All Shot Up (14 page)

“What we want to know is, why would a trio of bandits who had just robbed you of fifty grand run down your wife’s cousin and kill him?” Coffin Ed said.

“How in the mother-raping hell would I know?” Casper said. “And if you think she knows then ask her.”

“We’re going to ask her all right,” Grave Digger lisped.

“Then go, goddammit, and do it!” he shouted, his face turning a vivid apoplectic shade of bright purple-black. “And don’t get so mother-raping cute. I’ll have you out dredging the Gowanus Canal.”

“Don’t lose your temper, boss—at your age you might have a stroke,” Grave Digger lisped.

Casper harnessed his rage with an effort. His breath came out in a long, hard sigh. He threw the partly smoked cigar on the floor and picked up another one without looking. His hands trembled as he lit it.

“All right, boys, let’s cut out the crap,” he said in a conciliatory voice. “You know what I mean. I don’t want my wife’s name mixed up in a scandal.”

“That’s what we figured,” Coffin Ed said.

“And don’t forget I got you boys your jobs,” he stated.

“Yeah, you and our army records—” Grave Digger began.

“Not to mention our marks of eighty-five and eighty-seven percent in our civil service examinations,” Coffin Ed supplemented.

Casper took the cigar from his teeth and said, “All right, all right, so you think you can’t be hurt.” He spread his hands. “I don’t want to hurt you. All I want is those mother-raping bandits caught with the minimum of publicity.” He sucked smoke into his lungs and let it dribble from his wide, flat nostrils. “And you wouldn’t suffer any if these mother-rapers turned up dead.” He gave them a half-lidded conniving look.

“That’s the way we got it figured, boss,” Coffin Ed said.

“What the hell do you mean, by that?” Casper flared again.

“Nothing, boss. Just that dead men don’t talk, is all,” Coffin Ed said.

Casper didn’t move. He stared from one to the other through obsidian eyes. “If you’re insinuating what I think, I’ll break you both,” he threatened in a voice that sounded very dangerous.

For a moment there was only the sound of labored breathing in the room. The sound of muted footsteps came from the corridor. Down on a nearby street some halfwit was racing a motor.

Finally Grave Digger said lispingly, “Don’t go off half-cocked, Casper. We’ve all known each other too long. We just figured you wouldn’t want any talk from anybody with the campaign coming up you’ve got to organize before November.”

Casper gave in. “All right, then. But just don’t try to needle me, because I don’t needle. Now I’ll tell you what I know, and, if that don’t satisfy you, you can ask me questions.

“First, I didn’t recognize any of the mother-raping bandits, and I know goddam near everybody in Harlem, either by name or by face. There ain’t nobody in this town who could pull a caper like that I wouldn’t know, and that about goes for you, too.”

Grave Digger nodded.

“So I figure they’re from out of town. Got to be. Now how would they know I was getting a fifty-G payoff? That’s the fifty-thousand-dollar question. First of all, I haven’t told nobody, none of my associates, my wife, nobody. Secondly, I didn’t know exactly when I was going to get it myself. I knew I was getting it sometime, but I didn’t know when until the committee secretary, Grover Leighton, came into my office last night and plunked it down on my desk.”

“Rather early for it, wasn’t it? Early in the year, I mean,” Coffin Ed said.

“Yeah. I didn’t expect it until April or May. That would be sooner than usual. It don’t generally come through until June. But they wanted to get an early start this year. It’s going to be a rough election, with all these television deals and war issues and the race problem and such crap. So how they got to know about it before I knew about it myself—I mean the exact time of the delivery—is something I can’t figure.”

“Maybe the secretary let it slip,” Grave Bigger suggested

“Yeah. Maybe frogs are eating snakes this season,” Casper conceded. “I wouldn’t know. But don’t you boys tackle him. Let him work it out with the other white folks —” he winked—“The Pinkertons and the commissioners and the inspectors. Me—I don’t give a goddam how they found out. You boys know me—I’m a realist. I don’t want no out-of-town mother-rapers robbing me. I want ’em caught—you get the idea. And if you kill ’em that’s fine. You understand. I want everybody to know—everybody on this goddam green earth—that can’t no mother-rapers rob Casper Holmes in Harlem and get away with it.”

“We got you, boss,” Coffin Ed said. “But we don’t have any leads. You know everything forward and backward, we thought maybe you might have some ideas. That’s why we got here ahead of the confederates.”

