All Shot Up_ The Classic Crime Thriller - Chester Himes [62]
“We got to get to a phone,” he said, then added on sudden thought, “Drive over to the Seventeenth.”
The 17th Precinct was on 51st Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues. They were there in two minutes.
Coffin Ed telephoned Clay with Grave Digger standing by. They had left Roman handcuffed in the car.
“Clay’s burial home,” came the old man’s querulous voice.
“Clay. Ed Johnson and Digger Jones this end. Did you send a hearse to take Casper home?”
“I’m getting sick and tired of everybody wanting to guard the hearse I sent for Casper,” the old man said tartly. “He already had Joe Green’s boys—as if he couldn’t take care of himself, mean as he is. And besides which he wanted it kept quiet. Then the Pinkertons sent men up—”
“What? The Pinkerton Agency?”
“That’s what they told me. That they were sending three men on orders from—”
“Jesus Christ!” Coffin Ed said, breaking the connection. “Get the Pinkerton Detective Agency,” he asked the switchboard operator.
When he had finished talking, he and Grave Digger looked at one another with as much fear in their eyes as either had ever seen.
“They no doubt got him by now—but why?” Coffin Ed said.
“That ain’t the question now,” Grave Digger lisped. “It’s where?”
“There’s got to be a tie-in,” Coffin Ed said. “We’ve just missed it is all.”
“We got one more card that we can play; we can make like we’re a joker called Bernard Kaufman.”
“We’d need to know his straight moniker.”
“Makes no difference; we can play that one, since it’s all we got to play,” Grave Digger argued, “it might flush Baron into the open.”
Coffin Ed began getting the idea. “You know, it might work at that,” he conceded. “But we’re going to need Roman’s girl friend.”
“Let’s go get her, and let’s hurry. We’ve just about ran out of time.”
They went outside to their car and braced Roman.
“We’re going to set a trap for Baron, son, and we’re going to need your African queen to identify him,” Coffin Ed said.
“I can’t do that,” Roman said. “You-all don’t need her.”
“We want you both, and there isn’t any time to argue about it. A man’s life might depend on this, a big man’s life, an important man to us colored people any way you look at it—the way things are set up. If you help us now, we’ll help you later. But if you don’t we’ll crucify you. Have you ever been cold?”
“Yes, sir, lots of times.”
“But not as cold as we’ll make you. We’ll take you over to the river, handcuff your feet together, and let you hang in the water with all that snow they’re dumping from the bridges.”
Roman began to shiver just thinking about it.
Afterwards Coffin Ed admitted it might only have worked on an Alabama boy.
“If I tell you where she’s at, you won’t arrest her, will you?” Roman begged. “She ain’t done nothing.”
“If she helps us catch Baron, we’ll decorate her,” Coffin Ed promised.
They stood in the deserted office of the boathouse beside the lagoon, across from the apartment house in which Casper Holmes lived, using the telephone.
It was cold and damp; an inch-thick coating of ice covered the floor.
Coffin Ed was on the telephone, talking through the fine-tooth end of a gutta-percha comb held tight against the mouthpiece.
“This Bernie,” he said. “Just listen, don’t talk. There’s a police tap on your line. Have Baron get in touch with me immediately.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” a voice said coldly at the other end of the wire.
He hung up.
Grave Digger looked a question.
He shrugged.
Roman and Sassafras, standing to one side and handcuffed together, stared at him as though he had taken leave of his senses.
“If you is trying to imitate the Mister Bernard Kaufman, who stamped that bill of sale Mister Baron gave to Roman, you don’t sound nothing’ like him,” Sassafras said scornfully,
But the detectives had considered this.
“Well, let’s go see if it works,” Grave Digger lisped.
They took the handcuffed couple outside and crossed the sidewalk to Coffin Ed’s Plymouth.
It was parked between two snow-covered cars of indistinguishable make, directly across 110th Street from the entrance to Casper