A steam press out there hissed at that.

“That is,” he said, “if you want to know what I know about the Greenlease money.”

“Certain conditions.”

“Yes. You can only share this with Mr. Greenlease. I don’t even want his wife to know. You have to say that it’s…what’s the word? Hypothetical. This is what might have happened.”

“You won’t go on the record.”

“No.”

I crossed my legs and my arms and sighed. “Then what good is it?”

“It means he’ll know. The boy’s father will know. And maybe someday the world will, if I can outlive Lou Shoulders and Joe Costello. Maybe then I’ll tell the FBI—God knows they won’t have stopped asking me. Until then, this is all you get. Do I have your word?”

“…You do.”

“Are you a father?”

“I am. I have a son.”

“Swear on your son’s life.”

I nodded. Sighed again. “I swear.”

He told me. He left out what I already knew, including what I gathered but hadn’t witnessed, specifically the transfer of Carl Hall to that apartment at the Town House within St. Louis PD jurisdiction. That cabbie Hagan had been around for most of it, but hadn’t been there when Shoulders directed Dolan to load up the lieutenant’s car with the footlocker, the metal suitcase and a briefcase that collectively included the entire ransom but for the free-wheeling spending Hall had done on his day of binge drinking. Shoulders drove Dolan and all that money to the home of Joe Costello on Gurney Court in a nice, quiet South St. Louis neighborhood. Helped them down the stairs with the three heavy pieces of luggage into a paneled basement, where the money was counted on a coffee table.

“Shoulders pointed to the stacks of money,” Dolan told me, “and said, ‘Half of that is ours. You’ll wind up with fifty grand. What are you going to do with your share?’ I told him I didn’t want anything to do with that crap. And I didn’t even know, at that point, that this was the Greenlease ransom!”

“But Shoulders did?”

He nodded emphatically. “Yeah, I’m sure of it. From things he said that night, and other things he said over time. He knew. And when I said I didn’t want any part of the money, he said, ‘You really don’t have anything to say about it.’”

“You never took any of the ransom?”

“Not really. We took half back to the Newstead station. I pleaded with Shoulders all the way there not to take so goddamn much—it had to come back on us. And I was scared stiff, scared we’d be caught, scared if I didn’t go along with them, Costello and Shoulders would kill me. I should’ve pulled my gun and arrested them right there in that rec room!…But I didn’t.”

“What did you mean—‘not really’?”

“Well, to protect myself and my family, I backed up whatever story Shoulders was telling at the time—it shifted all over the place. And that landed me in prison on that perjury rap. I got two years. Maybe you know that.”