Casper smoked his cigar softly, his black face impassive.
“The appointment was for ten o’clock,” Coffin Ed went on. “Baron was a half hour late. He rode up in the car with a white man. Roman and his girl were waiting on the sidewalk in front of the dermatological clinic near One-twenty-sixth Street. The white man got out and went upstairs to an office in the rear. Roman and his girl stayed downstairs for another half hour with Baron, inspecting the car. A small crowd of people coming from the supermarket up the street collected.
“It was a brand new Cadillac convertible with some kind of gold-like finish. Baron was selling it to Roman for six thousand, five hundred dollars.”
Casper blinked but said nothing.
“You got a Cadillac convertible. What did yours cost?” Grave Digger asked.
“With accessories over eight thousand,” Casper said.
“Roman paid six thousand, five hundred for his,” Coffin Ed said. “The three of them went upstairs to the office where the white man was waiting, and executed the bill of sale. Sassafras witnessed it, and the white man signed as a notary public, using the name Bernard Kaufman. The white man left.
“Then the three of them took the car for a tryout at Baron’s suggestion. He had Roman turn into the street south of the Convent, where there would be little if any traffic, so he could test its pickup. Roman had no sooner started accelerating than he hit an old woman crossing the street. He wanted to stop, but Baron urged him to drive on. He didn’t have any insurance; the car still had dealer’s plates; he couldn’t apply for registration until Monday morning; and he didn’t have a driver’s license. His girl friend didn’t think the old woman was seriously hurt, but he ran anyway. He hadn’t got clear of the block when a Buick drove up and forced him to a stop. Three men in police uniforms got out and accused him of hit-and run manslaughter and forced the three of them out of the car.”
Casper sat up straight. His face turned slightly gray.
Coffin Ed waited for him to comment, but he still said nothing.
“The phony cops forced him and his girl into the Buick, sapped Baron, took the six thousand, five hundred dollars and went away in the Cadillac.
“We’ve been all night running down the Buick. We got it and Roman. We got a statement from Roman. He claims that Baron confessed that the old woman got up after he had hit her. So it must have been the bandits in the Buick who hit her the second time and killed her.”
Casper looked sick. “That’s horrible,” he said.
“More than you think,” Grave Digger lisped.
“But I don’t see what that has got to do with the robbery.”
“I’m coming to that,” Coffin Ed said.
Casper couldn’t see Coffin Ed’s face distinctly in the shadows, and it worried him. “Come over here and sit down where I can hear you,” he said.
“I’ll talk louder,” Coffin Ed said.
A flicker of anger passed over Casper’s face, but he said nothing. He picked up the gold lighter, and relit his cigar and hid behind a cloud of smoke.
“So far we haven’t got a line on Baron,” Coffin Ed went on. “We checked the building superintendent where the office is located and found that it is unoccupied and for rent. The super was out last night from nine o’clock until after two.
“The Cadillac hasn’t been found; there’s none reported stolen. The dealers are closed on Sundays, but there’s been no report that any have been broken into.
“We found the owner of the Buick-the manager of a hardware store in Yonkers. He parked his car in front of his house when he went home at seven o’clock last night and didn’t miss it until this morning. But that doesn’t help us any.
“We checked the listing of notary publics in Manhattan County. There was none named Bernard Kaufman; the address was bogus and the seal was counterfeit.”
“That’s well and good,” Casper rasped impatiently. “But where’s the tie-in?”
“The bandits who robbed you deliberately ran down the old lady a few minutes later and killed her.”
“Just proves they’re brutal mother-rapers,” Casper said, lapsing back to the Harlem vernacular of his youth. “But that’s all.”
“Not quite all,” Grave Digger lisped.
“The old lady was not an old lady,” Coffin Ed said. “He was a sort of a pansy pimp who went by the name Black Beauty.”
Casper strangled on cigar smoke. Grave Digger stepped beside the bed and beat him on the back. The nurse entered at that moment and looked horrified.
“It’s all right,” Casper gasped. “I just strangled.”
