“Well, that’s just not right, is it?”

“That dumb little broad will live to regret it. She doesn’t know that man the way I do. He used to beat his first wife! And I took my share of knocks, too. He’s mean when he’s crossed, and I’ve been around some pretty rough crowds in my day. I’ve seen that man go crazy. He threatened to kill my brother once! Held a knife to his throat.”

“Oh dear.”

Her eyes showed white all around. “And the violence, the terror tactics he’d go in for, for those Teamster slobs. You know, I could blow St. Louis wide open if I told what I really know about the Greenlease money!”

“You’re very close to earning this,” I said, and I gave her a glimpse of the folded one-hundred-dollar bill I had palmed.

Her mouth dropped and her eyes got smaller. “Look, I was just blowing off steam…”

“It’s good to get things off your chest.”

She put her hand over my clenched one, which held the hundred. She wiggled the painted-on eyebrows. “Maybe that could be arranged.”

There’d been a time. But this broad was tougher than a nickel steak and my middle-aged teeth couldn’t take it.

So I just withdrew my hand from hers. Gently. But withdrew it.

Her voice softened, barely audible above the jukebox blaring Berry’s “Almost Grown.”

“All I know is,” she said, trembling with desire for that hundred, “Barney had something to do with it. I can’t be more specific than that.”

I unfolded the C-note. “Sure you can.”

She swallowed. “Okay. Barney told me Joe Costello got the Greenlease money.”

Mollie snatched the bill from my open palm and put it with the Zippo. Stood. Before she hip-swung off, to show me what I was missing, she said, “That’s all I fucking know. I have to get back to work. Break’s over.”

So was Chuck Berry’s. He came on and did “Sweet Little Sixteen.”

Like Barney, he liked them young.

* * *

On the other side of the Eads Bridge, I headed for the DeBaliviere Strip just north of the Jefferson Memorial in Forest Park in the Central West End. The Strip, St. Louis’s only real rival to the neon playground across the river, offered an unlikely mix of supper clubs, niteries, and strip joints. The latter included the nationally famous Stardust Club at 309 DeBaliviere, where owner Evelyn West—her chest insured by Lloyd’s of London for $50,000—headlined a burlesque show of comics, singers, chorines and stripteasers. The other strip joints, like nearby Little Las Vegas, were more openly raunchy, and I knew from prior St. Louis jaunts that most bars hosted either a gambling joint or a betting parlor in back or upstairs.

I parked the loaner Caddy half a block down from my destination. Joe Costello’s joint at 317 walked a fine line between upright and lowdown, its reflective black plate-glass facade with TIC TOC CLUB in white neon compromised by cheesy sandwich-board signs out front. These sported glossy 8 x 10s touting the imminent appearances of such artists as George Shearing and Errol Garner, pianists, but also Miss Sylvia Albana, the Flame of New Orleans, and Tinker Bell, the probable Toast of Never-Never Land, ecdysiasts.