He got out, went around, opened the back of the hearse and began dragging out a long wicker basket. Two grinning colored attendants came from within the hospital and took the wicker basket inside with them.
Jackson got back into the driver’s seat and waited. He listened to an argument going on inside.
“You can’t come back here and poke your nose into these dead baskets,” an indignant voice was saying.
“Why not,” a laconic voice replied. “It’s a city hospital, ain’t it?”
“I’ll get the supervisor,” the first voice threatened.
“All right, I’ll go,” the laconic voice acceded. “I wasn’t looking for anyone; I was just curious as to how many people die in this joint during an average day.”
“More than you think,” the first voice said.
Eight minutes passed before the attendants reappeared, staggering beneath the weight of the loaded wicker basket. The lid was sealed with a metal clamp, to which was attached a name-card in a metal frame:
CLEFUS HARPER-male Negro
FOR: H. Exodus Clay Funeral Parlor
134th Street
They slid the basket into the coffin compartment and started to shut the doors.
“Let me do it,” Jackson said.
The attendants grinned and re-entered the hospital.
“Where you want to go, Mister Holmes?” Jackson asked in a stage whisper.
“We’re alone?” Casper asked in a low voice from within the basket.
“Yes, sir.”
“Joe Green’s boys are following in the Cadillac?”
“Yes, sir, they’s waiting outside in the street.”
“No one knows they’re tailing us?”
“No, sir, not as far as I know of. They’s keeping about a half a block behind.”
“Okay. Then drive me to my office on 125th Street. You know where that is?”
“Yes, sir, up over the Paris Bar.”
“Double-park somewhere close,” Casper instructed. “Then get out and come back and open the basket. Then stand there as if you’re doing something and watch the street. When it’s safe for me to get out without being seen, give me the word. You got that?”
“Yessir.”
“All right, let’s go.”
Jackson closed the back door and climbed back into the driver’s seat. The hearse purred slowly up the driveway.
Before reaching the street it was stopped again by newspaper reporters. They looked at the name tag on the basket. One of them made a note of it. The others didn’t bother.
The hearse turned toward 125th Street. Half a block distant it passed Joe Green’s black Cadillac limousine. Jackson glanced at the Cadillac. It looked unoccupied He began to worry. He drove slowly, watching it in his right-side fender mirror. When he had gone another half block, the Cadillac’s bright lights blinked once and went off. He was relieved. He blinked his own lights in reply and kept driving slowly until he had made the turn into 125th Street and saw the black Cadillac make the turn half a block behind him.
He crossed Park, Madison, Lenox, keeping to the right, letting the fast traffic pass him.
At Seventh Avenue he waited for a snowplow to pass, pulled around a dump truck, parked in front of the clock, that was being loaded by a gang of well-liquored men. They stopped and watched the hearse cross the avenue.
“Somebody going by way of H. Clay,” one of them remarked.
“Don’t ask who it is,” another replied. “It might be your mammy.”
“Don’t I know it,” the first one replied.
A Cadillac limousine pulled around the truck in the wake of the hearse and carefully crossed the avenue.
“That’s Joe Green’s big Cat,” a third laborer stated.
“Warn’t his men in it,” another replied.
“How you know? You running Joe’s business?”
“Most generally he got George Drake driving and Big Six sitting in the front.”
“Warn’t Joe in the back, neither.”
“Come on, you sports, and bend your backs,” the truck driver said. “You ain’t getting paid to second-guess Joe Green.”
The hearse double-parked beside a Ford station wagon in front of the drugstore adjacent to the Paris Bar. The drugstore was open for business, and a few customers were moving about inside. The Paris Bar seemed crowded as usual. Its plate-glass windows were steamed over, and from within came the muted sound of a jump tune issuing from the juke box.
The Cadillac double-parked at the corner in front of the United Cigar Store.
Jackson got out on the driver’s side, came around the front of the hearse and looked up and down the street. A couple of men issued from the Paris Bar, glanced at the hearse and went the other way.
