He waited until the sergeant had contacted the two prowl cars and dispatched them to the scene. Then he said, “Get Jones and Johnson.”

While the sergeant was calling for Jones and Johnson to come in, Anderson said anxiously, “Let us hope nothing has happened to Holmes.”

The sergeant couldn’t get Jones and Johnson.

Anderson stood up. “Keep trying,” he ordered. “I’m going to run over and take a quick look for myself.”

The reason the sergeant couldn’t get Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson is that they were in the back room of Mammy Louise’s pork store eating hot “chicken feetsy,” a Geechy dish of stewed chicken feet, rice, okra and red chili peppers. On a cold night like this it kept a warm fire burning in the stomach, and the white, tender gristle of the chicken feet gave a solid packing to the guts.

There were three wooden tables covered with oilcloth of such a bilious color that only the adhesive consistency of Mammy Louise’s Geechy stews could hold the food in the stomach. Against the side wall was a coal-burning stove flanked by copper water tasks. Pots of cooking foods bubbled on the hot lids, giving the small, close room the steamy, luxurious feeing of a Turkish bath.

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed were sitting at the table farthest from the stove, their coats draped over the backs of wooden chairs. Their beat-up black hats hung above their overcoats on nails in the outside wall. Sweat beaded on their skulls underneath their short-cropped, kinky hair and streamed down their dark, intent faces. Coffin Ed’s hair was peppered with gray. He had a crescent-shaped scar on the right-side top of his skull, where Grave Digger had hit him with his pistol barrel, the time he had gone berserk after being blinded by acid thrown into his face. That had been more than three years ago, and the acid scars had been covered by skin, grafted from his thigh. But the new skin was a shade or so lighter than his natural face skin and it had been grafted on in pieces. The result was that Coffin Ed’s face looked as though it had been made up in Hollywood for the role of the Frankenstein monster. Grave Digger’s rough, lumpy face could have belonged to any number of hard, Harlem characters.

Grave Digger sucked the gristle from his last chicken foot and spat the small white bones onto the pile on his plate.

“I’ll bet you a bottle he don’t make it,” he said in a low voice, barely audible.

Coffin Ed looked at his wrist watch. “What kind of bet is that,” he replied in a similar tone of voice. “It’s already five minutes to twelve, and she got off at eleven-thirty. You think she’s waiting for him.”

“Naw, but he thinks so.”

They glanced surreptitiously at a man sitting in a worn wooden armchair in the corner beside the stove. He was a short, fat, bald-headed man with the round, black, mobile face of a natural-born comedian. Except for an overcoat, he was dressed for the street. He was staring across at them with a pleading look.