Passing pedestrians, half-blinded by the snow, paid them no attention.
Sassafras leaned close to Roman and whispered conspiratorially, “I ain’t heard yet from my friend.”
She had been in hiding all day and hadn’t learned that her friend with the experience had finally lost his head.
“But as soon as I do-”
“Hush your mouth!” Roman said tensely. “You ain’t going to.”
“Well, I like that!” she exclaimed indignantly and withdrew to the other side.
The Plymouth was pointed toward Fifth Avenue, which bounds Central Park on the east. All Fifth Avenue buses going north turned the corner into 110th Street and branched out toward their various destinations further on. The line’s control office, where the schedules were checked and the personnel changed, was directly around the corner on the north side of 110th Street. Adjacent was a bar, facing the circular square, it contained the nearest public telephone.
Coffin Ed turned about on his seat and said, “Listen, we want you to watch the door across the street. If you see anyone come out that you know-anyone at all-tell us who it is.”
“Yes, sir,” they replied in unison and stared across the street.
A short, fat man came from the apartment. He was wearing a blue chesterfield overcoat, white scarf and a black Homburg. Grave Digger looked from Roman to Sassafras. Neither showed any sign of recognition.
A middle-aged couple came out; a woman with a little girl went in; a tall man in a polo coat rushed out.
Leila Holmes came out. She was wearing dark slacks, black fur-lined boots and a flowing ranch-mink coat. A wheat-colored cashmere scarf was wrapped about her head.
She began walking hurriedly toward the corner of Fifth Avenue.
Coffin Ed pushed the button for drive and eased the Plymouth out into the traffic lane. He drove ahead of the hurrying woman on the other side of the street and slowed down.
A street lamp spilled a circle of white light on the white snow.
When Leila came into the circle of light, Sassafras exclaimed, “There’s Mister Baron!”
Roman stiffened, leaned forward peering; his eyes popped. “Where?”
“Across the street!” Sassafras cried in her high keeping voice. “In that fur coat! That’s him!”
“That’s a woman!” Roman shouted. “Has you gone crazy?”
“’Course he’s a woman.” Sassafras shrieked in an outraged voice. “I’d know that bitch anywhere.”
Coffin. Ed had already pulled ahead and was making a U-turn to head Leila off.
“Goddammit, girl, why didn’t you tell me!” Roman raved in a popeyed fury.
“You think I was going to tell you he was a woman?” Sassafras said triumphantly.
The Plymouth had drawn abreast of Leila. Grave Digger got out, stepped over the snowbank and passed between two parked cars. Leila didn’t see him until he took her by the arm.
Her face jerked up, tight with panic; her big brown eyes were pools of fear. Her smooth brown skin had turned powdery gray.
Then she recognized him. “Get your dirty hands off me, you stinking cop!” she screamed in a sudden rage and tried to jerk her arm free from his grip.
“Let’s get into the car, Mister Baron,” Grave Digger lisped in a cottony voice. “Or I’ll slap you down right here in the street.”
Blood surging to her face had given it the bright painted look of an Indian’s. Her eyes had slitted like a cat’s and glittered with animal fury. But she ceased to fight. She merely said in a strangled voice, “Play tough, buster; I’ll have Casper break you for this.”
“Casper ain’t going to live that long, unless we find him quick,” he lisped.
“Oh God!” she said with a moan and went limp.
He had practically to carry her to the waiting car. Coffin Ed opened the front door, and they installed her between them on the front seat.
“How did you make me?” she asked.
“It figures,” Coffin Ed explained. “You had to be a woman or you’d be in the clique. And no one in the clique knew you.”
“They only knew Casper,” she said bitterly.
Grave Digger looked at his watch. “It’s nineteen minutes past eight,” he lisped. “Our only chance rides on how tough Casper is; and how much you’re going to tell us; and how fast you’re going to tell it.”
She began to bridle. “I wasn’t in with it, if that’s what you think-”
“Save it,” Coffin Ed grated.
“I just guessed it,” she said. “I recognized the white man when they stopped us, after they’d run down Junior. I don’t know why-”
“That can wait.”
“I’d seen him talking to Casper Friday morning. I knew he was a stranger. Then I remembered Casper putting in a long-distance phone call to Indianapolis on Thursday night, right after he’d got the phone call from Grover Leighton. I wondered at the time what he was up to-”
Grave Digger exploded. “For chrissakes, get to the point!”
“Then when I found out they were the same ones who had robbed Casper, I knew he had hired them to do it.” She took a deep breath, and her face twitched strangely. “Nobody could rob Casper unless he let them do it.”
“It figures,” Coffin Ed admitted.
“But why the snatch? What do they want with him now?”
She sighed. “He probably swung out on them.”
“Double-crossed them?” Coffin Ed sounded slightly startled. “He’d double-cross these dangerous hoods?”
“Why not?” Leila said. “Casper would double-cross his own mother; and he’s not scared of anybody who walks on two feet. He’d double-cross them and then job them. He probably had his brief case stuffed with newspapers when they pulled off that phony heist.”
“They’re going to kill him,” Coffin Ed said.
