The Heat's on

19

First, Coffin Ed and the youth called Wop had driven out to the Bronx and looked at the remains of Sister Heavenly’s house. A police barricade had been thrown about it and experts from the safe and loft squad were still digging in the wreckage. One look had been enough for Coffin Ed.

Afterwards, employing Wop as his guide, he made a junkie’s tour of Harlem. Wop was known to all the landprops as Daddy Haddy’s runner and had the entree. Coffin Ed had the persuader.

Pushing Wop in front of him to ring the doorbells and give the passwords, with the muzzle of Grave Digger’s pistol poking in his spine, he had crashed all the notorious shooting galleries in Harlem, the joints where the addicts met to take their kicks and greet their chicks; where the skinpoppers and the schmeckers (those who used the needle and those who sniffed the powder), the pushers and the weedheads gathered for sex circuses and to listen to the real cool jive.

He had gone in with a long nickel-plated revolver in each hand and homicide in his eyes.

He had flushed famous jazzmen, international blues singers, sophisticated socialites both white and colored, prominent people both men and women, mingling with the racketeers and the gamblers, the whores and the thieves and the dregs of humanity; all being rooked together by the peddlers of the five-colored dreams and the cool dry jags and the hot sex licks.

He had encountered the furtive and the indignant, “respectable” women who had burst into tears, puffed-up jokers who claimed political pull; those who couldn’t care less about being caught and those who figured money would settle it.

His entrance had set off panic, engendered terror, triggered rage. Jokers on the lam had jumped from windows, landprops had threatened to call the police, housewives had hidden under beds, drug-crazed starkers had charged him with stickers.

He had tamed the rambunctious and pacified the pacifists. He was not a narcotics man; he didn’t even have a shield. His entrance was illegal and he had no authority. All he had had was muscle, and it hadn’t worked.

He had left a trail of hysteria, screaming jeebies, knotty heads and bloody noses. But it hadn’t meant a thing. He hadn’t gotten any leads, hadn’t found out anything he didn’t know. Just a blank.

No one had admitted to seeing Pinky all that day. No one had admitted to seeing a yellow-skinned cat-eyed woman in a green suit accompanied by two white mobsters looking for Pinky. No one had ever heard of Sister Heavenly. No one had known anything about anything. He couldn’t pull them in and sweat it out.

And yet he knew some of them were lying. He was certain, since talking to Kid Blackie, that Ginny, the janitor’s wife, and the two gunmen were making the same tour. They were either in front of him or behind him, or perhaps more than once they had crossed paths. But he hadn’t seen a sign of them, nothing to indicate whether they were following him or in front of him. He had doubled back and laid in wait and they hadn’t showed

Now it was eleven o’clock at night. Coffin Ed sat in his parked car with the lights off in the middle of a dark block on St Nicholas Avenue opposite the park. He could feel the trembling body of the youth beside him, even though they were separated by two feet of space. He could hear Wop’s teeth chattering in the dark. The youth’s jag had worn off and the smell of terror came from him like a sickening miasma.

Coffin Ed reached into the dark and turned on the dashboard radio to catch the eleven-o’clock news broadcast.

A mealymouthed male voice came on, imitating some big-name newscaster, and blabbed about domestic politics, the Cold War, what the Africans were doing, the latest on the civil rights front and a fistfight between two motion picture actors in El Morocco.

Coffin Ed wasn’t listening but the sound of the voice set his teeth on edge. The top of his head felt like it was coming off. He had long since discarded his goggles but his eyes felt gritty.

He tried to think, but his thoughts didn’t make any sense. They were jumping about in his head like buck-and-wing dancers on their last breath. “Give a little, take a little,” one side of his brain was saying, while the other side was cursing in a blinding rage. He thought for a moment of how he would line the mother-rapers up and shoot them down.

He realized that he was wandering badly and caught himself. “Ain’t no time to blow your top now, son,” he told himself.

They had just one more place to go. It was run by a Harlem society matron, and it wasn’t going to be easy to crash. He didn’t want to hurry it. If it turned out to be another blank, he’d be up shit alley.

“You said you was going to give me my fare to Chicago,” a choked dry voice stammered from the dark beside him.

