The Heat's On (7 page)

Already the funnels of the Queen Mary at dock could be seen overtopping the wharf of the French Line adjoining the Cunard pier. The express truck swerved toward the curb and braked to a sudden stop behind a black Buick sedan parked less than fifty yards from the entrance to the French Line dock.

The maneuver was executed so quickly Uncle Saint didn’t have a chance to stop behind the truck and had to pull ahead of the Buick to park.

It was a no-parking zone and two cops in a prowl car looked meaningfully at the three parked vehicles as they drove slowly by. Being as one was a chauffeur-driven limousine and another an express truck, the cops let them slide for a moment.

Two dark-suited, straw-hatted, somber-looking men sat in the front seat of the Buick and watched the prowl car pass the Cunard dock and drop out of sight in the traffic. The man on the curb side opened the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He was a heavyset, black-haired man with a thick-featured, olive-skinned face and a bulging belly. His black single-breasted coat was buttoned at the bottom. He came down the street, looking anxiously toward the exit of the French Line wharf.

Uncle Saint watched in the rearview mirror, concentrating on the men in the express truck.

The driver of the Buick sat with his right hand on the wheel, his left hanging loosely through the open window.

When the heavyset man came level with the curb-side window of the Lincoln, he turned with a quick, catlike motion, unexpected in a man of his build, and came toward the car. He clapped his left hand on the car top, flipped open his coat and drew from a left shoulder sling. When he bent over to peer through the window, as though speaking to the gray-haired old chauffeur, his flapping coat shielded the pistol from view. It was a single-shot derringer with a six-inch perforated silencer attached. Without speaking a word, he took careful aim at the softest spot in Uncle Saint’s head. His dull dark eyes were impassive.

Abruptly from behind him a hard voice shouted, “Get ‘em up or I’ll shoot!”

He didn’t see the faint motion of Uncle Saint’s lips. He wheeled about convulsively, the back of his head striking the top of the doorframe, knocking off his hat onto the seat of the car.

Uncle Saint lunged for his shotgun lying on the floor. The gunman wheeled back, his eyes bugging out, as Uncle Saint was bringing up the muzzle of the double-barreled shotgun.

Both fired simultaneously.

The small coughing sound of the silenced derringer was lost in the heavy booming blast of the shotgun.

In his panic, Uncle Saint had squeezed the triggers of both barrels.

The gunman’s face disappeared and his thick heavy body was knocked over backward from the impact of the 12-gauge shells.

The rear light of a truck parked beneath the trestle in the middle of the avenue disintegrated for no apparent reason.

The air stunk with the smell of cordite and burnt flesh as the driver of the Buick leaned out the window and emptied an automatic pistol held in his left hand.

Holes popped into the back of the Lincoln’s tonneau and the left-side rearview mirror was shattered.

Uncle Saint hadn’t been touched, but his nappy hair was standing up like iron filings beneath a magnet.

Abruptly a woman began to scream in high, piercing, repetitious shrieks.

Uncle Saint felt as though the top of his head was coming off. Then men began to shout; horns blew; a police whistle shrilled, and there was a sudden shower of running feet.

Both cars took off at once.

A trailer truck was passing on the left side and a taxi coming from the French Line dock blocked the traffic lane ahead. Porters and stevedores were running up the sidewalk and a uniformed cop with a pistol in his hand was trying to break through.

Uncle Saint was looking through a blind haze of panic. His brain had stopped working. He was driving instinctively, like a fox encircled by hounds.

The truck was to his left, the taxi was in front; he pulled to the right, up over the curb, heading behind the taxi. The running men scattered, diving for safety, as the two cars roared down the broad sidewalk, the Buick following the Lincoln bumper to bumper.

At the entrance to the dock a porter was loading luggage from a taxi onto a four-wheeled cart. He didn’t see the Lincoln until it hit the cart. He sailed into the air, clinging to the suitcase as though running to catch a train waiting somewhere in the sky, while other luggage flew past like startled birds. The cart raced down the pier and dove into the sea. The porter came down feetfirst on top of the following Buick, did a perfect somersault and landed sitting on the suitcase, his astounded black face an ellipsoid of white eyeballs and white teeth.

