All Shot Up_ The Classic Crime Thriller - Chester Himes [64]
“How did you make me?” she asked.
“It figures,” Coffin Ed explained. “You had to be a woman or you’d be in the clique. And no one in the clique knew you.”
“They only knew Casper,” she said bitterly.
Grave Digger looked at his watch. “It’s nineteen minutes past eight,” he lisped. “Our only chance rides on how tough Casper is; and how much you’re going to tell us; and how fast you’re going to tell it.”
She began to bridle. “I wasn’t in with it, if that’s what you think—”
“Save it,” Coffin Ed grated.
“I just guessed it,” she said. “I recognized the white man when they stopped us, after they’d run down Junior. I don’t know why—”
“That can wait.”
“I’d seen him talking to Casper Friday morning. I knew he was a stranger. Then I remembered Casper putting in a long-distance phone call to Indianapolis on Thursday night, right after he’d got the phone call from Grover Leighton. I wondered at the time what he was up to—”
Grave Digger exploded. “For chrissakes, get to the point!”
“Then when I found out they were the same ones who had robbed Casper, I knew he had hired them to do it.” She took a deep breath, and her face twitched strangely. “Nobody could rob Casper unless he let them do it.”
“It figures,” Coffin Ed admitted.
“But why the snatch? What do they want with him now?”
She sighed. “He probably swung out on them.”
“Double-crossed them?” Coffin Ed sounded slightly startled. “He’d double-cross these dangerous hoods?”
“Why not?” Leila said. “Casper would double-cross his own mother; and he’s not scared of anybody who walks on two feet. He’d double-cross them and then job them. He probably had his brief case stuffed with newspapers when they pulled off that phony heist.”
“They’re going to kill him,” Coffin Ed said.
“Not before they get the money,” Grave Digger amended. “Where would he plant it?” he asked Leila.
“Somewhere in his office building,” she said dully. “He didn’t get to go anywhere else.”
Grave Digger looked at his watch again. It was twenty-four minutes past eight.
The Plymouth was already rolling.
“Hold out, son,” Grave Digger lisped in his cottony voice as he pulled his long-barreled, nickel-plated revolver from its shoulder sling and began checking the cartridges in the cylinder. “We’re coming.”
Chapter 19.
“Here goes nothing,” Leila Baron Holmes said to herself.
She took a large ring of keys from her mink-coat pocket and began searching for the one that fitted the lock.
One side of her head and shoulders were highlighted in the upper glass panel by the red light of the neon sign from the Paris Bar next door.
In the pitch darkness at the head of the stairs, a man crouched, watching her. He shifted the .38 Colt automatic to his left hand, wiped his sweating right palm against his overcoat and renewed his grip on the butt. He sucked his bottom lip and waited.
Leila found the right key and got the door open. She returned the keys to her pocket and groped for the light switch on the wall to the right. Her gloved fingers touched it; she pushed the button, but no lights came on.
“Oh, damn!” she said in a tremulous voice that she had tried vainly to make sound annoyed.
She turned, locked the door behind her and began ascending the stairs. Her body was trembling from head to foot, and she had to force her reluctant feet to make each step.
A strong, nerve-tingling, aphrodisiacal scent of a French perfume preceded her.
The man at the top of the stairs drew back out of sight and waited.
When her foot touched the runner in the corridor, the man put his right forearm about her throat and his left elbow between her shoulder blades and lifted her from the floor, cutting off her wind.
She kicked and beat him futilely with her hands as he carried her down the corridor.
“Cut it out or I’ll break your neck,” he whispered thickly, blowing her perfumed hair out of his face.
She stopped fighting and began to squirm.
He stopped before the last door toward the front and kicked softly on the bottom panel.
The upper panel was frosted glass with the words:
Casper Holmes and Associates