Jackson went to the back, opened the doors and cut the metal seal on the wicker basket with his pocket-knife.
Casper lay in the basket, fully dressed except for a hat. He wore the same dark clothes he had worn into the hospital. A soft black hat with the crown crushed in lay atop his stomach.
“Want me to help you up?” Jackson asked in a whisper.
“I can get up,” Casper said roughly. “Close the doors and watch the street.”
Jackson left the doors slightly ajar and looked one way and the other and then across the street. Cars passed in the street, a bus went by; people came and went along the sidewalks, trampling the deep snow into slush.
“Where’s Joe’s car parked?” Casper asked from the crack between the doors.
Jackson jumped. He wasn’t used to people talking to him from the back of the hearse. He looked down the street and said, “In front of the Cigar Store.”
“When you leave, give ’em a blink,” Casper instructed. “How is it now?”
For a moment there was no one nearby; no one seemed to be looking in that direction.
“All right, if you come fast,” Jackson said.
Casper came fast. He was down on the street in one jump, the black hat pulled low over his silver white hair. He cleared the back end of the station wagon in two strides, leaped over the snow banked along the curb, slipped in the slush but caught himself, and the next instant was close to the doorway of the stairs leading to his offices above. His back was to the street as he inserted the key in the lock; no one had noticed him jump from the hearse; no one had recognized him; no one was paying him the least bit of attention. He got the door open and went inside, turned once and glanced at Jackson through the upper glass panel, signaled him to go on.
Jackson got back into the driver’s seat, blinked his bright lights and looked into the rear-view mirror.
The Cadillac’s bright lights blinked in reply.
The hearse drove slowly away.
The Cadillac pulled up and double-parked in the same position beside the station wagon.
“What you going to do with this heap?” the driver asked.
“Leave it right here, with the motor running,” the white man said. “If Joe Green’s a big shot, which he’s gotta be, ain’t nobody going to bother with it.”
He took his short-barreled police special from his right overcoat pocket, held it in his lap and spun the chamber, then put it back into his pocket.
“I’ll go first,” he said.
He got out and crossed the sidewalk, side-stepped two men and a woman and tried the handle to the door.
The two colored men closed in behind him.
The handle turned; the door opened.
“He made it easy for us,” the white man said, and started up the stairs, keeping close to the edges and walking on the balls of his feet.
The colored men followed.
“Lock the door behind you,” the white man whispered over his shoulder.
Chapter 18
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed sat in the car with the lights off on 19th Street, and waited. The motor was idling and the windshield wipers working.
Snow drifted down. The superintendents of the swank high-rent apartment houses flanking the private reside
nces had their helpers out cleaning the sidewalks. Snowplows had already passed. The streets in this neighborhood were kept clean.
“I got a feeling we’re missing something,” Grave Digger lisped.
“Me, too,” Coffin Ed agreed. “But we got to have somewhere to start.”
“Maybe the sailor boy will hit it.”
Coffin Ed looked at his watch.
“It’s a quarter past seven. He’s had ten minutes. If he hasn’t hit it by now, he ain’t never going to hit it.”
“Blow for him then.”
Coffin Ed touched the horn, giving the prearranged signal. They watched in the rear-view mirrors.
Roman came out. Someone stood out of sight in the open door, watching him. He put his hat on the back of his head and started along the street.
When he came level, Grave Digger reached back, opened the door and said, “Get in.”
A head came out of the open door, peered briefly and then withdrew. The door closed.
“What did you make out of it?” Coffin Ed asked.
“Whew!” Roman blew. A film of sweat shone on his smooth tan skin. “Nobody knew Mister Baron,” he said. “Leastwise they all said they didn’t.” He blew again. “Jesus Godamighty!” he exclaimed. “Them people! And they’s rich. And educated, too!”
“They knocked you out, eh?” Coffin Ed said absently.
