Casper Holmes was back in the hospital.
His eyes and mouth were bandaged; he could not see nor talk. There were tubes up his nostrils, and he had been given enough morphine to knock out a junkie.
But he was still conscious and alert. There was nothing wrong with his ears, and he could write blind.
He was still playing God.
At eleven o’clock that night he held the press conference which he had last scheduled for ten o’clock, against the considered advice of the staff doctors and his own private physician.
His room was packed with reporters and photographers. His chin jutted aggressively. His hands were expressive. He was in his métier.
He had scribbled a statement to the effect that the robbers had evidently been tipped off that he had received another payroll and had attempted a second robbery before getting out of town.
He had equipped himself with a small scratch pad and stylo with which to answer questions.
The questions came hard and fast.
He scribbled the answers, ripped off the pages and flung them toward the foot of the bed.
Question: Were you given a second payoff?
Answer: Hell no.
Question: Where did they get the information?
Answer: Ask a Ouija board.
Question: How did they find out about the first payoff?
Answer: Can’t say.
Question: Why did you slip out of the hospital in a hearse?
Answer: Safety first.
Question: Why did you stop by your office?
Answer: Private reasons.
Question: How did it happen your wife was there?
Answer: I asked her to meet me.
Question: How did detectives Jones and Johnson locate you?
Answer: Ask them.
Question: How do you feel about it all?
Answer: Lucky.
So it went. He didn’t give away a thing.
Afterwards he held a private session with his colored attorney, Frederick Douglas Henderson. He scribbled some instructions:
Get charges against sailor Roman Hill nol-prossed, give him your check for his $6,500 and get him out the country on first ship leaving. Then file claim in his name for the $6,500 found on the white robber’s body. Then I want you to phone Clay and tell him to keep effects of body for me personally. Got all that?
Attorney Henderson read the instructions thoughtfully.
“Whose body?” he asked.
Casper wrote: He’ll know.
When he left, Casper scribbled across a page: Keep your lip buttoned up.
He rang for the nurse and wrote: Get me an envelope.
She returned with the envelope. He folded the note, put it into the envelope and sealed it. He wrote across the face: Mrs. Casper Holmes. He handed it to the nurse.
Leila was in the adjoining room, but the nurse did not deliver the note.
She had been in an oxygen tent, taking plasma transfusions, ever since the operation. It was touch-and-go.
Big Six was in another smaller, cheaper private room, which was being paid for by Joe Green.
He had lapsed into a coma. The knife was still in his head. Orders were to leave it there until an encystment had formed about it in the brain, permitting its removal to be attempted. There was no record of such an operation being successful, and brain specialists all over the country had been alerted to the case.
George Drake’s body was found shortly after midnight by a waiter on his way home from work.
He was the eighth victim taken to the morgue from Harlem that weekend resulting from what later became known as the Casper caper.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed worked all night in the precinct station, writing their report. They stuck to the bare unadorned facts, omitting all references to Casper’s private affairs and domestic life. Nevertheless, it filled fourteen sheets of foolscap paper.
It snowed all night, and Monday morning there was no letup in sight. The big suction-type snow removers had been put into use at midnight, and the city’s snow crews had worked unceasingly in a slowly losing race against the snow.
At eleven o’clock that morning Roman Hill shipped out on a cargo vessel bound for Rio de Janeiro. He put $6,500 in cash in the captain’s keeping before going to work.
Sassafras saw him off. As she was leaving the docks she met a man who reminded her of him very much. The man had a room in Brooklyn and invited her to a bar nearby to have a drink. She saw no reason why she should go all the way back to Harlem in that snow when you could find the same things in Brooklyn while the snow lasted.
At five minutes before noon two detectives from the Automobile Squad made a strike. They located the golden Cadillac in the showroom of a Cadillac dealer on midtown Broadway. It had been sitting outside the entrance to the service department, covered with snow, when the mechanics had shown up for work that morning.
No one admitted knowing how it had got there. It had been inside with the other demonstrator models when everybody left, and the place was locked eight o’clock Saturday evening.
One of the company’s oldest salesmen, Herman Rose, closely resembled the description that Roman Hill had given of the man posing as Bernard Kaufman, who had notarized the phony bill of sale Mister Baron had given him.
