“Question is,” I said, “did you send him? Howie doesn’t look bright enough to have too many of his own ideas.”
He showed me surrender palms. “Hear me out. Sandy O’Day came around to my house... my house, where I live with my wife and son—”
I stopped him with a raised forefinger. “That’s the wife with a nephew, right? Right. Go on.”
“She wanted ten grand. Said she worked up a story she was going to peddle to the FBI about me getting the Greenlease money.”
“Just another dirty blackmailer, huh?” I let a serpent of smoke curl out. “And here we both thought she was a good kid.”
His voice turned apologetic. “What happened to her outside Musial’s, that was probably my fault, partly — my bad judgment.”
“Oh?”
He sighed. “Y’see, after I talked to Sandy, I got pretty hot around the collar. I blew my top about it to Howie and a couple of the other guys, how she was putting the squeeze on me so tight I might have to shutter Ace Cab. And these are ex-cons who need the work. Who in St. Louis but Joe Costello pays good money to bad eggs just outa stir? It’s what I get for trying to give ’em a helping hand and a leg up. All I can think is, Howie musta got it in his stupid head to remove the problem. Without my urging, mind you.”
“Rash of the boy. Your wife’s nephew needs a good talking to. If he ever wakes up.”
He just sat there looking at me and trying not to look at the gun I was tempting him with. Then: “Heller... I’m willing to let it go.”
“Let what go?”
“You bashing my wife’s nephew.”
“Howie? What if he doesn’t wake up?”
“These things happen.” He sat forward. His mouth was twitching a little. “I, uh, understand you’ve been going around talking to people on both sides of the river.”
“I have.”
“Come up with anything?”
I flipped my left hand casually. “Just that one crisp fall evening in 1953, you and Lou Shoulders spent an hour at your house... you know, the place where you and your wife and son live?... counting that ‘missing’ three-hundred grand. That kings-in-the-counting house routine covers the missing hour between when Carl Hall was booked and the other half of the ransom finally got logged in.”
“You have no proof that meeting took place.”
“You mean, I have no proof because Johnny Hagan is bought off and afraid? And Lou Shoulders is lying his ass off and bawling his eyes out, tossing in the occasional heart attack as a convincer? Then there’s Sandy O’Day, with a baseball-size hole in the back of her skull at Stan Musial’s. Good thing Stan the Man has an alibi — he’s on the road with the Cardinals. Everybody else’s alibi seems kinda on the shaky side. My smoking isn’t bothering you, is it? This is a small space.”
“No,” he said coldly. “I don’t mind.”
I shrugged. “But proof is beside the point, in a way. I’m not a cop. Yes, I am an officer of the court, and as a licensed private investigator, I have a responsibility to share information with the authorities. Theories, however, I don’t have to share.”
The hooded eyes were boring through me now. He studied me for maybe ten seconds, which is longer than it sounds. “How much?”
“Oh, this isn’t blackmail. I was out with Sandy O’Day earlier, remember? I know how you dealt with her, and really all she wanted was a share of the spoils. No, I have no interest in your money. But I do have a client who will pay to hear what I learned.”
“Some you talked to,” he said, “come away thinking your client is Jimmy Hoffa. Others that you’re working for the Rackets Committee. Or maybe Robert Greenlease.”
“Why not all three? Everybody and his dog is interested in you, Joe. You’re a popular man. I don’t think anybody will be hard to convince that you and Shoulders and poor scared Dolan were divvying that dough up in your rec room back in September ’53. But the sad thing is, I don’t think any of you got much for your trouble. That money was so goddamn hot, it cost so much to launder it, only dribs and drabs came back. And nobody approved of what you’d done — not Vitale or Wortman, and sure as hell not Accardo and Humphreys... all of them saw that three-hundred grand as drenched in the blood of a child.”
“Easy for them,” he muttered.
“Easy for them is right. They’re making big money off the public’s little sins — pinball machines, gambling halls, slot machines, bookie parlors, union racketeering. Of course, there’s also loansharking, handbooks, prostitution, and some people traffic in narcotics... but nobody’s perfect. Kidnapping is something out of the Lindbergh past, the kind of ill-advised, out-of-date venture that in the ’30s got Ma Barker and her boys riddled with lead and made J. Edgar a household word. And these Outfit bigwigs, like Accardo and Humphreys, and field lieutenants like Wortman and Vitale, they see themselves as good old-fashioned American businessmen, standard bearers of capitalism, and all of them are working toward the day they’ll be wholly legit. More or less.”
“What do you want from me, Heller?”
“I want the name of the other man who was there that night.”
“What night?”
I slammed a fist on the desk and the nine mil jumped; so did Costello. “What night do you fucking think? Some big shot with Outfit ties who connected you to the Southmoor Bank and suggested how to avoid attracting the attention of the top dogs by using second-tier Outfit players, who didn’t have the luxury of being moral about blood money — the big man who said he’d buy the laundered money, when it finally made it through the wash.”
He thought about that, but not for long. “I think you already know that name.”
“I think I do,” I said, and spoke it.
He just nodded. “So then we don’t have other business to discuss, do we, Nate?”
It had gone from “Nate” to “Heller” and was back to “Nate” again.
“Really, just one other little thing.”
He clearly had no idea. “What?”
I leaned into the desk, the nine mil very nearby. “Johnny Hagan wasn’t with you in your rec room when you and Shoulders counted the money that night... or maybe the end buyer actually counted the money, but... anyway, Johnny wasn’t there. Yet he’s still on your payroll. Why?”
He shrugged that off. “I don’t pay him all that much.”
“Oh, I know. Mostly he’s just afraid. Doesn’t want to die. Who does?”
“What’s your point?”
I used an ashtray on the desk to dispose of the butt and lit up a fresh Chesterfield. “Just that I think Johnny knows something... and I think maybe Sandy learned about that something from him... which would change everything. Everything.”
He recoiled but then recovered: “I doubt that. We’re done, Heller. You should leave before Howie wakes up.”
“If he wakes up. I hit him pretty hard. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Here’s the thing — you played a much bigger role in all this than anyone knows, even though you were at the center of the Case of the Missing Ransom Money from that very first night. Only, really, this all began long before that.”
“That makes no sense, Heller.”
“Sure it does, Joe. Because Carl Hall came to you, months ahead of time, with a plan to take down the biggest ransom in history. He had an insider’s knowledge of the Greenlease family because he was friends with Bobby’s older brother, Paul, who Carl knew at military school. Carl may have oversold it to you... I don’t think Paul and Carl remained close or anything, Carl was just a guy who could get the cadets booze and maybe reefers and, who knows, even girls... but the kind of payday Carl was talking about was worth considering. Greenlease was maybe the richest man in the Midwest. The plan was to kidnap the daughter, who was eleven. She’d be easy to handle. Maybe you backed Carl in what looked like a potentially big, easy score, plowing a little money into the scheme. But for sure you told him to come to you with the money, after the snatch came off. You could get it laundered for him.”