“Yes, sir, lots of times.”

“But not as cold as we’ll make you. We’ll take you over to the river, handcuff your feet together, and let you hang in the water with all that snow they’re dumping from the bridges.”

Roman began to shiver just thinking about it.

Afterwards Coffin Ed admitted it might only have worked on an Alabama boy.

“If I tell you where she’s at, you won’t arrest her, will you?” Roman begged. “She ain’t done nothing.”

“If she helps us catch Baron, we’ll decorate her,” Coffin Ed promised.

They stood in the deserted office of the boathouse beside the lagoon, across from the apartment house in which Casper Holmes lived, using the telephone.

It was cold and damp; an inch-thick coating of ice covered the floor.

Coffin Ed was on the telephone, talking through the fine-tooth end of a gutta-percha comb held tight against the mouthpiece.

“This Bernie,” he said. “Just listen, don’t talk. There’s a police tap on your line. Have Baron get in touch with me immediately.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” a voice said coldly at the other end of the wire.

He hung up.

Grave Digger looked a question.

He shrugged.

Roman and Sassafras, standing to one side and handcuffed together, stared at him as though he had taken leave of his senses.

“If you is trying to imitate the Mister Bernard Kaufman, who stamped that bill of sale Mister Baron gave to Roman, you don’t sound nothing’ like him,” Sassafras said scornfully,

But the detectives had considered this.

“Well, let’s go see if it works,” Grave Digger lisped.

They took the handcuffed couple outside and crossed the sidewalk to Coffin Ed’s Plymouth.

It was parked between two snow-covered cars of indistinguishable make, directly across 110th Street from the entrance to Casper’s apartment house. Nothing about it indicated a police car.

Coffin Ed unlocked it, got in and started the motor and the windshield wipers. Grave Digger got into the front beside him; Roman and Sassafras piled into the back. Roman was still wearing his sailor suit; Sassafras wore the same ensemble she had the day before, with the exception of the red knitted cap, which she had exchanged for a green one.

Passing pedestrians, half-blinded by the snow, paid them no attention.

Sassafras leaned close to Roman and whispered conspiratorially, “I ain’t heard yet from my friend.”

She had been in hiding all day and hadn’t learned that her friend with the experience had finally lost his head.

“But as soon as I do—”

“Hush your mouth!” Roman said tensely. “You ain’t going to.”

“Well, I like that!” she exclaimed indignantly and withdrew to the other side.

The Plymouth was pointed toward Fifth Avenue, which bounds Central Park on the east. All Fifth Avenue buses going north turned the corner into 110th Street and branched out toward their various destinations further on. The line’s control office, where the schedules were checked and the personnel changed, was directly around the corner on the north side of 110th Street. Adjacent was a bar, facing the circular square, it contained the nearest public telephone.