The Heat's On (4 page)

“All right, let’s stop the clowning,” Anderson said. “What about this charge against a drug pusher?”

“He’s one of the big sources of supply for colored addicts up here, but he’s smart enough to keep out of Harlem,” Grave Digger said.

“When we saw him choking, we knew he’d been eating the decks he had on him, so before he could digest them we got enough out of him to convict him of possession anyway.”

“It’s in that envelope,” Grave Digger said, nodding toward the desk. “When it’s analyzed, thty’ll find five or six half-chewed decks of heroin.”

Anderson opened the end of the brown manila envelope lying atop the desk which the detectives had turned in as evidence. He shook out the folded handkerchief and opened it.

“Phew!” he exclaimed, drawing back. “It stinks.”

“It doesn’t stink anymore than a dirty pusher,” Grave Digger said. “I hate this type of criminal worse than God hates sin.”

“What’s the other stuff with it?” Anderson asked, pushing the mess about with the tip of his pencil.

Coffin Ed chuckled. “Whatever he last ate before he started eating evidence.”

Anderson looked sober. “I know your intentions are good, but you can’t go around slugging people in the belly to collect evidence, even if they are felons. You know that this man has been taken to the hospital.”

“Don’t worry, he won’t protest,” Grave Digger said.

“Not if he knows what’s good for him,” Coffin Ed echoed.

“Every precinct’s not like Harlem,” Anderson cautioned. “You get away with tricks here that’ll kick back in any other precinct.”

“If this kicks back, I’ll eat the foot that did it,” Grave Digger said.

“Talking about eating reminds me that we ain’t ate yet,” Coffin Ed said.

Mamie Louise was sick and the other all-night greasy spoons and barbecue joints had no appeal. They decided to eat in the Great Man nightclub on 125th Street.

“I like a joint where you can smell the girls’ sweat,” Coffin Ed said.

It had a bar fronting on the street with a cabaret in back where a two-dollar membership fee was charged to get in.

When the detectives flashed their buzzers they were made members for free.

Noise, heat and orgiastic odors hit them as they entered through the curtained doorway. The room was so small and packed that the celebrants rubbed buttocks with others at ad joining tables. Faces bubbled in the dim light like a huge pot of cannibal stew, showing mostly eyes and teeth. Smoke-blackened nudes frolicked in the murals about the fringes of the ceiling. Beneath were pencil sketches of numerous Harlem celebrities, interspersed with autographed photos of jazz greats. A ventilator fan was laboring in the back wall without any noticeable effect.

“You want stink, you got it,” Grave Digger said.

“And everything that goes with it,” Coffin Ed amended.

Some joker was shouting in a loud belligerent voice, “I ain’t gonna pay for but two whiskeys; dat’s all I drunk. Somebody musta stole the other three ‘cause I ain’t seen ‘em.”

Behind a dance floor scarcely big enough to hold two pairs of feet, a shining black man wearing a white silk shirt kept banging the same ten keys on a midget piano; while a lank black woman without joints wearing a backless fire-red evening gown did a snake dance about the tables, shouting “
Money-money-money-honey
,” and holding up her skirt. She was bare beneath. Whenever someone held out a bill, she changed the lyric to, “Ohhhweee, daddy, money makes me feel so funny,” and gave a graphic demonstration by accepting it.

The proprietor cleared a table in the back corner for the two detectives and showed them most of the amalgam fillings in his teeth.

“I believe in live and let live,” he said right off. “What you gentlemen wish to eat?”

There was a choice of fried chicken, barbecued pork ribs and New Orleans gumbo.

They chose the gumbo, which was the specialty of the house. It was made of fresh pork, chicken gizzards, hog testicles and giant shrimp, with a base of okra and sweet potatoes, and twenty-seven varieties of seasonings, spices and herbs.

“It’s guaranteed to cool you off,” the proprietor boasted.

“I don’t want to get so cooled off I can’t warm up no more,” Grave Digger said.

The proprietor showed him some more teeth in a reassuring smile.

They followed the gumbo with huge quarters of ice-cold watermelon which had black seeds.

While they were eating it, a chorus of four hefty, sepia-colored girls took the floor and began doing a bump dance with their backs to the audience, throwing their big strong smooth-skinned hams about as though juggling hundred-pound sacks of brown sugar.

