“Shoulders pointed to the stacks of money,” Dolan told me, “and said, ‘Half of that is ours. You’ll wind up with fifty grand. What are you going to do with your share?’ I told him I didn’t want anything to do with that crap. And I didn’t even know, at that point, that this was the Greenlease ransom!”
“But Shoulders did?”
He nodded emphatically. “Yeah, I’m sure of it. From things he said that night, and other things he said over time. He knew. And when I said I didn’t want any part of the money, he said, ‘You really don’t have anything to say about it.’”
“You never took any of the ransom?”
“Not really. We took half back to the Newstead station. I pleaded with Shoulders all the way there not to take so goddamn much — it had to come back on us. And I was scared stiff, scared we’d be caught, scared if I didn’t go along with them, Costello and Shoulders would kill me. I should’ve pulled my gun and arrested them right there in that rec room!... But I didn’t.”
“What did you mean — ‘not really’?”
“Well, to protect myself and my family, I backed up whatever story Shoulders was telling at the time — it shifted all over the place. And that landed me in prison on that perjury rap. I got two years. Maybe you know that.”
“Go on.”
“When I got out after fifteen months — it was December ’55 — Joe Costello wanted to meet with me at Ruggeri’s restaurant. He said he’d sold my share while I was inside, and offered me ten grand. I turned it down, but... I’m not proud of this... it was Christmas and I’d been doing time and had no job. I asked for fifteen-hundred dollars for living expenses and... to buy presents for the wife and kids.”
He started to cry.
Him I could feel for. Shoulders could go fuck himself.
I said, “Is that everything, son?”
“N... no. Not quite. A guy was already there when we got to Costello’s that night.”
“What guy?”
Steam hissed, a librarian asking for quiet.
He obeyed, keeping his voice down, saying, “A big guy with connections. You know? Connections. He helped Joe count the money. And was good at it, like a banker. Then he took the money with him, the other half of it, before we left with the rest, to turn in at the station.”
I leaned forward and put an edge in my voice. “What guy, Elmer?”
He shook his head. “Can’t tell you, Mr. Heller. Not even if Joe Costello and Lou Shoulders were dead and gone. Not even... not even if this big mob guy himself was dead and gone, because he’s so connected it would come back on me, sure as hell. My kids would not have a father and my wife would not have a husband.”
“Okay, Elmer.”
“The rest of it? You can tell Mr. Greenlease, but not before he swears on his life to keep it to himself. Maybe someday I’ll go public. But till then, he has to swear. On his daughter’s life, ’cause I read he has one. On her life, Mr. Heller.”
He was getting worked up.
I said, “All right, Elmer.”
“Because if you don’t keep your word, I’m a dead man.”
And he probably would be.
As he walked me out of the work area, I said, “You have a solid crew working back there. Business good?”
“I thought it was. But we’ve just sold the place.”
I frowned at him. “Why, if you’re doing well?”
He shook his head. “Our silent partners are people in Chicago who know the laundry business. They insisted we sell. They were disappointed with how we were doing.”
He opened the gate in the counter for me and we stepped through and I said, “Would one of those silent partners be named Humphreys, by any chance?”
“Murray Humphreys, yes. His people came in and set everything up for us, when we started out last year.”
And that explained it. The Murray Humphreys chain of dry-cleaning establishments laundered more than clothes.
At the door I asked, “Tell me, did the feds take an interest in your books?”
He laughed, once. “Oh, they’ve been all over us. But they didn’t find a thing. We’re squeaky clean. It’s disappointing, ’cause we were really making a go of it. Now I start at a service station next month, pumping gas.”
We shook hands and I went out.
Had the Outfit backed Lou Shoulders, as partial payback for bringing the Greenlease money to them? And had it proved a bad investment when federal scrutiny prevented them from cleaning up in a new market?
Chapter Fifteen
Extending over a carport and glassed-in lobby, the sign said in yellow-edged red neon, with the “M” and the “B” in white-edged pink—
— a neon baseball dotting the “I” in Musial, a floating star over “STAN,” and a toasting drinking glass near the “B” (Julius “Biggie” Garagnani had been a well-known St. Louis restaurateur even before bringing Musial into the business). The rest of the modern brick two-story restaurant loomed behind and to the right, the central windowed area of both floors dramatically spotlighted. All in all, aglow in the dusk, the restaurant made a gaudy eye-catching monument to a local hero, Stan the Man, the Cardinals’ beloved batter. And in a town noted for Italian fare, Musial’s was not a bad place to catch a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, although I was having the filet with mushroom sauce and Sandy O’Day a shrimp salad.
After such a spectacular exterior, the dining room proved something of a disappointment, just a bland sea of linen-clothed tables-for-four with subdued lighting, and organist Stan Kann quietly playing show tunes, all overseen by an endless mirrored bar. On a weeknight, business was slow and the prices high — $4.75 for my steak, a la carte, side dishes sixty cents — with mostly tourists taking the bait.
“I was at the other location once,” I said to Sandy, as we noshed on a buck’s worth of toasted ravioli, “when Musial himself was going table to table. Signing autographs, ruffling kids’ hair.”
“Sweet guy,” she said between nibbles. “But he’s usually only around in the off-season.”
She was in a creamy white silk blouse with pearls. Her gray pencil skirt and low heels weren’t apparent, seated, but when I’d picked her up at the little house across the highway from the Coral Court, I greeted her with a low wolf whistle, despite her insistence that she’d selected her wardrobe not to draw attention. Her short dark hair had an Audrey Hepburn look that shouldn’t have suited her but did.
In the little living room of the nondescript frame house, the three younger women living in had been lounging around in various states of partial dress and curlers, a blonde reading a comic book, a redhead a movie magazine, and a brunette sitting cross-legged in front of a rabbit-eared TV watching My Little Margie. They looked barely out of high school but a hardness at odds with their Bobby Soxer tastes was setting in already. Sandy had that hardness, too, the full-blown variety, but like her hair, she wore it well.
We were seated against the restaurant’s far wall under a row of baseball paintings — I’d asked for some privacy and we’d got it, at least as much as possible in a big dining room — and as we waited for our meals, I started by asking her about the owner of the Coral Court, a subject we’d largely danced around last night.