The Heat's On (11 page)

At the same time both were trying to reconstruct the layout of the basement from what little they had seen of it. On their previous visit they had noticed that the laundry was to the right of the back entrance facing a corridor which ran parallel to the back wall. Next to the laundry were the elevator, staircase to the front hall, a toolroom and the door to the janitor’s suite; all of which faced the blank whitewashed wall of the storeroom entered from the other side. Another hall running parallel with the front of the house turned off at right angles at the janitor’s door and no doubt continued around the other side of the house, encircling the basement. They had both noticed that the door to the boiler room opened off the front hall.

“I’d feel a hell of a lot better if I was heeled,” Grave Digger confessed.

“I got a notion we’re making rattlesnakes out of tadpoles,” Coffin Ed said.

“Let’s play it safe,” Grave Digger said. “Whoever cut this boy’s throat wasn’t kidding.”

Coffin Ed unhooked the dog’s chain from the doorknob, cracked the door and peered cautiously down the corridor.

“This situation is funny,” he said. “Here we are, supposed to be tough cops, and are scared to poke our heads out of this door in the basement of one of the safest houses in the city.”

“You call this safe?” Grave Digger said, indicating the gory stiff. “And it wouldn’t be so funny if you got your head blown off.”

“Well, we can’t stay holed up like two rats,” Coffin Ed said and threw open the door.

Grave Digger leaped to one side and flatted himself against the wall flanking the door, but Coffin Ed stood out in the open.

“You remind me of a Spanish captain I read about in a book by Hemingway,” Grave Digger said disgustedly. “This captain figured the enemies were all dead so he charged the dugout single-handed, beating his chest and yelling at them to come out and shoot him, showing how brave he was. And you know what— one of ‘em rose up and shot him through the heart.”

“Does that look like any enemy is out there?” Coffin Ed demanded.

In both directions, the brightly lit, whitewashed corridors were deserted and serene. The door to the laundry was open but the doors to the toolroom and boiler room were closed. But they had wire mesh in the place of upper panels and not a sound came from either room. It looked as peaceful as a grave. The idea of killers lurking in ambush seemed suddenly absurd.

“Hell, I’m going to look around,” Coffin Ed said.

But Grave Digger was still for playing it safe. “Not without a gun, man,” he cautioned again. Suddenly he was struck by an idea. “Let’s send out the dog to sniff around.”

Coffin Ed glanced at her scornfully. “She couldn’t hurt a mouse with that muzzle on.”

“I’ll fix that,” Grave Digger said and stepped over to the bitch and removed the muzzle and unhooked the chain.

He pushed her out into the corridor but she merely looked over her shoulder at him as though she wanted to come back in. He looked about for something to throw but everything movable was bloody, so he took off his hat and sailed it down the corridor in the direction of the boiler room door.

“There, boy, there, boy, go get it,” he urged.

But the bitch suddenly turned around with her tail between her legs and ran into the kitchen. They could hear her lapping up water.

“I’m going to call homicide,” Grave Digger said. “Have you seen a phone?”

“In the kitchen.”

“That’s a house phone.”

Coffin Ed stepped outside and looked up and down the corridors. “Here’s a pay phone beside the door. You got a dime?”

Grave Digger fished some change from his pocket. “Yeah.”

It was an old-fashioned telephone box attached to the wall with the mouthpiece on a level with the average man’s mouth. Grave Digger stepped around the corner, lifted the receiver and put in a dime. He held the receiver to his ear, waiting for the dial tone.

“I’m going to get a couple of wrenches or something we can use for saps, just in case,” Coffin Ed said, stepping over toward the toolroom.

“Why don’t you let it alone and let’s just wait for some cops with pistols,” Grave Digger called over his shoulder.

But Coffin Ed thought better. He pushed open the toolroom door and leaned inside, reaching for the light switch.

He never knew what hit him. Lights exploded in his head as though his brain had been dynamited right behind the eyes.

