The Heat's on cjagdj-7

by Chester Himes

  She stopped the taxi before it got too close to the police lines and hailed a passerby.

  “What happened down the street?”

  “Explosion!” the bareheaded Italian-looking worker gasped, breathing hard as though he couldn’t get enough of the hot dusty air into his lungs. “Blew the house up. Killed the old couple who lived there. Saint Heavenly they were called. No trace of ’em. Musta had a still.”

  He didn’t pause to see her reaction. He was scrabbling around, like scores of others, picking up scraps of paper.

  Well now, ain’t that just too beautiful for words? she thought. Then she asked the taxi driver, “See what that is they’re picking up.”

  He got out and asked a youth to see a sample. It was the corner of a hundred-dollar bill. He brought it back to show to Sister Heavenly. The youth followed him suspiciously.

  “Piece of a C-note,” he said. “They must have been making counterfeit.”

  “That tears it,” Sister Heavenly said.

  The two of them stood staring at her.

  “Give it back to him and let him go,” she said.

  She knew immediately that Uncle Saint had tried to blow her safe. It didn’t surprise her. He must have used an atom bomb, she thought. She wished he had picked a better time for the caper.

  The taxi driver climbed back into his seat and looked at her with growing suspicion. “Ain’t that the house where you wanted to go?”

  “Don’t talk foolish, man,” she snapped. “You see I can’t go there ’cause the house ain’t there no more.”

  “Don’t you wanna talk to the cops?” he persisted.

  “I just want you to turn around and drive me back to White Plains Road and put me out by the playground.”

  At that hour the treeless playground was deserted. The sandpits baked in the sunshine and heat radiated from the iron slides. The slatted bench on which Sister Heavenly sat burned stripes up and down her backsides. But she didn’t notice it.

  She took out her pipe and filled it with the finely ground stems of marijuana from an oilskin pouch and lit it with an old gold-initialed pipe lighter. Then she opened her black-and-white striped parasol and holding it over her head with her left hand, she held the pipe in her right hand and sucked the sweet pungent marijuana smoke deep into her lungs.

  Sister Heavenly was a fatalist. If she had ever read The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, she might have been thinking of the lines:

  The moving finger writes,

  And having writ moves on;

  Nor all your piety nor wit

  Nor all your tears

  Shall cancel half a line of it.…

  But instead she was thinking, Well, I’m back on my bare ass where I started, but I ain’t yet flat on my back.

  It was life that had taught Sister Heavenly not to cry. A crying whore was a liability; and she had started as a whore. At fifteen she had run away from the sharecropper’s shack her family had called home, with a pimp to be a whore because she was too cute and too lazy to hoe the corn and chop the cotton. He had told her that what she had to sell would find buyers when cotton and corn were a drug on the market. The memory brought a smile. He was a half-ass pimp but he was sweet, she thought. But in the end he had kicked her out like the others had afterwards with nothing but the clothes she had on her back.

  Then her thoughts turned cynical: Even cotton got rotten with age and corn got too wormy to shuck.

  Anyway, after she’d got onto the faith healing pitch, she had lived high on the hog, which meant she could eat pork chops and pork roasts instead of pig’s feet and chitterlings. It had been the other way around after that; she had been the ruler of the roost and had kicked her lovers out when she got tired of them.

  She knocked out her pipe and put it away. The ocher-colored pupils of her eyes had become distended with a marbleized effect and pink splotches had formed beneath her leathery skin.

  As she walked up White Plains Road the drab-colored buildings took on blinding bright hues in the sunshine. She hadn’t been that high in more than twenty years. Her feet seemed to glide through the air, but she was still in full command of her mind.

  She began to suspect she had cased the whole caper wrong from the very beginning. She had figured it as a shipment of H, but maybe it wasn’t that at all.

  It couldn’t be a mother-raping treasure map, she thought with exasperation. That old con game went out when airplanes came in.

