“He ought to be here any time,” she said, but she sounded as though she didn’t care if he never came.
Roman began looking worried again. “You’re sure this joker can help us? I’ve got a notion we’re up against some rough studs, and I don’t want nobody messing around who’s going to get rattled.”
Sassafras ran a greasy bone comb through her short, tousled hair. “Don’t worry ’bout him,” she said. “He ain’t going to lose his head.”
“This waiting around is dragging me,” he said. “I wish we could do something.”
“You call what we been doing nothing?” she said coyly.
“I mean about my car,” he said. “It’s going to soon be daylight and ain’t nobody doing nothing.”
She went over, put some coal on the fire and adjusted the damper. Her dress was pulled out of shape and hung one-sided.
“I’m going to see if he got any whisky left,” she said, rummaging about the shoes on the floor of the curtained-off clothes corner.
He followed her and saw a green dress hanging with the men’s clothes.
“This looks like your dress,” he said suspiciously.
“Don’t start that stuff again,” she said. “You think they only made one dress when they made mine. Besides which, his girl friend is about the same size as me.”
“You’re sure she ain’t wearing the same skin?” he said.
She ignored him. Finally she came up with a bottle of cheap blended whisky, three-quarters full.
“Here, drink this and shut up,” she said, thrusting the bottle into his hands.
He uncorked it and let whisky gurgle down his throat. “It ain’t bad, but it’s mighty weak,” he appraised.
“How you going to know bad whisky?” she said scornfully. “You’re been drinking white mule all your life.”
He took another drink, bringing the level down below half. “Baby, I’m hungry enough to eat a horse off his hoof and leave the skeleton still hitched to the plow,” he said, flexing his muscles. “Why don’t you see if your girl friend’s boy friend has got anything to eat in this joint.”
“If I found something, it’d just make you more suspicious,” she said.
“Anyhow, it’d fill my belly.”
She found some salt meat, a half loaf of white bread in wax-paper wrapping and a bottle of molasses in the bottom drawer. Then she opened a back window and delved into a screened cold-box attached to the sill; she found a pot half-filled with congealed hominy grits and a frozen can of sliced California peaches.
“I don’t see no coffee,” she said.
“Who wants coffee?” he said, taking another swig from the bottle.
Shortly the room was filled with the delicious-smelling smoke of fried fat meat. She sliced the gelatinous hominy and browned it in the hot fat. He opened the can with his pocket knife but the contents were frozen solid, so he put the can on top of the stove.
She couldn’t find but one clean plate, so she used one slightly soiled. She polished a couple of forks with a dry cloth.
He filled his plate with fried hominy, covered it with fried meat and doused it with molasses. He stuffed his mouth full of dry bread, then packed meat, hominy and molasses on top of it.
She looked at him with disgust. “You can get the boy out the country, but you can’t get the country out the boy,” she philosophized, eating her meat daintily along with bites of bread and holding her fried hominy between the first finger and thumb, according to etiquette.
He was finished first. He got up and looked at the peaches. A core of ice still remained. He picked up the whisky bottle and measured it with his eye.
“You want some grog mixed with peach juice?” he asked.
She gave him a supercilious look. “I don’t mind if I do,” she said in a proper voice.
He looked about for a receptacle to hold the mixture, but not seeing any, he squeezed the rim of the can into a spout and poured the peach syrup into the whisky bottle. He shook it up and took a swallow and passed it to her. She took a swallow and passed it back.
Soon they were giggling and slapping at one another. The next thing they were on the bed again.
“I wish that man would hurry up and come on,” he said, making one last effort to be sensible.
“What you want to go looking for an old Cadillac in this weather for, when here you is got me?” she said.
“Let’s stop here and walk back,” Coffin Ed said.
Grave Digger coasted to a stop beside the entrance to the Alley. It was a dark gray morning, and not a soul was in sight.
They alighted slowly, like decrepit old men.
“This jalopy looks as though it’s been to the wars,” Grave Digger lisped.
