The Big Bundle

Chapter One

A middle-aged man taking stock of his life is to be expected. But for this to be my midpoint, I would have to make it to 94, and anyway it was the ghosts of my past haunting me, not my conscience, which after all was the nine millimeter Browning automatic I still carried all these years after my father killed himself with it — when I disappointed him taking the Outfit’s money to get ahead on the Chicago PD.

As I write this I’m closer to 94 than 47, which was my age in October 1953 when I caught an Ace Company cab outside the Kansas City Municipal Airport. The cabbie was colored, which in a city where the population was 10 % that persuasion might not have been a surprise. Still, Negro hackies didn’t generally work white areas, though airport runs could make for a decent fare and those who didn’t like the driver’s shade could take the next ride down, and those who didn’t give a damn got a smile and a nod and no funny business like unrequested tours of K.C.

And I didn’t need one of those — I’d done jobs here before. The airport was five minutes from a downtown whose “Petticoat Lane” on Eleventh Street had smart shops and patrons who could afford to frequent them; around Twelfth and Main were the usual stores and palatial movie houses, a few blocks east was a civic center whose plaza included two of the taller buildings, the Courthouse and City Hall, with the massive bunker of Municipal Auditorium to the southeast.

Everything was still up to date in Kansas City. They were giving my toddling town a run on the meat-packing and agricultural fronts. They had an impressive art gallery, fine arts museum and kiddie-pleasing zoo, and the industries included steel, petroleum, and automotive manufacturing. And one once-booming local enterprise that had faded since the ’30s had made a big comeback recently.

“You in town about that kidnapping, boss?” the cabbie asked.

He was grinning at me in the rearview mirror. He looked like Mantan Moreland but with a flattened nose; that and his cauliflower ears made him a former prizefighter. Yes, I’m a detective.

“Why would you think that?”

Now he was looking out his windshield, which was my preference.

“Address rang a bell,” he said.

“Ah.”

“Anyway, boss, I read about you — you that private eye to the stars.”

Life magazine had done a story about me when I opened my L.A. branch.

“Don’t recall your name, though,” he said.

“Nathan Heller,” I said.

“Chicago, right?”

“Right.”

“...So what’s Alan Ladd like?”

“Short.”

“What about Mitchum?”

“Tall.”

That made him laugh.

For the record, I was an inch shorter than Mitchum and weighed around two hundred pounds, my reddish brown hair going white at the temples, and “almost leading man handsome” (the Life writer had said). I made up for the “almost” by being a success in my trade — president of Chicago’s A-1 Detective Agency. By way of evidence I offer the court my Botany 500 suit, Dobbs hat and Burberry raincoat, lining in — it was cold in Kansas City in October, and the sky was trying to make its mind up whether to rain or snow.

We rumbled across the Missouri River by way of the upper deck of the Hannibal Bridge.

No laughter now, as he asked, “You gonna help get that little boy back?”

“Do my best.”

“I got a boy that age myself.”

“So do I.”

“I believe somebody took my boy, I kill his ass.”

“So would I.”

He laughed again, but the sound of it was different.

Just under a week ago, a bit before nine A.M., someone rang the bell at an exclusive Catholic elementary school here in Kansas City. A young, inexperienced nun answered and found a plump, pleasant-looking (though agitated) woman on the doorstep; about forty, the caller looked respectable enough in a brown hat, beige blouse and dark gabardine skirt. The woman even wore white gloves.

She presented herself as the sister of Virginia Greenlease, whose six-year-old son Bobby attended the school, and said she’d just rushed her sister, who’d shown signs of a heart attack while they were out shopping, to the hospital. Virginia was asking to see her son. The nun — new at the school, barely speaking English — fetched the child and turned him over to the woman calling herself the boy’s aunt. The boy went along dutifully, hand-in-hand.

Later that morning the mother superior’s second-in-command called the Greenlease home to check on how Mrs. Greenlease was feeling.

Mrs. Greenlease, who answered the phone herself, said, “Why, just fine.”

The first ransom letter came a few hours later, special delivery.

We moved through an industrial area and then an unpretentious mix of commercial and residential, all pretty sleepy on an early Sunday afternoon. In the plush Country Club District, broad, winding boulevards followed the contours of the terrain, interrupted by public areas overseen by sculptures and fountains; a classy retail plaza ran to Spanish-style stucco and cream-color brick. The homes themselves were near mansions — not just “near,” really — with impeccably landscaped, evergreen-garnished yards that in warmer weather were likely trimmed as often as their owners saw their barbers.

“We in Kansas now, Mr. Heller.”

We’d only been traveling fifteen minutes. “Over the state line already?”

“Yessir. This is Mission Hills. Lots of rich folks. You a golfer, sir?”

“I am.” I disliked the sport, but sometimes it was the best way to keep clients happy.

“Well, they’s three golf courses to choose from. They keep ’em open till the first snow.”

Autumn had turned the plentiful trees into a riot of color, orange, yellow, red, green, even purple, that last desperate burst of life before winter delivered death. But the grass was still green, brown barely intruding, with a scattering of those vivid colors making a patchwork quilt of lawns. Fathers were tossing footballs to sons while littler kids leapt into heaping piles of leaves with a fearlessness they’d yet to outgrow, their mothers leaning on rakes and looking on in worried surrender.

The cab was about to turn onto Verona Road from West 63rd when a figure in a fedora and raincoat ambled out from around the corner and planted himself before us with his arms outstretched. The cabbie hadn’t been traveling fast in this residential area, but it was startling enough to make him hit the brakes with a squeal.

Tall, his long, narrow oval face home to a prominent nose and jutting chin, eyebrows heavy on a high forehead, the interloper came over to the window the cabbie was rolling down and leaned in like an officious carhop.

“Local traffic only,” he said, polite but with an edge.

I leaned up and said to the cabbie, “I’ll handle this.”

I got out and said, “Nathan Heller. They’re expecting me at the Greenlease home.”

“Special Agent Wesley Grapp,” he said, stepping away from the cab, holding up ID with his left hand and offering his right with the slightest of smiles. His grip was firm but not showy. “You’re on our list.”

I gave him about half a grin. “I’ve been on the FBI’s list a long time.”

That got a chuckle out of him. “Yes, I’ve seen the file. It’s thicker than Forever Amber and about as juicy. What did you do to get on the Chief’s bad side? It’s not included.”

The Chief, of course, was J. Edgar Hoover.

“Oh,” I said casually, “a long time ago I told him to go fuck himself.”

This chuckle came from somewhere deep. “That’ll do it. Call me Wes.”

“And I’m Nate. So you’ve set up a checkpoint.”

“We have. We’ll take you from here.”

My overnight bag was in the trunk and the cabbie got it out for me. I gave him a sawbuck and made a friend for life.

Grapp walked me around the corner to his ride, a dark blue Ford Crestliner. I tossed the bag in front where a younger agent in suit and fedora sat behind the wheel — slender in horn-rimmed glasses — and Grapp and I got in back.

I said, “I guess you know Bob Greenlease called me in personally. You have no objection?”

“None. I’m all for it, actually.”

That surprised me; the FBI didn’t usually welcome private detectives to the party. “Why’s that?”

“We’ve been pretty well frozen out of this so far. Helping as much as we’re allowed. Mr. Greenlease has kept us pretty much at arm’s length. The guy’s got a lot of clout. He’s working strictly through the K.C. chief of police.”

Greenlease, a major stockholder in General Motors, was one of the wealthiest men in the Midwest. A self-made man from farming stock, he’d started out around the turn of the century making handmade cars and running a repair garage, then landed a franchise to sell Cadillacs; now he was the largest distributor of Caddies in the Southwest. His founding dealership, the Greenlease Motor Car Company, was where I first met him in 1937, when I was brought in to deal with auto parts pilfering by employees. And since just after the war, the A-1 had arranged security for the Annual Chicago Automobile Show, of which Greenlease was always a big part.

“Of course FBI policy in kidnapping cases,” Grapp was saying, “means doing nothing that might jeopardize the victim’s safe return. And Mr. Greenlease insists on no surveillance of any ransom drop... or at least he has so far.”

“So far?”

“Well, Mr. Heller... Nate... he’s called you in. Might mean a change of tactics.”

“Yeah, but it’s taken almost a week.” I’d half expected a call; the case had made the papers and even CBS-TV by way of Edward R. Murrow’s fifteen-minute national evening news. But that had amounted to little more than descriptions of the boy and the fake aunt. And expressions of ongoing sympathy for the parents.

“We don’t have a man on the inside,” Grapp said. “So your cooperation could prove key.”

“What have you been able to do?”

He offered me a smoke and I declined. He lit up and said, “With Kansas and Missouri butting up against each other, chances are good this thing has crossed state lines, which’ll give us jurisdiction. Already we’ve been able to intercept Greenlease’s mail at the K.C. Post Office and record incoming phone calls.”

“So there’s been contact. Were you able to trace the calls?”

He sighed smoke. “We probably could have, and possibly closed in on the people responsible, but the family’s wish was that we do nothing that might hinder the boy’s return.”

I frowned, shook my hand. “That’s crazy.”

“I agree. Perhaps you can reason with Mr. Greenlease. After all, he’s taken a big step, bringing you in... considering your reputation.”

“Somehow I don’t think you mean to flatter me.”

A thick eyebrow went up. “Nate. Mr. Heller. You’re well-known for your underworld connections. And you’ve been in a number of well-publicized situations where you have, let’s say, taken matters effectively into hand.”

“Gee whiz, thanks. But let me remind you, Wes, Special Agent Grapp, that J. Edgar Hoover assures us that there is no such thing as organized crime.”

The young agent at the wheel frowned at me in the rearview mirror, but Grapp only smiled a little.

He gestured with the cigarette-in-hand. “Nate, let’s just say anything you can do to help this situation would be appreciated. Whoever did this goddamn thing must be aware that, even if state lines haven’t been crossed, the kidnapping law in Missouri means a death sentence.”

“Understood. Since there’s effectively been a press blackout, what can you tell me? What don’t I know?”

The FBI man’s laugh was raspy and wry. “You have been spared experiencing one of the most sadistic, heartless series of letters and messages and phone calls any of us has ever seen. Six ransom notes, over a dozen phone calls. One wild goose chase after another.” His eyes, a dark brown and almost black, narrowed. “We do know they have the boy, or at least had him — a medal he’d worn to school that day was sent along with the second note.”

“When you say ‘they’...?”

“It’s at least two people. The woman who picked the boy up at school, and a man who’s been making the phone calls. He insists Bobby’s still alive. Talks about him being a handful and mentions a pet the child misses, how homesick he is. But, uh... they aren’t the smartest pair, these two.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, they were lucky they snagged the kid at all. The nun who answered the door was new, very young, an import from France who spoke little English, and if the mother superior — away on an errand — had been there to go to the door that morning? That damn woman would never have pulled off her impersonation.”

“Think so, huh?”

He nodded curtly. “When the nun offered to show her the way to the chapel, to pray for her sick sibling? The dumbo dame said, ‘No thanks, I’m not a Catholic.’ Any other nun in that facility would’ve known that Mrs. Greenlease was a Catholic, meaning her sister would be, too!”

I let some air out. “That makes the woman a dope. But maybe the guy’s got more on the ball.”

“You think so, Heller? His first ransom note? He got the address wrong.”

They drove me down Verona Road, past a trio of cars with press cards in the rear windows; a TV camera truck was pulled over there, too. A female reporter was using a phone in a box strapped to a tree, a little stool next to it for her purse and whatnot. United Press International had installed the phone, Grapp said.

The press had a good view of the house from there. Of course, “house” didn’t cover it. An imposing two-story multi-gabled structure with slate roofs and a cream-and-brown fieldstone facade awaited us when we pulled in the half-circle drive; it was almost a castle and not quite a church, and wide enough to be a hotel.

The FBI dropped me off and I toted my overnight bag to the gabled entrance. I must have been watched from a window, because the door opened after I’d barely rung the bell. In his mid-thirties, my host was of average height and weight with a squared-off head and a rounded jaw, his forehead so high it was like his features had slipped down too far on his oval face. His hair was dark and short, his eyes dark and bloodshot, his dark suit and tie unusual for a Sunday afternoon, unless an evening church service was in the mix. Yet somehow he still seemed disheveled.

“You must be Mr. Heller,” he said, and stepped aside and gestured me in. He took my coat, hat and bag and set them on a chair by a mirror.

Then I was in a world of big rooms with dark woodwork, pale plaster walls, dark wood floors, tall leaded-glass windows; along the left wall, a stairway rose with a carved lion for a newel post. The interior seemed oddly at war with itself — everything Prairie-style and spare but for carved touches, as if the house couldn’t decide if it was a mission or a manor.

Few lights were on. This was a somber place — not necessarily always so, but right now the inhabitants could not quite acknowledge light, which even the tall windows seemed reluctant to admit.

He was about to lead me deeper into the house when he froze, remembering himself, and turned and said, with a stiff nod, “Paul Greenlease.”

This was the adopted son of Bob Greenlease’s first marriage; Greenlease’s second wife, Virginia, had presented her husband with two late-in-life children, a daughter whose name I didn’t recall and of course the missing Bobby.

“I’ve been serving as the family’s spokesman,” Paul said, offering a listless handshake. “Dad has taken this awfully hard.”

We were standing in an entryway larger than most living rooms.

“I’m sure,” I said. “How’s your mother doing?”

“It kind of varies, day to day. She’s been sedated a lot, frankly. Sometimes things seem to be looking up, then...”

“Then they’re down. I understand these creatures have you folks jumping through hoops — one message, one call, one snipe hunt after another.”

He nodded, swallowed. “They’ve left us notes under crayon-marked rocks. They’ve taped letters underneath mailboxes. One note sent us to another note with instructions too confusing to follow.”

“Sounds like you’re dealing with dolts.”

He had an ashen look. “They want a lot of money. That’s not a problem, understand, but it took a while to get together.”

“How much?”

He paused, not sure he should share this, then did: “Six hundred thousand. Dollars.”

“Good God. That must be a record.”

“I wouldn’t know. Is that a lot for this kind of thing?”

Lindbergh had been asked for $50,000. Of course that was a while ago. Inflation had hit every business.

“The very first letter specified federal reserve notes,” Paul said, “in tens and twenties. Mr. Eisenhower at Commerce Trust is helping. He’s the president’s brother.”

“Of the bank?”

“No, of America. You know — Ike?”

“Yeah.” I didn’t mention I hadn’t voted for him. “And Ike’s brother got the money together?”

“Yes. And we tried to deliver it but it was raining and these letters have been kind of illiterate and... well, we left the money but the kidnapper called us later and said he couldn’t find it.”

Jesus.

“We went back and picked the money up,” Paul said, escorting me down a hallway. “We tried another time, but... You should really talk to my father.”

We stopped at a doorless archway. Very softly, he said, “Sue’s become a sort of appendage to Dad. She’s eleven. They’re sort of... helping each other through this.”

“I understand.”

“But it might hamper what gets said. Just so you know.”

“Got it.”

We moved through the archway into a big living room. Again, the room was fighting itself, stark Arts and Crafts furnishings, walls of square-panel mahogany, but a ceiling of ornate plaster work with a chandelier; a grand piano lurked in one corner, the fireplace going, dispensing warmth out of a coldly elaborate decorative mantel over which hung a gilt-framed painting, a family portrait of Robert Greenlease and his wife Virginia with a much younger Paul at his side and a toddler Sue by her mother’s. Bobby Greenlease, not yet born, was already absent.

A dark leather-cushioned Stickley sofa faced the fire and the back of Robert Greenlease’s head and his broad shoulders — he was in a blue satin dressing gown — were to me.

“Dad,” Paul said quietly from where we stood just inside the room, “Mr. Heller from Chicago is here.”

Greenlease’s hand raised slowly, like a slow child risking an answer in class, and he gently motioned me forward. He did not turn.

Paul nodded to me and disappeared and I went around to face Greenlease, who wore a white shirt and tie under the dressing gown, its lapels so dark blue they were almost black. His eleven-year-old daughter, blonde and cute in a plaid jumper, was curled up sleeping next to him on a brown leather sofa cushion, her head on his knee; his hand was on her shoulder.

In his early seventies, Bob Greenlease was a big man with a rectangular head and white hair, wispy on top. His eyes were wide-set and light blue behind browline glasses, nose hawkish, mouth a thin line, a face that could have been severe but wasn’t, because he so frequently smiled.

Of course he wasn’t smiling now.

Seated or not, he had an off-balance look, as if he’d just realized he stood at the edge of a cliff.

He whispered, “Thank you for coming, Nate. We’ll keep our voices down. Don’t want to disturb the girl.”

He extended his left hand — his right remaining on his daughter’s shoulder — and we awkwardly but warmly shook.

I drew up a wood-and-leather-cushion chair, careful not to let it screech on the hardwood floor. “I’m so sorry about this terrible thing,” I said, sotto voce.

“Your son is well? Sam, isn’t it?”

“Yes. With his mother in California. He’s six. Like your boy.”

The tight mouth flinched. “Wish I’d called you in sooner. Should have been smart enough to take advantage of your prior experience with Lindbergh and all.”

I knew what he meant. But I wondered how it made me an expert, considering how that had come out.

I said, “You don’t have to fill me in. I spoke to Agent Grapp and your son and heard all about this damn nonsense you’ve had to endure.”

He nodded, just barely. “We seem to finally be on the verge of arranging the ransom drop. It’s been like something out of the Marx Brothers. But we’re to get a phone call at eight P.M. with the instructions.”

The fire snapped at us and was almost too warm as it cast an orange glow.

“What do you want me to do, Bob?”

“Join the team. Two old friends of mine, valued business associates, have been helping out on this thing — Will Letterman, who runs my Tulsa dealership, and from my K.C. operation here, Stew O’Neill. You’ll meet them. Fine fellas.”

“I’m sure they are. But you’re obviously dealing with dangerous, unscrupulous criminals. You need someone who can handle that breed.”

His smile was barely discernible. “Which is why I wish I’d called you sooner. Are you too old and successful, Nate, to still carry that Browning semiautomatic pistol?”

I nodded toward the outer area. “It’s in my bag. Holster, too.”

“Good. Afraid we don’t have room for you here, between the help and my support crew. I’ve had arrangements made for you at the Hotel President, just fifteen minutes away. I’ve got a new Cadillac waiting for your use, here in the garage — Paul has keys for you. Go get settled at the hotel and be back at seven-thirty. I’ll introduce you to Will and Stew.”

“Fine.” I got to my feet. “How are you holding up?”

“A lot of support here. Good people. My son and Will have been handling the press. My daughter sticks right by me, and my wife... well, Virginia has occasional rough moments, but she’s smart and strong. She took the call that came in today, herself, and let this ‘M’... that’s what he calls himself... have it.”

“Really.”

“Yes. Told the bastard there’d been enough runaround. But afterward...” He swallowed thickly and the blue eyes behind the glasses were glittering. “...she rather... came apart. You see, she had specific questions that M couldn’t, or anyway didn’t, answer. Name of our driver on the latest European trip... what Bobby was building with his monkey blocks in his room. The caller skated over those, just said what a handful Bobby was being. I think for the first time, Virginia... well. You know.”

I did know. She had realized how possible it was that her boy might already be dead.

The little girl stirred. She looked up at me with big eyes, as blue as her father’s, and grabbed his arm, startled, afraid. “Is he one of them, Daddy?”

“No, darling. This is Mr. Heller. He’s on our side.”

Chapter Two

The fifteen-story Hotel President in the Power and Light District — Kansas City’s business and entertainment section — was unquestionably elegant, even if it was best known for a mysterious murder that happened in Room 1046 in 1935. Nobody asked me to solve it then and I wasn’t interested in doing so now.

But Bob Greenlease had always known how to treat the help. The lobby — quiet on a Sunday afternoon but for my echoing footsteps — put any Chicago hotel to shame, what with the golden two-story columns, chandeliers, marble floors, wrought-iron second-floor balcony, green palms and over-stuffed furnishings.

My room on the eighth floor was larger than need be, but who was complaining? The hotel had been around since the late twenties, but a recent remodel had led to modern, spindly furnishings, abstract wall art, and a red coverlet to make up for gray walls and curtains; there was even a small TV by the mirror on the dresser opposite the bed.

I unpacked my bag and retrieved the second suit I’d brought along — a gray twill woolen number from Richard Bennett in the Loop, cut to conceal a holstered accessory. I hung the Botany 500 in the closet and the tailored suit on the hook inside the bathroom door and took a shower, providing steam for the suit to hang out and for me to loosen up. The meeting with Greenlease had left me tight as a drum.

Speaking of which, the hotel’s Drum Room — a big circular restaurant with a snare-shaped red-and-yellow bar at its center — was my destination for an early supper. Sunday was the only night they didn’t offer live music — everybody from Frank Sinatra and Benny Goodman to Glenn Miller and Dean Martin had played here. Right now, at six o’clock, one of a handful of diners, I had to settle for mellow Muzak.

I had the filet medium rare, hash browns, buttered lima beans and salad, and a rum and Coke. But I only ate half of everything and limited myself to the one drink. I would be working tonight and even now I was in the tailored Richard Bennett with the nine millimeter under my arm. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone over the photostats of the ransom notes before I came down to eat.

