He turned on the inside light and looked about the floor. He found seven shiny brass jackets of. 38 caliber cartridges sprinkled over the matting.
It had been some fight, he thought. But the full meaning didn’t strike him right away. All he could think of at the moment was how those bastards had taken his car.
He put his pistol back on the seat beside him and sat there picking his nose.
Two cops in a prowl car with the lights out slipped quietly up beside him. They were on the lookout for that particular car. But when they saw him, sitting there in his coonskin cap, looking as unconcerned as though he were fishing for eels underneath the bridge, they didn’t give the car a second glance.
“One of the Crocketts,” the driver said.
“Don’t wake him,” the other replied.
The car slipped noiselessly past. He didn’t see it until it had pulled ahead.
Trying to catch some whore hustling, he thought. Mother-rapers come along and steal my car and all these cops can do is chase whores.
The bar ran lengthwise, facing a row of booths. It was crowded. People were standing two and three deep.
Sassafras went ahead of Mister Baron, elbowing through the jam. She stopped and turned around.
“Where is the phones?”
“In the restaurant,” Mister Baron said. “We have to go all the way to the back.”
“You go ahead,” she said, pulling aside so he could pass.
A joker on a bar stool reached out and tugged the tassels of her cap.
“Little Red Riding Hood,” he cooed. “How about you.”
She snatched her cap from his hand and said, “How about your baby sister?”
The man drew back in mock affront. “I don’t play that.”
“Then pat your feet,” she said.
The man grinned. “What you drinking, baby.”
Her glance had caught the smoky oil paintings of two brownskin amazon nudes reclining on Elysian fields above the mirror behind the bar. She tried not to laugh, but she couldn’t help it.
The man followed her glance. “Hell, baby, you don’t need much as what they got.”
She gave herself a shake. “At least what I got moves,” she said.
Suddenly she remembered Mister Baron. She started off. The man grabbed her by the arm.
“What’s the rush, baby?”
She tore herself loose and squeezed hurriedly to the rear. Glass doors opened into the restaurant, and she bumped into a waitress going through. The phone booth was to the rear on the left. The door was closed. She snatched it open. A man was phoning, but it wasn’t Mister Baron.
“’Scuse me,” she said.
“Come on in,” the man said, grabbing at her.
She jerked away and looked about wildly. Mister Baron was nowhere in sight.
She stopped the waitress coming back.
“Did you see a little prissy man with wavy hair come through here?” she asked.
The waitress looked her over from head to feet.
“You that hard up, baby?”
“Oh shoo you!” she cried and dashed through the swinging doors into the kitchen.
“Did a man come through here?” she asked.
The big, sweating, bald-headed cook was up a tree.
“Git out of here, whore!” he shouted in a rage.
The dishwasher grinned. “Come ’round to the back door,” he said.
The cook grabbed a skillet and advanced on her, and she backed through the doorway. She looked through the dining room and bar again, but Mister Baron had disappeared.
She went outside and told Roman, “He’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
“I don’t know. He got away.”
“Where in the hell was you?”
“I was watching him all the time, but he just disappeared.”
She looked like she was about to cry.
“Get in the car,” he said. “I’ll look for him.”
She took her turn sitting in the hottest car in all of New York State while he searched the bar and restaurant for Mister Baron. He didn’t have any better luck with the cook.
“He must have got out through the kitchen,” he said when he returned to the car.
“The cook would have seen him.”
“It’d take a shotgun to talk to that evil man.”
He climbed in behind the wheel and sat there looking dejected. “You let him get away, now what us going to do?” he said accusingly.
“It ain’t my fault that we is in this mess,” she flared. “If you hadn’t been acting such a fool right from the start might not none of this happened.”
“I knew what I was doing. If he’d tried to pull off something crooked, I was trying to trick him by making him think I was a square.”
“Well, you sure made him,” she said. “Asking do it use much gas and then looking at the oil stick and saying you guessed the motor was all right.”
He defended himself. “I wanted all those people who was watching us to know I was buying the car so they could be witnesses in case anything happened.”
“Well, where is they now? Or has some more got to happen?”
“Ain’t no need of us arguing between ourselves,” he said. “We got to do something.”
“Well, let’s go see a fortune teller,” she said. “I know one who tells folks where to find things they has lost.”
“Let’s hurry then,” he said. “We got to get rid of this car ’fore daylight. It’s hotter than a West Virginia coke oven.”
Chapter 9
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed were buttoning up their coats when the telephone rang in the captain’s office.
Lieutenant Anderson took the call and looked up. “It’s for one of you.”
“I’ll take it,” Grave Digger said and picked up the receiver. “Jones speaking.”
The voice at the other end said, “It’s me, Lady Gypsy, Digger.”
He waited.
“You’re looking for a certain car, ain’t you? A black Buick with Yonkers plates?”
“How do you know that?”
“I’m a fortune teller, ain’t I?”
Grave Digger signaled Coffin Ed to cut in, and jiggled the hook.
Coffin Ed picked up one of the extensions on the desk and Lieutenant Anderson the other. The switchboard operator knew what to do.