“I’ll get you a. glass of water and a sedative,” she said, looking at Grave Digger disapprovingly. “You shouldn’t talk so much, and you’re not allowed to smoke either. And beating a patient on the back,” she said to Grave Digger, “is no cure for strangulation.”
“It works,” Grave Digger lisped.
“For chrissake, don’t bother me now,” Casper said roughly, wiping the tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand. “I’m busy as all hell.”
The nurse left in a huff.
“All right, goddammit, he was a mother-raping pansy called Black Beauty,” Casper said to Coffin Ed. “So what?”
“His straight moniker is Junior Ball,” Coffin Ed replied. “This morning at nine-thirty o’clock your wife, Missus Holmes, appeared at the morgue and identified the body and has requested it be released to her for burial.”
Casper gave no sign of outrage or surprise or any of the other emotions they might have expected. He began looking gutter-mean. He spat out shreds of wet tobacco and said in a hard, street-fighter’s voice, “So what! If his name was Junior Ball, he was her cousin.”
“What we want to know is, why would a trio of bandits who had just robbed you of fifty grand run down your wife’s cousin and kill him?” Coffin Ed said.
“How in the mother-raping hell would I know?” Casper said. “And if you think she knows then ask her.”
“We’re going to ask her all right,” Grave Digger lisped.
“Then go, goddammit, and do it!” he shouted, his face turning a vivid apoplectic shade of bright purple-black. “And don’t get so mother-raping cute. I’ll have you out dredging the Gowanus Canal.”
“Don’t lose your temper, boss-at your age you might have a stroke,” Grave Digger lisped.
Casper harnessed his rage with an effort. His breath came out in a long, hard sigh. He threw the partly smoked cigar on the floor and picked up another one without looking. His hands trembled as he lit it.
“All right, boys, let’s cut out the crap,” he said in a conciliatory voice. “You know what I mean. I don’t want my wife’s name mixed up in a scandal.”
“That’s what we figured,” Coffin Ed said.
“And don’t forget I got you boys your jobs,” he stated.
“Yeah, you and our army records-” Grave Digger began.
“Not to mention our marks of eighty-five and eighty-seven percent in our civil service examinations,” Coffin Ed supplemented.
Casper took the cigar from his teeth and said, “All right, all right, so you think you can’t be hurt.” He spread his hands. “I don’t want to hurt you. All I want is those mother-raping bandits caught with the minimum of publicity.” He sucked smoke into his lungs and let it dribble from his wide, flat nostrils. “And you wouldn’t suffer any if these mother-rapers turned up dead.” He gave them a half-lidded conniving look.
“That’s the way we got it figured, boss,” Coffin Ed said.
“What the hell do you mean, by that?” Casper flared again.
“Nothing, boss. Just that dead men don’t talk, is all,” Coffin Ed said.
Casper didn’t move. He stared from one to the other through obsidian eyes. “If you’re insinuating what I think, I’ll break you both,” he threatened in a voice that sounded very dangerous.
For a moment there was only the sound of labored breathing in the room. The sound of muted footsteps c
ame from the corridor. Down on a nearby street some halfwit was racing a motor.
Finally Grave Digger said lispingly, “Don’t go off half-cocked, Casper. We’ve all known each other too long. We just figured you wouldn’t want any talk from anybody with the campaign coming up you’ve got to organize before November.”
Casper gave in. “All right, then. But just don’t try to needle me, because I don’t needle. Now I’ll tell you what I know, and, if that don’t satisfy you, you can ask me questions.
“First, I didn’t recognize any of the mother-raping bandits, and I know goddam near everybody in Harlem, either by name or by face. There ain’t nobody in this town who could pull a caper like that I wouldn’t know, and that about goes for you, too.”
Grave Digger nodded.
“So I figure they’re from out of town. Got to be. Now how would they know I was getting a fifty-G payoff? That’s the fifty-thousand-dollar question. First of all, I haven’t told nobody, none of my associates, my wife, nobody. Secondly, I didn’t know exactly when I was going to get it myself. I knew I was getting it sometime, but I didn’t know when until the committee secretary, Grover Leighton, came into my office last night and plunked it down on my desk.”
