“Hey, it’s me.”
         “Well, well, well, I thought I wasn’t going to hear from you by phone,” said Katie. “Something about keeping things close to your vest.”
         “I was just wondering how things are coming along out there.”
         “Tidbits. What about you.”
         “Yeah, tidbits about describes it. I went out west, following a hunch.”
         “Whereabouts?”
         “I can’t really say. Confidential source.” David could hear Katie take a breath.
         “Confidential source?” she repeated. “I thought we were working on this together.  You’re not going to tell me everything you find out?”
         “Oh, I’ll tell you everything I find out, but the source has to stay confidential.”
         “Why?”
         “Because I promised the guy who gave me the information as to where the other source was that I wouldn’t mention him in any way.”
         David waited for Katie to speak, and clearly she was not happy.
         “If that’s the way you have to work it, then I guess I just have to accept it and shut up,” she said.
         “Katie,” said David, “I’d expect the same from you.  You’re a reporter, you have confidential sources.  Do you have to tell your editor who they are?”
         “Oh, they beg me to tell them, even threaten me to tell them.  Ever since the Watergate exposé, editors are very careful to get two or three sources to back up a confidential one.”
         “Well, if it makes you feel any better,” said David, “the only information I got from my confidential source was that there were three trucks used to haul away the gold from the armored truck and they all drove off in different directions.”
         “That’s it? That’s all you got?”
         “That and the details of how they did it.”
         “Well, that’s good to know. Hey, how were your expenses?”
         “Next to nothing.  I flew out in the morning, caught a red eye that evening.  Southwest Airlines. Oh, and I got a cheap rental car.”
         Katie sounded ready to move on and said, “Well, on my end I have a lot more reports on Capone from files in the Chicago papers.  I’ve spent the last two days in the library, reading microfiche and taking photos of the relevant pages.
         “I’ve also been going to a lot of the places Capone hung out at back in the day, mostly for color and background.  I was hoping to visit both the Metropole Hotel (above), where Capone lived as of 1925, and the Lexington Hotel (below), where he took over the entire fifth floor in 1928. The floor was ringed with rooms for his bodyguards.  For some reason he registered as a ‘George Philips.’ Why a guy as well known as Al Capone would use an alias, I can’t figure.”
         “Those guys got used to having aliases,” said David.
         Katie continued. “So Capone lived there until his arrest for carrying an illegal gun in Pennsylvania, spent a few months in jail, then moved back to Chicago when he got out.  Weird thing is, David, I ran across these stories that his bodyguards would run into his bedroom to find him raving from a nightmare about seeing ghosts and begging them to leave him alone.  He even hired a psychic, name of”—Katie flipped over a page in her notes—“Alice Britt, who held séances in Al’s dining room.”
         “Any chance she’s still alive?”
         “I don’t know yet.  I haven’t found anything more out about her. No obituary, though.”
         “Okay, so what else?” asked David.
         “After Capone was sent to prison in 1932, his men moved out of the hotel, but not before they’d made some major additions to the place.”
         “Like what?”
         “Like tunnels.”
         “The Geraldo Rivera tunnel,” laughed David.
         “Yep. And others.”
         “Yeah, I talked to an F.B.I. colleague who said they were all thoroughly searched.”
         “Well, it’s all gone now,” she said. “The place turned into a bordello, then a drug house and was demolished five years ago.  The Metropole was gone long before that.”
          “Anything else?” he asked.
         “One of the speakeasies Capone hung out in—maybe he owned it—near his home was called the 226 Club,  and it’s now the Exchequer Pub, decked out with a lot of 1930s memorabilia. And . . . let’s see.  Oh, did you know that if a place back then had a green door, it was probably a speakeasy?  There’s still a place called The Green Door Tavern that dates back to 1872. Capone went there, too.”
         “Imagine that,” said David, who thought all this research was going nowhere.
         “The Green Mill Tavern still exists. It used to be ‘Machine Gun’ McGurk’s place.  Halligan’s—still here—was Bugs Moran’s. Out in Cicero I had lunch at a Czech restaurant named Klas that opened in 1922, not far from Capone’s headquarters.”
      David was thinking to himself, this girl’s going to have a lot of color in her story, if there really is a story.
      “Did you go out to Capone’s house?”
      “Actually I wanted to speak to you about that,” she said.  “I went by it on my way in from the airport, and it’s still there and occupied.  It’s really a pretty modest, two-story brick house with a big garage out back. But—and you’re going to say I’m a wimp—I couldn’t get up the courage to knock on the door and see if I could get inside. What would you have done, David?”
      “I would have knocked on the door and asked if I could come inside.”
      “You mean you’d use your police badge?”
      “Not any more I couldn’t.  But if you just explain who you are and what you’re doing, maybe they’ll be nice enough to let you in.”
      “But they must have lots of curiosity seekers drop by like that.”
      David sighed and said, “All right, here’s what you do.  I’m going to call a cop friend of mine in Chicago and I’ll ask him to vouch for you, write you a letter of intro.  That should do it.  No one likes to refuse anything on official police letterhead.  It’ll just say you are in fact a reporter doing research on Capone and could you look around for five minutes.”
      “Oh, David, that would be so great. When could you do that?  I was planning on going back to New York tomorrow, but I’ll stay on if I have to.”
      “I’ll call him right now. Here, take his name down and, unless you hear otherwise from me, go over to the precinct around four o’clock.  You’ll be at your hotel?”
      “Yes, I’ll do some paperwork and wait for your call.”
      “All right, I’ll call you one way or the other.  Anything else?”
      There was a pause and the sound of Katie clearing her throat.
      “No, that’s it for now,” she said.
      “Well, then, stay well,” said David, who wished he were out there with her in Chicago.  Just to make sure things went well.