The Heat's on

15

It was one of those big, old-fashioned, four-story houses on 139th Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues. It had a limestone facade flanked by Ionic columns and a hand-carved mahogany door with crystal glass panels which had been enameled black. There was a carriage entrance on one side. The carriage house had been converted into a garage.

Years back, when the street had been inhabited by the nouveau riche, it had claimed pretensions. Then during the 1920s a smart colored real estate promoter filled the old mansions with socially ambitious Negro professionals, and it became known throughout the length and breadth of Harlem as “Strivers’ Row”.

But during the depression of the 1930s, hard times came upon the strivers like a storm of locusts and the street went rapidly down from sugar to shucks. The houses were first partitioned into flats, then the flats were divided into rooms. Then the madams took over and filled the rooms with prostitutes.

Coffin Ed parked his Plymouth in front of the house, got out and opened the back door. He reached inside and grasped the handle to a chain and pulled out the oversize dog. She was muzzled again but the wound on her head had been neatly bandaged and she looked more respectable.

He led her around the side of the house, past the carriage entrance, and rang the back door bell.

The kitchen door was wide open. Only the heavy screen outer door was locked. Coffin Ed watched a fat kimono-clad woman waddle in his direction.

She peered through the screen and said, “My God, it’s Coffin Ed.”

She unlocked the door and opened it for him to enter, then drew back quickly at sight of the dog. “What’s that thing?”

“It’s a dog.”

Her eyebrows went up. She had hennaed hair almost the same shade as her eyes, and wrinkled skin which was heavily coated with Max Factor pancake makeup and copper-red suntan powder. She was called Red Marie.

“It won’t bite, will it?” she asked. Her voice sounded as though she had something down her throat, and her thickly painted, greasy red lips curled and popped, exposing gold teeth smeared with lipstick.

“It can’t bite,” he said, pushing into the kitchen.

It was a modern electrical kitchen. Everything was spotlessly clean and dazzling white. A young whore, still active and competing, dreams of diamonds and furs. But an old whore, no longer active and competing, whether she’s gone down to a toothless hag or up to a rich landprop, dreams of a kitchen like this. It contained every kind of electrical gadget imaginable, including a big white enamel electric clock over the stove.

Coffin Ed looked at the clock. It read 4:23. Time was getting short.

On a small white enamel table to one side a white enamel radio stood on top of a blond oak television set. A television program was showing but the sound was turned off.

A big slouchy man with short kinky red hair growing in burs about a bald spot sat in a tubular stainless-steel chair with his elbows propped on top of a large white enamel kitchen table.

“We was just listening to the radio,” he said. “It said Digger has been shot up and you both is off the force.”

He sounded happy about it; but not happy enough to get his teeth knocked out.

Coffin Ed stood in the center of the floor, holding the dog loosely by the chain.

“Listen,” he said. “You can make it light on yourselves. I ain’t got much time. Where can I find Pinky?” His voice sounded forced, as though he had a stricture in his throat, and the tic was running away.

The man glanced at him, then looked back at the bottle of whiskey before him on the table and reaching out, touched it with the fingertips of both hands.

He had a broad flat face, rough reddish skin and little reddish eyes from which tears leaked continuously. He was called Red Johnny. He might have been related to Pinky.

He wore a white silk shirt open at the throat, green-and-red checked suspenders, tan gabardine pants, white-and-tan wing-tipped shoes, and the usual heavy gold jewelry denoting a successful pimp: gold ring with a huge milky stone of unknown origin, gold ring with three-quarter-carat yellow diamond, and a gold lodge ring with the outline of an owl with two ruby eyes.

He crossed glances with Red Marie, standing to the left and behind Coffin Ed, then he spread his thick-fingered hands and looked at the gun bulge on Coffin Ed’s shoulder.

“We’re clean,” he muttered. “We keeps squared off with the captain and you ain’t rightly got no authority no more.”

“We don’t even know nobody called Pinky,” Red Marie spoke up.

“All you’re doing is asking for trouble,” Coffin Ed said. His jaw muscles rippled beneath the tic as he tried to control his rage. “You ain’t got one mother-raping reason on earth to cover for Pinky. It’s just that I’m the law and you resent me. Now you can show it. But you’re making a mistake.”

“What mistake?” Red Johnny asked. He could barely keep the insolence from his voice.

