The Heat's on

6

Uncle Saint sat in the Lincoln and watched the entrance to the apartment. It was parked in the same place Grave Digger and Coffin Ed had vacated less than an hour earlier.

Sister Heavenly had gone inside to look for Gus. But Uncle Saint didn’t take any stock in Pinky’s story about a map. The way he figured, Gus was a connection for racketeers smuggling diamonds or maybe gold. He was picking it up somewhere and passing it on.

Sister Heavenly reckoned that Gus was carrying the boodle on him. But Uncle Saint didn’t figure it that way. Whatever it was would be in the trunk, he decided. You had to figure that racketeers who would use an old square like Gus for a connection knew what they were doing. And a trunk was still the best means of smuggling anything hot — because it was so obvious. All the smart federal men and slick city dicks would figure racketeers too smart to use an old worn-out gimmick like a trunk. And that was where the racketeers could outsmart them. Just plain human nature. Like the best mark is the one who has been clipped before; he figures then that he knows everything.

As he sat there and turned it over in his mind, Uncle Saint resolved to get that trunk for himself.

For more than twenty-five years he had flunkied for Sister Heavenly, serving her as guard, cook, nurse and toady — doing her dirty work. Before that he had been her lover. But when she had thrown him over, he had hung around like a homeless dog through a long succession of subsequent lovers. Now all he had for her was hate, but he couldn’t leave her because he didn’t have anywhere else to go, and she knew it.

So he decided to cross her, get the boodle and cut out. Leave her taking the rap. See how she’d handle a mob of racketeers.

He saw a green panel truck pull up before the apartment house entrance. It looked similar to a Railway Express Company truck except for the name in white letters on its sides: ACME EXPRESS CO.

Two white men in hickory-striped uniforms and blue-visored caps got out. One was tall and thin, the other medium height and heavyset. Both were clean-shaven and neither wore glasses. That was all Uncle Saint noticed.

Both men glanced toward the Lincoln. It was the only parked car with an occupant. But sight of the old liveried colored pappy behind the wheel allayed their suspicions.

Uncle Saint had a sour grin as they turned their backs and walked toward the door. They had him cased as a square like old Gus, he figured. On the one hand it rankled; but on the other it worked in his favor.

He waited until they had gone inside, then started the motor and kept it idling. He figured he was going to have to hijack the trunk. But not here in front of the apartment house. It was too open and there was no telling what Nosy Parker might be watching him from behind some curtained window, wondering what a strange limousine was doing in the neighborhood at this hour of morning. He just hoped Sister Heavenly wouldn’t do anything to rank his play.

Sister Heavenly was sitting in the janitor’s parlor, covering the janitor’s wife and the African with a blunt-nosed.38-caliber revolver, when the doorbell rang.

“I got to go and open the front door,” the janitor’s wife said. “It’s most likely Gus.”

She was standing beside the African, who was seated before the table, where she had backed when Sister Heavenly got the drop on her.

“Can the bullshit and press the buzzer,” Sister Heavenly said, motioning with the barrel of the pistol from where she sat on the arm of the davenport. “When they get here we’ll see who it is.”

The janitor’s wife shuffled sullenly over toward the door and pressed a button releasing the latch on the entrance door. She was barefooted and still wore the same cotton shift as before, but now it looked as though she had been rolling in it. Her face was greasy and her slanting yellow eyes glittered evilly.

“You ain’t going to get nothing by this, whatever it is you is after,” she muttered in her gravelly voice.

“Just get back over there and shut up,” Sister Heavenly said with an arrogant wave of the gun barrel.

The janitor’s wife shuffled back to the side of the African.

The African sat with drooping body, like a melted statue, his white-rimmed eyes staring at the pistol as though hypnotized.

They waited. Only their heavy breathing was audible in the surrounding silence.

The two expressmen saw the trunk in the basement corridor beside the elevator and took it away without seeing anyone.

Uncle Saint was watching when they returned to the street, carrying a large green steamer trunk, stickered and tagged for shipping. They put the trunk into the body of the truck, closed the doors, and looked once again toward the parked Lincoln.

Without appearing to notice them, Uncle Saint leaned out the car window and looked up toward the front windows of the third-story apartment as though listening to someone speaking to him.

The expressmen looked in the same direction, but they didn’t see anything.

“Yassum,” Uncle Saint called in a flunkey’s voice. “Right away, mum.”

He put the Lincoln in gear and drove past the express truck without giving it a look and kept on down Riverside Drive, keeping within the twenty-five-mile speed limit.

The expressmen got into the compartment of the truck. The driver started the motor and the truck took off behind the limousine at a more rapid speed.

Uncle Saint accelerated, watching the following truck in his rearview mirror. He kept well ahead, lengthening and shortening the gap between as though driving naturally.

He knew he was playing a dangerous game, especially alone. But he was too old and had lived too long on the edge of violence to be scared of death. What scared him was the idea of what he planned to do. What was in his favor was the fact nobody knew him. No one but Pinky and Sister Heavenly knew his straight monicker; in recent years but few people had seen him in the light. If he could get it and get away, only those two would know who had done it, and even they wouldn’t know where to look for him.