You’d have lost your appetite, too.

If do exactly as we say an try no tricks, advised the first missive in what looked to be a feminine hand, your boy will be back safe withen 24 hrs after we check money. The second said, Don’t try to stop us on pick-up or boy dies you will hear from us later. More notes followed, with instructions like: Tie a white rag on your radio aerial. Proceed north on highway No. 169 past the junction with highway No. 69 about there miles where you will come to Henry’s place. And: Go west to first rd heading south across from lum reek farm sign. None of this gibberish had panned out, of course. Phone call instructions had been even worse.

These were people who thought stealing a six-year-old boy was a good way to get ahead — stupid people who’d spent almost a week botching their ransom delivery instructions. When I asked myself if this boy could still be alive, the food I’d eaten roiled in my belly like storm clouds.

Back in my hotel room I put a long-distance call in to my ex-wife in Beverly Hills. Peggy was married to a film director who’d had his ups and downs, currently up. We maintained a truce for Sam’s sake, but she not surprisingly never seemed glad to hear from me when I phoned.

“Sam’s at a pool party at the Lewises,” she said.

He and Jerry’s son Gary were longtime pals, longtime for six-year-olds anyway.

“And you’re not with him?”

“I think he’ll be safe with a dozen other kids and more than enough parents. What did you want with him?”

“Just to see how he’s doing. I’m his father, or did that slip your mind?”

A tense truce, admittedly.

“Well,” Peg said, “he’s fine. You’ll see him soon enough.”

I got him during his Christmas vacation. He was in the first grade.

“Would you tell him...”

“What?”

Tell him his daddy loves him.

“Nothing,” I said.

At seven on this chilly but not quite cold night, I left the loaner Caddy in the driveway outside the four-car garage and walked around to the front door, where I was let in by a tall, white-haired, bald-on-top Sunday school teacher type in a tie under a sweater vest. Somewhat hunch-shouldered, probably nearly as old as Greenlease, he introduced himself as Will Letterman from the Tulsa branch. I had missed Stew O’Neill, the local Greenlease Motors crony who’d been released to spend the evening with his family.

Anyway, that was the story. The real reason for O’Neill’s night off, I figured, was my arrival on the scene. For a lot of good reasons — including staying close to his wife and not making a second kidnap target out of himself — Greenlease would likely maintain his executive position here and send his people to make the ransom drop. In this case, that was Letterman and me.

A colored maid in her twenties, shy with a friendly smile but a beleaguered demeanor, collected my hat and Burberry — working in a place under siege was not an easy job. Within moments the missing boy’s father — no dressing gown now, rather shirt sleeves and tie — joined us in the expansive entryway and took me aside. No sign of the clinging young daughter now, or the adopted son.

Greenlease’s smile was a ghastly thing. “Nate, if you have the opportunity to... do something, I know you will. But I must insist you honor Will’s lead, if this ransom drop finally happens tonight. He’ll be representing me.”

“No offense, Bob, but then... why bring me in?”

“Because these people are unpredictable and matters could get out of hand. That’s where I’m counting on you — the unexpected. You’re going to be compensated, of course.”

“I didn’t ask for—”

He pressed something that crinkled into my hand. “If this isn’t sufficient, let me know. And your expenses’ll be on top of it, of course.”

Then he started down the hall and Letterman trailed after him. I’m human — before I fell in line, I had a glimpse at the check before tucking it away. Five thousand dollars with “Retainer” in the memo line. Well, sure — we would do things his way.

Our little party wound up in a rectangular study with a wall of leather-bound books at right and at left a mural of hunting dogs and their shotgun-wielding masters heading after game in the trees. Leaded windows behind a big mahogany desk at the far end looked out at real trees and leaded-window double doors adjacent surveyed a dark night not helped much by a crescent moon over which clouds drifted like the black smoke of a distant fire.

Down by the mural a well-stocked liquor cart awaited with a leather-cushioned chair arranged in front of a low-slung coffee table with a matching sofa running along the wall under the hunters and dogs and trees. The coffee table had two phones on it, one on a wire from nearby, the other stretched on its cord from another room.

Greenlease poured himself some bourbon while both Letterman and I declined. Our host gestured to the chair and I took it, while Letterman sat on the couch, the twin phones in front of us. Behind me Greenlease began pacing; he might have been walking guard duty.

“I’ve already told Will,” Greenlease said, his words coming in a rush that undermined his controlled businessman manner, “that you’ll be handling the call when it comes in.”

“Mr. Heller...” Letterman began.

I said, “Please, Will. Nate.”

Letterman leaned forward. His features seemed to be hanging off his already long face; his eyes were light blue peering from slitted pouches. “Nate. I’ve told Bob I think putting you on the phone is a mistake. I have a pretty good rapport going with this ‘M’ character. He’s talked to Stew, as well, and a couple of times to Virginia.”

“Where is Mrs. Greenlease?”

Pausing his pacing, her husband said, “Still sedated. Our family doctor has been quite good about all this. Ginny was upset earlier today, after taking that call. Paul is at her bedside. This... ordeal simply has to stop, Nate.” Some rage broke through the calm: “Has to stop.”

I caught Greenlease’s eyes and nodded to the couch. He sighed and went over to join his associate; but he took the glass of bourbon along.

“I’m just afraid,” Letterman said, “a new voice might raise a warning bell with our ‘friend.’”

I said, “Will may be right.”

Greenlease’s palms came up. “Who the hell knows at this point? But you may be able to get more out of this son of a bitch than we have, Nate. You can size him from your perspective and experience. May be able to get him to, hell, clarify these jumbled instructions he keeps giving us.”

I frowned. “Is it a stall, you think?”

Letterman said, “I don’t take it that way. He seems... I hate to say this, but I’d swear this M has been drunk every time I’ve talked to him.”

“And you’re convinced this isn’t an impostor?”

Greenlease said, “He knows about the Jerusalem Cross Bobby was wearing — the medal with ribbons on it that was sent back with the second letter. Which we kept from the press.” His eyes went to his crony. “Will, Nate is an old hand at this. He’s dealt with this kind of thing before.”

The damn Lindbergh case again. Didn’t anybody remember how badly that had gone, right down to frying the wrong man?

“And I’ve told Nate,” Greenlease continued, “that if we’re able to make the exchange tonight, your word goes. You can overrule him, Will... Right, Nate?”

Not to be crass, but the five-grand check in my pocket said yes, and so did I.

I asked, “Are the feds or police in on this?”

Greenlease shook his head. “No. I’ve requested the call not be traced. They’re not to follow us on the drop. I don’t want to come this far and have it compromised. The important thing is Bobby making it home safe and sound.”

I didn’t look at Letterman — I was afraid we’d both give away our doubt that the boy’s safety remained an issue. But Bobby could still be alive. He could. Right?

The call was due at eight, which was coming up soon. I asked a few questions and heard some detailed stories from Letterman about the insanely frustrating runaround they’d been getting. Eight came and went. I allowed myself a rum and Coke. Green-lease had a second bourbon. Letterman continued to abstain, his eyes on those phones. We’d agreed that he and I would pick up on the count of three, and Greenlease would join him on the couch to listen in.

At 8:28, the phones rang. Frankly, we all jumped a little — the watched pot had seemed like it would never fucking boil. I counted to three silently with Letterman’s eyes on me, and picked up. Greenlease had already made his way over to the couch beside his associate, who held the receiver sideways so both could listen. Hand covering the mouthpiece.

I held the receiver to my ear. Silence.

I said, “Is this ‘M’?”

“...Speaking.”

“Let’s get this thing over with.”

“I don’t recognize your voice.”

“There are several of us who work for Mr. Greenlease helping him out. You and I haven’t spoken before.”

“If you’re police—”

“I’m not police. By the way, did the boy answer those questions his mother gave you this morning?”

That was my way of making him think I’d been part of this for a while.

“No, I, uh... I couldn’t... We couldn’t get anything out of him.”

The voice was tenor and thick, unsure and slurring. As Letterman said, almost certainly drunk. And his words had been less than encouraging.

I said, “You couldn’t get anything from him?”

“He wouldn’t talk.”

“Are we going to see the boy tonight?”

“No, you can’t, because they want to check the money. Anyway, the kid is raising so much hell they don’t want to have to deal with him on the pickup. You’ll get him back tomorrow, in Pittsburg, Kansas.”

The caller, I’d been told, had been portraying himself as an intermediary — hence, “they.” As for Pittsburg, Kansas, that was a new wrinkle — I would learn later that it was a town of twenty thousand, one hundred miles south near the Oklahoma border.

I asked, “Is that the straight goods?”

“It’s gospel.”

“And somebody will contact us there?”

“Someone will contact you. By telegram.”

“Where do we wait?”

“The telegraph office.”

“Listen, I want that kid tonight. No waiting till morning.”

The two men on the couch were frowning at me — they probably thought I was playing it too tough. But I could read this guy. He was soft if you weren’t six.

“You’ll get him tomorrow,” the slurry voice said, “but first I’ll call you tonight at Valentine 9279. At 11:30 P.M. exactly.”

Letterman was writing that down on a pad.

I said, “Valentine 9279? Where is that?”

“Phone booth in a hotel.”

“Here in town?”

“Yes.”

“Kansas City? Where in Kansas City?”

“Near the LaSalle Hotel.”

“In the LaSalle Hotel?”

“Near it. The Something-shire Hotel. Right across from the LaSalle.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place? And we’ll get instructions for the drop then?”

“Yes.”

“Is this another drive in the country? This crap about climbing trees and crawling around on the ground looking for the right rock is getting old. Let’s deal man-to-man. Middle of Main Street. Anywhere.”

More frowns.

“I would like that too, but I don’t have anything to say about it.”

“I thought you were running the show.”

“I’m just ‘M’ — the middleman. But I’ll see to it things go perfectly tonight — no mix-ups. And you’ll be contacted about the boy in Pittsburg, Kansas, in the morning.”

A click announced the end of the call.

The hotel across from the LaSalle was the Berkshire. Linwood Boulevard at 11:15 P.M. on a Sunday night in downtown Kansas City was underpopulated to say the least and traffic was minimal; tall buildings bore so few lighted windows the effect was black dominos with only occasional white dots.

We pulled in at the entry’s drop-off area. Letterman was at the wheel in topcoat and fedora, I was riding with my Burberry unbelted, and the passenger in back was a zippered olive-colored canvas duffel bag with $600,000 dollars of cash stacked within.

This, at least, Greenlease had allowed to be the handiwork of the FBI — the duffel bag had been marked in some undisclosed manner for easy identification. $400,000 was in twenties, $200,000 was in tens, as requested by M days before my arrival (this duffel had gone on several wild goose chases already, due to the incompetent directions of the kidnappers). Seventy employees of President Eisenhower’s brother Arthur at Commerce Trust had recorded the serial numbers, all forty-thousand bills were photographed, and FBI agent West Grapp had pressed his thumb print to the wrapper of each packet of bills.

The bag of money weighed eighty-five pounds.

This represented the biggest kidnap ransom to date in the United States. Maybe the world, but nobody had seemed to have checked on that. And my presence here was in part connected to that money.

While we’d waited the couple of hours between the last call and the next one, Bob Greenlease in his study had said, “Nate, with no police or FBI tailing us, the possibility some interloper might be watching can’t be discounted.”

The press hadn’t been told the exact amount of the ransom, but it was generally known to be a substantial sum — rumor had it a little low ($500,000) but that was high enough.

“We’ll park the car right in front of the hotel,” I said, “where it’s well-lighted. I’ll stay with the money and Will can take M’s next call. A Kansas City boy like Will can do better with the instructions than I would.”

“I haven’t done great so far,” Letterman said glumly.

“You’ll do fine. But I’m the one who needs to guard that money.” I opened my suitcoat and shared the holstered Browning with them. “There’s the possibility that M or others he’s working with are waiting to snatch this from us right then and there.”

Particularly if the boy is already dead — a thought I did not share with Greenlease, though I could sense Letterman was thinking along similar lines.

No doorman was on duty at the Berkshire but the entry with canopy was, as expected, well-lighted. Letterman went in at 11:20. With the motor running, I stayed behind in the loaner Caddy, sliding over behind the wheel, sitting there with my nine mil in my lap like a getaway man waiting for the bank robbery to wrap up. Twenty minutes or so later, Letterman came quickly out. I unlocked the driver’s-side door and slid back into the passenger seat.

Greenlease’s man got behind the wheel and into gear and swung out. He filled me in as we went.

“Our 11:30 call came in at 11:31,” Letterman said. “The longest minute of my life.”

“Tell me about it.” I holstered the nine mil. “Get anywhere?”

“I think so. We’re to head east on Highway 40 until it intersects with County Highway Road 10E — which used to be called Lee’s Summit Road. Turn right at something called Stephenson’s Restaurant and go for about a mile to a covered wooden bridge. There we throw the bag out on the left side of the road at the north end of the bridge. M told me they wouldn’t be far behind us.”

“This is an area you know?”

“Well enough. The restaurant doesn’t ring a bell, but I think I’ve been over that bridge before.”

“How did he sound?”

“Drunk.”

It wasn’t much of a drive — southeast of the city about five miles from Swope Park into a rural area where the only hitch was the dark night making us miss the junction of 40 and 10E; we had to backtrack and try again — no sign of anyone following, at least not yet. This time we turned south on the county road and soon came to a covered wooden bridge. Midnight now... midnight on a lonely country road....

I told Letterman to pull over.

He did, then nodded toward the bridge. “Should I leave the headlights on?”

“No. It’d just make a target of me.”

He shut off the beams and the bridge’s mouth turned black and unwelcoming. I got the nine millimeter out again and slipped from the car into the night.

I entered the sheltered structure slowly, cautiously, wood groaning under my feet, sparse moonlight filtering in between slats, my back to a creaky wall, edging along like I was expecting the Headless Horseman at any moment. But no ghost on horseback came charging and no one was lying in wait — there was really nowhere to do that. I went all the way to the north end and stayed low, gun ready, as I came out. I looked around the low brush on either side of the road, going down the slope on both sides to the narrow gurgling stream.

Nobody.

I climbed back up. There were trees on both sides but anyone who emerged would have shown himself even under that stingy slice of moon.

I returned to the car and got in. “No sign of a soul,” I said. “Not L, M, N or P. But go slow.”

We rumbled through the rickety bridge and then pulled off to the left as we exited the north end. From the back seat I yanked out the duffel and then the two of us, like gangsters in fedoras and topcoats dragging a dead body, lugged the eighty-five pounds of money — thirty pounds heavier than Bobby Greenlease — to the underbrush just past the north end of the bridge, concealing the duffel just a little, not wanting to attract anyone’s attention but M’s.

“All right,” I said. “Now you head back.”

He blinked at me. “You mean we head back.”

“No. I’m waiting for these bastards.” I lifted the nine mil and lowered it, to make a point.

He shook his head — really shook it. “No. We’re not taking that kind of chance.”

“I’m not asking you to. Don’t worry about me getting back, Will. They’ll have a car.”

He pointed to the Caddy, which sat purring. “Get in, Heller. You heard what Bob said. This is my call.”

I thought about my options. What could I do, slug him? He was twenty years older than me, and if I knocked him out, who’d drive the car back? It might even kill him, and that only complicated matters.

Well, shit.

We headed back to the Greenlease place.

We were again in the study with the dogs and hunters looking on from their mural. Back in our same seats with the two phones staring at us and us staring at them. Letterman didn’t mention our little confrontation to Greenlease and neither did I. We drank a while. I was on my second rum and Coke since our return and Greenlease was behind me, pacing again, but more like trudging now, bourbon sloshing in his glass, when the phones came alive, their doubled ring alarmingly loud.

I’d been appointed phone man again. After the third ring, as arranged, Greenlease was back on the couch next to Letterman, who picked up as I did.

As before, silence.

“You there, M?” I asked.

“Speaking.”

“Everything all right with the money?”

The response came in a rush of words: “We haven’t had time to count it yet. But I’m sure it’s all there. Rest assured the kid will be back with his mother as promised within twenty-four hours.”

M didn’t sound drunk to me now — more like high....

“How long are we going to have to wait down there before we pick him up?”

By “down there” I meant Pittsburg, Kansas.

M said, “You’ll hear in the morning and be told where and when.”

“We’ll have him tomorrow?”

“Definitely.”

“He’s alive and well?”

“Yeah, and as full of piss and vinegar as any kid I’ve ever seen.”

This seemed to try a little too hard to make the boy sound... alive. “I can quote you on that, can I?”

“You can quote me.”

The phone clicked dead.

I hung up. I looked at Greenlease. I looked at Letterman.

“Well,” Letterman said to me, poised to stand, “you and I need to head to Pittsburg.”

I shook my head. “No.”

Greenlease frowned at me. “No?”

I said to Letterman, “Collect your pal, what’s his name? Stew O’Neill? He’s had enough time with his family. You two go down to Kansas and have an adventure. You don’t need me for that.”

Besides, it sounded like a dodge to me. Another snipe hunt.

I rose. “I’ll stick around on this end a while in case I’m needed, if you like, Bob. Should our buddy M throw us a curve.”

“Well,” Letterman said, vaguely offended, “I’m going to head out as soon as I can round up Stew.”

“Do that,” I said. “I’m going back to my hotel, gentlemen — I’m beat. See you in the morning, Bob. Good luck, Will.”

I almost returned Greenlease’s check, but something told me I might still earn it.

Chapter Three

I got pulled over briefly at the FBI checkpoint, where Agent Grapp asked me to fill him in, which I did. It was a little after two A.M.

“This little trip Letterman and O’Neill are taking to south Missouri,” I said from behind the wheel, “means a state line’s been crossed. Surely you can wade in now.”

He was leaning in my window like a carhop again; it was cold enough for his breath to smoke and he peered at me above fogged hornrims. “Not unless the kidnappers actually take the kid there. It sounds like the runaround to me.”

“No argument. You don’t think that boy’s still alive, do you?” That forced-sounding remark about piss and vinegar was lingering.

The FBI man’s long face got longer. “We have to assume so. And I’ve been told to follow Mr. Greenlease’s lead.”

“Because he’s a worried father or a big General Motors stockholder?”

The only answer he’d had for that was a smirk as he backed away and waved me on.

Now I was in my hotel room, sitting up in bed with a slit of sun peeking between the closed curtains and the nightstand clock saying it was already after ten A.M. I had left no wake-up call, expecting to hear from Greenlease if anything had broken. Apparently nothing had, except maybe my head. While I hadn’t been drunk last night by any means, over the course of a long evening enough rum had been involved to give me a dull headache.

My stomach was in no mood for anything but the cup of black coffee I grabbed in the President’s coffee shop. Then I drove to the Greenlease place in Mission Hills. A different Fed stopped me at the checkpoint, but when I proved who I was passed me on.

Paul Greenlease greeted me again. His suit-and-tie seemed to be standard, for the duration of the kidnapping anyway, and the shyly smiling maid was there to collect my hat and coat. But before escorting me deeper into the big somber house, the older Greenlease son lingered with me in the high-ceilinged, expansive entryway like the only couple on a ballroom dance floor.

“Mr. Heller,” he said, and this adopted son looked enough like Greenlease to make a private detective suspicious, “may I ask you something?”

“Of course, Paul. And make it Nate. I’m a friend of the family in this.” With a check for five thousand dollars from his father in my billfold, admittedly.

“Now that the ransom has been delivered,” he said, stroking his rounded jaw nervously, “will you stay involved?”

“Is there news of your brother?”

“No. Nothing from Pittsburg yet.”

I offered a sigh. “It’s probably time to let the FBI take over, frankly. That’s what I’ll be advising your father.”

The dark eyes were still bloodshot. “I had the idea that... well, that Dad might want you out there trying to find the people who did this.”

“Again, that’s probably better handled by the federal investigators, at this point.” I shrugged. “I do have means and methods not open to them. Uh, admittedly there are certain... niceties I don’t have to respect. So I may be discussing that with your father. Why, son?”

The word “son” had come automatically. For a man in his mid-thirties, he seemed young to me. His high forehead tensed. “Mr. Heller, there’s something bothering me that I haven’t shared with anyone. Can I trust you not to take this to Dad and Mother?”

The formality of “Mother” next to “Dad” struck me as interesting. Not sure I could tell you why.

“You can trust me to keep your confidence, Paul, unless I think it might bear on bringing your brother home or finding those responsible.”

He tried to shrug it off. “It’s nothing, really. I shouldn’t bother you or... or anybody with it.”

“No. Please. Go ahead.”

He drew in enough air to make his chest grow; when he let it out, words came along: “I took two of the phone calls. Mostly it’s been Mr. Letterman and a few times Mother. But I spoke briefly to this... individual.”

“M?”

“M.” He lowered his voice to a near whisper. “And this is what I want to share with you. His voice sounded... familiar.”

I frowned; put a hand on his shoulder. “You think you may know this person?”

“I might. I can’t give you a name or anything. I don’t think it’s one of my friends. I mean, frankly, all of my circle are well-off. Not as well-off as we are, but... nobody I know needs money. Nobody needs to do something like, anything like... this.”

