Grave Digger groped at a leg through folds of garments. “It ain’t no dummy,” he said.
“Don’t touch it until the M. E. gets here,” the Homicide lieutenant cautioned. “It might fall.”
“It looks like it might be garroted,” one of the cops from the prowl car offered.
The Homicide lieutenant turned on him with a face suddenly gone beet-red. “Garroted! From within the convent? By who, the nuns?”
The cop backtracked hastily. “I didn’t mean by the nuns. A gang of niggers might have done it.”
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed turned to look at him.
“It’s just a way of speaking,” the cop said defensively.
“I’ll take a look,” Grave Digger said.
He stood on tiptoe and peered down the back of the fur collar.
“Nothing around its neck,” he said.
While still on tiptoe, he sniffed the wavy hair. Then he blew into it softly. Strands of silky hair floated outward. He dropped to his feet.
The lieutenant looked at him questioningly.
“Anyway, she’s no grandma,” Grave Digger said. “Her hair looks like a job from the Rose Meta beauty parlors.”
“Well, let’s see what’s keeping her up,” the lieutenant said.
They discovered an iron bar protruding from the wall at a point about six feet high. Below and above it there were deep cracks in the cement; and, at one point above, the crack had been dug out to form a long, oblong hole. The face of the corpse had been thrust into this hole with sufficient force to clamp it, and the end of the bar was caught between the legs, holding it aloft.
“Jesus Christ, it looks like it’s been hammered in there,” the lieutenant said.
“They’re no signs of bruises on the back of the head,” Grave Digger pointed out.
“One thing is for sure,” Haggerty cracked. “She didn’t get there by herself.”
“You’re going to be a senator someday,” the lieutenant said.
“Maybe she was hit by a car,” a harness cop suggested.
“I’ll buy that,” Coffin Ed said.
“Hit by a car!” the lieutenant exclaimed. “Goddammit, she’d have to be hit by a car traveling like a jet plane to get rammed into that wall like that.”
“Not necessarily,” Grave Digger said.
The flip cop said, “Oh, I forgot-there’s a wig in the gutter across the street.”
The lieutenant gave him a reproving look, but didn’t say the words.
In a group, they trudged across the street. The cold east wind whipped at them, and their mouths gave off steam like little locomotives.
It was a cheap wig of gray hair, fashioned in a bun at the back, and it was weighted down by a car jack.
“Was the jack with it?” the lieutenant asked.
“No sir-I put the jack on it to keep the wind from blowing it away,” the cop replied.
The lieutenant moved the jack with his foot and picked up the wig. A detective held a light.
“All I can say about it is it looks like hair,” the lieutenant said.
“Looks like real nigger hair,” the flip cop said.
“If you use that word again I’ll kick your teeth down your throat,” Coffin Ed said.
The cop bristled. “Knock whose teeth-”
He never got to finish. Coffin Ed planted a left hook in his stomach and crossed an overhand right to the jaw. The cop went down on his hips; his head leaned slowly forward until it stopped between his knees.
No one said anything. It was a delicate situation. Coffin Ed was due a reprimand, but the lieutenant from Homicide was the ranking officer, and the cop had already riled him with the crack about the nuns.
“He asked for it,” he muttered to himself, then turned to the other prowl car cop. “Take him back to the station.”
“Yes, sir,” the cop said with a dead-pan expression, giving Coffin Ed a threatening look.
Grave Digger put a hand on Coffin Ed’s arm. “Easy, man,” he murmured.
The cop helped his partner to his feet. He could stand, but he was groggy. They got in the prowl car and drove off.
The others recrossed the street and stared at the corpse. The lieutenant stuck the wig into his overcoat pocket.
“How old would you say she was?” he asked Grave Digger.
“Young,” Grave Digger said. “Middle twenties.”
”What beats me is why would a young woman masquerade as an old woman for?”
“Maybe she was trying to impersonate a nun, a Homicide detective ventured.
