The Real Cool Killers

by Chester Himes

  A girl entered and he locked the door behind her.

  She was a tall sepia-colored girl with short black curls, wearing a turtle-necked sweater, plaid skirt, bobby socks, and white buckskin shoes. She had a snub nose, wide mouth, full lips, even white teeth, and wide-set brown eyes fringed with long black lashes.

  She looked about sixteen years old, and was breathless with excitement.

  Sonny stared at her and muttered to himself, “If this ain’t it, it’ll have to do.”

  “Hell, it’s just Sissie. I thought it was Bones with the gun,” Choo-Choo said.

  “Stop beefing about the gun. It’s safe with Bones. The cops ain’t going to shake down no garbage collector’s house. His old man works for the city same as they do.”

  “What’s this about Bones and the gun?” Sissie asked.

  “Sheik’s got–”

  “It’s none of Sissie’s business,” Sheik cut him off.

  “Somebody said an Arab had been shot and at first I thought it was you,” Sissie said.

  “You hoped it was me,” Sheik said.

  She turned away, blushing.

  “Don’t look at me,” Choo-Choo said to Sheik. “You tell her. She’s your girl.”

  “It was Caleb,” Sheik said.

  “Caleb! Jesus!” Sissie dropped onto the bed beside Sonny. She looked stunned. “Jesus! Poor little Caleb. What will Granny do?”

  “What the hell can she do?” Sheik said brutally. “Raise him from the dead?”

  “Does she know?”

  “Does it look like she knows?”

  “Jesus! Poor little Caleb. What did he do?”

  “I gave old Coffin Ed the stink gun and–” Choo-Choo began.

  “You didn’t!” she exclaimed.

  “The hell I didn’t.”

  “What did Caleb do?”

  “He threw perfume over the monster. It’s the Moslem salute for cops. I told you about it before. But the monster must have thought Cal was throwing some more acid into his eyes. He blasted so fast we couldn’t tell him any better.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Where’s Sugartit?” Sheik asked.

  “At home. She didn’t come into town tonight. I phoned her and she said she was sick.”

  “Yeah. Did you have any trouble getting in here?”

  “No. I told the cops at the door that I live here.”

  They heard the signal rapped on the door.

  Sissie gasped.

  Sheik looked at her suspiciously. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  He hesitated before opening the door. “You ain’t expecting nobody?”

  “Me? No. Who could I expect?”

  “You’re acting mighty funny.”

  “I’m just nervous.”

  The signal was rapped again.

  Sheik stepped to the door and said, “Gaza.”

  “Suez,” a girl’s lilting voice replied.

  Sheik gave Sissie a threatening look as he unlocked the door.

  A small-boned chocolate-brown girl dressed like Sissie slipped hurriedly into the room.

  At sight of Sissie she stopped and said, “Oh!” in a guilty tone of voice.

  Sheik looked from one to the other. “I thought you said she was at home,” he accused Sissie.

  “I thought she was,” Sissie said.

  He turned his gaze on Sugartit. “What the hell’s the matter with you? What the hell’s going on here?”

  “A Moslem’s been killed and I thought it was you,” she said.

  “All you little bitches were hoping it was me,” he said.

  She had sloe eyes with long black lashes that looked secretive. She threw a quick defiant look at Sissie and said, “Don’t include me in that.”

  “Did you tell Granny?” Sheik asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “It was your lover, Caleb,” Sheik said brutally.

  She gave a shriek and charged at Sheik, clawing and kicking.

  “You dirty bastard!” she cried. “You’re always picking at me.”

  Sissie pulled her off. “Shut up and keep your mouth shut,” she said tightly.

  “You tell her,” Sheik said.

  “It was Caleb, all right,” Sissie said.

  “Caleb!” Sugartit screamed and flung herself face down across the bed. She was up in a flash, hurling accusations at Sheik. “You did it. You got him killed. On account of me. ’Cause he had the best go and you couldn’t get me to do what you made Sissie do.”

  “That’s a lie,” Sissie said.

