“You didn’t need one,” she said, as we settled into the red vinyl-and-metal chairs. “You’re Nate Heller. I saw you in Life or Look or something.”
She had a heart-shaped face, a bright red-lipsticked kewpie-doll mouth, a pug nose, and drawn-on eyebrows over big blue eyes that had seen it all and not been impressed. Her hair was black and hovered over her forehead in a pompadour Elvis Presley would have killed for.
“‘Private Eye to the Stars,’” she said with a smirk. “Somehow I don’t think you’re here for that kind of client.”
“I’m not. But any kind of client of mine gets the same confidentiality.”
She produced a cigarette from somewhere, the way Bugs Bunny can a carrot. She stuck it in her kewpie lips and waited to see if I’d light it for her. I told her I didn’t smoke, which seemed like disgusting news to her, and she got a Zippo from a pocket of her uniform.
“Here’s the thing,” she said, firing up the smoke. “I can use a hundred bucks right now. My fat fuck of a husband has a new wife, who is about twelve and comes from Iowa of all the stupid places. Why she’s still alive after he climbs on top of her, I couldn’t tell you.”
“One might say the same thing about you, Mrs. Baker.”
“Make it ‘Mollie,’ and I’ll call you ‘Nate,’ just to keep things friendly. I’m not as delicate as I look, Handsome.” She made “Handsome” sound like an insult. Of course, this was a doll who could put sarcasm into “Hello.”
I said, “So we’ve established you can use a hundred bucks.” Somebody started the jukebox up and it began blaring Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven,” which was a nice gesture if redundant.
“Yeah,” she said, letting smoke out, “we have. Here’s what else we need to establish. If you’re working for the Teamsters or any of those underworld creeps either side of the river, this conversation ends now. I got a little girl to look after, and I know what these people are capable of.”
I raised a courthouse palm. “I don’t represent anyone who means to do you harm. You have a little girl, huh? I have a boy of eleven.”
“Spare me the soft soap. I’m a mommy and you’re a daddy. That supposed to make us two of a kind? A woman reduced to waiting tables and a guy who gets movie stars out of jams?”
“No, but we’re both parents and don’t have to work at it to remember what happened to Bobby Greenlease.”
She drew on the cigarette. Held in smoke, expelled it, adding to the foggy atmosphere. “Is that what this is about?”
“That’s what this is about.”
When she frowned her forehead somehow stayed smooth. “All I’ve ever said to the FBI or that Rackets Committee investigator was Barney told me once he knew something about the Greenlease money. That’s all. Ever since then, the FBI treats me like I got the damn dough, in the attic or under the bed or something.”
“You think Barney had something to do with what became of that money?”
Another drag. “Barney’s no angel. I think I could have straightened him out if I got him away from Hoffa and the rest of those Teamster bums. I mean, he’s not such a bad guy, but he was always ready to let big shots lead him into trouble. He likes to feel like a big operator. Which he isn’t.”
“You’re still fond of him.”
Her smile was slight but it was a smile. “You should have seen him when I met him. He was tall, good-looking. Not fat at all — and a real charming guy. I can tell you one thing — I’m the best wife he ever had.”
That information wasn’t worth a hundred bucks. I almost told her so, but instead put on a smile and applied a needle.
“Have you heard anything from Barney, Mollie, since he married that young blonde in Iowa? Her father Jake is the state Democratic chairman there, and that’s how Barney met her, working for Harriman.”
W. Averell Harriman, governor of New York, had made a bid for the presidential nomination in ’56. You don’t have to be much of a student of history to know how that came out.
Steam damn near streamed out of her ears and nostrils. “He’d better not let that child bride keep him from making his payments for his little girl! If he doesn’t keep up, I’ll track him down wherever he is and put a gun in his big, fat belly and blow his guts out.”
That seemed fair.
She was raving: “Do you know that flabby son of a bitch sent word to me he wanted to get back together at the same time he was planning marriage to that Iowa brat?”
“Well, that’s just not right, is it?”
“That dumb little broad will live to regret it. She doesn’t know that man the way I do. He used to beat his first wife! And I took my share of knocks, too. He’s mean when he’s crossed, and I’ve been around some pretty rough crowds in my day. I’ve seen that man go crazy. He threatened to kill my brother once! Held a knife to his throat.”
“Oh dear.”
Her eyes showed white all around. “And the violence, the terror tactics he’d go in for, for those Teamster slobs. You know, I could blow St. Louis wide open if I told what I really know about the Greenlease money!”
“You’re very close to earning this,” I said, and I gave her a glimpse of the folded one-hundred-dollar bill I had palmed.
Her mouth dropped and her eyes got smaller. “Look, I was just blowing off steam...”
“It’s good to get things off your chest.”
She put her hand over my clenched one, which held the hundred. She wiggled the painted-on eyebrows. “Maybe that could be arranged.”
There’d been a time. But this broad was tougher than a nickel steak and my middle-aged teeth couldn’t take it.
So I just withdrew my hand from hers. Gently. But withdrew it.
Her voice softened, barely audible above the jukebox blaring Berry’s “Almost Grown.”
“All I know is,” she said, trembling with desire for that hundred, “Barney had something to do with it. I can’t be more specific than that.”
I unfolded the C-note. “Sure you can.”
She swallowed. “Okay. Barney told me Joe Costello got the Greenlease money.”
Mollie snatched the bill from my open palm and put it with the Zippo. Stood. Before she hip-swung off, to show me what I was missing, she said, “That’s all I fucking know. I have to get back to work. Break’s over.”
So was Chuck Berry’s. He came on and did “Sweet Little Sixteen.”
Like Barney, he liked them young.
On the other side of the Eads Bridge, I headed for the DeBaliviere Strip just north of the Jefferson Memorial in Forest Park in the Central West End. The Strip, St. Louis’s only real rival to the neon playground across the river, offered an unlikely mix of supper clubs, niteries, and strip joints. The latter included the nationally famous Stardust Club at 309 DeBaliviere, where owner Evelyn West — her chest insured by Lloyd’s of London for $50,000 — headlined a burlesque show of comics, singers, chorines and stripteasers. The other strip joints, like nearby Little Las Vegas, were more openly raunchy, and I knew from prior St. Louis jaunts that most bars hosted either a gambling joint or a betting parlor in back or upstairs.
I parked the loaner Caddy half a block down from my destination. Joe Costello’s joint at 317 walked a fine line between upright and lowdown, its reflective black plate-glass facade with TIC TOC CLUB in white neon compromised by cheesy sandwich-board signs out front. These sported glossy 8 x 10s touting the imminent appearances of such artists as George Shearing and Errol Garner, pianists, but also Miss Sylvia Albana, the Flame of New Orleans, and Tinker Bell, the probable Toast of Never-Never Land, ecdysiasts.