partner, Sam Price were attacked and unfooted by a flying saucer some one has released in the neighborhood.”
“Order them to report here before going off duty for an alcohol test,” Anderson said sternly.
The sergeant chuckled as he relayed the order. Then he plugged in another call, and his face went grim.
“Man giving his name as Benjamin Zazuly, calling from the Paris Bar on 125th Street, reporting a double murder. Says two men dead on the sidewalk in front of the bar. One a white man. A third man unconscious. Thinks he’s Casper Holmes…”
Anderson’s fist came down on the desk, and his lean, hard face went bitter. “Goddammit, everything happens to me,” he said, but the moment he had said it he regretted it.
“Get the other two cars over there,” he directed in a steady voice. The veins throbbed in his temples, and his pale-blue eyes looked remote.
He waited until the sergeant had contacted the two prowl cars and dispatched them to the scene. Then he said, “Get Jones and Johnson.”
While the sergeant was calling for Jones and Johnson to come in, Anderson said anxiously, “Let us hope nothing has happened to Holmes.”
The sergeant couldn’t get Jones and Johnson.
Anderson stood up. “Keep trying,” he ordered. “I’m going to run over and take a quick look for myself.”
The reason the sergeant couldn’t get Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson is that they were in the back room of Mammy Louise’s pork store eating hot “chicken feetsy,” a Geechy dish of stewed chicken feet, rice, okra and red chili peppers. On a cold night like this it kept a warm fire burning in the stomach, and the white, tender gristle of the chicken feet gave a solid packing to the guts.
There were three wooden tables covered with oilcloth of such a bilious color that only the adhesive consistency of Mammy Louise’s Geechy stews could hold the food in the stomach. Against the side wall was a coal-burning stove flanked by copper water tasks. Pots of cooking foods bubbled on the hot lids, giving the small, close room the steamy, luxurious feeing of a Turkish bath.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed were sitting at the table farthest from the stove, their coats draped over the backs of wooden chairs. Their beat-up black hats hung above their overcoats on nails in the outside wall. Sweat beaded on their skulls underneath their short-cropped, kinky hair and streamed down their dark, intent faces. Coffin Ed’s hair was peppered with gray. He had a crescent-shaped scar on the right-side top of his skull, where Grave Digger had hit him with his pistol barrel, the time he had gone berserk after being blinded by acid thrown into his face. That had been more than three years ago, and the acid scars had been covered by skin, grafted from his thigh. But the new skin was a shade or so lighter than his natural face skin and it had been grafted on in pieces. The result was that Coffin Ed’s face looked as though it had been made up in Hollywood for the role of the Frankenstein monster. Grave Digger’s rough, lumpy face could have belonged to any number of hard, Harlem characters.
Grave Digger sucked the gristle from his last chicken foot and spat the small white bones onto the pile on his plate.
“I’ll bet you a bottle he don’t make it,” he said in a low voice, barely audible.
Coffin Ed looked at his wrist watch. “What kind of bet is that,” he replied in a similar tone of voice. “It’s already five minutes to twelve, and she got off at eleven-thirty. You think she’s waiting for him.”
“Naw, but he thinks so.”
They glanced surreptitiously at a man sitting in a worn wooden armchair in the corner beside the stove. He was a short, fat, bald-headed man with the round, black, mobile face of a natural-born comedian. Except for an overcoat, he was dressed for the street. He was staring across at them with a pleading look.
He was Mister Louise, Mammy’s husband. He had been picking up a hot little brownskin waitress at the Fischer Cafeteria next to the 125th Street railroad station every Saturday night since the new year began.
But Mammy Louise had got a bulldog. It was a six-year-old bulldog of a dirty white color with a mouth big enough to let in full-grown cats. It sat on its haunches directly in front of Mister Louise’s shinily shod feet and stared up into his desperate face with a lidded, unblinking look. Its pink mouth was wide open as it panted in the steamy heat; its red tongue hung down its chest. There was a big wet spot on the floor where it had been drooling as though it would like nothing better than a hunk of Mister Louise’s fat black meat.
“He wants us to help him,” Coffin Ed whispered.
“And get ourselves chawed up by that dog instead of him.”
Mammy Louise looked up from the stove where she had been stirring a pot. She was fatter than Mister Louise, but not quite as tall. She wore an old woolen bathrobe over an old jersey dress, under which were layers of warm woolen underclothing. Over the bathrobe she wore a black knitted shawl; her head was protected by a man’s beaver hat with a turned-up brim, and her feet were encased in fur-lined woodsmen’s boots.
She was a Geechy, born and raised in the swamps south of Tater Patch, South Carolina. Geechies are a melange of runaway African slaves and Seminole Indians, native to the Carolinas and Florida. Their mother tongue is a mixture of African dialects and the Seminole language; and she spoke English with a strange, indefinable accent that sounded somewhat similar to a conference of crows.
“What you two p’licemens whispering about so seriously?” she asked suspiciously.
It took a moment before they could piece together what she said.
“We got a bet,” Grave Digger replied with a straight face.
“Naw we haven’t,” Coffin Ed denied.
“You p’licemens,” she said scornfully. “Gamblin’ an’ carryin’ on an’ whippin’ innocent folkses’ heads with your big pistols.”
“Not if they’re innocent,” Grave Digger contradicted.
“Don’t tell me,” she said argumentatively. “I has seen you.” She curled her thick, sensuous lips. “Whippin’ grown men about as if they was children. Mister Louise wouldn’t stand for it,” she added, looking slyly from her husband’s desperate face to the slobbering bulldog. “Get up, Mister Louise, and show these p’licemens how you captured them train robbers that time.”
Mister Louise looked at her gratefully and started to his feet. The bulldog raised up and growled a warning; Mister Louise slumped back into his seat.
Mammy Louise winked her off eye at the detectives. “Mister Louise ain’t so pokey tonight,” she explained. “He just want to set here and keep me company.”
“So we noticed,” Coffin Ed said.
Mister Louise stared longingly at the long-barreled, nickel-plated. 38 caliber revolvers sticking from the two detectives’ shoulder holsters.
They heard the front door to the store open and bang shut. Feet stamped. A whisky-thick voice called, “Hey, Mammy Louise, come out here and give me a pot of them frozen chitterlings.”
She waddled through the curtained doorway leading to the store. They heard her opening a five-gallon milk can and shuffling about, and the customer protesting, “I don’t wants them loose chitterlings; I wants some frozen chitterlings,” and her sharp reply, “If you wants to eat ’em frozen just take ’em outside and freeze ’em; hit’s cold enough.”
Grave Digger said, “Mammy Louise can’t stand this Northern climate.”
“She got enough fat to keep her warm at the North Pole,” Coffin Ed replied.
“The trouble is, her fat gets cold.”
Mister Louise begged in a piteous voice, “One of you gentlemens shoot him for me, won’t you.” He glanced toward the curtained doorway and added, “I’ll pay you.”
“It wouldn’t kill him,” Coffin Ed replied solemnly.
“Bullets would just bounce off his head,” Grave Digger supplemented.
Mammy Louise came back and looked at her husband suspiciously. Then she said to the detectives, “Your car is talking.”
“I’ll get it,” Grave Digger said, getting to his feet before he’d finished saying it.
He slipped an arm through his jacket, grabbed his hat from the peg and pushed through the curtains as he poked his second arm into its sleeve.
The bulldog rolled its pink eyes at his receding figure and looked at Mammy Louise for instructions. But she paid it no attention. She was half moaning to herself. “Trouble, always trouble in dis wicked city. Whar Ah comes from-”