His lips were swollen to such proportions it looked as though his face were turning wrong side out.
“You look like you’ve been with it,” Coffin Ed said.
“Yeah, let’s hope there’re no more jokers in this deck.”
He started to lock the car doors and then saw the naked front wheel, the battered rear end and the hole in the windshield, and he put the key into his pocket.
“We don’t have to worry about anybody stealing it,” he lisped.
“That’s for sure,” Coffin Ed agreed.
They picked their way along the uneven brick pavement, avoiding slick ice and stepping over frozen rats and cats. Garbage trucks couldn’t get into the Alley, and residents piled their garbage in the street the year around. Now it presented an uneven pile of mounds along the walls of the carriage houses, composed chiefly of hog bones, cabbage leaves and tin cans. They saw one lone black cat sitting on his haunches gnawing a piece of bacon rind frozen hard as a board.
“He must have stolen that,” Coffin Ed said. “Nobody living in here has thrown that much good meat away.”
“Let’s go easy now,” Grave Digger lisped.
When they came to the door, both took out their pistols and spun the cylinders. Brass bullets showed faintly against the gleaming nickel plate. Their shadowy figures had the silence of ghosts. They were mouth-breathing now, giving off soft puffs of vapor in the frigid air.
Grave Digger switched his pistol to his left hand and fished key from his right overcoat pocket. As he fitted the key into the lock, Coffin Ed pulled hard on the knob. The Yale lock opened without a sound. Coffin Ed pushed the door in three inches, and Grave Digger withdrew the key.
Both flattened against the outside wall and listened. From above came sounds like two people sawing wood; a man sawing dry pine boards with a bucksaw and a boy sawing shingles with a toy.
Coffin Ed reached out and slowly pushed the door open with his pistol barrel. The two kept on sawing. He put his head around the doorframe and looked.
There was no door at the head of the stairs. The opening was lit by a soft pink light, revealing the naked beams of a ceiling.
Coffin Ed went up first, stepping on the outside edge of the stairs, testing each before putting down his weight. Grave Digger let him get five steps ahead and followed in his footsteps.
At the top, Coffin Ed stepped quickly into the pink light, his gun barrel moving from left to right.
Then without turning, he beckoned to Grave Digger.
They stood side by side looking at the sleeping figures on the bed.
The man wore a plaid woolen shirt, open all the way down and the shirttail out, a heavy-ribbed T-shirt, army pants and stained white woolen socks. A leather jacket was piled on top of a pair of paratrooper boots on the floor beside the bed. He lay doubled up on one side, facing the woman, with an arm flung out across her stomach.
The woman wore a red knitted dress and black lace stockings. That seemed to be all. She lay half on her side, half on her back, with her legs outspread. Velvet black skin showed all the way up to her waist
A single dim pink-shaded lamp hanging from a nail above the head of the bed made the scene look cozy.
Their gazes roved over the room, lingered on the big rusty. 45 lying on
the coonskin cap, went on and came back.
Coffin Ed tiptoed over and picked it up. He sniffed at the muzzle, shook his head and slipped it into his pocket.
Grave Digger tiptoed over to the bed and poked the sleeping man in the ribs with the muzzle of his own pistol.
Afterwards he admitted he shouldn’t have done it.
Roman erupted from the bed like a scalded wildcat.
He came up all at once, all of him, as though released from a catapult. He struck a backhanded blow with his left hand while he was in the air, caught Grave Digger straight across his belly and knocked him on his rump.
Coffin Ed jumped over the top of Grave Digger’s head and slashed at Roman with his pistol barrel.
But, while he was flat in the air, Roman doubled up and spun over, taking the blow on the fat of his hams and kicking Coffin Ed in the face with both stockinged feet.
Then the screaming began. It was high, loud, keening screaming that dynamited the brain and poured acid on the teeth. Sassafras had reared up on all fours and was kneeling in the bed with her mouth wide open.
Coffin Ed went back into the table. The legs splintered, and he crashed to the floor.
Roman landed on the flat of his shoulders and the palms of his hands while his feet were still in the air.