“The voice doesn’t remind you of anyone in particular?”

“No. It’s almost... eerie. Something, someone, from the past.”

“Paul, you aren’t old enough to have much of a past.”

“I know. Jesus, I know! I’ve been racking my brain. When I was in military school, and later college, some of us would go out drinking. Could it have been somebody from those days?”

“Could it?”

His eyebrows went up and came down. “The voice on the phone sounded drunk to me.”

“And to me. Letterman commented on it, too.”

“If I come up with something, can I bring it to you?”

“Of course.”

“If I did get a hunch about who this might be, maybe you could look into it without getting some innocent guy in trouble.”

Did he already have a hunch? I really didn’t think so. But he was right — it might come to him.

I said, “Be glad to.” I gave him an A-1 business card. “If I wind up going back to Chicago, call me there.”

His eyes widened. “Are you planning to go back to Chicago?”

“No, but I might. If the FBI steps in and your father doesn’t have any further need of me.” I offered him my hand. “Thank you, Paul. Thank you for coming to me with this.”

We shook. Firmly, this time. He smiled a little and nodded, then led me to the library where his father and the hunting wall mural awaited, then quietly slipped away.

Greenlease was sitting on the couch with his little blonde daughter, who wore a green corduroy jumper and was reading a Nancy Drew book, The Ringmaster’s Secret. She looked up at me, but didn’t smile, still wary of me. The kid was a good judge of character.

“Darling,” Greenlease told the girl, getting to his feet, “I need to talk to Mr. Heller.”

She nodded and returned her eyes to the page while her father escorted me through the double doors onto a patio that looked onto fiery-topped trees and a browning golf course. The sun was out and the chill of the night before had backed off some. We sat at a wrought-iron table on wrought-iron chairs.

“I’m afraid we’ve heard nothing,” he said solemnly.

“Paul told me. He’s a nice young man.”

“He is. I’m going to set him up in a dealership of his own one of these days.” He shifted on the metal chair. “Will and Stew got to Pittsburg around 5:30 this morning. Checked into the Hotel Besse, caught a little sleep — Will had been up forty hours. They were at the Western Union office at seven when it opened. They took along fresh clothes for Bobby, including a topcoat.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. It was just so goddamned sad.

“They’re maintaining a sort of vigil,” he said. “We talk on the hour. Do you have any suggestions?”

I told him it was time to let Agent Grapp take over. “Bob, the FBI have cracked hundreds of kidnapping cases over the last several decades, almost always with a successful outcome. Sometimes kidnapped parties stay in their captors’ hands for weeks before their return. So this is far from over.”

He nodded, his expression dazed; his dark blue eyes rarely blinked behind the browline glasses. “We’ll let the Pittsburg thing play out,” he said. A light wind was turning the wispy white hair atop the rounded square of his head into dead-dandelion tufts that refused to fly away.

“Bob, is there anything more I can do for you on this end?”

His head shake was understandably weary. “I don’t believe so, Nate.”

I got out my billfold and removed the check. As I handed it his way, the light wind whipping it a little, he raised two palms.

“That’s not necessary, Nate. You’ve earned it.”

“No. I’ll send you an invoice for five hundred dollars — that’ll cover my time and any expenses. Hotel and airfare were pre-paid, so this isn’t generous of me in the least.”

I kept the check held out and it flapped like the golf course flag on a nearby hole. Finally he took the thing before the wind did.

The thin line of his mouth said, “But if I need you...”

“You’ll have me. I’m opening a New York office next month, so you may have to get in touch there. My people in Chicago will help you on that score.”

“You sound busy.”

I leaned an elbow on a glass tabletop. “Listen. I have a six-year-old myself, remember. You need me, I’m here. In the meantime — and you’ve probably thought of this — I’d get a priest in to talk to the family. Maybe a nurse for your wife.”

He looked alarmed. “Nate, do you anticipate bad news?”

“Let me ask you. Is Bobby high-strung?”

A rare blink came. “No. I suppose it’s fair to say he’s been sheltered. Pampered, perhaps. We love him very much. Such a good boy.”

Which was why he’d been trusting enough to go with a strange woman when she came for him at his school. To a child, the world of adults is unknowable — you did what they told you to.

“That ‘piss and vinegar’ remark,” I said. “Did that ring true to you?”

Greenlease said nothing. He looked toward the golf course. Some fools were playing. Hadn’t snowed yet.

Finally, he said, “No.” Then his eyes came to mine. “You think he’s dead. That’s why you’re talking about priests and nurses.”

“I think you need to prepare yourself for the possibility. Your wife, too. In the meantime, get the FBI on this full-throttle. If the worst happens, I can ask people I know in my world and see if we can find the bitch who took your boy and this bastard M, too. The feds can trace serial numbers. But I know how to trace lowlife scum.”

I got to my feet and so did he. We shook hands and went back inside, where he returned to his daughter’s side. Finally she smiled at me, just a little. But it was enough.

I was on my way out, back in my Burberry with my hat in hand, when an unfamiliar female voice called out to me, although I immediately knew just who it was.

“Oh, Mr. Heller?” The voice was a sweet, soft second soprano. “Would you wait a moment?”

I turned and a tall nicely built woman in her mid-forties approached from down the hall; her hair dark and short and well-coiffed, she was attractive in a dignified manner, reminiscent of Irene Dunne in some late ’30s tearjerker. She wore a navy suit, white silk blouse and low heels, as if ready for church on this Monday. Of course Catholics went to church all sorts of times we heathens couldn’t keep track of.

“We may have met years ago,” she said. “I know you’ve done a number of jobs for Bob.” She seemed utterly composed, but her dark eyes screamed red like her husband’s.

She had offered her hand for me to take — not a handshake, but for me to hold, which I did in both of mine. “No, Mrs. Greenlease, I would have remembered. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about all this.”

“You were very kind to come from Chicago to help us,” she said. “I understand you played a crucial role last night.”

I wished I’d played a more crucial role, like grabbing that M by the goddamn throat when he picked the money up and squeezed out of him what he’d done with her son.

I said, “I have a boy Bobby’s age. Glad to do anything to help. I’m heading back to Chicago for now, but I’ll be on call.”

Her smile was a lightly lipsticked wound. “You were on the Lindbergh case, I understand.”

Oh, Christ — not that again.

I risked the smallest smile. “Yes, I was a liaison between the authorities there and the Chicago police department — I didn’t have my own agency then.”

“Why a liaison?”

“Well, Al Capone was claiming he could get the child back through his underworld connections if we’d just let him out. All kinds of crazy things were going on back then.”

Her hand was still in mine. “Are things really any different now?”

“Yes, and for the better. Out of that tragedy came the FBI’s ability to look into this kind of crime. I’ve advised Bob to let them take over. People like me, and family friends like Will Letterman, can only do so much.”

Her smile widened enough to reveal perfect white teeth. “That sounds like good advice. But we’ve had wonderful help. Paul has been just a dear. I don’t know what...” The tears she was holding back were pooling, threatening to overflow, and the smile was crinkling.

She hugged me. Cried into my shoulder, quietly, softly, but she cried. That was what this had come to: a mother needing a stranger’s shoulder to cry on.

She drew away, leaned in and kissed me on the cheek, and nodded, slightly, embarrassed now, and turned away and started up the stairs. But then she paused two steps up, at the first landing, and leaned a hand on the newel-post lion.

“You know, Mr. Heller... Bob and I would be lost without our faith in God’s constant and abiding love. Even in our darkest hours, we know God is holding each one of us in this family very close. Bobby included.”

As if ascending into heaven, she went slowly up.

Me, I had my doubts. If God was in this, He might have whispered in the ear of the young nun who was so quick to hand over their kid.

And that was it.

I booked a late afternoon flight back by phone, then made a call to my partner Lou Sapperstein at the A-1 in Chicago, letting him know I’d be in tomorrow. Lou had a few things that couldn’t wait and we took care of those over the phone. I hadn’t bothered with a shower before going out to the Greenleases’, so I took one now. Then my minor hangover was dogging me enough to encourage lying down and I fell asleep for a while.

The two o’clock check-out time had come and gone when I awoke. Brushed my teeth, packed hurriedly and went down to the palatial lobby, which was pretty dead again. I was waiting for a salesman from somewhere to settle up his bill when a voice called out to me. This one was male and I didn’t recognize it — a husky baritone.

“Nate! Nate Heller!”

I turned and a big man — and I mean big, six-four and pushing four hundred pounds — came trundling toward me like a runaway circus elephant. Appropriately, he was in a tent of a brown suit with a yellow and red tie adding a clownish splash of color. His oblong head was too small for his massive body, eyes close-set and an unexpectedly pretty light blue, eyebrows perpetually high, hair curly black and pomaded, mouth small and thick-lipped, a little chin enveloped by a thick neck rising from the preposterous torso.

Distinctive as this individual was, I didn’t recognize him at first.

“Nate, I heard you were in town!”

“...Barney Baker?”

“In the flesh,” he said in a surprisingly mellow, mellifluous baritone. “What, have I changed so much? Okay, so maybe I put a few pounds on in the interim.”

He’d been big when I knew him before, but another hundred or so had been added.

We shook hands. That fat paw of his could generate real power.

Barney Baker, who looked fifty and was probably forty, had been one of Ben Siegel’s bouncers at the Flamingo in Las Vegas back in ’46. Siegel (Don’t Call Him Bugsy) had hired me to train security personnel at his new casino with an emphasis on spotting pickpockets — I’d been on the Pickpocket Detail of the Chicago PD a thousand years ago.

Even back at the Flamingo, Barney had been such a hulking presence he merely had to tap the shoulder of a troublemaker, who would turn and get a gander of the looming bouncer and look for the nearest exit with no further inducement. Not that Barney couldn’t do damage if need be. He had come with an impressive résumé — a waterfront collector in his teens who did a prison stretch in New York for throwing stink bombs in theaters during a union drive.

“You had lunch, Nate?”

He was the sort of guy who kept track of such things.

“No,” I said. “I thought I’d catch something at the airport.”

He settled a catcher’s mitt hand on my shoulder. “Listen, let me buy you lunch. We got things to talk about.”

We do?

“All right,” I said, “just let me check out.”

Which I did, leaving my overnight bag at the desk, and Barney slipped an overwhelming arm around my shoulder and walked me across the lobby to the coffee shop like a parent escorting an apprehensive child to the doctor’s office.

We took a table — Barney couldn’t fit into a booth — and I asserted myself. “Who told you I was in Kansas City?”

He was looking at the menu. “That colored cab driver who drove you to the Greenlease place in Mission Hills.”

“Why would he confide that to anybody?”

“The cab company keeps track of public-figure types who come to town. Can be valuable information. You should feel complimented.”

I smirked. “Why would you be privy to such valuable information?”

His big shoulders shrugged. “I’m their union representative. Ace Cabs are run out of St. Louis, which is where I’m out of, too, these days. I was in K.C. on union business and got the call about this just, oh, half an hour ago.”

“What call?”

“The call pertaining to you.”

I squinted at him. “When did you get so goddamn eloquent, Barney? I recall you being a dese, dem and doser.”

He waved a plump thing with fingers. “A union organizer has to be both a man of the people and a decent public speaker. I give a hell of a speech, Nate. You should hear me on Civil Rights. Nobody stirs up the colored vote like yours truly. I’m a good Democrat, you know.”

So was I, but that was enough to make me question my party affiliation.

“Ah,” he said, and his eyes glittered, “here’s the waitress. Pretty little babe, don’t you think?’

She was indeed, a pretty blonde and pretty bored, weighing about a hundred pounds, a considerably better-looking hundred than the one Barney had added on. I ordered the clubhouse sandwich with potato chips and cole slaw. Barney had a triple order of the boneless butt steak with mushroom sauce and triple french fries; it came with three salads too, but he passed on those. Cutting down, I guess.

I figured he would get around to what this was about soon enough. Till then, I thought we could stand some catching up.

“So after they bumped Ben,” I said, “you went back into union work, huh?”

“Yeah, the Teamsters. I was president of local 730 in D.C. for a while. Then opportunity knocked here in the Midwest. You done all right for yourself, Nate. L.A. office and everything. You get around. I mean, here you are in Kansas City.”

“Here I am. And what’s that to a union organizer who specializes in cab companies?”

Our drinks came — Coca-Cola for me, coffee with cream and sugar for Barney. The disturbingly nice blue eyes looked rather fondly at me.

“What I always liked about you, Nate, is your attitude toward money. There were lines you wouldn’t cross. But also, there were lines you didn’t mind crossing. Or are you too respectable now to turn your nose up at a good opportunity? Let me give you a hypothetical.”

“A what? When did you drop out of school, Barney?”

“After the third grade.”

“Ah.”

“But I learned to read by then. So. If we can get hypothetical and all? Suppose there was a despicable fucking crime like a kid getting snatched.”

I can’t say I didn’t see this coming, but it rocked me a little just the same.

Very quietly I said, “If you were involved in such a thing, Barney, I would gladly kill your un-hypothetical ass. I assume there are some vital organs still lurking under all of that blubber.”

His frown looked hurt, not mad. “Unkind, Nate. You ever know me taking part in an act of such a lowdown nature? You recall me ever doing something so criminal I’d go straight to Hell and take it up the ass from the Devil himself for all eternity?”

“Hey, you brought it up, Barney, and frankly? I never knew you all that well. Here’s the food.”

It came and we ate. Conversation ceased. He frowned throughout the meal, annoyed when he would rather just be savoring the enjoyment of shoveling butt steak between his thick lips. Somewhat surprisingly, he finished his three orders about the time I finished mine. He had tapioca coming with his meal. That came, was gone in seconds, and then he had another cup of coffee and I sprang for a second Coke, though I pretty much let it sit. I leaned back with my arms folded, kind of wishing the nine millimeter weren’t in my overnight bag at the desk.

“Hypothetically,” he said, very quietly, “we may have a line on the snatch.”

“No participation.”

“No.”

I unfolded my arms, sat forward, folded my hands prayerfully on the table as if tacking grace on after the meal. “Let’s skip the phony hypothetical bullshit, Barney. What’s this about?”

He took a couple of moments before answering, patting his mouth with a napkin almost daintily. “You know Joe Costello?”

“I don’t know him. I know of him. He and that Vitale character are the top rackets guys in St. Louis, they say.”

Barney nodded. “‘They’ are well-informed. Anyway. There’s a guy calls himself Steve who approaches an Ace cabbie this very morning looking for a hooker, but he doesn’t want to go to a house — he wants a ‘real nice girl.’ The guy is loaded with dough, a regular angel first-class.”

An angel, as cabbies and pimps called them, was a big spender, usually from out of town.

“Steve, in addition to throwing money around like it’s going out of style,” Barney said, “is also going from bar to bar in the daylight hours with the kind of thirst you can’t quench. As he gets deeper in his cups, he starts talking.”

“About the kidnapping?”

A stop palm came up fast. “No, no, no. Steve is some kind of insurance guy, he says, who has come into dough and not in a legal way. Steve says he has a bundle, and he wants it washed. Afraid the bills might be marked.”

What kind of insurance man had access to cash that might be marked bills? This sounded a lot more like a kidnapper than an embezzler.

Barney was saying, “One of our Ace guys got our buddy Steve a hooker, who can be trusted or at least for a hooker can be, and at some point our guy got a glimpse at stacks and stacks of green in a footlocker.”

Not a duffel bag.

“Maybe,” Barney went on, “our insurance guy really is somebody in insurance or at a bank who’s helped himself, and is worried about serial numbers. In which case, Joe is not concerned.”

“Joe Costello.”

“Joe Costello, who owns the Ace Cab Company. He has no moral compunctions about washing money from a bank or insurance company, either. But a kidnapping would be immoral. Joe has kids. I got kids. Who doesn’t have kids?”

Also, a racketeer who got dirtied by a notorious in-the-headlines kidnapping would not be looked upon kindly by public officials who might otherwise turn a blind eye in return for a filled palm.

I was at a stage of my professional life where normally I would not want anything to do with embezzlers whether the take was insurance or bank money. Hell, I had clients in both lines of business. But this sounded like it might be the path to the Greenlease kidnappers — the kind of path I could follow more effectively than the by-the-book likes of Wes Grapp.

“Look, Nate,” Barney said. Usually loud, the union goon was almost whispering now. “Joe wants to bring you in. What exactly he has in mind, I don’t know. You sure you don’t know him? ’Cause it sure seems like he knows you.”

“What if this bundle is the kidnap ransom?”

He swiped the air with a sideways hand. “If Steve is the kidnapper, we finger the fucker. Call in the cops. We got plenty of ’em in our pocket.” He had something else in his pocket, too, and he shoved it toward me: an engraving in green of Grover Cleveland.

In other words, a thousand-dollar bill. With a business card attached: Joseph G. Costello, President, Ace Cab Company, Taylor Avenue and Forest Park Boulevard.

“That’s just to come to St. Louis and talk to Joe,” Barney said. “You don’t even have to tell the tax boys about it. That’s between you and your conscience.”

I got my wallet out and slid the bill in. Barney apparently didn’t know my conscience was packed away in my overnight bag.

“You got wheels?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“You go on ahead and see Joe. I got business here. You may not see me in St. Louis.”

Was I supposed to be disappointed?

I got to my feet and put my wallet away. “Despite this wind-fall, Barney, I’ll let you get lunch. I don’t buy anybody three meals in one sitting.”

He tossed a fat hand. “Fair enough.”

The waitress was back and he asked her what kind of pie they had.

Chapter Four

The front desk traded me a roll of quarters for a ten-dollar bill and, just off the lobby, I selected a phone booth from a row and settled in. An operator gave me the numbers I needed and the first call I made was to the airline at the Kansas City Municipal Airport, cancelling my reservation for a flight back to Chicago.

The second call was a quick one to Lou Sapperstein at the A-1 telling him I might not be back for a few days. The third was to the Pittsburg, Missouri, Western Union office; I was told that the two gentlemen waiting for an important wire had gone back to their hotel, but that if it came in, a runner would take it over. The fourth was to Pittsburg’s Hotel Besse, where the hotel switchboard connected me to the room shared by William Letterman and Stewart O’Neill.

“I thought,” Letterman’s voice said, “you’d be on a plane by now back to Chicago.”

He and Greenlease were talking “on the hour,” so his knowing that was no surprise.

“I just cancelled that,” I said.

“We’ve had no word.”

“I gathered. How long are you going to wait for M to get in touch?”

“Another day at least.”

“That kid isn’t coming home, you know.”

“...I have to keep a good thought, Nate. What can I do for you?”

“I need to get word to Bob and I don’t dare call him. The feds will be listening in.”

“They’ve been listening in all along.”

I knew that. But they’d been sitting on their hands, so what good had it done? That they hadn’t traced M’s calls was damn near as criminal as the kidnapping itself. I didn’t blame Wes Grapp for that — complying with Greenlease’s wishes was a directive that came from the top.

I said, “I need you to tell Bob I have a possible lead in St. Louis on the kidnappers. It may be nothing, but there are promising aspects.”

“Can you be specific, Nate?”

“No. Just remind Bob what I told him about my ability to track down lowlife scum. Tell him this may be a long shot, but I’m going to play it out. I won’t do anything to endanger his boy. Tell him I’ll report in when or if I have anything.”

“All right. You’re sure this is wise?”

“Of course not.” What would have been wise was Letterman letting me grab M at the ransom drop, but that hadn’t happened. I referred to that only indirectly: “We’re past playing it safe being a good plan. Tell Bob I’ll be holding onto the loaner Caddy. In a day or two, I’ll return it and, with luck, have something to report.”

“Maybe you’ll be bringing Bobby back, too.”

Letterman had to know he was kidding himself.

“Yeah,” I said. “Go with that.”

They called Highway 40 the Main Street of America, and one reason might be that driving from Kansas City to St. Louis made you slow down for half a dozen bump-in-the-road Main Streets and a major one through Columbia. The trip took better than four hours, and though the slice of moon was even smaller tonight, the sky was clear, the traffic light and the sailing smooth, some of it four-lane. Fighting boredom, I tried the big car’s fancy radio but the result went a little too well with the farm country I was cruising through — I heard more fiddle playing than in a Hungarian restaurant.

Finally St. Louis showed itself, its light hovering as if promising a carnival. I followed 40 into the city through an industrial area, turning onto Nineteenth cutting through a nest of apartment buildings before factories and warehouses took over. Ace Cab Company, at 1835 Washington Avenue, shared its downtown intersection with an Esso Station, a Katz Drug and a busy White Castle. I parked on the street in front of a Swiss Chalet-style shopping arcade.

Ruling over a modest parking lot with two rows of varicolored and varied-make taxis, the dingy white-brick building’s mechanics in dingy white uniforms were at work under vehicles on lifts in the two-bay garage. On the far end, a picture window announced the place in big red letters as, not surprisingly, ACE CAB COMPANY, with a couple of phone numbers not much smaller.

