“I don’t recognize your voice.”

“There are several of us who work for Mr. Greenlease helping him out. You and I haven’t spoken before.”

“If you’re police—”

“I’m not police. By the way, did the boy answer those questions his mother gave you this morning?”

That was my way of making him think I’d been part of this for a while.

“No, I, uh…I couldn’t.…We couldn’t get anything out of him.”

The voice was tenor and thick, unsure and slurring. As Letterman said, almost certainly drunk. And his words had been less than encouraging.

I said, “You couldn’t get anything from him?”

“He wouldn’t talk.”

“Are we going to see the boy tonight?”

“No, you can’t, because they want to check the money. Anyway, the kid is raising so much hell they don’t want to have to deal with him on the pickup. You’ll get him back tomorrow, in Pittsburg, Kansas.”

The caller, I’d been told, had been portraying himself as an intermediary—hence, “they.” As for Pittsburg, Kansas, that was a new wrinkle—I would learn later that it was a town of twenty thousand, one hundred miles south near the Oklahoma border.

I asked, “Is that the straight goods?”

“It’s gospel.”

“And somebody will contact us there?”

“Someone will contact you. By telegram.”

“Where do we wait?”

“The telegraph office.”

“Listen, I want that kid tonight. No waiting till morning.”

The two men on the couch were frowning at me—they probably thought I was playing it too tough. But I could read this guy. He was soft if you weren’t six.

“You’ll get him tomorrow,” the slurry voice said, “but first I’ll call you tonight at Valentine 9279. At 11:30 P.M. exactly.”

Letterman was writing that down on a pad.

I said, “Valentine 9279? Where is that?”

“Phone booth in a hotel.”

“Here in town?”

“Yes.”

“Kansas City? Where in Kansas City?”

“Near the LaSalle Hotel.”

“In the LaSalle Hotel?”

“Near it. The Something-shire Hotel. Right across from the LaSalle.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place? And we’ll get instructions for the drop then?”

“Yes.”

“Is this another drive in the country? This crap about climbing trees and crawling around on the ground looking for the right rock is getting old. Let’s deal man-to-man. Middle of Main Street. Anywhere.”

More frowns.

“I would like that too, but I don’t have anything to say about it.”

“I thought you were running the show.”

“I’m just ‘M’—the middleman. But I’ll see to it things go perfectly tonight—no mix-ups. And you’ll be contacted about the boy in Pittsburg, Kansas, in the morning.”

A click announced the end of the call.

* * *

The hotel across from the LaSalle was the Berkshire. Linwood Boulevard at 11:15 P.M. on a Sunday night in downtown Kansas City was underpopulated to say the least and traffic was minimal; tall buildings bore so few lighted windows the effect was black dominos with only occasional white dots.

We pulled in at the entry’s drop-off area. Letterman was at the wheel in topcoat and fedora, I was riding with my Burberry unbelted, and the passenger in back was a zippered olive-colored canvas duffel bag with $600,000 dollars of cash stacked within.