the victim in the stomach while Coffin Ed held his arms pinned behind him.
Then Grave Digger and Coffin Ed had taken the stand in their own defense.
“What we did is routine procedure,” Grave Digger said. “You take these pushers, when they’re peddling dope they work in the street. They carry their decks in a pocket where they are convenient to dispose of. The officer has to apprehend them while they still have the junk on their person, or he has to swear he has seen them dispose of it. So when you close in on a pusher and he sees he can’t get rid of his load, he stuffs it into his mouth and eats it. They all carry some kind of physic which they take a short time afterwards — and there goes your evidence-”
The commissioner smiled.
“You know they’ve been selling dope; you’ve seen ’em; but you can’t prove it,” Grave Digger continued. “So Ed and me use this method to make them vomit up the evidence before they take the physic and dissipate it.”
Again the commissioner smiled at the use of the word
“However, if that were permitted, what is there to prohibit an officer from punching a person in the stomach suspected of drunken driving?” the assistant D.A. remarked.
“Nothing,” Grave Digger replied in a thick, dry voice. “If he’s run over somebody and killed ’em.”
“You’re forgetting that you are primarily a peace officer,” the asistant D.A. reminded him. “Your duty is to maintain the peace and the courts will punish the offenders.”
“Peace at what price?” Coffin Ed put in, and Grave Digger echoed thickly:
“You think you can have a peaceful city letting criminals run loose?”
The assistant D.A. reddened. “That’s not the point,” he said sharply. “You’ve killed a man suspected of a minor crime, and not in self-defense.”
Suddenly the room was filled with tension.
“You call dope peddling a minor crime?” Grave Digger said, pushing to his feet.
At the sound of his thick, dry voice, every eye in the room turned in his direction. The arteries in his neck became swollen from rage and veins throbbed in his temples.
“All the crimes committed by addicts — robberies, murders, rapes.… All the fucked-up lives.… All the nice kids sent down the drain on a habit.… Twenty-one days on heroin and you’re hooked for life.… Jesus Christ, mister, that one lousy drug has murdered more people than Hitler. And you call it
The assistant D.A. reddened. “He was merely a peddler,” he stated.
“And who gets it into the victim’s blood?” Grave Digger raved. “The peddler! He sells the dirty crap. He makes the personal contact. He puts them on the habit. He’s the mother-raper who gets them hooked. He looks into their faces and puts the poison in their hands. He watches them go down from sugar to shit, sees them waste away. He puts them out to stealing, killing, starts young girls to hustling — to get the money to buy the kicks. I’ll take a simple violent murderer any day.”
“Let’s put it this way,” Coffin Ed said, trying to mollify both parties. “Everybody here knows how the big-time operators work. They buy junk abroad — mostly heroin nowadays. They get a lot of it from France — Marseille — for about five thousand dollars a kilo — two pounds and three ounces. The French don’t seem to able to stop the traffic. It comes to New York and the wholesalers pay from fifteen thousand dollars to twenty thousand dollars a kilo for it. The U.S. federal agents don’t seem to be able to catch them either. So the wholesalers dilute the stuff, which is about eighty percent pure to begin with — they add enough sugar of milk or quinine to get it down to two percent pure. Just plain shit. And this is the stuff the peddler sells. It grosses a half million dollars a kilo. All of you know that. But who’s stopping it? All Digger and me can do is try to catch the peddlers in our precinct. So one gets hurt-”
“Killed,” the assistant M.E. corrected.
“By accident,” Coffin Ed amended. “If that is what killed him. In all that excitement up there last night he might have been trampled to death for all we know.”
The commissioner looked up. “What excitement?”
“The firemen were trying to detain a firebug who got away.”
“Oh, that.” His glance flicked from Lieutenant Anderson to the red-faced firemen.
“We are going to have these detectives indicted,” the assistant D. A. stated. “There has been too much police brutality in Harlem. The public is indignant.”
The commissioner pressed the tips of his fingers together and leaned back in his chair.
“Give us time to make a more thorough investigation,” he said.
The assistant D.A. was reluctant. “What more investigation is needed? They have admitted beating the deceased.”
The commissioner passed over him. “In the meantime, detectives Jones and Johnson, you are suspended from the force until further notice. Captain Brice,” he added, turning his head slightly, “have them turn in their shields and strike their names from the roll.”
Grave Digger’s swollen face turned gray around the mouth and the grafted skin on Coffin Ed’s face twitched like a tic.
“And that’s that,” Grave Digger said to their friend, Lieutenant Anderson, as they stood outside in the glaring hot sunshine. “For a mother-raping pusher.”
“It’s just the newspaper pressure. We’re suffering from the customary summer slack in news. It’ll blow over,” Lieutenant Anderson consoled. “The papers are on one of their periodic humanitarian kicks. Don’t worry. Nothing’s coming out of it.”
“Yeah, humanitarian,” Grave Digger said bitterly. “It’s all right to kill a few colored people for trying to get their children an education, but don’t hurt a mother-raping white punk for selling dope.”
Lieutenant Anderson winced. As accustomed as he was to these two colored detectives’ racial connotations, that one hurt.
8
Uncle Saint hung about the garage for a long time before he got up enough nerve to enter the house.
Three of the bullets had made holes which he plugged with putty and sprayed with quick-drying black enamel. But there were two big dents and one long seam atop the left rear fender which couldn’t be concealed. He had no mirror to replace the broken one, so he removed them from both front fenders and sprayed the marks they had left. That didn’t help much either; the bolt holes still remained. The license plates presented no problem. He had several changes of plates, none of which had the legitimate registration number. He put on some Connecticut plates.
Still he kept fiddling about. Once he thought of painting the whole car another color; or at least the upper half. But finally his jag began thinning out and he got jumpy. He knew he’d have trouble sure as hell with Sister Heavenly if he got too jumpy, so he decided to go inside and have it out.
She would just have to look after him, he told himself. She had kept him helpless and homeless for twenty- five years and he wasn’t going to jump up and run off by his lonesome just because he was in a little trouble. If he went down he was going to take her with him. It had been her idea anyway, he justified himself. He had just been trying to do her business.
He slunk up the path toward the house, holding the shotgun cradled in his arm as though stalking an enemy.
Only the screen door was closed. He became wary. When he poked his head into the kitchen, his eyes popped. Sister Heavenly was sitting at the kitchen table drinking sassafras tea and smoking a pipe of marijuana and looking content with the world. For a brief moment he thought she had gotten it and his head exploded with rage. But the next instant he realized she couldn’t have. He stepped inside and closed the door.
The kitchen had windows on the side and back but their shutters were closed tight to keep out the heat and the only light came in through the screened back door. The kitchen table, covered with blue-and-white checked oilcloth, sat before the side window. The stove stood against the inside wall and Uncle Saint’s bunk, covered with army blankets, lay beneath the back window.
Sister Heavenly was dressed as before. She sat sidewise to the table, one leg crossed over the other exposing the ruffles of her petticoats, and her little finger was extended properly as she held the steaming teacup to
