The Heat's On

by Chester Himes

  She took a long puff from her pipe and held it down by sipping tea. Her old faded eyes regarded him with cynical amusement over the rim of her cup. Finally, when she let the smoke dribble from her lungs, she said, “What you trying to con me out of?”

  “I ain’t trying to con you.”

  “Then what’s all this ’bout his other wife and his other farm, an’ all his money? You must be seeing double.”

  “It’s the God’s truth,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “I swear it.”

  “You swear it. Long as I knowed Gus he ain’t never let no woman get no legal hold on him. And if you think any woman what knows that is fool enough to die and leave him something, you don’t know the female race.”

  “He got something,” he maintained urgently. “He made me promise not to tell, but I knows it’s what they’s after.”

  She smiled evilly. “Then why don’t you get it yourself, if it’s worth anything — poor as you is?” Her voice dripped sarcasm.

  “I couldn’t rob Gus. He the only one who ever been good to me.”

  “You get it and let them rob and murder you, if you is so set on protecting him.”

  His face took on a desperate expression. Sweat trickled from the borders of his hair. Tears welled up in his eyes.

  “You sitting there, making fun, and he might be dead,” he accused in his whining voice.

  Slowly she put down her cup on the night table. She rested the pipe across her stomach and studied him deliberately. She saw, that something was troubling him. She realized with faint surprise that he was deadly earnest.

  “Ain’t I been good to you, too, treating you like my own son — if I had a son?” she cajoled.

  “Yassum,” he replied obediently. “But he took me in and called me his son.”

  “Ain’t I told you time and again that you is my heir?” she insisted. “Ain’t I told you that you is going to inherit all that I got when I die?”

  “Yassum, but you ain’t helping me now.”

  “You ain’t got no right to hold out on me like this. God won’t like it,” she said.

  “I ain’t holding out,’ he whined, looking trapped. “It’s just that I promised not to tell.”

  She leaned forward and held his eyes in a hypnotic stare. “Is it in a trunk?”

  Her eyes were like two balls of colored fire bearing down on him.

  “Not when I seen it.”

  “Is it in a sack?”

  He felt his power to defy her slipping away.

  “Twarn’t in no sack when I seen it.”

  “Were it hidden in the house?”

  He shook his head.

  “In the closet?… Beneath the floor?… Behind the wall?”

  He felt himself growing dizzy in a holocaust of lights.

  “That ain’t how it were hidden,” he admitted.

  “He got it on him,” she said triumphantly.

  He was too worn out by her eyes to resist further.

  “Yassum. In a money belt.”

  Intense thought wrinkled her face like a prune.

  “It’s jewelry,” she concluded. “He’s stolen some jewelry. Is it diamonds?”

  His willpower gave way. He slumped forward and sighed. “It’s a treasure map,” he confessed. “It tells how to find a whole mess of buried treasure in Africa.”

  Her eyes popped open as though the lids had broken.

  “Treasure map!” she screamed. “Lost treasure! You still believe in lost treasure, as old as you is?”

  “I know how it sound, but that’s what it is all right,” he maintained stubbornly.

  She stared at him speculatively until he felt himself withering.

  “Did you see it?” she asked finally.

  “Yassum. It shows a river and the sea and just where the treasure is buried on the bank.”

  “A river!” Her eyes glittered as her brain worked lightning fast. “Where did he get it?”

  “He’s had it.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “When he show it to you?”

  He hesitated before answering. “Last night.”

  “Don’t nobody but you know he got it?”

  “His wife and the African know. He’s going to give it to the expressmen who come for his trunk this morning. They’re going to send it on to his farm in Ghana so can’t nobody rob him of it before he gets there. But I knows that woman and the African plan to kill him and take it before the expressmen get there — if they ain’t already done it.”

  “Why didn’t you stay with him and protect him?”

  “He wouldn’t let me; he said he had something to do. He went off and I didn’t know where he was at. That’s why I rung the fire alarm.”

  “What time are the expressmen due?”

  “Six o’clock.”

