“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.”