Blind Man With a Pistol (23 page)

     
"Anyway, no harm done," Coffin Ed said, making the introductions. "My partner, Digger: my wife's cousin, Barbara."

     
Grave Digger looked as though he'd been insulted. "Come on, man, let's wash up and split. We ain't on vacation."

     
"You know where the bathroom is," Barbara said.

     
Coffin Ed looked as though he'd like to deny it, but he just said, "Yeah, all right. Maybe you can loan us some clean shirts of your husband's too."

     
Grave Digger gave him a sour look. "Cut out the bullshit, man; if this girl's got a husband, so have I."

     
Coffin Ed looked like his feelings were hurt. "Why not? We ain't customers."

     
Ignoring all their private talk, she said from her position on the floor, "You can have all his clothes you want. He's gone."

     
Coffin Ed looked startled. "For good?"

     
"It ain't for bad," she said.

     
Grave Digger had stepped into the kitchen, looking for the bath. He noticed the black and white checked linoleum had been recently scrubbed. Beside the sink was a pail of dirty suds, and standing beside it a long-handled scrub brush wrapped in a towel that had been used for dry. But it didn't strike him as strange in that kind of pad. A whore was subject to do anything, he thought.

     
"This way," he heard Coffin Ed call and found his way to the bath.

     
Coffin Ed had hung his pistol on the doorknob and stripped to the waist and was washing noisily in the bowl, splashing dirty water all over the spotlessly clean floor.

     
"You make more mess than a street sprinkler," Grave Digger complained, stripping down himself.

     
When they'd finished, Barbara led them to a built-in clothes closet in the bedroom. Each chose a sport shirt in candy-colored stripes and a sport coat in building-block checks. There weren't any other kinds. But they were big enough to allow for the shoulder holsters and still have enough flare from the side vents to look like giant grasshoppers.

     
"You look like a horse in that blanket," Coffin Ed said.

     
"No, I don't," Grave Digger contradicted. "No horse would stand still for this."

     
Barbara came back from the sitting-room. She had a dust cloth in her hand. "They look just fine," she said, studying them critically.

     
"Now I know why your old man left you," Grave Digger said.

     
She looked puzzled.

     
"It's a hot night to be housecleaning," Coffin Ed said.

     
"That's why I'm cleaning."

     
It was his turn to look puzzled. "Cause it's hot?"

     
"Cause he gone."

     
Grave Digger chuckled. They had gravitated into the sitting-room and upon hearing a Negroid voice saying loudly, "Be calm --" they all turned and looked at the color television. A white man was shown standing on the platform of a police sound truck, exhorting his listeners: 'Go home. It's all over. Just a misunderstanding. . . ." At just that moment he was shown in closeup so all one could see were his sharp Caucasian features talking directly to the television audience. But suddenly the perspective changed, showing all of the intersection of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue with a sea of faces of different colors. Except for the prevalence of so many black faces and such bright clothes, and the cops in uniform, it might have been a crowd scene from any Hollywood film about the Bible. But there aren't that many black people in the Bible. And no cops like those cops. It was a riot scene in Harlem. But no one was rioting. The only movement was of people trying to get before the cameras, get on television.

     
The white man was saying, ". . . no way to protest in justice. We colored people must be the first to uphold law and order."

     
The cameras briefly showed the spectators booing, then switched quickly to other sound trucks, occupied by colored people who were no doubt race leaders, and various white men whom Grave Digger and Coffin Ed recognized as the chief inspector of police, the Police Commissioner, the District Attorney, a Negro assistant police commissioner, a white congressman, and Captain Brice of the Harlem precinct, their boss. They didn't see Lieutenant Anderson, their assistant boss. But they noticed three people in one truck who looked like types of Negroes in a wax museum. One was a black hare-lip man in a metallic-blue suit, another a narrow-headed young man who might have been demonstrating Negro youth lacking opportunity and the third, a well-dressed, handsome, whitehaired, prosperous-looking man who was certainly the successful type. All of them looked vaguely familiar, but they couldn't place them just at the moment. Their thoughts were on other things.

