“I keep feeling ghosts,” he said as he holstered his revolver and pushed Wop before him toward the glass door of the apartment house.
It was an old elevator house, well-kept, and he knew that Madame Cushy lived on the top floor. But the front door was on the latch. His gaze ranged up the list of names above the pushbuttons and settled on one that read: Dr J. C. Douglas, M.D.
There was a house intercom beside the row of buttons and when he got the doctor on he said, “I gotta see you, Doc, I gotta case bad.”
“Let it wait,” the doctor snapped. “Come in tomorrow morning.”
“Can’t wait ’til then. I got a date for tomorrow. It’s my money,” he argued roughly.
“Who is this?” the doctor asked.
“Al Thompson,” Coffin Ed said, taking a chance on the name of a pimp.
“I can’t cure you overnight, Al,” the doctor said. “It takes two days at least.”
“Hell, give me all the units at one time, Doc. I been chippie chasing and I’m in trouble. I don’t wanna have to kill my whore when she comes back.”
Coffin Ed listened to the doctor’s chuckle, and heard him say, “All right, Al, come on up; we’ll see what we can do.”
The latch began to click and Coffin Ed opened the door and pushed Wop into the hall. They rode up to the top floor.
Madame Cushy’s was the black enamel door at the front.
“Have you been here before?” Coffin Ed asked Wop.
“Yassuh. Daddy Haddy has sent me with some stuff.” He was trembling as though he were seeing ghosts himself.
“All right, you ring it,” he said.
He flattened himself against the wall while Wop pushed the button.
After a time there was a faint click and a round peephole opened outward. Wop looked at the reflection of his own eye.
“What do you want, boy?” a woman’s cross and impatient voice came from within.
“I’se Wop; Daddy Haddy sent me,” he stammered.
“No he didn’t, he’s dead,” the voice said sharply. “What are you after?”
Coffin Ed knew he had goofed. He stepped out so he could be seen and said, “I’m with him.”
He was still wearing his beret and it took a moment for the voice to reply, “Oh! Edward! Well, what the hell do you want?”
“I want to talk to you.”
“Well, why didn’t you ring yourself? You ought to know better than to try to front this punk into my house.”
“I know better now,” he said.
“All right, I will let you in, but not as a cop,” she conceded.
“I’ve been suspended,” he said. “Didn’t you know?”
“Yes, I know,” she said.
There were two locks on the door, both equipped with adjustable cables to hold it at any position, one near the bottom and one near the top; and they worked so silently the door began to open before he knew she had unlocked it.
“This dirty little boy stays out,” she said.
“He’s my mascot.”
She eyed Wop distastefully and stepped back so he wouldn’t touch her when he passed.
A wide short entrance hall, flanked by two closed doors, ended at glass double doors of a front lounge and a narrow hallway turned off to the left somewhere. Muted male and female voices, along with the sound of jazz, came from the lounge. There was a faint smell of incense in the overplayed atmosphere of respectability.
After closing and locking the front door she stepped past them and opened the door to the right. Coffin Ed pushed Wop before him into a small sitting room that obviously took turns for other purposes. On one side, behind a glass-topped cocktail table littered with an impressive collection of pornographic picture magazines, was a studio couch equipped with as many odd straps as a torture wrack. On the other were two armchairs with suggestive-looking footstools. An air conditioner fitted in the bottom of the window was flanked by a television set and a console radio-phonograph. All manner of obscene figurines filled a three-tiered bookcase in the near corner. Oil nudes of a voluptuous colored woman and a well-equipped colored man faced each other from opposite walls. The air conditioner was turned off and there was the faint sweetish smell of opium in the air.
Madame Cushy followed them in, closed and locked the door, and turned to stare at the demoniacal tic in Coffin Ed’s face with impersonal fascination.
She was a buxom Creole-looking mulatto woman with sleepy, brown, bedroom eyes, black hair worn in a bun at the nape of her neck, and a faint black moustache. She wore a red decollete cotton cocktail dress and high-heeled black net shoes, and her neck, arms and hands gleamed and glittered with jewelry. She looked on the wrong side of forty, but still beautifully preserved and well-sexed. Her voice was a flat contradiction of her looks.
