The crazy kill

11

It was eight o'clock, but still light.

"Let's go for a ride," Grave Digger said to Coffin Ed, "and look at some scenery. See the brown gals blooming in pink dresses, smell the perfume of poppies and marijuana."

"And listen to the stool pigeons sing," Coffin Ed supplied.

They were cruising south on Seventh Avenue in the small battered black sedan. Grave Digger eased the little car behind a big slow-moving trailer truck, and Coffin Ed kept his eyes skinned along the sidewalk.

A numbers writer standing in front of Madame Sweetiepie's hairdressing parlor, flashing a handful of paper slips with the day's winning numbers, looked up and saw Coffin Ed's baleful eyes pinned on him and began eating the paper slips as though they were taffy candy.

Hidden behind the big truck trailer, they sneaked up on a group of weedheads standing in front of the bar at the corner of 126th Street. Eight young hoodlums dressed in tight black pants, fancy straw hats with mixed-colored bands, pointed shoes and loud-colored sport shirts, wearing smoked glasses, and looking like an assemblage of exotic grasshoppers, had already finished one stick and were passing around the second one when one of them exclaimed, "Split! Here comes King Kong and Frankenstein." The boy smoking the stick swallowed it so fast the fire burnt his gullet and he doubled over, strangling.

The one called Gigolo said, "Play it cool! Play it cool! Just clean, that's all."

They threw their switchblade knives onto the sidewalk in front of the bar. Another boy palmed the two remaining sticks and stuck them quickly in his mouth, ready to eat them if the detectives stopped.

Grave Digger smiled grimly.

"I could hit that punk in his belly and make him vomit up enough evidence to give him a year in the cooler," he said.

"We'll teach him that trick some other time," Coffin Ed said.

Two of the boys were beating the strangling boy on the back, the others began talking with big gestures as though discussing a scientific treatise on prostitution. Gigolo stared at the detectives defiantly.

Gigolo was wearing a chocolate-colored straw hat with a wide yellow band polka-dotted with blue. When Coffin Ed fingered his right coat lapel with the first two fingers of his right hand, Gigolo pushed his straw hat back on his head and said, "Nuts to them mother-rapers, they ain't got nothing on us."

Grave Digger drove on slowly without stopping, and in the rear-view mirror he saw the punk take the wet marijuana sticks from his mouth and start blowing on them to dry them.

They kept on down to 119th Street, turned back to Eighth Avenue, went uptown again and parked before a dilapidated tenement house between 126th and 127th Streets. Old people were sitting on the sidewalk in kitchen chairs propped against the front of the building.

They climbed the dark steep stairs to the fourth floor. Grave Digger knocked on a door at the rear, three single raps spaced exactly ten seconds apart.

For the space of a full minute no sound was heard. There was no sound of locks being opened, but slowly the door swung inward five inches, held by two iron cables at top and bottom.

"It's us, Ma," Grave Digger said.

The ends of the cables were removed from the slots and the door opened all the way.

A thin old gray-haired woman with a wrinkled black face, who looked to be about ninety years old, wearing a floor length Mother Hubbard dress of faded black cotton, stood to one side and let them pass into the pitchdark hallway and closed the door behind them.

They followed her without further comment down to the far end of the hall. She opened a door and sudden light spilled out, showing a snuff stick in the corner of her wrinkled mouth.

"There he," she said, and Coffin Ed followed Grave Digger into a small back bedroom and closed the door behind him.

Gigolo sat on the edge of the bed with his fancy hat pushed to the back of his head, biting his dirty nails to the quick. The pupils of his eyes were big black disks in his tight, sweaty brown face.

Coffin Ed sat facing him, straddling the single straightbacked wooden chair, and Grave Digger stood glaring down at him and said, "You've had a bang of heroin."

Gigolo shrugged. His skinny shoulders jerked beneath the canary-colored sport shirt.

"Don't get him excited," Coffin Ed warned, and then asked Gigolo in a confidential tone of voice, "Who made the sting last night, sport?"

Gigolo's body began jerking as though someone had slipped a hot poker down the seat of his pants.

"Poor Boy got new money," he said in a rapid blurred voice.

"Who kind of money?" Grave Digger asked.

"Hard money."

"No green money?"

"If he is, he ain't showed it."

"Where's he likely to be at this time?"

"Acey-Deucey's poolroom. He's a pool freak."

Grave Digger asked Coffin Ed, "Do you know him?"

"This town is full of Poor Boys," Coffin Ed said, turning back to the stool pigeon. "What's he look like?"

"Slim black boy. Plays it cool. Working stiff jive. Don't never flash. Looks a little like Country Boy used to look 'fore they sent him to the pen."

"How does he dress?" Grave Digger asked.

