“Okay, daddy, I got you covered,” Joe said. “Don’t do nothing I wouldn’t do.”
“It’s made then,” Casper said. “I’ll see you in church.”
When the connection was broken, he began dialing another number without putting down the receiver.
A proper male voice said, “H. Exodus Clay’s Funeral Parlor. Good afternoon. May we be of service to you?”
“I don’t want to be buried, if that’s what you mean,” Casper said. “Just let me speak to Clay.”
“Mr. Clay is resting; he’s having his customary after-noon nap. Perhaps I can help you.”
“Wake him up,” Casper said. “This is Casper Holmes.”
“Oh, Mister Holmes. Yes sir, right away, sir.”
A few moments later Clay’s thin, querulous voice came over the wire, “Casper. I was hoping to do some business with you.”
“You are, Hank, but not the kind you want.” Only a few people in Harlem knew that the H in Clay’s name stood for Henry; most people thought it stood for either Heaven or Hell. “I want to hire a hearse.”
“For yourself, or for a friend?”
“For myself.”
“The reason I asked, I have three hearses now. I use the old one for poor folks, the middle one for rich and the new one for celebrities. I’ll give you the new one.”
“Naw, give me the middle-newest. I don’t want to attract any attention to myself. I want to slip away from this hospital without anybody seeing me. And let Jackson drive it; nobody going to look at him twice.”
“Jackson!” Clay echoed. “Listen, Casper, I don’t want any shenanigans with my hearse. I never will forget the time Jackson was running all over town dodging the police with my hearse full of dead bodies.”
“What are you beefing about?” Casper said. “He made you a lot of business.”
“I’d rather get my business in the normal way; I’m not expecting a depression.”
“All right, Hank, have it your way. I just want to get this hearse over here at the back door at seven-thirty sharp.”
“The streets will be snowed under by that time,” Clay complained. “Can’t you make it earlier, or wait another day?”
“Naw. Just put some chains on it. And there’s going to be some boys of Joe Green’s following it. So don’t let that worry you.”
“Boys of Joe Green’s!” Gay exclaimed apprehensively. “Listen, Casper, if anything happens to my hearse, I’m going to bill the national party for it.”
“Okay, you do that. And tell Jackson to drive me first to my office on One-twenty-fifth Street.”
“Tell him yourself,” Clay said, losing interest and already drifting back to sleep.
Casper cradled the receiver and picked up his wrist watch from the night stand. It was thirteen minutes past five o’clock. He peered between the drawn curtains at the drifting snow. Everything that met his eye was white, except the gray sky. He selected a cigar, clipped it carefully, stuck one end between his lips and rolled it about. Then, he put it down on the edge of the night stand, picked up the receiver again and began dialing.
“Do you want an outside line?” the operator asked.
“What the hell do you think I’m dialing for,” he said.
He waited for the dial tone and began over. He heard the phone ringing at the other end.
A cool, contralto voice said, “Yes.”
“Leila. Casper,” he said.
“How are you, sugar,” she said in the same tone that she had said yes.
“Listen, I’ll be home around eight o’clock,” he said. His voice was as impersonal as hers. “I want you to stay there until after I get there-or say until nine o’clock. Then you can go wherever in the hell you want to. Understand?”
“I’m not deaf.”
“Naw, but you’re dumb sometimes.”
“That blow on your head hasn’t changed your disposition,” she observed.
“If anybody phones me, tell them I’m still in the hospital and won’t be home until Tuesday. Tell them I’ve had a relapse and am in a coma again. Get that?”
“Yes, sugar, I got it.” Under her breath she added, “And I’m going to keep it, too.”
“What’s that?”
“I didn’t say anything. Somebody must be talking on your end.”
“All right. And for once keep your lip buttoned up.”
“Is that all?”
He put down the receiver and reached for his cigar. Before he could pick it up, the phone rang. He picked up the receiver again.
“What is it?”
