Blind Man With a Pistol (9 page)
Read Blind Man With a Pistol Online
Authors: Chester Himes
Tags: #Police Procedural, #Detective and mystery stories, #Police, #Mystery & Detective, #African American police, #Police - New York (State) - New York, #General, #Johnson; Coffin Ed (Fictitious character), #Harlem (New York; N.Y.), #African American, #Fiction, #Jones; Grave Digger (Fictitious character)
People gathered on the adjoining rooming-house steps, trying to see what they were doing. A patrol car drew to the curb, the two uniformed cops in the front seat looking on with interest.
The sergeant became exasperated. "You officers get these people out the way," he ordered irritably.
The cops got sullen. "Hey, you folks get over there with the others," one ordered.
"I lives here," a buxom light-complexioned woman wearing gilt mules and a stained blue nightgown muttered defiantly. "I just got out of bed to see what the noise was all about."
"Now you know," the homicide photographer said slyly.
The woman grinned gratefully.
"Do as you're ordered!"the car cop shouted angrily, stepping to the sidewalk.
The woman's plaits shook in outrage. "Who you talking to?" she shouted back. "You can't order me off my own steps."
"You tell 'em sister Berry," a pajama-clad brother behind her encouraged.
The cop was getting red. The other cop climbed from beneath the wheel on the other side and came around the car threateningly. "What was that you said?" he challenged.
She looked toward Grave Digger and Coffin Ed for support.
"Don't look at me," Grave Digger said. "I'm the law too."
"That's a nigger for you," the woman said scornfully as the white cops marched them off.
"All right, now bring the light here," the sergeant said, returning to the dark purple pool of congealing blood where the murdered man had died.
Before joining the others, Grave Digger went back to their car and turned off the lights.
The trail wasn't hard to follow. It had a pattern. An irregular patch of scattered spots that looked like spots of tar in the artificial light was interspersed every fourth or fifth step by a dark gleaming splash where blood had spurted from the wound. Now that all the soul people had been removed from the street, the five detectives moved swiftly. But they could still feel the presence of teeming people behind the dilapidated stone façades of the old reconverted buildings. Here and there the white gleams of eyes showed from darkened windows, but the silence was eerie.
The trail turned from the sidewalk into an unlighted alleyway between the house beyond the rooming house, which described itself by a sign in a front window reading: _Kitchenette Apts. All conveniences_, and the weather-streaked red-brick apartment beyond that. The alleyway was so narrow they had to go in single file. The sergeant had taken the power light from his driver, Joe, and was leading the way himself. The pavement slanted down sharply beneath his feet and he almost lost his step. Midway down the blank side of the building he came to a green wooden door. Before touching it, he flashed his light along the sides of the flanking buildings. There were windows in the kitchenette apartments, but all from the top to the bottom floor had folding iron grilles which were closed and locked at that time of night, and dark shades were drawn on all but three. The apartment house had a vertical row of small black openings one above the other at the rear. They might have been bathroom windows but no light showed in any of them and the glass was so dirty it didn't shine.
The blood trail ended at the green door.
"Come out of there," the sergeant said.
No one answered.
He turned the knob and pushed the door and it opened inward so silently and easily he almost fell into the opening before he could train his light. Inside was a black dark voids
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed flattened themselves against the walls on each side of the alley and their big long-barreled .38 revolvers came glinting into their hands.
"What the hell!" the sergeant exclaimed, startled.
His assistants ducked.
"This is Harlem," Coffin Ed grated and Grave Digger elaborated:
"We don't trust doors that open."
Ignoring them, the sergeant shone his light into the opening. Crumbling brick stairs went down sharply to a green iron grille.
"Just a boiler room," the sergeant said and put his shoulders through the doorway. "Hey, anybody down there?" he called. Silence greeted him.
"You go down, Joe, I'll light your way," the sergeant said.
"Why me?" Joe protested.
"Me and Digger'll go," Coffin Ed said. "Ain't nobody there who's alive."
"I'll go myself," the sergeant said tersely. He was getting annoyed.
The stairway went down underneath the ground floor to a depth of about eight feet. A short paved corridor ran in front of the boiler room at right angles to the stairs, where each end was closed off by unpainted panelled doors. Both the stairs and the corridor felt like loose gravel underfoot, but otherwise they were clean. Splotches of blood were more in evidence in the corridor and a bloody hand mark showed clearly on the unpainted door to the rear.
"Let's not touch anything," the sergeant cautioned, taking out a clean white handkerchief to handle the doorknob.
"I better call the fingerprint crew," the photographer said.
"No, Joe will call them; I'll need you. And you local fellows better wait outside, we're so crowded in here we'll destroy the evidence."
"Ed and I won't move," Grave Digger said.
Coffin Ed grunted.
Taking no further notice of them, the sergeant pushed open the door. It was black and dark inside. First he shone his light over the wall alongside the door and all over the corridor looking for electric light switches. One was located to the right of each door. Taking care to avoid stepping in any of the blood splotches, the sergeant moved from one switch to another, but none worked. "Blown fuse," he muttered, picking his way back to the open room.