Casper allowed himself a grim smile. Then it vanished. “What’s wrong with your stool pigeons?” he asked. “They got the word around in Harlem that can’t nobody have the runs without your stool pigeons telling you about it.”

“We’ll get to them,” Grave Digger lisped.

“Weil, get to them, then,” Casper said. “Get to the whorehouses and the gambling joints and the dope pushers and the call girls. Goddam! Two hoods with fifty G’s are going to splurge on some vice or other.”

“If they’re still in town,” Coffin Ed said.

“If they’re still in town!” Casper echoed. “Two of ’em are niggers, and the white boy’s a cracker. Where the hell they going to go? Where would you go if you pulled a caper for fifty G’s? Where else would you look for kicks? Harlem’s the greatest town on earth. You think they’re going to leave it?”

Both detectives subdued the impulse to exchange looks.

Coffin Ed said dispassionately, “Don’t think we’re not on it, Casper. We’ve been on it from the moment it jumped. People got hurt, and some got killed. You’ll read about it in the newspapers. But that’s neither here nor there. We took our lumps, but we ain’t got thrown.”

Casper looked at Grave Digger’s swollen mouth. “It’s a job,” he said.

The apartment was on the fifth and top floor of an old stone-fronted building on 110th Street, overlooking the lagoon in upper Central Park.

Colored boys and girls in ski ensembles and ballet skirts were skating the light fantastic at two o’clock when Grave Digger and Coffin Ed parked their half-wrecked car before the building.

The detectives paused for a moment to watch them.

“Reminds me of Gorki,” Grave Digger lisped.

“The writer or the pawnbroker?” Coffin Ed asked.

“The writer, Maxim. In his book called
The Bystander.
A boy breaks through the ice and disappears. Folks rush to save him but can’t find him—can’t find any trace of him. He’s disappeared beneath the ice. So some joker asks, ‘Was there really a boy?’”

Coffin Ed looked solemn. “So he thought the hole in the ice was an act of God?”

“Must have.”

“Like our friend Baron, eh?”

They went silently up the old marble steps and pushed open the old, exquisitely carved wooden doors with cut-glass panels.

“The rich used to live here,” Coffin Ed remarked.

“Still do,” Grave Digger said. “Just changed color. Colored rich folks always live in the places abandoned by white rich folks.”

They walked through a narrow, oak-paneled hallway with stained-glass wall lamps to an old rickety elevator.

A very old colored man with long, kinky gray hair and parchmentlike skin, wearing a mixed livery of some ancient, faded sort, rose slowly from a padded stool and asked courteously, “What floor, gentlemens?”

“Top,” Coffin Ed said.

The old man drew his cotton-gloved hand back from the lever as though it had suddenly turned red hot.

“Mister Holmes ain’t in,” he said.

“Missus Holmes is,” Coffin Ed said. “We have an appointment.”

The old man shook his cotton-boll head. “She didn’t tell me about it,” he said.

“She doesn’t tell you everything she does, grandfather,” Coffin Ed said.

Grave Digger drew a soft leather folder from his inside pocket and lashed his shield. “We’re the men,” he lisped.

Stubbornly the old man shook his head. “Makes no difference to Mister Holmes. He’s
The Man.”

“All right,” Coffin Ed compromised. “You take us up. If Missus Holmes doesn’t receive us, you bring us down. Okay?”

“It’s a gentleman’s agreement,” the old man said.

Grave Digger belched as the ancient elevator creaked upward.

“That lets us out,” Coffin Ed said. “Gentlemen don’t belch.”

“Gentlemen don’t eat pig ears and collard greens,” Grave Digger said. “They don’t know what they’re missing.”

The old man gave the appearance of not hearing.

Casper had the whole top floor to himself. It had originally been built for two families with facing doors across a small elevator foyer, but one had been closed and plastered over and there was only the one red-lacquered one left, with a small, engraved brass nameplate in the middle of the upper panel, announcing:
Casper Holmes.

“Might just as well say Jesus Christ,” Grave Digger said.

“Go light on this lady, Digger,” Coffin Ed cautioned as he pushed the bell buzzer.

“Don’t I always?” Grave Digger said.

