“Okey-doke,” the cabbie said.

“And can you score me some fake I.D.? Know anybody can provide that?”

“There’s a guy.”

Sandy was listening intently. I could hear her wheels turning: the last thing she wanted was to get on an airplane to the West Coast and leave the fortune in those metal suitcases behind.

“I need the rest of that twenty-five hundred back,” Steve said to Hagan, “but keep five C’s—a man without money is nothing. Use what’s left after buying my new I.D. to fix yourself up with some classy new threads.”

Hagan complied. At her host’s prompting, Sandy gathered her extra things and got ready to leave. Then she gave me a wry look that said, Maybe next time, and thanked Steve for the grand. He said no thanks were necessary and she could get in touch with him about that Guernsey bull through Hagan, on her return from the Coast.

Before following the cabbie into the hall, Sandy gave the footlocker and suitcase a longing look—the kind a man wishes a woman might give him before parting.

When they’d left, Steve poured himself a fresh glass of whiskey and gave me one I hadn’t asked for. He went to the window and parted blades of the blinds to watch the Plymouth go, then returned to his spot on the edge of the bed.

“Nate, I wanted to talk to you alone.”

As if sending Sandy to L.A. to mail letters had been all about giving us a little privacy.

I sipped whiskey. I’ve never cared for the way it burns when it hits bottom. “What’s on your mind, Steve?”

His unblinking gaze was unsettling. “I want to play it straight with your friends in Chicago. I got no desire to have the Outfit unhappy with me.”

“Sound thinking.”

“So I’m not going to lie to you.” He pointed to the footlocker and black suitcase. “That’s not insurance money or from a bank vault, either. That’s ransom dough. The Greenlease kid.”

I’d been pretty much convinced of that since the moment I first saw Steve’s sweaty smear of a face. But hearing it still landed hard.

“I’m no fool,” he said. “That money is bound to be marked. Means I have to settle for whatever I can get. But you can help.”

“How?”

He shrugged. “You know these Chicago people. They’re your business associates. Maybe even your friends. And the more they give me, the more I can give you, right?”

“How many others are in this with you, Steve?”

“I got a girl named Bonnie. I stowed her in an apartment because she came a little unglued after we took the boy. She drinks too much.”

“Does she.”

He nodded, looked into his own glass, finding no irony there. “I said somebody slipped up, remember? And I guess you could say somebody was me.”

“How so, Steve?”

He jerked a thumb at himself, defensively. “I thought up the plan. The whole thing was mine. I have a real mind for this kind of thing—in my time, I robbed stores, and stuck up a whole string of taxi cabs…ha, don’t tell Johnny! Never a hitch, except maybe that bank job…just bad luck, after I case the place and plan so perfectly, it turns out to be closed on Saturdays. But when I was doing time, I got really good at planning.”