“Well, what is it, Edward? And don’t ask me anything about criminals, because I don’t know any.”
Coffin Ed said in his constricted voice, “Just a few questions, and I don’t want any mother-raping shit.”
Her face went black with a sudden bloodbursting fury. “Why, you small-time loudmouthed nigger-” she began, but was cut off by a knock on the door.
A woman’s flat unmusical voice from the entrance hall said, “It’s me — Ginny. I may as well go on if you’ll let me out.”
“Just a moment, dear,” Madame Cushy forced herself to say, and the next moment she felt her head jerked back by the bun of her hair, a knee in the small of her back, and the sharp edge of a knife blade across her throat.
Coffin Ed had moved so fast during the flicker of her gaze toward the door she hadn’t seen it.
“Walk slowly toward the door and open it and tell her to come in,” he whispered in her ear, lowering his knee so she could walk.
She didn’t move. Her face was a dull gray-black mask, looking twenty years older than a minute before, and the veins in her temples throbbed like artesian pumps.
“You’re going to get yourself killed,” she said in a low tight voice. “My bodyguard, Spunky, is in the lounge with my husband, and he’s wearing a forty-five. There’s a sawed-off shotgun in the bureau drawer. And Detective Ramsey is with them, and he’s got his police positive.”
“I always thought he was a crooked dick,” Coffin Ed whispered.
“Now you know.”
“But that won’t buy you anything. So help me God, I’ll cut your mother-raping throat.”
He motioned with his head to Wop to open the door. But Wop was paralyzed with terror. Huge obsidian eyes looked out in a hypnotized stare from a face gone battleship gray.
“I wouldn’t do it,” Madame Cushy said.
“Say good-bye,” Coffin Ed said and his arm tightened.
Madame Cushy looked at Wop’s eyes. She raised her voice and said, “Just one moment, Ginny.”
There was the sound of the lounge door opening and a male voice called, “What is it, baby?” Then it added in a lower tone as though the face had turned away, “Go see what’s happening, Spunky.”
Coffin Ed transferred Madame Cushy’s bun from his left hand to his teeth and drew Grave Digger’s pistol from his belt while still holding the knife blade to her throat.
When she moved he moved with her, like a monstrous Siamese twin.
Standing behind the door, she opened it and called out, “It’s nothing, dear. I’m trying to fix a rendezvous.” Then in a voice that sounded normal she added, “Come on in, Ginny.”
Ginny saw Wop’s face and hesitated, then stepped inside.
In one continuous motion Coffin Ed kicked the door shut with the edge of his left foot, spun Madame Cushy out of reach, transferred the knife blade to Ginny’s throat and closed her mouth with his left forearm, snapping back her head.
She felt the knife blade on her throat, tasted cloth, and saw the huge nickel-plated revolver gripped in a hard black hand just before her eyes. The strength went out of her knees and her body began to sag.
Madame Cushy stepped quickly to the door, opened it and went int
o the hall. Spunky was a step away, trying to look into the room. She pulled the door shut behind her and said, “Let them alone for a while.” Then she turned and called through the closed door, “Call me when you’re ready to leave.”
For a moment there was only the sound of their footsteps going toward the lounge and the closing of a door.
Inside the room the sound of Wop’s teeth chattering was as loud as castanets.
“Stand up!” Coffin Ed grated in Ginny’s ear.
Her knees straightened and she tried to talk. The movement of her head pressed her long black oily hair into his face.
“Shut up!” he whispered, turning his head to get his face out of the thick, perfumed, rancid, suffocating mass of hair.
The tight, close, abnormal contact of their bodies was aphrodisiacal in a sadistic manner, and both were shaken with an unnatural lust.
“Strip her,” Coffin Ed ordered Wop.
