“No participation.”

“No.”

I unfolded my arms, sat forward, folded my hands prayerfully on the table as if tacking grace on after the meal. “Let’s skip the phony hypothetical bullshit, Barney. What’s this about?”

He took a couple of moments before answering, patting his mouth with a napkin almost daintily. “You know Joe Costello?”

“I don’t know him. I know of him. He and that Vitale character are the top rackets guys in St. Louis, they say.”

Barney nodded. “‘They’ are well-informed. Anyway. There’s a guy calls himself Steve who approaches an Ace cabbie this very morning looking for a hooker, but he doesn’t want to go to a house—he wants a ‘real nice girl.’ The guy is loaded with dough, a regular angel first-class.”

An angel, as cabbies and pimps called them, was a big spender, usually from out of town.

“Steve, in addition to throwing money around like it’s going out of style,” Barney said, “is also going from bar to bar in the daylight hours with the kind of thirst you can’t quench. As he gets deeper in his cups, he starts talking.”

“About the kidnapping?”

A stop palm came up fast. “No, no, no. Steve is some kind of insurance guy, he says, who has come into dough and not in a legal way. Steve says he has a bundle, and he wants it washed. Afraid the bills might be marked.”

What kind of insurance man had access to cash that might be marked bills? This sounded a lot more like a kidnapper than an embezzler.

Barney was saying, “One of our Ace guys got our buddy Steve a hooker, who can be trusted or at least for a hooker can be, and at some point our guy got a glimpse at stacks and stacks of green in a footlocker.”

Not a duffel bag.

“Maybe,” Barney went on, “our insurance guy really is somebody in insurance or at a bank who’s helped himself, and is worried about serial numbers. In which case, Joe is not concerned.”

“Joe Costello.”

“Joe Costello, who owns the Ace Cab Company. He has no moral compunctions about washing money from a bank or insurance company, either. But a kidnapping would be immoral. Joe has kids. I got kids. Who doesn’t have kids?”

Also, a racketeer who got dirtied by a notorious in-the-headlines kidnapping would not be looked upon kindly by public officials who might otherwise turn a blind eye in return for a filled palm.

I was at a stage of my professional life where normally I would not want anything to do with embezzlers whether the take was insurance or bank money. Hell, I had clients in both lines of business. But this sounded like it might be the path to the Greenlease kidnappers—the kind of path I could follow more effectively than the by-the-book likes of Wes Grapp.

“Look, Nate,” Barney said. Usually loud, the union goon was almost whispering now. “Joe wants to bring you in. What exactly he has in mind, I don’t know. You sure you don’t know him? ’Cause it sure seems like he knows you.”