“You’ll get it,” he said absently, his cluttered thoughts echoing, “He thinks that’s far enough.”

“Kin I get some of my clothes?”

“Why not?” he said automatically, but he didn’t even hear the question. The thought of Chicago had got mixed up with the two gunmen he was hunting and he added aloud, “Mother-rapers better get off the face of the earth.”

Wop shrunk into silence.

The voice from the radio blabbed on: “… when Queen Elizabeth passed over the bridge.…” It sounded to Coffin Ed as though he said “when Queen Elizabeth pissed over the bridge …” and he wondered vaguely what did she do that for.

“You going to take me by my room?” Wop stammered hesitantly.

“What for?”

“They going be laying for me. They going kill me. You know they going kill me. You promised you’d protect me. You said if I steered you to them cribs wouldn’t nobody hurt me. Now you going let ’em-” He began getting hysterical.

Coffin Ed drew back wearily and slapped him across the face.

The voice cut off and the hysteria subsided, followed by snuffling sounds.

Coffin Ed listened to the newscaster report the finding of Daddy Haddy’s body by the patrolman on the beat. The words caught in his brain like red-hot rivets: “… died of gunshot wounds received earlier today while investigating a homicide in the basement of an apartment house on Riverside Drive. Jones, known locally in Harlem as Grave Digger, was one of the famous Harlem Detective team, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. They were on suspension for assaulting an alleged dope peddler named Jake Kubansky who subsequently died. The assailant, or assailants, are unknown. Reports from the homicide bureau-”

He reached out and turned the radio off. It was a reflex action, without thought. Perhaps from a subconscious desire to reject the knowledge by stopping the voice.

His mind fought against acceptance. He sat without moving, without breathing. But finally it sank in.

“That’s it,” he said aloud.

Wop hadn’t heard a word of it. His terrified thoughts were concentrated on himself.

“But you’re going to take me to the station, ain’t you? You going get me safe on the train, ain’t you?”

Coffin Ed turned his head slowly and looked at him. The muscles of his face were jumping almost out of control, but his reflexes were like a sleepwalker’s.

“You’re one of them too,” he said in a constricted voice. “Give you another month or two and you’ll be on junk. You’ll have the monkey on your back that you got to feed by stealing and robbing and murdering.”

As the voice hammered him with deadly intensity, Wop cringed in the corner of his seat and got smaller and smaller.

“I ain’t robbed nobody,” he whimpered. “I ain’t stole nothing. All I done was just work for Daddy Haddy. I ain’t hurt nobody.”

“I’m not going to kill you yet,” Coffin Ed said. “But I’m going to hang on to you, because you’re all I got. And you better hope we turn up something at Madame Cushy’s if you don’t want to get left. Get out.”

Coffin Ed got out on the street side and when he walked around the front of the car he had a sudden feeling that he was being watched from the park. He stepped onto the sidewalk, made a right turn and wheeled about, drawing from the greased holster in the same motion. His gaze raked the sidewalk, flanked by the low stone wall of the park, and above the rocky brush-spotted terrain rising in a steep hill to Hamilton Terrace.

A few scattered couples strolled along the pavement and old people in their shirtsleeves and cotton dresses still occupied the wooden benches. The heat had not let up with the coming of darkness and people were reluctant to turn indoors, but there was no movement within the dangerous confines of the dark grassless park. He saw no one who looked the least bit suspicious.

“I keep feeling ghosts,” he said as he holstered his revolver and pushed Wop before him toward the glass door of the apartment house.

It was an old elevator house, well-kept, and he knew that Madame Cushy lived on the top floor. But the front door was on the latch. His gaze ranged up the list of names above the pushbuttons and settled on one that read: Dr J. C. Douglas, M.D.

There was a house intercom beside the row of buttons and when he got the doctor on he said, “I gotta see you, Doc, I gotta case bad.”

“Let it wait,” the doctor snapped. “Come in tomorrow morning.”

“Can’t wait ’til then. I got a date for tomorrow. It’s my money,” he argued roughly.

“Who is this?” the doctor asked.

“Al Thompson,” Coffin Ed said, taking a chance on the name of a pimp.

“I can’t cure you overnight, Al,” the doctor said. “It takes two days at least.”

