As he dropped the envelope down the mail chute, Karl Syftestad told himself that he would start reading the paper more carefully during the next few weeks. It might be real interesting, he decided, like reading about something that you had something to do with.
2
Three days later, on August 17, a Thursday, the envelope that the Minneapolis private detective had dropped in the mail chute was delivered to a corner bar at the intersection of Margate Avenue and Winder Street in East St. Louis, Illinois, which meant that the letter had found its way to the heart of a professionally tough neighborhood in what people who are usually up on such things regard as a professionally tough town.
The corner bar was called just that, The Corner Bar, by its owner and proprietor, Julius C. Eames, who was black, a little over 214 pounds, and who had won the place eight years before in a crap game over in Joplin, Missouri, by making a four the hard way. Eames hadn’t gambled much since, because he was convinced that he had used up whatever luck the Lord had allotted him that night in Joplin when he had walked out of the game with the bar and $5,469 in cash. Now he contented himself with selling a fair amount of Dixie Belle gin, Smirnoff vodka, Thunderbird wine, and Falstaff beer. He also sold quite a bit of Seagram’s Seven, but not much Scotch.
The Corner Bar earned him a living, but not what could be called a good one, so he supplemented his income by helping his customers out with small loans. He lent them $50 on Friday and they paid him back $60 a week later. Eames usually had about $1,500 out on loan and there weren’t many defaulters, partly because most of his customers genuinely appreciated the service and partly because all of them knew about the stickup.
The stickup had happened four years before, just after Eames had received a phone call from the man who called himself Just Bill and who had wanted Eames to provide much the same service that Syftestad had agreed to provide in Minneapolis. Eames had refused, a little curtly. Three days later a tall, slender brown youth had walked into The Corner Bar, aimed a .22 Iver Johnson target revolver at Eames, and demanded money. Eames had nodded thoughtfully and then started around the bar, heading for the slender youth who shot him three times before Eames reached him, took away the .22, and broke the youth’s neck with the edge of his left hand.
When Eames got out of the hospital nine days later he was something of a neighborhood hero. He also received another call from the man called Bill.
“We sorta liked the way you handled that kid we sent around to see you,” Bill had said. “The way we heard it, you done a real neat job.”
“Say you sent him?”
“That’s right. Of course, he was just a kid. We coulda sent around somebody a little older. With a bigger gun. You know what I mean.”
“Uh-huh,” Eames had said. “I do exactly. Maybe you better tell me again just what it is you want me to do.”
So Bill had told him and now Eames, for the seventh time, was concentrating mightily as he sat in the back booth of The Corner Bar and laboriously printed out the name of a man who lived in Buffalo, New York. Eames didn’t bother to read the name that was penciled on the white card.
The man who lived in Buffalo had been born there thirty-six years before and now ran an Italian restaurant that he had inherited from his father, Frank Martelli, who had died in 1959 while sitting peacefully in his living room. The undertaker hadn’t been able to do much with Frank Martelli, because of the way the shotgun pellets had taken away most of his head, so the casket had been closed at the funeral. The younger Martelli, who was called Frank Junior by everyone although his real name was Enrico, took over the restaurant after his father died and because he kept his mouth shut, his father’s former business associates let him alone most of the time.
When Frank Junior got the letter from Eames on August 21, a Monday, he took five of the one-hundred-dollar bills, stuffed them away in a pocket, and quickly placed the remaining sixty-six bills in a brown envelope that he had already addressed to a box number in Jack, Oklahoma. Frank Junior recognized the name that was penciled on the white card and crossed himself. Since the death of his father, he had turned to his religion, becoming almost devout but not so much so that he ever told anyone about the penciled name on the white card, not even his priest.
The post office in Jack, Oklahoma, was in the general store that old man Wimple had owned and run for forty-two years. When the letter from Buffalo, New York, arrived he put it in that new fella’s box. That new fella was using the name Bryan Simpson and he had lived with his wife on a 160-acre farm about nine miles out of Jack for six years now, running a few head of white-faced cattle, but not growing anything except blackjack oaks as far’as most folks could see. Everyone around Jack thought that Simpson’s wife had money because he was sure a shiftless sort and drank a lot to boot. He also looked a little Indian, which — in that part of Oklahoma — was only something to comment on, but nothing to get upset and bothered about.
Simpson didn’t open the letter until he got back to his farm. He counted the money first and put six of the bills aside for himself. He glanced at the white card and grinned when he recognized the name. It was sure going to be something to watch on TV, he thought. After he addressed the envelope and sealed its contents of sixty one-hundred-dollar bills and the white card with the penciled name, he went to the closet and took out a small gray cashbox and unlocked it.
He put the six one-hundred-dollar bills in with the rest of the money in the box, which was what was left from the $126,000 that he had taken from the L Street Branch of the Riggs National Bank all by himself one summer afternoon in Washington a little over six years ago. He then got in his Chevrolet pickup and drove 81 miles to Ft. Smith where he mailed the letter.
From Ft. Smith, Arkansas, the money and the white card flew to Los Angeles where they were delivered on August 29, a Tuesday, to Miss Joan Littlestone who lived in an apartment in the 900 block on Hilldale a block or so down from Sunset. Miss Littlestone was known to be bright, pleasant, and scrupulously fair with customers and employees alike. She supervised six girls and was highly respected in the trade in which she had been engaged, in one capacity or another, for thirty-seven of her fifty-three years. When the man called Just Bill had telephoned her, she had readily agreed to do what he wanted her to do because it was her nature to do what men wanted her to do, no matter how bizarre. The fee of $1,000 per forwarding seemed ridiculously high to her, but she hadn’t questioned it. She had learned long ago that some men liked to pay more than they should; that, in fact, some men liked to be cheated and, as always, Miss Littlestone tried to be accommodating whenever she could and when the risk was low. Or at least not too high.
She took ten of the bills for herself and then carefully printed the name and address of the man who lived in Baltimore on the envelope. She glanced at the card that came with the money, but only the first name that was penciled on it stayed in her memory. Surnames hadn’t proved too useful, or reliable, in Miss Littlewood’s business and she seldom bothered with them.
It took six days for the letter to travel from Los Angeles to Baltimore by air because of a minor mix-up at O’Hare field in Chicago. The letter was waiting for Truman Goff when he arrived at his three-bedroom tract house in West Baltimore after putting in a full day at his job as produce manager of a Safeway store in the inner core of the city where the pilferage rate kept rising at a steady, almost predictable rate.