But there were no charges against him and no one to identify him, so nothing could be done.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed were summoned to the Chief Inspector’s office in the Headquarters building on Centre Street shortly after lunch.
The office was filled with Brass, including an assistant D.A. and a special investigator from the Commissioner’s office.
They had been asked why they had attempted to apprehend the robbers single-handed, using Mrs. Holmes as a front, instead of contacting their precinct station and getting instructions from the officer in charge.
“We were trying to save his life,” Coffin Ed replied. “If the block had been surrounded by police, those hoods would have killed him for sure.”
The Chief Inspector nodded. It was a straw-man question anyway.
What the Brass really wanted was their opinion as to Casper’s guilt.
“Who knows?” Grave Digger lisped.
“It hasn’t been proven,” Coffin Ed said. “All we know is what his wife said she guessed.”
“What was her racket?” the Chief Inspector asked.
“We haven’t figured it out,” Coffin Ed admitted. “We got wound up in this other business and we haven’t worked on it.”
The Chief Inspector admitted that a crew of detectives from the Safe, Loft and Truck Squad and two experts from the Pinkerton Detective Agency had searched Casper’s office and the entire office building, and had questioned all of the other tenants and the building superintendent. But they had not turned up the $50,000.
“You men know Harlem, and you know Holmes,” the Chief said. “Where would he hide it?”
“If he’s got it,” Grave Digger lisped.
“That’s the fifty-thousand dollar question,” Coffin Ed said.
“All that I have to say about this business,” the assistant D.A. said, “is that it stinks.”
Now it was Monday night.
The snow crews had lost the race. The city was snowed in.
The customary metropolitan roar was muffled to an eerie silence by sixteen inches of snow.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed were in the captain’s office in the Harlem Precinct station, talking over the case with their friend and superior officer, Lieutenant Anderson.
Grave Digger sat with one ham perched on the edge of the captain’s desk, while Coffin Ed leaned against a corner radiator in the shadow.
“We know he did it,” Grave Digger lisped. “But what can you do?”
Veins throbbed in Anderson’s temples, and his pale-blue eyes looked remote.
“How did you figure the tie-in between Baron’s racket and Casper’s caper?” Anderson asked.
Grave Digger chuckled.
“It was easy,” Coffin Ed said. “There wasn’t any.”
“We were just lucky,” Grave Digger admitted. “It was just like she said; she guessed it.”
“But you uncovered her,” Anderson said.
“That’s where we were lucky,” Coffin Ed replied.
“What was her racket?”
“Maybe we’ll never know for sure, but we figure it like this,” Coffin Ed explained. “Leila Baron knew this salesman, Herman Rose. Casper bought his Cadillac from there. When she met Roman and found out he had saved up sixty-five hundred dollars to buy a car, she got Rose to come in with her and Junior Ball—or Black Beauty if you want to call him that—on a deal to trim him. Rose provided the car; he probably has a key to the place; he’s been there long enough, and he’s trusted. And he also acted as notary public. Then his part was finished. Baron was going to take Roman down that deserted street where Black Beauty, masquerading as an old woman, was going to fake being hit. They had no doubt worked out some way to get the car back from Roman and keep the money, too; we’ll never know exactly unless she tells us. Probably she planned to scare him into leaving the country.
“Anyway, these hoods masqueraded as cops turned into the street as they were making their own getaway in time to see the whole play. They saw the Cadillac knock the old woman down; they saw the old woman getting up. They knew immediately it was a racket, and they decided on the spur of the moment to use it for their own purposes. They could get another car, which wouldn’t be reported as stolen, and pick up some additional money too. So they hit the phony victim deliberately to kill.”
“They wouldn’t have had to do that,” Anderson said. “They could have got the Cadillac and the money anyway.”
“They were playing it safe. With the phony victim really killed, no one could go to the police. They could use the Cadillac as long as they wanted without fear of being picked up.”
“Vicious sonsofbitches,” Anderson muttered.
“That was how we got the idea that the cases were connected,” Grave Digger said. “There was an extraordinary viciousness about both capers.”
“But why did they take the car back to the dealer’s?” Anderson wondered.
“It was the safest thing to do when they finished with it,” Coffin Ed contended. “The dealer’s name and address were on a sticker in the rear window. Roman and his girl just didn’t notice it.”