“Not before they get the money,” Grave Digger amended. “Where would he plant it?” he asked Leila.
“Somewhere in his office building,” she said dully. “He didn’t get to go anywhere else.”
Grave Digger looked at his watch again. It was twenty-four minutes past eight.
The Plymouth was already rolling.
“Hold out, son,” Grave Digger lisped in his cottony voice as he pulled his long-barreled, nickel-plated revolver from its shoulder sling and began checking the cartridges in the cylinder. “We’re coming.”
Chapter 19
“Here goes nothing,” Leila Baron Holmes said to herself.
She took a large ring of keys from her mink-coat pocket and began searching for the one that fitted the lock.
One side of her head and shoulders were highlighted in the upper glass panel by the red light of the neon sign from the Paris Bar next door.
In the pitch darkness at the head of the stairs, a man crouched, watching her. He shifted the. 38 Colt automatic to his left hand, wiped his sweating right palm against his overcoat and renewed his grip on the butt. He sucked his bottom lip and waited.
Leila found the right key and got the door open. She returned the keys to her pocket and groped for the light switch on the wall to the right. Her gloved fingers touched it; she pushed the button, but no lights came on.
“Oh, damn!” she said in a tremulous voice that she had tried vainly to make sound annoyed.
She turned, locked the door behind her and began ascending the stairs. Her body was trembling from head to foot, and she had to force her reluctant feet to make each step.
A strong, nerve-tingling, aphrodisiacal scent of a French perfume preceded her.
The man at the top of the stairs drew back out of sight and waited.
When her foot touched the runner in the corridor, the man put his right forearm about her throat and his left elbow between her shoulder blades and lifted her from the floor, cutting off her wind.
She kicked and beat him futilely with her hands as he carried her down the corridor.
“Cut it out or I’ll break your neck,” he whispered thick
ly, blowing her perfumed hair out of his face.
She stopped fighting and began to squirm.
He stopped before the last door toward the front and kicked softly on the bottom panel.
The upper panel was frosted glass with the words:
Casper Holmes and Associates
Public Relations spelled out in gold letters. But there was no light behind or in front, and the letters were a vague glittering.
The door opened inward abruptly. Nothing but the whites of the eyes of the man inside could be seen. The sound of Leila’s strangled breathing was loud in the pregnant silence.
“What you got?” a whisper asked.
“A woman-can’t you smell her?” the lookout whispered in reply, and stepped into Casper’s reception room, still holding her suspended by the neck.
“What is it?” a Mississippi voice asked from the other room.
“A woman,” the lookout repeated, unconsciously accenting the word.
Leila was rubbing herself seductively against him for all she was worth. Before arriving she had drenched herself in the aphrodisiacal perfume, and its scent, along with his own tongue swelling with lust, was choking him. Her trembling was setting him on fire. He lowered her to her feet and slackened his grip so she could breathe.
Suddenly a light came on in the private office, and the rectangle of a door appeared in the corner.
“Bring her in,” the voice ordered.
The lookout pushed Leila through the doorway; the other man followed.
Her eyes widened in abject terror, and she moaned.
The office was a shambles. Drawers hung open, papers littered the floor, the leather upholstery was slashed, spare clothes from the closet were torn into shreds, the safe in one corner stood open.
A heavy green shade covered the window opening onto the inside airwell, and Venetian blinds were closed tightly over the two front windows.
Street sounds came faintly, muffled by the snow. There was the soft sound of snow falling into the airwell and water running in the drainpipes. No other sounds came from inside. They had the building to themselves.
Casper lay on his back on the dark maroon rug; his legs were spread-eagled, with his ankles lashed to the legs of the desk with halves of an extension cord. He was stripped to his underwear. His arms were twisted behind him so that his hands extended above his shoulder blades and were manacled with a set of handcuffs looped across his throat. He was gagged with his own black silk scarf, tightly twisted and passing through his mouth to a knot behind his head. Blood trickled from his eyelids, seeped steadily from his huge, flaring nostrils, ran from the corners of his mouth and flowed down his cheeks alongside the scarf that gagged him.
The desk lamp had been placed on the floor and focused into his face. It supplied the only light.
His eyes were closed, and he looked near death. But Leila knew intuitively that he was conscious and alert. The knowledge kept her from fainting, but it didn’t help her terror.
The white man knelt beside him with a bloodstained knife pressed tightly against his throat. He had used the knife to slit Casper’s eyelids and jab inside his nostrils and slash his tongue, and he had threatened to use it next to relieve him of his manhood.
His coarse black hair was still plastered to his head, but his nostrils had whitened at the corners. He stared at Leila from black eyes that had the bright enameled look of a snake’s.
“Who’s she?” he asked as though without interest.
“I don’t know, she came up here with her own key.”
“I’m Leila Holmes,” she said in a voice that sounded as though her tongue had stuck to her teeth.
“Casper’s whore,” the white man said, getting to his feet. “Hold her, I’ll stab her.”
Leila whimpered and pushed closer to the lookout for protection. “You’re not going to let that cracker hurt me,” she begged in a tiny terror-stricken voice.