“Rather early for it, wasn’t it? Early in the year, I mean,” Coffin Ed said.
“Yeah. I didn’t expect it until April or May. That would be sooner than usual. It don’t generally come through until June. But they wanted to get an early start this year. It’s going to be a rough election, with all these television deals and war issues and the race problem and such crap. So how they got to know about it before I knew about it myself-I mean the exact time of the delivery-is something I can’t figure.”
“Maybe the secretary let it slip,” Grave Bigger suggested
“Yeah. Maybe frogs are eating snakes this season,” Casper conceded. “I wouldn’t know. But don’t you boys tackle him. Let him work it out with the other white folks — ” he winked-“The Pinkertons and the commissioners and the inspectors. Me-I don’t give a goddam how they found out. You boys know me-I’m a realist. I don’t want no out-of-town mother-rapers robbing me. I want ’em caught-you get the idea. And if you kill ’em that’s fine. You understand. I want everybody to know-everybody on this goddam green earth-that can’t no mother-rapers rob Casper Holmes in Harlem and get away with it.”
“We got you, boss,” Coffin Ed said. “But we don’t have any leads. You know everything forward and backward, we thought maybe you might have some ideas. That’s why we got here ahead of the confederates.”
Casper allowed himself a grim smile. Then it vanished. “What’s wrong with your stool pigeons?” he asked. “They got the word around in Harlem that can’t nobody have the runs without your stool pigeons telling you about it.”
“We’ll get to them,” Grave Digger lisped.
“Weil, get to them, then,” Casper said. “Get to the whorehouses and the gambling joints and the dope pushers and the call girls. Goddam! Two hoods with fifty G’s are going to splurge on some vice or other.”
“If they’re still in town,” Coffin Ed said.
“If they’re still in town!” Casper echoed. “Two of ’em are niggers, and the white boy’s a cracker. Where the hell they going to go? Where would you go if you pulled a caper for fifty G’s? Where else would you look for kicks? Harlem’s the greatest town on earth. You think they’re going to leave it?”
Both detectives subdued the impulse to exchange looks.
Coffin Ed said dispassionately, “Don’t think we’re not on it, Casper. We’ve been on it from the moment it jumped. People got hurt, and some got killed. You’ll read about it in the newspapers. But that’s neither here nor there. We took our lumps, but we ain’t got thrown.”
Casper looked at Grave Digger’s swollen mouth. “It’s a job,” he said.
Chapter 14
The apartment was on the fifth and top floor of an old stone-fronted building on 110th Street, overlooking the lagoon in upper Central Park.
Colored boys and girls in ski ensembles and ballet skirts were skating the light fantastic at two o’clock when Grave Digger and Coffin Ed parked their half-wrecked car before the building.
The detectives paused for a moment to watch them.
“Reminds me of Gorki,” Grave Digger lisped.
“The writer or the pawnbroker?” Coffin Ed asked.
“The writer, Maxim. In his book called The Bystander. A boy breaks through the ice and disappears. Folks rush to save him but can’t find him-can’t find any trace of him. He’s disappeared beneath the ice. So some joker asks, ‘Was there really a boy?’”
Coffin Ed looked solemn. “So he thought the hole in the ice was an act of God?”
“Must have.”
“Like our friend Baron, eh?”
They went silently up the old marble steps and pushed open the old, exquisitely carved wooden doors with cut-glass panels.
“The rich used to live here,” Coffin Ed remarked.
“Still do,” Grave Digger said. “Just changed color. Colored rich folks always live in the places abandoned by white rich folks.”
They walked through a narrow, oak-paneled hallway with stained-glass wall lamps to an old rickety elevator.
A very old colored man with long, kinky gray hair and parchmentlike skin, wearing a mixed livery of some ancient, faded sort, rose slowly from a padded stool and asked courteously, “What floor, gentlemens?”
