Two white men in hickory-striped uniforms and blue-visored caps got out. One was tall and thin, the other medium height and heavyset. Both were clean-shaven and neither wore glasses. That was all Uncle Saint noticed.
Both men glanced toward the Lincoln. It was the only parked car with an occupant. But sight of the old liveried colored pappy behind the wheel allayed their suspicions.
Uncle Saint had a sour grin as they turned their backs and walked toward the door. They had him cased as a square like old Gus, he figured. On the one hand it rankled; but on the other it worked in his favor.
He waited until they had gone inside, then started the motor and kept it idling. He figured he was going to have to hijack the trunk. But not here in front of the apartment house. It was too open and there was no telling what Nosy Parker might be watching him from behind some curtained window, wondering what a strange limousine was doing in the neighborhood at this hour of morning. He just hoped Sister Heavenly wouldn’t do anything to rank his play.
Sister Heavenly was sitting in the janitor’s parlor, covering the janitor’s wife and the African with a blunt-nosed.38-caliber revolver, when the doorbell rang.
“I got to go and open the front door,” the janitor’s wife said. “It’s most likely Gus.”
She was standing beside the African, who was seated before the table, where she had backed when Sister Heavenly got the drop on her.
“Can the bullshit and press the buzzer,” Sister Heavenly said, motioning with the barrel of the pistol from where she sat on the arm of the davenport. “When they get here we’ll see who it is.”
The janitor’s wife shuffled sullenly over toward the door and pressed a button releasing the latch on the entrance door. She was barefooted and still wore the same cotton shift as before, but now it looked as though she had been rolling in it. Her face was greasy and her slanting yellow eyes glittered evilly.
“You ain’t going to get nothing by this, whatever it is you is after,” she muttered in her gravelly voice.
“Just get back over there and shut up,” Sister Heavenly said with an arrogant wave of the gun barrel.
The janitor’s wife shuffled back to the side of the African.
The African sat with drooping body, like a melted statue, his white-rimmed eyes staring at the pistol as though hypnotized.
They waited. Only their heavy breathing was audible in the surrounding silence.
The two expressmen saw the trunk in the basement corridor beside the elevator and took it away without seeing anyone.
Uncle Saint was watching when they returned to the street, carrying a large green steamer trunk, stickered and tagged for shipping. They put the trunk into the body of the truck, closed the doors, and looked once again toward the parked Lincoln.
Without appearing to notice them, Uncle Saint leaned out the car window and looked up toward the front windows of the third-story apartment as though listening to someone speaking to him.
The expressmen looked in the same direction, but they didn’t see anything.
“Yassum,” Uncle Saint called in a flunkey’s voice. “Right away, mum.”
He put the Lincoln in gear and drove past the express truck without giving it a look and kept on down Riverside Drive, keeping within the twenty-five-mile speed limit.
The expressmen got into the compartment of the truck. The driver started the motor and the truck took off behind the limousine at a more rapid speed.
Uncle Saint accelerated, watching the following truck in his rearview mirror. He kept well ahead, lengthening and shortening the gap between as though driving naturally.
He knew he was playing a dangerous game, especially alone. But he was too old and had lived too long on the edge of violence to be scared of death. What scared him was the idea of what he planned to do. What was in his favor was the fact nobody knew him. No one but Pinky and Sister Heavenly knew his straight monicker; in recent years but few people had seen him in the light. If he could get it and get away, only those two would know who had done it, and even they wouldn’t know where to look for him.
He accelerated gradually as he realized the truck was headed downtown, and pulled far ahead. He was two blocks ahead on the almost empty drive when he came to the entrance to the Yacht Club at 79th Street. He swerved into the curving driveway and slowed down, hidden by the dense foliage of the crescent-shaped park. He got a glimpse of the truck passing on Riverside Drive. He came back into the drive a block behind it and kept a bakery truck in between down as far as 72nd Street.
The truck turned east on 72nd Street to Tenth Avenue, and went south. It was a southbound avenue, feeding the Lincoln and Holland tunnels underneath the Hudson River, and was fairly covered with commercial traffic at this hour. That made it easy. The express truck had only one rearview mirror on the left front fender. Uncle Saint kept far to the right, and always kept some vehicle in between.
At 56th Street when the truck turned toward the Hudson River, the Lincoln was exposed for a moment or two; but when the truck turned south again alongside the overhead trestle of the New York Central Railroad line, he was covered again. On the west side of the wide brick-paved avenue, the whole length of North River was closed in by the docks of the great oceangoing lines. Underneath the trestle, as far as the eye could see, trucks and truck-trailers were parked side by side. The southbound lane was heavy with traffic feeding the docks.
Already the funnels of the Queen Mary at dock could be seen overtopping the wharf of the French Line adjoining the Cunard pier. The express truck swerved toward the curb and braked to a sudden stop behind a black Buick sedan parked less than fifty yards from the entrance to the French Line dock.
The maneuver was executed so quickly Uncle Saint didn’t have a chance to stop behind the truck and had to pull ahead of the Buick to park.
It was a no-parking zone and two cops in a prowl car looked meaningfully at the three parked vehicles as they drove slowly by. Being as one was a chauffeur-driven limousine and another an express truck, the cops let them slide for a moment.
Two dark-suited, straw-hatted, somber-looking men sat in the front seat of the Buick and watched the prowl car pass the Cunard dock and drop out of sight in the traffic. The man on the curb side opened the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He was a heavyset, black-haired man with a thick-featured, olive-skinned face and a bulging belly. His black single-breasted coat was buttoned at the bottom. He came down the street, looking anxiously toward the exit of the French Line wharf.
Uncle Saint watched in the rearview mirror, concentrating on the men in the express truck.
The driver of the Buick sat with his right hand on the wheel, his left hanging loosely through the open window.
When the heavyset man came level with the curb-side window of the Lincoln, he turned with a quick, catlike motion, unexpected in a man of his build, and came toward the car. He clapped his left hand on the car top, flipped open his coat and drew from a left shoulder sling. When he bent over to peer through the window, as though speaking to the gray-haired old chauffeur, his flapping coat shielded the pistol from view. It was a single-shot derringer with a six-inch perforated silencer attached. Without speaking a word, he took careful aim at the softest spot in Uncle Saint’s head. His dull dark eyes were impassive.
Abruptly from behind him a hard voice shouted, “Get ’em up or I’ll shoot!”
He didn’t see the faint motion of Uncle Saint’s lips. He wheeled about convulsively, the back of his head striking the top of the doorframe, knocking off his hat onto the seat of the car.
Uncle Saint lunged for his shotgun lying on the floor.
The gunman wheeled back, his eyes bugging out, as Uncle Saint was bringing up the muzzle of the double-barreled shotgun.