The Heat's On

by Chester Himes

“Yeah,” Coffin Ed said, turning about to leave. “See you.”

  “Don’t tell him I told you.”

  “I won’t.”

  All the time he was there Kid Blackie had been looking him over covertly. His wise old eyes hadn’t missed a thing. He had made the two guns and the sap and he figured they weren’t all.

  He let Coffin Ed reach the head of the staircase, then called, “Wait a minute. You got some blood on your shirt cuff.”

  He was curious to know whose blood it was but it was too risky to ask outright.

  Coffin Ed didn’t even look at his cuff; he didn’t stop walking; he didn’t look around. “Yeah,” he said. “And there’s going to be some more.”

  17

  Unlike the opium derivatives and cocaine, marijuana gives one an esoteric appetite.

  Sister Heavenly had just come from seeing Daddy Haddy. After listening to Daddy Haddy’s recital of Pinky’s latest brainstorm, she had a sudden wild craving for something she’d never eaten before. She couldn’t even think until she ate; she couldn’t figure out what it meant.

  Twenty-five minutes later she left her hired car and the driver on 116th Street and staggered up an alley to a small, dirty “Home-Cooking” restaurant where she knew the cook. It stood in back of a store that advertised: Seafood — Eggs — Chicken-on-the-Feet — Southern Specialties. That gave her an idea.

  She ordered a half dozen shelled raw oysters, a bottle of sorghum molasses, three raw eggs and a glass of buttermilk.

  The big fat black woman who ran the joint had to send next door to fill the order, and she stood over Sister Heavenly and watched her pour sorghum molasses over the oysters and eat them and mix the raw eggs with the buttermilk and drink it.

  “Honey, if I didn’t know you I’d swear you was knocked up,” she said.

  “I ain’t knocked up,” Sister Heavenly said. “But I’m barefooted.” To herself she added, “And that ain’t no lie.”

  Suddenly she jumped up and rushed outside in the alley and was sick. Even the hungry dogs wouldn’t touch the mess. She came back and ordered fried chicken.

  “Thass more like it,” the big fat cook said.

  When Sister Heavenly had finished with the chicken she pushed back her chair and opened her beaded bag below the level of the table to check its contents. Aside from cosmetics it contained a billfold with five one-hundred-dollar bills, three tens and two ones, a handful of loose change rattling around in the bottom, her pipe and pouch of marijuana, a key ring with 13 keys, a .38 Owl’s Head revolver with the barrel sawed off to an inch in length and loaded with dumdum bullets, a spring-blade knife with a bone handle, a box of calling cards reading Sister Heavenly — Healing by Faith, three lavender initialed linen handkerchiefs, three French teasers that looked like miniature beartooth necklaces, a picture of a slick-haired black man with buck teeth inscribed, To Choochy from Hoochy, and an imitation deputy sheriff’s badge.

  “That don’t spell whore,” she said bitterly to herself. “It don’t spell nothing.”

  She didn’t think about Uncle Saint, her blown-up cache or her lost house. She was too old to regret.

  It was time that was worrying her now. She knew her time was short. If the devil don’t get me, the cops will, she thought. If the cops hadn’t already made the hot Lincoln, they would soon. She gave herself until morning. If she hadn’t scored by then it would be too late. She couldn’t let the sun catch her again in these parts.

  After talking to the pleasant-voiced woman at the S.P.C.A. she had figured that the dick who took Pinky’s dog was looking for Pinky. She had started looking for Pinky in the hopes of finding the dog.

  Her next stop was Kid Blackie’s gym.

  She had hired an old Mercury sedan driven by a rape-fiend-looking colored man who worked it as a taxi without buying a license. He was a lean, rusty-black, nervous-looking joker with bright red buck-wild eyes. He was a weedhead and she figured she could trust him.

  He was drowsing behind the wheel, sucking on a stick of weed, when she came out and got into the back.

  “Turn around and go back toward Lenox,” she said.

  He shifted into gear and executed the U-turn with flourishes like a maestro.

  “I know you can drive; you don’t have to prove it,” she said cynically.

  He grinned at her in the rearview mirror, narrowly missing a woman with a baby buggy crossing the street.