A young black man in a spotless white jacket opened the door. It opened so silently Grave Digger blinked. The young man had shining black curls that looked as though they had been milled from coal tar, a velvet-smooth forehead slightly greasy, and dark-brown eyes, with whites like muddy water, devoid of all intelligence. His flat nose lay against low, narrow cheeks slashed by a thin-lipped mouth of tremendous width. The mouth was filled with white, even teeth.

“Mister Jones and Mister Johnson?” he inquired.

“As if you didn’t know,” Grave Digger said.

“Please come right this way, sirs,” he said, leading them to a front room off the front of the hall.

He came as far as the doorway and left them.

It was a big room with windows overlooking Central Park. In the distance, over treetops, the towers of Rockefeller Center and the Empire Sate Building loomed in the murky haze. It remind in Ed of the lounge of the City Club.

Grave Digger lifted his feet high to keep from stumbling over the thick nap of the Oriental rugs, and Coffin Ed eyed the ornate furniture warily, wondering where he should sit.

Jazz classics were stacked on a combination set, and at their entrance Louis Armstrong was doing an oldy called
Where The Chickens Don’t Roost So High.

“Me and my old lady used to dance to that tune at the Savoy—before they tore it down,” Grave Digger said, and started cutting the rug.

He still had on his hat and overcoat, and he was performing the intricate steps of an old-time jitterbug with great abandon. His swollen lips were pecking at the perfumed air, and his overcoat tails were flapping in the breeze.

Coffin Ed stood beside a Louis XIV love seat, scratching his ribs.

“Digger, you’re a pappy,” he said. “Those steps you’re doing went out with zoot suits.”

“Don’t I know it,” Grave Digger said, sighing.

Mrs. Holmes swung into the room from an inner doorway like a stripteaser coming on stage. She stopped short in open-mouth amazement and put her hands on her hips.

“If you want to dance, go to the Theresa ballroom,” she said in a cool contralto voice. “There’s a matinee this afternoon.”

Grave Digger froze with a foot in the air, and Coffin Ed laughed: “Haw haw.”

In unison they turned and stared at Mrs. Holmes.

She had the type of beauty made fashionable in the 1930’s by an all-colored musical called
Brownskin Models.
She was rather short and busty, with a pear-shaped bottom and slender legs. She had short wavy hair, a heart-shaped face, and long-lashed, expressive brown eyes; and her mouth was like a red carnation.

She wore gold lame slacks which fitted so tight that every quiver of a muscle showed. Her waist was drawn in by a black leather belt, four inches wide, decorated with gilt figures. Her breasts stuck out from a turtleneck blue jersey-silk pullover as though taking dead aim at any man in front of her. Black, gilt-edged Turkish slippers turned up at the toes made her feet seem too small to support her. The combination of gold fingernail polish, sparkling rings and dangling charm bracelets gave her hands the appearance of jewelry-store windows.

Both men whipped off their hats and stood there, looking gawky and sheepish.

“I was just relaxing a bit,” Grave Digger lisped. “We’ve had a hard night.”

She glanced at his swollen lips and broke out a slow, insinuating smile. “You shouldn’t love so strenuously,” she murmured.

Grave Digger felt the heat spread over his face. Coffin Ed seemed to be having trouble figuring what to do with his feet.

She walked toward a pair of divans flanking an imitation fireplace on the far side of the room. Her hips rolled with the slow tantalizing motion of a natural-born teaser. Grave Digger was thinking how he could put his hands about her waist, while Coffin Ed was telling himself that she was the type of female who would set a man on fire and then direct him to a river.

Electric logs gave off a red glow. She sat down with her back to the windows and tucked a leg beneath her. She knew the red light on the colors of her skin and ensemble made her look exotic. Her eyes became luminous.

She waved them to a seat on the facing divan. Between them there was a huge circular table about knee-high, made by cutting down a dining room table. It was littered with the Sunday papers. Casper’s face peered out from beneath the headlines about the robbery.

“You want to talk to me about my cousin,” she said.

“Well, it’s like this,” Coffin Ed said. “We’re trying to find the connection between Black Beauty and a man named Baron.”

She frowned prettily. “It doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t know anyone named Black Beauty or Baron.”

The detectives stared at her for a moment. Grave Digger leaned forward and placed his hat atop the newspapers. Neither of them had removed their overcoats.

“Black Beauty’s your cousin,” Grave Digger lisped.

“Oh,” she said. “I’ve never heard him called by that name. Who told you that?”