All Shot Up_ The Classic Crime Thriller - Chester Himes [10]
Coffin Ed was not a moralist. But their cliquish quality of freezing up on an outsider grated on his nerves.
“Don’t everybody talk at once,” he shouted from the doorway.
No one said a word.
To a man, they were staring into their drinks as though competing in a contest of three wise monkeys: See nothing; hear nothing; say nothing. The contest was progressing toward a dead heat.
The three bartenders were rinsing glasses with an industriousness that would have gotten them all blacklisted by the bartenders’ union.
Coffin Ed began swelling at the gills. His gaze flickered dangerously down the line, seeking a likely candidate to begin with. But they were all equally engrossed in silence.
“Don’t try to give me that silent treatment,” he warned. “We’re all colored folks together.”
Someone in back giggled softly.
The uniformed white cop guarding the rear door stared at him with a dead-pan expression.
Coffin Ed’s temper flared, and the grafted patches on his face began to twitch.
He spoke to the back of the joker on the first stool. “All right, buddy boy, let’s start with you. Which way did they go?”
The girlish young man continued to stare into his drink as though he were stone-deaf. The indirect lighting from the bar gave his smooth brown face a bemused look. His luminescent silver cap gleamed faintly like swamp-fire.
He was drinking a tall frappé highball of dark rum with a streak of grenadine running down the center, called a “Josephine Baker.” If La Baker herself had been reclining stark nude in the bottom of his glass, he could not have given her any more attention.
Coffin Ed took him roughly by the shoulder and tamed him about. “Which way did they go?” he repeated in a rasping voice.
The young man looked at him from big, brown, bedroom eyes that seemed incapable of comprehending anything but love.
“Go, sir? Who go?” he lisped.
Face jumping in a sudden flash of rage, Coffin Ed slapped him left-handed from the bar stool. The young man crashed against the wall and crumpled in a lump.
Eyes pivoted in his direction and pivoted away. He wasn’t hurt so much as stunned. He thought it best just to lie there.
Coffin Ed looked at the next joker in line. He was an older man, dressed conservatively. Answers gushed from his mouth without his being questioned. “They went west, that is down 125th Street, I don’t mean to California.”
Coffin Ed’s face looked so macabre the man had to swallow before he could continue.
“They was in a black Buick. There was three of ’em. One was driving and the other two pulled off the heist.”
He ran out of breath.
“Did you get the license?”
“License!” He looked as though Coffin Ed had abused his mother. “What would I be doing getting their license? They looked like straight cops when they drove up, and for all I know they might just as well be straight cops.”
“Cops!” Coffin Ed stiffened.
“And when they took off I was lying on the floor like everybody else.”
“You said they were cops!”
“I don’t mean they actually was cops,” the joker amended hastily. “I figure you would know if they was real sure enough cops. All I means is they looked like cops.”
“In uniform?” Coffin Ed was taut as a crane cable, and his voice came in a rasping whisper.
“How else would I know if they looked like cops. I don’t mean you, suh,” the joker hastened to add with an ingratiating smile. “Everybody around here knows you is the man, no matter what you wears. All I means is these cops was dressed in cops’ uniforms. Of course I ain’t had no way of knowing whether they was cops or not. Naturally I wasn’t going to ask to see their shields. All I know is what I seen, and they—”
Coffin Ed was thinking fast. He cut the joker off. “Colored men?”
“Two of ’em was. One was a white man.”
Heistmen impersonating cops. He was trying to remember when was the last time that was worked in Harlem. Generally that was a big-time deal.
“What did he look like?”
“Look like? Who look like?”
He