  They had got past Eighth Avenue and were headed east when she casually noticed a Plymouth sedan passing on the other side of the street, headed west. At just that moment the dog stuck its head out of the window on her side.

  “Sheba!” she screamed. “Turn around!”

  The driver was teaed to the gills and on a livewire edge and her sudden scream scared the living hell out of him. He knew his name wasn’t Sheba and he didn’t know who Sheba was. But he figured if Sheba was enough to scare the old witch he was chauffeuring about, that was enough for him. He didn’t stop to see.

  He put his shoulders to the wheel and turned.

  Tires squealed. People screamed. Two cars behind him telescoped. A crosstown bus coming from the opposite direction braked so hard it scrambled the passengers into the aisle.

  The Mercury lurched and went up over the opposite curb. A sad-looking cripple leaped like a kangaroo through the door of a bar. An old lady was run over by a black-clad preacher shouting, “Praise God and run for your lives!”

  The front bumper knocked over a wooden stand displaying religious booklets and twenty-four marijuana cigarettes were scattered about the sidewalk.

  The driver didn’t see a thing. He was standing on the gas and trusting to fate.

  “Follow that car!” she screamed.

  “What car?” The street was full of cars.

  “It turned up Eighth!”

  He was already on top of Eighth Avenue, on the inside lane, pushing past 50 miles an hour. But he made another do-or-die turn, going in between a yellow taxi and a cabin truck with not more than a few inches give-or-take each way; tires screaming, drivers cursing. He came into the avenue so fast he almost climbed up in the back seat of a beat-up convertible carrying ten passengers.

  The women in the back seat screamed.

  Somewhere behind, a police whistle was blowing frantically.

  “Don’t stop!” Sister Heavenly cried.

  “Is I stopping?” he threw over his shoulder as he wrenched the car around the back of the convertible and gave it the gas.

  The bug-eyed driver of the convertible looked out from his galaxy of chicks and shouted threateningly, “Don’t you run into my car, nigger!”

  But the Mercury was past and closing rapidly in behind Coffin Ed’s Plymouth.

  “It’s the car!” Sister Heavenly hollered. “Don’t get too close.”

  “Hell, I gonna pass it,” he said.

  Coffin Ed noticed the beat-up Mercury when it passed. At another time he might have taken on the duties of a traffic cop and run it down. But he didn’t have the time.

  It was just another automobile racer, a black Stirling Moss trying out his car for a “Grand Prix” somewhere. Harlem was full of ’em. They got teaed on weed and imagined they could drive those old V-8 gas gluttons straight up in the sky, he thought. He noticed that the back seat was empty. He figured some cop up the line would get him if he didn’t get himself killed. He put it from his mind.

  The Mercury was out of sight when he pulled up before Daddy Haddy’s joint.

  The little hole-in-the-wall had a red painted front like the big chain of United Tobacco Stores. But Daddy Haddy had named his Re-United Tobacco Store; there wasn’t anything anybody could do about that.

  The shades were drawn.

  Coffin Ed glanced at his watch. It read 6:07.

  The tenement across the street threw a shadow on the store. But it was too early for it to be closed. Coffin Ed felt his stomach knot.

  He got out of his car, walked across the sidewalk and tried the door. It was locked. A
sixth sense told him to wipe his prints from the doorknob, get back into his car and drive — he wouldn’t get anything here. He was a civilian on a manhunt; he had no authority to investigate what he suspected might reveal a crime; he was outside of the law himself. “Phone the station, report your suspicions, and let it go at that,” an inner voice told him.

  But he couldn’t let it go. He was in it; he was committed; he was like the airplane over the middle of the ocean that had passed the point of no return. He thought fleetingly of Grave Digger, but that wouldn’t bear thinking about. The pain in his head and the brackish taste in his mouth had become normal, as though he had always had them.

  He took a deep breath and looked up and down the street to see if there were any police in sight. He took out his Boy Scout knife, opened the round, needle-point pry, and began fiddling with the Yale lock.

  The door had been closed on the latch. Whoever had last left had just pulled it shut. In a moment it was open. He closed and locked it behind him, groped about until he found the light switch, and turned on the light.

