Behind him, past a narrow barrier, the dry-cleaning business was singing its percussive, tuneless song: hiss of steam, presses opening and closing, metal pedals squeaking.

“Lou’s right,” I said. “I’m no cop. Of course, you aren’t either, anymore. I’m a Chicago private investigator working for a client.”

“I know who you are. I read about you in the papers sometimes. Who’s the client?”

Shoulders had talked to me because I invoked Hoffa. That wouldn’t work with Dolan.

Now and then you just have to play a hunch. Mine was an educated one, based upon a framed family portrait on the shop wall—a pretty young wife, a beaming boy of maybe three, and a proud papa with an arm around her and a hand on the child’s sleeve. The papa was Elmer Dolan, of course.

I said, “My client is the Greenlease family.”

An expression finally happened: the eyes tightened, the brow furrowed, the mouth quivered. “I suppose…I suppose they want their money back. Well, I don’t have it.”

“It’s not that they want their money back,” I said with a shrug, as if this were the most casual subject in the world, “it’s that it sickens them thinking of anybody profiting off their little boy’s death.”

His mouth was quivering so much he had to cover it; his eyes were going moist with something like genuine human feeling, not the self-pity that characterized the crocodile tears of Lou Shoulders.

“Give me a second, would you?” he said. “I have to get a girl to cover the counter.”

He slipped in back, past the hanging garment purveyor, and soon returned with a pleasant young colored woman in a D & S smock to take his place. He summoned me to follow him and I did, through the work area where an all-Negro crew in white was at presses with the exception of an older gal who was hand-ironing. The kerosene-like smell was much stronger back here. Not a big set-up, but an efficient one.

Dolan walked me into a cubbyhole office with metal furnishings, desk with chair, visitor’s chair, one four-drawer file cabinet. The desk was cluttered, centered with an oversize account book. He shut us in, then from a small refrigerator of bottles of Coke, he got us each one; I liked the boyish man’s taste in soda pop. He got behind the desk and gestured for me to sit opposite.

“The FBI,” he said, after swigging some Coke, “have been after my story for a long time. Why should I give it to you?”

“You wouldn’t be giving it to me,” I said. “You’d be giving it to Robert Greenlease, Sr.”

“Spare me the violins. If you hadn’t already pulled my heartstrings, we wouldn’t be sitting here. It makes me sick what happened to that boy, and what his parents got put through.”

“Are still going through.”

“I know. I know. But I have two children of my own now, and they are of more concern to me than, with all due respect, Mr. Greenlease’s late son Bobby.”