With no expression whatsoever in his beetle-browed, brutal face, the white man drew from the shoulder. He was lightning fast.
But Grave Digger had already taken a bead on him with the long nickel-plated barrel resting on an iron crossbar. He put the first one in the white man’s right arm, just above the elbow, and the second one in his left kneecap.
The pistol dropped from the white man’s hand as he pitched to the rug on his face. The pain in his knee was excruciating, but he didn’t make a sound. He was like a wounded tiger, silent, crippled, but still as dangerous a killer as the jungle ever saw. Without looking up, knowing that he didn’t have a chance, he turned over and lunged for his fallen pistol with his left hand.
Coffin Ed came in from the reception room and kicked it out of his reach, then crossed the room and shot the padlock off the window grill.
Grave Digger kicked it in, knocked out the broken window glass with the side of his shoe and came into the room. Snow followed him.
Leila was curled up against the baseboard with her hands gripping the handle of the knife, crying softly and moaning.
Grave Digger knelt down, pulled her hands away gently and handcuffed them behind her back.
“You can’t pull it out,” he said. “That would only kill you.”
Coffin Ed was occupied handcuffing the white man’s good left hand to his good right leg. The white man looked at him without expression.
Finally Casper opened his eyes. The scene was stained red by the blood on his eyeballs.
Coffin Ed undid the gag.
“Get me loose quick,” Casper said thickly, talking through a mouthful of blood.
Grave Digger unlocked the manacles and Coffin Ed freed his legs.
Casper got to his hands and knees and looked about. He saw the manacled white man. Their gazes met. Casper saw the white man’s revolver on the floor beside the desk. He crawled to it bear fashion and picked it up. Everyone was watching him, but no one except the white man expected it. He pumped three slugs into the white man’s head.
Coffin Ed went crazy with rage. He kicked the pistol from Casper’s hand and aimed his own revolver at Casper’s heart.
“God-damned sonofabitch, I’ll kill you!” he raved. “He was ours; he wasn’t yours. You God-damned sonofabitch, we worked all night and all day and took every God-damned rape-fiend risk to get this hoodlum, and you kill him.”
“It was self-defense,” Casper said thickly, blood spattering from his slashed tongue. “You saw the mother-raper trying to shoot me-didn’t you!”
Coffin Ed drew back his pistol as though to club him across the head. “I ought to knock out your God-damned brains and call it an accident,” he raved.
“Easy, Ed, easy man,” Grave Digger cautioned. “You ain’t God either.”
Leila was laughing hysterically. “You knew what kind of man he is when you were risking me and everybody else to save him.”
Grave Digger watched Casper pull to his feet and stagger toward the closet for some clothes to put on.
“Man, does money mean that much to you?” he asked.
“What money?” Casper said.
Down below on 125th Street was a crowd scene. Traffic was stopped. Joe Green’s big black Cadillac limousine sat in a line of cars a block long, the motor running and nobody in it. The sidewalks on both sides of the street were jammed. The Paris Bar and the Palm Cafe and the Apollo Bar had erupted their clients. The three movie houses had been deserted for the bigger attraction.
“Gawwwaheddamnnnn. A shooting every night,” a joker crowed triumphantly. “It’s crazy, man, crazy.”
Prowl cars converged from all directions, weaving in and out of the stopped cars, on the right side and on the wrong side of the street, jumping the curb when necessary to get by. Their sirens were screaming like the souls of the damned; their red lights were blinking like eyes from hell
Cops jumped out, big feet splattering in the ankle-deep slush, went up the stairs like the introduction to the television series called “Gang Busters.”
Their eyes popped at the sight that greeted them.
Coffin Ed was telephoning for an ambulance.
Grave Digger looked up from the floor, where he was kneeling beside Leila Baron, stroking her forehead and consoling her.
“It’s all over but the lying,” he lisped.
Chapter 20
Casper Holmes was back in the hospital.
His eyes and mouth were bandaged; he could not see nor talk. There were tubes up his nostrils, and he had been given enough morphine to knock out a junkie.
But he was still conscious and alert. There was nothing wrong with his ears, and he could write blind.
He was still playing God.
At eleven o’clock that night he held the press conference which he had last scheduled for ten o’clock, against the considered advice of the staff doctors and his own private physician.
His room was packed with reporters and photographers. His chin jutted aggressively. His hands were expressive. He was in his metier.
He had scribbled a statement to the effect that the robbers had evidently been tipped off that he had received another payroll and had attempted a second robbery before getting out of town.
He had equipped himself with a small scratch pad and stylo with which to answer questions.
The questions came hard and fast.
He scribbled the answers, ripped off the pages and flung them toward the foot of the bed.
Question: Were you given a second payoff?
Answer: Hell no.
Question: Where did they get the information?
Answer: Ask a Ouija board.
Question: How did they find out about the first payoff?
Answer: Can’t say.
Question: Why did you slip out of the hospital in a hearse?
Answer: Safety first.
Question: Why did you stop by your office?
Answer: Private reasons.
Question: How did it happen your wife was there?
Answer: I asked her to meet me.