He and Grave Digger stared at one another.
“We’d better stop by the hospital again,” Coffin Ed suggested. He sounded dispirited and perplexed.
“We’re losing time,” Grave Digger said. “We had better phone.”
Coffin Ed drove around Gramercy Square and stopped in front of a quiet, discreet-looking bar on Lexington. He got out and went inside.
Well-dressed white people were drinking aperitifs in a dim-lighted atmosphere of gold-lined wickedness. Coffin Ed fitted like Father Divine in the Vatican. He didn’t let it bother him.
The bartender informed him with a blank face that they didn’t have a phone. Bar customers on high stools looked at him covertly.
Coffin Ed flashed his shield. “Do that once more and you’re out of business,” he said.
Without a change of expression the bartender said, “In the rear to the right.”
Coffin Ed restrained the impulse to yank him over the bar and hurried back to the telephone booth. A man was coming out; one was waiting to enter. Coffin Ed flashed his shield again and claimed priority.
He got the reception desk at the hospital.
“Mister Holmes is resting and cannot be disturbed,” the cool voice said with a positive accent.
“This is Precinct Detective Edward Johnson on a matter of police business of an urgent nature,” Coffin Ed said.
“I’ll switch you to the supervisor,” the reception nurse said.
The supervising nurse was patient and polite. She said that Mr. Holmes was not feeling well and could not for any reason be disturbed at that time; he had postponed his scheduled press conference until ten o’clock, and the doctor had given him a sedative.
“I can’t say that I believe it, but what can I do?” Coffin, Ed said angrily.
“Precisely,” the supervisor said and hung up.
He phoned Casper’s house. Mrs. Holmes answered. He identified himself. She waited.
“Have you been in contact with Casper?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“He telephoned this afternoon.”
“Not during the past hour?”
“No.”
“Might I ask when he is expected home?”
“He said that he will come home Tuesday evening-if there are no complications.”
He thanked her, hung up and went back to the car.
“I don’t like this,” Grave Digger said.
Coffin Ed drove up Lexington Avenue, going fast, and turned over to Park Avenue at 35th Street, where the traffic moved faster. He skirted Grand Central Station on the upper ramp, skidding on the sharp corners and causing taxi drivers to shout at him.
“If I know Casper he’d get the hell out of that hospital as soon as he could,” he half muttered as he accelerated up the slope toward 50th Street.
“Unless he’s hiding,” Grave Digger offered.
From the back seat Roman said, “If you-all are talking about Mister Holmes, he done already left the hospital.”
The car slewed about and just missed a Lincoln limousine highballing in the middle lane. Coffin Ed pulled over to the curb, easing between two fast-moving cars, and parked at the corner of 51st Street He joined Grave Digger in staring at Roman.
“Leastwise, that’s what them people were saying in that house back there,” Roman added defensively. “He’d phoned one of ’em from the hospital and said he’d be home by eight o’clock-one named Johnny.”
“It’s thirteen minutes to eight now,” Coffin Ed said, looking at his watch. “I’d like to have that supervisor-”
“He fixed her; you know Casper,” Grave Digger said absently.
They were both thinking hard.
“If you were Casper and you wanted to slip out, how would you do it?” Grave Digger asked.
“I ain’t Casper, but I’d hire an ambulance.”
“That’s too obvious. The joint is crawling with newsmen, and, if anybody was laying for him, they’d spot it too.”
“A hearse,” Coffin Ed suggested. “As many people as die in that hospital-”
“Clay!” Grave Digger said, cutting him off.
He looked about; the street was flanked with new skyscraper office buildings and a few remaining impregnable apartment houses.
“We got to get to a phone,” he said, then added on sudden thought, “Drive over to the Seventeenth.”
The 17th Precinct was on 51st Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues. They were there in two minutes.
Coffin Ed telephoned Clay with Grave Digger standing by. They had left Roman handcuffed in the car.