  She drew from inside her gown an old-fashioned locket-watch attached to a thin gold chain. It read 5:27.

  She jumped out of bed and began to dress. First she snatched off the black wig and substituted a gray one.

  “You’ll find some green stuff in a bottle in the drawer,” she said. “Give yourself a shot. It’ll calm you. You’re too jumpy with all that C.”

  While he was loading the spike and banging himself, she dressed rapidly. She paid him no attention.

  She put on a flowing black gown over numerous petticoats, low-heeled black shoes and black silk gloves, elbow length. She pinned a small black straw hat to her gray wig with a long steel hatpin.

  “Go start the car,” she said.

  She listened until he had gone out of the back door. Then she picked up a large black-beaded handbag, got a black-and-white striped parasol from the closet, and went into the kitchen.

  Uncle Saint had already dressed. He now wore a black chauffeur’s uniform and cap, several sizes too large for him, and of a fashion popular during the 1920s.

  “Did you get it?” she asked tersely.

  “I heered him,” he replied straight from his mouth. “If Gus’s cut is big enough to buy a farm, it can’t be chicken feed — whatever it is.”

  “I have an idea what it is,” she said. “If we ain’t too late.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  She went outside. He picked up his shotgun from beside the doorway and followed her, closing and locking the door behind him. He was high as a kite.

  Although objects were already visible in the gray dawn light, they did not see Pinky. But they heard him. He was on his knees on the hard-packed dirt floor of the garage, gripping the doorposts with his hands, trying to get to his feet, breathing in loud hard gasps. The muscles of his neck, arms and torso were corded; his blood vessels stood out like ropes.

  “He’s got the constitution of an ox,” Uncle Saint said.

  “Shhh,” Sister Heavenly cautioned. “He can still hear.”

  His sense of hearing was unbearably heightened, and he heard every word they said as distinctly as though they had shouted. His mind was lucid. She gave me a knockout drop, he was thinking. But he could feel consciousness leaving him like a wrecked ship sinking slowly into the sea. Finally his muscles collapsed and he went down onto his face between the doorposts. He didn’t hear Sister Heavenly and Uncle Saint when they approached.

  Uncle Saint reached inside the garage and turned on the light. A 1937 black Lincoln Continental sprang into view.

  They stepped over Pinky without comment and left him lying there. Sister Heavenly got into the back. Uncle Saint placed the shotgun within easy reach on the floor of the front seat, then went forward to open the double doors.

  He followed a dirt road across an abandoned field, pushing up to fifty, bouncing over rocks and ruts, leaving a cloud of dust. A gardener in his undershirt, wearing a straw hat, was milking a goat tethered to a tree. He paid no attention to the black limousine; it was a common sight. But when Uncle Saint got onto the macadam streets and pushed up to seventy and seventy-five, early-morning workers, milkmen and garbage collectors, turned to stare.

  6

  Uncle Saint
sat in the Lincoln and watched the entrance to the apartment. It was parked in the same place Grave Digger and Coffin Ed had vacated less than an hour earlier.

  Sister Heavenly had gone inside to look for Gus. But Uncle Saint didn’t take any stock in Pinky’s story about a map. The way he figured, Gus was a connection for racketeers smuggling diamonds or maybe gold. He was picking it up somewhere and passing it on.

  Sister Heavenly reckoned that Gus was carrying the boodle on him. But Uncle Saint didn’t figure it that way. Whatever it was would be in the trunk, he decided. You had to figure that racketeers who would use an old square like Gus for a connection knew what they were doing. And a trunk was still the best means of smuggling anything hot — because it was so obvious. All the smart federal men and slick city dicks would figure racketeers too smart to use an old worn-out gimmick like a trunk. And that was where the racketeers could outsmart them. Just plain human nature. Like the best mark is the one who has been clipped before; he figures then that he knows everything.

  As he sat there and turned it over in his mind, Uncle Saint resolved to get that trunk for himself.

