The pastel blue-and-pink dining room, however, with its horizontal wall mural of Disney-ish aquatic animals and plants, had a definite Streamline Moderne feel. Though at four P.M. the venerable restaurant had just opened, a customer was already seated and digging in at a bowl of soup. Looking like a tourist in his tent-like pink sports shirt with pants baggy enough for a clown, Barney Baker was spooning thick, dark soup into the hole under his nose on the tiny head.

Normally that might have been enough to make me lose my appetite, but all I’d had today was a cup of frozen custard at one of the ubiquitous Ted Drewes stands. That had been between stops at the PD and FBI, both on Twelfth Street, letting the cops know I’d be back in Chicago by tomorrow afternoon, and sharing my investigative findings with federal agent Herb Moss and (on speaker phone from Kansas City) Wes Grapp. Like the ransom money, my account was laundered.

“Nate!” Barney burbled. “Sit down, kid. You’ve got to try this.”

“What is it—chili?”

“It’s the house specialty—turtle soup.”

“No thanks.”

“Don’t you have any adventure in your soul?”

“Fresh out.”

He waved that away. “Well, you got plenty of other choices. The Pelican menu’s ridiculous. German here, seafood there—but I recommend the stewed chicken and dumplings.”

That’s what I ordered, and it was delicious, all right. I didn’t say much for a while, since it was Barney who’d called the meeting. I passed on dessert while Barney took his time with a dish of orange sherbet (“Watching the ol’ weight”).

“That hooker turned madam,” he said, “kinda owned today’s headlines. Nice-lookin’ woman and I never heard bad things about her. You knew her?”

“You know I did. Sandy was at the Coral Court with Hagan and Carl Hall that night. So was all that cash.”

He didn’t rise to the bait.

“Judging by what I see in the papers,” Barney said—the afternoon editions were on the stands, “our pal Joe Costello had a rough-as-a-cob night. Wound up in the hospital, lost a lot of blood. Seems he was cleaning his gun before sun-up. Kind of a funny time to decide to oil up Old Betsy.”

“Isn’t it.”

“Or maybe he got depressed and tried to pull a Dutch act.” He narrowed his little eyes. “And speaking of Dutch, seems Wortman’s boy Elroy Downey turned up shot dead in his merry Oldsmobile. Over on the Illinois side, Huntswood Road? Him and his buddy Mel Beck, also dead by gunshot.”

Apparently after Mel dealt with the mess at the moat castle, the boss had decided to include him in the overall house cleaning.

“And,” Barney said, after another taste of sherbet, “an Ace Cab Company dispatcher named Howard Ratner was found bludgeoned in the boonies north of Belleville, also over in Illinois. Do I detect your fine hand at work in all this?”

“Do you?”

He shrugged. “Nice and quiet in our little river communities till Nate Heller come to visit. You sure do stir things up, buddy.”