The Heat's On (3 page)

“Ghana!” Grave Digger exclaimed. “Ghana in Africa? You’re going to Ghana?”

Her expression became suddenly triumphant. “You heard me.”

“Who’s we?” Coffin Ed asked over Grave Digger’s shoulder.

“Me and Gus, that’s who.”

“Let’s go inside and get this straightened out,” Grave Digger said.

“If you think we has stole something, you’re beating up the wrong bush,” she said. “We ain’t took nothing from nobody.”

“We’ll see.”

She wheeled and went down the brightly lighted, whitewashed corridor, her square bony shoulders held high and stiff while her hard sharp buttocks wiggled like a tadpole.

A dark green steamer trunk stood against the wall beside the elevator doors. It bore luggage stickers reading: SS QUEEN MARY—CUNARD LINE—_Hold_.” Both handles were tagged.

The detectives’ interest went up another notch.

The door to the janitor’s suite opened directly into the overstuffed parlor. When they entered, the African was sitting on the edge of a straight-backed chair with the rum highball shaking in his hand.

The radio was silent.

As she turned to close the door, an animal appeared silently in the kitchen doorway.

The detectives felt their scalps twitch.

At first sight it appeared to be a female lion. It was tawnycolored with a massive head, upright ears and lambent eyes. Then a low growl issued from its throat and they knew it was a dog.

Coffin Ed slipped his revolver from its holster.

“She won’t hurt you,” the woman said scornfully. “She’s chained to the stove.”

“Are you taking this animal with you?” Grave Digger asked in amazement.

“It don’t belong to us; it belongs to an albino nigger called Pinky who Gus had around here to help him,” she said.

“Pinky. He’s your son, ain’t he?” Grave Digger needled.

“My son!” she exploded. “Do I look like that nigger’s ma? He’s already older than I is.”

“He calls your husband his father.”

“He ain’t no such thing, even if he is old enough. Gus just found him somewhere and took pity on him.”

Coffin Ed nudged Grave Digger to show him four tan plastic suitcases which had been hidden from their view by the dining table.

“So where is Gus?” Grave Digger asked.

She got sullen again. “I don’t know where he’s at. Out watching the fire up the street, I suppose.”

“He didn’t go out to get a fix, did he?” Grave Digger took a shot in the dark, remembering their prisoner, Jake.

“Gus!” She appeared indignant. “He ain’t got the habit — no kind of habit, unless it’s the churchgoing habit.” She thought for a moment and added, “I guess he must have went to take the trunk from the storage room; I see somebody put in in the hall.”

“Who’s got the habit?” Coffin Ed insisted.

“Pinky’s got the habit. He’s on H.”

“How can he afford it?”

“Don’t ask me.”

Grave Digger let his gaze rest on the nervous African.

“What’s this man doing here?” he asked her suddenly.

“He’s an African chief,” she said proudly.

“I believe you; but that don’t answer my question.”

“If you just must know, he sold the farm to Gus.”

“What farm?”

“The cocoa plantation in Ghana where we is going.”

“Your husband bought a cocoa plantation in Ghana from this African?” Coffin Ed said incredulously. “What kind of racket is this?”

“Show him your passport,” she told the African.

The African fished a passport from the folds of his robe and held it out toward Grave Digger.

Grave Digger ignored it, but Coffin Ed took it and examined it curiously before handing it back.

“I don’t dig this,” Grave Digger confessed, removing his hat to scratch his head. “Where’s all this money coming from? Your husband can afford to buy a cocoa plantation in Ghana on a superintendent’s salary, and his helper can afford a heroin habit.”

“Don’t ask me where Pinky gets his money from,” she said. “Gus got his on the legit. His wife died and left him a tobacco farm in North Carolina and he sold it.”

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed looked at one another with raised brows.

“I thought you were his wife,” Grave Digger said to the woman.

“I is now,” she said triumphantly.

“Then he’s a bigamist.”

She tittered. “He ain’t no more.”

Grave Digger shook his head. “Some folks have all the luck.”

From outside came the sound of fire engines starting and beginning to move away.

“Where was the fire?” she asked.

“There wasn’t any fire,” Grave Digger said. “It was Pinky who turned in the fire alarm. He wanted to call the police.”