“Washington, D.C. calling,” the operator said “A Mister Grover Leighton. Shall I put him through?”
“Yes.”
Grover’s sunshiny, glad-handing Pennsylvania voice came on. “Casper. How are you?”
“Fine. Just resting. It’s all I can do at the moment.”
“That’s the thing to do. Just keep it up. We’ve all been worried about you.”
“Nothing to worry about. You can’t hurt an old dog like me.” Casper’s voice had taken on a subtle obsequious quality.
“That’s what I told them,” Grover said cheerfully. “And don’t you worry, either. We’ll come through again soon with the same score.”
“Oh, I’m not worrying about that,” Casper said. “But some of the city brass here have been making it a little rough.”
“For you?” Grover sounded slightly shocked. “Why so?”
“They’re trying to figure out how the hoods got the tipoff,” Casper said. “And the chief inspector claims that you told him that you had told me sometime early last week that you were stopping by last night with the payroll.”
There was a pause as though Grover was trying to remember. “Well, I guess I did tell him something like that,” he said finally. “But I thought I told you about it Wednesday, or was it Thursday, when we talked on the phone about the precinct units.”
“Listen, Grover, I want you to think, try to remember. Because I’m sure you didn’t tell me then. You might forget a thing like that, but I wouldn’t. All I’ve got to think of is my little group in Harlem, while you’ve got the whole country on your mind. And I’m sure I wouldn’t have forgotten your telling me that, because that’s what starts the cart to rolling.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Grover conceded. “It was in my mind to tell you, but it must have slipped. But that’s not important, is it?”
“Not to you and me; but the brass here are insinuating that the leak came from me.”
“My God!” Grover sounded really shocked. “They must be crazy. They’re not trying to push you around, are they?”
“Naw, it’s not that. But I don’t like all the innuendo, especially at the beginning of a campaign.”
“You’re right. I’ll telephone the chief inspector and put an end to that. And when they’re arrested we’ll find out where they got their information. But I telephoned you about another matter. I have asked the Pinkerton Agency in New York to keep an eye on you; we don’t want a duplication of this business, and we certainly don’t want anything to happen to you. And they are involved now also, since they lost one of their men.”
“You know I’ll co-operate, Grover. Be glad to. It’s as much to my interest as to anyone’s.”
“That’s what I told them. I asked them to arrange for an ambulance with a guard to take you home when you leave there-unless, of course, you have arranged something else.”
“Naw, I haven’t made any arrangements,” Casper said. “That suits me fine. One of the men phoned from the agency, said you had spoken to them. I told him I’d let him know in advance when I planned to leave.”
“Well, then, it’s all settled.” Grover sounded relieved. “Take care of yourself, Casper. We don’t want anything to happen to you. The Harlem vote is going to be mighty important in this coming election. It might mean the balance that will swing the whole state of New York in our favor.”
“I’m going to take damn good care of mys
elf from now on,” Casper said.
Grover laughed. “Good fellow! Let us know if there is anything we can do for you.”
“Nothing at the moment, Grover. Thanks for everything.”
“Don’t mention it. We’ll be thanking you before it’s done with.”
When they had hung up, Casper lit his cigar and sat smoking it slowly, looking thoughtful.
“It’s in the fire now,” he said to no one, and picked up the receiver again.
“Give me a line, honey,” he said.
He dialed a downtown number.
“Now who can this be?” a voice of indeterminate gender asked with an affected lisp.
“Let me speak to Johnny.”
“Oh, and not with me?”
Casper didn’t answer.
“And who shall I tell him is calling, dear?”
“None of your God-damned business.”
“Oh! You’re rude!”
He heard the receiver dropped on a table-top. After what seemed to him much longer than was necessary, a pleasant male tenor voice said, “Hello, Casper, it couldn’t be anybody but you who’d be so unkind to Zog.”
“I’m going home around eight o’clock,” Casper said “I want you to come up later.”
