The Heat's On

by Chester Himes

  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.

  Coffin Ed opened his Boy Scout knife and broke the seal. Ginny unlocked the door, stepped inside and switched on the light.

  She drew back and cried out, “God in heaven, what happened?”

  It looked the same as when Coffin Ed had seen it last, except the corpse of the African had been removed.

  “Your friend got his throat cut,” he said.

  She stared in horror at the patches and clots of black dried blood and began trembling violently. Wop’s teeth began to chatter again.

  “What the hell you so horrified about? It ain’t your blood,” Coffin Ed said bitterly, including them both.

  Ginny began turning green. He didn’t want her sick so he said quickly, “Just get me the keys.”

  She had to pass through the room to the kitchen. She skirted the edge, bracing herself with her hand against the wall, as though traversing the deck of a ship in a storm.

  When she returned with the ring of house keys, Coffin Ed said to Wop, “You stay here.”

  Wop looked at the dried blood and the wreckage and turned a shade of light gray that seemed impossible for a person with black skin.

  “Do I got to?” he stammered.

  “Either that or go home.”

  He stayed.

  Coffin Ed pushed Ginny into the corridor, closed and locked the door on Wop, then went and bolted the back door that opened onto the rear court. Ginny stood beside the elevator door as though she were afraid to move.

  “Stay put,” Coffin Ed directed when he returned and got into the elevator.

  Her face broke out in alarm. “You’re not going to leave me here?”

  “No worry,” he said and shut the door in her face.

  He heard her protesting as he took the elevator up to the first floor but he paid it no attention.

  He left the elevator and started down the stairs and ran head-on into Ginny as she was coming up.

  “Whoa, where you going, baby?” he said, heading her off.

  “If you think I’m gonna—” she began, but he interrupted, taking her arm:

  “You’re going to show me how to cut off the power to this thing.”

  “Awright, awright, you don’t have to be so mother-raping rough every time you open yo’ mouth,” she grumbled but she obeyed readily enough.

  She showed him a small square key on the ring which opened the basement door to the elevator shaft. The power switch was inside. “Just push it,” she said.

  He found a button switch and pushed it.

  “Anyway, it’s not in there,” she said. “They said they looked in there.” Her voice wasn’t loud, but it wasn’t lowered.

  He looked into a pit of blackness. “Shut up and give me a light,” he said.

  “There’s a light inside. Feel down below and you’ll find the switch.”

  He groped in the dark and found a small switch. A naked bulb at the end of an extension cord lying on the oil-covered floor lit up, showing a six-foot concrete pit at the bottom of the shaft.

  A heavy spring bumper supporting a thick steel block rose from the center of the pit. In the back were the cable pulleys and the large electric motor that operated the lift cable. Beside it were a switchboard and adjustment levers.

  He lowered himself into the pit, found some greasy cotton waste, and wiped off the instruction plates on the motor and above the levers. One of the levers worked with the motion of a jack handle, and was used to jack the elevator up or down to make it flush with the corridor floors.

  He jacked it down as far as it would go, about three feet. Then he climbed out of the pit and, leaving the light on, closed the door to the shaft.

  He turned the power back on and brought the elevator down to the basement. Now when he opened the door the floor of the elevator was three feet below the floor of the basement. It was now possible to crawl on top of the elevator from the door of the elevator shaft.

  He took the ladder from the wall, propped it against the front of the elevator, and climbed up.

  “Do you see it?” she asked breathlessly.

  He didn’t answer.

  He put his head and shoulders through the opening atop the elevator, ascended the ladder as far as he could, then wriggled forward on his belly.

  “Have you found it?” she called anxiously.

  “Pipe down,” he said, feeling about for the blue canvas utility bag.

  When he found it he drew it forward beside his hip, then turned over on his back and drew both revolvers. He checked them in the dim, reflected light coming up the sides of the elevator from the pit. They checked.

  He began worming forward on his back, inch by inch, moving the bag forward with his elbow.

  “It’s not there?” she asked. Her voice was strained to the breaking point and jarred on his nerves.

  “Will you shut up and let me look!” he grated.

  He kept inching forward until his feet touched the ladder. Only his head and shoulders and his hands holding the revolvers remained unseen. Then he knocked the bag out onto the basement floor.

  “He’s got it!” she screamed, and dove into the elevator.

  There was a slight grunting sound as Coffin Ed jumped and came down like a cat somersaulting in the air.

  Simultaneously the hophead gunman leaped into the corridor from the staircase.

  Both shot before their feet touched the floor. Coffin Ed shot left-handed with Grave Digger’s pistol, shooting from the hip in a manner he despised. The gunman shot right-handed with the silenced derringer across his left shoulder, the police positive dangling from his left hand.

  In the tight narrow corridor the very air exploded with the hard heavy thunderclap of the long-barreled .38 revolver, drowning the slight deadly cough of the silenced derringer.