  “Caleb!” Sugartit screamed at the top of her voice.

  “Shut up, Granny will hear you,” Choo-Choo said.

  “Granny! Caleb’s dead! Sheik killed him!” she screamed again.

  “Stop her,” Sheik commanded Sissie. “She’s getting hysterical and I don’t want to have to hurt her.”

  Sissie clutched her from behind, put one hand over her mouth and twisted her arm behind her back with the other.

  Sugartit looked furiously at Sheik over the top of Sissie’s hand.

  “Granny can’t hear,” Inky said.

  “The hell she can’t,” Choo-Choo said. “She can hear when she wants to.”

  “Let me go!” Sugartit mumbled and bit Sissie’s hand.

  “Stop that!” Sissie said.

  “I’m going to him,” Sugartit mumbled. “I love him. You can’t stop me. I’m going to find out who shot him.”

  “Your old man shot him,” Sheik said brutally. “The monster, Coffin Ed.”

  “Did I hear someone calling Caleb?” Granny asked from the other side of the door.

  Sheik closed his hands quickly about Sugartit’s throat and choked her into silence.

  “Naw, Granny,” he called. “It’s just these silly girls arguing about their cubebs.”

  “Hannh?”

  “Cubebs!” Sheik shouted.

  “You chillen make so much racket a body can’t hear herself think,” she muttered.

  They heard her shuffling back to the kitchen.

  “Jesus, she’s sitting up waiting for him,” Sissie said.

  Sheik and Choo-Choo exchanged glances.

  “She don’t even know what’s happening in the street,” Choo-Choo said.

  Sheik took his hands away from Sugartit’s throat.

  5

  “How soon can you find out what he was killed with?” the chief of police asked.

  “He was killed with a bullet, naturally,” the assistant medical examiner said.

  “You’re not funny,” the chief said. “I mean what caliber bullet.”

  His brogue had begun thickening and the cops who knew him best began getting nervous.

  The deputy coroner snapped his bag shut with a gesture of coyness and peered at the chief through magnified eyeballs encircled by black gutta-percha.

  “That can’t be known until after the autopsy. The bullet will have to be removed from the corpse’s brain and subjected to tests–”

  The chief listened in red-faced silence.

  “I don’t perform the autopsy. I’m the night man. I just pass on whether they’re dead. I marked this one as D.O.A. That means dead on arrival – my arrival, not his. You know more about whether he was dead on his arrival than I do, and more about how he was killed, too.”

  “I asked you a civil question.”

  “I’m giving you a civil answer. Or, I should say, a civil service answer. The men who do the autopsy come on duty at nine o’clock. You ought to get your report by ten.”

  “That’s all I asked you. Thanks. And damn little good that’ll do me tonight. And by ten o’clock tomorrow morning the killer ought to be hell and gone to another part of the United States if he’s got any sense.”

  “That’s your affair, not mine. You can send the stiffs to the morgue when you’ve finished with them. I’m finished with them now. Good night, everyone.”

  No one answered. He left.

 
“I never knew why we needed a goddamned doctor to tell us whether a stiff was dead or not,” the chief grumbled.

  He was a big weather-beaten man dressed in a lot of gold braid. He’d come up from the ranks. Everything about him from the armful of gold hash stripes to the box-toed custom-made shoes said “flatfoot.” Behind his back the cops on Centre Street called him Spark Plug, after the tender-footed nag in the comic strip “Barney Google.”

  The group near the white man’s corpse, of which he was the hub, had grown by then, to include, in addition to the principals, two deputy police commissioners, an inspector from homicide, and nameless uniformed lieutenants from adjoining precincts.

  The deputy commissioners kept quiet. Only the commissioner himself had any authority over the chief, and he was at home in bed.

  “This thing’s hot as hell,” the chief said at large. “Have we got our stories synchronized?”

  Heads nodded.

  “Come on then, Anderson, we’ll meet the press,” he said to the lieutenant in charge of the 126th Street precinct station.

  They walked across the street to join a group of newsmen who were being held in leash.

