The Heat's On (14 page)

She looked at her locket-watch when she had paid off the taxi driver in front of Riverside Church. It read 3:37.

She looked up and down the street. The prowl cars had gone and there was no sign left of the police unless it was the black sedan parked down the street from the entrance to the apartment.

She had a sinking sensation in her stomach as the thought occurred to her that it might already be too late.

She opened her parasol and holding it in her left hand and her heavy black beaded bag on her right arm, took hold of her skirt on the right side and lifting it slightly, sailed down the street and turned into the apartment house.

A big stolid-looking white cop was on guard at the door. He did a double take.

“Hey, whoa there, ma’am,” he said, stopping her. “You can’t go in here.”

On second thought he added, “Unless you live here.”

“Why not?” she countered. “Is it quarantined?”

“What do you want in here, if you don’t live here?” he reiterated.

“I’m taking up subscriptions for the colored peoples’ Old Folks Home,” she said blandly.

But he was a conscientious cop. “Do you have a license?” he demanded. “Or at least any identification or something to show who you are?”

She arched her eyebrows. “Do I need any? After all, I’m a sponsor.”

“Well, you’ll have to come back later, I’m afraid. You see, the police are conducting a search in there right now and they don’t want any strangers in the house.”

“A search!” she exclaimed, giving the impression of horrified shock. “For a body buried in the basement?”

The cop grinned. She reminded him of a character out of a stage play he had seen once.

“Well, not exactly a body, but a buried treasure,” he said.

“My land!” she said. “What’s the world coming to?”

His grin widened. “Ain’t it awful?”

She started to turn away. “Well, if they find it, don’t forget the old colored people,” she said.

He laughed out loud. “Never!” he said.

She went into the next-door apartment house and took up a station in the foyer from which she could watch the entrance next door. Passing tenants looked at her curiously, but she paid them no attention.

One thing was for sure, she was thinking; if it was there, the police would find it. But on the other hand, why hadn’t the two gunmen found it, since they would know exactly what they were looking for?

Her head swam with doubts.

I wish to Jesus Christ! knew what the hell I was looking for, she thought.

She saw a small panel truck pull up before the house next door. It had the letters S.P.C.A. painted on the sides.

Now what the hell is this? she thought.

She saw two men wearing heavy leather gloves and long white dusters alight from the compartment and enter the house.

A few minutes later they returned, leading Pinky’s dog Sheba by a heavy chain leash.

And all of a sudden it exploded in her head. All this goddamn time wasted! she thought disgustedly. And there it was all the time.

It fitted like white on rice.

She watched the attendants put the dog into the body of the S.P.C.A. truck and drive away. She had tofight back the impulse to rush out and call the bitch by name and claim her. But she knew she’d wind up in the pokey and they’d still have the dog. It was like watching a friend go down in the middle of the sea, she thought. You could feel for him but you couldn’t reach him.

She started racking her memory trying to figure out what S.P.C.A. stood for. It couldn’t be
Special Police for Collaring Animals
. That didn’t make any sense. What would they have special police to collar animals for when any policeman could do it?

Then suddenly she remembered:
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
. Where she had heard about it she didn’t know, but there it was.

She left her station and walked over to Broadway and entered the first bar. It took a little time to find the telephone number of the Manhattan branch of S.P.C.A.

A woman’s pleasant, impersonal voice answered her call.

“I’ve heard you sell stray dogs,” Sister Heavenly said. “I’d like to buy a dog.”

“We don’t actually sell the stray dogs that are brought in to us,” the woman explained. “We try to find congenial homes for them where they will fit in with the families, and we ask for a donation of two dollars to help carry on the work of the foundation.”

“Well, that’s all right,” Sister Heavenly said. “I can spare two dollars. Have you got any dogs on hand?”

“Well, yes, but is there any particular kind of dog you would like?”

“I want a big dog. A dog as big as a lion,” Sister Heavenly said.

“We seldom have dogs that size,” the woman said doubtfully. “And we are very particular about whom we let take them. Could you give me an idea of your reasons for wanting a dog that size?”