She heard the uncontrollable threads of desire in his voice and thought she was about to be raped. She shook her head and tried again to talk, mumbling what sounded like, “You don’t have to-”
Wop stared in petrified stupidity. “Strip her?” he echoed as though he didn’t understand the words.
“Take her mother-raping clothes off,” Coffin Ed said through clenched teeth. “Ain’t you never done that?”
Wop moved toward her as though she were a lioness with cubs. She was passive, raising each foot in turn for him to remove her shoes and stockings. No one spoke. Only their heavy breathing and the chattering of Wop’s teeth were audible. But he took so long to remove her sheen gabardine suit and chartreuse underclothes the silence became excruciating.
When she was stark naked, Coffin Ed released her.
She turned and saw him for the first time. “Oh, it’s you!” she said in her jarring voice.
“It’s me all right.”
She dropped to her knees and clasped his thighs in a tight embrace. “Just don’t hurt me,” she said.
“What the hell!” he said, and grabbed a fistful of her hair and dragged her onto the couch.
Her thick cushiony mouth opened in pain as she sucked in breath, but she didn’t dare scream. He rolled her over and carefully examined her for needle marks, but didn’t find any.
“Tie her down,” he ordered Wop.
Wop moved like a robot, joints stiff and eyes senseless.
When he had finished, Coffin Ed said, “Get her compact from her handbag.” Then he leaned over and took her by the hair again. Pulling her head back until her throat was taut, he cut the skin in a thin line six inches across her throat.
She didn’t move, didn’t breathe. Her eyes were limpid pools of terror set in a fixed stare.
“Give me the mirror,” he said.
He held it before her eyes. “See your throat.”
A thin line of blood showed where he had cut. She fainted.
He tossed away the compact and said with a choked impotent fury, “Let anybody’s blood flow but their own!”
Then he slapped her until she came to.
He knew that he had gone beyond the line; that he had gone outside of human restraint; he knew that what he was doing was unforgivable. But he didn’t want any more lies.
She lay rigid, looking at him with hate and fear.
“Next time I’ll cut it to the bone,” he said.
A shudder ran over her body as though a foot had stepped on her grave.
“All right, I’ll tell you,” she said. “I’ll tell you how to get it. It’s what you want, isn’t it?”
He looked at her without answering.
“We’ll split it,” she went on. “We’ll cut your partner in two. There’s enough for all three of us. You don’t want me but you can have me too. You’ll want me when you’ve had me. You won’t be able to get enough of me. I can make you scream with joy. I can do it in ways you never dreamed of. You’re cops. You’ll be safe. They can’t hurt you. You can kill them.”
He was caught for a moment in a hurt as terrible as any he had ever known. “Is everybody crooked on this mother-raping earth?” It came like a cry of agony torn out of him.
Then he said in a voice so tight it was barely audible, “You think because I’m a cop I’ve got a price. But you’re making a mistake. You’ve got only one thing I want. The truth. You’re going to give me that. Or I’m going to fix you so that no man will ever want anything else you got to give. And I ain’t playing.”
“They’ll kill me.”
“They’re going to kill you anyway if I don’t kill them first.”
Twenty-three minutes later he had her story. He had no way of knowing whether it was true. Only time would tell.
He looked at his watch. It read 11:57.
He untied her and told her to get up and dress.
He figured he knew as much as he was ever going to know. Before the payoff, anyway. If what she said was true, he had cased it right himself. If it wasn’t true, they were all going down together.
While she was dressing he listened to the sound of a recording coming from the lounge. Other recordings had been playing before, but he hadn’t heard them.
It was a saxophone solo by Lester Young. He didn’t recognize the tune, but it had the “Pres” treatment. His stomach tightened. It was like listening to someone laughing their way toward death. It was laughter dripping wet with tears. Colored people’s laughter.
His thoughts took him back to the late 1930s — the “depression” years. When he and Digger had attended a P.S. on 112th Street. They’d heard Lester playing with the Count Basie group at the Apollo, swapping fours and eights with Herschel Evans on their tenor horns.