  “Okay, men, you can get your pictures,” he said.

  Flash bulbs exploded in his face. Then the photographers converged on the corpses and left him facing the reporters.

  “Here it is, men. The dead man has been identified by his paper as Ulysses Galen of New York City. He lives alone in a two-room suite at Hotel Lexington. We’ve checked that. They think his wife is dead. He’s a sales manager for the King Cola Company. We’ve contacted their main office in Jersey City and learned that Harlem is in his district.”

  His thick brogue dripped like milk and honey through the noisy night. Stylos scratched on pads. Flash bulbs went off around the corpses like an anti-aircraft barrage.

  “A letter in his pocket from a Mrs. Helen Kruger, Wading River, Long Island, begins with Dear Dad. There’s an unposted letter addressed to Homer Galen in the sixteen hundred block on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. That’s a business district. We don’t know whether Homer Galen is his son or another relation–”

  “What about how he was killed?” a reporter interrupted.

  “We know that he was shot in the back of the head by a Negro man named Sonny Pickens who operates a shoe shine parlor at 134th Street and Lenox Avenue. Several Negroes resented the victim drinking in a bar at 129th Street and Lenox–”

  “What was he doing at a crummy bar up here in Harlem?”

  “We haven’t found that out yet. Probably just slumming. We know that the barman was cut trying to protect him from another colored assailant–”

  “How did the shine assail him?”

  “This is not funny, men. The first Negro attacked him with a knife – tried to attack him; the bartender saved him. After he left the bar Pickens followed him down the street and shot him in the back.”

  “You expect him to shoot a white man in the front.”

  “Two colored detectives from the 126th Street precinct station arrived on the scene in time to arrest Pickens virtually in the act of homicide. He still had the gun in his hand,” the chief continued. “They handcuffed the prisoner and were in the act of bringing him in when he was snatched by a teenage Harlem gang that calls itself Real Cool Moslems.”

  Laughter burst from the reporters.

  “What, no Mau-Maus?”

  “It’s not funny, men,” the chief said again. “One of them tried to throw acid in one of the detective’s eyes.”

  The reporters were silenced.

  “Another gangster threw acid in an officer’s face up here about a year ago, wasn’t it?” a reporter said. “He was a colored cop, too. Johnson, Coffin Ed Johnson, they called him.”

  “It’s the same officer,” Anderson said, speaking for the first time.

  “He must be a magnet,” the reporters said.

  “He’s just tough and they’re scared of him,” Anderson said. “You’ve got to be tough to be a colored cop in Harlem. Unfortunately, colored people don’t respect colored cops unless they’re tough.”

  “He shot and killed the acid thrower,” the chief said.

  “You mean the first one or this one?” the reporter asked.

  “This one, the Moslem,” Anderson said.

  “During the excitement, Pickens and the others escaped into the crowd,” the chief said.

  He turned and pointed toward a tenement building across the street. It looked indescribably ugly in the glare of a dozen powerful spotlights. Uniformed police stood on the roof, others were coming and going through the entrance; still others stuck their heads out of front windows to shout to other cops in the street. The other front windows were jammed with colored faces, looking like clusters of strange purple fruit in the stark white light.

  “You can see for yourselves we’re looking for the killer,” the chief said. “We’re going through those buildings with a fine-toothed comb, one by one, flat by flat, room by room. We have the killer’s description. He’s wearing toolproof handcuffs. We should have him in custody before morning. He’ll never get out of that dragnet.”

  “If he isn’t already out,” a reporter said.

  “He’s not out. We got here too fast for that.”

  The reporters then began to question him.

  “Is Pickens one of the Real Cool Moslems?”

  “We know he was rescued by seven of them. The eighth was killed.”

  “Was there any indication of robbery?’ ”

  “Not unless the victim had valuables we don’t know about. His wallet, watch and rings are intact.”

  “Then what was the motive? A woman?”

  “Well, hardly. He was an important man, well off financially. He didn’t have to chase up here.”

  “It’s been done before.”

