But the detectives had considered this.
“Well, let’s go see if it works,” Grave Digger lisped.
They took the handcuffed couple outside and crossed the sidewalk to Coffin Ed’s Plymouth.
It was parked between two snow-covered cars of indistinguishable make, directly across 110th Street from the entrance to Casper’s apartment house. Nothing about it indicated a police car.
Coffin Ed unlocked it, got in and started the motor and the windshield wipers. Grave Digger got into the front beside him; Roman and Sassafras piled into the back. Roman was still wearing his sailor suit; Sassafras wore the same ensemble she had the day before, with the exception of the red knitted cap, which she had exchanged for a green one.
Passing pedestrians, half-blinded by the snow, paid them no attention.
Sassafras leaned close to Roman and whispered conspiratorially, “I ain’t heard yet from my friend.”
She had been in hiding all day and hadn’t learned that her friend with the experience had finally lost his head.
“But as soon as I do-”
“Hush your mouth!” Roman said tensely. “You ain’t going to.”
“Well, I like that!” she exclaimed indignantly and withdrew to the other side.
The Plymouth was pointed toward Fifth Avenue, which bounds Central Park on the east. All Fifth Avenue buses going north turned the corner into 110th Street and branched out toward their various destinations further on. The line’s control office, where the schedules were checked and the personnel changed, was directly around the corner on the north side of 110th Street. Adjacent was a bar, facing the circular square, it contained the nearest public telephone.
Coffin Ed turned about on his seat and said, “Listen, we want you to watch the door across the street. If you see anyone come out that you know-anyone at all-tell us who it is.”
“Yes, sir,” they replied in unison and stared across the street.
A short, fat man came from the apartment. He was wearing a blue chesterfield overcoat, white scarf and a black Homburg. Grave Digger looked from Roman to Sassafras. Neither showed any sign of recognition.
A middle-aged couple came out; a woman with a little girl went in; a tall man in a polo coat rushed out.
Leila Holmes came out. She was wearing dark slacks, black fur-lined boots and a flowing ranch-mink coat. A wheat-colored cashmere scarf was wrapped about her head.
She began walking hurriedly toward the corner of Fifth Avenue.
Coffin Ed pushed the button for drive and eased the Plymouth out into the traffic lane. He drove ahead of the hurrying woman on the other side of the street and slowed down.
A street lamp spilled a circle of white light on the white snow.
When Leila came into the circle of light, Sassafras exclaimed, “There’s Mister Baron!”
Roman stiffened, leaned forward peering; his eyes popped. “Where?”
“Across the street!” Sassafras cried in her high keeping voice. “In that fur coat! That’s him!”
“That’s a woman!” Roman shouted. “Has you gone crazy?”
“’Course he’s a woman.” Sassafras shrieked in an outraged voice. “I’d know that bitch anywhere.”
Coffin. Ed had already pulled ahead and was making a U-turn to head Leila off.
“Goddammit, girl, why didn’t you tell me!” Roman raved in a popeyed fury.
“You think I was going to tell you he was a woman?” Sassafras said triumphantly.
The Plymouth had drawn abreast of Leila. Grave Digger got out, stepped over the snowbank and passed between two parked cars. Leila didn’t see him until he took her by the arm.
Her face jerked up, tight with panic; her big brown eyes were pools of fear. Her smooth brown skin had turned powdery gray.
Then she recognized him. “Get your dirty hands off me, you stinking cop!” she screamed in a sudden rage and tried to jerk her arm free from his grip.
“Let’s get into the car, Mister Baron,” Grave Digger lisped in a cottony voice. “Or I’ll slap you down right here in the street.”
Blood surging to her face had given it the bright painted look of an Indian’s. Her eyes had slitted like a cat’s and glittered with animal fury. But she ceased to fight. She merely said in a strangled voice, “Play tough, buster; I’ll have Casper break you for this.”
“Casper ain’t going to live that long, unless we find him quick,” he lisped.
“Oh God!” she said with a moan and went limp.
He had practically to carry her to the waiting car. Coffin Ed opened the front door, and they installed her between them on the front seat.
“How did you make me?” she asked.
“It figures,” Coffin Ed explained. “You had to be a woman or you’d be in the clique. And no one in the clique knew you.”
“They only knew Casper,” she said bitterly.
Grave Digger looked at his watch. “It’s nineteen minutes past eight,” he lisped. “Our only chance rides on how tough Casper is; and how much you’re going to tell us; and how fast you’re going to tell it.”
She began to bridle. “I wasn’t in with it, if that’s what you think-”
“Save it,” Coffin Ed grated.
“I just guessed it,” she said. “I recognized the white man when they stopped us, after they’d run down Junior. I don’t know why-”
“That can wait.”
“I’d seen him talking to Casper Friday morning. I knew he was a stranger. Then I remembered Casper putting in a long-distance phone call to Indianapolis on Thursday night, right after he’d got the phone call from Grover Leighton. I wondered at the time what he was up to-”
Grave Digger exploded. “For chrissakes, get to the point!”
“Then when I found out they were the same ones who had robbed Casper, I knew he had hired them to do it.” She took a deep breath, and her face twitched strangely. “Nobody could rob Casper unless he let them do it.”
“It figures,” Coffin Ed admitted.
“But why the snatch? What do they want with him now?”
She sighed. “He probably swung out on them.”
“Double-crossed them?” Coffin Ed sounded slightly startled. “He’d double-cross these dangerous hoods?”
“Why not?” Leila said. “Casper would double-cross his own mother; and he’s not scared of anybody who walks on two feet. He’d double-cross them and then job them. He probably had his brief case stuffed with newspapers when they pulled off that phony heist.”
“They’re going to kill him,” Coffin Ed said.
“Not before they get the money,” Grave Digger amended. “Where would he plant it?” he asked Leila.
“Somewhere in his office building,” she said dully. “He didn’t get to go anywhere else.”
Grave Digger looked at his watch again. It was twenty-four minutes past eight.
The Plymouth was already rolling.
“Hold out, son,” Grave Digger lisped in his cottony voice as he pulled his long-barreled, nickel-plated revolver from its shoulder sling and began checking the cartridges in the cylinder. “We’re coming.”
Chapter 19
“Here goes nothing,” Leila Baron Holmes said to herself.
She took a large ring of keys from her mink-coat pocket and began searching for the one that fitted the lock.
One side of her head and shoulders were highlighted in the upper glass panel by the red light of the neon sign from the Paris Bar next door.
