Coffin Ed was not a moralist. But their cliquish quality of freezing up on an outsider grated on his nerves.

“Don’t everybody talk at once,” he shouted from the doorway.

No one said a word.

To a man, they were staring into their drinks as though competing in a contest of three wise monkeys: See nothing; hear nothing; say nothing. The contest was progressing toward a dead heat.

The three bartenders were rinsing glasses with an industriousness that would have gotten them all blacklisted by the bartenders’ union.

Coffin Ed began swelling at the gills. His gaze flickered dangerously down the line, seeking a likely candidate to begin with. But they were all equally engrossed in silence.

“Don’t try to give me that silent treatment,” he warned. “We’re all colored folks together.”

Someone in back giggled softly.

The uniformed white cop guarding the rear door stared at him with a dead-pan expression.

Coffin Ed’s temper flared, and the grafted patches on his face began to twitch.

He spoke to the back of the joker on the first stool. “All right, buddy boy, let’s start with you. Which way did they go?”

The girlish young man continued to stare into his drink as though he were stone-deaf. The indirect lighting from the bar gave his smooth brown face a bemused look. His luminescent silver cap gleamed faintly like swamp-fire.

He was drinking a tall frappe highball of dark rum with a streak of grenadine running down the center, called a “Josephine Baker.” If La Baker herself had been reclining stark nude in the bottom of his glass, he could not have given her any more attention.

Coffin Ed took him roughly by the shoulder and tamed him about. “Which way did they go?” he repeated in a rasping voice.

The young man looked at him from big, brown, bedroom eyes that seemed incapable of comprehending anything but love.