“It’s like this,” Sister Heavenly said. “I have a roadhouse in New Jersey. It’s not far from Hoboken. And to be frank with you, it’s not the most law-abiding place you can find. But there’s a big fenced-in yard for the dog to run. And of course there’re always plenty of bones, not to mention meat, for him to eat.”

“I see. You need it for a watchdog?”

“Yes. And he can’t be too big. Our last watchdog was fairly big. He was a German dog. But prowlers killed him.”

“I see. You say
him
. Does it make any difference if the dog is female?”

“That’s all the better. As long as she’s big.”

“It so happens that you have called at an opportune time,” the pleasant-voiced woman said. “There might be a large female dog available within a few days. Would you mind giving me your name and address?”

“A few days!” Sister Heavenly exclaimed, filling her voice with dismay. “I thought I could get one today. I’m leaving tomorrow on two weeks’ vacation and I want to leave the dog there with the caretaker while I’m gone.”

“Oh, that’s not possible, you see we have to check…. But… . Won’t you hold on for a moment, perhaps….”

Sister Heavenly held on.

After a time the pleasant voice said, “Hello, are you there?”

“Yes, I’m still here.”

“Well, it’s quite likely that you may get your big dog today just as you wish. It’s highly irregular of course, but one has just come in and — if you will call me back an hour from now we will give you a definite answer. Okay?”

“Okay,” Sister Heavenly said and hung up.

She looked at her watch. It read 4:03.

She telephoned back at exactly 5 o’clock.

The pleasant-voiced woman said she was so sorry, but a detective had come and had taken the dog away.

Sister Heavenly knew just how people felt when they said “
Doggone!
”

Coffin Ed was in a crying rage, caught up in an impotent selftormenting fury that gave to his slightly disfigured face a look of ineffable danger.

“These miserable motherraping crumbs,” he grated through clenched teeth. “These sonofabitching rathole snakeshit hoppedup sons of syphilitic whores with their doctored rods trying to play tough by shooting an unarmed man in the back. But they ain’t seen nothing yet.”

He was talking to himself.

There was an electric clock on the wall at the end of the dazzling white hospital corridor. It read 2:26.

He thought bitterly, Yeah, they suspended us for punching a motherraping pusher in the guts and ain’t three hours passed before some drugged-up killer has got Digger.

Tears were seeping from his eyes and catching in the fine scar ridges between the patches of grafted skin on his face as though his very skin was crying.

Nurses and interns passing down the corridor gave him a wide berth.

What made it all the worse, he felt a sense of guilt. If I hadn’t been so motherraping cute and had listened to Digger and just let it alone until the guys from homicide came he might not have got it, he thought.

Grave Digger lay on the operating table beyond the closed white door. Death wasn’t two feet off. He needed blood and they had used the one lone pint of his type blood they had in store. It wasn’t enough. The only other place they had it was in the Red Cross blood bank in Brooklyn. A police car led by two motorcycle cops opening up the city traffic was bringing it as fast as anything could possibly move in the big congested town. But time was rapidly running ut.

Coffin Ed had just been told he didn’t have the type of blood Grave Digger needed.

Now I can’t even do this for him, he thought. But one thing is for sure, if he goes down, he ain’t going alone.

He had a lump on the side of his head, back of the left ear, as big as a goose egg, and his head seemed split in all directions by a blinding headache that began behind the eyes. The doctors had said he had concussion and had tried to put him to bed. But he had fought them off with a raving scarcely controlled violence and they had gotten the hell away from him.

It was a high-class, well-equipped hospital, the nearest to the scene of the shooting; and he knew if Grave Digger could be saved, they would save him there. But that did nothing to assuage his self-condemning rage.

Down at the end of the corridor he saw his and Grave Digger’s wife ascending the head of the stairs. He turned and fled through the first doorway. He found himself in a room for minor surgery. The lights were off and it was temporarily out of use.

He couldn’t bear to face Grave Digger’s wife and he didn’t want to see his own. His daughter was in a summer camp in the Catskills. There was no one to hinder him. Mentally, he thanked someone for this small favor.

