“If they’re still in town,” Coffin Ed said.

“If they’re still in town!” Casper echoed. “Two of ’em are niggers, and the white boy’s a cracker. Where the hell they going to go? Where would you go if you pulled a caper for fifty G’s? Where else would you look for kicks? Harlem’s the greatest town on earth. You think they’re going to leave it?”

Both detectives subdued the impulse to exchange looks.

Coffin Ed said dispassionately, “Don’t think we’re not on it, Casper. We’ve been on it from the moment it jumped. People got hurt, and some got killed. You’ll read about it in the newspapers. But that’s neither here nor there. We took our lumps, but we ain’t got thrown.”

Casper looked at Grave Digger’s swollen mouth. “It’s a job,” he said.

Chapter 14.

The apartment was on the fifth and top floor of an old stone-fronted building on 110th Street, overlooking the lagoon in upper Central Park.

Colored boys and girls in ski ensembles and ballet skirts were skating the light fantastic at two o’clock when Grave Digger and Coffin Ed parked their half-wrecked car before the building.

The detectives paused for a moment to watch them.

“Reminds me of Gorki,” Grave Digger lisped.

“The writer or the pawnbroker?” Coffin Ed asked.

“The writer, Maxim. In his book called The Bystander. A boy breaks through the ice and disappears. Folks rush to save him but can’t find him—can’t find any trace of him. He’s disappeared beneath the ice. So some joker asks, ‘Was there really a boy?’”

Coffin Ed looked solemn. “So he thought the hole in the ice was an act of God?”

“Must have.”

“Like our friend Baron, eh?”

They went silently up the old marble steps and pushed open the old, exquisitely carved wooden doors with cut-glass panels.

“The rich used to live here,” Coffin Ed remarked.

“Still do,” Grave Digger said. “Just changed color. Colored rich folks always live in the places abandoned by white rich folks.”

They walked through a narrow, oak-paneled hallway with stained-glass wall lamps to an old rickety elevator.

A very old colored man with long, kinky gray hair and parchmentlike skin, wearing a mixed livery of some ancient, faded sort, rose slowly from a padded stool and asked courteously, “What floor, gentlemens?”

“Top,” Coffin Ed said.

The old man drew his cotton-gloved hand back from the lever as though it had suddenly turned red hot.

“Mister Holmes ain’t in,” he said.

“Missus Holmes is,” Coffin Ed said. “We have an appointment.”

The old man shook his cotton-boll head. “She didn’t tell me about it,” he said.

“She doesn’t tell you everything she does, grandfather,” Coffin Ed said.

Grave Digger drew a soft leather folder from his inside pocket and lashed his shield. “We’re the men,” he lisped.

Stubbornly the old man shook his head. “Makes no difference to Mister Holmes. He’s The Man.”

“All right,” Coffin Ed compromised. “You take us up. If Missus Holmes doesn’t receive us, you bring us down. Okay?”