Grapp ordered a highball. My rum and Coke was holding up. She left, and he said, “Hall may have buried the missing half of that money. He didn’t deny doing it — just said he didn’t remember, and when a drunk who takes a morphine chaser says he doesn’t remember, you tend to listen. But he had a pair of trousers with mud that we were able to trace to the south bank of the Meramec River.”
I had seen those muddy pants. Of course, as far as Grapp was concerned, I’d never seen Carl Hall. I changed the subject. “You’re working the case from the Kansas City end?”
He shrugged. “I hop back and forth between St. Louis and Kansas City. I’ve been looking into the old Binaggio gang here in K.C., who’ve got ties to John Vitale, as a possible money laundry.”
Vitale was among the bigger St. Louis gangsters.
“But,” Grapp said, “that’s going nowhere. Par for the course on this goddamn thing. You know, this investigation couldn’t have started out any bigger, and now couldn’t be smaller.”
“How’s that?”
He leaned on an elbow. “Well, for the first three months we were a ‘Bureau Special,’ which is—”
“I know,” I said. A national investigation, operating out of FBI headquarters in D.C. “How many men were on it at the start?”
“At the start, when Greenlease was dancing to the kidnapper’s tune, it was just a handful of us — enough to man that checkpoint near the mansion was about it. When Hall and Heady were caught, and the child turned up dead, we moved to St. Louis. Sixty-five agents. A state line had been crossed, and a prominent citizen’s child had been killed.”
I smiled just a little. “But, Wes — like you said. Hall and Heady had been caught.”
His eyebrows went up. “Sure they had, but we still had to make the case. Greenap, the Special was called. We put the physical evidence together for the trial — the sheet the boy was wrapped in, photographs of the bloodstains in Heady’s house, bloodstains in the station wagon that matched the boy’s blood type, and bone fragments and lead fragments that were found confirming Bobby Greenlease was shot in that vehicle. And of course we handled the interrogations of the pair.”
“Getting what it took to put them in their side-by-side electric chairs shouldn’t have taken long.”
The waitress, delivering Grapp’s highball, widened her eyes, getting in on just the end of that.
“It didn’t,” he said. “Call it five days.” His sigh had frustration hanging on it like wet laundry on a line. “Five days, and then months and years of looking for that missing three hundred thousand. We were up to a hundred agents at that point. We kept Costello, Shoulders and Dolan under surveillance, hounded their friends and relatives too, tapped their phones, went over their finances, got their long-distance call records — anything and everything, before Mr. Ace Cab Company went up on an unrelated gun charge and Shoulders and Dolan went away for perjury.”
I frowned at him. “If you couldn’t prove those two cops were in on taking the bundle, how could the government make perjury stick?”
He sipped then smirked. “Because eight cops at Newstead Station said Shoulders and Dolan didn’t bring in the money... the half they did turn over... until an hour after hauling Hall in to be booked. Asked by a grand jury about that missing hour, Shoulders and Dolan both pled the Fifth.”
He took another taste of highball and I thought about what he’d just told me.
Then I said, “Something happened to that money the night they nabbed Carl and Bonnie. Something happened in that missing hour.”
“Clearly.”
I squinted at him like he’d gone out of focus. “And you minions of J. Edgar didn’t start looking for it until five days had flown. Didn’t anybody at the academy tell you G-men that the first few days of an investigation are the most important?”
His eyes flared and his voice turned defensive. “Jesus, Heller, we were busy! We had two murdering kidnappers to put away!”
“Two of the dumbest, sloppiest, smallest-time criminals who ever tried for the big time. Wouldn’t you agree? Couldn’t the Bureau have spared a few men from the hundred on the case to go after that money?”
He was shaking his head again. “At that point it was a St. Louis police matter. The suspects were two of their own, the heroic officers who’d brought in the perpetrators the world was looking for, and—”
“And bullshit.” I pointed a forefinger at him, thumb up, like I was aiming. “We’re talking ransom money from a kidnapping. A federal crime. You should have stepped in.”
His palms came up in surrender. “I admit we kept hands off the two cops, at first.” He sat forward, eyes tight, jaw firm. “But we were looking for that money from the start. The day after Hall’s arrest, we raided the Coral Court, thirty of us, went all through the building where he’d been holed up with that prostitute.”
I was taking a chance, but I had to ask: “Did you fellas go through all seventy rooms? It’s a big facility. And I understand the owner, that Carr character, has ties to ‘Buster’ Wortman’s bunch and maybe Chicago.”
“We knew Carr was a good suspect for the missing money. We searched the corridors and the furnace room and the grounds. We even made that joker dig up some fresh trees he’d just planted. Nothing. Not practical to tear apart every room, but we did hit 49-A hard — not that there’s much of anywhere to hide anything in a motel room — just ask a cheater. We gave the front office and the owner’s quarters a thorough shakedown. Not a damn thing.”
I didn’t push it further. I wasn’t anxious to have my presence at the Coral Court that evening get in the FBI’s crosshairs. As I told Johnny Hagan in L.A., I hadn’t broken any laws and had in fact been sent home by the cops. Crooked cops, though, I now knew; and I wasn’t anxious to have my own finances and business practices poked around in.
A second highball arrived for Grapp, who said, “Remember Tom Marsh, Carl’s supposed mastermind? We had on file a Thomas John Marsh, arrested in St. Louis, who did a stretch for sexually abusing an eight-year-old kid. We thought that would change everything. Then Hall, in his full confession, admitted pulling the name ‘Tom Marsh’ out of the air. When we tracked down Thomas John Marsh’s father, he informed us his son was dead. A literal dead end.”
I sipped what was left of my rum and Coke. “In five years, you must have had your share of those.”
“Oh, yeah. How about the disgruntled cabbie who claimed he’d overheard Shoulders and Costello scheming at Ace Cab, and saw them stow a big bundle in an employee locker in the basement there.”
“Sounds promising.”
“We thought so. Then we tossed the place, and you know what we turned up?”
“No. What?”
“No basement. No lockers either.”
“So what has turned up in five years of ‘Greenap’?”
He saluted me with his glass. “A grand total of 115 bills, tens and twenties. We repeatedly put the serial numbers of the missing ransom money in newspapers, distributed booklets to banks and businesses, and out of the missing seventeen thousand or so bills, a whole seventeen hundred bucks has shown up. Fifty-eight bills of which come from the Midwest.”
I frowned. “Turned up where, exactly?”
His shrug was loose now — thanks to the two highballs. “Well, often they came from a bank in a town where a state or county fair with a carnival had recently been. Easy enough for a carny to pass a hot bill in change. And the Outfit in Chicago runs a good share of those touring shows.”