Question: How did detectives Jones and Johnson locate you?
Answer: Ask them.
Question: How do you feel about it all?
Answer: Lucky.
So it went. He didn’t give away a thing.
Afterwards he held a private session with his colored attorney, Frederick Douglas Henderson. He scribbled some instructions:
Get charges against sailor Roman Hill nol-prossed, give him your check for his $6,500 and get him out the country on first ship leaving. Then file claim in his name for the $6,500 found on the white robber’s body. Then I want you to phone Clay and tell him to keep effects of body for me personally. Got all that?
Attorney Henderson read the instructions thoughtfully.
“Whose body?” he asked.
Casper wrote: He’ll know.
When he left, Casper scribbled across a page: Keep your lip buttoned up.
He rang for the nurse and wrote: Get me an envelope.
She returned with the envelope. He folded the note, put it into the envelope and sealed it. He wrote across the face: Mrs. Casper Holmes. He handed it to the nurse.
Leila was in the adjoining room, but the nurse did not deliver the note.
She had been in an oxygen tent, taking plasma transfusions, ever since the operation. It was touch-and-go.
Big Six was in another smaller, cheaper private room, which was being paid for by Joe Green.
He had lapsed into a coma. The knife was still in his head. Orders were to leave it there until an encystment had formed about it in the brain, permitting its removal to be attempted. There was no record of such an operation being successful, and brain specialists all over the country had been alerted to the case.
George Drake’s body was found shortly after midnight by a waiter on his way home from work.
He was the eighth victim taken to the morgue from Harlem that weekend resulting from what later became known as
the Casper caper.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed worked all night in the precinct station, writing their report. They stuck to the bare unadorned facts, omitting all references to Casper’s private affairs and domestic life. Nevertheless, it filled fourteen sheets of foolscap paper.
It snowed all night, and Monday morning there was no letup in sight. The big suction-type snow removers had been put into use at midnight, and the city’s snow crews had worked unceasingly in a slowly losing race against the snow.
At eleven o’clock that morning Roman Hill shipped out on a cargo vessel bound for Rio de Janeiro. He put $6,500 in cash in the captain’s keeping before going to work.
Sassafras saw him off. As she was leaving the docks she met a man who reminded her of him very much. The man had a room in Brooklyn and invited her to a bar nearby to have a drink. She saw no reason why she should go all the way back to Harlem in that snow when you could find the same things in Brooklyn while the snow lasted.
At five minutes before noon two detectives from the Automobile Squad made a strike. They located the golden Cadillac in the showroom of a Cadillac dealer on midtown Broadway. It had been sitting outside the entrance to the service department, covered with snow, when the mechanics had shown up for work that morning.
No one admitted knowing how it had got there. It had been inside with the other demonstrator models when everybody left, and the place was locked eight o’clock Saturday evening.
One of the company’s oldest salesmen, Herman Rose, closely resembled the description that Roman Hill had given of the man posing as Bernard Kaufman, who had notarized the phony bill of sale Mister Baron had given him.
But there were no charges against him and no one to identify him, so nothing could be done.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed were summoned to the Chief Inspector’s office in the Headquarters building on Centre Street shortly after lunch.
The office was filled with Brass, including an assistant D.A. and a special investigator from the Commissioner’s office.
They had been asked why they had attempted to apprehend the robbers single-handed, using Mrs. Holmes as a front, instead of contacting their precinct station and getting instructions from the officer in charge.
“We were trying to save his life,” Coffin Ed replied. “If the block had been surrounded by police, those hoods would have killed him for sure.”
The Chief Inspector nodded. It was a straw-man question anyway.
What the Brass really wanted was their opinion as to Casper’s guilt.
“Who knows?” Grave Digger lisped.
“It hasn’t been proven,” Coffin Ed said. “All we know is what his wife said she guessed.”
“What was her racket?” the Chief Inspector asked.
“We haven’t figured it out,” Coffin Ed admitted. “We got wound up in this other business and we haven’t worked on it.”
The Chief Inspector admitted that a crew of detectives from the Safe, Loft and Truck Squad and two experts from the Pinkerton Detective Agency had searched Casper’s office and the entire office building, and had questioned all of the other tenants and the building superintendent. But they had not turned up the $50,000.
“You men know Harlem, and you know Holmes,” the Chief said. “Where would he hide it?”
“If he’s got it,” Grave Digger lisped.
“That’s the fifty-thousand dollar question,” Coffin Ed said.
“All that I have to say about this business,” the assistant D.A. said, “is that it stinks.”
Now it was Monday night.
The snow crews had lost the race. The city was snowed in.
The customary metropolitan roar was muffled to an eerie silence by sixteen inches of snow.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed were in the captain’s office in the Harlem Precinct station, talking over the case with their friend and superior officer, Lieutenant Anderson.
Grave Digger sat with one ham perched on the edge of the captain’s desk, while Coffin Ed leaned against a corner radiator in the shadow.
“We know he did it,” Grave Digger lisped. “But what can you do?”
Veins throbbed in Anderson’s temples, and his pale-blue eyes looked remote.