  For more than twenty-five years he had flunkied for Sister Heavenly, serving her as guard, cook, nurse and toady — doing her dirty work. Before that he had been her lover. But when she had thrown him over, he had hung around like a homeless dog through a long succession of subsequent lovers. Now all he had for her was hate, but he couldn’t leave her because he didn’t have anywhere else to go, and she knew it.

  So he decided to cross her, get the boodle and cut out. Leave her taking the rap. See how she’d handle a mob of racketeers.

  He saw a green panel truck pull up before the apartment house entrance. It looked similar to a Railway Express Company truck except for the name in white letters on its sides: ACME EXPRESS CO.

  Two white men in hickory-striped uniforms and blue-visored caps got out. One was tall and thin, the other medium height and heavyset. Both were clean-shaven and neither wore glasses. That was all Uncle Saint noticed.

  Both men glanced toward the Lincoln. It was the only parked car with an occupant. But sight of the old liveried colored pappy behind the wheel allayed their suspicions.

  Uncle Saint had a sour grin as they turned their backs and walked toward the door. They had him cased as a square like old Gus, he figured. On the one hand it rankled; but on the other it worked in his favor.

  He waited until they had gone inside, then started the motor and kept it idling. He figured he was going to have to hijack the trunk. But not here in front of the apartment house. It was too open and there was no telling what Nosy Parker might be watching him from behind some curtained window, wondering what a strange limousine was doing in the neighborhood at this hour of morning. He just hoped Sister Heavenly wouldn’t do anything to rank his play.

  Sister Heavenly was sitting in the janitor’s parlor, covering the janitor’s wife and the African with a blunt-nosed .38-caliber revolver, when the doorbell rang.

  “I got to go and open the front door,” the janitor’s wife said. “It’s most likely Gus.”

  She was standing beside the African, who was seated before the table, where she had backed when Sister Heavenly got the drop on her.

  “Can the bullshit and press the buzzer,” Sister Heavenly said, motioning with the barrel of the pistol from where she sat on the arm of the davenport. “When they get here we’ll see who it is.”

  The janitor’s wife shuffled sullenly over toward the door and pressed a button releasing the latch on the entrance door. She was barefooted and still wore the same cotton shift as before, but now it looked as though she had been rolling in it. Her face was greasy and her slanting yellow eyes glittered evilly.

  “You ain’t going to get nothing by this, whatever it is you is after,” she muttered in her gravelly voice.

  “Just get back over there and shut up,” Sister Heavenly said with an arrogant wave of the gun barrel.

  The janitor’s wife shuffled back to the side of the African.

  The African sat with drooping body, like a melted statue, his white-rimmed eyes staring at the pistol as though hypnotized.

  They waited. Only their heavy breathing was audible in the surrounding silence.

  The two expressmen saw the trunk in the basement corridor beside the elevator and took it away without seeing anyone.

  Uncle Saint was watching when they returned to the street, carrying a large green steamer trunk, stickered and tagged for shipping. They put the trunk into the body of the truck, closed the doors, and looked once again toward the parked Lincoln.

  Without appearing to notice them, Uncle Saint leaned out the car window and looked up toward the front windows of the third-story apartment as though listening to someone speaking to him.

  The expressmen looked in the same direction, but they didn’t see anything.

  “Yassum,” Uncle Saint called in a flunkey’s voice. “Right away, mum.”

  He put the Lincoln in gear and drove past the express truck without giving it a look and kept on down Riverside Drive, keeping within the twenty-five-mile speed limit.

  The expressmen got into the compartment of the truck. The driver started the motor and the truck took off behind the limousine at a more rapid speed.

  Uncle Saint accelerated, watching the following truck in his rearview mirror. He kept well ahead, lengthening and shortening the gap between as though driving naturally.

  He knew he was playing a dangerous game, especially alone. But he was too old and had lived too long on the edge of violence to be scared of death. What scared him was the idea of what he planned to do. What was in his favor was the fact nobody knew him. No one but Pinky and Sister Heavenly knew his straight monicker; in recent years but few people had seen him in the light. If he could get it and get away, only those two would know who had done it, and even they wouldn’t know where to look for him.

