The Heat's on

13

Sister Heavenly figured there was more than one way to skin a cat. If Pinky didn’t show up soon, she was going to trick Uncle Saint into making like he had found the stuff, and force Pinky to show his hand.

Then she heard the shots. Nothing sounds like pistol shots but pistol shots. She had heard too many of them to be mistaken.

She sat up on the park bench across from Riverside Church and screwed her head around.

Next she heard the screaming.

In the back of her old jaded mind she thought cynically that the sequence was logical — when men shot off pistols, women screamed.

But the front of her mind was alive with conjectures. If anyone else got killed the stuff was going to get so hot it couldn’t be touched, she thought.

Then she saw two men come quickly from the apartment house. It was quite a distance to see faces distinctly and both wore their hats pulled low over their eyes, but she knew she’d never forget them.

One was a fat man, definitely fat, with a round greasy face but fair-skinned. His shoulders were broad and he looked as though he might be strong. He wore a dark blue Dacron single-breasted suit. He had the other man by the arm and seemed to be pushing him along.

The other man was thin with a too-white, haggard face and dark circles about his eyes. Even from that distance she made him as a junkie. He wore a light gray summer suit and was shaking as though he had a chill.

They turned and walked quickly in the opposite direction. She saw them get into a Buick Special sedan of ordinary battleship-gray. There was nothing about the car to distinguish it from any car of the same make. From that distance she couldn’t read the license number, but the plates were Empire State issue.

She figured she might have something valuable; something she could sell. She didn’t know how valuable, but she would wait and see.

She didn’t have to wait long. The first of the prowl cars showed up in a little over two minutes. Within five minutes the street was filled with police cars and two ambulances.

By then people were hanging out the windows and the customary crowd had collected. The police had formed lines, keeping the front of the house clear.

She figured it was safe to get closer. She saw a figure on a stretcher brought out and shoved quickly into an ambulance. A third attendant had walked alongside it, holding a bottle of plasma. The siren sounded and the ambulance roared off.

She had recognized the face.

“Grave Digger,” she whispered to herself.

A cold tremor ran down her spine.

Coffin Ed came out walking, assisted by two ambulance attendants whom he was trying to shake off. They managed to get him into the second ambulance and it drove off.

Sister Heavenly was backing off to leave when she heard someone say, “There’s another one, an African with his throat cut.”

She backed away fast. As she was leaving she saw two heavy black sedans filled with plainclothesmen from homicide pull up. She figured what she had was too damn valuable to sell. It was valuable enough to get her own throat cut.

She walked quickly up the hill to Broadway, looking for a taxicab. She was so disconcerted she forgot to raise her parasol to protect her complexion from the sunshine.

After she had hailed a taxi, got inside and felt it moving, she began to feel secure again. But she knew she had to get rid of Uncle Saint and the red-hot Lincoln, or she was going to find herself up a creek.

When she arrived on the street where she had left her house, she found it filled with fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, and thinly dressed people, for the most part Italians with a sprinkling of Negroes, cooking in the noonday heat, risking sunstroke to satisfy their morbid curiosity.

The whole city was running amok, she thought, from the sugar side to the shabby side.

As the taxi drew nearer, she craned her neck, looking for her house. She didn’t see it. From the window of the taxi, looking over the heads of the crowd, she couldn’t see the floor that remained. It looked to her as though the entire house had disappeared. The only thing she could see was the Lincoln, standing out like a red thumb in the bright sunshine.

She stopped the taxi before it got too close to the police lines and hailed a passerby.

“What happened down the street?”

“Explosion!” the bareheaded Italian-looking worker gasped, breathing hard as though he couldn’t get enough of the hot dusty air into his lungs. “Blew the house up. Killed the old couple who lived there. Saint Heavenly they were called. No trace of ’em. Musta had a still.”

He didn’t pause to see her reaction. He was scrabbling around, like scores of others, picking up scraps of paper.

Well now, ain’t that just too beautiful for words? she thought. Then she asked the taxi driver, “See what that is they’re picking up.”

He got out and asked a youth to see a sample. It was the corner of a hundred-dollar bill. He brought it back to show to Sister Heavenly. The youth followed him suspiciously.

“Piece of a C-note,” he said. “They must have been making counterfeit.”

“That tears it,” Sister Heavenly said.

The two of them stood staring at her.

“Give it back to him and let him go,” she said.

She knew immediately that Uncle Saint had tried to blow her safe. It didn’t surprise her. He must have used an atom bomb, she thought. She wished he had picked a better time for the caper.

The taxi driver climbed back into his seat and looked at her with growing suspicion. “Ain’t that the house where you wanted to go?”

“Don’t talk foolish, man,” she snapped. “You see I can’t go there ’cause the house ain’t there no more.”

