“I’m going home around eight o’clock,” Casper said “I want you to come up later.”
“I knew they couldn’t hurt you,” Johnny said, and then “How much later?”
“Around ten o’clock. Use your own key and come on in.”
“Will do,” Johnny said.
When Johnny had hung up, Casper jiggled the hook and asked the operator to have the supervising nurse come up to his room.
Chapter 16
It was past four o’clock when Grave Digger and Coffin Ed got away from Fats’s Down Home Restaurant-just about the time Casper had got finished with the brass.
They hadn’t intended to stay that long. But the place was filled with gamblers and whorehouse madams, all curious about the Casper caper, and they had been fishing themselves, to see what they could pick up about any new jokers in town on a kick binge.
The gamblers hadn’t run across any fresh money; if they had, they wouldn’t admit it. The madams hadn’t come across any mew customers, not with big money, anyway.
“If I had,” one madam confessed, “I’d have handcuffed each of ’em to two girls, and foot-chained ’em to the bed, bad as I need money.”
Pee Wee, the giant black bartender, had fixed them some hot bourbon teas to stave off grippe and pneumonia. Before they had a chance to test what those potent drinks might stave off, they were clutched in the throes of tremendous appetites.
Then Fats had appeared, looking like the scalded and scraped carcass of a hippopotamus, and said he was taking a Smithfield ham out of the oven. That did it.
They ate baked ham and sweet potatoes while Grave Digger held everybody entranced giving a detailed account of the joker getting his head cut off.
By the time they got back outside, they were both willing to believe the gremlins had done it.
The snow was drifting down like endless fields of cotton, and the street was covered an inch thick. Their wreck of a car, sitting at the curb, looked like an abandoned derelict. They hadn’t got to the precinct station as yet.
Grave Digger took hold of Coffin Ed’s sleeve and detained him for a discussion on criminology.
“Take a detective,” he said. “Like you and me. A man gets robbed in the street. The robber taps his victim on the head, knocks him unconscious and runs. Ain’t nobody seen him; the victim don’t know him. Then we come up. We don’t know a damn thing. Don’t even know the man’s been robbed. All we got is his word for it. But everybody expects us to run off and nab the criminals as if we got a robber’s preserve.”
“Maybe they expect us to crawl along and sniff them out, like human bloodhounds,” Coffin Ed said. “Maybe they think we got the nose for it.”
“That Casper,” Grave Digger said. “He got more twists in him than a barrel full of snakes.”
They got into the car. Normally at that hour it would have been dark, but the blanket of snow seemed to illuminate the streets. The few cars out were crawling along like snails, leaving black lines on the white blanket.
“Two bull alligators like you and me ain’t going to catch anything in that goldfish bowl downtown,” Coffin Ed stated. “We’re just going to scare the living hell out of everybody and get the deep freeze for our effort.”
“We’ll bait the hook,” Grave Digger suggested.
“I was thinking the same thing.”
Captain Rice was on duty in the precinct station. They asked his permission to take the prisoner along to identify Baron in case they unearthed him. The captain said a Homicide detective had taken Roman Hill down to the Bureau of Criminal Identification at Headquarters, but he gave them an order to pick him up. He was still a precinct prisoner until he appeared before magistrate’s court the next morning. They changed over to Coffin Ed’s new Plymouth and went down the East Side Drive. Coffin Ed took the wheel; he didn’t mind riding with Grave Digger in a city-owned car, but he had paid his own money for the Plymouth.
The small tractor-type snowplows were already at work on the main arteries, scurrying about like orange bugs, piling the snow along the curbs for the trucks to pick up and dump into the river.
The tires sang in the coating of snow, and the windshield wipers clicked back and forth.
They talked about the blizzard of 1949, when city traffic had been paralyzed by thirty-nine inches of snow.
Off to their left, unseen tugboats with green and red lights, barely discernible through the white curtain, raised a cacophony of foghorns. The lights of the petroleum companies across the East River were blanked out.
A ferryboat was docked at the 79th Street pier when they passed, unloading day workers from Welfare Island.
“Damn, this day is moving,” Grave Digger remarked.
They began feeling the pressure of time. A slow buildup of apprehension sobered them.
Coffin Ed stepped on the gas.
They found Roman in the Gallery on the first floor of Headquarters on Centre Street.
Headquarters, and the Annex across the street, were the only lighted buildings in the area. Skyscrapers in the adjacent Wall Street district loomed dark and ghostly against the bottomless gray sky.
They gave the Homicide detective Captain Rice’s order and took the prisoner. He looked scarcely the worse for the headwhipping he had taken; just a mass of unnoticeable clotted wounds in his thick curly hair.
“Do you want the other one, too?” the detective asked. “The bartender from the Paris Bar?”
“You still got him?”
“Got him and going to keep him until he looks at every picture on record-unless you want him.”
“You keep him,” Grave Digger said. “Nothing we can do with him.”
They handcuffed Roman and took him out to the Plymouth. Coffin Ed had left the motor running and the windshield wipers working. But he had to brush the snow from all the windows before he could move on.
They went a couple of blocks beyond Headquarters and stopped.
“You got a sailor suit?” Coffin Ed asked.
“Yeah, but I don’t wear it,” Roman said.
“Where is it?”
“It’s aboard ship.”
“All right, we’re going over to Brooklyn to get it, and you’re going to put it on,” Coffin Ed said, easing the car off slowly through the snow.
When the telephone rang again, Leila Holmes thought it was Casper calling back.
“Yes.” She sounded cold enough to make icicles.
“Leave me talk with Casper,” a man’s voice said.
The hand holding the receiver began to tremble. She thought she recognized the voice, but she wasn’t certain.
“He’s still in the hospital,” she said, a sudden indeterminable fear making her voice sound parrotlike. “He’s had a relapse; he’s in a coma.”
“Can the bull,” the voice said. “That li’l lick on a booger’s head ain’t putting him in no coma.”
She felt certain of it now. It was a Southern voice with a Mississippi accent. It was a white man’s voice.
She began trembling all over, her breasts moving in the jersey-silk pullover like molded Jell-O.
“Telephone the hospital if you don’t believe me,” she said, furious with herself for sounding defensive, but she couldn’t help it. She was scared witless. There was something sadistic and inhuman about the voice. “He is in a coma,” she contended.
“If he wants any of his fifty G’s back, he better come out of it,” the voice said. “And nigger-quick.”
The use of the epithet steadied her fear and scalded her with rage. “Who are you, you mother-raping peckerwood,” she flared.