I pushed through a door that said, in the same red lettering, EMPLOYEES ONLY. At left, a blond male dispatcher in khaki hunkered over a microphone in front of a metal city map dotted by magnetic pins; at right, a henna-dyed looker in a white blouse, black slacks and a headset sat at a switchboard. Both were shouting numbers and locations.

Covering his mike, the dispatcher — a burly guy of maybe thirty who glared at me like I’d interrupted him in the middle of a song — said, “You Heller?”

I resisted the impulse to say, “Me Jane,” and just nodded.

Half a dozen cabbies were seated in wooden schoolhouse chairs with their backs to the big window on the street, a rough-looking bunch who made the Bowery Boys look like actual boys. All but one wore matching caps with triangular ACE CAB patches but otherwise — like the cars in the lot — they were a mixed bunch, in jackets of leather, corduroy, gabardine, several in neckties, one in a bow tie. Their shirts ranged from white to pale blue to pale what-have-you. Two of the cabbies were colored; they were the only ones with white shirts.

“Go on in,” the dispatcher said in a grudging, we-don’t-cotton-to-strangers-in-this-here-town way. Probably an in-law. The switchboard redhead glanced at me with a little smile and shrug. Probably a mistress.

There was only one door, so I didn’t have any questions. In I went.

The scarred-up wooden desk was older than I was, the top empty of anything but a cup of coffee and a butt-filled glass ashtray, in a small office as dingy as the outer building and the mechanics in the two-bay garage. But the man at the desk — slender, mid-forties, with sandy, curly hair — was if anything spiffy. He wore a gray suit and a white shirt buttoned at the neck, no tie; a snap-brim fedora sat back rather jauntily, its indoor use suggesting he might be bald.

“Nate Heller!” He vaguely resembled Bing Crosby. He stood and shoved his hand across the desk at me like a spear. I shook it. You’d think we were old pals.

“Mr. Costello?” I said tentatively.

“Joe. Why would we stand on formality?”

He seemed to know me, and by more than just reputation. But if we’d met, I didn’t recall. He told me to make myself comfortable — “Take off your coat and stay a while!” — and I hung the Burberry and Dobbs on a corner coat tree with his own topcoat. I was in the Richard Bennett, by the way, cut for the holstered nine mil.

That precaution had to do with the type of cab company Ace almost certainly was — not that it was an unusual type for a city the size of St. Louis, or a lot of cities either, of any size. Certain cabbies all across America were rolling pimps, ready to fix up a visitor to their fair communities with female companionship, games of chance, and assorted other illegal recreational activities.

Beyond that, this cab company was run by a top Gateway City mob guy, said to be a front for fencing stolen goods, smuggled firearms and burgled jewels. I didn’t know Joe Costello personally, but I knew he’d done time on robbery raps in his salad days, and in his main-course years had made a rep setting up heists for others to pull off.

Looking like Bob Hope’s co-star in Road to Alcatraz, Costello folded his hands on the desk — whether he was intentionally showing off that big gold-set diamond ring, I couldn’t tell you. On the wall behind him were framed photos, all hanging crooked, of Joe and a narrow-faced, hooded-eye guy who looked vaguely familiar, taken over a period of time — shaking hands, smiling, laughing, sometimes with a cab in the background, other times in a barroom.

I pulled another of those wooden schoolhouse chairs over and sat down. “You paid well for the right to see me here in St. Louis. What can I do for you?”

“Maybe it’s what I can do for you.” Like Bing, he was a baritone, though not melodic. “You still working for the Greenlease family?”

“I was about to head back to Chicago when your friend Barney Baker caught up with me. I’m on call if Bob Greenlease needs me. Uh, Mr. Costello—”

“Joe. Please. I mean, Nate, I feel like I know you.”

I eyed him. “Why do you feel like you know me, Joe?”

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Are you kidding? I owe you, friend.”

Was he pointing at those pictures?

I asked, “Who is that anyway?”

“You really don’t recognize him? My late partner. We ran the Clover Club on Delmar together. Then we opened up Ace — he’s the one came up with the slogan, ‘Call an Ace cab for ace service.’ He never spoke ill of you, Nate. And him and me, we was like brothers.”

And then I finally recognized that narrow, jug-eared face: Leo Brothers! In June 1930, Jake Lingle, a mobbed-up Tribune leg man who phoned scoops in to rewrite men, was in the pedestrian walkway beneath Michigan Avenue, about to catch the 1:30 P.M. to Washington Park racetrack, when someone shot him in the head. Leo Brothers took the fall for it, identified on the witness stand by a uniformed cop who’d been paid off by the Capone mob. Brothers, also paid off, did eight years of a fourteen-year sentence, and the cop got promoted to plainclothes. His name was Nathan Heller.

“Your buddies in Chicago,” Costello said pleasantly, “set Leo up here with me in the Clover Club after he got out. Piece of luck for yours truly. I knew Leo from the old days when I was driving cab and he was union organizing. This is all news to you?”

“I heard the Outfit took care of him,” I admitted.

“Took care of him in a good way,” Costello clarified with a grin. “Nate, I never heard him say a bad word about you. Matter of fact, when you turned up in the papers or the true detective magazines, he always laughed and said, ‘My old pal Nate Heller — the man who made me!’”

Made him was right — made him in court as a man running away from the scene of the Lingle murder. And yet I’d never spoken to Brothers in my life. But I wasn’t surprised I’d made an impression.

I asked, “What’s become of my... old pal?”

Costello made a sad click in a cheek. “Booze and gambling and babes caught up with him, couple years ago.”

“How so?”

“Ah, well, when he drank he got hotheaded, and he was known to slap a mouthy broad now and again. He made his share of enemies here, too, frankly, getting tough with help who was holding out. Not every driver we hire is a fuckin’ boy scout. Somebody shot him through his screen door in the kitchen grabbing a beer from the fridge. Three times. And it took him three months to go. Tough man, my partner.”

“My condolences,” I said. “But you didn’t send Barney Baker to flag me down with a grand because it’s Old Home Week.”

“No. But before I make my pitch, I want you to get the low-down on this Good-time Charley my boys have been driving around town all day.”

Then began a parade of the mostly questionable-looking cabbies I’d seen lined up in the outer area. Each came in and stood with cap in hand like this was the office at school and Costello was the principal.

It’s about eight o’clock, the first cabbie said, a flat-nosed character who referred to his logbook, when I get called to the Sportsman’s Bar at 3500 South Jefferson. This guy who needs a shave is with a blowsy blonde who must have drunk her breakfast. Guy says he’s Steve Strand and this is his wife Bonnie, and somebody broke into their car and stole their luggage. He wants me to take them to the nearest pawnshop so he can buy replacements. I don’t know of any pawnshops around there, but we get in the cab and drive around.

Nothing.

I even pull over and ask a couple of times.

Nothing.

Finally I head downtown and find a pawnshop but it’s closed. Slay’s Bar at 114 Broadway is open. We go in and Steve has a shot of Walker’s Deluxe whiskey and so does Bonnie, twice. They buy me a drink... just a Coke, Mr. Costello, just a Coke... while we wait for the Army Store at 17 North Broadway to open at nine.

Nine comes, and Steve goes off to buy luggage and comes back with a green footlocker and a black suitcase. Both metal. Both empty. I load ’em in the trunk. They have me take ’em back to the Sportsman’s Bar and unload the footlocker and suitcase onto the sidewalk. They pay me. I go.

I find their behavior peculiar and take a spin around the block. On the return trip, I see ’em loading the luggage in the blue Ford’s trunk. I look to see if any windows in the car look busted, because of what they said about it being broken into. All the windows was rolled up and looked fine.

I get called to the Hi-Nabor Buffet at 2801 Wyoming Street, said the second cabbie, mustached, fifty, which sounds like a restaurant but is mostly a bar. It’s just after ten A.M. and they‘re drinking bourbon.

They have some metal luggage, a footlocker and a suitcase. I go out and put them in the trunk but they are so heavy I can hardly lift them. Steve asks me to take him to buy a used car. But the woman, who is drunker than he is, says, ‘No, take us to the bus station downtown.’

I take them to the Greyhound Bus Depot at Broadway and Delmar. Help them unload the luggage. The fare is a buck twenty-five. He pays with two one-dollar bills and lets me keep half a dollar. This is around 10:35 A.M.

I picked them up outside the bus station at 10:45, a round-faced young colored cabbie said, no more than twenty-five, and they were arguing but I can’t tell you about what. I had to load a couple of heavy pieces of luggage in my trunk, a footlocker and a metal suitcase.

The guy had me drop them at Columbo’s Bar at 3132 South Kingshighway. They paused and seemed about to cross the street where there are a couple of used car lots. Then they made like a bee to honey into that bar, guy dragging the footlocker and the blonde lugging the suitcase. They could hardly manage it, heavy as that stuff was and drunk as skunks as they was.

Maybe two o’clock in the afternoon, the middle-aged heavyset cabbie said, I was in the Old Shillelagh Bar at 3157 Morganford Road, catching a few innings of the World Series — sixth and deciding game! Yankees beat the Dodgers four to three.

Guy sat down next to me... Huh? No, he didn’t have a woman with him. Watched a while, had a drink or two; said his name was Steve Strand, like that was a big deal. Musta noticed my cap, because he said, ‘You on duty? I can use a ride to Hampton Village.’ You know, the shopping center? He was looking for an appliance store, but neglected to say so. They don’t got one at Hampton Village, and Jesus, there’s one right across from where we was before at the Shillelagh!

I take him to Petruso Electrical Appliance and he buys a radio for twenty-eight bucks. Says he likes to keep track of the news. I say, yeah, I like to be up on things, too. He wanted a box for it but the clerk only had a box that was too big. That only made the guy happy. He said, ‘It swims in this one!’ A nut, this guy. And drunk, though not falling-down drunk. Just loosey goosey.

I drop him and his big box with the little radio on Arsenal Street, and good riddance.

No, I’m not with Ace Cabs — I’m with the Laclede Company, the driver said, Negro and older than the others, hair and mustache salt-and-pepper. But Mr. Costello here called my supervisor and I’m glad to help out.

I picked this Steve Strand fare up at the Squeeze Box tavern at 3225 Morganford Road. He was drunk. I would say very drunk. And he was free with his money in a way that could get him in trouble... How so? He got in, handed me a twenty-dollar bill, and said, ‘Just drive. Just drive around.’ Then, as I did that, he dozed off.

He woke up after five, perhaps ten, minutes. Said, ‘I’d like to have a girl. I don’t want to go to a whorehouse, understand! I want a nice girl.’

I told him I didn’t provide that kind of service. He handed me up a second twenty-dollar bill and... well, that’s a lot of money. I told him I could drive him downtown to a driver I knew who might help him. That pleased him.

On the way, he asked to stop at Arsenal Street. He said he had an apartment there. He had some sample cases he wanted to pick up — he was, he said, a salesman of some kind. Then he spotted a tavern, Brownie’s just east of Gravois Avenue on Arsenal, and told me to pull over. He wanted a quick drink. I waited for him. Then he went inside his apartment house and I again waited outside. He returned twice, first with a metal suitcase, then with a footlocker. Struggling with them.

We loaded up my trunk with them, or I should say I loaded them up — he was bent over catching his breath. How much did they weigh? The suitcase, thirty to thirty-five pounds. The foot-locker, forty to fifty pounds. He seemed very concerned about them, making sure they were locked.

We set out again, and I took him to the Jefferson Hotel, where I thought I might find Johnny Hagan. I knew that Johnny had several girls he, uh, worked with. He was happy to take Steve off my hands, and helped me load that heavy luggage in his own trunk.

Next in was a broad-shouldered, black-haired lady-killer about five ten, his handsome, five o’clock-shadowed features compromised only by a scar through his upper lip. He wore the cap of his trade with triangular ACE CAB patch, a black leather zippered jacket, a yellow shirt with a red tie, pleated wide leg pants, and black-and-white wingtips.

Costello said, “This is Johnny Hagan, Nate.”

Hagan came over, took his cap off with his left hand and offered his right. Without getting up, I shook it and nodded. He pulled up another wooden chair and angled it toward me. While Hagan spoke, Costello made a muffled phone call, keeping his voice down, but I caught it: “Yeah, he’s here... Filling him in... Yeah... Yeah.”

There’s a few girls I work with, Hagan said, but the best of ’em is Sandy O’Day. Smart and good-looking and honest for, you know, a doxy. Perfect for a big spender like this Steve character.

I pick her up at her apartment over on North Ninth Street, and she gets in back with Steve and they hit it off fine. I take ’em to McNamee’s Bar at 2500 St. Louis Avenue for a couple of drinks, beer for Steve and me, highball for Sandy. The only thing that gives me, you know, pause was he had a bulge in his right-hand coat pocket. Might be a gun, so suddenly I think maybe my fare’s a vice cop.

I follow him to the can and at the urinals, I say, ‘Steve, I’m only fixing you up with Sandy as a favor. You wouldn’t return a favor by busting me, would you? I mean, you aren’t a cop, are you?’

‘Johnny boy,’ he says, ‘if you knew the truth, you’d know just how wrong you are.’

Back at the bar, he pays for the drinks with a twenty and pushes the change across the table to me, and says, ‘Here, it’s all yours.’ Which is when I realize I better not let this angel fly away.

I decide to take Steve and Sandy to the Coral Court Motel, where a lot of us hackies got an arrangement. We make a couple of stops — a drugstore for Steve to buy some shaving gear, then a liquor store for some bourbon and cigarettes. After that Steve gives me five twenties, saying, ‘Here’s some money on account.’

I get them checked in at the Coral Court around five. Registered as Mr. and Mrs. Robert White of Chicago. I help them haul that damn footlocker and suitcase up to room 49-A on the second floor. I hang around a while. We have some drinks, some laughs. Steve talks about how he likes to go on benders for three or four days at a crack. How it’s nothing to him to spend two or three G’s on a good time.

That footlocker and suitcase are just sitting on the floor by the wall. Steve goes over and cracks open the suitcase and pulls out a fistful of bills. Sandy and me can see in for a second and it looks like the damn suitcase is jammed with money. Steve goes over to the bed and starts counting what he grabbed, but is too drunk to make a go of it. He has me do it and it’s $2,480. He takes a twenty from his pocket and makes it an even $2,500, and says, ‘Johnny, hold onto this for me.’

He says he wants to go nightclubbing and needs some fresh clothes and I should use part of the twenty-five hundred to buy him a nice white silk shirt, some underwear, some socks. Sandy says she is not dressed for an evening out and asks me to go to her place and get her some things.

Which is how I got away from there for a while.

But before I go Steve grabs my arm and says, ‘Johnny, you seem like you know people. You cabbies always do.’ And I say I suppose I do. And he asks if I know anybody who would buy marked money off him. Money where the serial numbers have been recorded.

And I say I might.

So I come here, fill in Mr. Costello, who already seems to know about this Steve spreading money around town while he drinks like a fish. For now Sandy’s keeping him busy.

That’s about it.

Costello said, “Thanks, Johnny. Wait outside a minute. Nate will be joining you, I think.”

Hagan got up, gave me a little grin and a nod and went out, cap still in hand.

I said, “The woman with this Strand character could be the one who picked Bobby Greenlease up at that Catholic school. And Strand himself could be ‘M,’ the guy making phone calls and writing letters who got the ransom payoff last night.”

“Could be,” Costello said. “But if he’s the insurance man he claims, and it’s money he embezzled, or otherwise stolen... and needs laundering... that’s my business and not the FBI or cops or nobody’s.”

Leo Brothers was looking at me over his partner’s shoulder. That was why I was here: my host didn’t know my relationship with the Outfit had been largely reluctant and had mostly faded away when my patron, Frank Nitti, died ten years ago. But to Joe Costello I was still just another crooked cop. Ex-cop, at that.

“But I want nothing to do with kidnapping,” Costello said. “Particularly not a child. I’m a fucking father, five times over! If it’s just garden-variety dirty money, we’ll wash it. But if this Strand pulled the Greenlease snatch, then we turn him in and get credit from the cops and all of St. Louis for doing a public service.”

And maybe, I thought, if this is M, I could find out if that kid was alive and, if so, where he’s being held.

Or was I kidding myself now?

“Either way,” Costello said, “there’s another four grand in it for you, Nate.”

Looked like I was getting my five thousand after all. “How do you propose we go about this, Joe?”

He flipped a hand. “We’ll have Johnny Hagan introduce you as a mobbed-up PI from Chicago who has to approve laundering the insurance cash.”

A knock came at the door. “Joe — it’s me!”

Costello gave me a conspiratorial smile, whispering, “That’s Lt. Lou Shoulders. Rugged copper, handy with a pistol — three kills on duty... Come in, Lou!”

A big bucket-headed guy in a baggy black suit burst in like an undertaker late for the embalming. Maybe fifty-five, he had features as baggy as the suit, his Vitalis-heavy hair black, white at the temples, eyebrows bushy.

“Nate Heller, this is Lt. Louis Shoulders.”

Shoulders, who lived up to his name, was a little taller than me and I had no urge to look up at him, so I stood and we shook hands in a half-hearted, perfunctory way.

“My contact at the PD, and now yours,” Costello said. “Lou and me been pals for years. We both started out driving cabs. You run into trouble, he’s your man.”

“Mr. Heller,” Shoulders said amiably, dark eyes cold, “here’s my card. Home number on the back. Joe here’s explained the situation. I’ll be right behind you.”

If he racked up his fourth on-duty kill, I’d prefer it was the other way around.

Chapter Five

My headlights careened off the golden glazed ceramic-brick walls and glass-block windows of the array of Streamline Moderne bungalows that lurked on a slight slope among towering pin oaks like invaders from another planet getting ready to make their move.

I pulled the Caddy into the motor court drive at 7755 Watson Road in the St. Louis suburb of Marlborough, following Johnny Hagan in his ’49 Chevy taxicab. Each of over thirty two-unit, brown-trimmed, round-cornered structures on the winding drive through the well-manicured several acres had a room on either side of paired white-door garages providing unusual privacy for motel guests.

The pink-and-black neon sign told much of the story—

— and the marquee below gave some particulars:

The rest had been filled in on a St. Louis job of mine just after the war when I stopped by the Coral Court office looking for a client’s wandering wife. I found her in what I was told then was one of the new “Mae West” bungalows, so-called because of their rounded bays. I’d got a real eyeful, not just of my rich old client’s pretty young wife, but the double life of the Coral Court.

That it was the ultimate No-Tell Motel with hourly as well as nightly rates — the hourly (minimum four hours) were ostensibly to allow truckers to come in off Route 66 for a few hours of Z’s — did not stop families from making annual trips or honeymooners making legal whoopee. Some World War II newlywed brides, who never saw their husbands again, would remember their night at Coral Court forever.

Despite my previous visit, I had never stayed here. I pulled up at the office near the highway, joining Hagan, who was already out of his cab.

Hagan sent me in and I paid a reasonable $5.50, single occupancy, for the room reserved next to the one Steve Strand had booked earlier today as Mr. and Mrs. Robert White. The desk clerk was an almost good-looking red-lipstick brunette about forty in pink angora, her sultry friendliness suggesting a secondary business transaction was a possibility.

“Beds are comfy,” she said with a Groucho lift of the eyebrows. “We’re strictly Beautyrest mattresses at the Coral Court.”

“Good to know,” I said, and took my fifty cents in change.

That seemed to disappoint her a little. Still, there was promise or maybe hope in her voice as she said, “50-A’s next to 49-A — upper floor in the middle one of the new buildings.”

These proved to be a trio at the rear of the property, more conventional two-stories that hadn’t been here on my previous stop, but the same brick-and-brown-trim minus the bungalows’ rounded curves — two rooms above, two below. Paired garages were on the first floor in front with two more in back, where Hagan stowed his cab in Strand’s. I slid the Caddy into 50-A’s adjacent garage. You accessed the upper floor by an outer staircase snugged along the building’s side and leading to a little hallway off of which were, as promised, 50-A and 49-A.

I stowed my overnight bag in my room, which had none of the moderne motel’s exterior style but did maintain yellow walls and brown trim with serviceable modern furniture and a double bed, presumably with the promised Beautyrest. And that bed looked good to me. It had been a long day with a long drive, and of course yesterday with that ransom drop had taken its toll.

Nathan Heller was not as young as he used to be.

In a personality-free hallway, Hagan — some clothes draped over his arm and a bottle of I.W. Harper in one hand — knocked at 49-A.

“It’s Johnny!” he said.

The door opened on a tall, surprisingly good-looking chippie in low heels. She wore a white blouse and brown skirt and there was nothing sexy about that wardrobe except the voluptuous body it hugged. Her hair was big and blonde and phony, but who cared? Her eyes were big, too, and gray-blue, her nose pert and her mouth too wide and too red and too full and still nobody cared. She looked like Cleo Moore in the B-movies, only tall — five ten easy.

“Sandy, this is Nate Heller,” Johnny said. We were out in the hall. “He’s from Chicago.”

“Remind me to be impressed,” she said. “Here, give me those clothes. You pick out something good? Hope you didn’t ask my aunt’s help. Her taste is in her fucking ass.”

We went in.