The lieutenant, began to turn red. “You mean so she could get into the convent?”
“Not necessarily-maybe she had a racket.”
“What kind of racket?” The lieutenant looked at Grave Digger as though he had all the answers.
“Don’t ask me,” Grave Digger said. “Folks up here are dreaming up new rackets every day. They got the time and the imagination, and all they need is a racket to make the money.”
“Well, all we can do now is leave her for Doc Fullhouse,” the lieutenant said. “Let’s go over the ground and see what it tells.”
Grave Digger got a heavy flashlight from the glove compartment of their car, and he and Coffin Ed walked back to the intersection.
The others covered the area nearer to the corpse. No tire marks were evident where a car might have braked suddenly; they found no broken glass.
Coming up the street from Convent Avenue, playing the light from right to left, Grave Digger noticed two small black marks on the gray-black asphalt, and they knelt in the street to study them.
“Somebody gunned a car here,” he concluded.
“I’d say a big car with a used tread, but we’ll leave it for the experts.”
Coffin Ed noticed a car with a wheel jacked up. On closer inspection they noticed that the opposite wheel was missing. They looked at one another.
“That’s the money,” Grave Digger said.
“For this one,” Coffin Ed agreed. “Some local tire thief witnessed the kill.”
“What he saw made him broom like the devil was after him.”
“If he wasn’t seen and taken away.”
“Not that son. He had presence of mind enough to get away with his wheel,” Grave Digger said.
“He oughtn’t to be hard to find. Any son out tire-thieving on a night like this has got some pretty hot skirt to support.”
The lieutenant listened to their findings with interest but no particular concern.
“What I want to know is how this woman got killed,” he said. “Then we’ll know what to look for.”
A car turned in from Convent Avenue, and Coffin Ed said, “We ought to soon know; that looks like Doc’s struggle-buggy.”
Doctor Fullhouse was bundled up as though on an expedition to the South Pole. He was an old, slow-moving man, and what could be seen of his face between an astrakhan cap and a thick yellow cashmere muffler made one think of a laughing mummy.
His spectacles steamed over the instant he stepped from his overheated car, and he had to take them off. He peered about from watery blue eyes, searching for the body.
“Where’s the cadaver?” he asked in a querulous voice.
The lieutenant pointed. “Stuck to the wall.”
“You didn’t tell me it was a vampire bat,” he complained.
The lieutenant laughed dutifully.
“Well, get it down,” Doc said. “You don’t expect me to climb up there and examine it.”
Grave Digger clutched one arm, Coffin Ed the other; the two detectives from Homicide took a leg apiece. The body was stiff as a plaster cast. They tried to move it gently, but the face was firmly stuck. They tugged, and suddenly the body fell.
They laid the corpse on its back. The black skin of the cheeks framing the cockscomb of frozen blood had turned a strange powdery gray. Drops of frozen blood clung to the staring eyeballs.
“My God!” one of the Homicide detectives muttered, stepped to the curb an
d vomited.
The others swallowed hard.
Doc got a lamp from his car with a long extension cord and focused the light on the body. He looked at it without emotion.
“That’s death for you,” he said. “She was probably a goodlooking woman.”
No one said anything. Even Haggerty’s tongue had dried up.
“All right, give me a hand,” Doc said. “We got to undress her.”
Grave Digger lifted her shoulders, and Doc peeled off the coat. The other detectives got off her gloves and shoes. Doc cut open the thick black dress with a pair of shears. Underneath she wore only a black uplift bra and lace-trimmed nylon panties. Her limbs were smooth, and well-rounded, but muscular. Falsies came off with the bra, revealing a smooth, flat, mannish chest. Underneath the nylon panties was a heavily padded, yellow satin loincloth.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed exchanged a quick, knowing glance. But the others didn’t get it until the loincloth had been cut and stripped from the hard narrow hips.