  There were no surprises.

  He found the body of Daddy Haddy behind the glass-enclosed counter. There was a hole in the center of his forehead filled with a glob of blackish blood. It was encircled by powder burns more than an inch in diameter. He put his toe beneath the shoulder and turned the body just enough to see the back of the head. There was a small hard lump at the base of the hairline where the bullet had come out of the skull without force to penetrate the skin and had coursed downward and stopped.

  A clean job! he thought without any emotion whatever. No blood. No noise. Someone had held a pistol with a silencer a few inches in front of Daddy Haddy’s head and had pulled the trigger. Daddy Haddy had not expected it. So much for that. Daddy Haddy had had it.

  The joint had been searched hurriedly but thoroughly. Shelves, drawers, cases, boxes had been turned out, the contents dumped helter-skelter over the floor. Among the unopened packages of cigarettes, scattered cigars, matches, lighters, flints, fluids, pipes and cigarette and cigar holders was a sprinkling of neatly folded decks of heroin and carefully rolled marijuana cigarettes of bomber size. There was still the faint odor of cordite fumes in the hot, close, stinky air.

  He waded through the debris and opened the door at the rear. It showed a tiny storeroom containing two padded straight-backed chairs. The air was redolent with marijuana smoke. The treatment was the same.

  It was obvious the searchers hadn’t found what they were looking for.

  Two people already dead. And Digger—? The thought broke off, then came on again: Small-time dog-ass little Harlem hustlers on the fringe of the narcotics racket. Pee-wee colored scrabblers for a dirty buck. How do they get mixed up in this business? This is mob stuff from downtown. Hired gunmen from a syndicate.…

  He hadn’t discovered any lead to Uncle Saint, so he didn’t know there were already three others dead from the caper.

  He wondered if he oughtn’t back out before it got to be more than he could handle. Drop it back into the lap of homicide and the narcotics squad. Let ’em call in the feds.

  Then he thought if he reported the crime he’d be detained, held up for hours, questioned. His superiors were going to want to know what he was doing in this business when he had been warned by all of them to keep out.

  “They ain’t going to like it, Ed.” He didn’t realize he had spoken aloud.

  But on the other hand, they were going to dig him anyway. He hadn’t made any effort at concealment; his prints were everywhere. They’d find witnesses to testify he had been there. On one side was the devil, on the other the deep blue sea.

  He thought of Grave Digger again. He thought of having to break in a new partner — that is, if he ever got back on the force. He knew the Harlem hoodlums would make life rough with Grave Digger gone. He thought of how Grave Digger had tracked down the hoodlum who had thrown acid in his face; how he had shot him through both eyes. He thought of the effect on the Harlem gunslingers. He knew if he backed down now, he’d never live it down.

  There was nothing in there that he found of any use. Nothing he didn’t know before he came inside.

  I can’t find them, so the only thing for me to do now is let ’em find me, he thought and went outside and pulled the door shut behind him.

  A little girl about eleven or twelve years old had the back door of his car open and was trying to entice the dog onto the sidewalk. But she was too scared of the dog to reach inside and get the leash. She stood back a distance on the sidewalk and said, “Here, Sheba. Here, Sheba. Come on, Sheba.”

  It struck Coffin Ed as odd that she knew the dog’s name but didn’t know the dog.

  But before his mind had a chance to work on this, he caught a picture from the corners of his eyes that reacted instinctively on his brain. A youth was standing on the other side of Eighth Avenue at the corner of 137th Street looking up at the sky. Coffin Ed knew automatically there wasn’t anything in the sky at that moment to attract the attention of a Harlem youth.

  “Let her alone,” he told the little girl and closed the car door.

  The little girl ran up the street. He didn’t give her another thought.

  He walked around the car as though he were going to get in behind the wheel. He had the door open. Then he seemed to think of something and closed the door and turned and started to cross Eighth Avenue.

  Two cars were coming along the other side and he had to stop and let them pass.

  The youth turned and began sauntering slowly up 137th Street toward St Nicholas Avenue as though he didn’t have a thing on his mind.

