All Shot Up_ The Classic Crime Thriller - Chester Himes [41]
To listen to any sermon their preacher cared to preach. But on this cold day it had better be hot.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed parked their wreck in front of the Harlem Hospital and went inside to the reception desk.
They asked to speak with Casper Holmes.
The cool, young colored nurse at the desk lifted a telephone and spoke some words. She put it down and gave them a cool, remote smile. “I am sorry, but he is still in a coma,” she said.
“Don’t be sorry for us, be sorry for him,” Coffin Ed said.
Her smile froze as though the insect had talked back.
“Tell him it’s Digger Jones and Ed Johnson,” Grave Digger lisped.
She stared at the movement of his swollen lips with horrified fascination.
“Tell him we’re just ahead of the Confederates,” he went on. “Maybe that will get him out of his coma.”
Her face twisted as though she had swallowed something disagreeable.
“Confederates,” she murmured.
“You know who the Confederates are,” Coffin Ed said. “They’re the people who fought to keep us slaves.”
She smiled tentatively to prove she wasn’t sensitive about slavery jokes.
They stared at her, grave and unsmiling.
She waited and they waited.
Finally she picked up the telephone again and repeated their message to the floor supervisor.
They heard her say: “No, not conferees; they said Con-fed-er-ates... Yes...”
She put down the telephone and said without expression, “You will have to wait.”
They waited; neither moved.
“Please wait in the waiting room,” she said.
Behind them was a small nook with a table and several chairs, some occupied by others who were waiting.
“We’ll wait here,” Grave Digger lisped.
She pursed her lips. The telephone rang. She listened. “Yes,” she said.
She looked up and said, “His room is on the third floor. Take the elevator to the right, please. The floor supervisor will direct you.”
“You see,” Grave Digger lisped. “You don’t know what those Confederates are good for.”
The room was banked with flowers.
Casper sat up in a white bed wearing a turban of white bandages. His broad black face loomed aggressively above yellow silk pajamas. He looked like an African potentate, but it wasn’t a time for flattery.
French windows opened to a terrace facing the east. Two overstuffed chairs ranged along one side of the bed. On the other side, remains of a breakfast littered a wheel tray. The detectives saw at a glance that it had been a substantial breakfast of fried sausage, poached eggs on toast, hominy grits with butter, fruit and cereal with cream and a silver pot of coffee. A box of Havana cigars sat beside a basket of mixed fruit on the night stand.
The detectives took off their hats.
“Sit down, boys,” Casper said. “What’s this about Confederates?”
Grave Digger looked about for a window sill on which to rest a ham, was thwarted by the French window and compromised on the arm of a chair. Coffin Ed backed into a corner and leaned against the wall, his scarred face in the shadows.
“We were just kidding, boss,” Grave Digger lisped. “We thought you might want to talk to us before the big brass from downtown gets up here.”
Casper frowned. He didn’t like the insinuation that he preferred talking to colored precinct detectives rather than to downtown white inspectors. But since he had tacitly admitted as much by seeing them, he decided to pass it.
“A god-damned embarrassing caper,” he conceded. “Right in my own bailiwick.”
Now he looked like a martyred potentate.
“That’s what we figured,” Coffin Ed said.
Casper flicked a quick, sly look from one to the other. “You must feel the same way,” he observed. “Where were you at the time?”
“Eating chicken feetsy at Mammy Louise’s,” Grave Digger confessed.
Casper stared at him to see whether he was joking, decided he wasn’t. He opened the box of cigars and selected one, picked up a gadget from the table and carefully snipped off the end, then reached for an imported gold lighter behind