Blind Man With a Pistol (13 page)

     
"All right, stick with him."

     
When he had rung off, Grave Digger said, "What did he think we were going to do, go fishing?"

     
Coffin Ed grunted.

     
Take two crumbling, neglected, overcrowded brick buildings like the one they had just left, slam them together with a hallway down the middle like a foul-air sandwich, put two cement columns flanking a dirt-darkened glass-panelled door, and put the words, COZY FLATS, on the transom, and you have an incubator of depravity. There one could find all the vices of Harlem in microcosm: sex perversions, lesbians, pederasts, pot smokers, riders of the LSD, street hustlers and their cretinistic pimps sleeping in the same beds where they turned their tricks, daisy chains, sex circuses, and caterers to the society trade: wife-swappers, gang-fuckers, seekers of depravity -- name it, they had it.

     
But all the detectives found were closed doors, bedroom and toilet odors, the nose pinching smell of marijuana, the grunting and groaning of skin poppers and homosexuals, the muted whine of old blues played low.

     
The graffiti on the walls of the ground-floor hail gave the illusion of primitive painting of pygmies affected with elephantiasis of the genitals. A sign over a small green door beneath the staircase read: SUPERINTENDENT.

     
Sniffing the smells suggested by the graffiti, the sergeant said cynically, "Sin made easy."

     
"You call this easy?" Grave Digger flared. "You mean hot!"

     
Five minutes of hammering brought the superintendent up the stairs to open his door. He gave the appearance of having been asleep. He was clad in an old blue flannel robe with a frayed belt worn over wrinkled cotton pajamas with wide violently clashing red and blue stripes. His short kinky hair was burred from contact with the pillow and his smooth black skin had a tracery of lines as though the witches had been riding him. He held a blued steel .45 Colt automatic in his right hand and it was pointed on the level of their stomachs. He raked them with furious red eyes.

     
"What you want?"

     
The sergeant hastened with his shield. "We're the police."

     
"So what! You woke me out of a dead sleep."

     
"All right," Grave Digger said roughly. "You've made your point."

     
Slowly the man returned the automatic to the pocket of his robe, still holding it.

     
"You're Mr Covey, the superintendent?" the sergeant verified.

     
"Yeah, that's me."

     
"You always answer your door with a pistol?"

     
"You never know who's knocking at this time o' morning."

     
"Back up, buster, and let us in," Grave Digger said.

     
"You're the law," the man acknowledged, turning to precede them down the flight of brick stairs.

     
Grave Digger's first impression was he looked too arrogant to be the super of a joint like this, unless he had all the tenants working for him, like a sort of black Fagin. In which case, his being black would account for his arrogance.

     
To the average eye he was a thin superior-acting black man with a long smooth narrow face and a cranium that was almost a perfect ellipsoid. His thick-lipped mouth was as wide as his face and when he talked his lips curled back from even white teeth. His eyes had a slight Mongolian slant, giving his face a bitsa look, a bit of African, a bit of Nordic, a bit of Oriental. He was proud and handsome but there was a bit of effeminacy in his carriage. He looked very sure of himself.

     
The only thing missing was the sleep in the corners of his eyes.

     
Flinging open the door of his bedroom, he said, "_Entrez_."

     
The bedroom held a three-quarter bed that had been slept in; a rolltop desk with a green blotter, telephone, and desk chair; night-table with ashtray; television set on its separate stand and overstuffed leather armchair facing it, dressing table with black and white dolls flanking the mirror. Beyond the boiler room was a room used for a kitchen-dining-room and a shower room off from it with a toilet.

     
"You're fixed up cozy enough," Sergeant Ryan said. He had brought a fingerprint man and his photographer with him, and they grinned dutifully.

     
"That bother you?" Covey challenged.

