“Mr. Heller,” he said, with a nod. As if the last (and for that matter the first) time we’d met hadn’t been briefly, five years ago.
“So your partner called you with a heads-up,” I said, crossing to the counter and leaning there. “He’d be the ‘S’ in ‘D & S.’”
“And I’m the ‘D,’” he said. “But it doesn’t stand for dumb. Lou says I don’t have to talk to you.”
Behind him, past a narrow barrier, the dry-cleaning business was singing its percussive, tuneless song: hiss of steam, presses opening and closing, metal pedals squeaking.
“Lou’s right,” I said. “I’m no cop. Of course, you aren’t either, anymore. I’m a Chicago private investigator working for a client.”
“I know who you are. I read about you in the papers sometimes. Who’s the client?”
Shoulders had talked to me because I invoked Hoffa. That wouldn’t work with Dolan.
Now and then you just have to play a hunch. Mine was an educated one, based upon a framed family portrait on the shop wall — a pretty young wife, a beaming boy of maybe three, and a proud papa with an arm around her and a hand on the child’s sleeve. The papa was Elmer Dolan, of course.
I said, “My client is the Greenlease family.”
An expression finally happened: the eyes tightened, the brow furrowed, the mouth quivered. “I suppose... I suppose they want their money back. Well, I don’t have it.”
“It’s not that they want their money back,” I said with a shrug, as if this were the most casual subject in the world, “it’s that it sickens them thinking of anybody profiting off their little boy’s death.”
His mouth was quivering so much he had to cover it; his eyes were going moist with something like genuine human feeling, not the self-pity that characterized the crocodile tears of Lou Shoulders.
“Give me a second, would you?” he said. “I have to get a girl to cover the counter.”
He slipped in back, past the hanging garment purveyor, and soon returned with a pleasant young colored woman in a D & S smock to take his place. He summoned me to follow him and I did, through the work area where an all-Negro crew in white was at presses with the exception of an older gal who was hand-ironing. The kerosene-like smell was much stronger back here. Not a big set-up, but an efficient one.
Dolan walked me into a cubbyhole office with metal furnishings, desk with chair, visitor’s chair, one four-drawer file cabinet. The desk was cluttered, centered with an oversize account book. He shut us in, then from a small refrigerator of bottles of Coke, he got us each one; I liked the boyish man’s taste in soda pop. He got behind the desk and gestured for me to sit opposite.
“The FBI,” he said, after swigging some Coke, “have been after my story for a long time. Why should I give it to you?”
“You wouldn’t be giving it to me,” I said. “You’d be giving it to Robert Greenlease, Sr.”
“Spare me the violins. If you hadn’t already pulled my heartstrings, we wouldn’t be sitting here. It makes me sick what happened to that boy, and what his parents got put through.”
“Are still going through.”
“I know. I know. But I have two children of my own now, and they are of more concern to me than, with all due respect, Mr. Greenlease’s late son Bobby.”
“You’re afraid to talk.” Why sugarcoat it?
His eyes hardened. “You are goddamn right I’m afraid to talk. Not so much for myself — like you said, I was a cop. Every day when I went to work, I did so knowing I might not come home. Plenty of officers in St. Louis have been killed in the line of duty.”
“You weren’t.”
“No, I wasn’t. And I don’t want to be killed as a civilian, either, because that leaves my wife and two kids to fend for themselves.”
My turn to swig some Coke. “Well, at least you have your mentor to look after you.”
“What mentor?”
“The former Lieutenant Louis Ira Shoulders. The honored cop who killed bad guys dead and won all those honors. I mean, you’re in business with him aren’t you?”
Of course I knew exactly what reaction I was after. And got it.
“Fucking Shoulders!” He slammed his half-full Coke bottle on the desk and the liquid fizzed. “My partner, you call him! My mentor!”
“Well, isn’t he? The ‘S’ in—”
“In ‘D & S,’ yes! The Shadow! He’s my shadow, is who he is — keeping an eye on me. Making sure I stay mum.” He sat forward, elbows on the desk. “Let me tell you how my life got ruined. I’d already made my mind up to leave the department. The St. Louis PD is a nest of thieves! I don’t know why my father never warned me. Maybe he was one of them.”
“Your father was a cop?”
He nodded curtly. “And my uncle. But I wound up at Newstead Avenue station, the dirtiest district in town, and Shoulders ran it. I’d tried putting in for a transfer and got slapped down. That day... that very goddamn day that all the shit happened... I planned to sneak off to deliver my filled-out application to the Triple A.”
This was news to me. “You were going to quit?”
Now came some vigorous nodding. “I’d made up my mind. Then right after roll call, the 3 P.M. to 11 P.M. watch, Shoulders calls me over and says his regular driver is sick. He wants me to fill in. Now, he already knew about Hall and the money and everything, I’m sure of it. But not a word to me.”
“You weren’t his regular driver?”
“No. Without cluing me in at all, he yanks me into the dirtiest mess in St. Louis history.”
A wave of recognition went through me: in 1932, I’d been a young off-duty dick when the two most corrupt cops in Chicago grabbed me and pulled me unaware into a hit on Frank Nitti. They shot Capone’s successor twice in the neck but somehow Nitti hadn’t died. I quit the force and went private, staying alive by forging a surrogate father-and-son relationship with Nitti that connected me, unwillingly, to the Outfit to this day.
“Mr. Heller? I lost you there for a moment.”
“Sorry. Go on.”
He sat back. Folded his arms. Shrugged. “Well, that’s all I can give you... without certain conditions.”
A steam press out there hissed at that.
“That is,” he said, “if you want to know what I know about the Greenlease money.”
“Certain conditions.”
“Yes. You can only share this with Mr. Greenlease. I don’t even want his wife to know. You have to say that it’s... what’s the word? Hypothetical. This is what might have happened.”
“You won’t go on the record.”
“No.”
I crossed my legs and my arms and sighed. “Then what good is it?”
“It means he’ll know. The boy’s father will know. And maybe someday the world will, if I can outlive Lou Shoulders and Joe Costello. Maybe then I’ll tell the FBI — God knows they won’t have stopped asking me. Until then, this is all you get. Do I have your word?”
“...You do.”
“Are you a father?”
“I am. I have a son.”
“Swear on your son’s life.”
I nodded. Sighed again. “I swear.”
He told me. He left out what I already knew, including what I gathered but hadn’t witnessed, specifically the transfer of Carl Hall to that apartment at the Town House within St. Louis PD jurisdiction. That cabbie Hagan had been around for most of it, but hadn’t been there when Shoulders directed Dolan to load up the lieutenant’s car with the footlocker, the metal suitcase and a briefcase that collectively included the entire ransom but for the free-wheeling spending Hall had done on his day of binge drinking. Shoulders drove Dolan and all that money to the home of Joe Costello on Gurney Court in a nice, quiet South St. Louis neighborhood. Helped them down the stairs with the three heavy pieces of luggage into a paneled basement, where the money was counted on a coffee table.