“You’re over fifty,” Coffin Ed said. “You spent thirteen years in stir on a second-degree murder rap. Now you’re doing all right. You got this house through a lucky hit on the numbers and you set this ex-hustler up as a madam. I know you both. She did her bit too in stir for stabbing a teen-age whore not quite to death. Then when she got back on the bricks she streetwalked for a chickenshit pimp called Dandy who got his throat cut by a square for playing around with the deck in a five-and-ten-cent blackjack game. Now you’re both going great. Times are good. Tricks are walking. The streets are full of lains. Squares everywhere. The money’s rolling in. You’re paying off the man. You’re sitting pretty. But you’re making one mistake.”

“You said that before. What mistake?”

Coffin Ed let the handle to the dog chain drop to the floor. “I ain’t playing,” he said.

Red Johnny folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. His gaze dropped slightly to the impression of the gun stick in Coffin Ed’s belt.

“Course you ain’t rightly got no authority to come in here and ast me no questions ’bout nobody,” he began, and from across the table Red Marie warned, “Don’t push him, Johnny.”

“I ain’t pushing him and I ain’t going to let him push me neither. I done already told him I don’t know no Pinky and he can-”

He never got to say what Coffin Ed could do. One whole side of Coffin Ed’s face convulsed in a muscular spasm as his right hand flashed toward his hip. Red Johnny moved out of animal reflex; his head jerked about, eyes following the movement of Coffin Ed’s hand; his left foot braced against the floor; his left arm flew up instinctively to ward off the blow. He didn’t see the motion of Coffin Ed’s left hand at all as it came from the front with Grave Digger’s pistol and smashed the barrel in a backhanded swing straight across his loose-lipped mouth.

The whole front line of Red Johnny’s teeth caved into his mouth, two of the bottom teeth flew out sidewise like corn popping, and Red Johnny spun over backward in the tubular chair. The back of his head hit the linoleum floor with a dull thud while at the same instant his feet flew upward and kicked the bottom of the enamel table. The whiskey bottle rose six inches in the air and shattered the drinking glass when it came down.

The abrupt ear-shattering din panicked the dog. She leapt over Red Johnny’s face, making for the inner door. Red Johnny thought she was leaping for his throat and tried to scream. Nothing came out but a spray of blood and he choked on his teeth.

Coffin Ed didn’t see it. He had swung back to take a left-handed bead on Red Marie’s stomach, and had frozen her in midstride, her right hand waving out in front, left hand floating out behind, her big sloppy fat body poised on the ball of her right foot like a rip-roarious burlesque of a ballerina executing a movement in Swan Lake.

But no one thought it was funny. Her face was distorted with terror and Coffin Ed looked like a homicidal maniac.

The chair scraped as Red Johnny rolled over, clawing at his throat, making choking sounds.

The inside of Coffin Ed’s head was one great flaming-red blast of pain, through which sound trickled like curses. From somewhere came the thought that Red Johnny was trying to draw a gun. He wheeled back and kicked Red Johnny on the base of the jaw.

“Ugh!” Red Johnny grunted and fainted.

The dog pushed open the inner door and ran down the hall, her chain clanking behind her.

Red Marie grabbed at the table edge for support; her fingers slipped off and she fell to the floor with a crash.

From the front of the house came the sound of women screaming.

Coffin Ed stood in the center of the floor with the long-barreled nickel-plated pistol in one hand and the sap in the other, looking as dazed as though he had just emerged from a shock treatment for insanity.

On the television screen three shrunken lunatics, arms about one another’s shoulders, were dancing frantically back and forth, eyes rolling and lips flapping but no sound coming out.

Coffin Ed’s head suddenly cleared; only a shrill, almost imperceptible whistling in both ears still remained.

He pocketed the sap, stuck the pistol back into his belt, and reached down and rolled Red Johnny over onto his stomach.

“Lawd, don’t kill him,” Red Marie wailed. “I’ll talk.”

“Give me a tablespoon and shut up,” Coffin Ed grated. “He’ll do his own mother-raping talking.”

She crawled on all fours around the table and got a spoon from the drawer.

“Bring it here,” Coffin Ed said, kneeling beside Red Johnny and lifting his head.

Red Johnny had swallowed his tongue. Coffin Ed stuck the spoon down Red Johnny’s throat and kept levering until he got enough tongue out so he could reach in with his other hand and grab hold of the tip. The tongue was so slippery with blood it took half a dozen tries before he got hold of the tip and yanked it back into position. Blood gushed over his hands onto the floor and four broken teeth fell out.

