Satan’s Angel

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The Castle Club was a nighttime place. At night it was raw and loud and brazen, with the colored neon painting lurid highlights on the hoods of the big cars that nuzzled up to it. Bare shoulders and smoky music and false bottoms in the shot glasses. At night Sam Losser’s office was as strange as work gloves on a chorine. It could have been the office of a hick lawyer. Golden oak and worn green carpet and a spittoon.

But in the daytime when the Castle Club was gray and dingy, when the tables were stacked, when a man in a dirty shirt checked the bottles on the backbar, and a slow old man knelt in the dirty gray rain and picked slivers of glass out of the parking lot — in the daytime Sam Losser’s office became the only touch of reality.

He had a rolltop desk and an oak table at right angles to it. I sat on the other side of the oak table, my purse and gloves at my elbow. Sam’s chair creaked. He held a slender cigar in his fat, muddy fingers, and huffed out a blue-gray column of smoke. He wore a baggy gray suit that matched his office. His bald head had a high sheen in the gray light from the big window.

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