His palms came up in surrender. “I admit we kept hands off the two cops, at first.” He sat forward, eyes tight, jaw firm. “But we were looking for that money from the start. The day after Hall’s arrest, we raided the Coral Court, thirty of us, went all through the building where he’d been holed up with that prostitute.”

I was taking a chance, but I had to ask: “Did you fellas go through all seventy rooms? It’s a big facility. And I understand the owner, that Carr character, has ties to ‘Buster’ Wortman’s bunch and maybe Chicago.”

“We knew Carr was a good suspect for the missing money. We searched the corridors and the furnace room and the grounds. We even made that joker dig up some fresh trees he’d just planted. Nothing. Not practical to tear apart every room, but we did hit 49-A hard—not that there’s much of anywhere to hide anything in a motel room—just ask a cheater. We gave the front office and the owner’s quarters a thorough shakedown. Not a damn thing.”

I didn’t push it further. I wasn’t anxious to have my presence at the Coral Court that evening get in the FBI’s crosshairs. As I told Johnny Hagan in L.A., I hadn’t broken any laws and had in fact been sent home by the cops. Crooked cops, though, I now knew; and I wasn’t anxious to have my own finances and business practices poked around in.

A second highball arrived for Grapp, who said, “Remember Tom Marsh, Carl’s supposed mastermind? We had on file a Thomas John Marsh, arrested in St. Louis, who did a stretch for sexually abusing an eight-year-old kid. We thought that would change everything. Then Hall, in his full confession, admitted pulling the name ‘Tom Marsh’ out of the air. When we tracked down Thomas John Marsh’s father, he informed us his son was dead. A literal dead end.”

I sipped what was left of my rum and Coke. “In five years, you must have had your share of those.”

“Oh, yeah. How about the disgruntled cabbie who claimed he’d overheard Shoulders and Costello scheming at Ace Cab, and saw them stow a big bundle in an employee locker in the basement there.”

“Sounds promising.”

“We thought so. Then we tossed the place, and you know what we turned up?”

“No. What?”

“No basement. No lockers either.”

“So what has turned up in five years of ‘Greenap’?”

He saluted me with his glass. “A grand total of 115 bills, tens and twenties. We repeatedly put the serial numbers of the missing ransom money in newspapers, distributed booklets to banks and businesses, and out of the missing seventeen thousand or so bills, a whole seventeen hundred bucks has shown up. Fifty-eight bills of which come from the Midwest.”

I frowned. “Turned up where, exactly?”

His shrug was loose now—thanks to the two highballs. “Well, often they came from a bank in a town where a state or county fair with a carnival had recently been. Easy enough for a carny to pass a hot bill in change. And the Outfit in Chicago runs a good share of those touring shows.”