As if carrying a coffin, him in front, me in back, I helped him down with the footlocker. Hagan went up and got the black metal suitcase. We loaded the Plymouth trunk and the cabbie pulled the vehicle into the first-floor garage marked 49-A, got out and shut it inside.

“Catch yourself a cab,” Steve told Hagan, an arm around him. “I have some things to do this afternoon. Three of us’ll meet at the Pink House bar-and-grill up the street for a drink and a bite at four o’clock. Don’t forget my fake I.D. Okay?”

Hagan said, “Covered,” and the cabbie walked off to catch a cab.

Steve locked the garage and I followed him back up to his room. He poured himself some whiskey, then asked me if I wanted a “snort” and I declined. He resumed his favorite seat on the bed’s edge.

“Nate, can you get your Chicago friends to give me a figure for the money? Like I said, it’s a hell of a big bundle—around six hundred grand.”

I whistled, like I didn’t already know. “See what I can do. But I don’t know about trusting the phones here. They could be tapped by the cops or even the management.”

He nodded. “Maybe you could walk to a booth and call from there. Or use a pay phone in a restaurant.”

“You could drive me.”

He shook his head. “No, I got things to do.”

“Why not take me along?”

“No. Things I need to do on my own.”

“You’re not meeting up with Bonnie, are you? Or maybe Marsh?”

“No! Why are you pushing me, Nate?”

I got up and sat beside him. Put a hand on his shoulder. “Steve, you gotta be straight with me. If I tell the boys back home you can be trusted, and something goes off the rails, it’ll come back and hit both of us. Hard.”

He thought about that. Then had some whiskey and asked, “What if the kid was dead?”

“What? You mean, what if Marsh kills the boy?”

“I mean, what if he already has.” His eyes were looking right at me but registering nothing. “I mean…Nate. It’s better you hear this. He already has. Killed the kid.”

I didn’t say anything.

“If your Outfit pals knew the kid had been killed, would it mean less money? I mean, can we keep that from them? Make ’em believe we didn’t know ourselves?”

I stood. “Excuse me.”

I got up fast and shut myself in the bathroom. I raised the toilet seat and knelt before the porcelain altar on the ceramic tile floor as if in prayer and threw up. Well, first I retched a while, then everything flew out—the fried eggs, the bread, the coffee, the whiskey, and considerable bile.

It took a while.

I got uneasily to my feet and ran cold water in the sink. I looked at myself in the mirror and my reflection looked ghostly white. My features, which were so like my son’s, stared accusingly at me. I splashed cold water on my face and then I toweled off. Thoughts were careening in my brain, but one was that I didn’t dare kill Steve until he’d led me to Tom Marsh. And the child’s body.