He gestured me to an easy chair with cracked black faux-leather and sat opposite on the bed, which sagged under his weight like a very old horse. He tossed the .38 on the bed and the weapon bounced a little.

“Sorry about the frisk,” he said. “This neighborhood isn’t the best.”

“According to what I hear, your old boss Joe Costello moved you out here and is sending you two hundred a month. You ought to be able to live better than this.”

“Does it look like I got that much coming in?”

I shook my head. “I figure you were on Joe’s payroll for a couple of years. When that Grand Jury went after Costello for stealing a little matter of three hundred thousand dollars, you were good enough to plead the Fifth. So you covered for him, though by doing that you indicated you had something to hide. So he set you up out here in a new life. If you call this living.”

His eyes were lidded but alert. “You want me to talk, Heller? It’ll put you in the Coral Court with Hall and me…and Sandy, for that matter. How does that help you?”

I shrugged. “It doesn’t. It’d cause a few headaches. But all I did was what Lt. Shoulders, the officer in charge, told me to. I was gone before he and that kid Dolan hauled Hall’s ass out and into their jurisdiction. No one asked me about it then, but if they do now, I’ll come clean. I broke no laws.”

“Neither did I.”

“Then why take the Fifth? You helped those two cops transport that footlocker and metal suitcase and probably the briefcase out of that motel and take it, where? To Joe Costello, to count the dough and figure who got what? In ’54, Shoulders and Dolan caught a couple of years on a perjury charge, because they lied about having taken that money straight to the Newstead station, when there’s an hour unaccounted for. Eight of their fellow cops testified to that effect. Were you there, at Costello’s…his office, the cab company, his nightclub…for the real accounting?”

He said nothing.

I extended an open hand. “My client is a well-known journalist who wants an on-the-record interview with you. If you will tell what you know about where that money went…and you sure as hell didn’t get much of it…he will pay for the privilege. And he’ll pay well.”

“How well?”

“Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

His mouth dropped; his eyes all but fell out of his head. “What? Jesus, you gotta be…”

I raised a swear-to-God palm. “Not kidding. You’ll be able to trade your testimony to the Rackets Committee for immunity.” I gestured around his seedy circumstances. “You are obviously a small fish in this.”

He got off the bed and it whined like one of the Angel’s Flight cable cars. He put his hands in his pockets and he walked to the bay windows and stared out.

I let him stare. Several minutes went by, which is a very long time. But soul-searching can take a while.