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windows, tall porcelain urns, and glittering chandeliers and sconces. The club demonstrated its progressiveness by featuring an integrated band, fronted by a buxom, black female singer, who usually wore her hair in a bun and that night was wearing a blue halter dress.
    Cranston eyed Barth’s table once more. The nearly empty plates meant that Barth had gotten tired of waiting for his erstwhile, gadabout nephew and gone ahead and eaten. Cranston gave a smart tug to his Saville Row jacket and crossed the room, greeting regulars in route and signaling a waiter to bring him the usual. Many of them knew him as “Monty.”
    “Sorry I’m late, Uncle Wainwright,” he said, settling himself into the straight-backed chair opposite Barth’s. “There was an accident on the bridge.”
    Barth grunted resentfully and continued to mop up what was left of his meal. He was a large man with a big, round head and the soulful eyes of a hound dog in a fleshy face. His salt-and-pepper hair was neatly combed, and the lapel of his crisply tailored tuxedo jacket sported a white carnation. A member of the gentry, or so it would seem; but, in fact, he was the city’s newest police commissioner.
    “I didn’t think you’d want me to wait,” Barth said finally, in between bites. “The prime rib is excellent, by the way.”
    A waiter appeared with two martinis and placed them in front of Cranston.
    “Your usual, Mr. Cranston.”
    Cranston thanked him, popped one of the olives into his mouth, and took a long sip from the fluted glass. Alcohol wreaked havoc on the body, but it was important to keep up appearances.
    Barth set his fork down and dabbed at his mouth with a linen napkin. “I’m very upset with you, Lamont.”
    Cranston sighed on cue and took another sip. “What is it this time?”
    “Mr. Hadley Richardson is one of New York’s most respected financial counselors. I had to pull a lot of strings to get you that meeting with him. You could have at least had the decency to hear him out.”
    “I got caught up,” Cranston said, angling away from the table, his eyes sweeping the room for something of interest.
    Barth reddened. “You got caught up. Too damn busy to meet with Mr. Hadley Richardson?”
    Cranston made no reply. A young woman stood at the top of the stairs, gazing about as he had earlier. Attractive without having had to resort to the serene, languid look of the moment, she had a curvaceous if slender figure and a bonnet of wavy, golden-blond hair that barely reached her ivory-white shoulders. Cranston waited to see if she had arrived unescorted.
    Her gown was cream satin and hugged her like paint. It had an array of crystal-fringed sashes that crisscrossed her breasts and dangled over one shoulder, secured by a silver brooch. An actress, Cranston thought, as the maître d’ was showing her to a table. Half the men in the room were oogling her, but she was ignoring the attention, as only someone accustomed to attention could do.
    One man, who had the look of a tennis pro, was waving and grinning at her, showing perfect teeth. The woman acknowledged him with a tight smile and a gesture that anyone smart enough would have recognized as a kiss off.
    Barth’s voice intruded on his thoughts. “Lamont? Lamont? Are you listening to me?”
    Cranston turned to face him. “Sorry. What were we talking about?”
    Barth exhaled in exasperation. “Lamont, I have never meddled in your affairs. All this constant traveling around the world to remote places and such. And when you disappeared for all those years after the war, I didn’t ask any questions.”
    Cranston shot him a sharp look. He tolerated Barth because he had to: because he was Lamont Cranston’s uncle and because he was the police commissioner and useful as such, inept though he was. But he was sometimes a meddlesome fool who had to be controlled. Unlike the former commissioner, Ralph Weston, a social climber who was continually trying to curry favor with the wealthy