“No. I slept right through to my wake-up call.”
That had been eleven A.M. It was noon now — checkout time on the dot.
“Very lively day yesterday,” he commented. “Dispatch gives the O’Day shooting a lot of play. Some other juicy stuff didn’t make it in before deadline, but the TV had it. Seems Joe Costello shot himself cleaning his gun at home — in his rec room. He’ll live.”
“How about an Ace Cab employee who didn’t?”
“Nothing that made the TV news. Afternoon paper may have it. Oh, there’s a message for you.” He went and got it from the Red Room’s slot on the wall of key cubbyholes.
I opened the folded note “If you’re still around, call me,” then the number and the caller: “Barney.”
“Hope you had a pleasant stay,” Carr said.
“Call it memorable,” I said.
But as I pulled out onto Watson Road, AKA Route 66, I didn’t bother giving the array of yellow-glazed and glass-brick bungalows, shining in the sun, a last look. I remembered what happened to Lot’s wife.
Barney and I arranged by phone to have an early supper at Pelican’s, the massive gothic three-story, turreted red-brick building at South Grand and Shenandoah. Just what I needed — another castle. At least this one wasn’t modernistic with a moat.
The pastel blue-and-pink dining room, however, with its horizontal wall mural of Disney-ish aquatic animals and plants, had a definite Streamline Moderne feel. Though at four P.M. the venerable restaurant had just opened, a customer was already seated and digging in at a bowl of soup. Looking like a tourist in his tent-like pink sports shirt with pants baggy enough for a clown, Barney Baker was spooning thick, dark soup into the hole under his nose on the tiny head.
Normally that might have been enough to make me lose my appetite, but all I’d had today was a cup of frozen custard at one of the ubiquitous Ted Drewes stands. That had been between stops at the PD and FBI, both on Twelfth Street, letting the cops know I’d be back in Chicago by tomorrow afternoon, and sharing my investigative findings with federal agent Herb Moss and (on speaker phone from Kansas City) Wes Grapp. Like the ransom money, my account was laundered.
“Nate!” Barney burbled. “Sit down, kid. You’ve got to try this.”
“What is it — chili?”
“It’s the house specialty — turtle soup.”
“No thanks.”
“Don’t you have any adventure in your soul?”
“Fresh out.”
He waved that away. “Well, you got plenty of other choices. The Pelican menu’s ridiculous. German here, seafood there — but I recommend the stewed chicken and dumplings.”
That’s what I ordered, and it was delicious, all right. I didn’t say much for a while, since it was Barney who’d called the meeting. I passed on dessert while Barney took his time with a dish of orange sherbet (“Watching the ol’ weight”).
“That hooker turned madam,” he said, “kinda owned today’s headlines. Nice-lookin’ woman and I never heard bad things about her. You knew her?”
“You know I did. Sandy was at the Coral Court with Hagan and Carl Hall that night. So was all that cash.”
He didn’t rise to the bait.
“Judging by what I see in the papers,” Barney said — the afternoon editions were on the stands, “our pal Joe Costello had a rough-as-a-cob night. Wound up in the hospital, lost a lot of blood. Seems he was cleaning his gun before sun-up. Kind of a funny time to decide to oil up Old Betsy.”
“Isn’t it.”
“Or maybe he got depressed and tried to pull a Dutch act.” He narrowed his little eyes. “And speaking of Dutch, seems Wortman’s boy Elroy Downey turned up shot dead in his merry Oldsmobile. Over on the Illinois side, Huntswood Road? Him and his buddy Mel Beck, also dead by gunshot.”
Apparently after Mel dealt with the mess at the moat castle, the boss had decided to include him in the overall house cleaning.
“And,” Barney said, after another taste of sherbet, “an Ace Cab Company dispatcher named Howard Ratner was found bludgeoned in the boonies north of Belleville, also over in Illinois. Do I detect your fine hand at work in all this?”
“Do you?”
He shrugged. “Nice and quiet in our little river communities till Nate Heller come to visit. You sure do stir things up, buddy.”
“I get around. But then so do you.”
“Union organizing knows few boundaries.”
“Not the way you do it, it doesn’t.” I leaned back, folding my arms. “You know, you probably didn’t courier that money to Chicago yourself. I’m guessing you let Downey, working with somebody on the Outfit end, handle getting that bundle to the Southmoor Bank.”
He flipped a pudgy hand. “No idea what you’re talking about, son.”
“You were the big shot in Joe’s rec room. You saw all that money, Barney, and were the only one smart enough to know just how hot it was. You knew damn well the likes of Hoffa and top Outfit guys like Accardo and Humphreys would not want jack shit to do with the bloodiest blood money to ever come down the pike. They have kids of their own, and like to think they got lines they won’t cross. And even any who maybe could stomach where that dough came from, knew if it ever came out? The public blowback would be disastrous.”
He had a lopsided grin going. “I’d cry if it wasn’t so goddamn funny, what you’re saying!”
“Well, please don’t cry. There’s been enough of that.”
He leaned forward, patting my sleeve. “Nate, buddy, pal, amigo, come on. This is good ’ol Barney you’re talking to. Barney Baker, friend of the working man. Barney Baker, Civil Rights activist.”
“You mean, Barney Baker who showed up at the President Hotel just in time to shove me in the middle of Joe Costello’s plan to make a big score?”
He shook the tiny head; it was like the lid on a big bottle trying to screw itself off. “Hey, I was just on the fringes! I do what I always do — open doors, grease the wheels, you know, facilitate.”
Now I leaned in. “I don’t think you were on the fringes, Barney. I think you were either down out of sight with your hands jammed up the puppets’ asses, or else up in the theater flies working the strings on the marionettes.”
Finally he scowled at me. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about, Barney. You’re a smart guy, self-educated. Hell, you know words like ‘facilitate.’ You have nothing to worry about from me. I can’t put you in that rec room. And the other players are too fucking scared of you... good old jolly Barney.”
He raised a forefinger. “You wanna back off on this now, Nate. Right now.”
I grinned at him. “The one thing I don’t know... the one thing I’d still like to know is... were you in on it from the start? Did you know about the kidnapping all along? How could you not be hungry for a nice big pile of that Greenlease green? Then that psycho screwed you and Costello and everybody by putting a bullet in that sweet little boy’s head. Did you, Barney? Know all along?”
He reared like a bull elephant at its trainer. “What the hell difference does it make, Heller? Does it bring that kid back? Who made you the fuckin’ conscience of America all of a sudden?”
“Tell me, Barney. How do you sleep at night?”
“Like a baby, Nate. Like a goddamn baby.”
I pushed back on my chair and got to my feet. “Well, then — you better hope nobody snatches you from your cradle some night.”