“Don’t you wanna talk to the cops?” he persisted.

“I just want you to turn around and drive me back to White Plains Road and put me out by the playground.”

At that hour the treeless playground was deserted. The sandpits baked in the sunshine and heat radiated from the iron slides. The slatted bench on which Sister Heavenly sat burned stripes up and down her backsides. But she didn’t notice it.

She took out her pipe and filled it with the finely ground stems of marijuana from an oilskin pouch and lit it with an old gold-initialed pipe lighter. Then she opened her black-and-white striped parasol and holding it over her head with her left hand, she held the pipe in her right hand and sucked the sweet pungent marijuana smoke deep into her lungs.

Sister Heavenly was a fatalist. If she had ever read The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, she might have been thinking of the lines:

The moving finger writes,

And having writ moves on;

Nor all your piety nor wit

Nor all your tears

Shall cancel half a line of it.…

But instead she was thinking, Well, I’m back on my bare ass where I started, but I ain’t yet flat on my back.

It was life that had taught Sister Heavenly not to cry. A crying whore was a liability; and she had started as a whore. At fifteen she had run away from the sharecropper’s shack her family had called home, with a pimp to be a whore because she was too cute and too lazy to hoe the corn and chop the cotton. He had told her that what she had to sell would find buyers when cotton and corn were a drug on the market. The memory brought a smile. He was a half-ass pimp but he was sweet, she thought. But in the end he had kicked her out like the others had afterwards with nothing but the clothes she had on her back.

Then her thoughts turned cynical: Even cotton got rotten with age and corn got too wormy to shuck.

Anyway, after she’d got onto the faith healing pitch, she had lived high on the hog, which meant she could eat pork chops and pork roasts instead of pig’s feet and chitterlings. It had been the other way around after that; she had been the ruler of the roost and had kicked her lovers out when she got tired of them.

She knocked out her pipe and put it away. The ocher-colored pupils of her eyes had become distended with a marbleized effect and pink splotches had formed beneath her leathery skin.

As she walked up White Plains Road the drab-colored buildings took on blinding bright hues in the sunshine. She hadn’t been that high in more than twenty years. Her feet seemed to glide through the air, but she was still in full command of her mind.

She began to suspect she had cased the whole caper wrong from the very beginning. She had figured it as a shipment of H, but maybe it wasn’t that at all.

It couldn’t be a mother-raping treasure map, she thought with exasperation. That old con game went out when airplanes came in.

Or could it? another part of her mind asked. Could it be that some gang had come up with some treasure somewhere and had made a map of its whereabouts? But what the hell kind of treasure? And how the hell would the map get into the hands of a square like Gus, a simpleminded apartment house janitor?

The weed jag made her thoughts dance like jitterbugs. She turned into a supermarket drugstore and ordered black coffee.

She didn’t notice the man next to her until he spoke. “Are you a model, may I ask?”

She flicked him an absent-minded glance. He looked like a salesman, a house-to-house canvasser type.

“No, I’m one of the devil’s mistresses,” she said nastily.

The man reddened. “Excuse me, I thought maybe you were a model for some advertising agency.” He retired behind a newspaper.

It was the afternoon Journal American and she saw the streamer on the page turned toward her:

TWO HARLEM DETECTIVES SUSPENDED FOR BRUTALITY

A column was devoted to the story. To one side the pictures of Grave Digger and Coffin Ed looked like pictures of a couple of Harlem muggers taken from the rogues’ gallery.

She read as much of the story as she could before the man folded the paper.

So they killed Jake, she thought. In front of Riverside Church.

That must have been when Pinky put in the false fire alarm.

Her thoughts churned furiously. She tried to remember everything Pinky had said, how he had looked and acted. A pattern was beginning to take shape, but the answer eluded her.

Suddenly she jumped to her feet. Her table mate drew back in alarm. But she merely paid her bill and rushed outside and started walking rapidly to the nearest taxi stand.

She looked at her locket-watch when she had paid off the taxi driver in front of Riverside Church. It read 3:37.

She looked up and down the street. The prowl cars had gone and there was no sign left of the police unless it was the black sedan parked down the street from the entrance to the apartment.

She had a sinking sensation in her stomach as the thought occurred to her that it might already be too late.

She opened her parasol and holding it in her left hand and her heavy black beaded bag on her right arm, took hold of her skirt on the right side and lifting it slightly, sailed down the street and turned into the apartment house.

A big stolid-looking white cop was on guard at the door. He did a double take.

“Hey, whoa there, ma’am,” he said, stopping her. “You can’t go in here.”

On second thought he added, “Unless you live here.”

“Why not?” she countered. “Is it quarantined?”

“What do you want in here, if you don’t live here?” he reiterated.

“I’m taking up subscriptions for the colored peoples’ Old Folks Home,” she said blandly.

