All Shot Up_ The Classic Crime Thriller - Chester Himes [71]
“I can understand Casper pulling off a caper like that. He probably wouldn’t even think he was hurting anybody if he got away with it. The only people who’d get hurt would be some out-of-town hoods. But why would his wife get mixed up in a cheap chiseling racket like that? She’s a lovely woman, a socialite. She had a hundred activities to keep her occupied.”
“Hell, the reason is obvious,” Coffin Ed said. “If you were a woman and you had a husband who played about with the little boys, what would you do?”
Anderson turned bright red.
Several minutes passed. No one said anything.
“You can hear your own thoughts moving around in this silence,” Coffin Ed said.
“It’s like an armistice, when the guns stop shooting,” Anderson said.
“Let’s hope we don’t have to go through that again,” Grave Digger said. “What I have been thinking about is why Casper went by his office when it’s obvious by now that he doesn’t have the money hidden there,” Anderson said.
“That’s the big question,” Coffin Ed admitted.
They brooded over it in the eerie silence.
“Maybe to throw off the Pinkertons who were on to him by then, or maybe to set a trap for the hoods if they were still in town. It was a red herring, anyway.”
“Yeah,” Grave Digger said. “We’re missing something.”
“Just like we missed that tip-off on Ziegler.”
Grave Digger screwed about and looked at Coffin Ed.
“Yeah, maybe we’re missing the same thing.”
“You know what it is?” Coffin Ed said.
“Yeah, it just now came to me.”
“Me, too. It was thinking about the clique that did it.”
“Yeah, it’s as obvious as the nose on your face.”
“That’s the trouble. It’s too God-damned obvious.”
“What are you two talking about?” Anderson asked.
“We’ll tell you about it later,” Coffin Ed said.
There was no way to drive down 134th Street.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed left the Plymouth on Seventh Avenue, which had been kept open for the interstate tracks, and waded through snow that came up to their knees.
Mr. Clay was lying on his side on an old couch covered with faded gray velvet in the first-floor-front room that he used for an office. His face was toward the wall and his back was toward the street of falling snow, but he was not asleep.
The dark-shaded floor lamp in the window that he kept lit permanently threw the room in dim relief.
He was a small, dried-up old man with parchmentlike skin, washed-out brown eyes and long, bushy gray hair. As was customary, he was dressed in a frock coat, black-and-gray striped morning pants and old-fashioned black patent-leather shoes with high-button, gray-suede leather tops. He wore a wing collar and a black silk ascot tie held in place by a gray pearl stickpin. Pince-nez glasses, attached to a long black ribbon pinned to the lapel of his coat, were tucked into a pocket of his gray double-breasted vest.
When Grave Digger and Coffin Ed walked into the office, he said without moving, “Is that you, Marcus?”
“It’s Ed Johnson and Digger Jones,” Coffin Ed said.
Mr. Clay turned over, swung his feet to the floor and sat up. He clipped the pince-nez onto his nose and looked at them.
“Don’t shake the snow on my floor,” he said in his thin, querulous voice. “Why didn’t you clean yourselves outside.”
“A little water won’t hurt this place,” Grave Digger lisped. “It’ll help settle all this dust in here.”
Mr. Clay looked at his swollen mouth. “Hah, somebody gave it to you this time,” he said.
“I can’t always be lucky,” Grave Digger replied.
“Hot as you got it in here, you must be making mummies,” Coffin Ed observed.
“You didn’t come here to complain about the heat,” Mr. Clay snapped.
“No, we came to examine the effects of a body you got in here.”
“Whose body?”
“Lucius Lambert.”
Mr. Clay refused flatly. “You can’t see them.”
“Why not?”
“Casper doesn’t want them disturbed.”
“Did Casper claim his body from the morgue?”
“A relative claimed him, but Casper is paying for the funeral.”
“That don’t give him any