The Heat's On (16 page)

“You said that before. What mistake?”

Coffin Ed let the handle to the dog chain drop to the floor. “I ain’t playing,” he said.

Red Johnny folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. His gaze dropped slightly to the impression of the gun stick in Coffin Ed’s belt.

“Course you ain’t rightly got no authority to come in here and ast me no questions ‘bout nobody,” he began, and from across the table Red Marie warned, “Don’t push him, Johnny.”

“I ain’t pushing him and I ain’t going to let him push me neither. I done already told him I don’t know no Pinky and he can-“

He never got to say what Coffin Ed could do. One whole side of Coffin Ed’s face convulsed in a muscular spasm as his right hand flashed toward his hip. Red Johnny moved out of animal reflex; his head jerked about, eyes following the movement of Coffin Ed’s hand; his left foot braced against the floor; his left arm flew up instinctively to ward off the blow. He didn’t see the motion of Coffin Ed’s left hand at all as it came from the front with Grave Digger’s pistol and smashed the barrel in a backhanded swing straight across his loose-lipped mouth.

The whole front line of Red Johnny’s teeth caved into his mouth, two of the bottom teeth flew out sidewise like corn topping, and Red Johnny spun over backward in the tubular chair. The back of his head hit the linoleum floor with a dull thud while at the same instant his feet flew upward and kicked the bottom of the enamel table. The whiskey bottle rose six inches in the air and shattered the drinking glass when it came down.

The abrupt ear-shattering din panicked the dog. She leapt over Red Johnny’s face, making for the inner door. Red Johnny thought she was leaping for his throat and tried to scream. Nothing came out but a spray of blood and he choked on his teeth.

Coffin Ed didn’t see it. He had swung back to take a left-handed bead on Red Marie’s stomach, and had frozen her in midstnde, her right hand waving out in front, left hand floating out behind, her big sloppy fat body poised on the ball of her right foot like a rip-roarious burlesque of a ballerina executing a movement in Swan Lake.

But no one thought it was funny. Her face was distorted with terror and Coffin Ed looked like a homicidal maniac.

The chair scraped as Red Johnny rolled over, clawing at his throat, making choking sounds.

The inside of Coffin Ed’s head was one great flaming-red blast of pain, through which sound trickled like curses. From somewhere came the thought that Red Johnny was trying to draw a gun. He wheeled back and kicked Red Johnny on the base of the jaw.

“Ugh!” Red Johnny grunted and fainted.

The dog pushed open the inner door and ran down the hall, her chain clanking behind her.

Red Marie grabbed at the table edge for support; her fingers slipped off and she fell to the floor with a crash.

From the front of the house came the sound of women screaming.

Coffin Ed stood in the center of the floor with the long-barreled nickelplated pistol in one hand and the sap in the other, looking as dazed as though he had just emerged from a shock treatment for insanity.

On the television screen three shrunken lunatics, arms about one another’s shoulders, were dancing frantically back and forth, eyes rolling and lips flapping but no sound coming out.

Coffin Ed’s head suddenly cleared; only a shrill, almost imperceptible whistling in both ears still remained.

He pocketed the sap, stuck the pistol back into his belt, and reached down and rolled Red Johnny over onto his stomach.

“Lawd, don’t kill him,” Red Marie wailed. “I’ll talk.”

“Give me a tablespoon and shut up,” Coffin Ed grated. “He’ll do his own motherraping talking.”

She crawled on all fours around the table and got a spoon from the drawer.

“Bring it here,” Coffin Ed said, kneeling beside Red Johnny and lifting his head.

Red Johnny had swallowed his tongue. Coffin Ed stuck the spoon down Red Johnny’s throat and kept levering until he got enough tongue out so he could reach in with his other hand and grab hold of the tip. The tongue was so slippery with blood it took half a dozen tries before he got hold of the tip and yanked it back into position. Blood gushed over his hands onto the floor and four broken teeth fell out.

“Here, you hold his tongue down until he gets his breath,” he ordered Red Marie and made her take the handle of the spoon.

He got up and went to the sink and washed the blood from his hands with cold water from the tap, dried them on a kitchen towel. There was a small bloodstain on the cuff of his blue shirt, but he didn’t bother it.

He came back and stood over the two people on the floor. “I’m going to ask some questions—”

“I’ll answer ‘em,” Marie said.

“Let him answer them. When the answer is yes, nod your head. You hear me?”