Grave Digger came up on his left hand, his left foot jackknifed beneath him, and tapped Roman across the top of the head with his pistol butt. But his flopping overcoat impeded the blow, and Roman gave no sign that he felt it. He doubled his feet beneath him and came up straight, like an acrobat, turning at the instant he touched floor.
Grave Digger backhanded with the same motion that tapped Roman on the head and hit his right knee cap. Roman went down on one side, like the pier of a house giving way. Coffin Ed staggered in and kicked him solidly in the left calf.
Sassafras’s hair stood out like quills of a porcupine and her eyes were glazed, but the screaming kept on.
Roman fell into Grave Digger and clutched him by the leg, and, when Coffin Ed jumped forward to kick him away, he clutched his leg.
He got to his feet, holding each big man by a leg, and banged their heads into the ceiling beams.
“Run, Sassy, run!” he shouted. “This ain’t no time for a fit.”
She stopped screaming as suddenly as she had started. She jumped to her feet and started toward the door.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed began raining pistol blows on Roman’s head.
He sank to his knees but held onto their legs.
“Run, Sassy!” he gasped.
But she stopped at the doorway to run back and snatch up her new fur coat.
Grave Digger grabbed at her but missed.
“Turn loose, tough mouth!” Coffin Ed grated as he kept pounding Roman on the head.
But Roman held on long enough for Sassafras to scamper down the stairs like a frightened alley cat. Then he relaxed his grip; he grinned foolishly and murmured, “Solid bone…” He fell forward and rolled over.
Coffin Ed leaped toward the doorway, but Grave Digger called to him, lisping painfully, “Let her go. Let her go. He earned it.”
Chapter 13
It was eleven o’clock Sunday morning, and the good colored people of Harlem were on their way to church.
It was a gloomy, overcast day, miserable enough to make the most hardened sinner think twice about the hot, sunshiny streets of heaven before turning over and going back to sleep.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed looked them over indifferently as they drove toward Harlem hospital. A typical Sunday morning sight, come sun or come rain.
Old white-haired sisters bundled up like bales of cotton against the bitter cold; their equally white-haired men, stumbling along in oversize galoshes like the last herd of Uncle Toms, toddling the last mile toward salvation on half-frozen feet.
Middle-aged couples and their broods, products of the postwar generation, the prosperous generation, looking sanctimonious in their good warm clothes, going to praise the Lord for the white folks’ blessings.
Young men who hadn’t yet made it, dressed in lightweight suits and topcoats sold by color instead of quality or weight in the credit stores, with enough brown wrapping paper underneath their pastel shirts to keep them warm, laughing at the strange words of God and making like Solomon at the pretty brownskin girls.
Young women who were sure as hell going to make it or drop dead in the attempt, ashy with cold, clad in the unbelievable colors of cheap American dyes, some at that very moment catching the pneumonia which would take them before that God they were on their way to worship.
From all over town they came.
To all over town they went.
The big churches and little churches, stone churches and store-front churches, to their own built churches and to hand-me-down churches.
To Baptist churches and African Methodist Episcopal churches and African Methodist Episcopal Zionist churches; to Holy Roller churches and Father Divine churches and Daddy Grace churches, Burning Bush churches, and churches of God and Christ.
To listen to their preachers preach the word of God: fat black preachers and tall yellow preachers; straightened-haired preachers and bald-headed preachers; family preachers and playboy preachers; men preachers and lady preachers and children preachers.
To listen to any sermon their preacher cared to preach. But on this cold day it had better be hot.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed parked their wreck in front of the Harlem Hospital and went inside to the reception desk.
They asked to speak with Casper Holmes.
The cool, young colored nurse at the desk lifted a telephone and spoke some words. She put it down and gave them a cool, remote smile. “I am sorry, but he is still in a coma,” she said.
“Don’t be sorry for us, be sorry for him,” Coffin Ed said.
Her smile froze as though the insect had talked back.
“Tell him it’s Digger Jones and Ed Johnson,” Grave Digger lisped.