“Top,” Coffin Ed said.
The old man drew his cotton-gloved hand back from the lever as though it had suddenly turned red hot.
“Mister Holmes ain’t in,” he said.
“Missus Holmes is,” Coffin Ed said. “We have an appointment.”
The old man shook his cotton-boll head. “She didn’t tell me about it,” he said.
“She doesn’t tell you everything she does, grandfather,” Coffin Ed said.
Grave Digger drew a soft leather folder from his inside pocket and lashed his shield. “We’re the men,” he lisped.
Stubbornly the old man shook his head. “Makes no difference to Mister Holmes. He’s The Man.”
“All right,” Coffin Ed compromised. “You take us up. If Missus Holmes doesn’t receive us, you bring us down. Okay?”
“It’s a gentleman’s agreement,” the old man said.
Grave Digger belched as the ancient elevator creaked upward.
“That lets us out,” Coffin Ed said. “Gentlemen don’t belch.”
“Gentlemen don’t eat pig ears and collard greens,” Grave Digger said. “They don’t know what they’re missing.”
The old man gave the appearance of not hearing.
Casper had the whole top floor to himself. It had originally been built for two families with facing doors across a small elevator foyer, but one had been closed and plastered over and there was only the one red-lacquered one left, with a small, engraved brass nameplate in the middle of the upper panel, announcing: Casper Holmes.
“Might just as well say Jesus Christ,” Grave Digger said.
“Go light on this lady, Digger,” Coffin Ed cautioned as he pushed the bell buzzer.
“Don’t I always?” Grave Digger said.
A young black man in a spotless white jacket opened the door. It opened so silently Grave Digger blinked. The young man had shining black curls that looked as though they had been milled from coal tar, a velvet-smooth forehead slightly greasy, and dark-brown eyes, with whites like muddy water, devoid of all intelligence. His flat nose lay against low, narrow cheeks slashed by a thin-lipped mouth of tremendous width. The mouth was filled with white, even teeth.
“Mister Jones and Mister Johnson?” he inquired.
“As if you didn’t know,” Grave Digger said.
“Please come right this way, sirs,” he said, leading them to a front room off the front of the hall.
He came as far as the doorway and left them.
It was a big room with windows overlooking Central Park.
In the distance, over treetops, the towers of Rockefeller Center and the Empire Sate Building loomed in the murky haze. It remind in Ed of the lounge of the City Club.
Grave Digger lifted his feet high to keep from stumbling over the thick nap of the Oriental rugs, and Coffin Ed eyed the ornate furniture warily, wondering where he should sit.
Jazz classics were stacked on a combination set, and at their entrance Louis Armstrong was doing an oldy called Where The Chickens Don’t Roost So High.
“Me and my old lady used to dance to that tune at the Savoy-before they tore it down,” Grave Digger said, and started cutting the rug.
He still had on his hat and overcoat, and he was performing the intricate steps of an old-time jitterbug with great abandon. His swollen lips were pecking at the perfumed air, and his overcoat tails were flapping in the breeze.
Coffin Ed stood beside a Louis XIV love seat, scratching his ribs.
“Digger, you’re a pappy,” he said. “Those steps you’re doing went out with zoot suits.”
“Don’t I know it,” Grave Digger said, sighing.
Mrs. Holmes swung into the room from an inner doorway like a stripteaser coming on stage. She stopped short in open-mouth amazement and put her hands on her hips.
“If you want to dance, go to the Theresa ballroom,” she said in a cool contralto voice. “There’s a matinee this afternoon.”
Grave Digger froze with a foot in the air, and Coffin Ed laughed: “Haw haw.”
In unison they turned and stared at Mrs. Holmes.
She had the type of beauty made fashionable in the 1930’s by an all-colored musical called Brownskin Models. She was rather short and busty, with a pear-shaped bottom and slender legs. She had short wavy hair, a heart-shaped face, and long-lashed, expressive brown eyes; and her mouth was like a red carnation.
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