She came towards them smiling only with her teeth; her dark eyes were stone cold behind rimless lenses. She closed the door behind her.
'Hello, boys,' she said, shaking hands in turn. 'How are you?'
'Fine, Sarah, business is booming; how's your business?' Grave Digger said.
'Booming too, Digger. Only the criminals got money, and all they do with it is buy pussy. You know how it is, runs hand in hand; girls sell when cotton and corn are a drag on the market. What do you boys want?'
'We want Loboy, Sarah,' Grave Digger said harshly, souring at this landprop's philosophy.
Her smiled went out. 'What's he done, Digger?' she asked in a toneless voice.
'None of your mother-raping business,' Coffin Ed flared.
She looked at him. 'Be careful, Edward,' she warned.
'It's not what he's done this time, Sarah,' Grave Digger said soothingly. 'We're curious about what he's seen. We just want to talk to him.'
'I know what that means. But he's kinda nervous and upset now — '
'High, you mean,' Coffin Ed said.
She looked at him again. 'Don't get tough with me, Edward. I'll have you thrown out here on your ass.'
'Look, Sarah, let's level,' Grave Digger said. 'It's not like you think. You know Deke O'Hara got hijacked tonight.'
'I heard it on the radio. But you ain't stupid enough to think Loboy was on that caper.'
'Not that supid, Sarah. And we don't give a damn about Deke either. But eighty-seven grand of colored people's hard-earned money got lost in the caper; and we want to get it back.'
'How's Loboy fit that act?'
'Chances are he saw the hijackers. He was working in the neighborhood when their getaway truck crashed and they had to split.'
She studied his face impassively; finally she said, 'I dig.' Suddenly her smile came on again. 'I'll do anything to help our poor colored people.'
'I believe you,' Coffin Ed said.
She turned back into the reception room without another word and closed the door behind her. A few minutes later she brought out Loboy.
They took him to 137th Street and told him to reconstruct his activities and tell everything he saw before he got out of the vicinity.
At first Loboy protested, 'I ain't done nothing and I ain't seen nothing and you ain't got nothing against me. I been sick all day, at home and in bed.' He was so high his speech was blurred and he kept dozing off in the middle of each sentence.
Coffin Ed slapped him with his open palm a half-dozen times. Tears came to his eyes.
'You ain't got no right to hit me like that. I'm gonna tell Sarah. You ain't got nothing against me.'
'I'm just trying to get your attention is all,' Coffin Ed said.
He got Loboy's attention, but that was all. Loboy admitted getting a glimpse of the driver of the delivery truck that hit Early Riser, but he didn't remember what he looked like. 'He was white is all I remember. All white folks look alike to me,' he said.
He hadn't seen the white men when they had got from the wrecked truck. He hadn't seen the armored truck at all. By the time it had passed he had jumped the iron fence beside the church and was running down the passageway to 136th Street, headed towards Lenox.
'Which way did the woman go?' Grave Digger asked.
'I didn't stop to see,' Loboy confessed.
'What did she look like?'
'I don't remember; big and strong is all.'
They let him go. By then it was past four in the morning. They drove to the precinct station to check out. They were frustrated and dead beat, and no nearer the solution than at the start. Lieutenant Anderson said nothing new had come in; he had put a tap on Deke's private telephone line but no one had called.
'We should have talked to the driver who took those three white men to Brooklyn, instead of wasting time on Loboy,' Grave Digger said.
'There's no point in second-guessing,' Anderson said. 'Go home and get some sleep.'
He looked white about the gills himself. It had been a hot, raw night — Independence night, he thought — filled with big and little crime. He was sick of crime and criminals; sick of both cops and robbers; sick of Harlem and colored people. He liked colored people all right; they couldn't help it because they were colored. He was quite attached to his two ace colored detectives; in fact he depended on them. They probably kept his job for him. He was second in command to the precinct captain, and had charge of the night shift. His was the sole responsibility when the captain went home, and without his two aces he might not have been able to carry it. Harlem was a mean rough city and you had to be meaner and rougher to keep any kind of order. He understood why colored people were mean and rough; he'd be mean and rough himself if he was colored. He understood all the evils of segregation. He sympathized with the colored people in his precinct, and with colored people in general. But right now he was good and goddamned sick of them. All he wanted was to go home to his quiet house in Queens in a quiet white neighborhood and kiss his white wife and look in on his two sleeping white children and crawl into bed between two white sheets and go to hell to sleep.
So when the telephone rang and a big happy colored voice sang, '.. O where de cotton and de corn grow…' he turned purple with anger.
'Go on the stage, clown!' he shouted and banged down the receiver.
The detectives grinned sympathetically. They hadn't heard the voice but they knew it had been some lunatic talking in jive.
'You'll get used to it if you live long enough,' Grave Digger said.
'I doubt it,' Anderson muttered.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed started home. They both lived on the same street in Astoria, Long Island, and they only used one of their private cars to travel back and forth to work. They kept their official car, the little battered black sedan with the hopped-up engine, in the precinct garage.
But tonight when they went to put it away, they found it had been stolen.
'Well, that's the bitter end,' Coffin Ed said.
'One thing is for sure,' Grave Digger said. 'I ain't going in and report it.'
'Damn right,' Coffin Ed agreed.
8
The next morning, at eight o'clock, an open bed truck pulled up before a store on Seventh Avenue that was being remodeled. Formerly, there had been a notion goods store with a shoeshine parlor serving as a numbers drop on the site. But it had been taken over by a new tenant and a high board wall covering the entire front had been erected during the remodeling.
There had been much speculation in the neighborhood concerning the new business. Some said it would be a bar, others a night club. But Small's Paradise Inn was only a short distance away, and the cognoscenti ruled those out. Others said it was an ideal spot for a barbershop or a hairdresser, or even a bowling alley; some half-wits opted for another funeral parlor, as though colored folks weren't dying fast enough as it is. Those in the know claimed they had seen office furnishings moved in during the night and they had it at first hand that it was going to be the headquarters for the Harlem political committee of the Republican Party. But those with the last word said that Big Wilt Chamberlain, the professional basketball player who had bought Small's Cabaret, was going to open a bank to store all the money he was making hand over fist.
By the time the workmen began taking down the wall, a small crowd had collected. But when they had finished, the crowd overflowed into the street. Harlemites, big and little, old and young, strong and feeble, the halt and the blind, male and female, boys and girls, stared in pop-eyed amazement.
'Great leaping Jesus!' said the fat black barber from down the street, expressing the opinion of all.
