“Yassuh,” Roman said duly, as though the world had come to an end.
“All right,” the white cop said. “Just let this be a lesson; you can’t buy justice.”
“It weren’t him,” Sassafras said.
“You just keep him quiet if you know what’s good for you,” the cop said, and slammed the door.
He walked unhurriedly back to the Cadillac. One of the colored cops was sitting behind the wheel, the other sitting beside him. The white cop sat on the outside and slammed the door.
The cop driving started the motor and began easing off without turning on the lights. The big golden Cadillac crept silently around the back end of the Buick and had started past before Sassafras noticed it.
“Look, they is taking our car,” she cried.
Roman was too dejected to look up. “He’s impounding it,” he muttered.
“It ain’t just him; it’s all of them,” she said.
Roman’s cocked eyes came up in a startled face. “Why you reckon they is doing that?” he asked stupidly.
“I bet my life they is stealing it,” she said.
Roman jumped as though a time bomb had gone off in his pants. “Stealing my car!” he shouted, his hard, cable-like muscles coming into violent life.
He had the door open and was out on the pavement and pursuing the golden Cadillac before she could start screaming. She opened her mouth and let loose a scream that caused windows to pop open all up and down the street.
Roman was the only one who didn’t hear her. His big, muscle-bound body was rolling as he ran, as though the sloping black pavement were the deck of a ship caught in a storm at sea. He was tugging at something stuck down his pants leg, beneath his leather jacket. Finally he came out with a big, rusty. 45 caliber revolver, but before he had a chance to fire it the Cadillac had turned the corner and disappeared from sight.
A joker on a motorcycle with a sidecar was pulling out from the curb when the big Cadillac suddenly bore down on him and the driver switched on the lights. He did a quick turn back toward the curb. From the corners of his eyes he saw a golden Cadillac pass at a blinding speed. The silhouettes of three cops occupying the front seat lashed briefly across his vision. His brain did a double take and flipped.
This joker had seen this Cadillac a short time before. At that time the occupants had been two civilians and a woman. There couldn’t be but one Cadillac like that in Harlem, he was sure. If there was such a Cadillac. If he wasn’t just blowing his top.
This joker was wearing dark-brown coveralls, a woolen-lined army fatigue jacket and a fur-lined, dark-plaid hunter’s cap. There wasn’t but one joker looking like this outside on this bitter cold night.
“No, it ain’t true,” the joker said to himself. “Either I ain’t me or what I seen ain’t that.”
While he was trying to figure out which was which a big black sedan screamed around the corner with its bright lights splitting open the black-dark night.
It was a Buick sedan, and it looked familiar. But not nearly so familiar as the woman he’d seen a short time before in the golden Cadillac. However, now the freak with the coonskin cap who had been driving the Cadillac was driving the Buick.
All of it was so crazy it was reassuring. He bent over the handlebars of his motorcycle and began laughing as though he had gone crazy himself.
“Haw haw haw.” He laughed, and then began talking to himself. “Whatever it is I is dreaming, one thing is for sure-ain’t none of it true.”
Chapter 3
The switchboard in the precinct station was jammed.
The switchboard sergeant relayed the reports to Desk Lieutenant Anderson in a bored, monotonous voice: “There’s a woman who lives across the street from the convent says murder and rape taking place in the street…”
Lieutenant Anderson yawned. “Every time a man beats his wife some busybody calls in and says she’s being raped and murdered-the wife, I mean. And God knows some of them could use a little of it-the busybodies, I mean.”
“…another woman from the same vicinity. Says someone is torturing a dog…”
“Tell her we’re sending an officer over right away,” Anderson said. “Tell her dogs are our best friends.”
“She hung up. But here’s another one. Claims the nuns are having an orgy.”
“Something’s going on,” Anderson conceded. “Send Joe Abrams and his partner over to take a look.”
The sergeant switched on the radio. “Come in, Joe Abrams.”
Joe Abrams came in.
“Take a look along the south side of the convent.”
“Right,” Joe Abrams said.
“Patrolman Stick calling from a box on 125th Street,” the sergeant said to Anderson. “Claims he and his partner, Sam Price were attacked and unfooted by a flying saucer some one has released in the neighborhood.”
“Order them to report here before going off duty for an alcohol test,” Anderson said sternly.
The sergeant chuckled as he relayed the order. Then he plugged in another call, and his face went grim.
