ideas.'
'I don't know what you're on to, but be careful,' Anderson warned.
'How much more careful can a cop be?'
'You could use some help.'
'Help to get killed,' Coffin Ed grumbled and felt a warning pressure from Grave Digger's hand. 'We're going to Brooklyn now to get the owner of this junkyard.'
'Well, if you have to, but for God's sake go easy; you don't have any jurisdiction in Brooklyn and you can get us all in a jam.'
'Easy does it,' Coffin Ed said and cut off.
Grave Digger mashed the starter and they went down the dark street. He was frowning from his thoughts. 'Ed, we're just missing something,' he said.
'Goddamned right,' Coffin Ed agreed. 'Just missing getting killed.'
'I mean, doesn't this tell you something?'
'Tells me to get the hell off the Force while I'm still alive.'
'What I mean is, so much nonsense must make sense,' Grave Digger persisted as he entered the approach to the East Side throughway.
'Do you believe that shit?' Coffin Ed said.
'I was thinking why would anyone want to rub us out because a junkyard laborer was murdered?'
'You tell me.'
'What's so important about this killing? It smells like some kind of double-cross.'
'I don't see it. Unless you're trying to tie this to the hijack caper. And that sure don't make any sense. People are getting killed in Harlem all the time. Why not you and me?'
'I got to think something,' Grave Digger said and entered the stream of traffic on the throughway without stopping.
Mr Goodman was still awake when they arrived. The news of Josh's murder had upset him. He was clad in bathrobe and nightgown and looked as though he'd been raiding the kitchen. But he still protested against going back to Harlem just to look over his junkyard.
'What good can it do? How can it help you? No one steals junk. I only kept the dog to keep bums from sleeping in the yard, and cart pushers like Uncle Bud from filling his cart with my junk to sell to another junk man.'
'Listen, Mr Goodman, the other night eighty-seven poor colored families lost their life savings in a robbery — '
'Yes, yes, I read in the papers. They wanted to go back to Africa. I want to get back to Israel where I've never been either. It comes to no good, this looking for bigger apples on foreign trees. Here every man is free — '
'Yes, Mr Goodman,' Grave Digger interrupted with feigned patience. 'But we're cops, not philosophers. And we just want to find out what is missing from your junkyard and we can't wait until Monday morning because by then someone else might be killed. Even us. Even you.'
'If I must, I must, to keep some other poor colored man from being killed, about some junk,' Mr Goodman said resignedly, adding bitterly: 'What this world is coming to nobody knows, when people are killed about some junk — not to speak of a poor innocent dog.'
He led them into the parlor to wait while he dressed. When he returned ready to go, he said, 'My Reba don't like it.'
The detectives didn't comment on his Reba's dislikes.
At first Mr Goodman did not see where anything was missing. It looked exactly as he had left it.
'All this trouble, getting up and dressing and coming all this distance in the dark hours of morning, for nothing,' he complained.
'But there must have been something in this empty space,' Coffin Ed insisted. 'What are you keeping this space for?'
'Is that a crime? Always I keep space for what might come in. Did poor Josh get killed for this empty space? Just who is the lunatic, I ask you?' Then he remembered. 'A bale of cotton,' he said.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed froze. Their nostrils quivered like hound dogs on a scent. Thoughts churned through their heads like sheets of lightning.
'Uncle Bud brought in a bale of cotton this morning,' Mr Goodman went on. 'I had it put out here. I haven't thought of it since. With income taxes and hydrogen bombs and black revolutions, who thinks of a bale of cotton? Uncle Bud is one of the cart men — '
'We know Uncle Bud,' Coffin Ed said.
'Then you know he must have found this bale of cotton on his nightly rounds.' Mr Goodman shrugged and spread his hands. 'I can't ask every cart man for a bill of sale.'
'Mr Goodman, that's all we want to know,' Grave Digger said. 'We'll drive you to a taxi and pay for your time.'
'Pay I want none,' Mr Goodman said. 'But curious I am. Who would kill a man about a bale of cotton? Cotton, mein Gott.'
'That's what we want to find out,' Grave Digger said and led the way to their car.
Now it was three-thirty in the morning and they were back at the precinct station talking it over with Lieutenant Anderson. Anderson had already alerted all cars to pick up Uncle Bud for questioning and they were trying to fix the picture.
'You're certain this bale of cotton was carried by the meat delivery truck used by the jackers?' Anderson said.
'We found fibers of raw cotton in the truck. Uncle Bud finds a bale of cotton on 137th Street and sells it to the junkyard. The bale of cotton is missing. A junkyard laborer has been killed. We're certain of that much,' Grave Digger said.
'But what could make this bale of cotton that important?'
'Identification. Maybe it points directly to the hijackers,' Grave Digger said.
'Yes, but remember the dog was dead before Josh and his murderer arrived. Maybe the cotton was gone by then too.'
'Maybe. But that doesn't change the fact that somebody wanted the cotton and didn't let him live to tell whether they got it, or somebody got it before.'
'Let's quit guessing and go find the cotton,' Coffin Ed said.
Grave Digger looked at him as though he felt like saying, 'Go find it then.'
During the silence the phone rang and Anderson picked up the receiver and said, 'Yes… yes… yes, 119th Street and Lenox.. yes… well, keep looking.' He hung up.
'They found the junk cart,' Grave Digger said more than asked.
Anderson nodded. 'But Uncle Bud wasn't with it.'
'It figures,' Coffin Ed said. 'He's probably in the river by now.'
'Yeah,' Grave Digger said angrily. 'This mother-raping cotton punished the colored man down south and now it's killing them up north.'
'Which reminds me,' Anderson said. 'Dan Sellers of Car 90 says he saw an old colored junk man who'd found a bale of cotton on 137th Street right after the trucks crashed the night of the hijack. The old man was trying to get it into his cart — probably Uncle Bud — and they stopped to question him. Then he got out and helped him load it and ordered him to bring it to the station. But he never came.'
'Now you tell us,' Grave Digger said bitterly.
Anderson colored. 'I'd forgotten it until now. After all, we hadn't thought of cotton.'
'You hadn't,' Coffin Ed said.
'Speaking of cotton, what do you know about a Colonel Calhoun who's opened a store-front office on Seventh Avenue to recruit people to go south and pick cotton? Calls it the Back-to-the-Southland movement,' Grave Digger
