All Shot Up_ The Classic Crime Thriller - Chester Himes [59]
“You can’t come back here and poke your nose into these dead baskets,” an indignant voice was saying.
“Why not,” a laconic voice replied. “It’s a city hospital, ain’t it?”
“I’ll get the supervisor,” the first voice threatened.
“All right, I’ll go,” the laconic voice acceded. “I wasn’t looking for anyone; I was just curious as to how many people die in this joint during an average day.”
“More than you think,” the first voice said.
Eight minutes passed before the attendants reappeared, staggering beneath the weight of the loaded wicker basket. The lid was sealed with a metal clamp, to which was attached a name-card in a metal frame:
CLEFUS HARPER—male Negro
FOR: H. Exodus Clay Funeral Parlor
134th Street
They slid the basket into the coffin compartment and started to shut the doors.
“Let me do it,” Jackson said.
The attendants grinned and re-entered the hospital.
“Where you want to go, Mister Holmes?” Jackson asked in a stage whisper.
“We’re alone?” Casper asked in a low voice from within the basket.
“Yes, sir.”
“Joe Green’s boys are following in the Cadillac?”
“Yes, sir, they’s waiting outside in the street.”
“No one knows they’re tailing us?”
“No, sir, not as far as I know of. They’s keeping about a half a block behind.”
“Okay. Then drive me to my office on 125th Street. You know where that is?”
“Yes, sir, up over the Paris Bar.”
“Double-park somewhere close,” Casper instructed. “Then get out and come back and open the basket. Then stand there as if you’re doing something and watch the street. When it’s safe for me to get out without being seen, give me the word. You got that?”
“Yessir.”
“All right, let’s go.”
Jackson closed the back door and climbed back into the driver’s seat. The hearse purred slowly up the driveway.
Before reaching the street it was stopped again by newspaper reporters. They looked at the name tag on the basket. One of them made a note of it. The others didn’t bother.
The hearse turned toward 125th Street. Half a block distant it passed Joe Green’s black Cadillac limousine. Jackson glanced at the Cadillac. It looked unoccupied He began to worry. He drove slowly, watching it in his right-side fender mirror. When he had gone another half block, the Cadillac’s bright lights blinked once and went off. He was relieved. He blinked his own lights in reply and kept driving slowly until he had made the turn into 125th Street and saw the black Cadillac make the turn half a block behind him.
He crossed Park, Madison, Lenox, keeping to the right, letting the fast traffic pass him.
At Seventh Avenue he waited for a snowplow to pass, pulled around a dump truck, parked in front of the clock, that was being loaded by a gang of well-liquored men. They stopped and watched the hearse cross the avenue.
“Somebody going by way of H. Clay,” one of them remarked.
“Don’t ask who it is,” another replied. “It might be your mammy.”
“Don’t I know it,” the first one replied.
A Cadillac limousine pulled around the truck in the wake of the hearse and carefully crossed the avenue.
“That’s Joe Green’s big Cat,” a third laborer stated.
“Warn’t his men in it,” another replied.
“How you know? You running Joe’s business?”
“Most generally he got George Drake driving and Big Six sitting in the front.”
“Warn’t Joe in the back, neither.”
“Come on, you sports, and bend your backs,” the truck driver said. “You ain’t getting paid to second-guess Joe Green.”
The hearse double-parked beside a Ford station wagon in front of the drugstore adjacent to the Paris Bar. The drugstore was open for business, and a few customers were moving about inside. The Paris Bar seemed crowded as usual. Its plate-glass windows were steamed over, and from within came the muted sound of a jump tune issuing from the juke box.
The Cadillac double-parked at the corner in front of the United Cigar Store.
Jackson got out on the driver’s side, came around the front of the hearse and looked up and down the street. A couple of men issued from the Paris Bar, glanced at the hearse and went the other way.
Jackson went to