How did the three robbers know the lead man wouldn't simply disappear?

Yeah, I would have surely protested harder in their place...

Thanks for the fast answer, I wouldn't have expected a living discussion on the board of this movie! And I am sorry for answering this late, I was really busy these days with finally getting through with changing apartments (a process I have started a few months ago ).

As to the rest of the movie, here's the comment I wrote a few days ago:

I think that I can spot two main types of noirs: the tame ones and the wild ones, those built from usual, slightly superficial, mightly archetypal characters, with a mostly straight – or much straighter moral compass; and then there are the wild noirs which, although still subdued to the Almighty Code (unless produced outside the States; even so, they might still be subdued to elementary principles of human decency and affection), are still able to dress up the archetypes in human flesh and bones, to build intimate relationships between them and their environment, between each other , and to skew the moral compass so hard that, often enough, the only thing left from it is a pile of naked human emotions. (after thinking about it some more) But maybe the compass is not really skewed in the case of the wild noir. Maybe it’s just that the moral compass used is of a higher, or less immediate order, considering deeper levels of human connection and fairness thereof... Anyway, hoping that it will make my distinction more clear, here’s a few examples of noirs I consider „tame” vs noirs I consider „wild”: Panic in the Streets, The Dark Mirror, Dark Passage, The Woman in the Window, Kiss Me Deadly, Laura, Sorry, Wrong Number, Nightmare Alley, Raw Deal, (tame), Detour, Gun Crazy, Scarlett Street, The Killers, Nightfall, Night and the City (wild). There are many movies I can’t place in one category or another, so the distinction is only a rough one (besides I suspect that it applies to any movie genre). I am calling them „tame” respectively „wild” because the first ones are compliantly fulfilling our more common ethical and narrative expectations, while the second ones are forcing us to ask questions, probing deeper into the nature of the humans involved, unwilling to bend to our simple expectations, taking us on unknown and uncomfortable roads, like cars stopping to give a lift to a hitchhiker, yet the driver is silent and outside it’s a foggy night and we don’t know where the car will take us. I tend to like the wild noirs better, but there are enough examples of tame ones that got close to my heart.

Well, Kansas City Confidential was a well-built tame noir (though not quite that well-built). And, in its case, that it turned out to be a tame noir was a disappointment, like the before-final act of Ride the Pink Horse, it just looked like in the end the movie had put down its weapons and gave in to a straightforward type of morality, while the rest of it hinted towards a deeper closure. In the end we got a case of good guy wins, although the acts of the good guy were really not that different from those of the defeated wicked master mind: they had both been mistreated by the system and tried to get revenge by committing an unlawful act of their own, except that the act of the good guy didn’t succeed. Besides, many things happened in the movie just because the plot needed to go on, without a serious in-plot justification (such as Joe Rolfe inferring that Tim Foster, the fisherman, must have been the Big Man because only he knew that Pete Harris had been in Tijuana, when in fact the police had already found the name of the dead guy, which they communicated to Foster on the phone). I was also annoyed by the relationship between Rolfe and the remaining two baddies, the way Rolfe kept outsmarting them at every turn was quite monotonous, and they really felt just like two pawns meant to push the plot forward or to get Rolfe to a certain place.

But I did like a few things: the way in which the point of view of the story changed after the robbery (Rolfe, initially just an incidental character, became the lead), Rolfe’s initial behaviour and decisions (disregarding upright behaviour in face of the circumstances and taking things in his own hands, he would have really deserved a better fate than to be made the general good guy in the end!), the fact that the story moved from a Big City to Mexico, and then even deeper in Mexico (although the final stop of the story was so much less endearing than Tijuana, with its seedy yet benevolent cab driver and its sleazy taverns), and the way in which the name „Pete” kept having a strangely-fated bearer who either denied being Pete (Pete Harris’ first sentence on the phone), or who was trying to become Pete (Rolfe). The contrast of the „Pete” with the other two small-time baddies was interesting.

there's a highway that is curling up like smoke above his shoulder