The crazy kill (coffin johnson and grave digger jones)

by Chester Himes

  "Give her a chance, Johnny," Mamie pleaded. "Trust her."

  "You don't know how much I wanna trust that gal," Johnny confessed. "But I ain't gonna let her nor him nor nobody else make a chump out of me. I ain't gonna fatten no frogs for snakes. And that's final."

  "Oh Johnny," she begged, sobbing into her black-lace bordered handkerchief. "There's already been one killing too many. Don't kill nobody else."

  For the first time Johnny turned and looked at her.

  "What killing too many?"

  "I know you couldn't help it that time 'bout your ma," she said. "But you ain't got to kill nobody else." She was trying to dissemble, but she talked too quickly and in too strained a voice.

  "That ain't what you meant," Johnny said. "You meant about Val."

  "That ain't what I said," she said.

  "But that's what you meant."

  "I wasn't thinking about him. Not in that way," she denied again. "I just don't want to see any more blood trouble, that's all."

  "You don't have to pussyfoot about what you mean," he said in his toneless voice. "You can call his name. You can say he was stabbed to death, right over there on the sidewalk. It don't bother me. Just say what you mean."

  "You know what I mean," she said stubbornly. "I mean just don't let her be the cause of no more killings, Johnny."

  He tried to catch her eye, but she wouldn't meet his gaze. "You think I killed him," he said.

  "I didn't say no such thing," she denied.

  "But that's what you think."

  "I ain't said nothing like that and you know it."

  "I ain't talking about what you said. What I want to know is why you think I wanted to kill him."

  "Oh Johnny, I don't think no such thing that you killed him," she said in a wailing voice.

  "That ain't what I'm talking about, Aunt Mamie," he said. "I want to know what reason you think I'd have for killing him. Whether you think I killed him or not don't bother me. I just want to know what reason you think I'd do it for."

  She looked him straight in the eyes. "There ain't any reason for you to have killed him, Johnny," she said. "And that's the gospel truth."

  "Then why'd you start off pleading for me to trust Dulcy so much and then the next thing you're figuring she's done give me reason enough to kill Val. That's what I want to know," he persisted. "What kind of reasoning is that?"

  "Johnny, in this game of life, you got to give her as much as you ask to get from her," she said. "You can't win without risking."

  "I know," he admitted. "That's a gambler's rule. But I got to put in eight hours every day in my club. It's as much for her as it is for me. But that means she's got all the chances in the world to play me for a sucker."

  Mamie reached her gnarled old hand over and tried to take his hard long-fingered hand, but he drew it back.

  "I ain't asking for mercy," he said harshly. "I don't want to hurt nobody, either. If she wants him, all I want her to do is walk out and go to him. I ain't gonna hurt her. If she don't want him, I ain't gonna have him pressing her. I don't mind losing. Every gambler got to lose sometime. But I ain't gonna be cheated."

  "I know how you feel, Johnny," Mamie said. "But you got to learn to trust her. A jealous man can't win."

  "A working man can't gamble and a jealous man can't win," said Johnny, quoting the old gambler's adage. After a moment he added, "If it's like you said, ain't nobody going to get hurt."

  "I'm going up and get some sleep," she said, getting slowly to the sidewalk. Then she paused with her hand on the door and added, "Somebody's got to preach his funeral. Do you know any preacher who'd do it?"

  "Get your own preacher," he said. "That's what he likes best, to preach somebody's funeral."

  "You talk to him," she said.

  "I don't want to talk to that man," he said. "Not after what he said today."

  "You got to talk to him," she insisted. "Do it for Dulcy's sake."

  He didn't say anything, and she didn't say any more. When she vanished within the entrance he started the motor and drove slowly through the idling traffic up to the store-front Church of the Holy Rollers on Eighth Avenue.

  Reverend Short lived in a room at the back that had once been a storeroom. The street door was unlocked. Johnny entered without knocking and walked down the aisle between the broken benches. The door leading to Reverend Short's bedroom was cracked open a couple of inches. The plate glass windows at the front were painted black on the inside three-quarters high, but enough twilight filtered through the dingy glass overtop to glint on Reverend Short's spectacles as he peered through the narrow opening of the door.