  Or could it? another part of her mind asked. Could it be that some gang had come up with some treasure somewhere and had made a map of its whereabouts? But what the hell kind of treasure? And how the hell would the map get into the hands of a square like Gus, a simpleminded apartment house janitor?

  The weed jag made her thoughts dance like jitterbugs. She turned into a supermarket drugstore and ordered black coffee.

  She didn’t notice the man next to her until he spoke. “Are you a model, may I ask?”

  She flicked him an absent-minded glance. He looked like a salesman, a house-to-house canvasser type.

  “No, I’m one of the devil’s mistresses,” she said nastily.

  The man reddened. “Excuse me, I thought maybe you were a model for some advertising agency.” He retired behind a newspaper.

  It was the afternoon Journal American and she saw the streamer on the page turned toward her:

  TWO HARLEM DETECTIVES SUSPENDED FOR BRUTALITY

  A column was devoted to the story. To one side the pictures of Grave Digger and Coffin Ed looked like pictures of a couple of Harlem muggers taken from the rogues’ gallery.

  She read as much of the story as she could before the man folded the paper.

  So they killed Jake, she thought. In front of Riverside Church.

  That must have been when Pinky put in the false fire alarm.

  Her thoughts churned furiously. She tried to remember everything Pinky had said, how he had looked and acted. A pattern was beginning to take shape, but the answer eluded her.

  Suddenly she jumped to her feet. Her table mate drew back in alarm. But she merely paid her bill and rushed outside and started walking rapidly to the nearest taxi stand.

  She looked at her locket-watch when she had paid off the taxi driver in front of Riverside Church. It read 3:37.

  She looked up and down the street. The prowl cars had gone and there was no sign left of the police unless it was the black sedan parked down the street from the entrance to the apartment.

  She had a sinking sensation in her stomach as the thought occurred to her that it might already be too late.

  She opened her parasol and holding it in her left hand and her heavy black beaded bag on her right arm, took hold of her skirt on the right side and lifting it slightly, sailed down the street and turned into the apartment house.

  A big stolid-looking white cop was on guard at the door. He did a double take.

  “Hey, whoa there, ma’am,” he said, stopping her. “You can’t go in here.”

  On second thought he added, “Unless you live here.”

  “Why not?” she countered. “Is it quarantined?”

  “What do you want in here, if you don’t live here?” he reiterated.

  “I’m taking up subscriptions for the colored peoples’ Old Folks Home,” she said blandly.

  But he was a conscientious cop. “Do you have a license?” he demanded. “Or at least any identification or something to show who you are?”

  She arched her eyebrows. “Do I need any? After all, I’m a sponsor.”

  “Well, you’ll have to come back later, I’m afraid. You see, the police are conducting a search in there right now and they don’t want any strangers in the house.”

  “A search!” she exclaimed, giving the impression of horrified shock. “For a body buried in the basement?”

  The cop grinned. She reminded him of a character out of a stage play he had seen once.

  “Well, not exactly a body, but a buried treasure,” he said.

  “My land!
” she said. “What’s the world coming to?”

  His grin widened. “Ain’t it awful?”

  She started to turn away. “Well, if they find it, don’t forget the old colored people,” she said.

  He laughed out loud. “Never!” he said.

  She went into the next-door apartment house and took up a station in the foyer from which she could watch the entrance next door. Passing tenants looked at her curiously, but she paid them no attention.

  One thing was for sure, she was thinking; if it was there, the police would find it. But on the other hand, why hadn’t the two gunmen found it, since they would know exactly what they were looking for?

  Her head swam with doubts.

  I wish to Jesus Christ I knew what the hell I was looking for, she thought.

  She saw a small panel truck pull up before the house next door. It had the letters S.P.C.A. painted on the sides.

  Now what the hell is this? she thought.

  She saw two men wearing heavy leather gloves and long white dusters alight from the compartment and enter the house.