“Hell, give me all the units at one time, Doc. I been chippie chasing and I’m in trouble. I don’t wanna have to kill my whore when she comes back.”

Coffin Ed listened to the doctor’s chuckle, and heard him say, “All right, Al, come on up; we’ll see what we can do.”

The latch began to click and Coffin Ed opened the door and pushed Wop into the hall. They rode up to the top floor.

Madame Cushy’s was the black enamel door at the front.

“Have you been here before?” Coffin Ed asked Wop.

“Yassuh. Daddy Haddy has sent me with some stuff.” He was trembling as though he were seeing ghosts himself.

“All right, you ring it,” he said.

He flattened himself against the wall while Wop pushed the button.

After a time there was a faint click and a round peephole opened outward. Wop looked at the reflection of his own eye.

“What do you want, boy?” a woman’s cross and impatient voice came from within.

“I’se Wop; Daddy Haddy sent me,” he stammered.

“No he didn’t, he’s dead,” the voice said sharply. “What are you after?”

Coffin Ed knew he had goofed. He stepped out so he could be seen and said, “I’m with him.”

He was still wearing his beret and it took a moment for the voice to reply, “Oh! Edward! Well, what the hell do you want?”

“I want to talk to you.”

“Well, why didn’t you ring yourself? You ought to know better than to try to front this punk into my house.”

“I know better now,” he said.

“All right, I will let you in, but not as a cop,” she conceded.

“I’ve been suspended,” he said. “Didn’t you know?”

“Yes, I know,” she said.

There were two locks on the door, both equipped with adjustable cables to hold it at any position, one near the bottom and one near the top; and they worked so silently the door began to open before he knew she had unlocked it.

“This dirty little boy stays out,” she said.

“He’s my mascot.”

She eyed Wop distastefully and stepped back so he wouldn’t touch her when he passed.

A wide short entrance hall, flanked by two closed doors, ended at glass double doors of a front lounge and a narrow hallway turned off to the left somewhere. Muted male and female voices, along with the sound of jazz, came from the lounge. There was a faint smell of incense in the overplayed atmosphere of respectability.

After closing and locking the front door she stepped past them and opened the door to the right. Coffin Ed pushed Wop before him into a small sitting room that obviously took turns for other purposes. On one side, behind a glass-topped cocktail table littered with an impressive collection of pornographic picture magazines, was a studio couch equipped with as many odd straps as a torture wrack. On the other were two armchairs with suggestive-looking footstools. An air conditioner fitted in the bottom of the window was flanked by a television set and a console radio-phonograph. All manner of obscene figurines filled a three-tiered bookcase in the near corner. Oil nudes of a voluptuous colored woman and a well-equipped colored man faced each other from opposite walls. The air conditioner was turned off and there was the faint sweetish smell of opium in the air.

Madame Cushy followed them in, closed and locked the door, and turned to stare at the demoniacal tic in Coffin Ed’s face with impersonal fascination.

She was a buxom Creole-looking mulatto woman with sleepy, brown, bedroom eyes, black hair worn in a bun at the nape of her neck, and a faint black moustache. She wore a red decollete cotton cocktail dress and high-heeled black net shoes, and her neck, arms and hands gleamed and glittered with jewelry. She looked on the wrong side of forty, but still beautifully preserved and well-sexed. Her voice was a flat contradiction of her looks.

“Well, what is it, Edward? And don’t ask me anything about criminals, because I don’t know any.”

Coffin Ed said in his constricted voice, “Just a few questions, and I don’t want any mother-raping shit.”

Her face went black with a sudden bloodbursting fury. “Why, you small-time loudmouthed nigger-” she began, but was cut off by a knock on the door.

A woman’s flat unmusical voice from the entrance hall said, “It’s me — Ginny. I may as well go on if you’ll let me out.”

“Just a moment, dear,” Madame Cushy forced herself to say, and the next moment she felt her head jerked back by the bun of her hair, a knee in the small of her back, and the sharp edge of a knife blade across her throat.

Coffin Ed had moved so fast during the flicker of her gaze toward the door she hadn’t seen it.

“Walk slowly toward the door and open it and tell her to come in,” he whispered in her ear, lowering his knee so she could walk.