  The chief spread his hands. “That’s right. But in this case both Negroes who attacked him did so because they resented his presence in a colored bar. They expressed their resentment in so many words. We have colored witnesses who heard them. Both Negroes were intoxicated. The first had been drinking all evening. And Pickens had been smoking marijuana also.”

  “Okay, chief, it’s your story,” the dean of the police reporters said, calling a halt.

  The chief and Anderson recrossed the street to the silent group.

  “Did you get away with it?” one of the deputy commissioners asked.

  “God damn it, I had to tell them something,” the chief said defensively. “Did you want me to tell them that a fifteen-thousand-dollar-a-year white executive was shot to death on a Harlem street by a weedhead Negro with a blank pistol who was immediately rescued by a gang of Harlem juvenile delinquents while all we got to show for the efforts of the whole god-damned police force is a dead adolescent who’s called a Real Cool Moslem?”

  “Sho’ ’nuff cool now,” Haggerty slipped in sotto voce.

  “You want us to become the laughing stock of the whole goddamned world,” the chief continued, warming up to the subject. “You want it said the New York City police stood by helpless while a white man got himself killed in the middle of a crowded nigger street?”

  “Well, didn’t he?” the homicide lieutenant said.

  “I wasn’t accusing you,” the deputy commissioner said apologetically.

  “Pickens is the one it’s rough on,” Anderson said. “We’ve got him branded as a killer when we know he didn’t do it.”

  “We don’t know any such goddamned thing,” the chief said, turning purple with rage. “He might have rigged the blanks with bullets. It’s been done, God damn it. And even if he didn’t kill him, he hadn’t ought to’ve been chasing him with a goddamned pistol that sounded as if it was firing bullets. We haven’t got anybody to work on but him and it’s just his black ass.”

  “Somebody shot him, and it wasn’t with any blank gun,” the homicide lieutenant said.

  “Well, God damn it, go ahead and find out who did it!” the chief roare
d. “You’re on homicide; that’s your job.”

  “Why not one of the Moslems,” the deputy commissioner offered helpfully. “They were on the scene, and these teenage gangsters always carry guns.”

  There was a moment of silence while they considered this.

  “What do you think, Jones?” the chief asked Grave Digger. “Do you think there was any connection between Pickens and the Moslems?”

  “It’s like I said before,” Grave Digger said. “It didn’t look to me like it. The way I figure it, those teenagers gathered around the corpse directly after the shooting, like everybody else was doing. And when Ed began shooting, they all ran together, like everybody else. I see no reason to believe that Pickens even knows them.”

  “That’s what I gathered too,” the chief said disappointedly.

  “But this is Harlem,” Grave Digger amended. “Nobody knows all the connections here.”

  “Furthermore, we don’t have but one of them and that one isn’t carrying a gun,” Anderson said. “And you’ve heard Haggerty’s report on the statement he took from the bartender and the manager of the Dew Drop Inn. Both Pickens and the other man resented Galen making passes at the colored women. And none of the Moslem gang were even there at the time.”

  “It could have been some other man feeling the same way,” Grave Digger said. “He might have seen Pickens shooting at Galen and thought he’d get in a shot, too.”

  “These people!” the chief said. “Okay, Jones, you begin to work on that angle and see what you can dig up. But keep it from the press.”

  As Grave Digger started to walk away, Coffin Ed fell in beside him.

  “Not you, Johnson,” the chief said. “You go home.”

  Both Grave Digger and Coffin Ed turned and faced the silence.

  “Am I under suspension?” Coffin Ed asked in a grating voice.

  “For the rest of the night,” the chief said. “I want you both to report to the commissioner’s office at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Jones, you go ahead with your investigation. You know Harlem, you know where you have to go, who to see.” He turned to Anderson. “Have you got a man to work with him?”

  “Haggerty,” Anderson offered.

  “I’ll work alone,” Grave Digger said.

  “Don’t take any chances,” the chief said. “If you need help, just holler. Bear down hard. I don’t give a goddamn how many heads you crack; I’ll back you up. Just don’t kill any more juveniles.”