  The spectacles withdrew and the door closed as Johnny skirted the soapbox pulpit, and he heard the lock click shut as he approached.

  He knocked and waited. Silence greeted him.

  "It's Johnny Perry, Reverend; I want to talk to you," he said.

  There was a rustling sound like rats scurrying about inside, and Reverend Short spoke abruptly in his croaking voice. "Don't think I haven't been expecting you."

  "Good," Johnny said. "Then you know it's about the funeral."

  "I know why you've come and I'm prepared for you," Reverend Short croaked.

  Johnny had had a long hard day, and his nerves were on edge. He tried the door and found it locked.

  "Open this door," he said roughly. "How the hell you expect to do business through a locked door?"

  "Aha, do you think you're deceiving me," Reverend Short croaked.

  Johnny rattled the door knob. "Listen, preacher," he said. "Mamie Pullen sent me and I'm going to pay you for it, so what the hell's the matter with you."

  "You expect me to believe that a holy Christian like Mamie Pullen sent you to-" Reverend Short began croaking when all of a sudden Johnny grabbed the knob in a fit of rage and started to break in the door.

  As though reading his thoughts, Reverend Short warned in a thin dry voice as dangerous as the rattle of a rattlesnake, "Don't you break down that door!"

  Johnny snatched his hand back as though a snake had struck at him. "What's wrong with you, preacher, you got a woman in there with you?" he asked suspiciously.

  "So that's what you're after?" Reverend Short said. "You think that murderess is hiding in here."

  "Jesus Christ, man, are you stone raving crazy?" Johnny said, losing control of his temper. "Just open this mother-raping door. I ain't got all night to stand out here and listen to that loony stuff."

  "Drop that gun!" Reverend Short warned.

  "I ain't got no gun, preacher-are you jagged?"

  Johnny heard the click of some sort of weapon being cocked.

  "I warn you! Drop that gun!" Reverend Short repeated. "To hell with you," Johnny said disgustedly, and started to turn away.

  But his sixth sense warned him of imminent danger, and he dropped flat to the floor just before a double blast from a twelve-gauge shotgun blew a hole the size of a dinner plate through the upper panel of the wooden door.

  Johnny came up from the floor as though he were made of rubber. He hit the door with a driving shoulder-block that had so much force it broke the lock and flung the door back against the wall with a bang loud enough to be an echo to the shotgun blast.

  Reverend Short dropped the gun and whipped a knife from his side pants-pocket, so quick the blade was open in his hand before the shotgun clattered on the floor.

  Johnny was charging head first so fast he couldn't stop, so he stuck out his left hand and grabbed the wrist of Reverend Short's knife hand and butted him in the solar plexus. Reverend Short's glasses flew from his face like a bird taking wing, and he fell backwards across an unmade bed with a white-painted iron frame. Johnny landed on top of him, muscle-free as a cat landing on four feet, and in the same instant twisted the knife from Reverend Short's grip with one hand and began throttling him with the other.

  His knees were locked about Reverend Short's middle as he put the pressure on his throat. Reverend Short's nearsighted eyes began bulgi
ng like bananas being squeezed from their skins, and all they could see was the livid scar on Johnny's blood-purple forehead, puffing and wriggling like a maddened octopus.

  But he showed no signs of fear.

  Just short of breaking the skinny neck Johnny caught himself. He took a deep breath, and his whole body shuddered as though from an electric shock to his brain. Then he took his hands from Reverend Short's throat and straightened up, still straddling him, and looked down soberly at the blue-tinted face beneath him on the bed.

  "Preacher," he said slowly. "You're going to make me kill you."

  Reverend Short returned his stare as he gasped for breath. When finally he could speak, he said in a defiant voice, "Go ahead and kill me. But you can't save her. They're going to get her anyway."

  Johnny backed from the bed and got to his feet, stepping on Reverend Short's spectacles. He kicked them angrily from underfoot and looked down at Reverend Short lying supine in the same position.

  "Listen, I want to ask you just one question," he said in his toneless, gambler's voice. "Why would she want to kill her own brother?"

  Reverend Short returned his look with malevolence.

  "You know why," he said.