"Like I just said. Wears old blue jeans, T-shirt, canvas sneakers, always looks raggedy as a bowl of yakamein."

"Has he got a partner?"

"Iron Jaw. You know Iron Jaw."

Grave Digger nodded.

"But he don't seem to be in on this sting. He ain't showed outside today," Gigolo added.

"Okay, sport," Coffin Ed said, standing up. "Lay off the heroin."

Gigolo's body began to jerk more violently. "What's a man going to do? You folks keeps me scared. If anybody finds out I'm stooling for you I be scared to shake my head." He was referring to a story they tell in Harlem about two jokers, in a razor fight and one says, Man, you ain't cut me, and the other one says, if you don't believe I done cut you, just shake you head and it goin' to fall off.

"The heroin isn't going to keep your head on any better," Coffin Ed warned.

On the way out, he said to the old lady who'd let them in, "Cut down on Gigolo, Ma, he's getting so hopped he's going to blow his top one day."

"Lawd, I ain't no doctor," she complained. "I don't know how much they needs. I just sells it if they got the money to pay for it. You know, I don't use that junk myself."

"Well, cut down anyway," Grave Digger said harshly. "We're just letting you run because you keep our stool pigeons supplied."

"If it wasn't for these stool pigeons you'd be out of business," she argued. "The cops ain't goin' to never find out nothing if don't nobody tell 'em."

"Just put a little baking soda in that heroin, and don't give it to them straight," Grave Digger said. "We don't want these boys blind. And let us out this hole, we're in a hurry."

She shuffled down the black dark hall with hurt feelings and opened the three heavy locks on the front door without a sound.

"That old crone is getting on my nerves," Grave Digger said as they climbed into their car.

"What you need is a vacation," Coffin Ed said. "Or else a laxative."

Grave Digger chuckled.

They drove over to 137th Street and Lenox Avenue, on the other side from the Savoy Ballroom, climbed a narrow flight of stairs beside the Boll Weevil Bar to the AceyDeucey poolroom on the second floor.

A small space at the front was closed off by a wooden counter for an office. A fat, bald-headed brown-skinned man, wearing a green eyeshade, a collarless silk shirt and a black vest adorned with a pennyweight gold chain, sat on a high stool behind the cash register on the counter and looked over the six pool tables arranged crosswise down the long, narrow room.

When Grave Digger and Coffin Ed appeared at the top of the stairs, he greeted in a low bass voice usually associated with undertakers. "Howdy do, gentlemen, how is the police business this fine summer day?"

"Booming, Acey," Coffin Ed said, his eyes roving over the lighted tables. "More folks getting robbed, slugged and stabbed to death in this hot weather than usual."

"It's the season of short tempers," Acey said.

"You ain't lying, son," Grave Digger said. "How's Deucey?"

"Resting as usual," Acey said. "Far as I heard."

Deucey was the man he had bought the business from, and he had been dead for twenty-one years.

Grave Digger had already spotted their man down at the fourth table and led the way down the cramped aisle. He took a seat at one end of the table and Coffin Ed took a seat at the other.

Poor Boy was playing a slick half-white pool shark straight pool, twenty-no-count, for fifty cents a point, and was already down forty dollars.

The balls had been racked for the start of a new game. It was Poor Boy's break and he was chalking his cue stick. He looked slantwise from one detective to the other and chalked his stick for so long the shark said testily, "Go head and break, man, you got enough chalk on that mother-raping stick to make a fifteen-cushion billiard shot."

Poor Boy put his cue ball on the marker, worked his stick back and forth through the circle of his left index finger and scratched. He didn't tear the velvet, but he made a long white stripe. His cue ball trickled down the table and tapped the racked balls so lightly as to barely loosen them.

"That boy looks nervous," Coffin Ed said.

"He ain't been sleeping well," Grave Digger replied.

"I ain't nervous," the shark said.

He broke the balls and three dropped into pockets. Then he settled down and ran a hundred without stopping, going from the break seven times, and when he reached up with his cue stick and flipped the century marker against the other ninety-nine on the line overhead, all the other games had stopped and jokers were standing on the table edges to get a look.

"You ain't nervous yet," Coffin Ed corrected.

The shark looked at Coffin Ed defiantly and crowed, "I told you I wasn't nervous."

When the rack man put the paper sack holding the stakes on the table, Coffin Ed got down from his seat and picked it up.

"That's mine," the shark said.

Grave Digger moved in behind, putting both the shark and Poor Boy between himself and Coffin Ed.

"Don't start getting nervous now, son," he said. "We just want to look at your money."

"It ain't nothing but plain United States money," the shark argued. "Ain't you wise guys never seen no money?"

Coffin Ed upended the bag and dumped the contents onto the table. Dimes, quarters and half dollars spilled over the green velvet, along with a roll of greenbacks.

