She crawled to the window, put her arms on the ledge, and sucked in the hot, stinking outside air.
Then she stood up, took off the bloody apron and spread it over the bloody carcass, peeled off her gloves and dropped them beside it. The rubber sheet was covered with blood and filth and some had run off onto the linoleum floor.
It ain’t any worse than some of the tricks I’ve turned, she thought.
She went to the basin and washed her hands, arms and feet. She took a fresh handkerchief from her bag, saturated it with pertume, and wiped her bald head, face, neck and arms, and feet. She remade her face, put on her gray wig and black straw hat, sat on the bed and put on her shoes and stockings, put down her skirt, picked up her beaded bag and parasol, and left the room, locking the door behind her and taking the key along.
The proprietor was coming in from the street as she went out.
“You left your dog,” he said.
“I’m coming back.”
“Will she be quiet while you’re gone?”
For the first time in more than thirty years Sister Heavenly felt slightly hysterical.
“She’s the quietest dog in the city,” she said.
19
First, Coffin Ed and the youth called Wop had driven out to the Bronx and looked at the remains of Sister Heavenly’s house. A police barricade had been thrown about it and experts from the safe and loft squad were still digging in the wreckage. One look had been enough for Coffin Ed.
Afterwards, employing Wop as his guide, he made a junkie’s tour of Harlem. Wop was known to all the landprops as Daddy Haddy’s runner and had the entree. Coffin Ed had the persuader.
Pushing Wop in front of him to ring the doorbells and give the passwords, with the muzzle of Grave Digger’s pistol poking in his spine, he had crashed all the notorious shooting galleries in Harlem, the joints where the addicts met to take their kicks and greet their chicks; where the skinpoppers and the schmeckers (those who used the needle and those who sniffed the powder), the pushers and the weedheads gathered for sex circuses and to listen to the real cool jive.
He had gone in with a long nickel-plated revolver in each hand and homicide in his eyes.
He had flushed famous jazzmen, international blues singers, sophisticated socialites both white and colored, prominent people both men and women, mingling with the racketeers and the gamblers, the whores and the thieves and the dregs of humanity; all being rooked together by the peddlers of the five-colored dreams and the cool dry jags and the hot sex licks.
He had encountered the furtive and the indignant, “respectable” women who had burst into tears, puffed-up jokers who claimed political pull; those who couldn’t care less about being caught and those who figured money would settle it.
His entrance had set off panic, engendered terror, triggered rage. Jokers on the lam had jumped from windows, landprops had threatened to call the police, housewives had hidden under beds, drug-crazed starkers had charged him with stickers.
He had tamed the rambunctious and pacified the pacifists. He was not a narcotics man; he didn’t even have a shield. His entrance was illegal and he had no authority. All he had had was muscle, and it hadn’t worked.
He had left a trail of hysteria, screaming jeebies, knotty heads and bloody noses. But it hadn’t meant a thing. He hadn’t gotten any leads, hadn’t found out anything he didn’t know. Just a blank.
No one had admitted to seeing Pinky all that day. No one had admitted to seeing a yellow-skinned cat-eyed woman in a green suit accompanied by two white mobsters looking for Pinky. No one had ever heard of Sister Heavenly. No one had known anything about anything. He couldn’t pull them in and sweat it out.
And yet he knew some of them were lying. He was certain, since talking to Kid Blackie, that Ginny, the janitor’s wife, and the two gunmen were making the same tour. They were either in front of him or behind him, or perhaps more than once they had crossed paths. But he hadn’t seen a sign of them, nothing to indicate whether they were following him or in front of him. He had doubled back and laid in wait and they hadn’t showed
Now it was eleven o’clock at night. Coffin Ed sat in his parked car with the lights off in the middle of a dark block on St Nicholas Avenue opposite the park. He could feel the trembling body of the youth beside him, even though they were separated by two feet of space. He could hear Wop’s teeth chattering in the dark. The youth’s jag had worn off and the smell of terror came from him like a sickening miasma.
Coffin Ed reached into the dark and turned on the dashboard radio to catch the eleven-o’clock news broadcast.
A mealymouthed male voice came on, imitating some big-name newscaster, and blabbed about domestic politics, the Cold War, what the Africans were doing, the latest on the civil rights front and a fistfight between two motion picture actors in El Morocco.
Coffin Ed wasn’t listening but the sound of the voice set his teeth on edge. The top of his head felt like it was coming off. He had long since discarded his goggles but his eyes felt gritty.
He tried to think, but his thoughts didn’t make any sense. They were jumping about in his head like buck- and-wing dancers on their last breath. “Give a little, take a little,” one side of his brain was saying, while the other side was cursing in a blinding rage. He thought for a moment of how he would line the mother-rapers up and shoot them down.
He realized that he was wandering badly and caught himself. “Ain’t no time to blow your top now, son,” he told himself.
They had just one more place to go. It was run by a Harlem society matron, and it wasn’t going to be easy to crash. He didn’t want to hurry it. If it turned out to be another blank, he’d be up shit alley.
“You said you was going to give me my fare to Chicago,” a choked dry voice stammered from the dark beside him.
“You’ll get it,” he said absently, his cluttered thoughts echoing, “He thinks that’s far enough.”
“Kin I get some of my clothes?”
“Why not?” he said automatically, but he didn’t even hear the question. The thought of Chicago had got mixed up with the two gunmen he was hunting and he added aloud, “Mother-rapers better get off the face of the earth.”
Wop shrunk into silence.
The voice from the radio blabbed on: “… when Queen Elizabeth passed over the bridge.…” It sounded to Coffin Ed as though he said “when Queen Elizabeth
“You going to take me by my room?” Wop stammered hesitantly.
“What for?”
“They going be laying for me. They going kill me. You know they going kill me. You promised you’d protect me. You said if I steered you to them cribs wouldn’t nobody hurt me. Now you going let ’em-” He began getting hysterical.
Coffin Ed drew back wearily and slapped him across the face.
The voice cut off and the hysteria subsided, followed by snuffling sounds.
Coffin Ed listened to the newscaster report the finding of Daddy Haddy’s body by the patrolman on the beat. The words caught in his brain like red-hot rivets: “… died of gunshot wounds received earlier today while investigating a homicide in the basement of an apartment house on Riverside Drive. Jones, known locally in Harlem as Grave Digger, was one of the famous Harlem Detective team, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. They were on suspension for assaulting an alleged dope peddler named Jake Kubansky who subsequently died. The assailant, or assailants, are unknown. Reports from the homicide bureau-”
He reached out and turned the radio off. It was a reflex action, without thought. Perhaps from a subconscious desire to reject the knowledge by stopping the voice.
His mind fought against acceptance. He sat without moving, without breathing. But finally it sank in.
“That’s it,” he said aloud.