     
"Wonder the big boss ain't beating up his chops about that ain'tthe-right-way and crime-don't-pay shit," Grave Digger said.

     
"Ought to be," Coffin Ed said. "He'll never have as full a house again."

     
"I see they left little boss man to hold down the fort."

     
"Don't they always?"

     
"Let's go down and buzz him."

     
"Naw, we'd better go in."

     
On their way down the stairs, Grave Digger asked, "Where'd you find that?"

     
"In trouble. Where else?"

     
"You been holding out on me."

     
"Hell, I don't tell you everything."

     
"Sure don't. What was the rap?"

     
"Delinquency."

     
"Hell, Ed, that woman ain't been a delinquent since you were a little boy."

     
"It was a long time ago. I straightened her out."

     
Grave Digger turned his head but it was too dark to see. "So I see," he said.

     
"You want her to scrub floors?" Coffin Ed demanded testily.

     
"Ain't that what she been doing?"

     
Coffin Ed snorted. "You never know what a whore'll do after midnight."

     
"I was thinking about you, Ed."

     
"Hell, Digger, I ain't Chinese. I just saved her from a juvenile rap, ain't responsible for the rest of her life."

     
They emerged on to the street looking like working stiffs trying to play pimps, filled with complaints about their broads.

     
"Now to get back to the station before someone makes us," Grave Digger said, as he walked around the car and climbed beneath the wheel.

     
"Just don't go by the riot is all," Coffin Ed said, sliding in beside him.

     
Lieutenant Anderson came into the detective room as they were searching their lockers for a change of clothes. He looked startled.

     
"Don't say it," Grave Digger said. "We're the last of the end men."

     
Anderson grinned. "Be seated, gentlemen."

     
"We ain't beat our bones yet," Grave Digger added.

     
"We lost our bones," Coffin Ed elaborated.

     
"All right, Doctor Bones and Doctor Jones, stop in the office when you're ready."

     
"We're ready now," Grave Digger said and Coffin Ed echoed:

     
"As we're ever going to be."

     
Both had finished transferring the paraphernalia of their trade to the pockets of their own spare jackets. They followed Lieutenant Anderson into the Captain's office. Grave Digger perched a ham on the edge of the big flat-top desk, and Coffin Ed propped his back against the wall in the darkest corner as though holding up the building.

     
Anderson sat well back of the green-shaded desk lamp in the Captain's chair, looking like a member of the green race.

     
"All right, all right, out with it," he said. "I take it from those smirks on your faces that you know something we don't."

     
"We do," Grave Digger said.

     
"It's just that we don't know what is all," Coffin Ed echoed.

     
The brief dialogue about the prostitute had attuned their minds to one another, so sharply they could read each other's minds as though they were their own.

     
But Anderson was accustomed to it. "All joking aside --" he began, but Coffin Ed cut him off:

     
"We ain't joking."

     
"It ain't funny," Grave Digger added chuckling.

     
"All right, all right! I take it you know who started the riot."

     
"Some folks call him by one name, some another," Coffin Ed said.

     
"Some call him lack of respect for law and order, some lack of opportunity, some the teachings of the Bible, some the sins of their fathers," Grave Digger expounded. "Some call him ignorance, some poverty, some rebellion. Me and Ed look at him with compassion. We're victims."

     
"Victims of what?" Anderson asked foolishly.

     
"Victims of your skin," Coffin Ed shouted brutally, his own patchwork of grafted black skin twitching with passion.

     
Anderson's skin turned blood red.

     
"That's the mother-raper at the bottom of it," Grave Digger said. "That's what's making these people run rampage on the streets."

     
"All right, all right, let's skip the personalities--"

     
"Ain't nothing personal. We don't mean you, personally, boss," Grave Digger said. "It's your color --"

     
"My color then--"

     
"You want us to find the instigator," Grave Digger contended.

     
"All right, all right," Anderson said resigned, throwing up his hands. "Admitted you people haven't had a fair roll --"

     
"Roll? This ain't craps. This is life!" Coffin Ed exclaimed. "And it ain't a question of fair or unfair."