Grave Digger had just gotten the dial tone and had stuck his right index finger on the figure 7 when he heard the flat whacking sound made by the impact of a blunt instrument against a human skull. There could be no mistaking the sound; he had heard it often enough. He was moving, his head wheeling and ducking, before the sound of the following grunt reached his ears.

He never got around but his head had moved enough so that the bullet intended for his temple struck the guttapercha receiver in his left hand, shattered it but was deflected so that it merely burned a blister across the back of his neck.

The gunman was a marksman with a pistol. He was using a derringer with a sawed-off barrel and a silencer attached, similar to the one used by the gunman whom Uncle Saint had killed. At the sound of Coffin Ed opening the toolroom door, he had stepped from the boiler room into the corridor and had taken a bead on Grave Digger’s head, resting the meat side of his trigger hand in the crook of his raised left arm. But even the best of marksmen could miss with a one-shot gun, so he also held a .38caliber police positive in his left fist as insurance.

Grave Digger’s left hand and the whole left side of his head went numb and he felt as though he had been kicked in the head by a mule. But he was not stunned. He erupted into motion like the snapping of a clock spring. He went down into a rolling plunge toward the open door of the janitor’s suite.

He wasn’t looking toward the gunman; his eyes, his mind, his straining muscles, and all his five senses were concentrating on escape. But somehow his mind retained the impression of a face— a dead-white, death’s head face with colorless lips pulled back from small yellow teeth and huge deep-set eyes like targets on a pistol range: black balls rimmed with a thin line of white about which were large irregular patches of black — a hophead’s face.

The gunman straightened out his left arm and fired the police positive.

The bullet caught Grave Digger in his spin as he was turning on a long slant, almost horizontal to the floor. It went in underneath the left shoulder blade and came out three inches above the heart.

Grave Digger grunted once like a stuck hog and was knocked flat on his face. But he didn’t lose consciousness. He felt his face skidding across the slick cool surface of linoleum and he knew he had got inside the room. With a quick convulsive movement which consumed the last of his strength, he rolled over on his back like a cat turning in midair and kicked with his left foot toward the door, trying to close it. He missed it and his foot was in the air. His stabbing, desperate gaze went across it, and he found himself looking straight down the barrel of the police positive.

He thought fleetingly, without fear or regret, Digger, your number’s up.

That’s the last he knew.

Hopped to the gills, the gunman stalked forward on the balls of his feet to place another slug in the absolutely motionless body, but the second gunman, standing by the toolroom, door, shouted, “For chrissakes, cummon, Goddammit! Did you have to use that sonofabitching cannon?”

The hoppedup gunman paid him no attention. He was intent on pumping another slug into his victim.

But suddenly a woman let out a scream. It was a scream of unbelievable volume and immeasurable terror. You could tell it was a colored woman screaming by the heart she put into it. It was the loudest screaming the hoppedup gunman had ever heard and it shattered his control like glass breaking.

He started to run blindly and without direction. He ran headlong into the second gunman, who grappled with him and they struggled furiously for a brief moment.

The colored maid was standing as she had stepped from the elevator. The basket of soiled clothes lay overturned on the floor where it had fallen from her hands. Her body was rigid. Her mouth formed an ellipsoid big enough to swallow an ostrich egg, showing the chewing edges of her molars, a white-coated tongue flatted between the bottom teeth and humped in the back against the tip of a palate which hung down like a blood-red stalagmite. Her neck muscles were corded. Her popeyed stare was fixed. Screams kept pouring from her mouth with an unvarying, nerveshattering resonance.

The second gunman got his left arm free and slapped the hoppedup gunman twice across the face.

Sanity returned to the dilated pupils, along with terror.

He holstered the police positive in a right-shoulder sling, dropped the derringer into his right coat pocket, and went up the stairs as though the furies were after him.

“Not so fast, you hophead bastard!” the second gunman called from behind him. “
Walk
out into the street.”

The
Queen Mary
sailed at twelve noon sharp.

Wharf attendants said they had never witnessed so much confusion at the sailing of a Cunard Line ship.

Two of the tugboats on hand to ease the big ship from its mooring ran together. An able-bodied seaman was knocked into the drink and one of the tugboat captains choked on his false teeth.

