But Benny Mason’s chauffeur said, “Look, there’s been a switch.”
Benny already had his field glasses focused on the bag. “She gave it to somebody else, that’s all,” he said.
The two prowl car cops hit the pavement and charged into the apartment house, obscuring the vision of the watching detectives. For a moment the street looked clear of cops.
The Lincoln accelerated. Behind it the black Chrysler sedan pulled out from the curb. Far ahead down Riverside Drive was the distant red eye of another prowl car coming fast. And from all directions came the sound of sirens, shattering the night, as unseen cars and ambulances converged on the scene.
“Pull over fast,” Benny said.
The Lincoln lunged to the other side of the street and braked silently just ahead of Sister Heavenly and the driver jumped to the sidewalk with a heavy black sap in his hand.
Sister Heavenly saw the car brake and the man jump out in the same sidewise glance. She was carrying the blue canvas bag along with her own black beaded bag in her left hand. Somewhere along the way she had discarded the parasol and instead was carrying the.38-caliber Owl’s Head with the sawed-off barrel wrapped in a black scarf in her right hand.
Without turning her body or slackening her pace, she raised the pistol and pumped four dumdum bullets into the chauffeur’s body.
“Jesus Christ!” Benny said, and in a fast smooth motion drew his own P38 Walther automatic and shot twice through the open car door.
One slug caught Sister Heavenly in the left side below the ribs and lodged in the side of her spine; the other went wild. She fell sidewise to the pavement and was powerless to move, but her mind was still active and her vision was clear. She saw Benny Mason slide quickly across the seat, leap to the sidewalk, and aim the pistol at her head.
Well now, ain’t this lovely? she thought just before the bullet entered her brain.
Benny Mason snatched the bag from her limp hand and jumped back into the Lincoln beneath the wheel. All around him were the red lights of prowl cars converging in the street. His mind was shattered by the head-splitting screaming of sirens. He couldn’t see; the air looked red and his brains seemed to be pouring out of his ears. He began accelerating before closing the car door.
The Lincoln crashed broadside into the Chrysler sedan that had cut across in front of it. T-men poured from the Chrysler and surrounded him. He grabbed the bag and tried to throw it, but a T-man reaching through the open door caught him by the wrist and froze the bag in his hand.
“Son, you’re going on a long journey,” the T-man said.
“I want to see my lawyer,” Benny Mason said.
The apartment house basement was filling up with uniformed prowl car cops who couldn’t find anything to do.
Coffin Ed had his coat off and his right hand held between the buttons of his shirt in place of a sling. Detectives had cut out the back of his shirt and were using a wad of clean pocket handkerchief to staunch the flow of blood until the ambulance arrived. But he was slowly turning gray from loss of blood.
No one knew what the outcome was outside, and the homicide lieutenant put off interrogating Coffin Ed until his wound had been treated. So they were all just standing about.
But Coffin Ed had a need to talk.
“You guys figured too they’d come back?”
“We didn’t figure it,” the homicide lieutenant said. “We engineered it. We knew you were on the prowl and that they were on your tail. That might have kept up all night. So we had to get you here. We knew they’d come after you, just like you did.”
“You got me here? How was that?”
The homicide lieutenant reddened. “You know by now that Grave Digger is alive?”
Coffin Ed became rigid. “Alive? The radio said-”
“That was how we did it. We gave out the story. We knew that after you had heard it you would get them here some way to kill them. You’re not sore, are you?”
“Alive!” Coffin Ed hadn’t heard the rest of it. Tears were streaming unashamedly from his blood-red eyes. He shook his head. “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.” It felt as though his brains were banging against his skull. But he didn’t mind. “Then he’ll never die,” he said.
The lieutenant patted his good shoulder as delicately as though it were made of chocolate icing. “Only way we could figure to cover you. We don’t want to lose our good men.” He smiled a little. “Of course we didn’t expect a theatrical production.”
Coffin Ed grinned. “I dig you, Jack,” he said. “But sometimes these minstrel shows play on when grand opera folds.”
Then suddenly and unexpectedly he fainted.
22
It was past two o’clock in the morning. The prowl cars and ambulances and hearses had gone from the street and only the black inconspicuous sedans of the plainclothesmen remained among the sedate automobiles of the residents. Quiet once again prevailed in this exclusive residential street.
The crew from the Medical Examiner’s Office had been and gone and the six corpses had been taken to the morgue. The fat gunman had died before they arrived and had been tagged D.O.A. with the others. He had died without talking. Now there were only the gobs and patches of clotted blood to mark the spots where the six lives had taken exit.
Wop was in jail, safe at last.
But there was still activity in the basement of the apartment house where the interrogations continued and the reports of this fantastic caper were being recorded to shock and horrify what one must hope will be a less violent posterity.
The dining table from the janitor’s flat had been set up in the corridor and the two lieutenants and chief of the T-men were sitting in bloodstained chairs about it. A police stenographer sat apart, taking down the words as they were spoken.
Coffin Ed sat facing his interrogators across the table. He had been taken to the Polytechnical Clinic in midtown to have the bullet removed from his shoulder blade and the wound dressed. His guns, sap and hunting knife had been taken from him by the homicide lieutenant, and a detective had accompanied him to the clinic. Technically, he was under arrest for homicide and was being held for the magistrate’s court later that morning.
The hospital doctors had tried to put him to bed, but he had insisted on returning to the scene. In lieu of his bloodstained shirt, he now wore a hospital nightshirt tucked into his pants, and his arm was in a black cotton sling. Bandages made a lump on his right shoulder like a deformity.
“It’s been a bloody harvest,” the T-man said.
“Gun-killing is the twentieth-century plague,” the homicide lieutenant said.
“Let’s get to the story,” the narcotics lieutenant said impatiently. “This business is not finished yet.”
“All right, Ed, let’s hear your side,” the homicide lieutenant said.
“I’ll start with the janitor’s wife, and just repeat what she told me. You have my statement from before. Maybe you can fit it all together.”
“All right, shoot.”
“According to her, all she knew at first was that Gus had disappeared. He left her and the African in the flat at about eleven-thirty and said he’d be back in an hour. He didn’t come back-”
“Where was Pinky during this time?”
“She said she hadn’t seen Pinky since late afternoon and hadn’t thought about him until we questioned her after the false fire alarm.”
“So he wasn’t around?”
“He could have been. She just didn’t see him. When she found out he was on the lam and Gus hadn’t come back, she began to worry about what to do with the dog. They weren’t taking the dog and Gus hadn’t made any arrangements for it, and she didn’t know about S.P.C.A. And of course if Pinky turned up, there was the rap against him for the false fire alarm, and she intended phoning the police and having him arrested. So along toward morning she sent the African out to drown the dog in the river.