Sandy stepped aside, examining her share of the clothes — Hagan had provided several options. A guy only in his white-and-black polka-dot boxer shorts, a sleeveless sweaty white undershirt, and the black socks/shoes combo you see in stag films rolled off the bed and came over in a clumsy, hurried stagger. He was maybe five nine and not fat exactly, more a fruit-gone-bad softness, his legs short and stocky and nearly hairless.

He had dark thinning hair swept back, a receding hairline that emphasized a widow’s peak, and a short, wide nose and dull light blue eyes, like somebody who couldn’t remember where he put his car keys. No, his car. His mouth was a rosebud thing, and he had the kind of five o’clock shadow that just makes a face look dirty. A cigarette with an ash about to fall off drooped from the small, plump lips.

Like a greedy kid, he grabbed from Hagan the bottle of Harper’s and the remainder of the clothing — a silk shirt and fresh boxers — then beamed at him. “You are really on the ball, Johnny!”

“Aim to please, Steve.”

Steve put the shirt on over the grubby t-shirt and turned his back to us as he dropped his drawers and got into the new ones, giving us a look at a flabby ass that made Hagan and me share a cringe. Sandy was off to one side paying no attention to anything but the selection of clothes, which seemed to satisfy but not thrill her. Like her life. She took her fresh things into the bathroom and shut herself in. Nice to know she had a sense of decorum.

Then Steve turned and his face went as blank as a baby’s. He pointed at me. “Who’s this? Chicago?”

Steve’s voice was husky, low, smarter than the face.

I offered my hand. “Nate Heller. You must be Steve Strand.”

He stuck something out that proved to be a clammy excuse for an appendage.

Just looking at him, I knew he’d done this evil thing. Over against the wall was the metal luggage from the pawnshop — a green footlocker and black suitcase, likely filled with the money Letterman and I had dropped off by that covered bridge last night.

“That’s who I am, I’m Steve Strand,” he said, as if reminding himself, and went over and sat on the edge of the bed as he stuck his stubby legs into some trousers he’d plucked off a chair. “Thanks for making time. It’ll be worth your while, I promise.”

The voice might have been M’s. It seemed lower here, but a phone voice can sound higher. And he could have been disguising it on the calls.

Or wasn’t M.

I sat next to Steve. On the Beautyrest. “Well, I promise you I’ll be fair. We want you to feel like you can do business with us the next time you have a windfall.”

The dull eyes tightened. “We ever met?”

I shook my head. “I’d remember.”

Maybe he recognized my voice.

“Well, we’ll get to know each other,” he said with a shrug. He looked at me the way a dog does a hydrant. “We’re just gettin’ ready to go out on the town. You’re coming along, right? What’s your name again?”

“Nate.”

“Nate, you won’t be sorry you met me.”

“I’m damn near giddy already.”

Steve laughed at that. So did I. Neither of us meant it.

Sandy came out in a four-alarm fire of a red pencil cocktail dress with a square-neck that showed off at least a third of her breasts. Once a man got past thinking contemptuously, “She’s for sale,” his next thought was, “How much?”

“Take me to the Hill,” she said to nobody in particular. That was the Italian-American enclave of St. Louis famed for toasted ravioli and roasted gangsters. “Ruggieri’s.”

“No,” Steve said, getting into a new-looking houndstooth sport coat that had been slung over a chair. “We’ll just get sandwiches somewhere.”

She gestured to herself and her screaming red sexuality. “You’re not gonna buy this a goddamn sandwich.”

He waved her off like they were married. “Okay, okay. But it’s getting late. Not everything’s open. I’ll take you for a nice dinner, but someplace near here.” He looked at Hagan, who was leaning against the wall near the door. “Know anyplace?”

“Harbor Inn is close,” he said with a shrug. “It’s all right. You can get a full meal, if the kitchen’s still open.”

“Harbor Inn it is,” Steve said, and Sandy rolled her eyes, hands on hips.

I said, “I’m not that hungry. I’ll wait for you folks to get back.” I was thinking about that footlocker and suitcase against the wall; I still carried lock picks.

Steve came over and put a pudgy hand on my sleeve; he smelled like Old Spice and desperation. “No, you come along, Nate. We’ll have a chance to talk. Get to know each other. Can you hold onto this for me?”

He reached in his pocket and got out a .38 revolver. He held it in his hand like this was a stick-up. For a moment I weighed diving for him, as death seemed a possibility and I’d rather it be his; but he shifted it to his palm and held it out like a gift.

“Ain’t it a little beaut?” he asked.

“I’m not licensed in this state,” I said, which was a lie. The nine mil was under my left arm. Thank you, Richard Bennett.

Steve swung toward Hagan. “How about you, Johnny?”

“No can do, buddy,” handsome Johnny said through a stiff smile. “I’m on parole.”

Sandy came over in a lightning flash of red and plucked the gun from Steve’s palm, startling him. “Cute,” she said. “Just what we need, going out to dinner, case the waitress is a bitch.” Efficiently she emptied the bullets into her hand. “What’s an insurance agent doing with a gun?”

“Protection,” Steve said defensively, “what do you think? I carry around considerable sums of money, you know.”

She closed her fingers around the cartridges and swayed back to her purse, a black leather clutch, and dumped the slugs into it. Then she sashayed back and returned the gun.

Under the five o’clock shadow, Steve’s cheeks were as red as Sandy’s dress. “You think I don’t have more slugs?” Proving his point, he dipped a hand into a sport coat pocket and showed off his own handful of bullets.

But they were .25 caliber. Whose gun did they belong to? A female partner, maybe? That blowsy dame he seemed to have ditched?

Steve left the .38 under a pillow and we set out for the Harbor Inn. I did not suggest using my car, tucked away in one of the garages below, because Steve — if he was M — might recognize the Caddy from the ransom drop last night; Letterman and I had not been sure we hadn’t been watched.

We went in Hagan’s taxi and I sat in front with him, keeping an eye on the couple in the backseat. Looking out opposite windows, they had less chemistry than oil and water. Steve was smoking again, and it soon became clear he was a chain-smoker. Hagan had a cigarette going, too, and so did Sandy, and a nicotine cloud formed inside the cab.

“Not a smoker, Nate?” Steve asked with his sphincter of a smile. He was fidgety back there. The woman might have been waxworks but for her occasional blink.

“I smoked overseas during the war,” I said. “Gave it up when I got home.”

I’d smoked in combat but dropped the habit when I was recuperating at St. Elizabeth’s. The only time I got the urge in peacetime was when I found myself in a combat-tense situation. That was rare. Even last night, on that wooden bridge, hadn’t qualified.

The Harbor Inn did not have so much as a small body of water to cozy up to, and the only “seafood” served was catfish; it was just a small roadside joint with table and booth seating, a horseshoe-shaped bar, and — for a touch of class — linen tablecloths and bentwood café chairs. For a Monday night, the place was hopping, jukebox blaring and couples dancing. Hagan ordered fried chicken and the rest of us went for the open-face steak sandwich — the menu was limited after nine. Sandy seemed annoyed or maybe frustrated with her sweaty john, who seemed to sense that, sensitive individual he so clearly was.

“Did you say you got a daughter?” Steve asked her. Beer had come for everybody while we waited for the food.

“Yeah. Michelle. We call her Mickey. She’s smart as a whip and cute as hell. Lives with my aunt and me. I’m a good mom.”

“I’m sure you are,” Steve said, nodding, though the only thing about her that suggested motherhood was her neckline. “I hope you’re putting your money away.”

That actually seemed to hurt her feelings a little. “Don’t take me for just another party girl. I already own a farm.”

If this doll owned a farm, bodies were buried on the back forty.

Steve said, “Oh, that’s great. Everybody needs a dream.”

“It’s not a dream! It’s real. Maybe you’d like to go in on it with me. You have a lot of money in that footlocker and suitcase, don’t you?”

Hagan and I exchanged quick looks: here it comes.

“Those are sample cases,” Steve said. “I’m a pharmaceutical salesman. Those are serum samples.”

Nobody brought up that earlier he’d been an insurance agent. Maybe because Sandy had glommed the greenback “serum” in the footlocker.

“Veterinary medicine,” Steve went on. “Animals and humans, what’s the difference?”

She smoothed some edges off herself. “Well, I want to buy a big Guernsey bull. To raise prize show cattle. If you’d buy me a bull, I would be the happiest woman on earth.”

If he bought her bull, Steve would be the biggest jackass on the imaginary farm.

“Maybe I can arrange that,” he said, with a wave of a plump-fingered paw. “Ah. Speaking of cattle.”

The steak sandwiches arrived; so did the fried chicken. The conversation slowed, most of what ensued coming from Steve, who had talked about how he was starving but only ate a few bites. What he had to say, however, was interesting.

“Johnny,” he said to the matinee-idol cabbie, “you seem like a right kind of guy.”

“Well, thanks, Steve.”

“You taxi drivers know a lot of people.”

Which was how Hagan had been able to add me to this little party.

“I know a few,” Hagan admitted.

Very quietly, Steve asked, “Can you score me some morphine?”

Like, Pass the salt.

Hagan was chewing, and obviously wondering how to respond, when Steve said, “My car was stolen, and along with it, my medicine, and all the paraphernalia that goes with it.”

And yet his “sample cases” were still in his possession.

“Look, I’m no damn lowlife junkie,” he said, with a sickly smile. “I just got hooked on the stuff when I was in the Pacific. During the war. When I was wounded. And they gave me more in the hospital, so till I can catch a breath and get some proper medical treatment...”

“I don’t really know of any place where I can get the stuff,” Hagan said with a noncommittal shrug, “but I can ask around.”

“Good! Good. Pick up a number 25 or 26 needle, while you’re at it. You can drop us off after dinner at the Coral Court and go on home. Your missus is probably wondering about you by now.”

“I gave her a call, but yeah. I should get home.”

Steve leaned in and put a hand on Hagan’s. “One more thing. Before you come by the motor court tomorrow morning, rent me a car and buy me a nice leather suitcase and a briefcase.”

That sounded like two things. Or three.

“All right,” Hagan said.

“Dig into that dough I gave you.”

“Sure.”

Sandy, sitting next to Steve between him and Hagan, perked up. “Oh! I love that song. Johnny, come dance with me.”

“Vaya Con Dios” by Les Paul and Mary Ford had started up on the jukebox.

They went off to dance.

A waitress brought another round of beers. The third.

Steve said, “So, Nate — you were in the war, too?”

“I was.”

“What branch?”

“Marines.”

The dull eyes got a little lively. “You’re shittin’ me! Same here! Well, Semper Fi, Mac! Where did you serve?”

“Guadalcanal. Second Marines. I was wounded and sent home. My war lasted less than a year.”

His chest puffed up. “Oh, I was in for the duration... First Marine Division — New Britain, Peleliu, Okinawa campaigns. Made sergeant.”

“What did you do over there?”

“...Oh, whatever they asked me to.”

“What was your job? Mine was trying not to get my ass shot off in a foxhole.”

“Uh... telephone equipment repairman.”

I managed not to laugh. Deadpan, I said, “Where the hell would we have been without communications? Listen, while we have a moment alone...” Sandy and Hagan were dancing to “Crying in the Chapel” by June Valli now. “...we can talk money.”

He folded his hands and tried to look calm, but the eyes were lively again. “Why don’t we?”

“Depends on the nature of the currency,” I said. “Bank money could have some marked bills mixed in, so maybe fifty cents on the dollar. If it’s insurance money, why is it in cash? What’s the story there?”

He merely shrugged. No answer beyond that.

“If it’s out of a company safe and you don’t figure the serial numbers are recorded,” I said, “you can get an even higher return. Much as seventy-five, eighty cents on the dollar. But if it’s something like this kidnapping that’s in the papers, well, that could mean twenty, even fifteen cents on the dollar. Money doesn’t get much hotter.”

Steve’s laugh seemed forced. “You don’t think that’s what this is? Do I look like that kind of guy?”

You do, Steve. You really, really do.

“It’s insurance money, okay?” he blurted. “Everything would have gone fine if this one guy hadn’t made a mistake.”

If Steve was trying to wash the ransom money, did this remark indicate three accomplices? Steve, the blowsy broad he maybe already dumped, and... who?

“Get in touch with your people in Chicago,” he said. “Tell ’em you got a line on a big bundle. Say I want seventy-five cents on the dollar, no questions asked.”

Sandy and Hagan joined us — apparently they didn’t care to dance to the “Theme from Dragnet” by Ray Anthony — and we gathered our things. Hagan used Steve’s money to pay the check and we headed out.

Hagan dropped us off at the Coral Court and Sandy went up the exterior staircase first followed by Steve and then me. I stopped at my door and said good night to them and Steve, who was stumbling drunk now, threw me a wave and Sandy winked at me before they disappeared into 49-A.

I paused, then moved down to the door they’d gone through and listened. I could probably have accomplished the same thing in 50-A with a drinking glass to the wall, but their conversation bled out just fine right here. The rooms at the Coral Court, unlike the glazed-brick-and-glass-block exteriors, were fashioned of flimsy stuff.

Sandy, in a sultry, slutty way that tried a little too hard, said, “Come on, honey, let’s go to bed...”

“Don’t worry,” Steve said, “you’ll get your money.”

“What the hell kind of deal is this?”

“I got you here for one reason and I’ll tell you what it is later.”

Sandy’s voice spiked. “What’s wrong with you, anyway? You got physical problems or something? Shit, I don’t understand this at all!”

Steve yelled back: “Listen, goddamnit! I haven’t slept for five days. I’m half-gone on nerves, whiskey, and dope. The last thing I wanna do right now is fuck! So sit down and shut up!”

“Oh? Well, fuck you, buddy!”

“Fuck you too, you goddamn tramp!”

Sandy shrieked and must have been hitting him, because he said, “Stop it! Stop it! Goddamnit, all I want from you is to run a goddamn errand for me tomorrow.”

“What?”

“You do a simple fucking favor for me and I’ll buy you the biggest fucking bull I can find for that fucking farm of yours.”

Then she was cooing at him and when I heard the Beautyrest starting to sing, I guessed Sandy was plying her trade. I went to my room, got into my pajamas, slipped under the covers, and switched off the bedside lamp. Went over everything I’d heard and seen tonight, feeling more and more convinced that metal luggage held the ransom money.

I mulled calling my wife’s number out in California and talking to my son, but even with the time difference it was too late for that.

Considering what I had on my mind, I fell asleep fast. The knock at my door came so soft, it worked its way into my dream. But it grew louder enough to wake me. I crawled out of bed and cracked the door open.

Sandy O’Day looked at me. For a moment I didn’t recognize her — her hair was short and black now, carelessly bobby-pinned up. Seemed all that blondeness had been a wig. Her too-wide, very red, generously lipped mouth came up with a hell of a smirk.

She said, “That limp-dick jerk-off fell asleep on me. I think I had too much coffee at that dump we ate at. Can I come in?”

I opened the door for her and she swept in, a pink nightgown trailing after like a cape. She let it drop to the floor and unleashed her long-legged body, slightly plump in the best ways, displayed in a Frederick’s of Hollywood-style purple bra and panties. Her hair might have been tousled, but her makeup was working overtime.

“You got anything to drink?” she asked.

“A couple bottles of 7-Up I got from a machine at check-in. A bucket of ice from down the hall. A couple of water glasses.”

“Sounds like a party.”

I poured us glasses with ice and we sat on top of the unmade bed with pillows propped behind us.

“I must be losing my charm,” she said. “When nothing developed in bed, Steve-a-rino took a bath to relax and I crawled in with him and got nothing but the wrong kind of wet. I’m starting to think he has eyes for Johnny or maybe you.”

I shook my head. “He’s just a lush. But he may be a rich one.”

She frowned curiously at me. “Where do you think he got that dough?”

I gave her back a question of my own. “How good a look did you get at it?”

She shrugged. “Just a flash. But, man, it looked stuffed in there like a Thanksgiving turkey.” She showed me small feral white teeth and her eyebrows went up and down and up and down. “You and me could grab those babies and South America here we come. You’re right, he’s a lush. You probably won’t even have to kill him.”

“That’s a relief. South America, huh? Wouldn’t you rather plow your share into your farm?”

Her head went back and she horse-laughed. “Ha! You didn’t buy that load of bullshit, did you, Nate?”

“No. I think you fooled Steve, though. He’s not very bright. Did he ever tell you what errand he wanted you to run?”

She sipped 7-Up, ice clinking, nodded. “Yeah. He’s gonna give me a thousand dollars to fly to Los Angeles and mail a letter.”

“What the hell?”

She repeated that word for word.

But by now I got it: “It’s a letter from him to somebody.”

“Yeah. A lawyer in St. Joe.”

“He thinks the postmark will give him an alibi. Make it appear he’s in L.A.”

“I guess.”

“You have the letter?”

“No. I saw it. He says I can keep anything left from the thousand after air fare and hotel and incidental shit. And he’ll give me enough to buy that Guernsey bull.” She giggled, then got serious and conspiratorial. “Which is all well and good, Heller, but I say take the money and run.”

“He has a gun.”

She glanced at the nightstand, where my nine millimeter was resting. “Looks like you do, too.” She worked her hand in my hair. “I think we’d make a good team. We both been to the rodeo before....”

Hard as it may be to believe, she smelled good. Arpège by Lanvin — a showgirl I dated a while back wore it. And the truth is, over the years, I have dated (to put it euphemistically) all kinds of females — from rich to poor, from brilliant to dumb, and a good number have been strippers and showgirls. Now that I was respectable, with a L.A. office and all, you can add starlets to the list. How can I put it politely? I’d screwed sleazier.

She turned the lamp to a low setting — that was one of Coral Court’s trademarks, although the ceiling mirrors proved to be a rumor, at least in 49-A and 50-A — and the room fell into a kind of dusk. She glided off the bed and slowly stripped off the bra — her breasts full and high and beautifully shaped — then turned her back to me and slid off the panties, revealing a dimpled bounteous ass as smooth as a marble statue. She turned to reveal a plush dark pubic bush and kicked off the heels and climbed back onto the bed and onto me. She slipped a hand inside the pajama trousers’ fly and fished me out and worked me to attention.

She was about to mount me when I took her by the arms and said no.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I have a rubber.” She revealed the coil in her left palm; hadn’t seen that. She was good. Or shall we say, practiced.

“No,” I said. “I’m just not in the mood.”

“You look like you’re in the mood!”

“No. No offense, but... no. I don’t want to give you the wrong idea.”

“The wrong idea?”

“Call me old-fashioned, but I draw the line at murder.”

“I said you probably wouldn’t have to!” She huffed a sigh and scrambled off the bed. She got into the panties and bra in an irritated, unsexy way, stepped into her shoes, and stalked to the door, where she stopped and, clearly frustrated, looked at me as I reached to switch off the lamp.

“Jesus,” she said as she went out. “Doesn’t anybody wanna fuck me tonight?”

Chapter Six

This time the knock at the door woke me at once. Insistent, the pounding was accompanied by Steve’s husky voice saying, “Nate! Are you up? Nate!”

The urgency put a frown on my face and the nine mil in my hand. But by the time I was on my feet, the sunlight peeking through the Venetian blinds said it was morning. I went over where the ruckus was, put the gun behind my back in one hand, and edged the door open a ways with the other.

Steve looked sweaty and upset, in desperate need of a shave, his dull blue eyes wide; he was in his houndstooth sport coat, brown trousers and bare feet. “Oh, good, you’re awake. I just don’t wanna leave my things unattended.”

He apparently meant the footlocker and suitcase, though he’d never admitted they were full of money.

“Okay,” I said. “You want me to watch ’em while you, uh... what?”

“Come see me when you’re dressed,” Steve said hurriedly, and was gone.

Everything’s a crisis with this guy, I thought, except things that should be.

I’d just closed the door when I heard Sandy’s voice and for a moment thought I was imagining it. Or worse, that I’d relented in the night and let her back in. Then I realized it was coming from outside, and went over and peered between blinds at the drive curving around past the small rear parking lot bordered by pin oaks.

Nobody.

But I could still hear her. In my pajamas, leaving the gun behind, I exited the room as barefoot as Steve had been, the door ajar, and stepped out onto the white metal landing at the top of the exterior stairs; it was crisp and chilly outside.

Sandy was on the far end of the landing in her purple dressing gown, leaning over the rail and yelling at a young colored maid poised by a housekeeping cart.

“What do you mean,” my unlikely Juliet was indignantly asking, “you can’t bring us some breakfast? We’ll pay for the privilege!”

The maid, in a green and white uniform, looked up and said, “We ain’t allowed to do that, lady. And I ain’t asking the manager a question when I know the answer, because he’s not in a good mood mornings. Actually, he ain’t in a good mood, period.”

And the maid and her cart rumbled on.

Sandy hadn’t noticed me, so I spoke. “Good morning.”

She gave me barely a glance. “Go fuck yourself.”

“Why, aren’t you available?”

That got a throaty laugh out of her. “Well, breakfast isn’t. I’m not hungry, but Steve’s having a cow.”

“That’ll save him buying you a Guernsey.”

She laughed again, just something short from her belly. Now she looked at me — surprisingly pretty, make-up free, though the hardness of her life lingered. “You always this funny in the morning?”

“Keep trying. Maybe you’ll find out.”