She didn’t move. Her face was a dull gray-black mask, looking twenty years older than a minute before, and the veins in her temples throbbed like artesian pumps.

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” she said in a low tight voice. “My bodyguard, Spunky, is in the lounge with my husband, and he’s wearing a forty-five. There’s a sawed-off shotgun in the bureau drawer. And Detective Ramsey is with them, and he’s got his police positive.”

“I always thought he was a crooked dick,” Coffin Ed whispered.

“Now you know.”

“But that won’t buy you anything. So help me God, I’ll cut your mother-raping throat.”

He motioned with his head to Wop to open the door. But Wop was paralyzed with terror. Huge obsidian eyes looked out in a hypnotized stare from a face gone battleship gray.

“I wouldn’t do it,” Madame Cushy said.

“Say good-bye,” Coffin Ed said and his arm tightened.

Madame Cushy looked at Wop’s eyes. She raised her voice and said, “Just one moment, Ginny.”

There was the sound of the lounge door opening and a male voice called, “What is it, baby?” Then it added in a lower tone as though the face had turned away, “Go see what’s happening, Spunky.”

Coffin Ed transferred Madame Cushy’s bun from his left hand to his teeth and drew Grave Digger’s pistol from his belt while still holding the knife blade to her throat.

When she moved he moved with her, like a monstrous Siamese twin.

Standing behind the door, she opened it and called out, “It’s nothing, dear. I’m trying to fix a rendezvous.” Then in a voice that sounded normal she added, “Come on in, Ginny.”

Ginny saw Wop’s face and hesitated, then stepped inside.

In one continuous motion Coffin Ed kicked the door shut with the edge of his left foot, spun Madame Cushy out of reach, transferred the knife blade to Ginny’s throat and closed her mouth with his left forearm, snapping back her head.

She felt the knife blade on her throat, tasted cloth, and saw the huge nickel-plated revolver gripped in a hard black hand just before her eyes. The strength went out of her knees and her body began to sag.

Madame Cushy stepped quickly to the door, opened it and went into the hall. Spunky was a step away, trying to look into the room. She pulled the door shut behind her and said, “Let them alone for a while.” Then she turned and called through the closed door, “Call me when you’re ready to leave.”

For a moment there was only the sound of their footsteps going toward the lounge and the closing of a door.

Inside the room the sound of Wop’s teeth chattering was as loud as castanets.

“Stand up!” Coffin Ed grated in Ginny’s ear.

Her knees straightened and she tried to talk. The movement of her head pressed her long black oily hair into his face.

“Shut up!” he whispered, turning his head to get his face out of the thick, perfumed, rancid, suffocating mass of hair.

The tight, close, abnormal contact of their bodies was aphrodisiacal in a sadistic manner, and both were shaken with an unnatural lust.

“Strip her,” Coffin Ed ordered Wop.

She heard the uncontrollable threads of desire in his voice and thought she was about to be raped. She shook her head and tried again to talk, mumbling what sounded like, “You don’t have to-”

Wop stared in petrified stupidity. “Strip her?” he echoed as though he didn’t understand the words.

“Take her mother-raping clothes off,” Coffin Ed said through clenched teeth. “Ain’t you never done that?”

Wop moved toward her as though she were a lioness with cubs. She was passive, raising each foot in turn for him to remove her shoes and stockings. No one spoke. Only their heavy breathing and the chattering of Wop’s teeth were audible. But he took so long to remove her sheen gabardine suit and chartreuse underclothes the silence became excruciating.

When she was stark naked, Coffin Ed released her.

She turned and saw him for the first time. “Oh, it’s you!” she said in her jarring voice.

“It’s me all right.”

She dropped to her knees and clasped his thighs in a tight embrace. “Just don’t hurt me,” she said.

“What the hell!” he said, and grabbed a fistful of her hair and dragged her onto the couch.

Her thick cushiony mouth opened in pain as she sucked in breath, but she didn’t dare scream. He rolled her over and carefully examined her for needle marks, but didn’t find any.

“Tie her down,” he ordered Wop.

Wop moved like a robot, joints stiff and eyes senseless.