Suddenly, there was a horse of another color.
The black lookout shoved her to one side and drew his. 38 automatic. He didn’t aim it at the white man, but he showed it to him.
“I ain’t going for that,” he muttered.
The white man looked at him without expression.
“Go back and keep watch,” he ordered.
“Door’s locked,” the lookout said.
“Go back anyway.”
The lookout didn’t move. “What you going to do with her?”
“Kill her, goddammit, what you think?” the white man said flatly. “You think I’m going to let her live and send me to the chair?”
“We can use her to make him talk,” the lookout argued.
“You think he’s going to talk to save this whore?”
Leila had inched over to the partition separating the two rooms and now began edging slowly toward the inside window.
“Don’t let him kill me,” she begged in her little-girl’s voice to keep their attention distracted.
Her mouth was open; the tip of her tongue slid across her dry lips to make the red paint glisten. She stuck out her breasts and made her body sway as though her pelvic girdle was equipped with roller bearings. She was playing her sex along with her race for all it was worth; but her big brown eyes were dark pools of terror.
The white man turned his back on the lookout and moved toward her with the knife held in a stabbing position.
The second colored man said, “Wait a minute; he’s going to shoot you.”
The white man halted but kept staring at Leila without turning around. “What’s the matter with you niggers?” he said. “The bitch has got to be silenced; and we ain’t got all night to fool around.”
The word nigger estranged him. Where before they were divided by a woman, now they were separated by race. Neither of the colored men moved or spoke.
Down below in the Paris Bar someone had put a coin in the juke box, and the slow hypnotic beat of an oldtime platter called Bottom Blues came faintly through the floor.
The second colored man decided to act as peacemaker. “Ain’t no need of you two falling out about a woman,” he said. “Let’s consider it.”
“Consider what?” the white man said. His big, sloping shoulders beneath the loose blue coat seemed suspended in motion.
Moving inch by inch, Leila played the lookout with eyes that promised a thousand nights of frenzied love. All of her life she had played sex for kicks; now she was playing it for her life and it didn’t work the same; she felt as sexless as a leg of veal. But everything depended on it, and she forced words through her numb trembling lips.
“Don’t let him kill me, please, I beg of you. I’ll give you money-all the money you want. I’ll be every kind of woman you can think of; just don’t let him-”
“Shut up, whore,” the white man said.
“Let’s talk it over,” the lookout mouthed. Lust was shaking him like electric shocks, half choking him, draining his stomach down into his groin.
“We’ve talked too much already,”. the white man said, moving into Leila and raising the knife.
Leila’s hand flew to her mouth but she didn’t dare scream.
The lookout moved forward and stuck the gun muzzle against the small of the white man’s back, then pulled it back a few inches so it could breathe; it was an automatic, and if he had to shoot it needed air.
The white man got the message. He froze with his hand raised. “You ain’t going to shoot me,” he said. His voice sounded as dangerous as a rattlesnake’s warning.
“Just don’t hurt her is all,” the lookout said in a voice that sounded equally as dangerous:
The second colored man drew his own. 38 police special, holding it down beside him in his left hand.
“This is getting too tight for me,” he said. “I got fifteen grand wrapped up in this deal myself, and if it gets blown away we’re all going to go.”
“Chicken feed,” Leila whispered, holding the lookout with her eyes.
Sweat had filmed on her temples
and upper lip; a vein in the left side of her throat was throbbing. She breathed as though she couldn’t get enough air; her breasts in the jersey-silk pullover were rising and falling like bellows. She was playing a sex pot if there ever was one; but all she wanted in this world was to get to the window, and it seemed like ten thousand miles away.
Unseen by the lookout, the white man turned the knife in his hand and gripped the point.
“This bitch is going to scream any minute,” he said.
The lookout made an offer. “I’ll give you my share for her.”
Leila edged closer to the window. “You won’t lose,” she promised.
Nobody spoke. In the silence the slow, hypnotic beat coming from below repeated itself endlessly, changing instruments for eight-bar solos.
“It’s a deal,” the white man said. “Now get back on the door.”
“I’ll stay here-let Lefty take the door.”
Leila turned her back to the window and groped behind her for the shade. Her fingers found the drawstring.
“Kill him!” she screamed and jerked the string.
Everything happened at once.
The shade flew up and spun at the top in sudden chopping sound like a runaway ratchet wheel.
Leila dropped toward the floor as the white man threw the knife. It caught her in the stomach and went in up to the hilt.
The lookout swung his automatic, searching for a target.
Glass shattered, and the room exploded with the big, hard, head-splitting roar of a high-powered. 38 as Grave Digger, standing on the snow-covered fire escape, shot through the iron window grill and put two slugs less than an inch apart in the gunman’s heart.
Simultaneously, two shots sounded from the corridor; metal broke and wood crashed, and cold air rushed into the room.
The left-handed gunman spun toward the connecting doorway and went through with his pistol down at his left hip in the Hollywood gunslinger’s fashion. He ran into a brace of slugs and came reeling back with two sudden eyes in his forehead, his coat flapping in the hard percussion of sound.
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