He kept his gaze on his martini when he next spoke. “You’re Kinsey, right?”

“How did you know?”

“You’re the only one in here I don’t know. My grandmother says you left a message for me.”

“You didn’t return my call.”

“You left one earlier with my parole officer.”

“You didn’t return that one, either.”

“I figured if it was important you’d get back to me, which you did. So what’s this about?”

“You know what I do for a living?”

“You’re a private investigator.”

“Exactly. A couple of weeks ago, I was hired by a woman who claimed she wanted to locate a child she put up for adoption thirty-some-odd years ago. Yours was the name she gave me, along with newspaper clippings about your trial. I found out later she was full of shit, but by then I’d already sent off my report, in which I gave her your mother’s address and phone number. I may have put you in harm’s way and I thought you deserved a warning.”

“Two weeks is a little late for warnings, don’t you think?”

“It took me a while to figure out she’d put one over on me. I assume Teddy’s been in touch.”

“That’s correct,” he said.

He turned and looked at me with eyes that were a startling gray. Up close I could see that his teeth were good, and his aftershave suggested carnations and clean skin. These are qualities that loom large with me. For the first time, I entertained the idea that he was in Teddy’s life for the amusement value. I might have found him amusing myself, though his criminal history left much to be desired. A hard-boiled private eye and a bank robber seemed like a strange mix.

“What happened to your safecracking career?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t call it a career. It was an avocation.”

“A hobby?”

“Let’s call it a passion and leave it at that.”

“What was the draw?”

“I liked the challenge. Problem solving. Getting in there and figuring it all out. I avoided vaults. Those are in a whole separate category that’s way over my head. I started with home safes you could pick up and take with you to work on in your spare time. The fireproof models are lightweight, really just a shell of thin steel walls filled with insulating material to protect the contents from damage in case of a fire.”

“Have you ever heard of a Diebold Cannonball Safe?”

“Oh, sure. It was a Cannonball that stumped Jesse James in Northfield, Minnesota. Burglar-resistant safes are a tough proposition. With most, you’re talking about a seven-hundred-and-fifty-pound box embedded in concrete. Safe like that you have to work on in place, which is time-consuming. In those days, I didn’t care about finding cash, which is good because I never netted much.”

“How’d you manage to support yourself? Did you have an outside job?”

“I was twelve.”

“So mowing lawns.”

“Sometimes, sure. You know what the real problem was? Safecracking requires so much equipment. Drills, cold chisels, sledgehammers, electric saws with diamond-edged blades. An acetylene torch is mandatory, which means you have to have a hose and tank. Punch or drift pins you can’t do without, maybe a two-twenty-volt electric cutting torch. What was I supposed to do, hide it all under my bed?”