  He accelerated gradually as he realized the truck was headed downtown, and pulled far ahead. He was two blocks ahead on the almost empty drive when he came to the entrance to the Yacht Club at 79th Street. He swerved into the curving driveway and slowed down, hidden by the dense foliage of the crescent-shaped park. He got a glimpse of the truck passing on Riverside Drive. He came back into the drive a block behind it and kept a bakery truck in between down as far as 72nd Street.

  The truck turned east on 72nd Street to Tenth Avenue, and went south. It was a southbound avenue, feeding the Lincoln and Holland tunnels underneath the Hudson River, and was fairly covered with commercial traffic at this hour. That made it easy. The express truck had only one rearview mirror on the left front fender. Uncle Saint kept far to the right, and always kept some vehicle in between.

  At 56th Street when the truck turned toward the Hudson River, the Lincoln was exposed for a moment or two; but when the truck turned south again alongside the overhead trestle of the New York Central Railroad line, he was covered again. On the west side of the wide brick-paved avenue, the whole length of North River was closed in by the docks of the great oceangoing lines. Underneath the trestle, as far as the eye could see, trucks and truck-trailers were parked side by side. The southbound lane was heavy with traffic feeding the docks.

  Already the funnels of the Queen Mary at dock could be seen overtopping the wharf of the French Line adjoining the Cunard pier. The express truck swerved toward the curb and braked to a sudden stop behind a black Buick sedan parked less than fifty yards from the entrance to the French Line dock.

  The maneuver was executed so quickly Uncle Saint didn’t have a chance to stop behind the truck and had to pull ahead of the Buick to park.

  It was a no-parking zone and two cops in a prowl car looked meaningfully at the three parked vehicles as they drove slowly by. Being as one was a chauffeur-driven limousine and another an express truck, the cops let them slide for a moment.

  Two dark-suited, straw-hatted, somber-looking men sat in the front seat of the Buick and watched the prowl car pass the
Cunard dock and drop out of sight in the traffic. The man on the curb side opened the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He was a heavyset, black-haired man with a thick-featured, olive-skinned face and a bulging belly. His black single-breasted coat was buttoned at the bottom. He came down the street, looking anxiously toward the exit of the French Line wharf.

  Uncle Saint watched in the rearview mirror, concentrating on the men in the express truck.

  The driver of the Buick sat with his right hand on the wheel, his left hanging loosely through the open window.

  When the heavyset man came level with the curb-side window of the Lincoln, he turned with a quick, catlike motion, unexpected in a man of his build, and came toward the car. He clapped his left hand on the car top, flipped open his coat and drew from a left shoulder sling. When he bent over to peer through the window, as though speaking to the gray-haired old chauffeur, his flapping coat shielded the pistol from view. It was a single-shot derringer with a six-inch perforated silencer attached. Without speaking a word, he took careful aim at the softest spot in Uncle Saint’s head. His dull dark eyes were impassive.

  Abruptly from behind him a hard voice shouted, “Get ’em up or I’ll shoot!”

  He didn’t see the faint motion of Uncle Saint’s lips. He wheeled about convulsively, the back of his head striking the top of the doorframe, knocking off his hat onto the seat of the car.

  Uncle Saint lunged for his shotgun lying on the floor.

  The gunman wheeled back, his eyes bugging out, as Uncle Saint was bringing up the muzzle of the double-barreled shotgun.

  Both fired simultaneously.

  The small coughing sound of the silenced derringer was lost in the heavy booming blast of the shotgun.

  In his panic, Uncle Saint had squeezed the triggers of both barrels.

  The gunman’s face disappeared and his thick heavy body was knocked over backward from the impact of the 12-gauge shells.

  The rear light of a truck parked beneath the trestle in the middle of the avenue disintegrated for no apparent reason.

  The air stunk with the smell of cordite and burnt flesh as the driver of the Buick leaned out the window and emptied an automatic pistol held in his left hand.