“Did he make your belt?” he asked.
She hesitated as though she might refuse to answer, then reluctantly said, “Yes.”
Grave Digger had made out some of the gilded designs encircling the belt. They depicted a series of Pans with nude males and females caught in grotesque postures on their horns. The thought struck him suddenly that Junior Ball got gored by one of his own Pans.
Coffin Ed picked up the idea. “Did he ever work for Baron?” he asked. “Design anything for him?”
“I’ve told you I don’t know this Baron,” she said, her voice still rough. “What has he got to do with all of this?”
“Well, I’ll tell you how it goes,” he said, and related the statement they had got from Roman. “So you see how it figures,” he concluded. “Your cousin, Ball, and this man, Baron, were in some kind of racket.”
She frowned, but this time not prettily. “It is possible,” she conceded. “Although I can’t see why Junior should have been mixed up in any kind of racket. He was doing well in his own field; he didn’t need anything. And I still don’t understand how this man, Baron, can help you find the scum who robbed Casper.”
“He got a good look at them, for one thing,” Coffin Ed said. “He talked to them; he knows their voices.”
“And we have a hunch he knew them from before,” Coffin Ed said. “He talked to them; he knows their voices.”
“And we have a hunch he knew them from before,” Grave Digger added.
She sighed theatrically. “I’ve gotten used to a lot of strange things with my husband in politics,” she said. “But all this terrible, horrible violence is too much for me.” A tremor ran over her body, making all of it shake.
Grave Digger licked his swollen lips. He was thinking about some of the lonely women about town he hadn’t stopped in to see lately.
She knew what he was thinking and gave him a quick up-from-under look, her big brown eyes stark naked for an instant; then she turned her face away and looked into the fire, and her expression became sad.
“I’d better not catch him on a dark street,” Grave Digger lisped in a voice so thick it was blurred.
She whirled about and stared at him. “Oh!” The red light on her face seemed to be reflected from somewhere underneath the brown of her skin. “I thought you said-” She thought he’d said, “I’d better not catch you on a dark street.” She was flustered for a moment. It made her furious with herself.
“I’ve helped you all I can,” she said abruptly. She began trembling in earnest. “Please go. I can’t stand any more of this.” Her eyes brimmed with tears. She looked even more desirable than with her brassy manner.
Coffin Ed stood up and tapped Grave Digger on the shoulder. Grave Digger came out of his trance with a start.
“Just one more thing,” Coffin Ed said. “Do you know if Junior saw your husband last night?”
“I don’t know. Don’t ask me anything else,” she said tearfully. “All I know is what I’ve read in the newspapers. I haven’t talked to Casper. He’s still in a coma. And I don’t know-” She stopped as though struck by a sudden thought, then said, “And if you’re so interested in Junior’s business, go down on Nineteenth Street and talk to his associate, Zog Ziegler. He ought to know.”
For an instant the two detectives were held in an imperceptible rigidity, as though listening for a sound to be repeated that had come from fax away.
“Zog Ziegler,” Coffin Ed repeated in a flat voice. “Do you know his address.”
“Somewhere on East Nineteenth Street,” she said. “Just go down and look. You’ll know the house when you see it.”
She sounded hysterically anxious for them to leave.
“Good day, Missus Holmes, and thank you,” Coffin Ed said, and Grave Digger said, “You’ve helped us more than you know.”
She stiffened slightly at the subtle jibe in his words, but she didn’t look up.
The wide-mouthed boy in the white jacket appeared in the doorway as though by magic. He let them out.
After an interminable delay, the creaking elevator made its appearance. The old elevator operator with the cotton-boll head refused to look at them for reasons of his own. They left him to his solitude.
When they came out into the street, big fat snowflakes were drifting from a solid gray sky. The motionless air had become degrees warmer, and the snowflakes stack where they landed, too heavy to roll over.
“She knew what I meant, the teasing bitch.”
“Didn’t we all.”
“She never did answer your question.”
“She said enough.”
They stood looking at their wreck of a car for a moment before getting in.
“We’d better change buggies before going downtown,” Grave Digger said. “We might get booked on vag.”
“We can go back to the station and get my car.”
“We might stop at Fat’s for a couple of shots.”
“Whisky ain’t going to help us think any better,” Coffin Ed cautioned.
“Hell, beat as I am now it don’t matter,” Grave Digger said.
Chapter 15
It was four o’clock when Casper got finished with the brass and the half-brass. He had had it with the chief inspector, the inspector in charge of the Homicide squads, Lieutenant Brogan and a detective stenographer from Homicide, and two lieutenants from the Central Office Bureaus.
They had handled him gently, with all due respect for the tender sensibilities of a vote-getting politician, but he had been through the wringer nevertheless.
What they had hammered on mainly was the mystery of the leak. One or the other kept pointing out that the hoods got the tip-off from somewhere, that it didn’t come from heaven, until Casper blew his top.
“I tipped them!” he had exploded. “I leaked it. I said come on and get it. Knock oat my mother-raping brains and kill a couple of people. Is that what you think?”
“It could have been somebody in your organization,” the chief inspector had said.
“All right, it was somebody in my organization. Then go out and arrest them. All of ’em! Start with my two secretaries. Haul in my associates. Don’t forget my field workers. Not to mention my wife. Take ’em all downtown. Give ’em the third degree. Tickle ’em with your mother-raping loaded hose. And see what you get. You’ll get nuttin’, because they didn’t know nuttin’. At least if they did, they didn’t get it from me, because I didn’t know the payoff was coming through when it did my own damn self.”
No one had batted an eye at the outburst.
“Grover Leighton said he told you several days ago that he’d bring it up Saturday night,” the chief inspector had said quietly. “He doesn’t remember the exact day.”
“He doesn’t remember because he didn’t do it,” Casper had raved. “Maybe he thinks he did. But Grover has the whole fifty states to think of; and if you think he can remember every goddam little thing he has done you’re giving him credit for having a mechanical brain.”
They had let it go at that.
Now Casper had a headache the likes of which would have made his professed coma preferable.
A colored trainee nurse had come in to straighten up and remove the saucers filled with cigar butts. She had opened the French windows to clear the air, and sight of the heavy fall of snow added to Casper’s fury.
“Now they’ll send in Canadian trackers,” he muttered.
The little girl glanced at him apprehensively; she didn’t know whether she was supposed to answer or not. She began edging toward the door.
The telephone on the night stand rang. He snatched up the receiver and shouted, “Tell ’em I’m dead!”
The cool, controlled voice of the reception nurse asked, “Do you care to see the press? Our lobby down here is packed with reporters and photographers.”
“Tell ’em I’m still in a coma.”