When he had finished, Coffin Ed said, “Get her compact from her handbag.” Then he leaned over and took her by the hair again. Pulling her head back until her throat was taut, he cut the skin in a thin line six inches across her throat.

She didn’t move, didn’t breathe. Her eyes were limpid pools of terror set in a fixed stare.

“Give me the mirror,” he said.

He held it before her eyes. “See your throat.”

A thin line of blood showed where he had cut. She fainted.

He tossed away the compact and said with a choked impotent fury, “Let anybody’s blood flow but their own!”

Then he slapped her until she came to.

He knew that he had gone beyond the line; that he had gone outside of human restraint; he knew that what he was doing was unforgivable. But he didn’t want any more lies.

She lay rigid, looking at him with hate and fear.

“Next time I’ll cut it to the bone,” he said.

A shudder ran over her body as though a foot had stepped on her grave.

“All right, I’ll tell you,” she said. “I’ll tell you how to get it. It’s what you want, isn’t it?”

He looked at her without answering.

“We’ll split it,” she went on. “We’ll cut your partner in two. There’s enough for all three of us. You don’t want me but you can have me too. You’ll want me when you’ve had me. You won’t be able to get enough of me. I can make you scream with joy. I can do it in ways you never dreamed of. You’re cops. You’ll be safe. They can’t hurt you. You can kill them.”

He was caught for a moment in a hurt as terrible as any he had ever known. “Is everybody crooked on this mother-raping earth?” It came like a cry of agony torn out of him.

Then he said in a voice so tight it was barely audible, “You think because I’m a cop I’ve got a price. But you’re making a mistake. You’ve got only one thing I want. The truth. You’re going to give me that. Or I’m going to fix you so that no man will ever want anything else you got to give. And I ain’t playing.”

“They’ll kill me.”

“They’re going to kill you anyway if I don’t kill them first.”

Twenty-three minutes later he had her story. He had no way of knowing whether it was true. Only time would tell.

He looked at his watch. It read 11:57.

He untied her and told her to get up and dress.

He figured he knew as much as he was ever going to know. Before the payoff, anyway. If what she said was true, he had cased it right himself. If it wasn’t true, they were all going down together.

While she was dressing he listened to the sound of a recording coming from the lounge. Other recordings had been playing before, but he hadn’t heard them.

It was a saxophone solo by Lester Young. He didn’t recognize the tune, but it had the “Pres” treatment. His stomach tightened. It was like listening to someone laughing their way toward death. It was laughter dripping wet with tears. Colored people’s laughter.

His thoughts took him back to the late 1930s — the “depression” years. When he and Digger had attended a P.S. on 112th Street. They’d heard Lester playing with the Count Basie group at the Apollo, swapping fours and eights with Herschel Evans on their tenor horns.

Pres! He was the greatest, he thought.

“I’m ready,” Ginny said.

“Open the door and call Madame Cushy,” he said.

When Madame Cushy entered the room, he looked her over carefully. Satisfied she was unarmed, he said to Ginny, “You go out first, I’ll follow you,” and then to Wop, “You come behind me and if you see anybody with a gun, just scream.”

Madame Cushy’s lips curled. “If we were going to hurt you, you’d be dead by now. You won’t be hurt around here.”

Silently he sheathed the knife and stuck Grave Digger’s pistol back inside his waistband. He looked at her again. “Digger’s dead,” he said, then added, “And you’re living.”

He motioned with his hand and they left in single file.

Madame Cushy held the door open. When Coffin Ed passed her, she said quietly, “I won’t forget you.”

He didn’t answer.

He smelled the stink of terror coming from their bodies as they descended in the elevator. He thought bitterly, They’re all scared as hell when it’s their own lives they’re playing around with.

Before crossing the sidewalk to his car, he stood for a moment in the doorway, casing the street, his gun in his hand. He didn’t expect any gunplay. If what she had said was true, the gunmen would not be in sight. It was just a precaution. He had learned the hard way not to believe anybody entirely when it’s your own life at stake.

He didn’t see anyone or anything that looked suspicious.

They walked to the car in the same position as they had left the flat. He got into the front seat from the inside and slid over. The other two came in after him, Ginny in the middle and Wop on the outside.

I wish Digger was here, he thought without thinking.

He didn’t think that thought anymore.