“No sir—I put the jack on it to keep the wind from blowing it away,” the cop replied.

The lieutenant moved the jack with his foot and picked up the wig. A detective held a light.

“All I can say about it is it looks like hair,” the lieutenant said.

“Looks like real nigger hair,” the flip cop said.

“If you use that word again I’ll kick your teeth down your throat,” Coffin Ed said.

The cop bristled. “Knock whose teeth—”

He never got to finish. Coffin Ed planted a left hook in his stomach and crossed an overhand right to the jaw. The cop went down on his hips; his head leaned slowly forward until it stopped between his knees.

No one said anything. It was a delicate situation. Coffin Ed was due a reprimand, but the lieutenant from Homicide was the ranking officer, and the cop had already riled him with the crack about the nuns.

“He asked for it,” he muttered to himself, then turned to the other prowl car cop. “Take him back to the station.”

“Yes, sir,” the cop said with a dead-pan expression, giving Coffin Ed a threatening look.

Grave Digger put a hand on Coffin Ed’s arm. “Easy, man,” he murmured.

The cop helped his partner to his feet. He could stand, but he was groggy. They got in the prowl car and drove off.

The others recrossed the street and stared at the corpse. The lieutenant stuck the wig into his overcoat pocket.

“How old would you say she was?” he asked Grave Digger.

“Young,” Grave Digger said. “Middle twenties.”

”What beats me is why would a young woman masquerade as an old woman for?”

“Maybe she was trying to impersonate a nun, a Homicide detective ventured.

The lieutenant, began to turn red. “You mean so she could get into the convent?”

“Not necessarily—maybe she had a racket.”

“What kind of racket?” The lieutenant looked at Grave Digger as though he had all the answers.

“Don’t ask me,” Grave Digger said. “Folks up here are dreaming up new rackets every day. They got the time and the imagination, and all they need is a racket to make the money.”

“Well, all we can do now is leave her for Doc Fullhouse,” the lieutenant said. “Let’s go over the ground and see what it tells.”

Grave Digger got a heavy flashlight from the glove compartment of their car, and he and Coffin Ed walked back to the intersection.

The others covered the area nearer to the corpse. No tire marks were evident where a car might have braked suddenly; they found no broken glass.

Coming up the street from Convent Avenue, playing the light from right to left, Grave Digger noticed two small black marks on the gray-black asphalt, and they knelt in the street to study them.

“Somebody gunned a car here,” he concluded.

“I’d say a big car with a used tread, but we’ll leave it for the experts.”

Coffin Ed noticed a car with a wheel jacked up. On closer inspection they noticed that the opposite wheel was missing. They looked at one another.