“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.