She stared at the movement of his swollen lips with horrified fascination.
“Tell him we’re just ahead of the Confederates,” he went on. “Maybe that will get him out of his coma.”
Her face twisted as though she had swallowed something disagreeable.
“Confederates,” she murmured.
“You know who the Confederates are,” Coffin Ed said. “They’re the people who fought to keep us slaves.”
She smiled tentatively to prove she wasn’t sensitive about slavery jokes.
They stared at her, grave and unsmiling.
She waited and they waited.
Finally she picked up the telephone again and repeated their message to the floor supervisor.
They heard her say: “No, not conferees; they said Con-fed-er-ates
… Yes…”
She put down the telephone and said without expression, “You will have to wait.”
They waited; neither moved.
“Please wait in the waiting room,” she said.
Behind them was a small nook with a table and several chairs, some occupied by others who were waiting.
“We’ll wait here,” Grave Digger lisped.
She pursed her lips. The telephone rang. She listened. “Yes,” she said.
She looked up and said, “His room is on the third floor. Take the elevator to the right, please. The floor supervisor will direct you.”
“You see,” Grave Digger lisped. “You don’t know what those Confederates are good for.”
The room was banked with flowers.
Casper sat up in a white bed wearing a turban of white bandages. His broad black face loomed aggressively above yellow silk pajamas. He looked like an African potentate, but it wasn’t a time for flattery.
French windows opened to a terrace facing the east. Two overstuffed chairs ranged along one side of the bed. On the other side, remains of a breakfast littered a wheel tray. The detectives saw at a glance that it had been a substantial breakfast of fried sausage,
poached eggs on toast, hominy grits with butter, fruit and cereal with cream and a silver pot of coffee. A box of Havana cigars sat beside a basket of mixed fruit on the night stand.
The detectives took off their hats.
“Sit down, boys,” Casper said. “What’s this about Confederates?”
Grave Digger looked about for a window sill on which to rest a ham, was thwarted by the French window and compromised on the arm of a chair. Coffin Ed backed into a corner and leaned against the wall, his scarred face in the shadows.
“We were just kidding, boss,” Grave Digger lisped. “We thought you might want to talk to us before the big brass from downtown gets up here.”
Casper frowned. He didn’t like the insinuation that he preferred talking to colored precinct detectives rather than to downtown white inspectors. But since he had tacitly admitted as much by seeing them, he decided to pass it.
“A god-damned embarrassing caper,” he conceded. “Right in my own bailiwick.”
Now he looked like a martyred potentate.
“That’s what we figured,” Coffin Ed said.
Casper flicked a quick, sly look from one to the other. “You must feel the same way,” he observed. “Where were you at the time?”
“Eating chicken feetsy at Mammy Louise’s,” Grave Digger confessed.
Casper stared at him to see whether he was joking, decided he wasn’t. He opened the box of cigars and selected one, picked up a gadget from the table and carefully snipped off the end, then reached for an imported gold lighter behind the box and snapped a flame. He applied the flame like a jeweler using a miniature torch on filigree of gold, snapped shut the lighter, slowly rolled the end of the cigar about between his thick lips and blew out a thin stream of smoke. The good smell of fine tobacco dissipated the hospital odors.
As an afterthought, he extended the box toward the detectives. Both declined.
“I will tell you what I know, which isn’t much,” he said. “Then we will see what we can make out of it. You boys must have been working on it all night yourselves.”
“Still at it,” Grave Digger lisped.
“First we’ll tell you what we got,” Coffin Ed said. “A colored sailor, a country boy from Alabama, left his ship at about six o’clock last evening. He had been working for one entire year to save money to buy a car; when he got his final pay, he had six thousand, five hundred dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills in a money belt. The ship docks in Brooklyn. It was eight o’clock before he got uptown. He met his girl friend, Sassafras Jenkins. They had some drinks and then took a taxi over to an office on lower Convent Avenue, where he had an appointment to meet one Mister Baron, who was selling him the car.”
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