Pres! He was the greatest, he thought.
“I’m ready,” Ginny said.
“Open the door and call Madame Cushy,” he said.
When Madame Cushy entered the room, he looked her over carefully. Satisfied she was unarmed, he said to Ginny, “You go out first, I’ll follow you,” and then to Wop, “You come behind me and if you see anybody with a gun, just scream.”
Madame Cushy’s lips curled. “If we were going to hurt you, you’d be dead by now. You won’t be hurt around here.”
Silently he sheathed the knife and stuck Grave Digger’s pistol back inside his waistband. He looked at her again. “Digger’s dead,” he said, then added, “And you’re living.”
He motioned with his hand and they left in single file.
Madame Cushy held the door open. When Coffin Ed passed her, she said quietly, “I won’t forget you.”
He didn’t answer.
He smelled the stink of terror coming from their bodies as they descended in the elevator. He thought bitterly, They’re all scared as hell when it’s their own lives they’re playing around with.
Before crossing the sidewalk to his car, he stood for a moment in the doorway, casing the street, his gun in his hand. He didn’t expect any gunplay. If what she had said was true, the gunmen would not be in sight. It was just a precaution. He had learned the hard way not to believe anybody entirely when it’s your own life at stake.
He didn’t see anyone or anything that looked suspicious.
They walked to the car in the same position as they had left the flat. He got into the front seat from the inside and slid over. The other two came in after him, Ginny in the middle and Wop on the outside.
I wish Digger was here, he thought without thinking.
He didn’t think that thought anymore.
20
It took only seven minutes to get there and he didn’t hurry. The hurry was off.
He made a U-turn on St Nicholas Avenue, went down the incline to 125th Street, and turned west toward the Hudson River.
For a couple of blocks more, 125th Street was still in the colored section: jukeboxes blared from the neon-lighted bars, loudmouthed people milled up and down the sidewalks, shrill-voiced pansies crowded in front of the Down Beat where the dusky-skinned female impersonators held forth, weedheads jabbe
red and gesticulated in front of Pop’s Billiards Parlor. And then the big new housing project loomed dark and silent.
He turned south on Broadway, west again on 124th Street, and climbed the steep hill of Clermont Avenue behind the high stone wall of International House. Another turn toward the river and he came out into the quiet confines of Riverside Drive beside Riverside Church.
He had kept an eye on the rearview mirror but had seen no indications that he was being followed.
So far so good, he thought.
He parked directly in front of the apartment house and doused his lights; but he sat for a moment casing the street before alighting. Everything looked normal. Nothing was moving for the moment but the cool breeze coming up from the river. Cars parked for the night lined the inside curb despite a city ordinance forbidding it. Nevertheless he had his pistol in his hand when he got out on the street side and walked around the front of the car.
Wop was already getting out on his side and Ginny followed. They crossed the sidewalk in single file and she unlocked the apartment house door with her own key.
Coffin Ed let them both precede him, then said, “Wait here.”
He went down the hall to the elevator door and brought the elevator to the ground floor. He opened the door and looked inside of it, then closed the door to the elevator itself and stood for a moment studying the outside door to the elevator shaft. There was nothing to be seen. The floor of the elevator was flush with the floor of the hall and the top of the elevator door was flush with the top of the door to the shaft.
He came back and said, “All right, let’s go down,” leading the way.
They came out in the basement corridor and found the night lights turned on as was customary. Coffin Ed stopped them for a moment and made them stand still while he listened. He could see the doors to the janitor’s suite, the toolroom, the staircase, the elevator and the laundry, and the one at the back which opened onto the back court. There was not a sound to be heard, not even from outside. His gaze lit for a moment on a short ladder hanging from the inside wall beneath a fire extinguisher. It must have been there before but he hadn’t noticed it.
At the end of the corridor, toward the janitor’s door, the cheap worn luggage, trunks and household furnishings of the new janitor were stacked against the wall. But the janitor hadn’t moved in. There was a police seal on the janitor’s door.
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