Chapter 20
Casper Holmes was back in the hospital.
His eyes and mouth were bandaged; he could not see nor talk. There were tubes up his nostrils, and he had been given enough morphine to knock out a junkie.
But he was still conscious and alert. There was nothing wrong with his ears, and he could write blind.
He was still playing God.
At eleven o’clock that night he held the press conference which he had last scheduled for ten o’clock, against the considered advice of the staff doctors and his own private physician.
His room was packed with reporters and photographers. His chin jutted aggressively. His hands were expressive. He was in his metier.
He had scribbled a statement to the effect that the robbers had evidently been tipped off that he had received another payroll and had attempted a second robbery before getting out of town.
He had equipped himself with a small scratch pad and stylo with which to answer questions.
The questions came hard and fast.
He scribbled the answers, ripped off the pages and flung them toward the foot of the bed.
Question: Were you given a second payoff?
Answer: Hell no.
Question: Where did they get the information?
Answer: Ask a Ouija board.
Question: How did they find out about the first payoff?
Answer: Can’t say.
Question: Why did you slip out of the hospital in a hearse?
Answer: Safety first.
Question: Why did you stop by your office?
Answer: Private reasons.
Question: How did it happen your wife was there?
Answer: I asked her to meet me.
Question: How did detectives Jones and Johnson locate you?
Answer: Ask them.
Question: How do you feel about it all?
Answer: Lucky.
So it went. He didn’t give away a thing.
Afterwards he held a private session with his colored attorney, Frederick Douglas Henderson. He scribbled some instructions:
Get charges against sailor Roman Hill nol-prossed, give him your check for his $6,500 and get him out the country on first ship leaving. Then file claim in his name for the $6,500 found on the white robber’s body. Then I want you to phone Clay and tell him to keep effects of body for me personally. Got all that?
Attorney Henderson read the instructions thoughtfully.
“Whose body?” he asked.
Casper wrote: He’ll know.
When he left, Casper scribbled across a page: Keep your lip buttoned up.
He rang for the nurse and wrote: Get me an envelope.
She returned with the envelope. He folded the note, put it into the envelope and sealed it. He wrote across the face: Mrs. Casper Holmes. He handed it to the nurse.
Leila was in the adjoining room, but the nurse did not deliver the note.
She had been in an oxygen tent, taking plasma transfusions, ever since the operation. It was touch-and- go.
Big Six was in another smaller, cheaper private room, which was being paid for by Joe Green.
He had lapsed into a coma. The knife was still in his head. Orders were to leave it there until an encystment had formed about it in the brain, permitting its removal to be attempted. There was no record of such an operation being successful, and brain specialists all over the country had been alerted to the case.
George Drake’s body was found shortly after midnight by a waiter on his way home from work.
He was the eighth victim taken to the morgue from Harlem that weekend resulting from what later became known as the Casper caper.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed worked all night in the precinct station, writing their report. They stuck to the bare unadorned facts, omitting all references to Casper’s private affairs and domestic life. Nevertheless, it filled fourteen sheets of foolscap paper.
It snowed all night, and Monday morning there was no letup in sight. The big suction-type snow removers had been put into use at midnight, and the city’s snow crews had worked unceasingly in a slowly losing race against the snow.
At eleven o’clock that morning Roman Hill shipped out on a cargo vessel bound for Rio de Janeiro. He put $6,500 in cash in the captain’s keeping before going to work.
Sassafras saw him off. As she was leaving the docks she met a man who reminded her of him very much. The man had a room in Brooklyn and invited her to a bar nearby to have a drink. She saw no reason why she should go all the way back to Harlem in that snow when you could find the same things in Brooklyn while the snow lasted.
At five minutes before noon two detectives from the Automobile Squad made a strike. They located the golden Cadillac in the showroom of a Cadillac dealer on midtown Broadway. It had been sitting outside the entrance to the service department, covered with snow, when the mechanics had shown up for work that morning.
No one admitted knowing how it had got there. It had been inside with the other demonstrator models when everybody left, and the place was locked eight o’clock Saturday evening.
One of the company’s oldest salesmen, Herman Rose, closely resembled the description that Roman Hill had given of the man posing as Bernard Kaufman, who had notarized the phony bill of sale Mister Baron had given him.
But there were no charges against him and no one to identify him, so nothing could be done.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed were summoned to the Chief Inspector’s office in the Headquarters building on Centre Street shortly after lunch.
The office was filled with Brass, including an assistant D.A. and a special investigator from the Commissioner’s office.
They had been asked why they had attempted to apprehend the robbers single-handed, using Mrs. Holmes as a front, instead of contacting their precinct station and getting instructions from the officer in charge.
“We were trying to save his life,” Coffin Ed replied. “If the block had been surrounded by police, those hoods would have killed him for sure.”
The Chief Inspector nodded. It was a straw-man question anyway.
What the Brass really wanted was their opinion as to Casper’s guilt.
“Who knows?” Grave Digger lisped.
“It hasn’t been proven,” Coffin Ed said. “All we know is what his wife said she guessed.”
“What was her racket?” the Chief Inspector asked.
“We haven’t figured it out,” Coffin Ed admitted. “We got wound up in this other business and we haven’t worked on it.”
The Chief Inspector admitted that a crew of detectives from the Safe, Loft and Truck Squad and two experts from the Pinkerton Detective Agency had searched Casper’s office and the entire office building, and had questioned all of the other tenants and the building superintendent. But they had not turned up the $50,000.
“You men know Harlem, and you know Holmes,” the Chief said. “Where would he hide it?”
“If he’s got it,” Grave Digger lisped.
“That’s the fifty-thousand dollar question,” Coffin Ed said.
“All that I have to say about this business,” the assistant D.A. said, “is that it stinks.”
