Chester Himes - All shot up

Coffin Ed went crazy with rage. He kicked the pistol from Casper’s hand and aimed his own revolver at Casper’s heart.

“God-damned sonofabitch, I’ll kill you!” he raved. “He was ours; he wasn’t yours. You God-damned sonofabitch, we worked all night and all day and took every God-damned rape-fiend risk to get this hoodlum, and you kill him.”

“It was self-defense,” Casper said thickly, blood spattering from his slashed tongue. “You saw the mother-raper trying to shoot me-didn’t you!”

Coffin Ed drew back his pistol as though to club him across the head. “I ought to knock out your God-damned brains and call it an accident,” he raved.

“Easy, Ed, easy man,” Grave Digger cautioned. “You ain’t God either.”

Leila was laughing hysterically. “You knew what kind of man he is when you were risking me and everybody else to save him.”

Grave Digger watched Casper pull to his feet and stagger toward the closet for some clothes to put on.

“Man, does money mean that much to you?” he asked.

“What money?” Casper said.

Down below on 125th Street was a crowd scene. Traffic was stopped. Joe Green’s big black Cadillac limousine sat in a line of cars a block long, the motor running and nobody in it. The sidewalks on both sides of the street were jammed. The Paris Bar and the Palm Cafe and the Apollo Bar had erupted their clients. The three movie houses had been deserted for the bigger attraction.

“Gawwwaheddamnnnn. A shooting every night,” a joker crowed triumphantly. “It’s crazy, man, crazy.”

Prowl cars converged from all directions, weaving in and out of the stopped cars, on the right side and on the wrong side of the street, jumping the curb when necessary to get by. Their sirens were screaming like the souls of the damned; their red lights were blinking like eyes from hell

Cops jumped out, big feet splattering in the ankle-deep slush, went up the stairs like the introduction to the television series called “Gang Busters.”

Their eyes popped at the sight that greeted them.

Coffin Ed was telephoning for an ambulance.

Grave Digger looked up from the floor, where he was kneeling beside Leila Baron, stroking her forehead and consoling her.

“It’s all over but the lying,” he lisped.

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 metier.

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.