In front of the Cunard Line dock Uncle Saint found an opening back to the street. He turned into it but couldn’t straighten out fast enough and crossed in front of the same trailer truck he had already passed on the sidewalk. It was so close the truck bumper passed overtop and left rear fender of the Lincoln as he barely missed the concrete pier of the railroad trestle on the other side.

Rubber screamed on the dry brick pavement as the truck driver applied air brakes. The truck horn bleated desperately. But it didn’t save the Buick following in the wake of the Lincoln. The truck hit it broadside. The sound of metal rending metal shattered the din. A senseless pandemonium broke out up and down the street.

The truck had overturned the Buick and the front wheels had run overtop it. Hundreds of people were running in all directions, without rhyme or reason.

Uncle Saint got away.

He didn’t see the accident or hear the sound. He was on the inside traffic lane and it was clear for nine straight blocks. Instinctively he looked into the rearview mirror. Behind him the avenue was empty.

Traffic had been stopped at the scene of the accident. The first two prowl cars to arrive had blocked off the street. For the moment the black Lincoln had been forgotten. By the time the cops got around to gathering evidence, Uncle Saint had passed 42nd Street. None of the witnesses had recognized the make of the car; no one had thought to take the license number; all descriptions of the driver were conflicting.

Suddenly Uncle Saint found himself caught in one of the clover-leaf approaches to the Lincoln Tunnel. The three traffic lanes were jammed with vehicles, bumper to bumper. There was no turning back.

As he crawled along in back of a refrigerator truck, his panic cooled to a sardonic, inverted scare. The killing didn’t bother him whatever. “Thought the old darky was tame,” he muttered to himself.

A subtle change came over him. He reverted to the legendary Uncle Tom, the old halfwit darky, the white man’s jester, the obsequious old white-haired coon without a private thought.

During one of the stops as the long lines of traffic were halted at the toll gates, he hid the shotgun underneath the back seat and tossed the gunman’s straw hat on top of the seat.

The toll gates looked like the entrance to a wartime military post housing nuclear weapons. Booted and helmeted cops sat astride high-powered motorcycles beside the toll booths; beyond were the white-and-black police cars that patrolled the tunnel.

The guard took the fifty cents toll and waved Uncle Saint on, but a motorcycle cop strolled over and stopped him.

“What are these holes in the back of this car, boy?”

Uncle Saint grinned, showing stained decayed teeth, and his old bluish-red eyes looked sly.

“Bullet holes, sah,” he said proudly.

“What!” The cop was taken aback; he had expected Uncle Saint to deny it. “Bullet holes?”

“Yas sah, gen-you-wine bullet holes.”

The cop pinned a beetle-brow stare onto Uncle Saint.

“You make ‘em?”

“Naw sah, Ah was goin’ the other way.”

The toll guard could not repress a smile, but the cop scowled.

“Who made ‘em?”

“My boss, sah. Mistah Jeffers. He made ‘em.”

“Who was he shooting at?”

“Shooting at me, sah. He always shoots at me when he’s had a liddle too much. But he ain’t never hit me though — he-hee.”

The toll guard laughed out loud, but the cop didn’t like it.

“Pull over there and wait,” he ordered, indicating the parking space for the patrol cars.

Uncle Saint drove over and stopped. The cops in the cars looked at him curiously.

The motorcycle cop went into the glass-enclosed toll booth and studied the list of wanted cars. The Lincoln was not on the list. He fiddled about for fifteen minutes, looking more and more annoyed. Finally he asked the toll guard, “Think I ought to hold him?”

“Hold him for what?” the guard said. “What’s an old darky like him ever done but steal his boss’s whiskey?”

The cop came out of the booth and waved him on.

It was only a quarter past seven when Uncle Saint came out of the tunnel into Jersey City.

He left the parkway at the first turn-off and went north along the rutted, brick-paved streets that bordered the wharves. He drove slowly and carefully and obeyed all the traffic signs. It took him an hour to reach the first New Jersey approach to the George Washington Bridge. He crossed over into Manhattan and fifteen minutes later crossed the Harlem River back into the Bronx.

Before arriving at Sister Heavenly’s he threw out the dead gunman’s hat, then retrieved the shotgun, reloaded it, and placed it on the floor of the front seat within reach.