“Throw itto the wind!” someone shouted.

“Those hams won’t stay up on wind,” Coffin Ed muttered.

The tight close air was churned into a steaming bedlam.

The temptation was too great for Coffin Ed. He filled his mouth full of watermelon seeds and began spitting them at the live targets. It was a fifteen-foot shot and before he got the range he had hit a couple of jokers at ringside tables in the back of their necks and almost set off a rumpus. The jokers were puffing up to fight when finally Coffin Ed’s shots began landing on the targets. First one girl and then another began leaping and slapping their bottoms as though stung by bees. The audience thought it was part of the act. It was going over big.

One joker was inspired to give an impromptu rendition of “
Ants in your pants
.”

Then one of the black seeds stuck to the cream-colored bottom of one of the girls and she captured it. She held it up and looked at it. She stopped dancing and turned an irate face toward the audience.

“Some motherraper is shooting at me with watermelon seeds,” she declared. “And I’m gonna find out who it is.”

The other three dancers examined the seed. Then all four of them, looking evil as housemaids scrubbing floors, began pushing between the tables, roughing up the customers, shaking down the joint for someone eating watermelon.

Grave Digger had the presence of mind to whip the plates containing the rinds and seeds from atop the table and hide them on the floor underneath their chairs. No one else was eating watermelon, but Coffin Ed went undiscovered.

When finally the dancing was resumed, Grave Digger let out his breath. “That was a close shave,” he said.

“Let’s get out ef here before we get caught,” Coffin Ed said, wiping his mouth with the palm of his hand.

“We! What we?” Grave Digger exploded.

The proprietor escorted them to the door. He wouldn’t let them pay for the dinners. He gave them a big fat wink, letting them know he was on their side.

“Live and let live, that’s my motto,” he said.

“Yeah. Just don’t think it buys you anything,” Grave Digger said harshly.

It was pressing S a.m. when they came out into the street, almost an hour past their quitting time.

“Let’s take a last look for Gus,” Grave Digger suggested.

“What for?” Coffin Ed asked.

“For reference.”

“You don’t never give up, do you?” Coffin Ed complained. It was 5:05 when Grave Digger drove past the apartment over on Riverside Drive. He kept down to Grant’s Tomb, turned around and parked on the opposite side of the street, three houses down. Gray dawn was slipping beneath an overcast sky and the sprinklers were already watering the browned grass in the park surrounding the monument.

They were about to alight when they saw the African come from the apartment, leading the mammoth dog by a heavy iron chain. The dog wore an iron-studded muzzle that resembled the visor of a sixteenth-century helmet.

“Sit still,” Grave Digger cautioned.

The African looked up and down the street, then crossed over and walked in the opposite direction. His white turban and manycolored robe looked outlandish against the dull green background of foliage.

“Good thing I’m in New York,” Grave Digger said. “I’d take him for a Zulu chief out hunting with his pet lion.”

“Better follow him, eh?” Coffin Ed said.

“To watch the dog piss?”

“It was your idea.”

The African turned down steps descending into the park and passed out of sight.

They sat watching the apartment entrance. Minutes passed. Finally Coffin Ed suggested, “Maybe we’d better buzz her; see what’s cooking.”

“Hell, if Gus ain’t there, all we’ll find is dirty sheets,” Grave Digger said. “And if he’s home he’s going to want to know what we’re doing busting into his house when we’re off duty.”

“Then what the hell did we come for?” Coffin Ed flared.

“It was just a hunch,” Grave Digger admitted. They lapsed into silence.

The African ascended the stairs from the park. Coffin Ed looked at his watch. It read 5:27. The African was alone.

They watched him curiously as he crossed the street and pressed the bell to the apartment. They saw him turn the knob and go inside. They looked at one another.

“Now what the hell does that mean?” Coffin Ed said.

“Means he got rid of the dog.”

“What for?”

“The question is, how?” Grave Digger amended.

“Well, don’t ask me. I’m no Ouija board.”

“Hell with this, let’s go home,” Grave Digger decided suddenly.

“Don’t growl at me, man, you’re the one who suggested this nonsense.”

