“You’ll find some green stuff in a bottle in the drawer,” she said. “Give yourself a shot. It’ll calm you. You’re too jumpy with all that C.”
While he was loading the spike and banging himself, she dressed rapidly. She paid him no attention.
She put on a flowing black gown over numerous petticoats, low-heeled black shoes and black silk gloves, elbow length. She pinned a small black straw hat to her gray wig with a long steel hatpin.
“Go start the car,” she said.
She listened until he had gone out of the back door. Then she picked up a large black-beaded handbag, got a black-and-white striped parasol from the closet, and went into the kitchen.
Uncle Saint had already dressed. He now wore a black chauffeur’s uniform and cap, several sizes too large for him, and of a fashion popular during the 1920s.
“Did you get it?” she asked tersely.
“I heered him,” he replied straight from his mouth. “If Gus’s cut is big enough to buy a farm, it can’t be chicken feed — whatever it is.”
“I have an idea what it is,” she said. “If we ain’t too late.”
“Let’s go then.”
She went outside. He picked up his shotgun from beside the doorway and followed her, closing and locking the door behind him. He was high as a kite.
Although objects were already visible in the gray dawn light, they did not see Pinky. But they heard him. He was on his knees on the hard-packed dirt floor of the garage, gripping the doorposts with his hands, trying to get to his feet, breathing in loud hard gasps. The muscles of his neck, arms and torso were corded; his blood vessels stood out like ropes.
“He’s got the constitution of an ox,” Uncle Saint said.
His sense of hearing was unbearably heightened, and he heard every word they said as distinctly as though they had shouted. His mind was lucid. She gave me a knockout drop, he was thinking. But he could feel consciousness leaving him like a wrecked ship sinking slowly into the sea. Finally his muscles collapsed and he went down onto his face between the doorposts. He didn’t hear Sister Heavenly and Uncle Saint when they approached.
Uncle Saint reached inside the garage and turned on the light. A 1937 black Lincoln Continental sprang into view.
They stepped over Pinky without comment and left him lying there. Sister Heavenly got into the back. Uncle Saint placed the shotgun within easy reach on the floor of the front seat, then went forward to open the double doors.
He followed a dirt road across an abandoned field, pushing up to fifty, bouncing over rocks and ruts, leaving a cloud of dust. A gardener in his undershirt, wearing a straw hat, was milking a goat tethered to a tree. He paid no attention to the black limousine; it was a common sight. But when Uncle Saint got onto the macadam streets and pushed up to seventy and seventy-five, early-morning workers, milkmen and garbage collectors, turned to stare.
6
Uncle Saint sat in the Lincoln and watched the entrance to the apartment. It was parked in the same place Grave Digger and Coffin Ed had vacated less than an hour earlier.
Sister Heavenly had gone inside to look for Gus. But Uncle Saint didn’t take any stock in Pinky’s story about a map. The way he figured, Gus was a connection for racketeers smuggling diamonds or maybe gold. He was picking it up somewhere and passing it on.
Sister Heavenly reckoned that Gus was carrying the boodle on him. But Uncle Saint didn’t figure it that way. Whatever it was would be in the trunk, he decided. You had to figure that racketeers who would use an old square like Gus for a connection knew what they were doing. And a trunk was still the best means of smuggling anything hot — because it was so obvious. All the smart federal men and slick city dicks would figure racketeers too smart to use an old worn-out gimmick like a trunk. And that was where the racketeers could outsmart them. Just plain human nature. Like the best mark is the one who has been clipped before; he figures then that he knows everything.
As he sat there and turned it over in his mind, Uncle Saint resolved to get that trunk for himself.
For more than twenty-five years he had flunkied for Sister Heavenly, serving her as guard, cook, nurse and toady — doing her dirty work. Before that he had been her lover. But when she had thrown him over, he had hung around like a homeless dog through a long succession of subsequent lovers. Now all he had for her was hate, but he couldn’t leave her because he didn’t have anywhere else to go, and she knew it.
So he decided to cross her, get the boodle and cut out. Leave her taking the rap. See how she’d handle a mob of racketeers.
He saw a green panel truck pull up before the apartment house entrance. It looked similar to a Railway Express Company truck except for the name in white letters on its sides: ACME EXPRESS CO.
Two white men in hickory-striped uniforms and blue-visored caps got out. One was tall and thin, the other medium height and heavyset. Both were clean-shaven and neither wore glasses. That was all Uncle Saint noticed.
Both men glanced toward the Lincoln. It was the only parked car with an occupant. But sight of the old liveried colored pappy behind the wheel allayed their suspicions.
Uncle Saint had a sour grin as they turned their backs and walked toward the door. They had him cased as a square like old Gus, he figured. On the one hand it rankled; but on the other it worked in his favor.
He waited until they had gone inside, then started the motor and kept it idling. He figured he was going to have to hijack the trunk. But not here in front of the apartment house. It was too open and there was no telling what Nosy Parker might be watching him from behind some curtained window, wondering what a strange limousine was doing in the neighborhood at this hour of morning. He just hoped Sister Heavenly wouldn’t do anything to rank his play.
Sister Heavenly was sitting in the janitor’s parlor, covering the janitor’s wife and the African with a blunt- nosed.38-caliber revolver, when the doorbell rang.
“I got to go and open the front door,” the janitor’s wife said. “It’s most likely Gus.”
She was standing beside the African, who was seated before the table, where she had backed when Sister Heavenly got the drop on her.
“Can the bullshit and press the buzzer,” Sister Heavenly said, motioning with the barrel of the pistol from where she sat on the arm of the davenport. “When they get here we’ll see who it is.”
The janitor’s wife shuffled sullenly over toward the door and pressed a button releasing the latch on the entrance door. She was barefooted and still wore the same cotton shift as before, but now it looked as though she had been rolling in it. Her face was greasy and her slanting yellow eyes glittered evilly.
“You ain’t going to get nothing by this, whatever it is you is after,” she muttered in her gravelly voice.
“Just get back over there and shut up,” Sister Heavenly said with an arrogant wave of the gun barrel.
The janitor’s wife shuffled back to the side of the African.
The African sat with drooping body, like a melted statue, his white-rimmed eyes staring at the pistol as though hypnotized.
They waited. Only their heavy breathing was audible in the surrounding silence.
The two expressmen saw the trunk in the basement corridor beside the elevator and took it away without seeing anyone.
Uncle Saint was watching when they returned to the street, carrying a large green steamer trunk, stickered and tagged for shipping. They put the trunk into the body of the truck, closed the doors, and looked once again toward the parked Lincoln.
Without appearing to notice them, Uncle Saint leaned out the car window and looked up toward the front windows of the third-story apartment as though listening to someone speaking to him.
