All Shot Up_ The Classic Crime Thriller - Chester Himes [48]
“I’d better not catch him on a dark street,” Grave Digger lisped in a voice so thick it was blurred.
She whirled about and stared at him. “Oh!” The red light on her face seemed to be reflected from somewhere underneath the brown of her skin. “I thought you said—” She thought he’d said, “I’d better not catch you on a dark street.” She was flustered for a moment. It made her furious with herself.
“I’ve helped you all I can,” she said abruptly. She began trembling in earnest. “Please go. I can’t stand any more of this.” Her eyes brimmed with tears. She looked even more desirable than with her brassy manner.
Coffin Ed stood up and tapped Grave Digger on the shoulder. Grave Digger came out of his trance with a start.
“Just one more thing,” Coffin Ed said. “Do you know if Junior saw your husband last night?”
“I don’t know. Don’t ask me anything else,” she said tearfully. “All I know is what I’ve read in the newspapers. I haven’t talked to Casper. He’s still in a coma. And I don’t know—” She stopped as though struck by a sudden thought, then said, “And if you’re so interested in Junior’s business, go down on Nineteenth Street and talk to his associate, Zog Ziegler. He ought to know.”
For an instant the two detectives were held in an imperceptible rigidity, as though listening for a sound to be repeated that had come from fax away.
“Zog Ziegler,” Coffin Ed repeated in a flat voice. “Do you know his address.”
“Somewhere on East Nineteenth Street,” she said. “Just go down and look. You’ll know the house when you see it.”
She sounded hysterically anxious for them to leave.
“Good day, Missus Holmes, and thank you,” Coffin Ed said, and Grave Digger said, “You’ve helped us more than you know.”
She stiffened slightly at the subtle jibe in his words, but she didn’t look up.
The wide-mouthed boy in the white jacket appeared in the doorway as though by magic. He let them out.
After an interminable delay, the creaking elevator made its appearance. The old elevator operator with the cotton-boll head refused to look at them for reasons of his own. They left him to his solitude.
When they came out into the street, big fat snowflakes were drifting from a solid gray sky. The motionless air had become degrees warmer, and the snowflakes stack where they landed, too heavy to roll over.
“She knew what I meant, the teasing bitch.”
“Didn’t we all.”
“She never did answer your question.”
“She said enough.”
They stood looking at their wreck of a car for a moment before getting in.
“We’d better change buggies before going downtown,” Grave Digger said. “We might get booked on vag.”
“We can go back to the station and get my car.”
“We might stop at Fat’s for a couple of shots.”
“Whisky ain’t going to help us think any better,” Coffin Ed cautioned.
“Hell, beat as I am now it don’t matter,” Grave Digger said.
Chapter 15.
It was four o’clock when Casper got finished with the brass and the half-brass. He had had it with the chief inspector, the inspector in charge of the Homicide squads, Lieutenant Brogan and a detective stenographer from Homicide, and two lieutenants from the Central Office Bureaus.
They had handled him gently, with all due respect for the tender sensibilities of a vote-getting politician, but he had been through the wringer nevertheless.
What they had hammered on mainly was the mystery of the leak. One or the other kept pointing out that the hoods got the tip-off from somewhere, that it didn’t come from heaven, until Casper blew his top.
“I tipped them!” he had exploded. “I leaked it. I said come on and get it. Knock oat my mother-raping brains and kill a couple of people. Is that what you think?”
“It could have been somebody in your organization,” the chief inspector had said.
“All right, it was somebody in my organization. Then go out and arrest them. All of ’em! Start with my two secretaries. Haul in my associates. Don’t forget my field workers. Not to mention my wife. Take ’em all downtown. Give ’em the third degree. Tickle ’em with your mother-raping loaded hose. And see what you