“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.”