“Now let’s see which way the cat’s gonna jump,” he said to himself.

It was about 8:30 o’clock. The clock in the car didn’t work and Uncle Saint didn’t have a watch. But time meant nothing to him one way or another.

Grave Digger was sound asleep. His wife shook him.

“Telephone. It’s Captain Brice.”

Grave Digger knuckled the sleep from his eyes. On duty all of his senses were constantly on the alert. Coffin Ed had once summed it up by saying, “Blink once and you’re dead.” To which Grave Digger had rejoined, “Blink twice and you’re buried.”

But at home, Grave Digger relaxed completely. His wife sometimes called him “Slowpoke”.

He was still sleep-groggy when he took the phone and said grumpily, “Now what gives?”

Captain Brice was a disciplinarian. He never fraternized with the men under him and played no favorites. The Harlem precinct was his command. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed were under his supervision, although their hours at night rarely permitted them to see him.

“Jake Kubansky is dead,” he said in a voice without inflection. “I have orders to present you to the commissioner’s office at nine o’clock.”

Grave Digger became abruptly alert. “Has Ed been notified?”

“Yes. I wish we’d had time for you to drop by here and go over this business, but the order just came in. So you had better go straight down to Centre Street.”

Grave Digger looked at his watch. It read 8:10.

“Right, sir,” he said and hung up.

His wife looked at him anxiously. “Are you in trouble?”

“Not as far as I know.”

That didn’t answer her question, but she had learned not to press him.

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed lived only two blocks apart in Astoria, Long Island. Coffin Ed was waiting in his new Plymouth sedan. “It’s going to be another scorcher,” he greeted.

“Let it burn up,” Grave Digger said.

Everyone was in shirtsleeves.

The commissioner, deputy commissioner, inspector in charge of detectives, an assistant D.A., an assistant medical examiner, Captain Brice and Lieutenant Anderson from the Harlem precinct, three firemen and two patrol car cops from the horde who had answered the false fire alarm the previous night.

The hearing was being held in a big barren room in the headquarters annex across the street from the headquarters building. It had begun at 9:55; now it was 11:13.

Hard yellow sunlight slanted in from the three windows looking out on Centre Street and the room was sweltering hot.

The charge of “unwarranted brutality” resulting from the death of Jake had been lodged against Coffin Ed and Grave Digger.

First the assistant M.E. had testified that the autopsy had shown that Jake had died from a ruptured spleen caused by severe external blows in the region of the stomach. In the opinion of the Examiner’s Office he had either been kicked in the stomach or pummeled by a heavy blunt instrument.

“I didn’t hit him that hard,” Grave Digger had contradicted from where he sat with one ham perched on the window ledge.

Coffin Ed, backed against the wall on the shady side of the room, said nothing.

The commissioner had raised a hand for silence.

Lieutenant Anderson gave a verbal account of the detectives’ report and produced photostats of the pages of the precinct blotter where the entry had been made.

Captain Brice explained the special detail to which he had assigned the two detectives, sending them to all trouble spots over Harlem during all hours of the night.

The three firemen and the two patrol car cops testified reluctantly that they had witnessed Grave Digger hit the victim in the stomach while Coffin Ed held his arms pinned behind him.

Then Grave Digger and Coffin Ed had taken the stand in their own defense.

“What we did is routine procedure,” Grave Digger said. “You take these pushers, when they’re peddling dope they work in the street. They carry their decks in a pocket where they are convenient to dispose of. The officer has to apprehend them while they still have the junk on their person, or he has to swear he has seen them dispose of it. So when you close in on a pusher and he sees he can’t get rid of his load, he stuffs it into his mouth and eats it. They all carry some kind of physic which they take a short time afterwards — and there goes your evidence—”

The commissioner smiled.

“You know they’ve been selling dope; you’ve seen ‘em; but you can’t prove it,” Grave Digger continued. “So Ed and me use this method to make them vomit up the evidence before they take the physic and dissipate it.”

Again the commissioner smiled at the use of the word
dissipate
.

“However, if that were permitted, what is there to prohibit an officer from punching a person in the stomach suspected of drunken driving?” the assistant D.A. remarked.