then Grave Digger said, 'That ought to tell me something,' adding, 'but it don't.'
'It tells me they ain't got the money either,' Coffin Ed said.
'What they?'
'How the hell do I know? I didn't see the ones who got away,' Coffin Ed said.
Anderson thumbed through the report sheets on his desk. 'The Lincoln was found abandoned on Broadway, where the subway trestle passes over 125th Street, with the two rifles still inside,' he noted. 'It showed where you hit it.'
'So what?'
'The gunmen haven't been found but Homicide has got leaders out. Anyway, we know who they are and they won't get far.'
'Don't worry about those birds, they'll never fly,' Coffin Ed said.
'Those are not the flying kind,' Grave Digger added. 'Those are jailbirds, headed for home.'
'And we're headed for food,' Coffin Ed said. 'My stomach is sending up emergency calls.'
'Damn right,' Grave Digger agreed. 'As Napoleon said, 'A woman thinks with her heart but a man with his stomach.' And we've got some heavy thinking to do.'
Anderson laughed. 'What Napoleon was that?'
'Napoleon Jones,' Grave Digger said.
'All right, Napoleon Jones, don't forget crime,' Anderson said.
'Crime is what pays us,' Coffin Ed said.
They went to Mammy Louise's. She had changed her pork store with the tiny restaurant in back into a fancy all-night barbecue joint. Mr Louise was dead and a slick young black man with shiny straightened hair and fancy clothes had taken his place. The English bulldog who used to keep Mr Louise at home was still there, but his usefulness was gone and he looked lonely for the short fat figure of Mr Louise, whom he delighted in scaring. The new young man didn't look like the type anything could keep home, bulldog or whatnot.
They sat at a rear table facing the front. The barbecue grill was to their right, presided over by a white-clad chef. To their left was the jukebox, blaring out a Ray Charles number.
Mammy Louise's slick young man came personally to take their orders, playing the role of Patron with mincing arrogance.
'Good evening, gentlemen, what will you gentlemen have tonight?'
Grave Digger looked up. 'What have you got?'
'Barbecued ribs, barbecued feet, barbecued chicken, and we got some chitterlings and hog maws and some collard greens with ears and tails — '
'You'd go out of business if hogs had only loins,' Coffin Ed interrupted.
The young man flashed his teeth. 'We got some ham and succotash and some hog head and black-eyed peas — '
'What do you do with the bristles?' Grave Digger asked.
The young man was becoming irritated. 'Anything you want, gentlemen,' he said with a strained smile.
'Don't brag,' Coffin Ed muttered.
The smile went out.
'Just bring us two double orders of ribs,' Grave Digger said quickly. 'With side dishes of black-eyed peas, rice, okra, collard greens with fresh tomatoes and onions, and top it off with some deep-dish apple pie and vanilla ice cream. Okay?'
The young man smiled again. 'Just a light snack.'
'Yeah, we want to think,' Coffin Ed said.
They watched the young man walk away with a switch. 'Mr Louise must be turning over in his grave,' Coffin Ed said. 'Hell, he's more likely running after some chippy angel, now that he's got away from that bulldog.'
'If he went in that direction.'
'All chippies were angels to Mr Louise,' Grave Digger said. The place was filled mostly with young people who peeped at them through the corners of their eyes when they came back to play the jukebox. Everyone knew them. They looked at these young people, thinking they didn't know what it was all about yet.
Suddenly they were listening.
'Pres,' Grave Digger recognized, cocking his ear. 'And Sweets.'
'Roy Eldridge too,' Coffin Ed added. 'Who's on the bass?'
'I don't know him or the guitar either,' Grave Digger confessed. 'I guess I'm an old pappy.'
'What's that platter?' Coffin Ed asked the youth standing by the jukebox who had played the number.
His girl looked at them through wide dark eyes, as though they'd escaped from the zoo, but the boy replied self-consciously, ' 'Laughing to Keep from Crying.' It's foreign.'
'No, it ain't,' Coffin Ed said.
No one contradicted him. They were silent with their thoughts until a waiter brought the food. The table was loaded. Grave Digger chuckled. 'Looks like a famine is coming on.'
'We're going to head it off,' Coffin Ed said.
The waiter brought three kinds of hot sauce — Red Devil, Little Sister's Big Brother, West Virginia Coke Oven — vinegar, a plate of yellow corn bread and a dish of country butter.
'Bone apperteet,' he said.
' Merci, m'sieu,' Coffin Ed replied.
'Black Frenchman,' Grave Digger commented when the waiter had left.
'Good old war,' Coffin Ed said. 'It got us out of the South.'
'Yeah, now the white folks want to start another war to get us back.'
That was the last of that conversation. The food claimed their attention. They sloshed the succulent pork barbecue with Coke Oven hot sauce and gnawed it from the bones with noisy relish. It made the chef feel good all over to watch them eat.
When they had finished, Mammmy Louise came from the kitchen. She was shaped like a weather balloon on two feet, with a pilot balloon serving as a head. The round black face beneath the bandanna which encased her head was shiny with sweat, but still she wore a heavy sweater over a black woollen dress. She claimed she had never been warm since coming north. Her ancestors were runaway slaves who had joined a tribe of southern Indians and formed a new race known as 'Geechies'. Her native language was a series of screeches punctuated by grunts, but she spoke American with an accent. She smelled like stewed goat.
'How's y'all, nasty 'licemen?' she greeted them jovially.
'Fine, Mammy Louise, how's yourself?'
'Cold,' she confessed.
'Don't your new love keep you warm?' Coffin Ed asked.
She cast a look at the mincing dandy flashing his teeth at two women at a front table. 'Oman lak me tikes w'ut de good Lawd send 'thout question, I'se 'fied.'
'If you are satisfied, who're we to complain?' Grave Digger said.
A man poked his head in the door and said something to her fine young man and he hurried back to their table and said, 'Your car's calling.'
They jumped up and hurried out without paying.
15
Lieutenant Anderson said, 'A man was found dead in a junkyard underneath 125th Street approach to the Triborough Bridge.'
'What about it?' Coffin Ed replied.
' What about it? ' Anderson flared. 'Have you guys quit the force? Go over and look at it. You might learn that killing is a crime. Just the same as robbery.'
Coffin Ed felt his ears burning. 'Right away,' he said respectfully.
