“We haven’t made him,” Anderson said. “Haven’t touched him. We’re waiting for the M.E. and the crew from Homicide.”
“What do the witnesses say?”
“Witnesses?”
“Somebody in the bar must have seen the whole caper.”
“Yeah, but we haven’t got any of them to admit it,” Anderson said. “You know how it is when a white man gets killed. No one wants to get involved. I’ve sent for the wagon, and I’m going to take them all in.”
“Let me talk to them first,” Coffin Ed said.
“Okay, give it a try.”
Coffin Ed ambled toward the entrance to the bar, which was being guarded by a white patrolman.
Grave Digger looked enquiringly at a white civilian who had edged into the group.
“This is Mr. Zazuly,” Anderson said. “He got here right after the shooting and telephoned the station.”
“What did he see?” Grave Digger asked.
“When I got here the street was overrun with people,” Mr. Zazuly said, his magnified eyes blinking rapidly behind the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed spectacles. “The two men were lying there just as you see them, and not an officer in sight.”
“He’s an accountant for Blumstein’s,” Anderson explained.
“Did he hear the shooting?”
“Of course I heard the shooting. It sounded like the Second World War. And not a policeman in sight.” His round, owlish face glared from a mohair muffler with a look of extreme outrage. “Gang wars on a main thoroughfare like this. Right out in the broad open,” he went on indignantly. “Where were the police, I ask you?”
Grave Digger looked sheepish.
No one answered him.
“I’m going to write a complaint to the Commissioner,” he threatened.
The sound of a siren grew quickly in the night.
“Here comes the ambulance,” Anderson said with relief.
The red eye of the ambulance was coming up 125th Street fast, from the direction of Lenox Avenue.
Grave Digger addressed Mr. Zazuly directly. “And that’s all you saw?”
“What did you expect him to see?” Haggerty cracked. “Look at those specs.”
The ambulance double-parked beside a prowl car, and the cops stood by silently while the intern made a cursory examination.
“Can you give him something to bring him to?” Anderson asked him.
“Give him what?” the intern replied.
“Well, when will he be able to talk?”
“Can’t say, Inspector, he might have concussion.”
“I see you’re going to get ahead fast,” Anderson commented.
Nothing more was said while Casper Holmes was rolled onto the stretcher and moved.
Anderson glanced at his watch. “Homicide ought to be getting here,” he said anxiously.
“The stiffs won’t spoil in this weather,” Haggerty said, turning up the collar of his overcoat and putting his back to the ice-cold, dust-laden wind.
“I’m going to see how Ed’s making out,” Grave Digger said, and strolled toward the entrance to the Paris.
When Coffin Ed entered the Paris Bar, not one person looked in his direction.
It was a long, narrow room, with the bar running the length of the left side, taking up hall the space. Customers sat on bar stools or stood; there were no tables.
The usual Saturday night crowd was gathered, bitchy young men wearing peacock clothes with bright-colored caps, blue and silver and gold and purple, perched atop greasy curls straight from the barbershops at seven dollars a treatment. And the big, strong, rough-looking men who made life wonderful for them. But there was not a woman present.
Coffin Ed was not a moralist. But their cliquish quality of freezing up on an outsider grated on his nerves.
“Don’t everybody talk at once,” he shouted from the doorway.
No one said a word.
To a man, they were staring into their drinks as though competing in a contest of three wise monkeys: See nothing; hear nothing; say nothing. The contest was progressing toward a dead heat.
The three bartenders were rinsing glasses with an industriousness that would have gotten them all blacklisted by the bartenders’ union.
Coffin Ed began swelling at the gills. His gaze flickered dangerously down the line, seeking a likely candidate to begin with. But they were all equally engrossed in silence.
“Don’t try to give me that silent treatment,” he warned. “We’re all colored folks together.”
Someone in back giggled softly.
The uniformed white cop guarding the rear door stared at him with a dead-pan expression.
Coffin Ed’s temper flared, and the grafted patches on his face began to twitch.
He spoke to the back of the joker on the first stool. “All right, buddy boy, let’s start with you. Which way did they go?”
The girlish young man continued to stare into his drink as though he were stone-deaf. The indirect lighting from the bar gave his smooth brown face a bemused look. His luminescent silver cap gleamed faintly like swamp- fire.
He was drinking a tall frappe highball of dark rum with a streak of grenadine running down the center, called a “Josephine Baker.” If La Baker herself had been reclining stark nude in the bottom of his glass, he could not have given her any more attention.
Coffin Ed took him roughly by the shoulder and tamed him about. “Which way did they go?” he repeated in a rasping voice.
The young man looked at him from big, brown, bedroom eyes that seemed incapable of comprehending anything but love.
“Go, sir? Who go?” he lisped.
Face jumping in a sudden flash of rage, Coffin Ed slapped him left-handed from the bar stool. The young man crashed against the wall and crumpled in a lump.
Eyes pivoted in his direction and pivoted away. He wasn’t hurt so much as stunned. He thought it best just to lie there.
Coffin Ed looked at the next joker in line. He was an older man, dressed conservatively. Answers gushed from his mouth without his being questioned. “They went west, that is down 125th Street, I don’t mean to California.”
Coffin Ed’s face looked so macabre the man had to swallow before he could continue.
“They was in a black Buick. There was three of ’em. One was driving and the other two pulled off the heist.”
He ran out of breath.
“Did you get the license?”
“License!” He looked as though Coffin Ed had abused his mother. “What would I be doing getting their license? They looked like straight cops when they drove up, and for all I know they might just as well be straight cops.”
“Cops!” Coffin Ed stiffened.
“And when they took off I was lying on the floor like everybody else.”
“You said they were cops!”
“I don’t mean they actually was cops,” the joker amended hastily. “I figure you would know if they was real sure enough cops. All I means is they looked like cops.”
“In uniform?” Coffin Ed was taut as a crane cable, and his voice came in a rasping whisper.
“How else would I know if they looked like cops. I don’t mean you, suh,” the joker hastened to add with an ingratiating smile. “Everybody around here knows you is the man, no matter what you wears. All I means is these