The wives were not permitted in the operating room. They stood outside the door in the corridor, their brown faces set like graven images. From time to time Grave Digger’s wife touched a handkerchief to her eyes. Neither of them spoke.

Coffin Ed looked for a way to get out. There was a connecting door at the end of the room but it was locked. He raised the bottom half of the frosted-glass window. It opened onto a fire escape. He went outside. A group of medical students in an adjoining building stopped to watch him. He didn’t notice them. He went down one story and the swing ladder dropped to the paved driveway that led to the emergency entrance at the rear.

He went out to the street and walked bareheaded in the blinding midday sunshine to where his car was parked on Riverside Drive. Heat shimmered before his vision, distorting his perspective. His head ached like rheumatic fever of the brain.

Half an hour later he pulled into the driveway of his house in Astoria, Long Island. How he managed to get there he never knew.

He had been given a sedative at the hospital to take home. The label on the bottle read:
One teaspoonful every hour
. He tossed it into the trash can outside the kitchen door and let himself into the kitchen.

He put the Silex coffee maker on the gas stove, with enough coffee in it to make mud. While waiting for it to boil he stripped off his clothes and piled them on the chair beside the bed. In the bathroom medicine cabinet he found a bottle of Benzedrine tablets. He took two and drank water from the washbowl faucet in his cupped hand. He heard the coffee maker boiling and went into the kitchen and turned off the fire.

After that he took a shower, turning it from lukewarm to as cold as he could bear. He held his breath and his teeth chattered as the cold needles bit into his skin. His head felt as though sheets of lightning were going off in his brain, but the lethargy left his limbs.

He toweled and went into the bedroom and put on jockey shorts, nylon socks, lightweight black shoes with rubber soles, the pants to his brand-new dark gray summer suit, and a blue oxford cloth shirt with a button-down collar. He omitted the tie. He didn’t want anything to be in his way when he reached for the handle of his revolver.

His shoulder holster hung from a hook inside the door of the clothes closet. The special-made, long-barreled, nickelplated .38caliber revolver, that had shot its way to fame in Harlem, was in the holster. He took it out, spun the chamber, rapidly ejecting the five brassjacketed cartridges, and quickly cleaned and oiled it. Then he reloaded it, putting a U.S. army tracer bullet into the last loaded chamber and leaving the one under the trigger empty so there wouldn’t be an accident in case he had to club some joker across the head with the butt.

He placed the revolver on the bed and took down the holster. From the shelf in the closet he took a can of seal fat and smeared a thick coating on the inside of the holster. He wiped the excess off with a clean handkerchief, tossed the hankerchief into the soiledclothes hamper, and strapped on the shoulder sling. When he had cradled the revolver, he strapped a stopwatch to his left wrist.

He chose a knockout sap from the collection in his dresser drawer. It was made of plaited cowhide covering a bananashaped hunk of soft solder, with a whalebone handle. He stuck this into a hip pocket made especially for that purpose.

He slipped a Boy Scout knife into his left pants pocket. As an afterthought he stuck a thin flat hunting knife with a grooved hard-rubber handle, sheathed in soft pigskin, inside the back of his pants alongside his spinal column, and snapped the sheath to his belt. Not that he thought he would need it, but he didn’t want to overlook anything that might keep him living until his job was done.

I’d drink some
everlasting
water if I knew where some was at, he thought grimly.

Then he put on his coat. He had chosen that suit because the coat was bigger than any of his others and it had been tailor-made to accommodate his shoulder sling.

He dropped a new box of cartridges into the leather-lined pocket on the left side, then put a handful of cartridges with tracer bullets into the leather-lined pocket on his right side.

He went into the kitchen and drank two cups of scalding hot, mud-thick coffee. It recoiled in his empty stomach like cold water on a hot stove, but stayed down. The Benzedrine had killed his appetite and left a dry brackish taste in his mouth. He scarcely noticed it.

Just as he was about to leave the house the telephone rang. For a moment he debated whether to ignore it, then went back into the bedroom and picked up the receiver.