  The brass-nosed .38 slug hit the gunman on the pivot of the jaw and scattered bone, blood and teeth into the air, while the .44 slug from the derringer burned a hole through Coffin Ed’s left sleeve and seared his flesh like a branding iron.

  Landing wide-legged and flat-footed in a half-crouch, Coffin Ed pumped two more slugs into the gunman’s body, propelling it into a macabre dance before the fat gunman had cleared the bottom step.

  Trying to brake his charge and shoot at the same time, the fat gunman threw two wild shots with his .38 automatic, chipping plaster from the ceiling and puncturing the fire extinguisher; while Coffin Ed blasted with both guns and put two slugs side by side in his bulging belly.

  Then Coffin Ed’s beret sailed from his head in a forward flight like a missile taking off, and a fraction of a second later a brassjacketed .45 slug coming from behind hit him on the shoulder blade and knocked him flat on is face.

  The third gun
man had stepped from the laundry, blasting with a .45-caliber Colt’s army automatic. But before he could squeeze the trigger for the third time, plainclothes dicks poured out of the very walls and crevices, and the corridor erupted with the heavy artillerylike booming of several police positives fired in unison. The gunman went down riddled with thirteen slugs.

  It was all over in twenty-seven seconds.

  The air was blue-gray and suffocating from cordite fumes, and gun-roar still echoed in their ears.

  Two gunmen lay dead on the floor. With his guts perforated, his liver punctured and his spleen blown open, the fat gunman lay dying. A detective was trying to get a statement but he wasn’t talking.

  Another detective dragged Ginny from the elevator and slipped on the cuffs while a third brought Wop from the janitor’s flat. There were nine detectives in all, three from the homicide bureau, three from the narcotics squad, and three T-men.

  Coffin Ed was gritting his teeth in an agony of bone hurt and trying to push to his feet with his left hand. Two detectives helped him up while another went to the telephone at the end of the corridor and called the precinct station for two police hearses and two ambulances.

  “I’m all right,” Coffin Ed said. “Where’s my gun?”

  He still had Grave Digger’s pistol in his left hand, but he’d been knocked loose from his own by the impact of the .45 slug.

  With a grin, a T-man opened his coat and put the pistol into its holster. Coffin Ed stuck the other one back into his waistband. The T-man buttoned the bottom of Coffin Ed’s jacket and made a sling for his arm.

  The lieutenant from the narcotics squad weighed the blue canvas bag in his hand and looked at Coffin Ed questioningly.

  But it was the lieutenant from homicide who asked the question, “How did you figure it was there?”

  The narcotics lieutenant said, “He didn’t. Don’t you think we looked there?”

  “The hell I didn’t,” Coffin Ed said. “I put it there the first thing I did this afternoon when I left the house.”

  “So it’s just bait.”

  “Yeah. It was the best I could think of.”

  For a moment everyone looked at him. His jerking, ugly patchwork face was such a picture of agony, they looked away.

  “It gives me an idea,” one of the T-men said. “If it worked once, it might work twice. We got Benny Mason and his chauffeur staked out down the street, beyond Grant’s Tomb. He’s watching the entrance here through night field glasses.”

  “She said he’d be around somewhere,” Coffin Ed said, nodding toward the woman.

  “What’s your idea?” the narcotics lieutenant asked.

  “Let’s send this woman down the street, the other way, carrying this bag. He’ll try to get it—”

  “Then what? There’s nothing in it,” the homicide lieutenant said. “Nothing to make a charge.”

  The T-man smiled. “We’ll put something in it. We were thinking of a trap too, in case we found a way to spring it. So we brought along a little package too, with two kilos of pure heroin. We’ll just slip that into the bag—”

  “And let him get it?”

  “That’s the idea. We don’t want to disappoint Mister Mason.”

  “You’d better hurry,” the homicide lieutenant said. “In two minutes’ time this street will be overrun with prowl cars.”

  “That won’t make much difference to Mister Mason, as hot as he is after this stuff, but we’ll hurry anyway.”

  Another T-man produced the package of heroin and they made the substitution and took the handcuffs from Ginny’s wrists.

  “I won’t do it,” she said.

  All of them stared at her with those blank looks policemen have when a prisoner defies them.

  “What do you have on her?” the T-man asked.

  “Conspiracy,” Coffin Ed said.

  “We got more than that,” the homicide lieutenant said with a straight face. “She killed the African.”

  “I didn’t!” she screamed. “It’s a mother-raping lie!”

  “We can prove it,” the homicide lieutenant said in a flat voice.

  “You’re trying to frame me,” she accused.

  “That’s the general idea. Of course you can take your chances in court.”

  “Dirty mother-rapers!” she fumed.

  “Give me thirty seconds alone with her,” Coffin Ed said.

  She flicked one glance at his face and her defiance wilted. “All right, give me the mother-raping bag,” she said.

  21

  Shadows were framed in dark open windows and the faint distant sound of a siren floated in the silent night when she stepped outside, but no one was in sight.

  She turned toward downtown, in the direction of Riverside Church, and began walking fast. She carried the bag as far as possible away from contact with her own flesh, as though it contained a germ bomb that might leak.

