brackish taste in his mouth. He scarcely noticed it.
Just as he was about to leave the house the telephone rang. For a moment he debated whether to ignore it, then went back into the bedroom and picked up the receiver.
“Johnson,” he said.
“This is Captain Brice,” the voice said from the other end. “Homicide wants you to get in touch — Lieutenant Walsh. And keep out of this. Stay home. Let the men with the shields have it. If you get in any deeper I’m not going to be able to help you.” After a pause he added, “Nobody is.”
“Yes sir,” Coffin Ed said. “Lieutenant Walsh.”
“They got the blood from Brooklyn, in case you haven’t heard,” the captain added.
Coffin Ed held on to the receiver, but he didn’t have the nerve to ask.
“He’s still hanging on,” Captain Brice said, as though reading his thought.
“Yes sir,” Coffin Ed said.
The phone began to ring again as soon as he cradled the receiver. He picked it up again.
“Johnson.”
“Ed, this is Lieutenant Anderson.”
“How goes it, Lieutenant?”
“I called to ask you.”
“He’s still in there fighting,” Coffin Ed said.
“I’m going over there now,” Anderson said.
“I ain’t any use. He don’t know anybody yet.”
“Right. I’ll wait ’til it’s time.” A pause, then, “Keep out of this, Ed. I know how you feel, but keep out of this. You don’t have any authority now and anything you do is going to make it worse.”
“Yes sir.”
“What?” Anderson was startled. Coffin Ed had never said
But Coffin Ed had hung up.
He telephoned the West Side homicide bureau and asked for Lieutenant Walsh.
“Who’s calling?”
“Just tell him Ed Johnson.”
After a while a deliberate, scholarly-sounding voice came on.
“Johnson, I’d like to know what you think about this.”
“Up until we found the African’s corpse, I didn’t think anything about it. We couldn’t figure that from any angle. Then when they got Digger, that changed the story. There must have been two-”
“We know that,” Lieutenant Walsh cut him off. “Two professional gunmen. We know they were after something. The whole place is being gone over by a crew from the safe and loft squad. But they haven’t found anything, or even anything to indicate what they’re looking for. What do you think it might be? If we knew that, we might know where to start.”
“I think it might be H; a shipment of H that’s taken off.”
“We thought of that. The narcotics squad is working on it. But a shipment of heroin, even as pure as it comes, large enough to induce murder is not easy to hide. A really valuable shipment, considering all the wrappings it would need, would run to about the size of a football. By this time anything that size would have been found by the crew at work on it.”
“It doesn’t have to be a shipment. It can be a key.”
“A key. I hadn’t thought of that; I don’t know about the searchers. Just a key to a plant somewhere. Maybe you’re right. I’ll pass the suggestion on. Anyway, they’re going to keep after it until they’re satisfied there’s nothing there.”
“If it isn’t that I don’t know what it is.”
“Right. By the way, what do you think has happened to the janitor and his wife? Gus and Ginny Harris, they are called. And they had a helper, an ex-pug called Pinky.”
“Gus and Ginny were supposed to sail on the
“They had booked passage but they didn’t sail. All three of them have just dropped out of sight.”
“They can’t stay hidden forever.”
“They can if they’re at the bottom of the river.”
Coffin Ed waited. He had said all he had to say.
“That’s all for the time, Johnson. Stick around. We might want to get in touch with you again. And Johnson-”
“Yes sir.”
“Keep out of this. Let us handle it. Okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
Coffin Ed went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water from the refrigerator bottle. His throat felt bone dry.
Then he went into the garage and put a suit of paint-smeared coveralls into a large canvas bag left behind by the painters who had worked on his house. He put the bag into the back of his car and got in and drove down the street to Grave Digger’s house.
He knew the doors would be locked so he walked around to the back and jimmied the kitchen window. His body had a light weightlessness that put an edge on his reflexes, making them a shade too quick. He’d have to be careful, he cautioned himself. He’d kill someone before he knew it.
Two of the neighborhood children, a little boy and girl, stopped playing in the yard next door and looked at him, accusingly.
“You’re breaking into Mister Jones’s house,” the little boy piped up, then shouted at the top of his voice, “Mama, there’s a burglar breaking into Mister Jones’s house.”
A woman came quickly from the back door of the next-door house just as Coffin Ed got one leg over the window ledge.
He nodded toward her and she smiled. They were all colored people on that street and the grownups knew one another; but the children seldom got sight of the detectives, who were sleeping most of the day.
“That’s just Mister Jones’s partner,” she told the children. “Mister Jones has been hurt.” She figured that explained it.
Coffin Ed closed and locked the window and went into the bedroom and opened the clothes closet. A long- barreled nickel-plated.38-caliber revolver identical with his own was cradled in a holster hanging from an identical hook inside the door. He slipped it from the holster, spun the cylinder to make certain it was loaded, then stuck the barrel down inside the waistband of his trousers with the handle angled toward the left side.
“Almost ready,” he said out loud, and inside of his splitting head he felt the tension mount.
He went into the living room, searched about in the writing desk, and scribbled on a sheet of stationery: STELLA,
He brought it back and propped it on top of the dressing table.
He was turning away to leave when a sudden thought struck him. He stepped over to the night table and picked up the telephone and dialed homicide again.
When he got Lieutenant Walsh, he asked, “What happened to the janitor’s dog?”
“Ah yes, she was turned over to the S.P.C.A. Why?”
“I just remembered that it was hurt and I wondered if anybody was taking care of it.”
“That’s what I forgot to ask,” Lieutenant Walsh said. “Do you happen to know how she got that wound in the head?”
“We saw the African take her down toward the river early this morning and then come back without her. That was early this morning — a little after five. We didn’t have any reason to be suspicious, so we didn’t question him. When we got back to the place around one o’clock she was lying in front of the side gate with that hole in her head.”
“That clears up that,” Walsh said. “How’s Jones coming on?”
“He’s still breathing — the last I heard.”