  Johnny stood dead still, as though listening, looking down at him. Finally he said, "You've tried to kill me. I ain't going to do nothing about that. You've called her a murderess. I ain't going to do nothing about that, either. I don't think you're crazy, so we can rule that out. All I want to ask you is why?"

  Reverend Short's near-sighted eyes filled with a look of malignant evil.

  "There's only two of you who would have done it," he said in a thin dry voice no louder than a whisper. "That's you and her. And if you didn't do it, then she did. And if you don't know why, then ask her. And if you think you're going to save her by killing me, then go ahead and do it."

  "I ain't got much of a hand," Johnny said. "But I'll call it."

  He turned and picked his way through the church benches toward the door. Light from the street lamps came in through the unpainted upper rim of the dingy front windows, showing him the way.

  11

  It was eight o'clock, but still light.

  "Let's go for a ride," Grave Digger said to Coffin Ed, "and look at some scenery. See the brown gals blooming in pink dresses, smell the perfume of poppies and marijuana."

  "And listen to the stool pigeons sing," Coffin Ed supplied.

  They were cruising south on Seventh Avenue in the small battered black sedan. Grave Digger eased the little car behind a big slow-moving trailer truck, and Coffin Ed kept his eyes skinned along the sidewalk.

  A numbers writer standing in front of Madame Sweetiepie's hairdressing parlor, flashing a handful of paper slips with the day's winning numbers, looked up and saw Coffin Ed's baleful eyes pinned on him and began eating the paper slips as though they were taffy candy.

  Hidden behind the big truck trailer, they sneaked up on a group of weedheads standing in front of the bar at the corner of 126th Street. Eight young hoodlums dressed in tight black pants, fancy straw hats with mixed-colored bands, pointed shoes and loud-colored sport shirts, wearing smoked glasses, and looking like an assemblage of exotic grasshoppers, had already finished one stick and were passing around the second one when one of them exclaimed, "Split! Here comes King Kong and Frankenstein." The boy smoking the stick swallowed it so fast the fire burnt his gullet and he doubled over, strangling.

  The one called Gigolo said, "Play it cool! Play it cool! Just clean, that's all."

  They threw their switchblade knives onto the sidewalk in front of the bar. Another boy palmed the two remaining sticks and stuck them quickly in his mouth, ready to eat them if the detectives stopped.

  Grave Digger smiled grimly.

  "I could hit that punk in his belly and make him vomit up enough evidence to give him a year in the cooler," he said.

  "We'll teach him that trick some other time," Coffin Ed said.

  Two of the boys were beating the strangling boy on the back, the others began talking with big gestures as though discussing a scientific treatise on prostitution. Gigolo stared at the detectives defiantly.

  Gigolo was wearing a chocolate-colored straw hat with a wide yellow band polka-dotted with blue. When Coffin Ed fingered his right coat lapel with the first two fingers of his right hand, Gigolo pushed his straw hat back on his head and said, "Nuts to them mother-rapers, they ain't got nothing on us."

  Grave Digger drove on slowly without stopping, and in the rear-view mirror he saw the punk take the wet marijuana sticks from his mouth and start blowing on them to dry them.

  They kept on down to 119th Street, turned back to Eighth Avenue, went uptown again and parked before a dilapidated tenement house between 126th and 127th Streets. Old people were sitting on the sidewalk in kitchen chairs propped against the front of the building.

  They climbed the dark steep stairs to the fourth floor. Grave Digger knocked on a door at the rear, three single raps spaced exactly ten seconds apart.

  For the space of a full minute no sound was heard. There was no sound of locks being opened, but slowly the door swung inward five inches, held by two iron cables at top and bottom.

  "It's us, Ma," Grave Digger said.

  The ends of the cables were removed from the slots and the door opened all the way.

  A thin old gray-haired woman with a wrinkled black face, who looked to be about ninety years old, wearing a floor length Mother Hubbard dress of faded black cotton, stood to one side and let them pass into the pitchdark hallway and closed the door behind them.

  They followed her without further comment down to the far end of the hall. She opened a door and sudden light spilled out, showing a snuff stick in the corner of her wrinkled mouth.