“Where is it?” Grave Digger asked.
“It’s sitting as big as life down on the street in front of my place,” Lady Gypsy said.
Grave Digger palmed the mouthpiece and whispered an address on 116th Street
Anderson picked up the intercom and ordered the sergeant on the switchboard to alert all prowl cars and await further instructions.
“Who’s in it?” Grave Digger asked.
“Ain’t nobody in it at the moment,” Lady Gypsy said. “I got a square and his girl friend up here in my seance chamber who drove up in it. They got a wild story about a lost Cadillac-”
“Hold the story,” Grave Digger said. “And keep them there, even if you have to use ghosts. Me and Ed will be there before you can say Jack Robinson.”
“I’ll send the cars on,” Anderson said.
“Give us three minutes and seal off the block,” Grave Digger said. “Have them come in quietly with the blinkers off.”
Lady Gypsy’s joint was on the second floor of a tenement on 116th Street, midway between Lexington and Third Avenues. On the ground floor was an ice and coal store.
The painted tin plaque in a box beside the entrance read:
Lady Gypsy
Perceptions-Divinations
Prophesies-Revelations
Numbers Given
The word Findings had been recently added. Business had been bad.
Once upon a time Lady Gypsy had lived an ultrarespectable private life in an old dark house on upper Convent Avenue with her two bosom associates: Sister Gabriel, who sold tickets to heaven and begged alms for nonexistent charities; and Big Kathy, who
ran a whorehouse on East 131st Street. They were knows in that upper-crust colored neighborhood as “The Three Black Widows.” But when Sister Gabriel got his throat cut by one of the trio of con men responsible for the acid-throwing caper that permanently scarred Coffin Ed’s face, the two remaining “Widows” let the house go, relinquished respectability and holed up in their dens of vice.
Now Lady Gypsy was seldom seen outside the junk-crammed five-room apartment where she contacted the spirits and sometimes gave messages to the initiate that were out of this world.
It was a normal five-minute drive on open streets from the 126th Street precinct station, but Grave Digger made it in his allotted three. Sleet blew along the frozen streets like dry sand, making the tires sing. The car didn’t skid, but it shifted from side to side of the street, as though on a sanded spot of slick ice. Grave Digger drove from memory of the streets, with the bright lights on, more to be seen than to see, because sighting through his windshield was like looking through frosted glass. His siren was silent.
A prowl car was parked in front of Lady Gypsy’s but no sign of the Buick.
“Anderson jumped the gun,” Coffin Ed said.
“They might have got ’em,” Grave Digger said without much hope.
The little car skidded when he tamped the brake, and it banged into the rear bumper of the prowl car. They hit the street without giving it a thought.
Coffin Ed went first, overcoat flapping, pistol in his hand. Grave Digger slipped as he was rounding the back of the car and hit the top of the luggage compartment with the butt of his pistol. Coffin Ed wheeled about to find Grave Digger rising from the gutter.
“You’re sending telegrams,” Coffin Ed accused.
“It ain’t my night,” Grave Digger said.
A prowl car rounded the distant corner, siren wide open and red eye blinking.
“Makes no difference now,” Coffin Ed said disgustedly, taking the dimly lit stairs two at a time.
They found a uniformed cop standing beside the door at the head of the staircase with a drawn pistol, another in the shadows of the stairs, leading to the upper floors.
“Where’s the car?” Coffin Ed asked.
“There wasn’t any car,” the cop said.
Grave Digger cursed. “What are you doing here?”
“Lieutenant said to seal up this joint and wait for you.”
“What’s going to stop them from going out the back?”
“Joe and Eddie got the back covered.”
Grave Digger couldn’t hear him over the screaming of the siren down below.
“How’s the back?” he shouted.
“Covered,” the cop shouted back.
“Well, let’s see what gives,” Grave Digger said.
The siren died to a whimper, and. his voice filled the narrow corridor like organ notes.
“Hold it!” a voice cried from below.
Two cops pounded up the stairs like the Russian Army.
“This beats vaudeville,” Coffin Ed said.
The cops came into sight with guns in their fists. They halted at sight of the assemblage, and both turned bright pink.
“We didn’t know anybody was here,” one of them said.
“You were making sure just in case,” Coffin Ed said.
Grave Digger fingered the buzzer beside the door. From inside came the distant sound of a bell ringing.
“These doorbells always sound like they’re miles away,” he said.
The cops looked at him curiously.
No one came to the door.
“Let me shoot the lock off,” a cop said.
“You can’t shoot these locks off,” Grave Digger said. “Look at them; there are more locks on this door than on Fort Knox and there’re more inside.”
“There’s a chance that only one is locked,” Coffin Ed said. “If somebody left here who didn’t have a key-”
“Right,” Grave Digger agreed. “I’m too tired to think.”
A cop raised his eyebrows, but Grave Digger didn’t see it.
“Stand back,” Coffin Ed said.
Everyone backed off to one side.
He backed to the opposite wall, leveled his long-barreled. 38 and put four bullets about the Yale snap lock. Sound shattered the front hall windows, and doors down at the back of the hall cracked open an inch. From all directions came the sound of a sudden scurrying like rats deserting a ship.