“Clay’s burial home,” came the old man’s querulous voice.
“Clay. Ed Johnson and Digger Jones this end. Did you send a hearse to take Casper home?”
“I’m getting sick and tired of everybody wanting to guard the hearse I sent for Casper,” the old man said tartly. “He already had Joe Green’s boys-as if he couldn’t take care of himself, mean as he is. And besides which he wanted it kept quiet. Then the Pinkertons sent men up-”
“What? The Pinkerton Agency?”
“That’s what they told me. That they were sending three men on orders from-”
“Jesus Christ!” Coffin Ed said, breaking the connection. “Get the Pinkerton Detective Agency,” he asked the switchboard operator.
When he had finished talking, he and Grave Digger looked at one another with as much fear in their eyes as either had ever seen.
“They no doubt got him by now-but why?” Coffin Ed said.
“That ain’t the question now,” Grave Digger lisped. “It’s where?”
“There’s got to be a tie-in,” Coffin Ed said. “We’ve just missed it is all.”
“We got one more card that we can play; we can make like we’re a joker called Bernard Kaufman.”
“We’d need to know his straight moniker.”
“Makes no difference; we can play that one, since it’s all we got to play,” Grave Digger argued, “it might flush Baron into the open.”
Coffin Ed began getting the idea. “You know, it might work at that,” he conceded. “But we’re going to need Roman’s girl friend.”
“Let’s go get her, and let’s hurry. We’ve just about ran out of time.”
They went outside to their car and braced Roman.
“We’re going to set a trap for Baron, son, and we’re going to need your African queen to identify him,” Coffin Ed said.
“I can’t do that,” Roman said. “You-all don’t need her.”
“We want you both, and there isn’t any time to argue about it. A man’s life might dep
end on this, a big man’s life, an important man to us colored people any way you look at it-the way things are set up. If you help us now, we’ll help you later. But if you don’t we’ll crucify you. Have you ever been cold?”
“Yes, sir, lots of times.”
“But not as cold as we’ll make you. We’ll take you over to the river, handcuff your feet together, and let you hang in the water with all that snow they’re dumping from the bridges.”
Roman began to shiver just thinking about it.
Afterwards Coffin Ed admitted it might only have worked on an Alabama boy.
“If I tell you where she’s at, you won’t arrest her, will you?” Roman begged. “She ain’t done nothing.”
“If she helps us catch Baron, we’ll decorate her,” Coffin Ed promised.
They stood in the deserted office of the boathouse beside the lagoon, across from the apartment house in which Casper Holmes lived, using the telephone.
It was cold and damp; an inch-thick coating of ice covered the floor.
Coffin Ed was on the telephone, talking through the fine-tooth end of a gutta-percha comb held tight against the mouthpiece.
“This Bernie,” he said. “Just listen, don’t talk. There’s a police tap on your line. Have Baron get in touch with me immediately.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” a voice said coldly at the other end of the wire.
He hung up.
Grave Digger looked a question.
He shrugged.
Roman and Sassafras, standing to one side and handcuffed together, stared at him as though he had taken leave of his senses.
“If you is trying to imitate the Mister Bernard Kaufman, who stamped that bill of sale Mister Baron gave to Roman, you don’t sound nothing’ like him,” Sassafras said scornfully,
But the detectives had considered this.
“Well, let’s go see if it works,” Grave Digger lisped.
They took the handcuffed couple outside and crossed the sidewalk to Coffin Ed’s Plymouth.
It was parked between two snow-covered cars of indistinguishable make, directly across 110th Street from the entrance to Casper’s apartment house. Nothing about it indicated a police car.
Coffin Ed unlocked it, got in and started the motor and the windshield wipers. Grave Digger got into the front beside him; Roman and Sassafras piled into the back. Roman was still wearing his sailor suit; Sassafras wore the same ensemble she had the day before, with the exception of the red knitted cap, which she had exchanged for a green one.
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