“Will do,” Johnny said.

When Johnny had hung up, Casper jiggled the hook and asked the operator to have the supervising nurse come up to his room.

Chapter 16.

It was past four o’clock when Grave Digger and Coffin Ed got away from Fats’s Down Home Restaurant—just about the time Casper had got finished with the brass.

They hadn’t intended to stay that long. But the place was filled with gamblers and whorehouse madams, all curious about the Casper caper, and they had been fishing themselves, to see what they could pick up about any new jokers in town on a kick binge.

The gamblers hadn’t run across any fresh money; if they had, they wouldn’t admit it. The madams hadn’t come across any mew customers, not with big money, anyway.

“If I had,” one madam confessed, “I’d have handcuffed each of ’em to two girls, and foot-chained ’em to the bed, bad as I need money.”

Pee Wee, the giant black bartender, had fixed them some hot bourbon teas to stave off grippe and pneumonia. Before they had a chance to test what those potent drinks might stave off, they were clutched in the throes of tremendous appetites.

Then Fats had appeared, looking like the scalded and scraped carcass of a hippopotamus, and said he was taking a Smithfield ham out of the oven. That did it.

They ate baked ham and sweet potatoes while Grave Digger held everybody entranced giving a detailed account of the joker getting his head cut off.

By the time they got back outside, they were both willing to believe the gremlins had done it.

The snow was drifting down like endless fields of cotton, and the street was covered an inch thick. Their wreck of a car, sitting at the curb, looked like an abandoned derelict. They hadn’t got to the precinct station as yet.

Grave Digger took hold of Coffin Ed’s sleeve and detained him for a discussion on criminology.

“Take a detective,” he said. “Like you and me. A man gets robbed in the street. The robber taps his victim on the head, knocks him unconscious and runs. Ain’t nobody seen him; the victim don’t know him. Then we come up. We don’t know a damn thing. Don’t even know the man’s been robbed. All we got is his word for it. But everybody expects us to run off and nab the criminals as if we got a robber’s preserve.”

“Maybe they expect us to crawl along and sniff them out, like human bloodhounds,” Coffin Ed said. “Maybe they think we got the nose for it.”

“That Casper,” Grave Digger said. “He got more twists in him than a barrel full of snakes.”

They got into the car. Normally at that hour it would have been dark, but the blanket of snow seemed to illuminate the streets. The few cars out were crawling along like snails, leaving black lines on the white blanket.

“Two bull alligators like you and me ain’t going to catch anything in that goldfish bowl downtown,” Coffin Ed stated. “We’re just going to scare the living hell out of everybody and get the deep freeze for our effort.”