  A few minutes later they returned, leading Pinky’s dog Sheba by a heavy chain leash.

  And all of a sudden it exploded in her head. All this goddamn time wasted! she thought disgustedly. And there it was all the time.

  It fitted like white on rice.

  She watched the attendants put the dog into the body of the S.P.C.A. truck and drive away. She had to fight back the impulse to rush out and call the bitch by name and claim her. But she knew she’d wind up in the pokey and they’d still have the dog. It was like watching a friend go down in the middle of the sea, she thought. You could feel for him but you couldn’t reach him.

  She started racking her memory trying to figure out what S.P.C.A. stood for. It couldn’t be Special Police for Collaring Animals. That didn’t make any sense. What would they have special police to collar animals for when any policeman could do it?

  Then suddenly she remembered: Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Where she had heard about it she didn’t know, but there it was.

  She left her station and walked over to Broadway and entered the first bar. It took a little time to find the telephone number of the Manhattan branch of S.P.C.A.

  A woman’s pleasant, impersonal voice answered her call.

  “I’ve heard you sell stray dogs,” Sister Heavenly said. “I’d like to buy a dog.”

  “We don’t actually sell the stray dogs that are brought in to us,” the woman explained. “We try to find congenial homes for them where they will fit in with the families, and we ask for a donation of two dollars to help carry on the work of the foundation.”

  “Well, that’s all right,” Sister Heavenly said. “I can spare two dollars. Have you got any dogs on hand?”

  “Well, yes, but is there any particular kind of dog you would like?”

  “I want a big dog. A dog as big as a lion,” Sister Heavenly said.

  “We seldom have dogs that size,” the woman said doubtfully. “And we are very particular about whom we let take them. Could you give me an idea of your reasons for wanting a dog that size?”

  “It’s like this,” Sister Heavenly said. “I have a roadhouse in New Jersey. It’s not far from Hoboken. And to be frank with you, it’s not the most law-abiding place you can find. But there’s a big fenced-in yard for the dog to run. And of course there’re always plenty of bones, not to mention meat, for him to eat.”

  “I see. You need it for a watchdog?”

  “Yes. And he can’t be too big. Our last watchdog was fairly big. He was a German dog. But prowlers killed him.”

  “I see. You say him. Does it make any difference if the dog is female?”

  “That’s all the better. As long as she’s big.”

  “It so happens that you have called at an opportune time,” the pleasant-voiced woman said. “There might be a large female dog available within a few days. Would you mind giving me your name and address?”

  “A few days!” Sister Heavenly exclaimed, filling her voice with dismay. “I thought I could get one today. I’m leaving tomorrow on two weeks’ vacation and I want to leave the dog there with the caretaker while I’m gone.”

  “Oh, that’s not possible, you see we have to check.… But.… Won’t you hold on for a moment, perhaps.…”

  Sister Heavenly held on.

  After a time the pleasant voice said, “Hello, are you there?”

  “Yes, I’m still here.”

  “Well, it’s quite likely that you may get your big dog today just as you wish. It’s highly irregular of course, but one has just come in and — if you will call me back an hour from now we will give you a definite answer. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Sister Heavenly said and hung up.

  She looked at her watch. It read 4:03.

  She telephoned back at exactly 5 o’clock.

  The pleasant-voiced woman said she was so sorry, but a detective had come and had taken the dog away.

  Sister Heavenly knew just how people felt when they said “Doggone!”

  14

  Coffin Ed was in a crying rage, caught up in an impotent self-tormenting fury that gave to his slightly disfigured face a look of ineffable danger.

  “These miserable mother-raping crumbs,” he grated through clenched teeth. “These sonofabitching rathole snakeshit hopped-up sons of syphilitic whores with their doctored rods trying to play tough by shooting an unarmed man in the back. But they ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  He was talking to himself.

  There was an electric clock on the wall at the end of the dazzling white hospital corridor. It read 2:26.

