Grave Digger mashed the starter. “We’ll take you down to Centre Street.”
The detective and his witness got out in front of the Headquarters Annex, a loft building across the street from the domed headquarters building.
Coffin Ed leaned out of the window and said, “We’ll be waiting for you, lover.”
By the time they got back uptown, the windshield was frosted over with a quarter-inch coating of ice. Approaching headlights resembled hazy spectrums coming out of the sea.
They had a new dent in their right fender and a claim against their insurance company from the irate owner of a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce whom they had attempted to pass on a stretch of slick ice just north of the U.N. Building.
Coffin Ed chuckled. “He was mad, wasn’t he.”
“Can you blame him?” Grave Digger said. “He felt the same as Queen Elizabeth would if we tramped into Buckingham Palace with muddy feet.”
“Why don’t you turn off that heater? You’ve said yourself it don’t make nothing but ice.”
“What, and catch pneumonia!”
They had been tippling a bottle of bourbon, and Grave Digger felt sort of witty.
“Anyway, you might slow down if you can’t see,” Coffin Ed said.
“It’s nights like this that cause wars,” Grave Digger philosophized without slacking speed.
“How so?”
“Increases the population. Then when you get enough prime males they start fighting to kill them off.”
“Look out for that garbage truck!” Coffin Ed cried as they turned on two wheels into 125th Street.
“Is that what that was?” Grave Digger asked.
It was past three o’clock. They worked a special detail from eight until four, and this was the hour they usually contacted stool pigeons.
But tonight even stool pigeons had gone under cover. The 125th Street railroad station was closed and locked, and next door the all-night cafeteria was roped off except for a few tables at the front, occupied by bums clinging to bone-dry coffee cups and keeping one foot moving to prove they weren’t asleep.
“Going back to the case, or rather cases-the trouble with these people is they lie for kicks,” Grave Digger said seriously.
“They want to be treated rough; brings out the female in them,” Coffin Ed agreed.
“But not too rough; they don’t want to lose any teeth.”
“That’s how we’re going to get them,” Coffin Ed summed up.
Lieutenant Anderson was waiting for them. He had taken over the captain’s office, and was mulling over reports.
He greeted them, as they came in bunched up and ashy from cold, with: “We got a line on the private eye who was killed. Paul Zalkin.”
Coffin Ed backed up against the radiator, and Grave Digger perched a ham on the edge of the desk. The rough whisky humor was knocked out of them, and they looked serious and intent.
“Casper talk?” Grave Digger asked.
“No, he’s still in a coma. But Lieutenant Brogan got through to the Pinkerton Agency and got a fill-in on Zalkin’s assignment. The secretary of the national committee of Holmes’ party stopped by his office earlier last night and left him fifty grand in cash, for organizational expenses for the presidential election this fall. Holmes hinted that he might take the money home with him rather than leave it in his office safe over the weekend. You know he lives in one of those old apartment houses on 110th Street, overlooking Central Park.”
“We know where he lives,” Coffin Ed said.
“Well, the secretary got to thinking about it after he had left, so he called the Pinkerton Agency and asked them to send a man up to cover Holmes on his way home. But he didn’t want Holmes to think he was spying on him, so he asked that the man keep out of sight. That’s how come Zalkin was there when the heist was staged.”
“How long was it before the secretary left Casper?” Grave Digger asked, frowning with an idea.
“The agency got the call at ten-twenty o’clock.”
“Then somebody knew about the payoff beforehand,” Grave Digger said. “You can’t organize a heist like that in that length of time.”
“Not even in a day,” Coffin Ed said. “These men were pros; and you can’t get pros like ordering groceries. They might have had their uniforms, but they’d have to lift a car-”
“It hasn’t even been reported as stolen yet,” Anderson cut in.
“I got a notion these guns were from out of town,” Coffin Ed went on. “No local hoods would choose 125th Street for a caper like that. Not that block of 125th Street. They couldn’t depend on the weather to drive the ground-hogs in their holes; and normally on a Saturday night that block, with all its bars and restaurants, would be jumping with pedestrians. They had to be somebody who didn’t know this.”
“That doesn’t help us much,” Anderson said. “If they’re from out of town, they’re long gone by now.”
“Maybe,” Grave Digger said. “Maybe not. If it wasn’t for this hit-and-run business, I might buy it.”
Anderson gave him a startled look.
“What the hell, Jones; you can’t think there’s a tie-in.”
Coffin Ed grunted.
“Who knows,” Grave Digger said. “There is something specially vicious about both those capers, and there ain’t that many vicious people running loose in Harlem on a night as cold as this.”
“My God, man, you can’t think that hit-and-run was done deliberately.”
“And then in both instances pansies were croaked,” Grave Digger went on. “Accidents just don’t happen to those people like that.”
“The hit-and-run driver couldn’t have possibly known his victim was a man,” Anderson argued.
“Not unless he knew who he was and what racket he was pulling,” Grave Digger said.
“What racket was he pulling?”
“Don’t ask me. It’s just a feeling I got.”
“Hell, man, you’re going mystical on me,” Anderson said. “How about you, Johnson. Do you go along with that?”
“Yep,” Coffin Ed said. “Me and Digger have been drinking out the same bottle.”
“Well, before you get too drunk with that mysticism, let me fill you in with the latest facts. The two patrolmen, Stick and Price, who thought it was a joke to report they’d been knocked down by a homemade flying saucer, have admitted they were hit by a run-away automobile wheel coming down Convent Avenue. Does that give you any ideas?”
Grave Digger looked at his watch. It said five minutes to four.
“Not any that won’t keep until tomorrow,” he said. “If I start talking to my old lady about automobile tires, as fat as she’s getting, I’m subject to losing my happy home.”
Chapter 8
When Roman came to the castle standing in the fork, where St. Nicholas Place branches off from St. Nicholas Avenue, he stood on the brake.
Sassafras sailed headfirst into the windshield, and Mister Baron’s unconscious figure rolled off the back seat and plumped onto the floor.
“Which way did they go?” Roman asked, reaching for the. 45 revolver that lay on the seat between them.
Sassafras straightened up, rubbing her forehead, and turned on him angrily. “You asking me? I ain’t seen which way they went. They might have went downtown for all I know.”
“I seen them turn uptown,” he argued, his cocked gray eyes seeming to peer down both streets at once.
“Well, make up your mind,” she said in her high, keening voice. “They didn’t go into the castle, that’s for sure.