But he was a conscientious cop. “Do you have a license?” he demanded. “Or at least any identification or something to show who you are?”

She arched her eyebrows. “Do I need any? After all, I’m a sponsor.”

“Well, you’ll have to come back later, I’m afraid. You see, the police are conducting a search in there right now and they don’t want any strangers in the house.”

“A search!” she exclaimed, giving the impression of horrified shock. “For a body buried in the basement?”

The cop grinned. She reminded him of a character out of a stage play he had seen once.

“Well, not exactly a body, but a buried treasure,” he said.

“My land!” she said. “What’s the world coming to?”

His grin widened. “Ain’t it awful?”

She started to turn away. “Well, if they find it, don’t forget the old colored people,” she said.

He laughed out loud. “Never!” he said.

She went into the next-door apartment house and took up a station in the foyer from which she could watch the entrance next door. Passing tenants looked at her curiously, but she paid them no attention.

One thing was for sure, she was thinking; if it was there, the police would find it. But on the other hand, why hadn’t the two gunmen found it, since they would know exactly what they were looking for?

Her head swam with doubts.

I wish to Jesus Christ I knew what the hell I was looking for, she thought.

She saw a small panel truck pull up before the house next door. It had the letters S.P.C.A. painted on the sides.

Now what the hell is this? she thought.

She saw two men wearing heavy leather gloves and long white dusters alight from the compartment and enter the house.

A few minutes later they returned, leading Pinky’s dog Sheba by a heavy chain leash.

And all of a sudden it exploded in her head. All this goddamn time wasted! she thought disgustedly. And there it was all the time.

It fitted like white on rice.

She watched the attendants put the dog into the body of the S.P.C.A. truck and drive away. She had to fight back the impulse to rush out and call the bitch by name and claim her. But she knew she’d wind up in the pokey and they’d still have the dog. It was like watching a friend go down in the middle of the sea, she thought. You could feel for him but you couldn’t reach him.

She started racking her memory trying to figure out what S.P.C.A. stood for. It couldn’t be Special Police for Collaring Animals. That didn’t make any sense. What would they have special police to collar animals for when any policeman could do it?

Then suddenly she remembered: Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Where she had heard about it she didn’t know, but there it was.

She left her station and walked over to Broadway and entered the first bar. It took a little time to find the telephone number of the Manhattan branch of S.P.C.A.

A woman’s pleasant, impersonal voice answered her call.

“I’ve heard you sell stray dogs,” Sister Heavenly said. “I’d like to buy a dog.”

“We don’t actually sell the stray dogs that are brought in to us,” the woman explained. “We try to find congenial homes for them where they will fit in with the families, and we ask for a donation of two dollars to help carry on the work of the foundation.”

“Well, that’s all right,” Sister Heavenly said. “I can spare two dollars. Have you got any dogs on hand?”

“Well, yes, but is there any particular kind of dog you would like?”

“I want a big dog. A dog as big as a lion,” Sister Heavenly said.

“We seldom have dogs that size,” the woman said doubtfully. “And we are very particular about whom we let take them. Could you give me an idea of your reasons for wanting a dog that size?”

“It’s like this,” Sister Heavenly said. “I have a roadhouse in New Jersey. It’s not far from Hoboken. And to be frank with you, it’s not the most law-abiding place you can find. But there’s a big fenced-in yard for the dog to run. And of course there’re always plenty of bones, not to mention meat, for him to eat.”

“I see. You need it for a watchdog?”

“Yes. And he can’t be too big. Our last watchdog was fairly big. He was a German dog. But prowlers killed him.”

“I see. You say him. Does it make any difference if the dog is female?”

“That’s all the better. As long as she’s big.”

“It so happens that you have called at an opportune time,” the pleasant-voiced woman said. “There might be a large female dog available within a few days. Would you mind giving me your name and address?”

“A few days!” Sister Heavenly exclaimed, filling her voice with dismay. “I thought I could get one today. I’m leaving tomorrow on two weeks’ vacation and I want to leave the dog there with the caretaker while I’m gone.”

“Oh, that’s not possible, you see we have to check.… But.… Won’t you hold on for a moment, perhaps.…”

Sister Heavenly held on.

After a time the pleasant voice said, “Hello, are you there?”

“Yes, I’m still here.”

“Well, it’s quite likely that you may get your big dog today just as you wish. It’s highly irregular of course, but one has just come in and — if you will call me back an hour from now we will give you a definite answer. Okay?”

“Okay,” Sister Heavenly said and hung up.

She looked at her watch. It read 4:03.

She telephoned back at exactly 5 o’clock.

The pleasant-voiced woman said she was so sorry, but a detective had come and had taken the dog away.

Sister Heavenly knew just how people felt when they said “Doggone!”