“Pinky. He’s your son, ain’t he?” Grave Digger needled.
“My son!” she exploded. “Do I look like that nigger’s ma? He’s already older than I is.”
“He calls your husband his father.”
“He ain’t no such thing, even if he is old enough. Gus just found him somewhere and took pity on him.”
Coffin Ed nudged Grave Digger to show him four tan plastic suitcases which had been hidden from their view by the dining table.
“So where is Gus?” Grave Digger asked.
She got sullen again. “I don’t know where he’s at. Out watching the fire up the street, I suppose.”
“He didn’t go out to get a fix, did he?” Grave Digger took a shot in the dark, remembering their prisoner, Jake.
“Gus!” She appeared indignant. “He ain’t got the habit — no kind of habit, unless it’s the churchgoing habit.” She thought for a moment and added, “I guess he must have went to take the trunk from the storage room; I see somebody put in in the hall.”
“Who’s got the habit?” Coffin Ed insisted.
“Pinky’s got the habit. He’s on H.”
“How can he afford it?”
“Don’t ask me.”
Grave Digger let his gaze rest on the nervous African.
“What’s this man doing here?” he asked her suddenly.
“He’s an African chief,” she said proudly.
“I believe you; but that don’t answer my question.”
“If you just must know, he sold the farm to Gus.”
“What farm?”
“The cocoa plantation in Ghana where we is going.”
“Your husband bought a cocoa plantation in Ghana from this African?” Coffin Ed said incredulously. “What kind of racket is this?”
“Show him your passport,” she told the African.
The African fished a passport from the folds of his robe and held it out toward Grave Digger.
Grave Digger ignored it, but Coffin Ed took it and examined it curiously before handing it back.
“I don’t dig this,” Grave Digger confessed, removing his hat to scratch his head. “Where’s all this money coming from? Your husband can afford to buy a cocoa plantation in Ghana on a superintendent’s salary, and his helper can afford a heroin habit.”
“Don’t ask me where Pinky gets his money from,” she said. “Gus got his on the legit. His wife died and left him a tobacco farm in North Carolina and he sold it.”
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed looked at one another with raised brows.
“I thought you were his wife,” Grave Digger said to the woman.
“I is now,” she said triumphantly.
“Then he’s a bigamist.”
She tittered. “He ain’t no more.”
Grave Digger shook his head. “Some folks have all the luck.”
From outside came the sound of fire engines starting and beginning to move away.
“Where was the fire?” she asked.
“There wasn’t any fire,” Grave Digger said. “It was Pinky who turned in the fire alarm. He wanted to call the police.”
Her slanting yellow eyes stretched into the shape of almonds. “He did! What did he want to do that for?”
“He said that you and this African were murdering and robbing his father.”
She turned a dirty muddy color. The African jumped to his feet as though he had been stung in the rear by a wasp; he started sputtering denials in a guttural-sounding, strangely accented English. She cut him off harshly, “Shut up! Gus will take care of him. The dirty mother-raping white nigger! After all we has done for him, trying to make trouble for us on our last day.”
“Why would he do that?”
“He don’t like Africans is all. He’s just envious ’cause he ain’t got no color in his own fishbelly skin.”
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed shook their heads in unison.
“Now I’ve heard everything,” Grave Digger said. “Here’s a white colored man who puts in a false fire alarm that Riverside Church is on fire, getting half the fire equipment in New York City on the roll and all the police in the neighborhood up here — and why? I ask you why?”
“Because he don’t like black colored people,” Coffin Ed said.
“You can’t blame that on the heat,” Grave Digger said.
The front doorbell began to ring. It rang long and insistently, as though someone was trying to jab the button through the wall.
“Now who in the hell is that at this hour of the night?” the woman said.
“Maybe it’s Gus,” Coffin Ed said. “Maybe he’s lost his key.”
“If Pinky done put in another false fire alarm, he better watch out,” the woman threatened.
She opened the door to the corridor and went to answer the bell. The detectives followed her up the stairs into the front foyer.
Through the glass-paneled doors, uniformed cops were seen swarming about the entrance.
The woman flung open the doors.
“Now what you all want?” she demanded.
The white cops looked suspiciously at the two colored detectives.
“We got several reports that two colored prowlers have been seen around this house,” one of them said in a hard challenging voice. “You know anything about it?”
“That’s us,” Grave Digger said as he and Coffin Ed flashed their buzzers. “We’ve been prowling around.”
The white cop reddened.
“Well, don’t blame us,” he said. “We got to check on these reports.”
“Hell, we ain’t blaming you,” Grave Digger said. “It’s the heat.”
They left with the other cops and went up the street to look for Jake the dwarf, but he was gone. A prowl car cop still lingering in the vicinity said he had been taken to the hospital.
The fire engines had gone but several deserted prowl cars were still parked haphazardly in the street. Some cops were still searching for Pinky, the giant albino, but they had not found him.
Coffin Ed glanced at his watch.
“It’s twelve after two,” he said. “This joke has lasted for more than an hour.”
“The bars have closed,” Grave Digger said. “We’d better take a look in the valley before checking in.”
“What about Jake?”
“He’ll keep. But first let’s look see what’s cooking in all this heat.”
They got into their little black sedan and drove off, looking like two farmers who had just arrived in town.
3
It was 3:30 a.m. before they finally got back to the precinct station to write out their report.
The heat had detained them.
Even at past two in the morning, “The Valley,” that flat lowland of Harlem east of Seventh Avenue, was like the frying pan of hell. Heat was coming out of the pavement, bubbling from the asphalt; and the atmospheric pressure was pushing it back to earth like the lid on a pan.
Colored people were cooking in their overcrowded, overpriced tenements; cooking in the streets, in the after-hours joints, in the brothels; seasoned with vice, disease and crime.