Red Johnny’s head nodded carefully.

“When the answer is no, shake your head. And don’t make any more mistakes.”

Again Red Johnny nodded.

“It hurts him,” Red Marie said.

“I want it to hurt him,” Coffin Ed said. “You run a shooting gallery in here?”

Red Johnny nodded.

“It ain’t really no regular shooting gallery,” Red Marie said defensively. “It’s just we have some jags here sometimes, just folks with a chicken habit—”

“And pushers,” Coffin Ed cut in.

Red Johnny shook his head.

“If I catch you lying—”

“I hope God may kill me,” Red Marie blurted. “We don’t let no pushers come in here. It’s just parties we has and folks bring their own stuff. We gets a few skinpoppers but the H they has ain’t even strong enough to be habit-forming. Ain’t none of ‘em real addicts. Most of ‘em just blows weed. Just to get a kick. That ain’t our racket. We just sells poontang here.”

“Pinky is an addict.”

“Yes, but—”

“Let him answer.”

Red Johnny nodded.

Coffin Ed stepped back from the pool of blood that was reaching toward his feet.

“Lawd be my secret judge, he don’t come here for it,” Red Marie said. “He don’t come for the jags neither. He just buys pussy.”

“Has he got any particular choice?”

“He too ugly to score a home here; he’s like Jesus, he loves ‘em all.”

“Was he here today?”

Red Johnny shook his head.

“Last night?”

Again Red Johnny shook his head.

“Know where he lives?”

The answer was the same.

“You’ve been doing so much talking; talk some now,” Coffin Ed said to Marie.

“We don’t know nothing ‘bout Pinky, I swear ‘fore God; he just come here to see the girls and I wish to heaven he had picked on somebody else for that; I don’t need his money and I can’t stand his looks.”

“Where does he hang out?”

“Hang out?” She started to parry, but one glance at Coffin Ed’s face loosened her tongue so that she began to stammer. “Kid Blackie’s gym is all I know. I heered him say once he’d just come from there. You know somewheres else, Johnny?”

Red Johnny shook his head.

“All right,” Coffin Ed said. “That’s Pinky’s dog I got. I’m gonna take it through this house and let it sniff around. If I find out you’re lying—”

“As God be my benefactor and protector and my haven-” Marie began, but Coffin Ed cut her off.

“You’re making me puke. How is it that all you worn-out whores get so chummy with God?”

“It ain’t really Him,” Marie said solemnly. “It’s Jesus.” He couldn’t tell whether she was in earnest or not. He pushed open the door and went toward the front hail and called the dog.

“She’s here!” a woman’s voice replied.

He went up the front stairs to the second floor and traced the voice to an open bedroom at the rear. A brownskin whore in a negligee was stuffing cream chocolates into the side of the dog’s mouth through the muzzle. The bitch loved it.

Coffin Ed took the chain leash and led the dog. He didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, but he was playing out a hunch. Nothing came of it but some curses from some whores working at their trade.

“Gawddammmm!” one of the girls said disgustedly when her white customer became suddenly deflated at sight of the big colored man and monstrous dog poking into the room. “As long as it took to get this slow-John started—”

Upon seeing a pay telephone in the front hall, Coffin Ed stopped and telephoned the hospital.

The answer was the same.

Red Johnny and Red Marie were nowhere in sight when he passed through the kitchen.

He led the dog around on the other side of the table from the pool of blood, through the back door and around the house. He didn’t encounter anyone. The whole block looked deserted.

He put the dog in the back of the Plymouth and got into the front seat behind the wheel. He looked at his watch. It read 4:51.

He had a sudden crazy, desperate feeling that he was looking for a needle in a haystack, wasting time; and that time was the most precious thing on earth.

Kid Blackie was a short black man with a face like a monkey’s and a shining bald head. His torso was naked in the dim-lit stinking heat of the small dirty gym. Big flopping breasts shaped like gourds with rusty-looking teats as big as a woman’s hung down to his navel. His flabby muscles seemed about to drop from the bones and his bay window was big enough to give birth to quintuplets.

He had his thumbs hooked in frayed suspenders holding up baggy-seated pants that looked loaded, and was chewing the stub of a cigar in the corner of his mouth, as he watched two young chocolate-skinned middleweights work out on the greasy square of canvas.

“Wait a minute, Ed,” he said and blew on a whistle that hung from a string about his neck.

The boys stopped punching and stared at him.