  He thought bitterly, Yeah, they suspended us for punching a mother-raping pusher in the guts and ain’t three hours passed before some drugged-up killer has got Digger.

  Tears were seeping from his eyes and catching in the fine scar ridges between the patches of grafted skin on his face as though his very skin was crying.

  Nurses and interns passing down the corridor gave him a wide berth.

  What made it all the worse, he felt a sense of guilt. If I hadn’t been so mother-raping cute and had listened to Digger and just let it alone until the guys from homicide came he might not have got it, he thought.

  Grave Digger lay on the operating table beyond the closed white door. Death wasn’t two feet off. He needed blood and they had used the one lone pint of his type blood they had in store. It wasn’t enough. The only other place they had it was in the Red Cross blood bank in Brooklyn. A police car led by two motorcycle cops opening up the city traffic was bringing it as fast as anything could possibly move in the big congested town. But time was rapidly running ut.

  Coffin Ed had just been told he didn’t have the type of blood Grave Digger needed.

  Now I can’t even do this for him, he thought. But one thing is for sure, if he goes down, he ain’t going alone.

  He had a lump on the side of his head, back of the left ear, as big as a goose egg, and his head seemed split in all directions by a blinding headache that began behind the eyes. The doctors had said he had concussion and had tried to put him to bed. But he had fought them off with a raving scarcely controlled violence and they had gotten the hell away from him.

  It was a high-class, well-equipped hospital, the nearest to the scene of the shooting; and he knew if Grave Digger could be saved, they would save him there. But that did nothing to assuage his self-condemning rage.

  Down at the end of the corridor he saw his and Grave Digger’s wife ascending the head of the stairs. He turned and fled through the first doorway. He found himself in a room for minor surgery. The lights were off and it was temporarily out of use.

  He couldn’t bear to face Grave Digger’s wife and he didn’t want to see his own. His daughter was in a summer camp in the Catskills. There was no one to hinder him. Mentally, he thanked someone for this small favor.

  The wives were not permitted in the operating room. They stood outsi
de the door in the corridor, their brown faces set like graven images. From time to time Grave Digger’s wife touched a handkerchief to her eyes. Neither of them spoke.

  Coffin Ed looked for a way to get out. There was a connecting door at the end of the room but it was locked. He raised the bottom half of the frosted-glass window. It opened onto a fire escape. He went outside. A group of medical students in an adjoining building stopped to watch him. He didn’t notice them. He went down one story and the swing ladder dropped to the paved driveway that led to the emergency entrance at the rear.

  He went out to the street and walked bareheaded in the blinding midday sunshine to where his car was parked on Riverside Drive. Heat shimmered before his vision, distorting his perspective. His head ached like rheumatic fever of the brain.

  Half an hour later he pulled into the driveway of his house in Astoria, Long Island. How he managed to get there he never knew.

  He had been given a sedative at the hospital to take home. The label on the bottle read: One teaspoonful every hour. He tossed it into the trash can outside the kitchen door and let himself into the kitchen.

  He put the Silex coffee maker on the gas stove, with enough coffee in it to make mud. While waiting for it to boil he stripped off his clothes and piled them on the chair beside the bed. In the bathroom medicine cabinet he found a bottle of Benzedrine tablets. He took two and drank water from the washbowl faucet in his cupped hand. He heard the coffee maker boiling and went into the kitchen and turned off the fire.

  After that he took a shower, turning it from lukewarm to as cold as he could bear. He held his breath and his teeth chattered as the cold needles bit into his skin. His head felt as though sheets of lightning were going off in his brain, but the lethargy left his limbs.

  He toweled and went into the bedroom and put on jockey shorts, nylon socks, lightweight black shoes with rubber soles, the pants to his brand-new dark gray summer suit, and a blue oxford cloth shirt with a button-down collar. He omitted the tie. He didn’t want anything to be in his way when he reached for the handle of his revolver.