“Well, I’ll be God-damned!” the Homicide lieutenant exclaimed. “She’s a man!”
“There ain’t any doubt about that,” Haggerty said, finding his voice at last.
Doc turned the body over. Across the back, at the base of the spine, was a tremendous welt, colored dark grape-purple.
“Well, that’s what did it,” Doc said. “He was struck here by great force and catapulted into the wall.”
“By what, for chrissake?” the lieutenant asked.
“Certainly not by a baseball bat,” Haggerty said.
“My conjecture is that he was hit by an automobile from behind,” Doc ventured. “I couldn’t say positively until after the autopsy; and maybe not then.”
The lieutenant looked from the street to the convent wall. “Frankly, Doc, I don’t believe he was knocked from the street against that wall in the position that we found him,” he said. “Isn’t there a possibility that he was run over and then stuck up there afterwards?”
Doc made a bundle of the clothes, covered the body with its coat and stood up.
“Everything is possible,” he said. “If you can imagine a driver running over him, then stopping his car and getting out and propping the body against the wall, and pushing its face into that crevice until it was stuck, then-”
The lieutenant cut him off. “Well, goddammit, I can imagine that better than I can imagine the body being knocked up there from the street, no matter what hit it. Besides which, people have been known to do things worse than that.”
Doc patted him on the shoulder, smiling indulgently. “Don’t try to make your job any harder than it is,” he said. “Look for a hit-and-run driver, and leave the maniacs to Bellevue’s psychiatrists.”
Chapter 7
It was past two o’clock Sunday morning. Sand-fine sleet was peppering the windshield of the small black sedan as it hustled down the East Side Drive. There was just enough heat from the defroster to make the windshield sticky, and a coating of ice was forming across Grave Digger’s vision.
“This heater only works in the blazing hot summer,” he complained. “In this kind of weather it just makes ice.”
“Turn it off,” Coffin Ed said.
The car skidded on a glazed spot on the asphalt, and from the back seat Detective Tombs from Homicide Bureau yelled, “Watch it, man! Can’t you drive without skidding?”
Grave Digger chuckled. “You work with murder every day, and here you are-scared of getting scratched.”
“I just don’t want to wind up in East River with a car on my back,” Tombs said.
The witness giggled.
That settled it. Conversation ceased. They didn’t want outsiders horning in on their own private horseplay.
When they drew up before the morgue downtown on 29th Street, they all looked grim and half-frozen.
An attendant sitting at a desk in the entrance foyer checked them in, recording their names and badge numbers.
The barman from the Paris Bar gave his name as Alfonso Marcus and his address as 217 Formosa Street, Yonkers, N.Y.
They walked through corridors and downstairs to the “cold room.” Another attendant opened a door and turned on a switch.
He grinned. “A little chilly, eh?” he said, getting off his standard joke.
“You ain’t been outside, son,” Coffin Ed said.
“We want to see the victim of a hit-and-run driver from Harlem,” Grave Digger said.
“Oh yes, the colored man,” the attendant said.
He led them down the long, bare room, lit by cold, white light, and glanced at a card on what looked like the drawer of a huge filing cabinet.
“Unidentified,” he said, pulling out the drawer.
It rolled out smoothly and soundlessly. He removed a coarse white sheet covering the body.
“It hasn’t been autopsied yet,” he said, adding with a grin, “got to take its turn like everybody else. It’s been a busy night-two asphyxiations from Brooklyn; one ice pick stabbing, also from Brooklyn; three poisonings, one by lye-”
Grave Digger cut him off. “You’re holding us spellbound.”
Coffin Ed took the bartender by the arm and shoved him close.
“My God,” the bartender whimpered, covering his face with his hands.
“Look at it, goddammit!” Coffin Ed flared. “What the hell you think we brought you down here for-to start gagging at sight of a stiff?”
Despite his horror, the bartender giggled.
Grave Digger reached over and pulled his hands from his face.
“Who is he?” he asked in a flat, emotionless voice.