  Four blocks north, where the drive bends around the sloping green park surrounding Grant’s Tomb, a long black Mark II Lincoln, with only its parking lights burning, pulled from the curb. No light emanated from the instrument panel. Only the vague silhouettes of two black-hatted men on the front seat were visible in the dim light coming from the street. The dark aquiline features of the man beside the driver were further obscured by heavy sunglasses. The driver’s face was but a round white blur beneath his black chauffeur’s cap.

  The Lincoln accelerated with incredible speed, but slowed down almost instantly as a prowl car screamed around the far corner by Riverside Church on two wheels, its red light blinking like the eye of hell.

  Ginny had seen the Lincoln move and now she welcomed the prowl car as a savior and hastened in its direction. But it was still some distance away. She had started to break into a run when a voice called from the dark entrance of the apartment house next door.

  “Honey,” the cracked voice called sweetly.

  Her scalp crawled as her head jerked around. Her eyes probed the darkness. She halted on the balls of her feet.

  “It’s me, Sister Heavenly,” the cracked saccharine voice identified itself.

  She stood suspended in flight. “What the hell do you want?” she demanded viciously.

  The prowl car roared past, lighting them briefly with the red spotlight, and dragged to a screaming stop beyond the next-door entrance. It had ignored them.

  “Come here, honey, I got something for you,” Sister Heavenly said in what she thought was a sweet cajoling voice.

  Ginny realized instantly that Sister Heavenly was after the canvas bag. And I’ll give her the mother-raping bag, she decided evilly.

  She turned quickly and stepped forward into the dark entrance.

  “Here,” Sister Heavenly said sweetly, and plunged the long sharp blade of her knife deep into Ginny’s heart.

  Ginny slumped without a sound, without so much as a gasp, and Sister Heavenly clutched the bag from her nerveless fingers and hastened down the sidewalk in the same direction.

  It went so fast it looked like magic. One moment a young woman in a green suit was carrying a blue canvas bag down the sidewalk; the next moment an old woman in a long black dress and a black straw hat was carrying the same bag in the same direction.

  The detectives watching from a black Chrysler sedan parked at the curb up the street didn’t know what to make of it.

  But Benny Mason’s chauffeur said, “Look, there’s been a switch.”

  Benny already had his field glasses focused on the bag. “She gave it to somebody else, that’s all,” he said.

  The two prowl car cops hit the pavement and charged into the apartment house, obscuring the vision of the watching detectives. For a moment the street looked clear of cops.

  The Lincoln accelerated. Behind it the black Chrysler sedan pulled out from the curb. Far ahead down Riverside Drive was the distant red eye of another prowl car coming fast. And from all directions came the sound of sirens, shattering the night, as unseen cars and ambulances converged on the scene.


  “Pull over fast,” Benny said.

  The Lincoln lunged to the other side of the street and braked silently just ahead of Sister Heavenly and the driver jumped to the sidewalk with a heavy black sap in his hand.

  Sister Heavenly saw the car brake and the man jump out in the same sidewise glance. She was carrying the blue canvas bag along with her own black beaded bag in her left hand. Somewhere along the way she had discarded the parasol and instead was carrying the .38-caliber Owl’s Head with the sawed-off barrel wrapped in a black scarf in her right hand.

  Without turning her body or slackening her pace, she raised the pistol and pumped four dumdum bullets into the chauffeur’s body.

  “Jesus Christ!” Benny said, and in a fast smooth motion drew his own P38 Walther automatic and shot twice through the open car door.

  One slug caught Sister Heavenly in the left side below the ribs and lodged in the side of her spine; the other went wild. She fell sidewise to the pavement and was powerless to move, but her mind was still active and her vision was clear. She saw Benny Mason slide quickly across the seat, leap to the sidewalk, and aim the pistol at her head.

  Well now, ain’t this lovely? she thought just before the bullet entered her brain.

  Benny Mason snatched the bag from her limp hand and jumped back into the Lincoln beneath the wheel. All around him were the red lights of prowl cars converging in the street. His mind was shattered by the head-splitting screaming of sirens. He couldn’t see; the air looked red and his brains seemed to be pouring out of his ears. He began accelerating before closing the car door.

  The Lincoln crashed broadside into the Chrysler sedan that had cut across in front of it. T-men poured from the Chrysler and surrounded him. He grabbed the bag and tried to throw it, but a T-man reaching through the open door caught him by the wrist and froze the bag in his hand.

  “Son, you’re going on a long journey,” the T-man said.

  “I want to see my lawyer,” Benny Mason said.

  The apartment house basement was filling up with uniformed prowl car cops who couldn’t find anything to do.

  Coffin Ed had his coat off and his right hand held between the buttons of his shirt in place of a sling. Detectives had cut out the back of his shirt and were using a wad of clean pocket handkerchief to staunch the flow of blood until the ambulance arrived. But he was slowly turning gray from loss of blood.