'There was an open window on the fire-escape at the back,' Anderson said. 'But no one has been found who saw him leave.' He looked through the reports on his desk. 'A woman on the fourth floor directly below telephoned to report that she thought she heard her front door being opened and when she went to look found the chain off. But nothing was missing from the house. Homicide found the window open onto the fire-escape but she said she had left it open. Any prints that might have been left on the doorknob were smeared by her son coming and going afterwards, and she wiped whatever prints there may have been from the windowsill when dusting.'
'They believe in keeping spick and span in those apartments,' Grave Digger said.
'So clean that even Deke gets away clean,' Coffin Ed said.
'Who knows?' Grave Digger said. 'Let's go talk to her.'
They had her taken from the cell where she was held, awaiting magistrate's court Monday morning, to the interrogation room in the basement known to the Harlem underworld as the 'Pigeons' Nest'. It was claimed that more pigeons were hatched there than beneath all the eaves in Harlem.
It was a soundproof, windowless room with a stool in the center bolted to the floor and surrounded by floodlights bright enough to make the blackest man transparent.
But only the overhead light was on when the jailer brought her in. She saw Grave Digger standing beside the stool, waiting for her. The door was closed and locked behind her. She had a sudden feeling of being taken from the earth. Then she saw the vague outline of Coffin Ed backed against the wall in the shadows. His acid-burned face looked like a Mardi Gras masque to scare little children. She shuddered.
Grave Digger said, 'Sit down, baby, and tell us how you are.'
She stood defiantly. 'I'm not talking in this hole. You've got it bugged.'
'What for? Ed and me are going to remember anything you say.'
Coffin Ed stepped forward. He looked like the dead killer in the play Winterset, coming up out of East River. 'Sit down anyway,' he said.
She sat down. He stepped towards her. Grave Digger switched on the floodlights. She blinked. Coffin Ed had intended to slap her. But now he saw her. He caught his hand. 'Well, well, well,' he said. 'Ain't you beautiful.'
Her smooth, yellow, creamed and perfumed flesh of the day before now ran through all the colors of the spectrum, from black to bright orange; her neck was swollen, one breast was twice the size of the other; red, raw scratches ran down her face, over her neck and shoulders, to disappear beneath her dress; and her hair looked like it had been doused in the river Styx.
'It could have been worse,' Grave Digger said.
'How?' she asked, squinting at the bright lights. The bruises and scratches looked painted on her transparent skin.
'You could be dead.'
She shrugged faintly. 'You call that worse?'
'Well, hell, you're still alive,' Coffin Ed said. 'And you can get eight thousand and seven hundred dollars' reward money if you help us.'
'How about this chickenshit rap they're holding me on?' she bargained.
'That's your baby,' Grave Digger said.
She winced at the word baby; that was what had started it all.
'And it ain't chickenshit,' Coffin Ed added.
'It's a rap,' she said.
'Where's Deke?' Grave Digger asked.
'If I knew where the mother-raper was, I'd sure tell you.'
'But you went there to see him.'
She sat thinking for a time, then seemingly she made up her mind. 'He was there,' she admitted. 'In his drawers. Why else would I be mad enough to shoot the chippy whore. But I don't remember him getting away. He had knocked me unconscious.' After a moment she added, 'I wonder why he didn't kill me.'
'How did you get away from the detective guarding you?' he asked.
She laughed suddenly and her marks formed another pattern like one of those innocuous pictures revealing shocking obscenities at certain angles. 'That was a beauty,' she said. 'It could only happen to a white man.'
Grave Digger looked sardonic. 'As long as it's got nothing to do with this caper, let's skip it.'
'It was just between me and him.'
'What we want to know, baby, is what was the set-up of Deke's Back-to-Africa pitch.'
'Where have you been all your life, you don't know that?' she said.
'We know it. We just want you to confirm it.'
Some of her flippancy returned. 'What's in it for me?' she asked.
Coffin Ed stepped forward. 'Try it on, anyway,' he grated. 'Just for size.'
She looked towards his voice but she couldn't see him through the light and that made it sound more frightening.
'Well, you know he was going to take the money and blow,' she began. 'But not until he'd played other cities too. He had the armored car made. The guards were his. Only the agents and other personnel were squares. The detectives were to come in and get him off the hook by confiscating the money until an investigation could be made. Since all the suckers thought he was honest, there was nothing to fear. He borrowed the idea from the Marcus Garvey movement.'
'We know all that,' Grave Digger said. 'We want some names and descriptions.'
She gave him the name and address of Barry Waterfield, alias Baby Jack Johnson, alias Big Papa Domore. She said the two guns who had guarded the truck were known as Four-Four and Freddy; she had never heard them called by their real monickers and she didn't know where they were staying. They were Deke's men, he probably got them from prison; and he kept them out of sight. The dead man who had impersonated the other detective had been called Elmer Sanders. They were all from Chicago.
That was what they wanted and Coffin Ed relaxed.
But Grave Digger asked, 'He wasn't putting the double-cross on his own men by having himself hijacked?'
She thought for a moment, then said, 'No, I don't think so. I'm reckoning on the way he's acted afterwards.'
'Any idea who they were?'
'I keep thinking of the Syndicate. Just because I can't think of anyone else, I guess.'
'It wasn't the Syndicate,' Grave Digger stated flatly.
'Then I don't know. He never seemed scared of anybody else — Of course he never told me everything.'
Grave Digger smiled sourly at the understatement.
'What you got on Deke?' Coffin Ed asked.
She looked towards the voice behind the lights and felt a tremor run through her body. Why did that mother- raper scare her so? she wondered. Finally she said simply, 'The proof.'
Both detectives froze as though listening for an echo. It didn't come.
'You want us to take him, don't you?' Grave Digger said.
'Take him,' she said.
'Be ready,' he said.
'I'm ready,' she said.
On their way out they stopped again to see Lieutenant Anderson and have him put a tail on Barry Waterfield.
Then Grave Digger said, 'We're going to put our pigeons on Deke. If they get anything they'll phone it to you and you call us in the car.'
'Right,' Anderson said. 'I'll have a couple of cars on alert for an emergency.'
'There ain't going to be any emergency,' Coffin Ed said and they left.
They began contacting all the stool pigeons they could reach. They got many tips on unsolved crimes and wanted criminals but nothing on Deke O'Hara. They filed away the information for later use, but for all of their stool pigeons they had only one instruction: 'Find Deke O'Hara. He's loose on the town. Telephone Lieutenant Anderson at the precinct station, drop the message and hang up. And disappear.'