“Oh, I couldn’t say.” The bartender looked as though he might burst out crying. “Jesus Christ in heaven, look at his face.”
“Who is he?” Grave Digger repeated flatly.
“How can I tell? I can’t see his face. It’s all covered with blood.”
“If you come back in an hour or two they’ll have it all cleaned up,” the morgue attendant said.
Grave Digger gripped the bartender by the back of his neck and pushed his head toward the nude body.
“Goddammit, you don’t need to see his face to recognize him,” he said. “Who is he? And I ain’t going to ask you no more.”
“He’s Black Beauty,” the bartender whispered. “What’s left of him.”
Grave Digger released him and let him straighten up.
The bartender shuddered.
“Get yourself together,” Grave Digger said.
The bartender looked at him from big, pleading eyes.
“What’s his square moniker?” Grave Digger asked.
The bartender shook his head.
“I’m giving you a chance,” Grave Digger told him.
“I really don’t know,” the bartender said.
“The hell you don’t!”
“No, sir, I swear. If I knew I’d tell you.”
The morgue attendant looked at the bartender with compassion. He turned toward Grave Digger and said indignantly, “You can’t third-degree a prisoner in here.”
“You can’t help him,” Grave Digger replied. “Even if you are a member of the club.”
“What club?”
“Let’s take him out of here,” Coffin Ed said.
Detective Tombs listened to the byplay with fascination.
They took the witness outside to their car and put him in the back seat beside Detective Tombs.
“Who’s Mister Baron?” Grave Digger asked.
The bartender turned pleadingly to the white detective. “If I knew, sir, I’d tell them.”
“Don’t appeal to me,” Tombs said. “Half of this is Greek to me.”
“Listen, son,” Coffin Ed said to the bartender. “Don’t make it hard on yourself.”
“But I just know these people from the bar, sir,” the bartender contended. “I don’t know what they do.”
“It’s going to be just too bad,” Grave Digger said. “What you don’t know is going to hang you.�
��
Again the bartender appealed to the white detective. “Please, sir, I don't want to get mixed up in all this bad business. I’ve got a wife and family.”
The windows of the small, crowded car had steamed over. The face of the detective couldn’t be seen, but his embarrassment was tangible. “Don’t cry to me,” he said harshly. “I didn’t tell you to get married.”
Suddenly the bartender giggled. Emotions exploded. The white detective cursed. Grave Digger banged the metal edge of his hand against the steering wheel. The muscles in Coffin Ed’s face jumped like salt on a fresh wound as he reached across the back of the seat and double-slapped the bartender with his left hand.
Grave Digger rolled down a window.
“We need some air in here,” he said.
The bartender began to cry.
“Give me a fill-in,” the white detective said.
“The one who got killed in the heist and the one we just saw are newlyweds,” Grave Digger said. “This one-” He nodded toward the bartender-“is Snake Hips’ used-to-be.”
“How did you dig that?”
“Just guessing. They’re all just one big club. But you got to know it. It’s like when I was in Paris at the end of the war. All of us colored soldiers, no matter what rank or from what army or division, belonged to the same set. We all hung out at the same joints, ate the same food, told the same jokes, laid the same poules. There wasn’t anything that one of us could do that the whole God-damned shooting party didn’t know about.”
“I see what you mean. But what’s the angle here?”
“We haven’t guessed that far,” Grave Digger admitted. “Probably none. We’re just trying to get all these people in position. And this one is going to help us. Or he’s going to get something even he can’t handle.”
“Not before I get done with him,” the detective said. “My boss man wants him to look at some pictures in the gallery. Maybe he can identify the heistmen-one of them at least.”
“How long do you think that will take?” Coffin Ed asked.
“A few hours, maybe, or a few days. We can’t employ your techniques; all we can do is keep him looking until he goes blind.”
Grave Digger mashed the starter. “We’ll take you down to Centre Street.”
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