He accelerated gradually as he realized the truck was headed downtown, and pulled far ahead. He was two blocks ahead on the almost empty drive when he came to the entrance to the Yacht Club at 79th Street. He swerved into the curving driveway and slowed down, hidden by the dense foliage of the crescent-shaped park. He got a glimpse of the truck passing on Riverside Drive. He came back into the drive a block behind it and kept a bakery truck in between down as far as 72nd Street.

The truck turned east on 72nd Street to Tenth Avenue, and went south. It was a southbound avenue, feeding the Lincoln and Holland tunnels underneath the Hudson River, and was fairly covered with commercial traffic at this hour. That made it easy. The express truck had only one rearview mirror on the left front fender. Uncle Saint kept far to the right, and always kept some vehicle in between.

At 56th Street when the truck turned toward the Hudson River, the Lincoln was exposed for a moment or two; but when the truck turned south again alongside the overhead trestle of the New York Central Railroad line, he was covered again. On the west side of the wide brick-paved avenue, the whole length of North River was closed in by the docks of the great oceangoing lines. Underneath the trestle, as far as the eye could see, trucks and truck-trailers were parked side by side. The southbound lane was heavy with traffic feeding the docks.

Already the funnels of the Queen Mary at dock could be seen overtopping the wharf of the French Line adjoining the Cunard pier. The express truck swerved toward the curb and braked to a sudden stop behind a black Buick sedan parked less than fifty yards from the entrance to the French Line dock.

The maneuver was executed so quickly Uncle Saint didn’t have a chance to stop behind the truck and had to pull ahead of the Buick to park.

It was a no-parking zone and two cops in a prowl car looked meaningfully at the three parked vehicles as they drove slowly by. Being as one was a chauffeur-driven limousine and another an express truck, the cops let them slide for a moment.

Two dark-suited, straw-hatted, somber-looking men sat in the front seat of the Buick and watched the prowl car pass the Cunard dock and drop out of sight in the traffic. The man on the curb side opened the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He was a heavyset, black-haired man with a thick-featured, olive-skinned face and a bulging belly. His black single-breasted coat was buttoned at the bottom. He came down the street, looking anxiously toward the exit of the French Line wharf.

Uncle Saint watched in the rearview mirror, concentrating on the men in the express truck.

The driver of the Buick sat with his right hand on the wheel, his left hanging loosely through the open window.

When the heavyset man came level with the curb-side window of the Lincoln, he turned with a quick, catlike motion, unexpected in a man of his build, and came toward the car. He clapped his left hand on the car top, flipped open his coat and drew from a left shoulder sling. When he bent over to peer through the window, as though speaking to the gray-haired old chauffeur, his flapping coat shielded the pistol from view. It was a single-shot derringer with a six-inch perforated silencer attached. Without speaking a word, he took careful aim at the softest spot in Uncle Saint’s head. His dull dark eyes were impassive.

Abruptly from behind him a hard voice shouted, “Get ’em up or I’ll shoot!”

He didn’t see the faint motion of Uncle Saint’s lips. He wheeled about convulsively, the back of his head striking the top of the doorframe, knocking off his hat onto the seat of the car.

Uncle Saint lunged for his shotgun lying on the floor.

The gunman wheeled back, his eyes bugging out, as Uncle Saint was bringing up the muzzle of the double-barreled shotgun.

Both fired simultaneously.

The small coughing sound of the silenced derringer was lost in the heavy booming blast of the shotgun.

In his panic, Uncle Saint had squeezed the triggers of both barrels.

The gunman’s face disappeared and his thick heavy body was knocked over backward from the impact of the 12-gauge shells.

The rear light of a truck parked beneath the trestle in the middle of the avenue disintegrated for no apparent reason.

The air stunk with the smell of cordite and burnt flesh as the driver of the Buick leaned out the window and emptied an automatic pistol held in his left hand.

Holes popped into the back of the Lincoln’s tonneau and the left-side rearview mirror was shattered.

Uncle Saint hadn’t been touched, but his nappy hair was standing up like iron filings beneath a magnet.

Abruptly a woman began to scream in high, piercing, repetitious shrieks.

Uncle Saint felt as though the top of his head was coming off.

Then men began to shout; horns blew; a police whistle shrilled, and there was a sudden shower of running feet.

Both cars took off at once.

A trailer truck was passing on the left side and a taxi coming from the French Line dock blocked the traffic lane ahead. Porters and stevedores were running up the sidewalk and a uniformed cop with a pistol in his hand was trying to break through.

Uncle Saint was looking through a blind haze of panic. His brain had stopped working. He was driving instinctively, like a fox encircled by hounds.

The truck was to his left, the taxi was in front; he pulled to the right, up over the curb, heading behind the taxi. The running men scattered, diving for safety, as the two cars roared down the broad sidewalk, the Buick following the Lincoln bumper to bumper.