Two stout businessmen celebrating the departure of their wives, along with a fat lady seeing off her daughter, fell off the dock and the
Queen
had to backwater until they were fished out.

The dock police trying to keep the people behind the guard lines were mobbed. Fights broke out; several people were trampled.

Fifteen hundred passengers were on board and five thousand people on the dock to see them off. With the blowing of the tugboat whistles, the shouting of orders, the screaming of goodbyes from six thousand five hundred throats, there was enough noise to arouse the inhabitants of a cemetery.

Authorities said it was due to the excessive heat. The threat of a thunderstorm had passed over and the sun beat down from a cloudless sky.

In the general confusion, no one gave Pinky a second glance. An international atmosphere prevailed; thoughts dwelled on faraway places and people. Those who saw him put him down as either an African politician, a Cuban revolutionary, a Brazilian snake charmer, or just a plain ordinary Harlem shoeshine boy.

Pinky was looking for the trunk.

While everyone’s attention was directed to the confusion on the dock, he looked through the pile of freight inside the shed at the end of the wharf.

One of the guards came back and caught him there.

“What you doing in here, boy? You know you ain’t got any business here.”

“I’m looking for Joe,” Pinky said, ducking and dodging like a halfwit to divert the guard’s suspicions.

Like all colored people, Pithy knew if he acted stupid enough the average white man would pass him off as a harmless idiot.

The guard looked at Pithy and suppressed a smile.

Pinky was sweating and where the dye had run he had big purple splotches across the back of his red jersey silk shirt, down the front, underneath the arms and on the seat of his Palm Beach pants. Sweat was running down his face, collecting on the knot of his chin strap to his hat and dripping to the floor.

“Joe who?” the guard asked.

“Joe the porter. You know Joe.”

“Look upstairs where they keep the passenger luggage; porters don’t work here,” the guard said.

“Yassah,” Pinky said and shuffled off.

A moment later the guard told a co-worker who had come over to join him, “See that darky there?” He pointed. “The one in the white hat and red shirt going upstairs.”

The second guard looked dutifully.

“He’s sweating ink,” the first guard said.

The second guard smiled indulgently.

“I mean it,” the first guard said. “Look there on the floor. That’s where he sweated.”

The second guard looked at the purple blots on the gray concrete floor and grinned unbelievingly.

The first guard grew indignant. “You don’t believe it? Go look at him for yourself.”

The second guard conceded with a nod.

The first guard relaxed. “I’ve heard of darkies sweating ink,” he said. “But this is the first time I’ve ever seen it.”

Pinky saw the truth the moment he approached the section for the luggage that went aboard ship. All the luggage that had surrounded it had been loaded and it stood by itself.

He didn’t go near it. He seemed satisfied just by the sight of it.

The next thing was to find the African.

He took up a station behind a concrete pier underneath the railroad trestle and watched the people as they left the wharf. He didn’t anticipate any difficulty in locating him among the throng. He gonna look like a fly in a glass of buttermilk, he thought.

But after an hour he gave it up. If the African had been there to see Gus and Ginny off, he would have left by then.

He decided to go uptown and check with the African’s landlady. If he lost the African he was going to be caught holding the bag.

The African had a room at 145th Street and Eighth Avenue. The hell of it was how to get there without getting nabbed by the cops. It had occurred to him that he was beginning to look conspicuous with the dye running all over his clothes. Besides which he didn’t have but fifteen cents, and he couldn’t take a taxi if he had found a driver willing to take him.

While he was giving this some thought an old sandwichman shuffled along the sidewalk opposite the wharves, looking wistfully into all the bars he passed. Pithy’s mind was cool and sharp from the four speedballs he had loaded his veins with that morning.

He read the advertisement on the signboards hanging fore and aft the old man’s shoulders:

BLINSKY’S BURLESQUE

in

Jersey City

50
Beautiful Girls
50

10
Glamorous Striptease Artistes
10

6
Zippy Comedians
6

GREATEST DISPLAY ON EARTH