She grinned and gave me a middle finger. We were finally getting along.

“I’ll handle Steve,” I told her, as she slid past me into the hall and we slipped into our respective quarters.

Bathed and shaved and back in the Richard Bennett with the holstered nine mil accouterment, I knocked at the 49-A door and Sandy answered, back in her big blonde wig and in a pink knit sweater and black pencil skirt and low black heels. She rolled her eyes at me. Beyond, Steve was pacing like an expectant father.

I stepped past her. “What’s the problem?”

“I’m gonna talk to that fucking manager,” he said, still pacing. “Johnny told them, when we checked in, we were to get the first-class treatment.”

“First-class treatment in this kind of place,” I said, “does not include breakfast. They don’t have a restaurant, much less room service.”

“I’m gonna let that manager know who he’s dealing with.”

Sandy took my arm, sending her words back and forth between me and Steve. “I know the manager. Jack Carr. He’s tight with Buster Wortman and an ex-con himself. Not a good idea getting his attention.”

Wortman was known as the rackets boss of East St. Louis, Illinois.

She gave me a little nod toward the footlocker and suitcase against the wall. The likes of Carr and Wortman would just love to know about those... if they didn’t already.

I said, “I’ll go out and get us some breakfast.”

Steve froze but his expression melted. “Would you, Nate? That’d be mighty white of you.”

“Anything else you need?”

He put his hand on top of his head like an ice pack. “Aspirin.”

So I would play delivery boy. I only hoped this errand wasn’t meant to get rid of me just long enough for Steve and his money to move on without me. If Sandy had told him about the nine millimeter on my nightstand, he might think I wasn’t here for the advertised purpose. Which I wasn’t.

Of course, that would require Sandy telling Steve she’d been in my room, which would not thrill him, since he was the one paying for the pleasure of her company; and anyway, I was representing the Chicago Outfit, wasn’t I? Why wouldn’t I travel heavy?

I returned in forty minutes or so with three fried-egg sandwiches and paper cups of coffee from a diner up the road and Bayer aspirin from a Katz Drug. When Steve sat on the edge of the bed, to eat his sandwich, setting his coffee on the bedside stand, I picked up his hat to make room for myself, tossing it onto a chair.

“Don’t you know it’s unlucky,” I said, “to leave your hat on the bed?”

Through a mouthful of white bread and fried egg, Steve said, “Do I look like some superstitious chump?”

Well, he didn’t look superstitious. A glimpse at the fedora’s sweatband had revealed “CAH” and “LEVINE HAT COMPANY, ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI.” Not being a chump myself, I knew at once Steve Strand’s initials were not CAH.

Nobody had much to say. Sandy turned on the TV while she ate and a sickeningly folksy Arthur Godfrey kept us company by way of a bunch of blather and Julius LaRosa singing “Eh, Cumpari!” When “Strike It Rich” came on, it was a relief.

Meanwhile, Steve prowled and paced, pausing on occasion to peek through the Venetian blinds at the rear parking lot. Finally I stepped up next to him. “Checking for cops?”

“No, no — insurance investigators, maybe.”

About a quarter after eleven, Johnny Hagan arrived, wearing the same working man’s clothes as last night but minus his ACE CAP. He had a tan leather two-suit bag over one arm, a matching briefcase in one hand, and a brown-paper-bagged bottle in the other. Still barefoot, Steve strode over, annoyed.

“Where the hell have you been?” he blurted. “We been sitting around all morning with our thumbs up our asses!”

The big good-looking cabbie cowered, as if this pudgy punk was a threat; of course Steve did have a gun in his sport coat pocket.

“I’m sorry, pal,” Hagan said. “That was some laundry list of errands you gave me. I got that luggage you wanted. Hey, and I rented you a swell ride — a ’52 Plymouth sedan, two-tone green.” He held out a handful of pills. “Plus I got you Bennies off a bellboy.”

“Gimme!” Steve said. He snatched the pills from the cabbie’s palm and stuffed them in a pocket. At least he didn’t just toss them down his throat like Vitamin Flintheart in the funnies.

Hagan shook the paper bag off the bottle — I.W. Harper again — and handed it toward Steve, who grinned like a ventriloquist’s dummy. “Johnny, I won’t soon forget you!”

Then Steve was passing around drinking glasses in which he’d poured several fingers of amber liquid, like the pacing father’s baby had finally been delivered. Crossing her nice long legs, Sandy replaced me in the seat of honor next to Steve on the edge of the Beautyrest while Johnny and I found chairs.

“Stick by me a few days,” Steve said to the cabbie, between generous gulps, “and see me through this rough patch, you can be damn sure I’ll take care of you.”

What rough patch exactly?

Steve went on: “Sandy here wants a bull to hey-diddle-diddle the cows on her farm. What’s your dream, Johnny?”

The cabbie gestured around him, sloshing the whiskey in hand; his eyes traveled to where the walls met the ceiling as if that were where heaven began.

“Place of my own like this would be just about goddamn perfect,” Hagan mused. “Can you picture it? Motel down in Florida, beach for a back yard, away from the Saint fuckin’ Looie snow.” He snorted in self-contempt. “Rolling drunks in your cab only takes a guy so far. Why hustle johns for whores out of a Chevy... no offense, Sandy... when you can run a ring of ’em right out of your own clean and comfy motel? Drivin’ cab is no kind of life for a real man. A place like the Coral Court — hell, half as nice — would cover what it takes for a guy to make his support payments and make a bet when he feels like it, maybe buy a new suit of clothes now and again, and never feel the pinch.”

“Everybody needs a dream,” I agreed.

“Well, yours is gonna come true, Johnny,” Steve said, saluting him with an already empty whiskey glass. “Like Sandy and her farm and that male nympho bull I’m gonna buy her... I’m gonna set you up for life, kid. And Nate, you are not forgotten in this — I’m gonna kick back ten percent of whatever you arrange for me with the Chicago boys. Consider that a promise.”

Sandy, not too subtly, said to Steve, “That new bag you had Johnny buy? You need help shifting the money into it from that footlocker and suitcase?”

Steve took no offense at this breach of etiquette. He just shook his head gently and said, “No, suit bag’s for clothes we’re gonna buy this afternoon, me and Johnny. Now, Johnny boy, first you should drop Sandy off at a cab stand, where she can get a ride to the airport for her L.A. trip. Use the car you rented and come back here after. Sandy, I got a couple more letters for you to mail from out there. Then, Johnny, rent me a nice apartment in a quiet, refined neighborhood where I can lay low for a while. If it hadn’t been for one man’s slip-up, none of this would be necessary. But it is. Pay a month’s rent if you have to.”

“Okey-doke,” the cabbie said.

“And can you score me some fake I.D.? Know anybody can provide that?”

“There’s a guy.”

Sandy was listening intently. I could hear her wheels turning: the last thing she wanted was to get on an airplane to the West Coast and leave the fortune in those metal suitcases behind.

“I need the rest of that twenty-five hundred back,” Steve said to Hagan, “but keep five C’s — a man without money is nothing. Use what’s left after buying my new I.D. to fix yourself up with some classy new threads.”

Hagan complied. At her host’s prompting, Sandy gathered her extra things and got ready to leave. Then she gave me a wry look that said, Maybe next time, and thanked Steve for the grand. He said no thanks were necessary and she could get in touch with him about that Guernsey bull through Hagan, on her return from the Coast.

Before following the cabbie into the hall, Sandy gave the footlocker and suitcase a longing look — the kind a man wishes a woman might give him before parting.

When they’d left, Steve poured himself a fresh glass of whiskey and gave me one I hadn’t asked for. He went to the window and parted blades of the blinds to watch the Plymouth go, then returned to his spot on the edge of the bed.

“Nate, I wanted to talk to you alone.”

As if sending Sandy to L.A. to mail letters had been all about giving us a little privacy.

I sipped whiskey. I’ve never cared for the way it burns when it hits bottom. “What’s on your mind, Steve?”

His unblinking gaze was unsettling. “I want to play it straight with your friends in Chicago. I got no desire to have the Outfit unhappy with me.”

“Sound thinking.”

“So I’m not going to lie to you.” He pointed to the footlocker and black suitcase. “That’s not insurance money or from a bank vault, either. That’s ransom dough. The Greenlease kid.”

I’d been pretty much convinced of that since the moment I first saw Steve’s sweaty smear of a face. But hearing it still landed hard.

“I’m no fool,” he said. “That money is bound to be marked. Means I have to settle for whatever I can get. But you can help.”

“How?”

He shrugged. “You know these Chicago people. They’re your business associates. Maybe even your friends. And the more they give me, the more I can give you, right?”

“How many others are in this with you, Steve?”

“I got a girl named Bonnie. I stowed her in an apartment because she came a little unglued after we took the boy. She drinks too much.”

“Does she.”

He nodded, looked into his own glass, finding no irony there. “I said somebody slipped up, remember? And I guess you could say somebody was me.”

“How so, Steve?”

He jerked a thumb at himself, defensively. “I thought up the plan. The whole thing was mine. I have a real mind for this kind of thing — in my time, I robbed stores, and stuck up a whole string of taxi cabs... ha, don’t tell Johnny! Never a hitch, except maybe that bank job... just bad luck, after I case the place and plan so perfectly, it turns out to be closed on Saturdays. But when I was doing time, I got really good at planning.”

I had a regular criminal mastermind here.

“You see, I come from a wealthy family, but I had a bad run of luck with some businesses, legit ones that chewed up my inheritance. In stir, I got to thinking about the rich kids I grew up around... and a kidnapping seemed like a safe, easy way to get rich again. If only... if only I hadn’t got mixed up with that crazy bastard.”

“What crazy bastard, Steve?”

“Tom Marsh.”

Marsh? M?

He sighed, shook his head. “He was just somebody I ran into in the Netherlands Hotel bar, in Kansas City. We hit if off right away — talked the same language. You know, words and expressions only ex-cons use. He had charm and he was tough. But he had bad qualities I didn’t pick up on.”

“Such as?”

“Well, he was low-class. Had tattoos on his arms and chest. And he was a perverted son of a bitch. You think I woulda snatched a kid if I knew I’d thrown in with a short eyes?”

The flesh on my arms goose-pimpled and the hair on the back of my neck bristled.

“Short eyes” was prison slang for child molester.

“And,” Steve continued, “Marsh has been looking after the Greenlease boy ever since Bonnie picked him up at that school. In a nice quiet house in a nice quiet neighborhood, never mind where. Marsh swears he’s leaving the kid alone — that he knows if he touches him, in that way, it could sink the whole damn deal. But how can I trust a goddamn kiddie-diddling drug addict?”

Good point. “He still has the boy?”

Steve nodded. “He was supposed to deliver the kid to a hotel in Pittsburg, Missouri. But he hasn’t yet. He thinks we can squeeze another round of money out of Greenlease. Greedy, grasping prick! When I found that out, I grabbed the money, and Bonnie and me took off.”

“Then it’s Marsh you’ve been on the lookout for,” I said, nodding toward the blinds.

“Yes! Yes.” He sat forward, the dull eyes getting some real life in them now. “I want to do the deal with your Outfit boys, score some real money for me and Bonnie, and you, of course... then I’ll call the cops and tell them where to find Marsh and the boy.”

“If he hasn’t killed him.”

Steve waved that off. “Oh, no, the boy is fine. Marsh is nuts but not stupid. Then Bonnie and me will lie low in an apartment till the cops take Marsh in and the boy back to Mommy and Daddy.” He slapped his knees. “So. Everything hunky-dory now?”

Yeah. Fucking swell. Bobby Greenlease’s babysitter was a drug-addicted pedophile. Steve and Bonnie were drunk and on the lam. What could go wrong?

And yet the kid seemed to be alive. I’d been ready to write Bobby off in this thing. Now here was a ray of hope in this nightmare tragicomedy.

A car motor outside announced itself. Steve went to the window and peeked out. “Johnny’s back! Help me take the luggage down and load it in the Plymouth.”

As if carrying a coffin, him in front, me in back, I helped him down with the footlocker. Hagan went up and got the black metal suitcase. We loaded the Plymouth trunk and the cabbie pulled the vehicle into the first-floor garage marked 49-A, got out and shut it inside.

“Catch yourself a cab,” Steve told Hagan, an arm around him. “I have some things to do this afternoon. Three of us’ll meet at the Pink House bar-and-grill up the street for a drink and a bite at four o’clock. Don’t forget my fake I.D. Okay?”

Hagan said, “Covered,” and the cabbie walked off to catch a cab.

Steve locked the garage and I followed him back up to his room. He poured himself some whiskey, then asked me if I wanted a “snort” and I declined. He resumed his favorite seat on the bed’s edge.

“Nate, can you get your Chicago friends to give me a figure for the money? Like I said, it’s a hell of a big bundle — around six hundred grand.”

I whistled, like I didn’t already know. “See what I can do. But I don’t know about trusting the phones here. They could be tapped by the cops or even the management.”

He nodded. “Maybe you could walk to a booth and call from there. Or use a pay phone in a restaurant.”

“You could drive me.”

He shook his head. “No, I got things to do.”

“Why not take me along?”

“No. Things I need to do on my own.”

“You’re not meeting up with Bonnie, are you? Or maybe Marsh?”

“No! Why are you pushing me, Nate?”

I got up and sat beside him. Put a hand on his shoulder. “Steve, you gotta be straight with me. If I tell the boys back home you can be trusted, and something goes off the rails, it’ll come back and hit both of us. Hard.”

He thought about that. Then had some whiskey and asked, “What if the kid was dead?”

“What? You mean, what if Marsh kills the boy?”

“I mean, what if he already has.” His eyes were looking right at me but registering nothing. “I mean... Nate. It’s better you hear this. He already has. Killed the kid.”

I didn’t say anything.

“If your Outfit pals knew the kid had been killed, would it mean less money? I mean, can we keep that from them? Make ’em believe we didn’t know ourselves?”

I stood. “Excuse me.”

I got up fast and shut myself in the bathroom. I raised the toilet seat and knelt before the porcelain altar on the ceramic tile floor as if in prayer and threw up. Well, first I retched a while, then everything flew out — the fried eggs, the bread, the coffee, the whiskey, and considerable bile.

It took a while.

I got uneasily to my feet and ran cold water in the sink. I looked at myself in the mirror and my reflection looked ghostly white. My features, which were so like my son’s, stared accusingly at me. I splashed cold water on my face and then I toweled off. Thoughts were careening in my brain, but one was that I didn’t dare kill Steve until he’d led me to Tom Marsh. And the child’s body.

When I came out, Steve was gone.

A car motor roared outside and I ran to the window, fingered open blind blades and saw a two-tone green Plymouth taking off, fast.

“Shit,” I said.

I sat on the edge of the Beautyrest where Steve had perched minutes ago. I breathed hard. I clenched my fists. Tried not to trash the room. Then, slowly — and it took a good two minutes — I came to my senses. Steve had left things here. Extra clothes, toiletries, an unfinished bottle of I.W. Harper. This last alone meant he had not checked out of the Coral Court.

He would be back. He would likely still make that meeting at the Pink House at four P.M. He may have heard me puking but that didn’t mean he was on the run from me. Quite the opposite — he likely wanted me to settle down, after my unexpectedly human reaction to hearing that a little boy had been murdered. We needed a time out, before we completed our hot money transaction. Or perhaps he had things to do, unaccompanied.

So I was breathing normally as I poked around the room, a detective again. Steve hadn’t brought much with him, but I did find in the wastebasket yesterday’s morning edition of the Post-Dispatch. I lay it open on the bed and paged through. An ad in the classifieds was circled in pen — for a two-room furnished apartment at 4504 Arsenal Street.

From the Coral Court to the apartment house on Arsenal took only fifteen minutes, even for a non-native. The area was somewhat schizophrenic, scenic Tower Grove Park with its sassafras trees, manicured grounds, and gazebos facing a row of once-proud brick residences now given over to apartments — 4504 somewhat larger than most buildings here, probably home to seven or eight flats on its two floors.

The middle-aged, well-preserved landlady on the ground floor accepted unquestioningly the badge I flashed, though a closer look would have revealed it to designate a State of Illinois Licensed Private Investigator. The salt-and-pepper-haired, blue-eyed Mrs. Webb seemed to like me — I was well-preserved, too — and answered all of my questions unhesitatingly.

About noon yesterday, John Grant of Elgin, Illinois (maybe she had read my badge) rented for twenty dollars and a five-dollar key deposit her only available apartment. He and his wife Esther were staying in St. Louis while Mrs. Grant recovered from a serious illness.

“Don’t know what her problem is,” Mrs. Webb said. “But she seemed very weak. She was leaning on her husband.”

“What did he look like?”

The description of John Grant was Steve Strand right down to the five o’clock shadow and oily complexion. He had dragged in and up the stairs, one at a time, two very heavy pieces of luggage. Later in the day he had carried them back out, one at a time.

Mrs. Webb took me upstairs and knocked, said, “Mrs. Grant?” a few times, before unlocking the door for me and smiling and nodding and leaving me to it.

I went in and the place was two rooms that I would describe more as under-furnished; still, pleasant enough with its floral wallpaper and fleur-de-lis rugs. The lumpy double bed had a lumpy woman in it. In a slip, she was walking the line between deep sleep and out cold. The nightstand bore two whiskey bottles (one empty, one two-thirds empty), a water glass and the small radio Steve bought yesterday.

And one other thing: an envelope addressed with “Mrs. Esther Grant” scrawled on it. Inside was a note, similarly hasty: “Had to move bags in a hurry as report came in on radio — Girl next door looked funny — Couldn’t wake you — Stay here and I’ll call you when I can.”

On a bureau was a brown cloth purse and in it was $2,500 in twenties and tens, and another note, folded in half: “Stay where you are baby. I will see you in short order. Tell them you are not well and they will bring you food. Just say your husband was called away unexpectedly.”

I got a pad from my sport coat and jotted down a dozen of the serial numbers, then returned the money to the purse.

Mrs. Grant seemed to be rousing a little. I went over and sat on the bed by her. She groaned and so did the mattress — not a Beautyrest. Nor was Steve’s “Bonnie” a beauty at rest. She had a contusion over her left eye and a red streak across the bridge of her nose. Her dark hair medium length and unkempt, she reminded me of a dissipated version of Patsy Kelly, the movie comedienne you used to see in the thirties and early forties with Thelma Todd or maybe the Ritz Brothers.

Round-faced with a weak chin, narrow wide-set eyes and, spookily, the same kind of cupid lips as Steve, she had probably been good-looking once or nearly so. Her nose was red and it didn’t take my detective skills to figure why, though the stench of booze aided and abetted.

I helped her sit up in bed and her eyes tried to focus and her busty, not quite fat frame worked to right itself.

“You’re Bonnie?”

She frowned at me, as if to say, Am I?

“Tell me about the boy. The little boy.”

She seemed like she might cry but never got there. “It’s... it’s all hazy.” Words were hard for her. Her lips, tongue and teeth just weren’t working in tandem. “I’m so hazy on things... I don’t remember.”

“Try, Bonnie.”

Her voice had traces of emotion, but her face was a putty mask. “If you’d been drunk as long as me, you’d understand.”

“Understand what?”

“It does something to your brain. I travel around in a haze most of the time.”

“Did Steve give you those marks? Did he hit you?”

“Steve... you mean... Carl?”

CAH.

“Yeah, Bonnie. I mean Carl.”

Her shrug was in slow motion. “We fight sometimes. I didn’t like this place. I said it was a dump. He didn’t like that.”

“Tell me about the little boy.”

“I picked him up at school. Carl told me he was the boy’s father, custody thing. He took the boy off somewhere. Then I saw in the paper it was a kidnapping and thought maybe Carl wasn’t really his father. I asked him what he did with the boy and he told me to mind my own business.”

“And he hit you then?”

She swallowed, nodded. “Yeah... I been looking like hell ever since. I... I don’t remember how I got here. We were in K.C. and this is... St. Louis, right? Look, I started drinking after I saw the papers. So it’s hazy, like I said.”

“Did you see the ransom money?”

“Carl has a lot of money in his luggage.”

“If you knew Carl kidnapped the boy, why didn’t you call the police?”

The putty face managed a frown. “If I did that, they’d come take Carl away. And I love him very much.” She clutched my lapel. Something human entered her eyes. “You know, that boy just put his little hand in mine... he was just so trusting.”

Then her eyes rolled back in her head and she was snoring again.

From a phone booth down the street, I called Lt. Lou Shoulders, getting him at the Newstead Avenue Police Station, his work number.

I brought him up to date, then said, “You need to put some men on the apartment house. This woman Bonnie is the accomplice, and Steve or Carl or whoever the fuck is going to lead us to Tom Marsh.”

Shoulders groaned, “And the kid’s body, sounds like.”

“Yeah. Look, this is going to break real soon. You should post men at the Coral Court, too. Plenty of rooms to watch from. But don’t rush it... and don’t rush him. He’s armed and screwy as hell. I’ve got his confidence, though, and I’m on top of it.”

“Brother, you better be.”

