All Shot Up_ The Classic Crime Thriller - Chester Himes [26]
“Did a man come through here?” she asked.
The big, sweating, bald-headed cook was up a tree.
“Git out of here, whore!” he shouted in a rage.
The dishwasher grinned. “Come ’round to the back door,” he said.
The cook grabbed a skillet and advanced on her, and she backed through the doorway. She looked through the dining room and bar again, but Mister Baron had disappeared.
She went outside and told Roman, “He’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
“I don’t know. He got away.”
“Where in the hell was you?”
“I was watching him all the time, but he just disappeared.”
She looked like she was about to cry.
“Get in the car,” he said. “I’ll look for him.”
She took her turn sitting in the hottest car in all of New York State while he searched the bar and restaurant for Mister Baron. He didn’t have any better luck with the cook.
“He must have got out through the kitchen,” he said when he returned to the car.
“The cook would have seen him.”
“It’d take a shotgun to talk to that evil man.”
He climbed in behind the wheel and sat there looking dejected. “You let him get away, now what us going to do?” he said accusingly.
“It ain’t my fault that we is in this mess,” she flared. “If you hadn’t been acting such a fool right from the start might not none of this happened.”
“I knew what I was doing. If he’d tried to pull off something crooked, I was trying to trick him by making him think I was a square.”
“Well, you sure made him,” she said. “Asking do it use much gas and then looking at the oil stick and saying you guessed the motor was all right.”
He defended himself. “I wanted all those people who was watching us to know I was buying the car so they could be witnesses in case anything happened.”
“Well, where is they now? Or has some more got to happen?”
“Ain’t no need of us arguing between ourselves,” he said. “We got to do something.”
“Well, let’s go see a fortune teller,” she said. “I know one who tells folks where to find things they has lost.”
“Let’s hurry then,” he said. “We got to get rid of this car ’fore daylight. It’s hotter than a West Virginia coke oven.”
Chapter 9.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed were buttoning up their coats when the telephone rang in the captain’s office.
Lieutenant Anderson took the call and looked up. “It’s for one of you.”
“I’ll take it,” Grave Digger said and picked up the receiver. “Jones speaking.”
The voice at the other end said, “It’s me, Lady Gypsy, Digger.”
He waited.
“You’re looking for a certain car, ain’t you? A black Buick with Yonkers plates?”
“How do you know that?”
“I’m a fortune teller, ain’t I?”
Grave Digger signaled Coffin Ed to cut in, and jiggled the hook.
Coffin Ed picked up one of the extensions on the desk and Lieutenant Anderson the other. The switchboard operator knew what to do.
“Where is it?” Grave Digger asked.
“It’s sitting as big as life down on the street in front of my place,” Lady Gypsy said.
Grave Digger palmed the mouthpiece and whispered an address on 116th Street
Anderson picked up the intercom and ordered the sergeant on the switchboard to alert all prowl cars and await further instructions.
“Who’s in it?” Grave Digger asked.
“Ain’t nobody in it at the moment,” Lady Gypsy said. “I got a square and his girl friend up here in my seance chamber who drove up in it. They got a wild story about a lost Cadillac—”
“Hold the story,” Grave Digger said. “And keep them there, even if you have to use ghosts. Me and Ed will be there before you can say Jack Robinson.”
“I’ll send the cars on,” Anderson said.
“Give us three minutes and seal off the block,” Grave Digger said. “Have them come in quietly with the blinkers off.”
Lady Gypsy’s joint was on the second floor of a tenement on 116th Street, midway between Lexington and Third Avenues. On the ground floor was an ice and coal store.
The painted tin plaque in a box beside the entrance read:
Lady Gypsy
Perceptions—Divinations
Prophesies—Revelations
Numbers Given
The word Findings had been recently added. Business had been bad.
Once