I pulled another of those wooden schoolhouse chairs over and sat down. “You paid well for the right to see me here in St. Louis. What can I do for you?”

“Maybe it’s what I can do for you.” Like Bing, he was a baritone, though not melodic. “You still working for the Greenlease family?”

“I was about to head back to Chicago when your friend Barney Baker caught up with me. I’m on call if Bob Greenlease needs me. Uh, Mr. Costello—”

“Joe. Please. I mean, Nate, I feel like I know you.”

I eyed him. “Why do you feel like you know me, Joe?”

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Are you kidding? I owe you, friend.”

Was he pointing at those pictures?

I asked, “Who is that anyway?”

“You really don’t recognize him? My late partner. We ran the Clover Club on Delmar together. Then we opened up Ace—he’s the one came up with the slogan, ‘Call an Ace cab for ace service.’ He never spoke ill of you, Nate. And him and me, we was like brothers.”

And then I finally recognized that narrow, jug-eared face: Leo Brothers! In June 1930, Jake Lingle, a mobbed-up Tribune leg man who phoned scoops in to rewrite men, was in the pedestrian walkway beneath Michigan Avenue, about to catch the 1:30 P.M. to Washington Park racetrack, when someone shot him in the head. Leo Brothers took the fall for it, identified on the witness stand by a uniformed cop who’d been paid off by the Capone mob. Brothers, also paid off, did eight years of a fourteen-year sentence, and the cop got promoted to plainclothes. His name was Nathan Heller.

“Your buddies in Chicago,” Costello said pleasantly, “set Leo up here with me in the Clover Club after he got out. Piece of luck for yours truly. I knew Leo from the old days when I was driving cab and he was union organizing. This is all news to you?”

“I heard the Outfit took care of him,” I admitted.

“Took care of him in a good way,” Costello clarified with a grin. “Nate, I never heard him say a bad word about you. Matter of fact, when you turned up in the papers or the true detective magazines, he always laughed and said, ‘My old pal Nate Heller—the man who made me!’”

Made him was right—made him in court as a man running away from the scene of the Lingle murder. And yet I’d never spoken to Brothers in my life. But I wasn’t surprised I’d made an impression.

I asked, “What’s become of my…old pal?”

Costello made a sad click in a cheek. “Booze and gambling and babes caught up with him, couple years ago.”

“How so?”

“Ah, well, when he drank he got hotheaded, and he was known to slap a mouthy broad now and again. He made his share of enemies here, too, frankly, getting tough with help who was holding out. Not every driver we hire is a fuckin’ boy scout. Somebody shot him through his screen door in the kitchen grabbing a beer from the fridge. Three times. And it took him three months to go. Tough man, my partner.”