He climbed into the ring and squared off with one of the boys.

“Like this,” he said, the cigar butt wobbling in the corner of his mouth, and jabbed a left at the boy’s face.

When the boy’s guard flew up automatically, he crossed a right to the boy’s stomach, bringing it down. The boy’s right shoulder dropped as he started a looping right hook. Kid Blackie hooked a left to the boy’s jaw so fast the boy never saw it. The boy sat down, looking dazed.

Kid Blackie turned to the other boy. “You seen howl done it?”

The boy nodded mutely.

“You try it.”

The boy jabbed with his left. Kid Blackie went under it and left-hooked him in the stomach. The boy bent in slightly, dropping his left arm, and tried to cross with his right. But he wasn’t fast enough. Kid Blackie threw an overhand right to his jaw and knocked him unconscious.

He spat frayed tobacco to the canvas and climbed down out of the ring. His old glassy brown eyes looked sad.

“These boys that turn up nowadays,” he bemoaned. “If they was chicks they’d never get hatched.”

Kid Blackie had been lightweight champion of the world at one time. Rumor had it that he had squandered over a million dollars on white women and Cadillacs. He didn’t look as though he regretted it.

“All old people say the same thing,” Coffin Ed dissented. “There’re always some good and some bad. You don’t expect everybody to be like you.”

“Maybe you’re right.” He watched the two boys helping one another up. “What’s on your ass?”

“I’m looking for Pinky.”

Kid Blackie scratched his bald head. “That’s funny. Some bitch was just in here looking for him too. Cat-eyed woman. Ain’t been more’n ten minutes ago.”

Coffin Ed tensed and his tic started jumping.

“By herself?”

Kid Blackie wasn’t looking directly at him, but he didn’t miss the sudden change.

“Yeah,” he said. “She come up by herself but I got curious. Only reason for a bitch like her be looking for Pinky would be to shoot him, so when she left I looked out the window. She got in a car with two white jokers — looked like mobsters.” He let it go at that.

Coffin Ed felt his heart constrict and his breath turned rockhard in his lungs. I’m on your tail now, you motherrapers, he thought. Pain flooded his head like a sudden hemorrhage and his tic went spasmodic. He tried to control his voice.

“Get a look at ‘em?”

“Not much. Come on, let’s take a gander. Maybe they’re still hanging around.”

They walked to the grimy flyspecked window and looked down on 116th Street.

“Had a gray Buick — little one,” Kid Blackie added.

Their gazes searched the parked cars lining the curbs.

The sun was on the south side and the street lay in shadow. Colored people dressed for the heat milled about on the wide sidewalks, shiny black faces peering from beneath a variety of headgear, black arms protruding from light cotton fabrics.

A two-wheel pushcart loaded with slices of watermelon packed in ice and covered with wet gunnysacks was parked behind an empty ice truck. A hand-lettered sign on one side read: SUGAR TooF GORGIA MELON, with the S turned around. Water dripped from the bottom.

Farther down an old man with a smaller pushcart was selling glasses of flavored ice. The varicolored bottles stood in a rack about a block of ice covered with wet newspaper. Fronting on the sidewalk behind it was an open hot-dog counter with big glass bottles of orange-flavored ice water and a grill covered with franks like soldiers on parade.

Venetian blinds covered the windows of the bars. Signboards in the lobby of a movie theater depicted gangsters never seen on land or sea shooting it out with blasting rods. On the street in front of it, skinny black children wearing loincloths romped in a stream of water gushing from a fire hydrant.

Coffin Ed had left the dog in his Plymouth and she had her head out of the window, panting. A crowd had collected to stare at her. They kept a respectful distance despite her muzzle.

One little boy was holding up his mongrel in his arms to see the big dog. The mongrel didn’t like that business.

There was no sign of a gray Buick.

Kid Blackie shook his head. “They musta gone.”

The distant blaring of a jukebox came from a bar somewhere below. A bottle fly buzzed against the grimy windowpane.

“You didn’t get a look at ‘em?” Coffin Ed asked finally, trying to keep the disappointment from his voice.

“I didn’t see ‘em too good,” Kid Blackie confessed. “The mugs looked like mugs look anywhere. One looked sort of bony, whitefaced, like he was sick, a hopheaded-looking character. Other was a fatty, too light to be a greaser, maybe a Swede. Both of ‘em was wearing straw hats and smoked glasses. That mean anything to you?”