“He fixed her; you know Casper,” Grave Digger said absently.

They were both thinking hard.

“If you were Casper and you wanted to slip out, how would you do it?” Grave Digger asked.

“I ain’t Casper, but I’d hire an ambulance.”

“That’s too obvious. The joint is crawling with newsmen, and, if anybody was laying for him, they’d spot it too.”

“A hearse,” Coffin Ed suggested. “As many people as die in that hospital—”

“Clay!” Grave Digger said, cutting him off.

He looked about; the street was flanked with new skyscraper office buildings and a few remaining impregnable apartment houses.

“We got to get to a phone,” he said, then added on sudden thought, “Drive over to the Seventeenth.”

The 17th Precinct was on 51st Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues. They were there in two minutes.

Coffin Ed telephoned Clay with Grave Digger standing by. They had left Roman handcuffed in the car.

“Clay’s burial home,” came the old man’s querulous voice.

“Clay. Ed Johnson and Digger Jones this end. Did you send a hearse to take Casper home?”

“I’m getting sick and tired of everybody wanting to guard the hearse I sent for Casper,” the old man said tartly. “He already had Joe Green’s boys—as if he couldn’t take care of himself, mean as he is. And besides which he wanted it kept quiet. Then the Pinkertons sent men up—”

“What? The Pinkerton Agency?”

“That’s what they told me. That they were sending three men on orders from—”

“Jesus Christ!” Coffin Ed said, breaking the connection. “Get the Pinkerton Detective Agency,” he asked the switchboard operator.

When he had finished talking, he and Grave Digger looked at one another with as much fear in their eyes as either had ever seen.

“They no doubt got him by now—but why?” Coffin Ed said.

“That ain’t the question now,” Grave Digger lisped. “It’s where?”

“There’s got to be a tie-in,” Coffin Ed said. “We’ve just missed it is all.”

“We got one more card that we can play; we can make like we’re a joker called Bernard Kaufman.”

“We’d need to know his straight moniker.”

“Makes no difference; we can play that one, since it’s all we got to play,” Grave Digger argued, “it might flush Baron into the open.”

Coffin Ed began getting the idea. “You know, it might work at that,” he conceded. “But we’re going to need Roman’s girl friend.”

“Let’s go get her, and let’s hurry. We’ve just about ran out of time.”

They went outside to their car and braced Roman.

“We’re going to set a trap for Baron, son, and we’re going to need your African queen to identify him,” Coffin Ed said.

“I can’t do that,” Roman said. “You-all don’t need her.”

“We want you both, and there isn’t any time to argue about it. A man’s life might depend on this, a big man’s life, an important man to us colored people any way you look at it—the way things are set up. If you help us now, we’ll help you later. But if you don’t we’ll crucify you. Have you ever been cold?”