The other man was thin with a too-white, haggard face and dark circles about his eyes. Even from that distance she made him as a junkie. He wore a light gray summer suit and was shaking as though he had a chill.
They turned and walked quickly in the opposite direction. She saw them get into a Buick Special sedan of ordinary battleship-gray. There was nothing about the car to distinguish it from any car of the same make. From that distance she couldn’t read the license number, but the plates were Empire State issue.
She figured she might have something valuable; something she could sell. She didn’t know how valuable, but she would wait and see.
She didn’t have to wait long. The first of the prowl cars showed up in a little over two minutes. Within five minutes the street was filled with police cars and two ambulances.
By then people were hanging out the windows and the customary crowd had collected. The police had formed lines, keeping the front of the house clear.
She figured it was safe to get closer. She saw a figure on a stretcher brought out and shoved quickly into an ambulance. A third attendant had walked alongside it, holding a bottle of plasma. The siren sounded and the ambulance roared off.
She had recognized the face.
“Grave Digger,” she whispered to herself.
A cold tremor ran down her spine.
Coffin Ed came out walking, assisted by two ambulance attendants whom he was trying to shake off. They managed to get him into the second ambulance and it drove off.
Sister Heavenly was backing off to leave when she heard someone say, “There’s another one, an African with his throat cut.”
She backed away fast. As she was leaving she saw two heavy black sedans filled with plainclothesmen from homicide pull up. She figured what she had was too damn valuable to sell. It was valuable enough to get her own throat cut.
She walked quickly up the hill to Broadway, looking for a taxicab. She was so disconcerted she forgot to raise her parasol to protect her complexion from the sunshine.
After she had hailed a taxi, got inside and felt it moving, she began to feel secure again. But she knew she had to get rid of Uncle Saint and the red-hot Lincoln, or she was going to find herself up a creek.
When she arrived on the street where she had left her house, she found it filled with fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, and thinly dressed people, for the most part Italians with a sprinkling of Negroes, cooking in the noonday heat, risking sunstroke to satisfy their morbid curiosity.
The whole city was running amok, she thought, from the sugar side to the shabby side.
As the taxi drew nearer, she craned her neck, looking for her house. She didn’t see it. From the window of the taxi, looking over the heads of the crowd, she couldn’t see the floor that remained. It looked to her as though the entire house had disappeared. The only thing she could see was the Lincoln, standing out like a red thumb in the bright sunshine.
She stopped the taxi before it got too close to the police lines and hailed a passerby.
“What happened down the street?”
“Explosion!” the bareheaded Italian-looking worker gasped, breathing hard as though he couldn’t get enough of the hot dusty air into his lungs. “Blew the house up. Killed the old couple who lived there. Saint Heavenly they were called. No trace of ’em. Musta had a still.”
He didn’t pause to see her reaction. He was scrabbling around, like scores of others, picking up scraps of paper.
Well now, ain’t that just too beautiful for words? she thought. Then she asked the taxi driver, “See what that is they’re picking up.”
He got out and asked a youth to see a sample. It was the corner of a hundred-dollar bill. He brought it back to show to Sister Heavenly. The youth followed him suspiciously.
“Piece of a C-note,” he said. “They must have been making counterfeit.”
“That tears it,” Sister Heavenly said.
The two of them stood staring at her.
“Give it back to him and let him go,” she said.
She knew immediately that Uncle Saint had tried to blow her safe. It didn’t surprise her. He must have used an atom bomb, she thought. She wished he had picked a better time for the caper.
The taxi driver climbed back into his seat and looked at her with growing suspicion. “Ain’t that the house where you wanted to go?”
“Don’t talk foolish, man,” she snapped. “You see I can’t go there ’cause the house ain’t there no more.”
“Don’t you wanna talk to the cops?” he persisted.
“I just want you to turn around and drive me back to White Plains Road and put me out by the playground.”
At that hour the treeless playground was deserted. The sandpits baked in the sunshine and heat radiated from the iron slides. The slatted bench on which Sister Heavenly sat burned stripes up and down her backsides. But she didn’t notice it.
She took out her pipe and filled it with the finely ground stems of marijuana from an oilskin pouch and lit it with an old gold-initialed pipe lighter. Then she opened her black-and-white striped parasol and holding it over her head with her left hand, she held the pipe in her right hand and sucked the sweet pungent marijuana smoke deep into her lungs.
Sister Heavenly was a fatalist. If she had ever read
The moving finger writes,
And having writ moves on;
Nor all your piety nor wit
Nor all your tears
Shall cancel half a line of it.…
But instead she was thinking, Well, I’m back on my bare ass where I started, but I ain’t yet flat on my back.
It was life that had taught Sister Heavenly not to cry. A crying whore was a liability; and she had started as a whore. At fifteen she had run away from the sharecropper’s shack her family had called home, with a pimp to be a whore because she was too cute and too lazy to hoe the corn and chop the cotton. He had told her that what she had to sell would find buyers when cotton and corn were a drug on the market. The memory brought a smile. He was a half-ass pimp but he was sweet, she thought. But in the end he had kicked her out like the others had afterwards with nothing but the clothes she had on her back.
Then her thoughts turned cynical: Even cotton got rotten with age and corn got too wormy to shuck.
Anyway, after she’d got onto the faith healing pitch, she had lived high on the hog, which meant she could eat pork chops and pork roasts instead of pig’s feet and chitterlings. It had been the other way around after that; she had been the ruler of the roost and had kicked her lovers out when she got tired of them.
She knocked out her pipe and put it away. The ocher-colored pupils of her eyes had become distended with a marbleized effect and pink splotches had formed beneath her leathery skin.
As she walked up White Plains Road the drab-colored buildings took on blinding bright hues in the sunshine. She hadn’t been that high in more than twenty years. Her feet seemed to glide through the air, but she was still in full command of her mind.
She began to suspect she had cased the whole caper wrong from the very beginning. She had figured it as a shipment of H, but maybe it wasn’t that at all.
It couldn’t be a mother-raping treasure map, she thought with exasperation. That old con game went out when airplanes came in.
Or could it? another part of her mind asked. Could it be that some gang had come up with some treasure somewhere and had made a map of its whereabouts? But what the hell kind of treasure? And how the hell would the map get into the hands of a square like Gus, a simpleminded apartment house janitor?
The weed jag made her thoughts dance like jitterbugs. She turned into a supermarket drugstore and ordered