"You ain't been in Harlem long, son," he said to the shark. "He ain't goin' to be here long either," Grave Digger said, reaching out to flip the roll of greenbacks apart from the silver money. "There's your roll, son," he said. "Take it and find yourself another town. You're too smart for us country hicks in Harlem." When the shark opened his mouth to protest, he added roughly, "And don't say another God-damned word or I'll knock out your teeth."

The shark pocketed his roll and melted into the crowd. Poor Boy hadn't said a word.

Coffin Ed scooped up the change and put it back into the paper sack. Grave Digger touched the slim black boy on his T-shirted shoulder.

"Let's go, Poor Boy, we're going to take a ride."

Coffin Ed made an opening through the crowd. Silence followed them.

They put Poor Boy between them in the car and drove around the corner and parked.

"What would you rather have?" Grave Digger asked him. "A year in the Auburn state pen or thirty days in the city jail?"

Poor Boy looked at him slantwise through his long muddy eyes. "What you mean?" he asked in a husky Georgia voice.

"I mean you robbed that A and P store manager this morning."

"Naw suh, I ain't even seen no A and P store this morning. I made that money shining shoes down at the 125th Street Station."

Grave Digger hefted the sack of silver in his hand. "It's over a hundred dollars here," he said.

"I was lucky pitching halves and quarters," Poor Boy said. "You can ask anybody who was round there this morning."

"What I mean, son," Grave Digger explained, "is that when you steal over thirty-five dollars that makes it grand larceny, and that's a felony, and they give you one to five years in the state stir. But if you cooperate, the judge will let you take a plea to petty larceny and save the state the cost of a jury trial and appointing state lawyers, and you get off with thirty days in the workhouse. It depends on whether you want to cooperate."

"I ain't stole no money," Poor Boy said. "It's like what I done said, I made this money shining shoes and pitching halves."

"That's not what Patrolman Harris and that A and P store manager are going to say when they see you in that line-up tomorrow morning," Grave Digger said.

Poor Boy thought that over. Sweat started beading on his forehead and in the circles underneath his eyes, and oily beads formed over the surface of his smooth flat nose.

"Cooperate how?" he said finally.

"Who was riding with Johnny Perry when he drove down Seventh Avenue early this morning, just a few minutes before you made your sting?" Grave Digger asked.

Poor Boy blew air from his nose as though he'd been holding his breath. "I ain't seen Johnny Perry's car," he said with relief.

Grave Digger reached down and turned on the ignition and started the motor.

Coffin Ed said, "Too bad, son, you ought to have better eyes. That's going to cost you eleven months."

"I swear to God I ain't seen Johnny's big Cad in nearmost two days," Poor Boy said.

Grave Digger pulled out into the street and began driving toward the 126th Street precinct station.

"Y'all gotta believe me," Poor Boy said. "I ain't seen nobody on all of Seventh Avenue."

Coffin Ed looked at the people standing on the sidewalks and sitting on the stoops uninterestedly. Grave Digger concentrated on driving.

"There warn't a car moving on the avenue, I swear to God," Poor Boy whined. " 'Ceptin' that store manager when he drove up and that cop what's always there."

Grave Digger pulled to the curb and parked just before turning into 126th Street.

"Who was with you?" he asked.

"Nobody," Poor Boy said. "I swear to God."

"That's just too bad," Grave Digger said, reaching toward the ignition key.

"Listen," Poor Boy said. "Wait a minute. You say all I'm goin' to get is thirty days."

"That depends on how good your eyes were at four-thirty this morning, and how good your memory is now."

"I didn't see nothing," Poor Boy said. "And that's the God's truth. And after I grabbed that poke I was running so fast I didn't have time to see nothing. But Iron Jaw might of seen something. He was hiding in a doorway on 132nd Street."

"Where were you?"

"I was on 131st Street, and when the man drove up Iron Jaw was supposed to start yelling bloody murder and draw the cop. But he ain't let out a peep, and there I was, had already done sneaked up beside the car, and I just had to grab the poke and run."

"Where's Iron Jaw now?" Coffin Ed asked.

"I don't know. I ain't seen him all day."

"Where does he usually hang out?'

"At Acey-Deucey's like me most times, else downstairs in the Boll Weevil."

"Where does he live?"

"He got a room at the Lighthouse Hotel at 123rd and Third Avenue, and if'n he ain't there he might be at work. He pick chickens at Goldstein's Poultry Store on 116th Street and sometimes they stay open 'til twelve o'clock."

Grave Digger started the motor again and turned into 126th Street toward the precinct station.

When they drew up before the entrance, Poor Boy asked, "It's gonna be like you say, ain't it? If I cop a plea I don't get but thirty days?"

"That depends on how much your pal Iron Jaw saw," Grave Digger said.