When I finally answered the insistent ring, it wasn’t a wake-up call, but a familiar voice that shook me awake just as effectively.

“They stop serving breakfast at ten-thirty,” Barney Baker said. “Shake a leg.”

The giant man with the small head—in another tent of a suit, this one charcoal gray with a black-and-white striped tie—was seated at a table in the underpopulated coffee shop eating ham and eggs and hash browns. This might have seemed a relatively restrained breakfast for this particular diner but for the half-eaten side plate of stacked pancakes rising a good five inches. Atop it, three pats of melting butter swam in hot syrup that dripped down like Johnny Weissmuller’s hair after a swim.

I sat across from Barney and nodded hello and he smiled and nodded back, too polite to speak with his mouth full. The same pretty waitress from a couple of days ago took my order, after giving me a wide-eyed look behind Barney’s back, as if challenging my selection of dining companions. I ordered coffee and a doughnut.

“Everybody’s happy with you,” Barney said. His potatoes were gone, making room for the transfer of the top three pancakes.

“Not everybody,” I said.

“Well, not those two fucking deadbeat lowlifes keeping the St. Louis cops entertained with one self-serving story after another. You’re out of this now, understood?”

“Yeah, I got that. Of course, I can’t duck a subpoena, if it comes to that.”

“No, that’d be un-American. But if you have to go public, we’ll help you through it. You been coached on giving evidence before, right?”

That was a low blow.

He ate a while. My coffee came. Too bitter. I added a touch of cream.

Barney delicately dabbed his syrupy puss with a paper napkin. “They picked up Johnny Hagan and his whore.”

“Together?”

“No, she was in St. Joe shacked up with another whore. A lot of those dames swing both ways, y’know. I can’t blame ’em. Would you wanna fuck a guy?”

The four-hundred-pound slob made his own case. No, that’s unfair—for a guy who weighed four hundred pounds, he was the personification of grace and refinement.

“Not that either her or Hagan know anything,” Barney said. “To them, Hall was just another big spender. And neither of ’em are gonna mention you, not and risk Joe Costello’s enmity.”

“Pretty fancy vocabulary on the kid,” I said. “Last time it was ‘hypothetical,’ this time ‘enmity.’”

He grinned. To his credit, he had no syrup on his face, though it was dripping off the triple bite of pancake waiting on his fork. “You really oughta come hear me speak some time, Nate. Did I mention Civil Rights is a specialty?”

“You did.”

“Oh, and speaking of Joe Costello…that’s why I called this meeting.”

“Is that what this is?”

He nodded. He got a white letter-size envelope out from inside the tent and handed it to me with no discretion whatsoever. I employed some, though, and peeked in at the stack of twenties.