Her slanting yellow eyes stretched into the shape of almonds. “He did! What did he want to do that for?”

“He said that you and this African were murdering and robbing his father.”

She turned a dirty muddy color. The African jumped to his feet as though he had been stung in the rear by a wasp; he started sputtering denials in a guttural-sounding, strangely accented English. She cut him off harshly, “Shut up! Gus will take care of him. The dirty motherraping white nigger! After all we has done for him, trying to make trouble for us on our last day.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He don’t like Africans is all. He’s just envious ‘cause he ain’t got no color in his own fishbelly skin.”

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed shook their heads in unison.

“Now I’ve heard everything,” Grave Digger said. “Here’s a white colored man who puts in a false fire alarm that Riverside Church is on fire, getting half the fire equipment in New York City on the roll and all the police in the neighborhood up here — and why? I ask you why?”

“Because he don’t like black colored people,” Coffin Ed said.

“You can’t blame that on the heat,” Grave Digger said.

The front doorbell began to ring. It rang long and insistently, as though someone was trying to jab the button through the wall.

“Now who in the hell is that at this hour of the night?” the woman said.

“Maybe it’s Gus,” Coffin Ed said. “Maybe he’s lost his key.”

“If Pinky done put in another false fire alarm, he better watch out,” the woman threatened.

She opened the door to the corridor and went to answer the bell. The detectives followed her up the stairs into the front foyer.

Through the glass-paneled doors, uniformed cops were seen swarming about the entrance.

The woman flung open the doors.

“Now what you all want?” she demanded.

The white cops looked suspiciously at the two colored detectives.

“We got several reports that two colored prowlers have been seen around this house,” one of them said in a hard challenging voice. “You know anything about it?”

“That’s us,” Grave Digger said as he and Coffin Ed flashed their buzzers. “We’ve been prowling around.”

The white cop reddened.

“Well, don’t blame us,” he said. “We got to check on these reports.”

“Hell, we ain’t blaming you,” Grave Digger said. “It’s the heat.”

They left with the other cops and went up the street to look for Jake the dwarf, but he was gone. A prowl car cop still lingering in the vicinity said he had been taken to the hospital.

The fire engines had gone but several deserted prowl cars were still parked haphazardly in the street. Some cops were still searching for Pinky, the giant albino, but they had not found him.

Coffin Ed glanced at his watch.

“It’s twelve after two,” he said. “This joke has lasted for more than an hour.”

“The bars have closed,” Grave Digger said. “We’d better take a look in the valley before checking in.”

“What about Jake?”

“He’ll keep. But first let’s look see what’s cooking in all this heat.”

They got into their little black sedan and drove off, looking like two farmers who had just arrived in town.

It was 3:30 a.m. before they finally got back to the precinct station to write out their report.

The heat had detained them.

Even at past two in the morning, “The Valley,” that flat lowland of Harlem east of Seventh Avenue, was like the frying pan of hell. Heat was coming out of the pavement, bubbling from the asphalt; and the atmospheric pressure was pushing it back to earth like the lid on a pan.

Colored people were cooking in their overcrowded, overpriced tenements; cooking in the streets, in the after-hours joints, in the brothels; seasoned with vice, disease and crime.

An effluvium of hot stinks arose from the frying pan and hung in the hot motionless air, no higher than the rooftops — the smell of sizzling barbecue, fried hair, exhaust fumes, rotting garbage, cheap perfumes, unwashed bodies, decayed buildings, dog-ratand-cat offal, whiskey and vomit, and all the old dried-up odors of poverty.

Half-nude people sat in open windows, crowded on the fire escapes, shuffled up and down the sidewalks, prowled up and down the streets in dilapidated cars.

It was too hot to sleep. Everyone was too evil to love. And it was too noisy to relax and dream of cool swimming holes and the shade of chinaberry trees. The night was filled with the blare of countless radios, the frenetic blasting of spasm cats playing in the streets, hysterical laughter, automobile horns, strident curses, loudmouthed arguments, the screams of knife fights.

The bars were closed so they were drinking out of bottles. That was all there was left to do, drink strong bad whiskey and get hotter; and after that steal and fight.