Pinky peered through the plate-glass window of a laundrymat at the corner of 225th Street and White Plains Road in the Bronx. There was an electric clock on the back wall. The time read 3:33.

The sky was overcast with heavy black clouds. The hot sultry air was oppressive, as before a thunderstorm. The elevated trestle of the IRT subway line loomed overhead, eerie and silent, snaking down the curve of White Plains Road. As far as he could see, the streets were empty of life. The silence was unreal.

He reckoned it had taken him more than an hour to get there from the Riverside Park in Manhattan. He had covered part of the distance by hopping a New York Central switch engine, but afterwards he had slunk along endless blocks of silent, sleeping residential streets, ducking to cover when anyone hove into view.

Now he began to feel safe. But his body was still trembling as though he had the ague.

He turned east in the direction of the Italian section.

Apartment buildings gave way to pastel-colored villas of southern Italian architecture, garnished with flower gardens and plaster saints. After a while the houses became scattered, interspersed by market gardens and vacant lots overgrown with weeds in which hoboes slept and goats were tethered.

Finally he reached his destination, a weather-stained, one-storied, pink stucco villa at the end of an unfinished street without sidewalks. It was a small house flanked by vacant lots used for rubbish dumps. Oddly enough, it had a large gabled attic. It sat far back of a wire fence enclosing a front yard of burnt grass, dried-up flowers and wildly thriving weeds. In a niche over the front door was a white marble crucifixion of a singularly lean and tortured Christ, encrusted with bird droppings. In other niches at intervals beneath the eaves were all the varicolored plaster saints good to the souls of Italian peasants.

All of the front windows were closed and shuttered. Save for the faint sounds of a heavy boogie beat on a piano, the house seemed abandoned.

Pinky vaulted the fence and followed a path through tall weeds around the side of the house, taking care to avoid a concrete birdbath, an iron statue of Garibaldi and a large zinc vase of artificial roses.

There was a deep backyard enclosed by a high plank fence. The back door opened onto a grape arbor with thick clusters of purple grapes hanging between the dusty leaves. To one side was a rotting tool-and-wood shed adjoining a chicken coop and rabbit hutch. From the door of the tool shed a tethered nanny goat gazed at Pinky from sad wise eyes. Beyond was a dusty vegetable garden dying from thirst and neglect. But along the back fence a patch of well-watered, carefully tended marijuana weeds grew adjacent to a garage of corrugated steel.

Pinky halted in the dark beside the arbor and listened. He breathed in a choking manner and tears streamed down his cheeks.

Now the sound of music was loud and defiant. Vying with the hard banging of piano notes was the ratchetlike rhythm of someone strumming an accompaniment on a double-sided wooden washboard. It sounded like a cross between bone-beating and rim-rapping.

The two attic windows were wide open. Through the left-side one, from where he stood, Pinky saw the back of an upright piano, atop which sat a kerosene lamp and a half-filled bottle of gin. As he watched, a black, pudgy-fingered hand rose from the far side of the piano and grasped the gin bottle. The tempo of the piano changed. Instead of two-handed playing with the steady bass beat marching alongside the light fantastic tripping on the treble keys, there followed a wild left-hand riffing the whole length of the board.

The hand holding the bottle reappeared. The hand withdrew. The bottle remained. The level of the gin had lowered noticeably. Suddenly the bass came in again like John Henry driving steel and the treble notes ran through the night like the patter of rain.

Then another black hand appeared from the other side of the piano and took down the bottle. The sound of rim-rapping ceased and only the sound of beating bones continued. One side of the washboard had conked out. The hand and the bottle reappeared. After which the rapping went wild.

Through the right-side window could be seen vague figures of shirtsleeved men and black-shouldered women swaying back and forth, locked in tight embrace; the locked liquid motions steady and unchanging despite the eccentricity of the music, sometimes keeping on the beats, sometimes in between. The Bear Hug and the Georgia Grind were being performed with a slow steady motion. Black skin gleamed like oily shadows in the dim yellow rays of the single flickering light of the kerosene lamp.

“Missa Pinky,” came a soft small voice from the dark.

Pinky jumped and wheeled about.

Big white circles shone from a small black face almost invisible in the dark. The skinny barefooted figure was clad in a patched mansize overall jumper.