She had a good laugh, Dinky Weiss, lots of nice teeth. Expensive dental work? Hard to say. I searched her face to see if she had had work done. Maybe an eye-job, I decided. She was an appealing woman.

"Do you still go by the name Dinky?" I asked.

"Only with old girlfriends. It's a name my parents gave me, and comes from my infant attempt at saying daddy."

"It has a nice ring to it."

"I never minded it. Maybe it's not so fitting for a woman of a certain age, but call me it if you like."

We began talking about the old days in West Rogers Park, about some of our teachers at Mather, about the kids we grew up with. Lots of laughter. Looking across the table at her, I saw the attractive girl I knew from high school. It was as if the forty-odd years since that time had never happened. I, Jerry Rappaport, was on a date with Dinky Weiss, and enjoying the hell out of it.

I looked at my watch. It was 5.30pm. I should have been back at the restaurant for the dinner hour. We'd been together two-and-a-half hours, schmoozing away. I walked her to her car — a three-series white BMW. At her car door, she offered her cheek for me to kiss. She asked me not to wait too long to call so that we could meet again. When I got to my car, parked on Southport, I found a $60 parking ticket, but didn't mind, so much did I enjoy myself with Dinky Weiss.

She was good company, with a sense of humor, and an interesting outlook. She'd been around the block a few times, but she didn't come back from the trips empty-handed. She was no dope. As for Kizerman's telling Feigenbaum she needed protection, about that I wasn't so sure. I was fairly sure that if she really did need it, Hal Kizerman, in his middle eighties without much dough, wasn't in any position to provide it.

Kizerman came into the restaurant the following Friday. He greeted me as always, curtly, and took a booth, ate his lunch alone reading the Sun-Times. I was awaiting some sign that he knew I had met with Deborah Schapiro, but he gave none. My best guess is that she never bothered to tell him. No reason for her to do so, really. Maybe she was no longer seeing him. She said she "was" seeing an older man, past tense.

I waited a full week to call Dinky Schapiro. She was free for dinner on Friday, and I took her to a dark and rather noisy Italian joint on Clark Street in Andersonville called Calo. She ordered salmon. I thought of ordering the barbeque ribs, but decided I didn't want the mess that ribs bring. I ordered the white fish, tail portion.

"Why the tail portion?" Dinky wanted to know when the waitress left.

"Fewer bones in the tail portion," I said, "Old Jewish wives' wisdom. I learned it from my grandmother."

The restaurant was darker and noisier than I remembered. I don't know what I hoped for from the evening, except getting to know Dinky Weiss — Shapiro, as I started to think of her, better. Nothing that Feigenbaum said about her checked out, at least in my reading.