We shook hands and I went out.

Had the Outfit backed Lou Shoulders, as partial payback for bringing the Greenlease money to them? And had it proved a bad investment when federal scrutiny prevented them from cleaning up in a new market?

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Extending over a carport and glassed-in lobby, the sign said in yellow-edged red neon, with the “M” and the “B” in white-edged pink—

STAN Musial & Biggies

—a neon baseball dotting the “I” in Musial, a floating star over “STAN,” and a toasting drinking glass near the “B” (Julius “Biggie” Garagnani had been a well-known St. Louis restaurateur even before bringing Musial into the business). The rest of the modern brick two-story restaurant loomed behind and to the right, the central windowed area of both floors dramatically spotlighted. All in all, aglow in the dusk, the restaurant made a gaudy eye-catching monument to a local hero, Stan the Man, the Cardinals’ beloved batter. And in a town noted for Italian fare, Musial’s was not a bad place to catch a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, although I was having the filet with mushroom sauce and Sandy O’Day a shrimp salad.

After such a spectacular exterior, the dining room proved something of a disappointment, just a bland sea of linen-clothed tables-for-four with subdued lighting, and organist Stan Kann quietly playing show tunes, all overseen by an endless mirrored bar. On a weeknight, business was slow and the prices high—$4.75 for my steak, a la carte, side dishes sixty cents—with mostly tourists taking the bait.

“I was at the other location once,” I said to Sandy, as we noshed on a buck’s worth of toasted ravioli, “when Musial himself was going table to table. Signing autographs, ruffling kids’ hair.”

“Sweet guy,” she said between nibbles. “But he’s usually only around in the off-season.”

She was in a creamy white silk blouse with pearls. Her gray pencil skirt and low heels weren’t apparent, seated, but when I’d picked her up at the little house across the highway from the Coral Court, I greeted her with a low wolf whistle, despite her insistence that she’d selected her wardrobe not to draw attention. Her short dark hair had an Audrey Hepburn look that shouldn’t have suited her but did.

In the little living room of the nondescript frame house, the three younger women living in had been lounging around in various states of partial dress and curlers, a blonde reading a comic book, a redhead a movie magazine, and a brunette sitting cross-legged in front of a rabbit-eared TV watching My Little Margie. They looked barely out of high school but a hardness at odds with their Bobby Soxer tastes was setting in already. Sandy had that hardness, too, the full-blown variety, but like her hair, she wore it well.

We were seated against the restaurant’s far wall under a row of baseball paintings—I’d asked for some privacy and we’d got it, at least as much as possible in a big dining room—and as we waited for our meals, I started by asking her about the owner of the Coral Court, a subject we’d largely danced around last night.