I resisted the impulse to say, “Me Jane,” and just nodded.

Half a dozen cabbies were seated in wooden schoolhouse chairs with their backs to the big window on the street, a rough-looking bunch who made the Bowery Boys look like actual boys. All but one wore matching caps with triangular ACE CAB patches but otherwise—like the cars in the lot—they were a mixed bunch, in jackets of leather, corduroy, gabardine, several in neckties, one in a bow tie. Their shirts ranged from white to pale blue to pale what-have-you. Two of the cabbies were colored; they were the only ones with white shirts.

“Go on in,” the dispatcher said in a grudging, we-don’t-cotton-to-strangers-in-this-here-town way. Probably an in-law. The switchboard redhead glanced at me with a little smile and shrug. Probably a mistress.

There was only one door, so I didn’t have any questions. In I went.

The scarred-up wooden desk was older than I was, the top empty of anything but a cup of coffee and a butt-filled glass ashtray, in a small office as dingy as the outer building and the mechanics in the two-bay garage. But the man at the desk—slender, mid-forties, with sandy, curly hair—was if anything spiffy. He wore a gray suit and a white shirt buttoned at the neck, no tie; a snap-brim fedora sat back rather jauntily, its indoor use suggesting he might be bald.

“Nate Heller!” He vaguely resembled Bing Crosby. He stood and shoved his hand across the desk at me like a spear. I shook it. You’d think we were old pals.

“Mr. Costello?” I said tentatively.

“Joe. Why would we stand on formality?”

He seemed to know me, and by more than just reputation. But if we’d met, I didn’t recall. He told me to make myself comfortable—“Take off your coat and stay a while!”—and I hung the Burberry and Dobbs on a corner coat tree with his own topcoat. I was in the Richard Bennett, by the way, cut for the holstered nine mil.

That precaution had to do with the type of cab company Ace almost certainly was—not that it was an unusual type for a city the size of St. Louis, or a lot of cities either, of any size. Certain cabbies all across America were rolling pimps, ready to fix up a visitor to their fair communities with female companionship, games of chance, and assorted other illegal recreational activities.

Beyond that, this cab company was run by a top Gateway City mob guy, said to be a front for fencing stolen goods, smuggled firearms and burgled jewels. I didn’t know Joe Costello personally, but I knew he’d done time on robbery raps in his salad days, and in his main-course years had made a rep setting up heists for others to pull off.

Looking like Bob Hope’s co-star in Road to Alcatraz, Costello folded his hands on the desk—whether he was intentionally showing off that big gold-set diamond ring, I couldn’t tell you. On the wall behind him were framed photos, all hanging crooked, of Joe and a narrow-faced, hooded-eye guy who looked vaguely familiar, taken over a period of time—shaking hands, smiling, laughing, sometimes with a cab in the background, other times in a barroom.