But that was five years ago and here in the present I was hungry, and the filet, baked potato and even the lima beans went down just fine. I passed on dessert and sat there nursing my second rum and Coke, the bar’s after-work crowd having faded away and the weeknight dining crowd scant. After a while a guy wandered in who might have been one of Greenlease’s sales staff if his suit had cost a little more.

Special Agent Wesley Grapp of the FBI came over and I rose, shook his hand, and we both sat down. About forty now, he looked noticeably older—his wasn’t an easy job, the long face longer now, his hairline going Nixon on him. The nose seemed more pointed, the jutting chin cushioned in a second un-jutting one.

Bob Greenlease had put this meeting together, so I got right to it: “Five years, and you’re still on this case?”

“Not on Bonnie and Carl we aren’t,” he said. “Though that bastard Hall is just as annoying dead as he was alive.”

“How does he manage that? No dumber criminal ever fumbled a big score.”

He sighed, shook his head, laughed a little. A waitress came over in a white blouse, red string tie and short red skirt; she was blonde and pleasant, trying out her nice smile—on a slow night, a couple of middle-aged guys in business suits meant a potentially good tip.

Grapp ordered a highball. My rum and Coke was holding up. She left, and he said, “Hall may have buried the missing half of that money. He didn’t deny doing it—just said he didn’t remember, and when a drunk who takes a morphine chaser says he doesn’t remember, you tend to listen. But he had a pair of trousers with mud that we were able to trace to the south bank of the Meramec River.”

I had seen those muddy pants. Of course, as far as Grapp was concerned, I’d never seen Carl Hall. I changed the subject. “You’re working the case from the Kansas City end?”

He shrugged. “I hop back and forth between St. Louis and Kansas City. I’ve been looking into the old Binaggio gang here in K.C., who’ve got ties to John Vitale, as a possible money laundry.”

Vitale was among the bigger St. Louis gangsters.

“But,” Grapp said, “that’s going nowhere. Par for the course on this goddamn thing. You know, this investigation couldn’t have started out any bigger, and now couldn’t be smaller.”

“How’s that?”

He leaned on an elbow. “Well, for the first three months we were a ‘Bureau Special,’ which is—”

“I know,” I said. A national investigation, operating out of FBI headquarters in D.C. “How many men were on it at the start?”

“At the start, when Greenlease was dancing to the kidnapper’s tune, it was just a handful of us—enough to man that checkpoint near the mansion was about it. When Hall and Heady were caught, and the child turned up dead, we moved to St. Louis. Sixty-five agents. A state line had been crossed, and a prominent citizen’s child had been killed.”