Distinctive as this individual was, I didn’t recognize him at first.
“Nate, I heard you were in town!”
“...Barney Baker?”
“In the flesh,” he said in a surprisingly mellow, mellifluous baritone. “What, have I changed so much? Okay, so maybe I put a few pounds on in the interim.”
He’d been big when I knew him before, but another hundred or so had been added.
We shook hands. That fat paw of his could generate real power.
Barney Baker, who looked fifty and was probably forty, had been one of Ben Siegel’s bouncers at the Flamingo in Las Vegas back in ’46. Siegel (Don’t Call Him Bugsy) had hired me to train security personnel at his new casino with an emphasis on spotting pickpockets — I’d been on the Pickpocket Detail of the Chicago PD a thousand years ago.
Even back at the Flamingo, Barney had been such a hulking presence he merely had to tap the shoulder of a troublemaker, who would turn and get a gander of the looming bouncer and look for the nearest exit with no further inducement. Not that Barney couldn’t do damage if need be. He had come with an impressive résumé — a waterfront collector in his teens who did a prison stretch in New York for throwing stink bombs in theaters during a union drive.
“You had lunch, Nate?”
He was the sort of guy who kept track of such things.
“No,” I said. “I thought I’d catch something at the airport.”
He settled a catcher’s mitt hand on my shoulder. “Listen, let me buy you lunch. We got things to talk about.”
We do?
“All right,” I said, “just let me check out.”
Which I did, leaving my overnight bag at the desk, and Barney slipped an overwhelming arm around my shoulder and walked me across the lobby to the coffee shop like a parent escorting an apprehensive child to the doctor’s office.
We took a table — Barney couldn’t fit into a booth — and I asserted myself. “Who told you I was in Kansas City?”
He was looking at the menu. “That colored cab driver who drove you to the Greenlease place in Mission Hills.”
“Why would he confide that to anybody?”
“The cab company keeps track of public-figure types who come to town. Can be valuable information. You should feel complimented.”
I smirked. “Why would you be privy to such valuable information?”
His big shoulders shrugged. “I’m their union representative. Ace Cabs are run out of St. Louis, which is where I’m out of, too, these days. I was in K.C. on union business and got the call about this just, oh, half an hour ago.”
“What call?”
“The call pertaining to you.”
I squinted at him. “When did you get so goddamn eloquent, Barney? I recall you being a dese, dem and doser.”
He waved a plump thing with fingers. “A union organizer has to be both a man of the people and a decent public speaker. I give a hell of a speech, Nate. You should hear me on Civil Rights. Nobody stirs up the colored vote like yours truly. I’m a good Democrat, you know.”
So was I, but that was enough to make me question my party affiliation.
“Ah,” he said, and his eyes glittered, “here’s the waitress. Pretty little babe, don’t you think?’
She was indeed, a pretty blonde and pretty bored, weighing about a hundred pounds, a considerably better-looking hundred than the one Barney had added on. I ordered the clubhouse sandwich with potato chips and cole slaw. Barney had a triple order of the boneless butt steak with mushroom sauce and triple french fries; it came with three salads too, but he passed on those. Cutting down, I guess.
I figured he would get around to what this was about soon enough. Till then, I thought we could stand some catching up.
“So after they bumped Ben,” I said, “you went back into union work, huh?”
“Yeah, the Teamsters. I was president of local 730 in D.C. for a while. Then opportunity knocked here in the Midwest. You done all right for yourself, Nate. L.A. office and everything. You get around. I mean, here you are in Kansas City.”
“Here I am. And what’s that to a union organizer who specializes in cab companies?”
Our drinks came — Coca-Cola for me, coffee with cream and sugar for Barney. The disturbingly nice blue eyes looked rather fondly at me.
“What I always liked about you, Nate, is your attitude toward money. There were lines you wouldn’t cross. But also, there were lines you didn’t mind crossing. Or are you too respectable now to turn your nose up at a good opportunity? Let me give you a hypothetical.”
“A what? When did you drop out of school, Barney?”
“After the third grade.”
“Ah.”
“But I learned to read by then. So. If we can get hypothetical and all? Suppose there was a despicable fucking crime like a kid getting snatched.”
I can’t say I didn’t see this coming, but it rocked me a little just the same.
Very quietly I said, “If you were involved in such a thing, Barney, I would gladly kill your un-hypothetical ass. I assume there are some vital organs still lurking under all of that blubber.”
His frown looked hurt, not mad. “Unkind, Nate. You ever know me taking part in an act of such a lowdown nature? You recall me ever doing something so criminal I’d go straight to Hell and take it up the ass from the Devil himself for all eternity?”
“Hey, you brought it up, Barney, and frankly? I never knew you all that well. Here’s the food.”
It came and we ate. Conversation ceased. He frowned throughout the meal, annoyed when he would rather just be savoring the enjoyment of shoveling butt steak between his thick lips. Somewhat surprisingly, he finished his three orders about the time I finished mine. He had tapioca coming with his meal. That came, was gone in seconds, and then he had another cup of coffee and I sprang for a second Coke, though I pretty much let it sit. I leaned back with my arms folded, kind of wishing the nine millimeter weren’t in my overnight bag at the desk.
“Hypothetically,” he said, very quietly, “we may have a line on the snatch.”
“No participation.”
“No.”
I unfolded my arms, sat forward, folded my hands prayerfully on the table as if tacking grace on after the meal. “Let’s skip the phony hypothetical bullshit, Barney. What’s this about?”
He took a couple of moments before answering, patting his mouth with a napkin almost daintily. “You know Joe Costello?”
“I don’t know him. I know of him. He and that Vitale character are the top rackets guys in St. Louis, they say.”
Barney nodded. “‘They’ are well-informed. Anyway. There’s a guy calls himself Steve who approaches an Ace cabbie this very morning looking for a hooker, but he doesn’t want to go to a house — he wants a ‘real nice girl.’ The guy is loaded with dough, a regular angel first-class.”
An angel, as cabbies and pimps called them, was a big spender, usually from out of town.
“Steve, in addition to throwing money around like it’s going out of style,” Barney said, “is also going from bar to bar in the daylight hours with the kind of thirst you can’t quench. As he gets deeper in his cups, he starts talking.”
“About the kidnapping?”
A stop palm came up fast. “No, no, no. Steve is some kind of insurance guy, he says, who has come into dough and not in a legal way. Steve says he has a bundle, and he wants it washed. Afraid the bills might be marked.”