“Here, you hold his tongue down until he gets his breath,” he ordered Red Marie and made her take the handle of the spoon.

He got up and went to the sink and washed the blood from his hands with cold water from the tap, dried them on a kitchen towel. There was a small bloodstain on the cuff of his blue shirt, but he didn’t bother it.

He came back and stood over the two people on the floor. “I’m going to ask some questions-”

“I’ll answer ’em,” Marie said.

“Let him answer them. When the answer is yes, nod your head. You hear me?”

Red Johnny’s head nodded carefully.

“When the answer is no, shake your head. And don’t make any more mistakes.”

Again Red Johnny nodded.

“It hurts him,” Red Marie said.

“I want it to hurt him,” Coffin Ed said. “You run a shooting gallery in here?”

Red Johnny nodded.

“It ain’t really no regular shooting gallery,” Red Marie said defensively. “It’s just we have some jags here sometimes, just folks with a chicken habit-”

“And pushers,” Coffin Ed cut in.

Red Johnny shook his head.

“If I catch you lying-”

“I hope God may kill me,” Red Marie blurted. “We don’t let no pushers come in here. It’s just parties we has and folks bring their own stuff. We gets a few skinpoppers but the H they has ain’t even strong enough to be habit-forming. Ain’t none of ’em real addicts. Most of ’em just blows weed. Just to get a kick. That ain’t our racket. We just sells poontang here.”

“Pinky is an addict.”

“Yes, but-”

“Let him answer.”

Red Johnny nodded.

Coffin Ed stepped back from the pool of blood that was reaching toward his feet.

“Lawd be my secret judge, he don’t come here for it,” Red Marie said. “He don’t come for the jags neither. He just buys pussy.”

“Has he got any particular choice?”

“He too ugly to score a home here; he’s like Jesus, he loves ’em all.”

“Was he here today?”

Red Johnny shook his head.

“Last night?”

Again Red Johnny shook his head.

“Know where he lives?”

The answer was the same.

“You’ve been doing so much talking; talk some now,” Coffin Ed said to Marie.

“We don’t know nothing ’bout Pinky, I swear ’fore God; he just come here to see the girls and I wish to heaven he had picked on somebody else for that; I don’t need his money and I can’t stand his looks.”

“Where does he hang out?”

“Hang out?” She started to parry, but one glance at Coffin Ed’s face loosened her tongue so that she began to stammer. “Kid Blackie’s gym is all I know. I heered him say once he’d just come from there. You know somewheres else, Johnny?”

Red Johnny shook his head.

“All right,” Coffin Ed said. “That’s Pinky’s dog I got. I’m gonna take it through this house and let it sniff around. If I find out you’re lying-”

“As God be my benefactor and protector and my haven-” Marie began, but Coffin Ed cut her off.

“You’re making me puke. How is it that all you worn-out whores get so chummy with God?”

“It ain’t really Him,” Marie said solemnly. “It’s Jesus.”

He couldn’t tell whether she was in earnest or not. He pushed open the door and went toward the front hall and called the dog.

“She’s here!” a woman’s voice replied.

He went up the front stairs to the second floor and traced the voice to an open bedroom at the rear. A brownskin whore in a negligee was stuffing cream chocolates into the side of the dog’s mouth through the muzzle. The bitch loved it.

Coffin Ed took the chain leash and led the dog. He didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, but he was playing out a hunch. Nothing came of it but some curses from some whores working at their trade.

“Gawddammmm!” one of the girls said disgustedly when her white customer became suddenly deflated at sight of the big colored man and monstrous dog poking into the room. “As long as it took to get this slow-John started-”

Upon seeing a pay telephone in the front hall, Coffin Ed stopped and telephoned the hospital.

The answer was the same.

Red Johnny and Red Marie were nowhere in sight when he passed through the kitchen.

He led the dog around on the other side of the table from the pool of blood, through the back door and around the house. He didn’t encounter anyone. The whole block looked deserted.

He put the dog in the back of the Plymouth and got into the front seat behind the wheel. He looked at his watch. It read 4:51.

He had a sudden crazy, desperate feeling that he was looking for a needle in a haystack, wasting time; and that time was the most precious thing on earth.