Anderson sat for a time, musing.
“And you don’t think his wife was connected in any way with his caper?” he asked.
“It doesn’t figure,” Grave Digger said. “She hates him.”
“She’d have tipped the police if she had known about it in advance,” Coffin Ed added.
“She tried to give us a lead, but we didn’t pick it up,” Grave Digger admitted. “When she sent us down to Zog Ziegler’s crib. She figured that somebody down there would probably know about it, and we could find it out without her telling us.”
“But we figured she was tipping us on Baron, and we missed it,” Coffin Ed said.
“But she helped you to save him in the end,” Anderson said. “How do you figure that?”
“She didn’t want him taken by those hoodlums who had knocked her out and robbed her,” Grave Digger said.
“Besides, she might still think Casper is a great man,” Coffin Ed said.
“He is a great man,” Grave Digger said. “According to our standards.”
Anderson took his pipe from his side coat pocket and cleaned it with a small penknife over a report sheet. He filled it from an oilskin pouch and struck a kitchen match on the underside of the desk. When he had the pipe going, he said:
“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 legal rights,” Coffin Ed said. “We’ll get an order from the relative. Who is he?”
“I don’t have to tell you,” Mr. Clay said peevishly.
“Naw, but you’re going to have to do one or the other,” Grave Digger lisped. “You can’t hold bodies here without the proper authority.”
“What did you want with his effects?”
“We just want to look at them. You can come with us if you want.”
“I don’t want to look at them; I’ve seen them. I’ll send Marcus with you.” He raised his voice and called, “Marcus!”
A tall, light-skinned, loose-lipped man affecting the latest English fashion came into the room. He was the embalmer.
“Show these dicks Lambert’s effects,” Mr. Clay directed. “And see that they don’t take anything.”
“Yes, sir,” Marcus said.
He took them to a basement storeroom, adjacent to the embalming room, where the clothes and effects of the bodies were kept in small wicker baskets until claimed by relatives.
Marcus took one of the baskets from a shelf and placed it on the table.
“Help yourself,” he said, and started from the room. At the door he turned and winked. “There’s nothing in it worth taking, except a box of stockings, and the old man has already spotted them,” he said.
“I’ll bet you know,” Coffin Ed said.
It didn’t take but a few moments. Grave Digger pushed the clothes aside until he found the box of stockings.
It was a black box with a gold stripe across it, intended for twelve pairs of stockings. It was sealed with a tiny bit of Scotch tape.
Grave Digger peeled back the tape and removed two pairs of sheer silk stocking wrapped separately in gold cellophane paper. Underneath was another package wrapped in similar paper. He placed the package on the table and opened it.
It contained fifty brand-new thousand-dollar bills.
“It had to be,” he said. “Snake Hips was the only one he could have passed it to. And we missed it all this time.”
“It was right there in front of our eyes,” Coffin Ed admitted. “This boy would never have been dancing in the street half dressed on a night as cold as Saturday just to bitch off that square bartender. We ought to have known that.”
“And he was in the clique, too. That’s how we should have known. Casper passed him the package as he went by.”
“Why do you think he left it here, Digger?”
“Safer here than anywhere else, and he probably didn’t figure us to dig Snake Hips’ straight moniker as Lucius Lambert.”
“What are we going to do with it?”
“Let’s just seal up this package and put it back and don’t say anything about it,” Grave Digger said.
“And keep the money?”
“Damn right keep the money.”
“Casper’s going to know we got it.”
“Damn right he’s going to know we got it. And there ain’t going to be a damn thing he can do about it. That’s what’s going to hurt him. He’s going to want to job us, but you can’t job two detectives with twenty-five thousand bucks in their kicks. And as much as we know about him now, he knows he’d better not try.”
“I’d like to see his face when he comes for it,” Coffin Ed said.
“Yeah, there’s going to be some arteries bursting for sure.”
Two days later, the New York Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund, which sends New York City boys of all races and creeds on vacations in the country during the summer, received an anonymous cash donation of $50,000. The executives of the fund didn’t bat an eye; they were used to this kind of money.
On the same day, as he was about to leave the hospital, Casper received an anonymous telegram.
It read: Crime doesn’t pay.