     
"It's a question of law, if the law don't feed us, who is?"

     
Grave Digger added.

     
"You got to enforce law to get order," Coffin Ed said.

     
"What's this, an act?" Lieutenant Anderson asked. "You said you were the last of the end men, you don't have to prove it. I believe you."

     
"It ain't no act," Coffin Ed said, "Not ours anyway. We're giving you the facts."

     
"And one fact is the first thing colored people do in all these disturbances of the peace is loot," Grave Digger said. "There must be some reason for the looting other than local instigation, because it happens everywhere, and every time."

     
"And who're you going to charge for inciting them to loot?" Coffin Ed demanded.

19

     
The Harlem detectives knew him well. They looked at him. He looked back through his old glazed eyes. No one spoke. They kept their record straight.

     
Jonas "Fats" Little came to Harlem from Columbus, Georgia, thirty years before at the age of twenty-nine. It had been an open city then. White people had come in droves to see the happy, exotic blacks, to hear the happy jazz from New Orleans, to see the happy dances from the cotton fields. Negroes had aimed to please. They worked in the white folks' kitchens, grinning happily all the time; they changed the white folks' luck and accepted the resulting half-white offspring without protest or embarrassment. They made the best of their ratridden slums, their gingham dresses and blue denim overalls, their stewed chitterlings and pork bones, their ignorance and Jesus. From the very first, Fats was at home. He understood that life; it was all he'd ever known. He understood the people; they were his soul brothers and sisters.

     
His first job was shining shoes in a barbershop in the Times Square subway station. But the folks uptown in the rooming house where he lived on 117th Street loved the down-home sausage he made for Aunty Cindy Loo, his landprop, from pork scraps he got from the pork concessionaires in the West Forties around the NYC freight line, Saturday afternoons when they shut for the weekends. Other landprops and soul folks running home-cooking joints heard about his sausages, which were dark gray in color from pepper and spices, and melted in the mouth like shortening bread when fried. His landprop put up the capital and provided her kitchen and meat grinder, and they went into business making the original "Cindy Loo Country Sausage", which they sold in brown paper sacks to Harlem restaurants and pork stores and professional sponsors of house rent parties. Soon he was famous and sporting a La Salle limousine with a crested hog's head painted on each of the front doors, a yellow diamond set in a heavy gold band. He was known throughout Harlem as the "Sausage King". That was long before the days of angry blacks and civil rights and black power. A black man with a white woman and a big car was powerful enough. But Fats didn't have any white women -- he liked boys.

     
It was only natural that he became a policy banker. When Dutch Schultz was rubbed out, every sport in Harlem who had two white quarters to rub together opened a policy house. The difference in Fats' was he succeeded, mainly because he didn't stop making sausage. Instead he expanded, taking over the premises of a coal and wood shed on upper Park Avenue, under the NYC railroad trestle, for his factory. And when Cindy Loo died, it was all his own. And he lasted longer than most of the other brothers because he came to terms immediately with the Syndicate, and handed over forty per cent of his gross take to the white man who let him live, without argument. Fats had the advantage over other ambitious brothers, because he always knew who he was. But the Syndicate took all of the hard out of the dick, and soon Fats was earning more from his sausage than his numbers. But the Syndicate didn't want to lose a good man like Fats, who didn't make trouble and knew his place, so they made him their connection in Harlem for horse. That was when he had married that tall tan lesbian chick then working in the chorus line at Small's Paradise Inn, who was still his wife. What with his other affairs, keeping his boys apart and out of the way of his lesbian wife, supervising the manufacture and sales of his sausages, the cutting and distributing of heroin for all the Harlem pushers was too risky; and he got out just one jump ahead of the feds by dumping the shipment for that month into the meat grinder with his sausage moments before they broke in the door. Fats knew his heart wouldn't stand too many capers like that so he looked around for something less hectic and had got in on the LSD trade at the start. Now the extent of his carousing was to take a trip with his favorite boy.