At the entrance to the dock a porter was loading luggage from a taxi onto a four-wheeled cart. He didn’t see the Lincoln until it hit the cart. He sailed into the air, clinging to the suitcase as though running to catch a train waiting somewhere in the sky, while other luggage flew past like startled birds. The cart raced down the pier and dove into the sea. The porter came down feetfirst on top of the following Buick, did a perfect somersault and landed sitting on the suitcase, his astounded black face an ellipsoid of white eyeballs and white teeth.

In front of the Cunard Line dock Uncle Saint found an opening back to the street. He turned into it but couldn’t straighten out fast enough and crossed in front of the same trailer truck he had already passed on the sidewalk. It was so close the truck bumper passed overtop and left rear fender of the Lincoln as he barely missed the concrete pier of the railroad trestle on the other side.

Rubber screamed on the dry brick pavement as the truck driver applied air brakes. The truck horn bleated desperately. But it didn’t save the Buick following in the wake of the Lincoln. The truck hit it broadside. The sound of metal rending metal shattered the din. A senseless pandemonium broke out up and down the street.

The truck had overturned the Buick and the front wheels had run overtop it. Hundreds of people were running in all directions, without rhyme or reason.

Uncle Saint got away.

He didn’t see the accident or hear the sound. He was on the inside traffic lane and it was clear for nine straight blocks. Instinctively he looked into the rearview mirror. Behind him the avenue was empty.

Traffic had been stopped at the scene of the accident. The first two prowl cars to arrive had blocked off the street. For the moment the black Lincoln had been forgotten. By the time the cops got around to gathering evidence, Uncle Saint had passed 42nd Street. None of the witnesses had recognized the make of the car; no one had thought to take the license number; all descriptions of the driver were conflicting.

Suddenly Uncle Saint found himself caught in one of the clover-leaf approaches to the Lincoln Tunnel. The three traffic lanes were jammed with vehicles, bumper to bumper. There was no turning back.

As he crawled along in back of a refrigerator truck, his panic cooled to a sardonic, inverted scare. The killing didn’t bother him whatever. “Thought the old darky was tame,” he muttered to himself.

A subtle change came over him. He reverted to the legendary Uncle Tom, the old halfwit darky, the white man’s jester, the obsequious old white-haired coon without a private thought.

During one of the stops as the long lines of traffic were halted at the toll gates, he hid the shotgun underneath the back seat and tossed the gunman’s straw hat on top of the seat.

The toll gates looked like the entrance to a wartime military post housing nuclear weapons. Booted and helmeted cops sat astride high-powered motorcycles beside the toll booths; beyond were the white-and-black police cars that patrolled the tunnel.

The guard took the fifty cents toll and waved Uncle Saint on, but a motorcycle cop strolled over and stopped him.

“What are these holes in the back of this car, boy?”

Uncle Saint grinned, showing stained decayed teeth, and his old bluish-red eyes looked sly.

“Bullet holes, sah,” he said proudly.

“What!” The cop was taken aback; he had expected Uncle Saint to deny it. “Bullet holes?”

“Yas sah, gen-you-wine bullet holes.”

The cop pinned a beetle-brow stare onto Uncle Saint.

“You make ’em?”

“Naw sah, Ah was goin’ the other way.”

The toll guard could not repress a smile, but the cop scowled.

“Who made ’em?”

“My boss, sah. Mistah Jeffers. He made ’em.”

“Who was he shooting at?”

“Shooting at me, sah. He always shoots at me when he’s had a liddle too much. But he ain’t never hit me though — he-hee.”

The toll guard laughed out loud, but the cop didn’t like it.

“Pull over there and wait,” he ordered, indicating the parking space for the patrol cars.

Uncle Saint drove over and stopped. The cops in the cars looked at him curiously.

The motorcycle cop went into the glass-enclosed toll booth and studied the list of wanted cars. The Lincoln was not on the list. He fiddled about for fifteen minutes, looking more and more annoyed. Finally he asked the toll guard, “Think I ought to hold him?”

“Hold him for what?” the guard said. “What’s an old darky like him ever done but steal his boss’s whiskey?”

The cop came out of the booth and waved him on.

It was only a quarter past seven when Uncle Saint came out of the tunnel into Jersey City.

He left the parkway at the first turn-off and went north along the rutted, brick-paved streets that bordered the wharves. He drove slowly and carefully and obeyed all the traffic signs. It took him an hour to reach the first New Jersey approach to the George Washington Bridge. He crossed over into Manhattan and fifteen minutes later crossed the Harlem River back into the Bronx.

Before arriving at Sister Heavenly’s he threw out the dead gunman’s hat, then retrieved the shotgun, reloaded it, and placed it on the floor of the front seat within reach.

“Now let’s see which way the cat’s gonna jump,” he said to himself.

It was about 8:30 o’clock. The clock in the car didn’t work and Uncle Saint didn’t have a watch. But time meant nothing to him one way or another.