“I knew they couldn’t hurt you,” Johnny said, and then “How much later?”
“Around ten o’clock. Use your own key and come on in.”
“Will do,” Johnny said.
When Johnny had hung up, Casper jiggled the hook and asked the operator to have the supervising nurse come up to his room.
Chapter 16
It was past four o’clock when Grave Digger and Coffin Ed got away from Fats’s Down Home Restaurant-just about the time Casper had got finished with the brass.
They hadn’t intended to stay that long. But the place was filled with gamblers and whorehouse madams, all curious about the Casper caper, and they had been fishing themselves, to see what they could pick up about any new jokers in town on a kick binge.
The gamblers hadn’t run across any fresh money; if they had, they wouldn’t admit it. The madams hadn’t come across any mew customers, not with big money, anyway.
“If I had,” one madam confessed, “I’d have handcuffed each of ’em to two girls, and foot-chained ’em to the bed, bad as I need money.”
Pee Wee, the giant black bartender, had fixed them some hot bourbon teas to stave off grippe and pneumonia. Before they had a chance to test what those potent drinks might stave off, they were clutched in the throes of tremendous appetites.
Then Fats had appeared, looking like the scalded and scraped carcass of a hippopotamus, and said he was taking a Smithfield ham out of the oven. That did it.
They ate baked ham and sweet potatoes while Grave Digger held everybody entranced giving a detailed account of the joker getting his head cut off.
By the time they got back outside, they were both willing to believe the gremlins had done it.
The snow was drifting down like endless fields of cotton, and the street was covered an inch thick. Their wreck of a car, sitting at the curb, looked like an abandoned derelict. They hadn’t got to the precinct station as yet.
Grave Digger took hold of Coffin Ed’s sleeve and detained him for a discussion on criminology.
“Take a detective,” he said. “Like you and me. A man gets robbed in the street. The robber taps his victim on the head, knocks him unconscious and runs. Ain’t nobody seen him; the victim don’t know him. Then we come up. We don’t know a damn thing. Don’t even know the man’s been robbed. All we got is his word for it. But everybody expects us to run off and nab the criminals as if we got a robber’s preserve.”
“Maybe they expect us to crawl along and sniff them out, like human bloodhounds,” Coffin Ed said. “Maybe they think we got the nose for it.”
“That Casper,” Grave Digger said. “He got more twists in him than a barrel full of snakes.”
They got into the car. Normally at that hour it would have been dark, but the blanket of snow seemed to illuminate the streets. The few cars out were crawling along like snails, leaving black lines on the white blanket.
“Two bull alligators like you and me ain’t going to catch anything in that goldfish bowl downtown,” Coffin Ed stated. “We’re just going to scare the living hell out of everybody and get the deep freeze for our effort.”
“We’ll bait the hook,” Grave Digger suggested.
“I was thinking the same thing.”
Captain Rice was on duty in the precinct station. They asked his permission to take the prisoner along to identify Baron in case they unearthed him. The captain said a Homicide detective had taken Roman Hill down to the Bureau of Criminal Identification at Headquarters, but he gave them an order to pick him up. He was still a precinct prisoner until he appeared before magistrate’s court the next morning. They changed over to Coffin Ed’s new Plymouth and went down the East Side Drive. Coffin Ed took the wheel; he didn’t mind riding with Grave Digger in a city-owned car, but he had paid his own money for the Plymouth.
The small tractor-type snowplows were already at work on the main arteries, scurrying about like orange bugs, piling the snow along the curbs for the trucks to pick up and dump into the river.
The tires sang in the coating of snow, and the windshield wipers clicked back and forth.
They talked about the blizzard of 1949, when city traffic had been paralyzed by thirty-nine inches of snow.
Off to their left, unseen tugboats with green and red lights, barely discernible through the white curtain, raised a cacophony of foghorns. The lights of the petroleum companies across the East River were blanked out.
