“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?
Book Two
St. Louis Blues
August 1958
Chapter Nine
On a hot August day, I took my almost eleven-year-old son to Disneyland. He’d spent July with me in Chicago, going to boxing and ball games and museums and street fairs, and now I was returning him to his mother and her husband, the supposed film producer; but first Sam and I were having a father-and-son day in the Magic Kingdom in Anaheim, California.
I looked like any other tourist in my Bermuda shorts and polo shirt with a straw fedora topping it off; my son was dressed similarly, right down to the fedora — Nathan Heller’s son being too cool for mouse ears — and we looked enough alike in our Ray-Bans to get amused looks. He was in fact my spitting image, although we both had too much class to spit, with only Sam’s lack of a reddish tinge to his brown hair to differentiate us. That and one of us had clearly been through puberty.