Casper sat up straight. His face turned slightly gray.

Coffin Ed waited for him to comment, but he still said nothing.

“The phony cops forced him and his girl into the Buick, sapped Baron, took the six thousand, five hundred dollars and went away in the Cadillac.

“We’ve been all night running down the Buick. We got it and Roman. We got a statement from Roman. He claims that Baron confessed that the old woman got up after he had hit her. So it must have been the bandits in the Buick who hit her the second time and killed her.”

Casper looked sick. “That’s horrible,” he said.

“More than you think,” Grave Digger lisped.

“But I don’t see what that has got to do with the robbery.”

“I’m coming to that,” Coffin Ed said.

Casper couldn’t see Coffin Ed’s face distinctly in the shadows, and it worried him. “Come over here and sit down where I can hear you,” he said.

“I’ll talk louder,” Coffin Ed said.

A flicker of anger passed over Casper’s face, but he said nothing. He picked up the gold lighter, and relit his cigar and hid behind a cloud of smoke.

“So far we haven’t got a line on Baron,” Coffin Ed went on. “We checked the building superintendent where the office is located and found that it is unoccupied and for rent. The super was out last night from nine o’clock until after two.

“The Cadillac hasn’t been found; there’s none reported stolen. The dealers are closed on Sundays, but there’s been no report that any have been broken into.

“We found the owner of the Buick—the manager of a hardware store in Yonkers. He parked his car in front of his house when he went home at seven o’clock last night and didn’t miss it until this morning. But that doesn’t help us any.

“We checked the listing of notary publics in Manhattan County. There was none named Bernard Kaufman; the address was bogus and the seal was counterfeit.”

“That’s well and good,” Casper rasped impatiently. “But where’s the tie-in?”

“The bandits who robbed you deliberately ran down the old lady a few minutes later and killed her.”

“Just proves they’re brutal mother-rapers,” Casper said, lapsing back to the Harlem vernacular of his youth. “But that’s all.”

“Not quite all,” Grave Digger lisped.

“The old lady was not an old lady,” Coffin Ed said. “He was a sort of a pansy pimp who went by the name Black Beauty.”

Casper strangled on cigar smoke. Grave Digger stepped beside the bed and beat him on the back. The nurse entered at that moment and looked horrified.

“It’s all right,” Casper gasped. “I just strangled.”

“I’ll get you a. glass of water and a sedative,” she said, looking at Grave Digger disapprovingly. “You shouldn’t talk so much, and you’re not allowed to smoke either. And beating a patient on the back,” she said to Grave Digger, “is no cure for strangulation.”

“It works,” Grave Digger lisped.