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.