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.