“How did you figure the tie-in between Baron’s racket and Casper’s caper?” Anderson asked.
Grave Digger chuckled.
“It was easy,” Coffin Ed said. “There wasn’t any.”
“We were just lucky,” Grave Digger admitted. “It was just like she said; she guessed it.”
“But you uncovered her,” Anderson said.
“That’s where we were lucky,” Coffin Ed replied.
“What was her racket?”
“Maybe we’ll never know for sure, but we figure it like this,” Coffin Ed explained. “Leila Baron knew this salesman, Herman Rose. Casper bought his Cadillac from there. When she met Roman and found out he had saved up sixty-five hundred dollars to buy a car, she got Rose to come in with her and Junior Ball-or Black Beauty if you want to call him that-on a deal to trim him. Rose provided the car; he probably has a key to the place; he’s been there long enough, and he’s trusted. And he also acted as notary public. Then his part was finished. Baron was going to take Roman down that deserted street where Black Beauty, masquerading as an old woman, was going to fake being hit. They had no doubt worked out some way to get the car back from Roman and keep the money, too; we’ll never know exactly unless she tells us. Probably she planned to scare him into leaving the country.
“Anyway, these hoods masqueraded as cops turned into the street as they were making their own getaway in time to see the whole play. They saw the Cadillac knock the old woman down; they saw the old woman getting up. They knew immediately it was a racket, and they decided on the spur of the moment to use it for their own purposes. They could get another car, which wouldn’t be reported as stolen, and pick up some additional money too. So they hit the phony victim deliberately to kill.”
“They wouldn’t have had to do that,” Anderson said. “They could have got the Cadillac and the money anyway.”
“They were playing it safe. With the phony victim really killed, no one could go to the police. They could use the Cadillac as long as they wanted without fear of being picked up.”
“Vicious sonsofbitches,” Anderson muttered.
“That was how we got the idea that the cases were connected,” Grave Digger said. “There was an extraordinary viciousness about both capers.”
“But why did they take the car back to the dealer’s?” Anderson wondered.
“It was the safest thing to do when they finished with it,” Coffin Ed contended. “The dealer’s name and address were on a sticker in the rear window. Roman and his girl just didn’t notice it.”
Anderson sat for a time, musing.
“And you don’t think his wife was connected in any way with his caper?” he asked.
“It doesn’t figure,” Grave Digger said. “She hates him.”
“She’d have tipped the police if she had known about it in advance,” Coffin Ed added.
“She tried to give us a lead, but we didn’t pick it up,” Grave Digger admitted. “When she sent us down to Zog Ziegler’s crib. She figured that somebody down there would probably know about it, and we could find it out without her telling us.”
“But we figured she was tipping us on Baron, and we missed it,” Coffin Ed said.
“But she helped you to save him in the end,” Anderson said. “How do you figure that?”
“She didn’t want him taken by those hoodlums who had knocked her out and robbed her,” Grave Digger said.
“Besides, she might still think Casper is a great man,” Coffin Ed said.
“He is a great man,” Grave Digger said. “According to our standards.”
Anderson took his pipe from his side coat pocket and cleaned it with a small penknife over a report sheet. He filled it from an oilskin pouch and struck a kitchen match on the underside of the desk. When
he had the pipe going, he said:
“I can understand Casper pulling off a caper like that. He probably wouldn’t even think he was hurting anybody if he got away with it. The only people who’d get hurt would be some out-of-town hoods. But why would his wife get mixed up in a cheap chiseling racket like that? She’s a lovely woman, a socialite. She had a hundred activities to keep her occupied.”
“Hell, the reason is obvious,” Coffin Ed said. “If you were a woman and you had a husband who played about with the little boys, what would you do?”
Anderson turned bright red.
Several minutes passed. No one said anything.
“You can hear your own thoughts moving around in this silence,” Coffin Ed said.
“It’s like an armistice, when the guns stop shooting,” Anderson said.
“Let’s hope we don’t have to go through that again,” Grave Digger said. “What I have been thinking about is why Casper went by his office when it’s obvious by now that he doesn’t have the money hidden there,” Anderson said.
“That’s the big question,” Coffin Ed admitted.
They brooded over it in the eerie silence.
“Maybe to throw off the Pinkertons who were on to him by then, or maybe to set a trap for the hoods if they were still in town. It was a red herring, anyway.”
“Yeah,” Grave Digger said. “We’re missing something.”
“Just like we missed that tip-off on Ziegler.”
Grave Digger screwed about and looked at Coffin Ed.
“Yeah, maybe we’re missing the same thing.”
“You know what it is?” Coffin Ed said.
“Yeah, it just now came to me.”
“Me, too. It was thinking about the clique that did it.”
“Yeah, it’s as obvious as the nose on your face.”
“That’s the trouble. It’s too God-damned obvious.”
“What are you two talking about?” Anderson asked.
“We’ll tell you about it later,” Coffin Ed said.
There was no way to drive down 134th Street.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed left the Plymouth on Seventh Avenue, which had been kept open for the interstate tracks, and waded through snow that came up to their knees.
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