“Man giving his name as Benjamin Zazuly, calling from the Paris Bar on 125th Street, reporting a double murder. Says two men dead on the sidewalk in front of the bar. One a white man. A third man unconscious. Thinks he’s Casper Holmes…”
Anderson’s fist came down on the desk, and his lean, hard face went bitter. “Goddammit, everything happens to me,” he said, but the moment he had said it he regretted it.
“Get the other two cars over there,” he directed in a steady voice. The veins throbbed in his temples, and his pale-blue eyes looked remote.
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 wat
ch. “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.
He was Mister Louise, Mammy’s husband. He had been picking up a hot little brownskin waitress at the Fischer Cafeteria next to the 125th Street railroad station every Saturday night since the new year began.
But Mammy Louise had got a bulldog. It was a six-year-old bulldog of a dirty white color with a mouth big enough to let in full-grown cats. It sat on its haunches directly in front of Mister Louise’s shinily shod feet and stared up into his desperate face with a lidded, unblinking look. Its pink mouth was wide open as it panted in the steamy heat; its red tongue hung down its chest. There was a big wet spot on the floor where it had been drooling as though it would like nothing better than a hunk of Mister Louise’s fat black meat.
“He wants us to help him,” Coffin Ed whispered.
“And get ourselves chawed up by that dog instead of him.”
Mammy Louise looked up from the stove where she had been stirring a pot. She was fatter than Mister Louise, but not quite as tall. She wore an old woolen bathrobe over an old jersey dress, under which were layers of warm woolen underclothing. Over the bathrobe she wore a black knitted shawl; her head was protected by a man’s beaver hat with a turned-up brim, and her feet were encased in fur-lined woodsmen’s boots.
She was a Geechy, born and raised in the swamps south of Tater Patch, South Carolina. Geechies are a melange of runaway African slaves and Seminole Indians, native to the Carolinas and Florida. Their mother tongue is a mixture of African dialects and the Seminole language; and she spoke English with a strange, indefinable accent that sounded somewhat similar to a conference of crows.
“What you two p’licemens whispering about so seriously?” she asked suspiciously.
It took a moment before they could piece together what she said.
“We got a bet,” Grave Digger replied with a straight face.
“Naw we haven’t,” Coffin Ed denied.
“You p’licemens,” she said scornfully. “Gamblin’ an’ carryin’ on an’ whippin’ innocent folkses’ heads with your big pistols.”
“Not if they’re innocent,” Grave Digger contradicted.
“Don’t tell me,” she said argumentatively. “I has seen you.” She curled her thick, sensuous lips. “Whippin’ grown men about as if they was children. Mister Louise wouldn’t stand for it,” she added, looking slyly from her husband’s desperate face to the slobbering bulldog. “Get up, Mister Louise, and show these p’licemens how you captured them train robbers that time.”
Mister Louise looked at her gratefully and started to his feet. The bulldog raised up and growled a warning; Mister Louise slumped back into his seat.
Mammy Louise winked her off eye at the detectives. “Mister Louise ain’t so pokey tonight,” she explained. “He just want to set here and keep me company.”
“So we noticed,” Coffin Ed said.
Mister Louise stared longingly at the long-barreled, nickel-plated. 38 caliber revolvers sticking from the two detectives’ shoulder holsters.
They heard the front door to the store open and bang shut. Feet stamped. A whisky-thick voice called, “Hey, Mammy Louise, come out here and give me a pot of them frozen chitterlings.”
She waddled through the curtained doorway leading to the store. They heard her opening a five-gallon milk can and shuffling about, and the customer protesting, “I don’t wants them loose chitterlings; I wants some frozen chitterlings,” and her sharp reply, “If you wants to eat ’em frozen just take ’em outside and freeze ’em; hit’s cold enough.”
Grave Digger said, “Mammy Louise can’t stand this Northern climate.”
“She got enough fat to keep her warm at the North Pole,” Coffin Ed replied.
“The trouble is, her fat gets cold.”
Mister Louise begged in a piteous voice, “One of you gentlemens shoot him for me, won’t you.” He glanced toward the curtained doorway and added, “I’ll pay you.”
“It wouldn’t kill him,” Coffin Ed replied solemnly.
“Bullets would just bounce off his head,” Grave Digger supplemented.
Mammy Louise came back and looked at her husband suspiciously. Then she said to the detectives, “Your car is talking.”
“I’ll get it,” Grave Digger said, getting to his feet before he’d finished saying it.
He slipped an arm through his jacket, grabbed his hat from the peg and pushed through the curtains as he poked his second arm into its sleeve.