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed had been held up by an outburst of petty crime.

Thieves had broken into a supermarket and had stolen 50 pounds of stew beef, 20 pounds of smoked sausage, 20 pounds of chicken livers, 29 pounds of oleomargarine, 32 pounds of cooking lard, and one TV set.

A drunk had staggered into a funeral parlor and had refused to leave until he got “first-class service.”

A man had stabbed a woman because she “wouldn’t give him none.”

A woman had stabbed a man whom she claimed had stepped on the corn on her left little toe.

Then on their way in they got held up again by a free-for-all on Eighth Avenue and 126th Street. It had been started by a man attacking another man with a knife in a dice game in a room back of a greasy spoon restaurant. The attacked man had run out into the street and grabbed a piece of iron pipe from a garbage can where he had cached it for just such an emergency before joining the dice game. When the man with the knife saw his erstwhile victim coming back with the iron pipe, he did an about-face and took off in the opposite direction. Then a friend of the man with the knife charged from a dark doorway wielding a baseball bat and began to duel the man with the pipe. The man with the knife turned back to help his friend with the baseball bat. Upon seeing what was happening, the cook came from the greasy spoon, wielding a meat cleaver, and demanded fair play. Whereupon the man with the knife engaged the cook with the cleaver in a separate duel.

When Grave Digger and Coffin Ed arrived at the scene, the hot dusty air was being churned up by the slinging and slashing of weapons.

Without engaging in preliminaries, Coffin Ed began pistolwhipping the man with the knife. The man was staggering about on the sidewalk, holding on to his knife which he was too scared to use; his legs were wobbling and his knees were buckling and he was saying, “You can’t hurt me hitting me on the head.”

With his left hand, Grave Digger began slapping the face of the man with the baseball bat, and with his right hand fanning the air with his pistol to keep back the crowd; at the same time shouting, “Straighten up!”

Coffin Ed was echoing, “Count off, red-eye! Fly right!”

Both of them looked just as red-eyed, greasy-faced, sweaty and evil as all the other colored people gathered about, combatants and spectators alike. They were of a similar size and build to other “working stiffs” — big, broad-shouldered, loose-jointed and flatfooted. Their faces bore marks and scars similar to any colored street fighter. Grave Digger’s was full of lumps where felons had hit him from time to time with various weapons; while Coffin Ed’s was a patchwork of scars where skin had been grafted over the burns left by acid thrown into his face.

The difference was they had the pistols, and everyone in Harlem knew them as the “Mens”.

The cook took advantage of this situation to slip back into his kitchen and hide his meat cleaver behind the stove. While the man with the pipe quickly cached his weapon inside his pants leg and went limping rapidly away like a wooden-legged man in a race of one-legged men.

After a little, peace was restored. Without a word or backward glance, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed walked to their car, climbed in and drove off.

They checked into the precinct station and wrote their report.

When Lieutenant Anderson finished reading the statement of the janitor’s wife as to the reason Pinky put in the false fire alarm, he asked incredulously, “Do you believe that?”

“Yeah,” Grave Digger replied. “I’ll believe it until some better reason comes along.”

Lieutenant Anderson shook his head. “The motives these people have for crimes.”

“When you think about them, they make sense,” Coffin Ed said argumentatively.

Lieutenant Anderson wiped the sweat from his face with a limp dirty handkerchief.

“That’s all right for the psychiatrists, but we’re cops,” he said.

Grave Digger winked at Coffin Ed.

“
If you’re white, all right
,” he recited in the voice of a schoolboy.

Coffin Ed took it up. “
If you’re brown, stick around
…”

Grave Digger capped it, “
If you’re black, stand back
.”

Lieutenant Anderson reddened. He was accustomed to his two ace detectives needling him, but it always made him feel a little uneasy.

“That might all be true,” he said. “But these crimes cost the taxpayers money.”

“You ain’t kidding,” Grave Digger confirmed.

Coffin Ed changed the subject. “Have you heard whether they caught him?”

Lieutenant Anderson shook his head. “They caught everyone but him — bums, perverts, whores, tricks, and one hermit.”

“He won’t be too hard to find,” Grave Digger said. “There ain’t too many places for a giant albino Negro turning black-and-blue to hide.”