Chapter Seven

The Pink House was indeed pink, a dirty coral, but not what you’d call a house — just a dive with a red overhang roof that bore its name. Though typical bar food was on offer, its rationale for existence was clearly stated by the vertical sign near the front door, red letters on pink:

The cigarette smoke within was no thicker than carbon monoxide fumes in a suicide garage, the grizzled regulars at the U-shaped bar consisting of that breed of working men who never seemed to be working. The dark-wood interior had half a dozen dark-wood tables and dark-wood chairs, on loan from the kind of jury room where guilty verdicts are frequent and deserved.

Only a couple of the tables for four were taken, and the one I chose was away from those patrons, a bald guy negotiating with a redheaded hooker at one table, and at another two guys laughing too loud as they drank too much. Maybe they were trying to be heard over the jukebox — Tony Bennett, “Rags to Riches.” After I collected a bottle of Schlitz from the bar, I made sure to sit on the opposite side of the room from the corner where a currently not-in-use dart board dwelled, in case some barroom athlete got ambitious.

I’d been right on time but my cabbie pal Hagan was five minutes late. I almost didn’t recognize him, and he sure was in the wrong bar for his new duds — navy felt hat and blue gabardine suit, blue-and-white tie on a crisp white shirt, wing-tip Oxford shoes. Florsheim, probably.

He got himself a bottle of beer and joined me. “Any sign of Steve?”

“No. But that gives us a chance to talk. We’ll start with his name isn’t Steve. It’s Carl.”

A puzzled look. “He tell you that?”

“No, his forty-year-old ‘girl’ did. She’s Bonnie. And Bonnie and Carl make Bonnie and Clyde look like geniuses.”

I filled him in on what little I’d managed to get out of our friend’s drunk-out-of-her-mind accomplice, and how Lt. Shoulders had the Arsenal Street apartment house under watch.

“When I get Steve alone,” I said, “I intend to squeeze it all out of him. But I did get the gist from Bonnie.”

His dark eyebrows flicked up, then down. “Oh, Christ. This is the Greenlease thing?”

“Yes. It is. Is the Greenlease boy alive? No.”

A loud sigh followed. “How fucked in the ass are we?”

“Let’s put it this way, Johnny — get sticky fingers around that ransom dough? Even a snazzy new outfit won’t make you feel good in the electric chair.”

Hagan shook his head glumly. “It’s the gas chamber in Missouri.”

“Sorry. Hard for an out-of-stater to keep track. But they let you sit down for that, too.”

He scowled. “Come on, man. You know Costello was only interested in that bundle if it came from some righteous source like embezzlement or robbery.”

I let him get away with that — bigger fish to fry.

“If Joe’s to be believed,” I said, “he wants nothing to do with the Greenlease kidnap except getting credit for helping nab the snatchers. Okay, then, fine. With luck and a little sweat, I can shake the whereabouts of this Marsh character out of ‘Steve.’ And what became of the boy... of his body.”

I gulped air, then gulped beer.

Hagan was nodding. “Give ’em Steve and Bonnie and Marsh, it’ll make the cops look good, and take some of the smell off Costello’s reputation.”

“He’ll be content with that? You got any idea how much money six hundred grand is?”

“I know it’s heavy carrying it up and down those damn stairs at the Coral Court.” He sat forward. “Look, I wouldn’t worry about Costello. He’s no saint, but the one to watch is Shoulders.”

“You’re saying a crooked cop who killed three times in the line of duty might be a threat?”

He missed the sarcasm or anyway ignored it. “Shoulders is a shakedown artist from way back. He’ll give a free pass to any thief who’ll cut him in for half. He’s nightwatch commander at the Newstead Avenue Station — perfect spot to not be seen doing what you shouldn’t be seen doing.”

I was glad I didn’t have to diagram that sentence.

I said, “You think Sandy got herself off to the airport?”

He shook his head. “No, she’s headed to St. Joe.”

“What?”

Flipping a palm, he said, “She told me she got a real good look at that money in Steve’s, or Carl’s, luggage. She said he’s from St. Joe.”

“Keep thinking of him as Steve for now,” I advised. “How did Sandy figure that?”

“Saw it in his hatband.”

So much for me being a great detective.

“I put her with another cabbie I know,” Hagan said, after a gulp of beer, “who said he was willing to make a meter-off trip out of town, if the two of ’em could come to terms. She has that grand from Steve, y’know. I wonder what terms Sandy and him will come to.”

“I don’t.”

Finally Steve/Carl rolled in, a cigarette drooping from his cupid’s bow mouth. He looked sloppy, the houndstooth jacket rumpled. His baggy brown slacks bore dirt stains. What had he been up to?

But his manner was upbeat and his eyes had more life than I’d seen before. He came over, grinning, and gestured with open arms like a ringmaster. “Gents, you are looking at an idiot!”

Tell me something I don’t know, I thought.

“I was sitting at the bar across the street,” Steve said, still grinning, jerking a thumb in that direction, “at Angelo’s. Waiting for you fellas! Thought that was the Pink House! They both got a red roof, y’know? Anyway, I was grousing to the bartender, a gal, about people who can’t keep their appointments on time, and then I went outa there to go back to the motel and, bingo, I see this place across the street! What a dummy!”

His words were flying.

“Johnny boy!” he said. “Man, you really look sharp. That a Hickey-Freeman suit?”

“Yup.”

Steve laughed twice. “We’re gonna both of us buy a whole closet of new clothes. Two closets, each! Nate here already knows how to dress, but you and me, Johnny Boy, we gotta spruce up our style!”

Bennies.

“You guys want sandwiches? I could eat. I’ll get us sandwiches. Burgers okay? Cheeseburgers with everything, onions too? French fries?”

“Sure,” I said, and Hagan nodded.

Steve got up and went to the bar, fast.

“He’s sure in a good mood,” Hagan observed.

“He’s high as a fucking kite. You see his pupils? They look like black polka dots.”

Steve came back, informed us we’d be having chips not fries because “this fine establishment doesn’t seem to have a frier,” and leaned in, settling a hand on Hagan’s shoulder. I was starting to suspect this guy’s gate swung both ways. He was an ex-con, after all, and being inside could expand a man’s horizons.

“You got that I.D. for me?” Steve asked the cabbie, thinking he was whispering but wasn’t. Booze and bennies are a tricky combo.

Hagan said he did and got from his suitcoat pocket an Army discharge photostat, a Social Security card and a medical record, all in the name John Byrne of Kirkwood, Missouri.

“Man, you did fine!” Steve said, looking the things over, then slapping Hagan on the back and sitting back down. “You find me new digs?”

“Yeah. Two-room suite at the Town House in the Central West End. Apartment annex of the Congress Hotel.”

“Nice?”

“Oh, yeah. Living room with a couple of couches, bath, kitchen, bedroom, whatchamacallit French doors out to a balcony. Class all the way.”

“Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Who needs more beer? I need more beer.”

He got us more beer.

“You know who I miss?” Steve was drinking Schlitz. All three of us were. It made Milwaukee famous, after all. Of course we were in St. Louis.

“You know who I miss?” Steve repeated. “Sandy. What a great gal.”

Yeah, they’d really hit it off.

The cheeseburgers arrived with a basket of greasy potato chips, delivered by the bartender, who looked irritated about it. The burger was almost as thin as the slice of cheap cheese on it, but I started eating the thing anyway — my stomach had been empty since I puked earlier.

Steve took a bite of the burger, chewed, swallowed, then said, “So did she get away all right? To the airport? Sandy?”

“She got in a cab with a guy I know,” Hagan said. “Another Ace driver. Dependable. She’ll be fine.”

That was a fairly skillful lie — Sandy had gotten in a cab with another cabbie, all right; but wasn’t going to the airport unless it was the one in St. Joseph, Missouri.

“I miss her,” Steve said again. “I was too tired last night to do right by her, but I could use some, you know, companionship of the female variety. You think you could fix me up with another girl tonight, Johnny? I don’t wanna spend the night by myself. I get lonesome. Or is the Town House too high class for that?”

“I can find somebody,” Hagan said. “I know some girls who work the big hotels. Wised-up broads who know their way around.”

“Good. I like nice girls, remember.”

I knew all about that. I’d met Bonnie.

I ate about half of my burger, and Hagan wolfed his down, although Steve took only that one bite. He finished the second beer before saying, “If I’m gonna have myself a big date tonight, I can’t be looking like a bum when a guy like you all spiffed up is making the introductions. You know anyplace around here I can get some decent things myself?”

The cabbie shrugged. “There’s a Famous-Barr department store in Clayton.”

“Where’s Clayton?”

“Just another suburb, not far.”

In the small parking lot, dusk now, the green two-tone Plymouth waited; mud was on its tires and fender.

Where had Carl/Steve been this afternoon?

He told Hagan to drive — “I don’t have a license, why take chances?” — and I got in the back. Propped against the seat next to me was a shovel. The hair on the back of my neck prickled again.

Steve got in front and Hagan started up the car.

I said, “What’s the shovel for, Steve?”

“Oh, sorry. I was gonna bury something and changed my mind. No room in the trunk. My metal suitcases are still in there. Hey! Get a load of that.”

He had spotted my loaner Caddy in the lot nearby. He’d not seen me driving it — did he recognize it from the ransom drop two nights ago?

If he did, he made no mention of it. Instead he said, “Johnny boy, we’ll all be swimmin’ in Cadillacs before long. Drivin’ ’em right down the middle of Easy Street.”

I said, “That’s my ride.”

He turned and looked at me in the back sitting next to the shovel. “You Outfit guys travel right.”

“Well, we don’t go Second Class.”

The Famous-Barr was closed, but a pedestrian directed us to a Boyd’s branch close by. Hagan parked out front and Steve led the way, playing the big shot, striding into the men’s department and telling the first salesman he came to, “I need a new suit.”

The slender, pomaded salesman, with a superior attitude from home and expensive suit provided at work, said, “I’m afraid we have a considerable backlog of alterations. It will be several days, I’m afraid, before anything can be ready for you.”

Steve was already thumbing through hanging Hickey-Freeman suits like they were wallpaper samples. “Are you a gambler?”

“Sir?”

“I will bet you ten dollars you can have a suit ready for me by tomorrow.”

And Steve yanked a wad of cash from his dirt-smudged pants and fanned out twenty-dollar bills like he was dealing cards. “Price tag says one-hundred and-twenty-two dollars,” he said. “That’s one-hundred-and-thirty right there. Put the rest against any alteration charge. That assumes, of course...”

“It will be ready tomorrow, sir.”

“Good.”

I sat to one side and watched rather numbly while Steve — who introduced himself to the salesman as John Byrne — was measured for his suit, then bought a new pair of shoes, several pair of trousers (one to replace his muddy ones), a Dobbs hat (we were all wearing them that season), an assortment of socks, three sets of cufflinks, a belt and various neckties. Steve turned Hagan loose — “Buy yourself half a dozen shirts” — and, as the store closed around us, settled up with the salesman.

“We’ll be doing more business with your fine firm,” Steve said, “when we pick up my Hickey-Freeman tomorrow.” He had changed trousers and had the rest of his purchases in a big-handled bag. “Shall we say at noon?”

“Noon will be fine, sir.”

Back in the Plymouth, with Hagan again at the wheel, Steve said, “Sometimes I think these people don’t know who they’re dealing with.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

But Steve was coming down off his high. “I want a nice girl, remember. Some nice, sexy doll, Johnny. Go two hundred. Go three if you have to.”

“Okay,” Hagan said. “Sure.”

He’d been confident minutes ago, but now he was all nerves, lighting up a cigarette clumsily. “I don’t think I care to move to the Town House tonight. If it’s a nice place like you say, Johnny, the Coral Court’s better for a rendezvous.”

“Okay,” Hagan said.

“We need to get my luggage up to the room again.”

Outside the Pink House, they dropped me to pick up the Caddy. I followed them to the motor court, our middle two-story building at the rear, then parked in the 50-A garage and walked around where the Plymouth was backed up to the foot of the exterior stairs, trunk lid up. Hugging the black metal suitcase to him as he went up, Steve looked like he might lose his balance and tumble down onto us any moment. We were following, perhaps too close, the green footlocker in a coffin carry again, the cabbie climbing backward.

A car pulled in behind the Plymouth. In the darkness, I couldn’t discern the make or its occupants. Could it be Shoulders and his cops jumping the gun? Gun being the operative word — Steve was still armed, and the cabbie and I were between him and the new arrival. This night could easily go Fourth of July on us, exploding into deadly orange muzzle flashes and the sharp firecracker reports of pistols.

Steve, not surprisingly, panicked — somehow, still clutching the heavy suitcase to himself, he made it up those last few steps and got to the landing and through into the hall. Below, a car door opened and shut, but no one in the vehicle called out. Hagan looked startled and seemed about to panic himself when I said, very quietly, “We’re working with the cops, remember?”

An arguable benefit, but it calmed him.

We finished the last few steps of this latest trip up and rested the footlocker on the landing. We caught our breaths. Then I raised a settling palm and said, “I’ll check,” and went down. I did not withdraw my nine mil, although I unbuttoned my suit-coat and Burberry.

A man in a topcoat and hat stood next to a late-model Ford sedan. In the rider’s seat, looking abashed, was his pretty wife (or possibly “wife”).

“Sorry,” the man said, embarrassed. “We just need to get in our garage here. You’re blocking, I’m afraid.”

We exchanged a few additional friendly words and I moved the Plymouth enough to allow these occupants of a first-floor room to pull into their private garage.

Then I rejoined Hagan atop the exterior stairs on the landing, told him the score, and we carted the footlocker of ransom money back into the building. Hagan knocked with his elbow, said, “It’s us,” and Steve let us in.

He had the .38 revolver in hand, so my instincts were right — if that had been Shoulders down there, the night would have burst into gunfire with Hagan and me right in the middle.

“Just a couple motel guests downstairs,” I assured Steve, “wanting to get in their garage. Put that thing away.”

I meant the .38. He went over and stowed it in the night-stand drawer. We placed the footlocker in its familiar position along the wall by its black metal mate.

“I got the goddamn shakes,” Steve said. “That really fuckin’ spooked me! Man, I am jumpy as a damn cat. I really thought that was... you know, insurance investigators or something.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Hagan looked a bit disheveled despite his new wardrobe. He was still over by the door and Steve joined him. “I’m sorry, Johnny boy. That really threw me. Everything’s gonna be fine. Let’s have a couple of drinks.”

The cabbie shook his head. “No, I need to round that girl up for you. If she has a friend or two, maybe we can have a regular orgy. Nate, you up for that?”

“Sure,” I said. Who wouldn’t want to get naked with Steve and Johnny Boy?

Hagan opened the door and Steve asked him when he’d be back with the girls.

“Oh,” the cabbie said, “maybe half an hour.”

“Okay. Knock twice fast, once slow, and say, ‘Steve, this is Johnny.’ Got it?”

“Twice fast, once slow, ‘Steve, this is Johnny.’ Got it.”

And Hagan was gone.

The air seemed to go out of Steve. He’d come down from the Bennies, then got rattled by that car pulling up, which had him going again; but that was over now and he was looking at me with those familiar dead dull eyes. He went over to the nightstand and poured himself a glass of whiskey from the half-empty bottle. Or maybe he was an optimist and it was half-full.

“You want a snort, Nate?” He was pacing as he drank. A slow pace, but pacing.

“No thanks. Sit down, Carl.”

He caught it quicker than I figured he would.

He stopped in mid-pace and said, “Carl?”

“That’s your name. Your first name. What’s the last?”

He trudged over to the bed and sat on the edge like he’d done so often yesterday and today. Sat hunch-shouldered. Defeat settled on him like heavy humidity.

I dragged a chair over and sat facing him, but he was looking past me into nothing.

“Your last name, Carl. What is it?”

“Hall. How did you know my name is Carl?”

“Bonnie told me.”

Now he looked at me. “Bonnie!”

“You left a newspaper with the apartment marked on it here in this room. When you slipped out this afternoon, I found it. Went over to Arsenal Street and had a little talk with her.”

“What did she tell you?”

“Not much. She was pretty drunk.”

“Big surprise.”

“Here’s the thing. My friends in Chicago don’t like surprises. If you don’t come clean with them, they’ll find you and kill you.”

“Kill me.”

“Right. If they’re going to risk fencing that money, they need to know exactly what happened and what your role was in it. If Tom Marsh killed the boy, they will want Marsh in custody or better still dead, but out of the way. That’s a must before they can do business with you. A must before they wash that dirty goddamn money of yours.”

His laugh was a small thing that happened in his chest and barely got out. A private joke. But then he shared it: “Tom Marsh had nothing to do with this. He wasn’t involved. He’s a guy I met in a bar once, yeah, and we pulled a small job together, but... I haven’t seen him in a couple years. His name just popped in my head when I needed... someone to blame.”

“Is the boy dead?”

“Yeah. Since the first day.”

That made me squint at him, like I was trying to believe he was really sitting there. “What do you mean... the first day?”

“Bonnie picked the kid up at that school. A cab took her and him. Dropped them at a Katz Drug parking lot where I was waiting with our station wagon. I had her dog along with me — Doc. She raises boxers. She’s good with dogs and horses and other dumb animals. We told the kid we were going to get him some ice cream. You know how kids like ice cream. I took Westport Road into Kansas. Into farmland. The kid enjoyed the ride. I drove us into a field and stopped. Bonnie took Doc out for a walk. I was going to strangle the kid, but I didn’t bring enough rope. He fought like a little wildcat.”

...as full of piss and vinegar as any kid I’ve ever seen...

“I shot him in the head. I missed the first time, but the second I did okay. You’d be surprised how much blood there is in a kid.”

The nine millimeter under my left arm was talking to me. I could feel it like some part of me that ached.

Somehow I said, “What did you do then?”

“Well, I had this plastic sheeting I brought. Wrapped him up in that and put him in the back of the station wagon. Covered him with a comforter Doc sleeps on. We stopped for a drink. I had to send Bonnie in because I had too much blood on me. We just sat and drank in the car. I got out once and walked around the station wagon to make sure it wasn’t leaking blood. It got on the floorboard in front, you see. When we finished our whiskey, I drove us home.”

“To St. Joe.”

That surprised him. “Yes. Bonnie has a little house there. We buried him near the back porch. She put flowers in on it and it looked nice. Seemed like the right thing to do.”

The Browning talked to me. Do it. Do it. Was that my father’s voice?

I said, just filling the air, “Must have taken a while to dig that hole.”

“Oh, yeah. I’d dig an hour, then go inside and lie down and rest a while... you know, drink a little... then go out and dig some more. Wasn’t much of a hole, though. Three feet deep, maybe. Five feet long?”

Was he asking me?

I said, burying the sarcasm deeper than the boy, “You must have been beat after such a busy day.”

“Oh, no. I dug the hole in advance.”

I backhanded him.

Then I got the nine millimeter out and his little mouth opened big, trailing blood from one corner but not enough blood to suit me, and the dead eyes got wide and afraid.

A bang followed, but it was a fist on the door — it banged three times, twice fast, once slow, and Hagan’s voice said, “Steve, this is Johnny.”

A key worked in the door and Lt. Lou Shoulders and a young patrolman came in with their guns out and ready. I put mine away. Hagan was out in the hall, glimpsed for a moment, before he slipped away.

Still just sitting there, trickling blood, Carl looked at me in tragic disappointment. “I can’t believe Johnny Boy betrayed me...”

“There are worse sins,” I said.

Chapter Eight

Lt. Shoulders kept his revolver trained on a dazed Carl Hall as the young uniformed officer shuttled me into my room next door. Oddly, the patrolman might have been a junior version of Shoulders: dark hair, high forehead, dark bushy eyebrows, prominent nose over a small but full mouth. The difference was Shoulders’ fleshy face, which had seen considerable wear and tear, while this crossing guard of a cop seemed like his had barely been used yet.

The young cop followed me inside, shut the door behind him, and gestured with a traffic-cop palm, as if I’d been charging toward him and not just facing him with folded arms.

His voice was high and reedy. “Now, you just stay put, buddy, till Lt. Shoulders tells you otherwise.”

“Name’s Heller. What’s yours, officer?”

He was already halfway out the door; his slim frame didn’t resemble Shoulders — his superior had a hulking physique. “Dolan. Patrolman Elmer Dolan.”

I gestured to the wall separating 50-A from 49-A. “That creep put a gun in the nightstand drawer. You’ll want to collect it.”

“Okay. Thanks, Mr. Heller.”

I stopped him with one last question before he closed the door on me: “You’re a rookie, aren’t you?”

“I am, yes, sir.”

“Well, keep your wits about you. That dope is on dope, boozed-up out of his gourd, and capable of just about any evil shit.”

He swallowed, nodded thanks and closed me in.

I looked at the phone by the bed and wondered if I should call Bob Greenlease. But all I had was Carl’s confession. And while I believed what that greasy-faced monster had told me, it was just the latest of several versions of the kidnap tale.

On the other hand, it had been chillingly credible, and the one thing I accepted as a certainty was that Bobby Greenlease was dead.

So I stared at the phone and it stared back at me. Was what I’d got out of Carl something appropriately shared long-distance with the father who’d been hoping against hope that $600,000 would bring his boy home alive and well?