The bulldog rolled its pink eyes at his receding figure and looked at Mammy Louise for instructions. But she paid it no attention. She was half moaning to herself. “Trouble, always trouble in dis wicked city. Whar Ah comes from-”
“There ain’t no law,” Coffin Ed cut her off as he put on his jacket. “Folks cut one another’s throats and go on about their business.”
“It’s better than getting kilt by the law,” she argued. “You can’t pay for one death by another one. Salvation ain’t the swapping market.”
Coffin Ed jammed his hat on his head, turned up the brim and slipped into his overcoat.
“Tell it to the voters, Mammy,” he said absently as he took down Grave Digger’s overcoat and straightened out a sleeve. “I didn’t make these laws.”
“I’ll tell it to everybody,” she said.
Grave Digger came back in a hurry. His face was set.
“Hell’s broke loose on the street,” he said, poking his arm into the coat Coffin Ed held for him.
“We’d better hop it then,” Coffin Ed said.
Unnoticed by anyone but Mister Louise, the bulldog had moved over to block the curtained doorway. When Grave Digger moved toward it, the dog planted its feet and growled.
Grave Digger’s long, gleaming, nickel-plated revolver came out in his hand like a feat of legerdemain, but Mammy Louise swooped down on the dog and dragged it off before he did it injury.
“Not dem, Lawd Jim, mah God, dawg,” she cried. “You can’t stop dem from goin’ nowhere. Them is de mens. ”
Chapter 4
The small, battered black sedan parked at the curb in front of Mammy Louise’s Hog Store: open day amp; night was still talking when they came out on the street. Grave Digger slid beneath the wheel, and Coffin Ed went around and climbed in from the other side.
The store was on 124th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, and the car was pointing toward Seventh.
The Paris Bar was due north as the bird flies on 125th Street, midway between the Apollo Bar and the Palm Cafe and across the street from Blumstein’s Department Store.
It was ten minutes by foot, if you were on your way to church, about two and a half minutes if your old lady was chasing you with a razor.
Coffin Ed checked his watch when Grave Digger mashed the starter. The little car might have looked like a bow-legged turtle, but it ran like an antelope.
It passed the Theresa Hotel, going up the wrong side of the street, bright lights on and siren screaming. Jokers in the lobby staring out the windows scattered like a hurricane had passed. They made it in thirty-three seconds.
Two prowl cars and Lieutenant Anderson’s black sedan were parked in front of the Paris Bar, taking up all the available space. Save for the cops standing about in clusters, the street was deserted.
“One’s a white man,” Grave Digger said.
“What else?” Coffin Ed replied.
What he meant was what else could keep the black citizens away from the circus provided by a killing.
“Butts going to jump,” Grave Dig
ger added as he made a sharp-angled turn and squeezed between the front car and a fireplug, jumping the curb.
Before he had dragged to a stop, crosswise the sidewalk, just short of banging into the grilled front of a drugstore adjacent to the Paris Bar, they saw the three prone figures on the sidewalk.
The one nearest wore a belted trench coat and a dark snapbrim hat that was still clinging to his head. He lay that on his belly, his legs spread and his feet resting on his toes. His left arm was folded down beside him with the palm turned up; his right arm was flung out at an angle, still gripping a short-barreled revolver. Street light shone on the soles of his shoes, showing runover rubber heels and recent toecaps. The top part of his face was shaded by his hat brim, but orange light from the neon bar sign lit the lower part, showing the tip of a hooked nose and a long, pointed chin and leaving the thin, compressed lips invisible, so that the face seemed to lack a mouth.
One glance was enough to tell that he was dead.
The Paris Bar had a stainless-steel front framing the two big plate-glass windows that tanked the doorway. The left-side steel baseboard directly behind the stiff was punctured with bullet holes.
With the second stiff, it was different. He lay piled up like a wet towel directly in front of the door. His smooth, handsome black face peered from folds of gay-colored clothes with a look of infinite surprise. He didn’t look so much dead from gunshot as from shock; but the small, round, purple-lipped hole above his right temple told the story.
The third figure was encircled by cops.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed alighted and converged on the first stiff.
“Two hits through the top of the hat,” Grave Digger observed, his gaze roving. “He was lying on his belly and they nailed the hat on tighter.”
“Two in the right shoulder and one in the left neck,” said Coffin Ed. “Somebody sure wanted this son dead.”
“No one man scored five hits on this guy and him with a gun in his hand,” Grave Digger stated.
All shot up cjagdj-5 Page 2
