“That’s a little surprising.”

“Not really.” He threw some money on the table. “I don’t have a hundred men anymore.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

I set up the meet with Barney Baker’s ex-wife Mollie by phone before I left Kansas City.

After I gave her my name, and identified myself as a private investigator, I said, “I’d like to chat with you off the record.”

Her voice was husky, sleepy. I was pretty sure I’d woken her, though it was close to ten-thirty A.M.

“What about?” she asked.

“If there’s a hundred bucks in it, does it matter?”

“…The D.C. boys weren’t paying anything. They appealed to my patriotism. I think they had me confused with Betty Ross.”

She meant “Betsy,” but that was close enough.

“I’m not from D.C.,” I assured her.

“Where are you from?”

“Chicago.”

The pause was like that proverbial long drop off a short pier. Then she said, “We’d have to meet in a public place.”

“Okay. Where?”

“I work at the Club Cosmopolitan in East St. Louis. I waitress there. I have a fifteen-minute break every two hours. One of those comes at 8:45. Can you find your way?”

“I’ll buy a compass. Should I ask for you at the bar?”

“That’ll work. Or maybe you’ll just spot me. I wear a name tag.”

“What do you look like, Mollie?”

“Claudette Colbert, in some movie where she’s sunk to working as a waitress.”

She hung up.

I timed my drive in the used ’56 Series 62 Sedan so I’d hit St. Louis just after dark, having specifically asked Bob Greenlease for an older, pre-tailfin Caddy to avoid undue attention. The still familiar trip with its farm country and little towns hadn’t changed any, but some of the radio stations were playing rock ’n’ roll now. Which I didn’t mind—it wasn’t Sinatra or Brubeck, but it was better than country and western. In downtown St. Louis at Washington Avenue, I took the Eads Bridge to the Illinois side of the Mississippi past railroad yards and onto Broadway, cutting through industrial sprawl.

East St. Louis had been named an All-American City, fourth largest in the state, with a prosperous array of stockyards and factories. But the factories were starting to close and meat-packing was moving away, and the only industry still flourishing seemed to be vice. Like Chicago’s wide-open suburb, Calumet City, this was where St. Louis cab drivers on commission would steer passengers to gambling houses, brothels, burlesque bars and after-hours saloons.

Inside the story-and-a-half white-awninged brick building on Bond Avenue, I found a nearly packed house of maybe three hundred. A bar stretched along the wall at right and a pool table was in its own little world at left, glass-block windows letting in the vague bright colors of a dying city desperate for nightlife. Red and blue neon beer signs glowed in the smoke like the lights of incoming planes on a foggy night while raucous rock ’n’ roll emanated from a small stage at the far end of the big square high-ceilinged room. The back two-thirds was jammed with red-vinyl-and-chrome chairs at black-topped tables where the mostly young crowd drank from bottles of beer—the criteria for alcoholic beverage service here seemed to be a capacity for human speech. Space had been allowed near the stage for a dance floor consumed by wildly gyrating patrons, and I suppose there was nothing special about any of it except the nearly equal mix of colored and white. The Supreme Court had approved desegregation a while back and it had hit this club in East St. Louis in spades. And ofays.