A knock was followed by an announcement: “Lou Shoulders, Heller.”

I let the big baggy cop in. He had a raincoat on over his black suit, his tie black, too, and a shapeless gray fedora tugged on his skull indifferently — he had a circuit preacher look about him, right down to hard eyes in a soft face.

“He says his name is John Byrne,” Shoulders said, in his low, rumbly way. “Insurance agent from Elgin, Illinois. No driver’s license, though some other I.D. backs that up. But this is Steve Strand, aka Carl Something, right?”

“Oh yeah. His last name is Hall. Middle initial A, if his hatband is to be believed. From St. Joseph, Missouri, if he’s to be believed.”

“You smack him? He’s bleeding a bit.”

“Just once and not hard enough. And it was after he talked. I told him if he wanted the Chicago Outfit to wash his ransom money, he had to be straight with me about his role in the kidnapping. He copped to everything.”

I gave Shoulders a quick recap. I won’t lie to you: my voice caught a couple times.

The circuit preacher’s look turned mournful. “Yeah. I got kids, too. I wouldn’t mind shooting him trying to escape.”

He didn’t know how close I’d come to doing that without an excuse.

“So,” I said, “how can I help?”

“You can’t. You already done plenty, Heller — tied a red ribbon around this slimy cocksucker. We’ll take it from here.”

I reached for my wallet and got him out a card. “I should be back in Chicago in a day or so, unless you advise otherwise. You need me for a court appearance or anything, I’ll be there with bells on.”

He took the card but shook his head. “That’s doubtful, Heller. Y’see, you was never here.”

“Is that right?”

“Carl is scared as shit of you and the Outfit. And my pal Johnny Hagan and his favorite whore Sandy, they’ll stay mum, too.”

“Like I said, I’m willing to testify.”

He shook the big bucket head. “It’d just open up a whole can of worms. See, we’re taking Carl for a ride... no, not the Chicago kind. We’re hauling him over to the Town House where Johnny Hagan rented him a suite. That’s where the arrest’ll be made.”

“Why not here?”

Shoulders lit up a cigarette and it bobbled as he talked. “Matter of jurisdiction. Marlborough is well outside the St. Louis city limits. Need to make the bust on home soil, so to speak.”

“Ah. You probably want me to clear out of this room and make myself scarce. I’ll check out right away.”

“You’re already checked out. Manager, Jack Carr, is an old pal. He’s helping us keep things on the q.t. This isn’t the kind of publicity a, uh, respectable little Mom-and-Pop shop like the Coral Court needs.”

“You’re saying I should fade.”

His grin was an unsettling array of big yellow teeth. “Heller, you are so close to gone already I can barely see you.”

He gave me a nod and sauntered out, shutting the door soft, like he didn’t want to wake the dead.

I drove through the night.

No moon, just blackness, the big Cadillac cutting through nothing, farmland rolling flat and anonymous, with only the occasional small-town Main Street to indicate the world hadn’t ended. What seemed a fire in the night was only the lights of Columbia, where a We-Never-Close service station filled the belly of the Caddy. I was hungry too, and had a Baby Ruth bar and a cup of vending machine coffee. The heater put out fine. I found a radio station that wasn’t playing Grand Ole Opry, instead putting me in the soothing company of Johnnie Ray, Rosemary Clooney and Eddie Fisher. I turned it off once, when Patti Page started singing “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window.” The song was worth hating in general, but it reminded me of Carl and Bonnie’s dog Doc and the comforter the animal used to sleep on before it became Bobby Greenlease’s shroud. I thought the veins on the back of my hands would pop, clutching the steering wheel. After a while I switched the radio back on and Frankie Laine was singing “High Noon,” all about killing bastards and that was better.

Then, somehow, it was four hours after I left the Coral Court and I was in Kansas City — or I should say Mission Hills, coming up to the FBI checkpoint at West 53rd and Verona Road, the sleepy affluent neighborhood that at midnight was even sleepier.

I slowed and the passenger door opened on the parked blue Ford and agent Wesley Grapp stepped out. Like me, he was in a raincoat, just not a Burberry — I made more money than FBI agents, which wasn’t fair but that was capitalism for you.

I pulled over and, leaving the motor running, met him just outside the driver’s door of the Cadillac.

We skipped any greeting.

I went right to: “Has anybody informed Bob Greenlease yet?”

Once again, it was cold enough for our breath to smoke, and his glasses were already fogging. “Informed him of what?”

“That the kidnappers are in the custody of the St. Louis police.”

His face was immobile but I could tell he was frowning inside. “What do you know about it, Nate?”

“I asked you first, Wes. I’ll remind you that I’m in Mr. Greenlease’s employ.”

His sigh made a misty cloud. “We don’t know much yet. Just that the two suspects keep confessing but never the same way twice. They can’t seem to stop gilding the lily. We’re looking for a third suspect.”

That would be Tom Marsh. I could have told him it was a waste of time, but better to let the feds track the guy down and make sure he really didn’t have anything to do with anything.

Now Grapp’s frown emerged. “What’s your role in this, Nate?”

“I did some poking around in St. Louis. Undercover, essentially. The key cops are in the know, but I’m to stay off the official radar, unless I’m needed.”

His jutting chin came up. “You like these suspects?”

“In the ‘like’ sense of yes, they are the scum responsible. That boy is dead, Wes. His body will turn up tomorrow at the latest. They were thoughtful, though. They planted flowers over him.”

“This is our case now,” Grapp said. “Lindbergh law kicks in — maybe you’ve heard of it.”

I didn’t rise to the bait. “I’m guessing there will be some jurisdictional squabbling between county and city and federal, but I don’t care about that. I might lean toward Missouri because they are more liable to execute this lovely pair. Uncle Sam hasn’t killed a woman since Mary Surratt. That’s before your time — she conspired to kill Lincoln.”

“I know my history. What are you doing here?”

“I want to prepare Bob Greenlease for what’s coming. He has a right to know.”

He sighed another cloud, then said, “I don’t know that that’s your call.”

“You don’t know that it isn’t. Let’s just say I’m returning the Cadillac he loaned me.”

I gave him a smile that barely cracked my face and got back in the Caddy where it was warm. He seemed to be thinking about stopping me, but probably couldn’t think of a legitimate reason why.

The Greenlease house, so austerely lovely by day, seemed just a barely defined geometric shape on a night so black it threatened to swallow the structure up. The handful of yellow flickery windows might have represented a fire not quite out of control yet.

Rather than ring the bell, and risk waking more people than necessary, I knocked, gently. I had a hunch someone would be posted near the door. They were still in the mode of getting Bobby back, and time was a precious commodity. Yes it was — but one little boy’s had already run out.

The door cracked open. I’d been right — a guardian was at the gate, and once again that guardian was the other son, the adopted one, Paul. He was in a suit that looked slept in and lacked a tie — probably camped out on the living room sofa, should the door need him.

“Mr. Heller,” he said, blinking, making himself wake up more. He gave his head a shake. “Come in. Please.”

He opened the door for me and I stepped into that ballroom of an entryway, the stairs rising to darkness, its lion’s-head newel roaring with silence.

I said, “I don’t suppose your father is still up.”

“No.” Quickly he gathered my raincoat and hat, placing them on a chair nearby. “He went upstairs about eleven. Have you heard something?”

“Could we sit down for a moment, Paul? I’ll fill you in.” I gestured toward the living room, down the hall to the right.

He nodded and led the way. Then we were in the room where just days ago I’d spoken with his father while his young sister slept nestled to Daddy on the sofa that faced the fireplace, which was going now, giving off ironic warmth. A blanket was on the cushions — this was indeed where Paul had been bivouacked — and he picked the thing up quickly, folded it, set it on a chair.

We both sat.

“I do have news,” I said. “Most of it very bad.”

“Tell me.”

“I will, but I need to know whether you think we should wake your father up for it.”

“Oh, we should. Whatever it is. But... but not Mother.”

I nodded. “Listen first. Your brother is dead. The kidnappers took his life right away the first day.”

The blood drained out of his face and made a ghost of him. He swallowed. His lower lip quivered.

“The only good news,” I said, “is that the two who did it are in the custody of the St. Louis police.”

“What... what kind of people are they?”

“Possibly a married couple. They seem to have lived together, at least. A pair of drunken lowlifes looking to make a bundle.”

“They did this... together?”

“The woman picked your brother up at school. The man killed Bobby shortly after. Shot him to death. It was relatively quick. Bobby suffered, I won’t lie to you... but not for long.”

Tears came from his eyes and then trailed onto his cheeks like rain down a window. His voice wobbled. “What kind of man...”

I shrugged. “You’ll know soon enough. He’s about your age and from your social class. His name is Carl Hall. From things he said, I’d gather he squandered his own fortune and looked for a way to... replenish it.”

Paul’s eyes had grown wide. Large. “Carl Hall? Carl Austin Hall?”

“His middle initial is ‘A,’ so it... it could be Austin. Why? Does that sound familiar?”

“Tell me what he looks like.”

I did.

“My God,” Paul said. His tears had stopped. He dug out a handkerchief and dried his face. “So that’s why his voice stirred something. I think I know him. Or, anyway... knew him. Carl Austin Hall was at Kemper with me.”

“What’s Kemper?”

“A military school. ‘West Point of the West,’ they call it. Boonville, hundred miles from here. It’s just high school with gray uniforms and no girls. I hated it. My circle had a good time despite that.”

“Was Carl part of your circle?”

“No. He wanted to be. He was a hanger-on. He would get liquor for us and try to... worm his way in. I frankly thought he was a jerk.”

Paul hadn’t been wrong.

“We weren’t close by any means,” Paul said. “But I did know him. I wonder... my God, did I cause this somehow? Was he taking it out on my family because I snubbed him? Or maybe... did he think I flaunted the family wealth?”

“No, no, he was well-off himself at that time. Paul, this is nothing you could have predicted.”

His face tightened like a terrible fist. “What if my father... what if he blames me for this? What if people think I had something to do with it?”

He began to cry again, but it was a different kind of crying now; he’d gone past sad into despair.

I don’t know how long he was in the doorway, listening, but suddenly the figure in the blue satin dressing gown seemed to fly by and gathered into his arms this man in his mid-thirties like a boy of six and held him close. Paul was sobbing into his father’s chest and that private detective’s mind kicked in again and I suspected this adopted son was in some way of Robert Greenlease’s own blood — perhaps the wrong side of the sheets, if not his own sheets then perhaps a relative’s. But blood was blood, and when it wasn’t being spilled, it was a good thing.

I started to get up.

Greenlease looked at me, his older son still in his arms, standing together like a statue carefully designed not to fall over, and raised a hand as if in benediction, but his tears-slick expression said to wait.

I did so, sitting on the stairs by the carved lion.

Greenlease joined me in perhaps ten minutes and bid me follow him. Soon we were once again in the study where hunters and dogs looked to lush trees for their prey.

“How much did you hear?” I asked.

“Almost all of it,” he said.

Somewhere, somehow, he’d had the presence of mind to make me a rum and Coke and pour himself a good slug of bourbon.

“But,” he said, “I want to hear everything. All of it.”

“Bob...”

“All of it, goddamnit.”

I gave him chapter and verse. He didn’t need some of the more salacious details, like Sandy O’Day’s wee hours visit to my room, or the quiet horror of “Steve” throwing around ransom money on suits, socks and shoes. But I didn’t stint on what I knew about Bobby’s demise. I kept it understated, but then so had been Carl’s telling of it and that didn’t help soften the blows any. The boy’s father sat expressionless, eyes unblinking and blue, in an eerie reminder of the kidnapper’s dull glazed look.

I said, “I have no idea when you’ll get an official call. Sometime in the morning, I assume. The questioning of those two will go on through the night. Their stories are shifting in pathetic attempts to lessen their roles.”

“This fellow Marsh?” he said, the first he’d spoken in a while.

“Yes. I believe he exists, but doubt he had anything to do with this. Just a name that the real perpetrator pulled out of his past. Be secure in the belief that I got the truth out of Carl Hall — he had the threat of Chicago hanging over him. The police will have to work at him for a while to catch up with me. And the woman was drunk out of her mind through most of it.”

His sigh started high and stair-stepped down. “I appreciate what you’ve done, Nate. It’s a great help. I want you to accept that five thousand dollars. I’ll write you a new check...”

“No. I’ll invoice you for my time and expenses. It won’t run anywhere near that.”

“If you get pulled back into this—”

“I’ll let you know and we’ll discuss it. And of course I’ll cooperate if either the police or FBI need me. But the details of how I came to identify Carl and Bonnie as the kidnappers, and turn them both over, are unlikely to go on the record.”

“Why is that?”

“Frankly, I was working with a cop and a crook — this Lt. Shoulders, a bent copper if I ever saw one, and Joe Costello, a known racketeer. They suspected Hall was the kidnapper but were prepared not to turn him in if he proved instead to be an embezzler or bank robber. In that case they were ready to do business with him.”

He shivered though the room was quite warm. “It’s appalling. And they thought you’d go along with that?”

“I have a reputation for being, as they say, ‘connected’ to the Chicago mob... the Outfit. When I started out, frankly, there was some truth to it. Years later, that assumption on the part of some people can come in handy. It was in this instance.”

He was shaking his head. “What kind of world are we living in, Nate?”

“A world where men like us can get ahead, Bob. Can make a nice life for ourselves and our families. But it’s also one where men of envy and greed and stupidity and flat-out evil are ready and willing to take everything away.”

“And now I have to tell Virginia.”

“You do. And I have no advice for you but to spare her the details as much as possible. Hitting her with all of it at once... well, the cruelty of that is just too much. She’s going to have to take the biggest, worst blow now, and then as the terrible details make themselves manifest, she’ll have to suffer again, but at least with that initial impact behind her. Hell, what do I know about it? I know one thing for sure — she needs to hear this from you, before it gets out otherwise.”

Sorrow and shock had erased any expression from his features. The only difference between Carl Hall’s blankness and Robert Greenlease’s was the humanity behind Bob’s.

Or was Carl Austin Hall all too human? Was he all our weaknesses wrapped up in one selfish, careless package? Where killing a child was just another get-rich-quick scheme?

Greenlease walked me to the door. I told him I’d be heading back tomorrow. My presence here was no longer needed or desirable — he knew where to find me and so did the authorities. He told me a room would be waiting at the President Hotel and that I could leave the Cadillac there. I should be sure, he said, to include such items as cabs to the airport on my expenses. I said I’d book my own flight. Life goes on. Like death.

When I approached the Verona Road FBI checkpoint, Special Agent Grapp waved me over. I rolled the window down and he leaned in, a federal carhop again, asking, “Did you give Green-lease the news?”

“Yeah.”

“How did he take it?”

“Like a guy so far gone he couldn’t feel his guts being ripped out. What do you think?”

He shook his head. His glasses were fogging up again. “They’ve confessed everything, but they’re still all over the map. We’re gonna have to step in.”

“As well you should.”

“For one thing, the count is way off.”

“What count?”

“The money count. Less than three hundred grand in Hall’s luggage. That’s not even half the ransom haul.”

“Your math skills are impressive.”

“You’re not surprised?”

“There are crooked cops and racketeers and cabbie pimps and grasping whores and drunken idiots all over this fucking case. What surprises me is there’s still almost three hundred grand to confiscate.”

“You have a cynical outlook, Heller.”

“Wow. They must train you FBI guys in psychology and everything. Goodnight, Agent Grapp.”

He grunted a tiny laugh and waved me off.

A room was waiting at the President and I fell asleep so fast you would think nothing troubling was on my mental and emotional horizon at all. But I was almost in my fifties and of an age where exhaustion could prevail.

My bedside phone rang and I wondered if I’d been dumb enough last night to put in for a wake-up call; my watch, also on the nightstand, said it was almost ten, so maybe I should get up, even if I hadn’t got to bed till two A.M.

When I finally answered the insistent ring, it wasn’t a wake-up call, but a familiar voice that shook me awake just as effectively.

“They stop serving breakfast at ten-thirty,” Barney Baker said. “Shake a leg.”

The giant man with the small head — in another tent of a suit, this one charcoal gray with a black-and-white striped tie — was seated at a table in the underpopulated coffee shop eating ham and eggs and hash browns. This might have seemed a relatively restrained breakfast for this particular diner but for the half-eaten side plate of stacked pancakes rising a good five inches. Atop it, three pats of melting butter swam in hot syrup that dripped down like Johnny Weissmuller’s hair after a swim.

I sat across from Barney and nodded hello and he smiled and nodded back, too polite to speak with his mouth full. The same pretty waitress from a couple of days ago took my order, after giving me a wide-eyed look behind Barney’s back, as if challenging my selection of dining companions. I ordered coffee and a doughnut.

“Everybody’s happy with you,” Barney said. His potatoes were gone, making room for the transfer of the top three pancakes.

“Not everybody,” I said.

“Well, not those two fucking deadbeat lowlifes keeping the St. Louis cops entertained with one self-serving story after another. You’re out of this now, understood?”

“Yeah, I got that. Of course, I can’t duck a subpoena, if it comes to that.”

“No, that’d be un-American. But if you have to go public, we’ll help you through it. You been coached on giving evidence before, right?”

That was a low blow.

He ate a while. My coffee came. Too bitter. I added a touch of cream.

Barney delicately dabbed his syrupy puss with a paper napkin. “They picked up Johnny Hagan and his whore.”

“Together?”

“No, she was in St. Joe shacked up with another whore. A lot of those dames swing both ways, y’know. I can’t blame ’em. Would you wanna fuck a guy?”

The four-hundred-pound slob made his own case. No, that’s unfair — for a guy who weighed four hundred pounds, he was the personification of grace and refinement.

“Not that either her or Hagan know anything,” Barney said. “To them, Hall was just another big spender. And neither of ’em are gonna mention you, not and risk Joe Costello’s enmity.”

“Pretty fancy vocabulary on the kid,” I said. “Last time it was ‘hypothetical,’ this time ‘enmity.’”

He grinned. To his credit, he had no syrup on his face, though it was dripping off the triple bite of pancake waiting on his fork. “You really oughta come hear me speak some time, Nate. Did I mention Civil Rights is a specialty?”

“You did.”

“Oh, and speaking of Joe Costello... that’s why I called this meeting.”

“Is that what this is?”

He nodded. He got a white letter-size envelope out from inside the tent and handed it to me with no discretion whatsoever. I employed some, though, and peeked in at the stack of twenties.

“That’s the four you’re owed,” Barney said and shoveled the syrupy bite in.

He meant four grand.

I tucked it away. “Thank Joe for me,” I said, rising. I’d finished my coffee and half of the doughnut. “But give him a message for me, would you, Barney?”

He swallowed. “Sure, Nate.”

“Tell him these better not have Greenlease serial numbers on them, or he’ll be back in business with his pal Brothers.”

I wasn’t there for any of the aftermath.

The same morning I breakfasted with Barney Baker, the FBI found Bobby’s body buried beneath the chrysanthemums in the backyard of Bonnie Heady’s blue-shuttered white bungalow in St. Joseph, Missouri.

I followed the rest in the press and on the TV news. Information came out about both Bonnie and Carl.

Bonnie had been married to a livestock merchant and dog breeder for twenty respectable years, during which time she had eleven abortions. Never really a fan of kids, Bonnie. Voted “Best Dressed Cowgirl” in 1951, she claimed to have been treated cruelly by her husband, but her post-divorce life had found her turning tricks (and to drink), despite having inherited a family farm and not really needing money. She had decided what she really needed was Carl Austin Hall.

Hall was the son of a respected lawyer and his mother had been daughter of a prominent judge. He got in trouble at military school, dropped out of college, paid for the occasional abortion, went into the Marines for two tours, was court-martialed for going AWOL and drinking on duty. Inherited two hundred thousand dollars, started up various businesses — music shop, two liquor stores, a crop-dusting operation — and went broke. He robbed eight taxi cabs on a spree that netted $33. He went to the Missouri State prison in Jefferson City on a five-year term, worked in the dispensary getting hooked on drugs, bragged to his fellow inmates that he’d commit a perfect crime: “I’ll be driving Cadillacs and you’ll be carrying a lunch bucket.” Paroled after a year and three months, he tried to sell cars (unsuccessfully), then sold insurance, and did make one sale.

To Bonnie Heady.

Bonnie and Carl were indicted by a federal grand jury in late October and went to trial on November 16, fifty days after they killed Bobby Greenlease. Took the jury just under an hour to find them guilty. At midnight, eighty-one days after the kidnapping, Heady and Hall sat side by side in the gas chamber as sodium cyanide powder was dropped into vats of sulfuric acid.

Carl died first, Bonnie two minutes later.

On Death Row, Carl had been no help about the missing half of the ransom money. He thought maybe he’d buried some of it, but couldn’t be sure — he’d been too drunk. The FBI targeted Lt. Shoulders and Patrolman Dolan, who were caught in lies and both did time on perjury raps, but no money was recovered. Various St. Louis racketeers, Joe Costello included, came under federal scrutiny. Rumor had it the money never left the Coral Court. Some spoke of a mysterious man on the fringes of things.

Him I can vouch for. He, which is to say me, never got a dime of that blood money.

But who did?