  "There he," she said, and Coffin Ed followed Grave Digger into a small back bedroom and closed the door behind him.

  Gigolo sat on the edge of the bed with his fancy hat pushed to the back of his head, biting his dirty nails to the quick. The pupils of his eyes were big black disks in his tight, sweaty brown face.

  Coffin Ed sat facing him, straddling the single straightbacked wooden chair, and Grave Digger stood glaring down at him and said, "You've had a bang of heroin."

  Gigolo shrugged. His skinny shoulders jerked beneath the canary-colored sport shirt.

  "Don't get him excited," Coffin Ed warned, and then asked Gigolo in a confidential tone of voice, "Who made the sting last night, sport?"

  Gigolo's body began jerking as though someone had slipped a hot poker down the seat of his pants.

  "Poor Boy got new money," he said in a rapid blurred voice.

  "Who kind of money?" Grave Digger asked.

  "Hard money."

  "No green money?"

  "If he is, he ain't showed it."

  "Where's he likely to be at this time?"

  "Acey-Deucey's poolroom. He's a pool freak."

  Grave Digger asked Coffin Ed, "Do you know him?"

  "This town is full of Poor Boys," Coffin Ed said, turning back to the stool pigeon. "What's he look like?"

  "Slim black boy. Plays it cool. Working stiff jive. Don't never flash. Looks a little like Country Boy used to look 'fore they sent him to the pen."

  "How does he dress?" Grave Digger asked.

  "Like I just said. Wears old blue jeans, T-shirt, canvas sneakers, always looks raggedy as a bowl of yakamein."

  "Has he got a partner?"

  "Iron Jaw. You know Iron Jaw."

  Grave Digger nodded.

  "But he don't seem to be in on this sting. He ain't showed outside today," Gigolo added.

  "Okay, sport," Coffin Ed said, standing up. "Lay off the heroin."

  Gigolo's body began to jerk more violently. "What's a man going to do? You folks keeps me scared. If anybody finds out I'm stooling for you I be scared to shake my head." He was referring to a story they tell in Harlem about two jokers, in a razor fight and one says, Man, you ain't cut me, and the other one says, if you d
on't believe I done cut you, just shake you head and it goin' to fall off.

  "The heroin isn't going to keep your head on any better," Coffin Ed warned.

  On the way out, he said to the old lady who'd let them in, "Cut down on Gigolo, Ma, he's getting so hopped he's going to blow his top one day."

  "Lawd, I ain't no doctor," she complained. "I don't know how much they needs. I just sells it if they got the money to pay for it. You know, I don't use that junk myself."

  "Well, cut down anyway," Grave Digger said harshly. "We're just letting you run because you keep our stool pigeons supplied."

  "If it wasn't for these stool pigeons you'd be out of business," she argued. "The cops ain't goin' to never find out nothing if don't nobody tell 'em."

  "Just put a little baking soda in that heroin, and don't give it to them straight," Grave Digger said. "We don't want these boys blind. And let us out this hole, we're in a hurry."

  She shuffled down the black dark hall with hurt feelings and opened the three heavy locks on the front door without a sound.

  "That old crone is getting on my nerves," Grave Digger said as they climbed into their car.

  "What you need is a vacation," Coffin Ed said. "Or else a laxative."

  Grave Digger chuckled.

  They drove over to 137th Street and Lenox Avenue, on the other side from the Savoy Ballroom, climbed a narrow flight of stairs beside the Boll Weevil Bar to the AceyDeucey poolroom on the second floor.

  A small space at the front was closed off by a wooden counter for an office. A fat, bald-headed brown-skinned man, wearing a green eyeshade, a collarless silk shirt and a black vest adorned with a pennyweight gold chain, sat on a high stool behind the cash register on the counter and looked over the six pool tables arranged crosswise down the long, narrow room.

  When Grave Digger and Coffin Ed appeared at the top of the stairs, he greeted in a low bass voice usually associated with undertakers. "Howdy do, gentlemen, how is the police business this fine summer day?"

  "Booming, Acey," Coffin Ed said, his eyes roving over the lighted tables. "More folks getting robbed, slugged and stabbed to death in this hot weather than usual."