Without having to move, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed could see all they wanted through the open door. Originally made to accommodate a part-time janitor or any type of laborer who would fire the boiler for a place to sleep, the room had been converted into a pad. All that remained of the original was a partitioned-off toilet in one corner and a washbasin in the other. An opening enclosed by heavy wire mesh opened into the boiler room, serving for both ventilation and heat. Otherwise the room was furnished like a boudoir. There was a dressing-table with a triple mirror, three-quarter bed with chenille spread, numerous foam-rubber pillows in a variety of shapes, three round yellow scatter rugs. On the whitewashed walls an obscene mural had been painted in watercolors depicting black and white silhouettes in a variety of perverted sex acts, some of which could only be performed by male contortionists. And everything was splattered with blood, the walls, the bed, the rugs. The furnishings were not so much disarrayed, as though a violent struggle had taken place, but just bloodied.
"Mother-raper stood still and let his throat be cut," Grave Digger observed.
"Wasn't that," Coffin Ed corrected. "He just didn't believe it is all."
The photographer was taking pictures with a small pocket camera but the sergeant sent him back to the car for his big Bertillon camera. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed left the cellar to look around.
The apartment was only one room wide but four storeys high. The front was flush with the sidewalk, and the front entrance elevated by two recessed steps. The alleyway at the side slanted down from the sidewalk sufficiently to drop the level of the door six feet below the ground-floor level. The cellar, which could only be entered by the door at the side, was directly below the ground-floor rooms. There were no apartments. Each of the four floors had three bedrooms opening on to the public hall, and to the rear was a kitchen and a bath and a separate toilet to serve each floor. There were three tenants on each floor, their doors secured by hasps and staples to be padlocked when they were absent, bolts and chains and floor locks and angle bars to protect them from intruders when they were present. The doors were pitted and scarred either because of lost keys or attempted burglary, indicating a continuous warfare between the residents and enemies from without, rapists, robbers, homicidal husbands and lovers, or the landlord after his rent. The walls were covered with obscene graffiti, mammoth sexual organs, vulgar limericks, opened legs, telephone numbers, outright boasting, insidious suggestions, and impertinent or pertinent comments about various tenants' love habits, their mothers and fathers, the legitimacy of their children.
"And people live here," Grave Digger said, his eyes sad.
"That's what it was made for."
"Like maggots in rotten meat."
"It's rotten enough."
Twelve mailboxes were nailed to the wall in the front hall. Narrow stairs climbed to the top floor. The ground-floor hallway ran through a small back courtyard where four overflowing garbage cans leaned against the wall.
"Anybody can come in here day or night," Grave Digger said. "Good for the whores but hard on the children."
"I wouldn't want to live here if I had any enemies," Coffin Ed said. "I'd be scared to go to the john."
"Yeah, but you'd have central heating."
"Personally, I'd rather live in the cellar. It's private with its own private entrance and I could control the heat."
"But you'd have to put out the garbage cans," Grave Digger said.
"Whoever occupied that whore's crib ain't been putting out any garbage cans."
"Well, let's wake up the brothers on the ground floor."
"If they ain't already awake."
8
"You're assuming that I'm a criminal because I'm married to a Negro and living in a Negro neighbourhood," Anny said tremulously. She still wore the dazed look from too much nigger and too much blood and the two black detectives weren't helping it any. She was down in the pigeon's nest on the bolted stool with the bright lights pouring over her, like any other suspect, but she'd already had a taste of this eye-searing glare and that didn't bother her as much as the indignity.
Coffin Ed and Grave Digger stood back in the shadow beyond the perimeter of the glare and she couldn't see their expressions.
"How does it feel?" Grave Digger asked.
"I know what you mean," she said. "I've always said it was unfair."
"We're holding you as a material witness," he explained.
"It's after midnight now," Coffin Ed said. "By eight o'clock this morning you'll be sprung."
"What he means is we've got to get such information as we can before then," Grave Digger explained.
"I don't know much," she said. "My husband's the one you ought to question."
"We'll get to him, we got to you," Coffin Ed said.
"It all came from Mister Sam wanting to get rejuvenated," she said.
"Did you believe in that?" Grave Digger asked.
"You sound like his chauffeur, Johnson X," she said.
He didn't dispute her.
"All colored people sound alike," Coffin Ed muttered.
A slow blush crept over her pale face. "It wasn't so hard," she confessed. "It was harder for my husband. You see, I have come to believe in a lot of things most people consider unbelievable."
Grave Digger continued the questioning. "How long had you known about it?"
"A couple of weeks."
"Did Mister Sam tell you?"
"No, my husband told me."
"What did he think about it?"
"He just thought it was a trick his father was playing on his wife, Viola."
"What kind of trick?"
"To get rid of her."
"Kill her?"
"Oh, no, he just wanted to be rid of her. You see, he knew she was having an affair with his attorney, Van Raff."
"Did you know him well?"
"Not well. He considered me his son's property, and he wouldn't poach --"
"Although he wanted to?"
"Maybe, but he was so old -- that's why he wanted to be rejuvenated."
"To have you?"
"Oh, no, he had his own. One white woman was the same as another to him -- only younger."
"Mildred?"
"Yes , the little tramp." She didn't say it vindictively, it was just descriptive.
"Anyway, she's young enough," Coffin Ed said.
"And he figured his wife and his lawyer were after his money?" Grave Digger surmised.
"That's what started it," she said, and then suddenly, as the memory washed over her, she buried her face in her hands. "Oh, it was horrible," she sobbed. "Suddenly they were savaging one another like wild beasts."