  There was a small chain grocery store on the corner. Coffin Ed headed for it. He knew that in his Scotch beret, green goggles and suit with a coat, he didn’t look like a Harlem character out shopping for dinner. But it couldn’t be helped; it had to appear he was headed for some definite place until he had closed the gap.

  The youth walked faster. He was a coal-black boy, wafer thin, with a long egg-shaped head from which fell locks of long straight black hair. He wore a white T-shirt, blue jeans, canvas sneakers and smoked glasses. The only thing to set him apart from other Harlem youths was his watching Coffin Ed. Harlem youths kept the hell away from Coffin Ed.

  Going toward St Nicholas Avenue, 137th Street became residential. It was nearing the dinner hour and the smell of cooking seeped into the street and mingled with the smell of heat and motorcar exhaust. Half-clad people lounged in the doorways, sat on the stoops; naked black torsos gleamed in the sunshine on the upper windows; women’s long fried hair glistened and grease trickled down their necks.

  Anything was welcome that broke the monotony.

  When Coffin Ed yelled to the youth, “Halt!” everyone perked up.

  The youth began to run. He kept to the sidewalk, dodging the people in his path.

  Coffin Ed drew Grave Digger’s pistol from his belt because it hampered his running. But he didn’t dare fire the customary warning shot into the air. He couldn’t afford to draw the cops. It was the first time he found himself trying to avoid the cops. But it wasn’t funny.

  He ran in a long-gaited, flat-footed, knee-straining lope, as though his feet were sinking into the concrete. The light rubber-soled shoes helped, but the heavy artillery weighed him down, and each step set off explosions in his head.

  The thin agile youth ran in a high-stepping, light-footed, ground-eating sprint, ducking and dodging between the people pouring into the street.

  Sides were taken by the enthusiastic spectators.

  “Run, buster, run!” some shouted.

  “Catch ’im, daddy!” others echoed.

  “Look at them niggers picking ’em up and putting ’em down,” a big fat lady crowed jubilantly.

  “Dig the canon, Jack!” a weedhead exclaimed as Coffin Ed ran past.

  Two jokers jumped from a parked car at the corner of St Nicholas Avenue and split in an effort to catch the fleeing youth. They didn’t have anything
against him; they just wanted to join in the excitement.

  The youth ducked to the right and one of the jokers lunged at him like a baseball catcher trying to stop a wild pitch. The youth bent low and went underneath the outstretched hand, but the other joker stuck out his foot and tripped him.

  The youth skidded forward on his hands and elbows, scraping off the skin, and Coffin Ed closed in.

  Now the two jokers decided to take the youth’s part. They turned toward Coffin Ed grinning confidently and one said in a jocular voice, “What’s the trouble, daddy-o?”

  Their eyes popped simultaneously. One saw the nickel-plated revolver and the other saw Coffin Ed’s face.

  “Great Godamighty, it’s Coffin Ed!” the first one whispered.

  How the people up and down that noisy street heard him is one of those mysteries. But suddenly everybody started drawing in. The two jokers took off, running in opposite directions.

  By the time Coffin Ed had reached down and grabbed the youth by the back of his neck and yanked him to his feet, the street was deserted save for heads peeking furtively around corners.

  Coffin Ed took the youth by the arm and turned him around. He found himself looking into a pair of solid black eyes. He had to fight down the impulse to take Grave Digger’s pistol and start beating the punk across the head.

  “Listen to me, snake-eyes,” he grated in a constricted voice. “Walk back to the car ahead of me. And if you run this time I’m going to shoot you in the spine.”

  The boy walked back in that high-stepping, cloud-treading gait that marijuana gives. Blood was dripping from his skinned elbows. Silence greeted them along the way.

  They crossed Eighth Avenue and stopped beside the car. The dog was gone.

  “Who got it?” Coffin Ed asked in a voice that seemed to come from a dried-up throat.

  The youth glanced at the tic in Coffin Ed’s face and said, “Sister Heavenly.”

  “You’re sure it wasn’t Pinky?”

  “Nossuh, ’twere Sister Heavenly.”

  “All right, fine, you know the family. Go around and get inside on the front seat and we’re going away where we won’t be disturbed and talk.”