A ferryboat was docked at the 79th Street pier when they passed, unloading day workers from Welfare Island.
“Damn, this day is moving,” Grave Digger remarked.
They began feeling the pressure of time. A slow buildup of apprehension sobered them.
Coffin Ed stepped on the gas.
They found Roman in the Gallery on the first floor of Headquarters on Centre Street.
Headquarters, and the Annex across the street, were the only lighted buildings in the area. Skyscrapers in the adjacent Wall Street district loomed dark and ghostly against the bottomless gray sky.
They gave the Homicide detective Captain Rice’s order and took the prisoner. He looked scarcely the worse for the headwhipping he had taken; just a mass of unnoticeable clotted wounds in his thick curly hair.
“Do you want the other one, too?” the detective asked. “The bartender from the Paris Bar?”
“You still got him?”
“Got him and going to keep him until he looks at every picture on record-unless you want him.”
“You keep him,” Grave Digger said. “Nothing we can do with him.”
They handcuffed Roman and took him out to the Plymouth. Coffin Ed had left the motor running and the windshield wipers working. But he had to brush the snow from all the windows before he could move on.
They went a couple of blocks beyond Headquarters and stopped.
“You got a sailor suit?” Coffin Ed asked.
“Yeah, but I don’t wear it,” Roman said.
“Where is it?”
“It’s aboard ship.”
“All right, we’re going over to Brooklyn to get it, and you’re going to put it on,” Coffin Ed said, easing the car off slowly through the snow.
When the telephone rang again, Leila Holmes thought it was Casper calling back.
“Yes.” She sounded cold enough to make icicles.
“Leave me talk with Casper,” a man’s voice said.
The hand holding the receiver began to tremble. She thought she recognized the voice, but she wasn’t certain.
“He’s still in the hospital,” she said, a sudden indeterminable fear making her voice sound parrotlike. “He’s had a relapse; he’s in a coma.”
“Can the bull,” the voice said. “That li’l lick on a booger’s head ain’t putt
ing him in no coma.”
She felt certain of it now. It was a Southern voice with a Mississippi accent. It was a white man’s voice.
She began trembling all over, her breasts moving in the jersey-silk pullover like molded Jell-O.
“Telephone the hospital if you don’t believe me,” she said, furious with herself for sounding defensive, but she couldn’t help it. She was scared witless. There was something sadistic and inhuman about the voice. “He is in a coma,” she contended.
“If he wants any of his fifty G’s back, he better come out of it,” the voice said. “And nigger-quick.”
The use of the epithet steadied her fear and scalded her with rage. “Who are you, you mother-raping peckerwood,” she flared.
An evil chuckle came over the wire. “I’m the man who can help him get his money back-for a split,” the voice said.
She tried to think, but she didn’t know where to start. “You’d better call Casper at the hospital,” she said.
“You call him, sugar pie. I’ve called six times and can’t get through to him. So you do it, honey chile.”
“What shall I tell him?” she asked, then added viciously, “Redneck.”
“I’ll make your li’l neck red if I get hold of you,” the voice said, then added, “just tell him what I told you, and if he wants to do business, he better take my call.”
She remembered what Casper had told her about keeping her lip buttoned up. If she did the wrong thing, he’d be furious. She didn’t know what to do.
“It can keep, can’t it?” she said.
“Keep until when?”
“Until he gets out the hospital.”
“When will that be?”
“When?” She felt trapped. “I don’t know when. Ask at the hospital.”
“You ain’t doing him no good, baby doll,” the voice taunted. “He ain’t going to like it when he finds out what he’s missed.”
“All right, sonofabitch!” she flared. “I’ll call him and you call me back.”
“What good is that going to do? I got to do business with him. And it ain’t going to keep. If Casper wants to lie in the hospital with his head underneath the pillow, that’s just going to be his bad luck. And I’ll figure out some other way to get my split.”
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