     
The sergeant dropped all pleasantries, and began asking questions. Covey said he had been to the Apollo Theater and seen a gangster film called _Double or Nothing_ and a stage show which had The Supremes and Martha and The Vandellas and television comedian Bill Cosby, along with the house orchestra. Afterwards he had stopped at the bar of Frank's Restaurant and had a bean and cornbeef sandwich and had walked home down Eighth Avenue.

     
"You can check that?" Ryan said to the precinct detectives.

     
"Not easily," Grave Digger admitted. "Everybody goes to the Apollo and Frank's bar is so crowded at that time of night only celebrities stand out."

     
Covey hadn't seen anyone on entering the apartment and he lived alone so that once he was down in his hole he didn't see anyone until he came up the next day. If it wasn't for the garbage stinking if he didn't put it out, he could be down here dead for weeks and no one would notice. Didn't he have other duties besides putting out the garbage? In the winter he fired the boilers. Didn't he have any relatives? Sure, plenty, but they were all in Jamaica and he hadn't seen any of them since he had come to New York three years previous. Friends? Money was a man's only friend. Women? "What a question," Coffin Ed muttered, looking at the dolls. The sergeant reddened. Covey got on his dignity. There were women everywhere, he said. "Damn right," Grave Digger said. The sergeant dropped it. Who cleaned up, then? The tenants cleaned in front of their doors and the wind blew the dirt off the street. Well, all right, did he know about the cellar in the other house? Cellar? Basement? What about the basement? About the furnished room? Naturally he knew about the furnished room, he was the superintendent, wasn't he? Well, then, who did he rent it to? Rent it to? He didn't rent it to nobody. Who lived in it, then? Didn't nobody live in it in the summer; the company built it for a helper to sleep in in the winter -- someone to fire the boiler. What company was that? The owners, Acme Realty; they owned lots of buildings in Harlem. Was he the superintendent for them all? No, just these two. Did he know the officials of the company? No, just the building manager and the rent collector. Well, where were they located? They had an office on lower Broadway, in the Knickerbocker Building, just south of Canal Street. And what were the names of the men he knew? Well, Mr Shelton was the building manager and Lester Chambers was the rent collector. West Indians too? No, they were white. The sergeant dropped it. Well, to get back to the room in the other basement, could anyone live there without his knowing it? Not hardly, he was over there every morning to put out the garbage. But it was possible? Everything was possible, but it wasn't likely anybody would be living there with him not knowing; 'cause first they'd have to get in and the outside door had a Yale lock and he had the only two keys. He went across the room and took a large ring of keys from a hook on the wall beside the door and exhibited two brass Yale keys. And if they was to break in, he would see it first thing he got there to put out the garbage. But they could have had a key made? the sergeant persisted. Covey ran a hand over his burrs. What was he trying to get at? The sergeant asked his own question in reply. He had looked into the basement recently? Covey looked around impatiently; his gaze met Coffin Ed's; he looked away. What for? he countered. The place was only used in the winter; it was kept closed and locked in the summer to keep young punks from taking girls down there to rape them. He was a mighty distrustful man, the sergeant observed. Meeting people at the door with a pistol in his hand, thinking of teen-agers as rapists. The colored detectives joined Covey in a condescending smile. The sergeant noticed it, but passed it by. Did he, Covey, know what kind of people lived in these buildings he served? Naturally, he was the superintendent; all respectable, hard-working, honest, married people, like all Harlem tenants of Acme Realty. The sergeant's face was a picture of incredulity; he didn't know whether Covey was making fun of him or not. Coffin Ed and Grave Digger kept their faces absolutely blank. Well, someone had been living in the furnished room of that other basement, the sergeant announced abruptly. Impossible! Covey denied promptly. If anyone had been down there all the tenants on the ground floor would know about it for you could hear through that floor as good as you could hear through those walls. Then somebody was lying, the sergeant said, because not only had someone been living there but a man had been killed there only a few hours ago. Covey's eyes widened slowly until all the other features looked disarranged in his narrow face.

     
"You kidding, aren't you?" His voice was a shocked whisper.