“Let’s hit it,” Coffin Ed said, coughing slightly from the cordite fumes filling the hall.
The sound of scurrying ceased.
He and Grave Digger hit the door with left shoulders, and reeled into a room.
It was a reception room. Decrepit kitchen chairs flanked opposite walls. A stained, dusty, dark-blue, threadbare carpet covered the floor. In the center, a round table-top seemed to be floating in the air. It was supported by four small steel cables, which, attached to the ceiling, were practically invisible in the dim light. On the table rested a gruesome-looking sepulcher made of dull-gray papier-mache. Out of this sepulcher was coming the ghost of Jesus Christ.
Coffin Ed caught himself, but Grave Digger reeled into the hanging table with such force that he overturned the sepulcher and the ghost of Christ went sailing across the room as though the devil had grabbed at it.
The uniformed cops followed, looking from one to the other with wide-eyed consternation.
Someone started hammering on the back door. Another bell starting ringing.
“Pipe down!” Grave Digger shouted.
The noise ceased.
The walls of the room were papered with faded blue skies packed with constellations. Across from the entrance was a double doorway closed by a faded red curtain containing the gilded signs of the zodiac.
Coffin Ed stepped over the ghost of Christ and parted the zodiac.
They found themselves in the seance chamber. A crystal ball sat on a draped table. All four walls were curtained in some kind of dark satiny material covered with luminescent figures of stars, moons, suns, ghosts, griffins, animals, angels, devils and faces of African witch doctors,
The room was lit by a faint glow from the crystal ball. Their sudden entrance stirred the curtain to fluttering, and the luminescent figures flickered in and out of sight.
“Where the hell’s the light?” Grave Digger roared. “I’m getting seasick.”
A cop flashed on his torch. They didn’t see another light.
“Let’s find the doors,” he said, tearing the curtains aside.
Behind the curtains there were doors everywhere.
He opened the first one that gave. It led to a dining room. A chandelier with four bulbs lit a square dining room table covered with a black-and-silver checked plastic cloth. Two chairs were drawn up to two dirty plates and the skeleton of a roasted opossum, lying one-sided in congealed possum grease and the remains of baked yellow yams, like the ribs of a derelict ship in shallow surf.
“Possum and taters,” Coffin Ed said, unconsciously licking his lips.
“That’s what they ate, but where are they?” Grave Digger said.
“Ain’t nobody here but us ghosts,” a cop said.
“Don’t forget us possums,” another added.
Coffin Ed opened another door and found himself in a kitchen. He heard movement on the outside open-air stairs.
“Hey, let us in,” a voice called from without.
A cop pushed past Coffin Ed to open the back door.
Grave Bigger had opened another door, which led to a bedroom.
“In here,” he called.
Coffin Ed went in, and six cops followed.
A fat, light-complexioned colored man with a flabby, sensual face and a shining, bald head lay across the bed, breathing heavily with his eyes closed. He wore a big, old-fashioned faded-yellow brassiere, holding his lopping breasts, and a pair of purple-and-golden striped boxer shorts, from which extended the fasteners of a worn garter belt attached to the tops of purple silk stockings. He was fat, but his f
lesh was so flabby it spread out beside his bones like melted tallow.
Another bald-headed man lay face down on the floor beside the bed. He wore a red-and-gray striped rayon bathrobe over white-dotted blue rayon pyjamas. His face was unseen, but the fringe of hair beneath his bald dome was silky white.
The white cops stared.
“What did they do with Lady Gypsy?” one asked.
“That’s him on the bed,” Coffin Ed said.
“That ain’t the question,” Grave Digger said. “We got to find out who it was slugged him.”
“He isn’t talking,” a white cop said.
“We’ll fix that,” Grave Digger said. “Get a bottle of vinegar from the kitchen.”
He reached over and clutched Lady Gypsy by the arm and pulled him over to the side of the bed. Then, when the cop brought the vinegar, he opened the bottle and poured the lukewarm liquid over Lady Gypsy’s face.
“That the way you do it?” the cop asked.
“It works,” Grave Digger said.
“Every time,” Coffin Ed supplemented.
Lady Gypsy stirred and spluttered. “Who is that pissing on me?” he said in a distinct, cultivated voice.
“It’s me, Digger,” Grave Digger said.
Lady Gypsy sat up suddenly on the side of the bed. He opened his eyes and saw all the white cops staring at him.
“You sonofabitch,” he said.
Grave Digger slapped him with his left hand.
His head fell to one side and straightened up as though his neck were made of rubber.
“It wasn’t my fault the bastard got away,” he said, fingering an egg-size lump on the back of his head. He looked down at his half-naked self. “He took my second-best ensemble.”
“Fill us in,” Grave Digger said. “And don’t start begging for sympathy.”
Lady Gypsy flipped back the covers and wiped his face with the top end of the sheet. “He’s a rough boy,” he said. “A square, but really ragged.” There were threads of desire and admiration in his voice. “And he’s carrying a rusty forty-five.”
“If you go patsy on me, I’ll kick out your teeth,” Grave Digger said.
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