     
"I'm not kidding," the sergeant said. "His throat was cut."

     
"I was just by there yesdiddy morning."

     
"You're going back this morning. Now! Put your clothes on. And give me that gun."

     
Covey moved in a daze, handing over the pistol docilely as he might have passed a plate. He looked stunned. "It ain't possible," he kept muttering to himself.

     
But sight of the bloody furnished room changed that quickly to rage. "Them mother-rapers upstairs know about it," he raved. "You couldn't cut a man down here without them hearing him scream."

     
They took him upstairs and confronted him with each of the three couples. Other than the vilest language that he had ever heard, the sergeant learned nothing new. Covey couldn't shake the tenants' story that they hadn't heard anything, and they couldn't shake his that he hadn't known about the room.

     
"Let's make an experiment," the sergeant said. "Ted, you and this man -- what's your name? Stan. You and Stan go down in the basement and yell, and the rest of us will stand in each of the rooms up here and see if we can hear you."

     
Putting their ears to the floor they could hear faintly in the middle room, occupied by Socrates and Poon Hoover, but they doubted if they could hear lying in the bed, although they didn't try. But they couldn't hear in the front and back rooms, nor in the kitchen which they tried too. But they could hear quite clearly in the hall and strangely enough they could hear in the john.

     
"Well, that narrows it down to everybody who was awake in the whole of Harlem," the sergeant said disgustedly. "You people go back to bed."

     
"What you want us to do with this one?" the white detectives who were flanking Covey asked.

     
"Hell, we'll take him on back and call it a day. None of these people can get anywhere, and maybe by tomorrow my brains won't be so fuzzy."

     
When Covey had disappeared through the entrance of the Cozy Flats, Coffin Ed got out of the car beside Grave Digger, and called, "Hey, wait a minute; I left my sound meter in your flat." But Covey didn't hear him.

     
"Go and get it," Grave Digger said. "I'll wait for you."

     
The white detectives looked at each other curiously. They hadn't seen Coffin Ed's sound meter either. But it wasn't anything to work up a sweat about; they all wanted to get home. But the sergeant wanted to have a word with the colored precinct detectives before he turned in so the fingerprint crew drove off and left him with his two disgruntled assistants, the photographer, Ted, and his driver, Joe.

     
Coffin Ed had been slightly surprised to find Covey's hall door unlocked, but he didn't hesitate. He went down silently and opened the door of Covey's bed-sitting-room without knocking and went inside.

     
Covey was leaning back in his desk chair with a wide, taunting grin. "I knew you'd follow me, you old fox. You thought you'd catch me telephoning. But I don't know nothing 'bout this business. I'm as clean as a minister's dick."

     
"That's too mother-raping bad," Coffin Ed said, his burnscarred face twitching like a French version of _the jerk_, as he moved in with his long nickel-plated, head-whipping pistol swinging in his hand. "Your ass pays for it."

     
Grave Digger didn't want to talk to the sergeant at that moment, so he radio-phoned Lieutenant Anderson at the precinct station.

     
"It's me, Digger."

     
"What's new?"

     
"Count me ninety seconds."

     
Without another word, Anderson began, "One, two, three.. . ." Not too fast, not too slow. At". . . ninety. . . ", Grave Digger slid across the seat and got out on the sidewalk and went towards the entrance of the Cozy Flats, loosening his pistol as he went.

     
"Hey. . . "the sergeant called, but he made as though he didn't hear him and went through the entrance and down the front hall.

     
When he entered Covey's bedroom, he found him lying sideways across the bed, a red bruise aslant his forehead, his left eye shut and bleeding, his upper lip swollen to the size of a bicycle tire, and Coffin Ed atop him with a knee in his solar plexus, choking him to death.

     
He clutched Coffin Ed by the back of the collar and pulled him back. "Leave him able to talk."

     
Coffin Ed looked down at the swollen bloody face beneath him. "You want to talk, don't you, mother?"