The Heat's On (8 page)

“Nothing,” Grave Digger replied in a thick, dry voice. “If he’s run over somebody and killed ‘em.”

“You’re forgetting that you are primarily a peace officer,” the asistant D.A. reminded him. “Your duty is to maintain the peace and the courts will punish the offenders.”

“Peace at what price?” Coffin Ed put in, and Grave Digger echoed thickly:

“You think you can have a peaceful city letting criminals run loose?”

The assistant D.A. reddened. “That’s not the point,” he said sharply. “You’ve killed a man suspected of a minor crime, and not in self-defense.”

Suddenly the room was filled with tension.

“You call dope peddling a minor crime?” Grave Digger said, pushing to his feet.

At the sound of his thick, dry voice, every eye in the room turned in his direction. The arteries in his neck became swollen from rage and veins throbbed in his temples.

“All the crimes committed by addicts — robberies, murders, rapes… . All the fucked-up lives… . All the nice kids sent down the drain on a habit.… Twenty-one days on heroin and you’re hooked for life… . Jesus Christ, mister, that one lousy drug has murdered more people than Hitler. And you call it
minor!
” His voice sounded like it was filtered through absorbent cotton.

The assistant D.A. reddened. “He was merely a peddler,” he stated.

“And who gets it into the victim’s blood?” Grave Digger raved. “The peddler! He sells the dirty crap. He makes the personal contact. He puts them on the habit. He’s the motherraper who gets them hooked. He looks into their faces and puts the poison in their hands. He watches them go down from sugar to shit, sees them waste away. He puts them out to stealing, killing, starts young girls to hustling — to get the money to buy the kicks. I’ll take a simple violent murderer any day.”

“Let’s put it this way,” Coffin Ed said, trying to mollify both parties. “Everybody here knows how the big-time operators work. They buy junk abroad — mostly heroin nowadays. They get a lot of it from France — Marseille — for about five thousand dollars a kilo — two pounds and three ounces. The French don’t seem to able to stop the traffic. It comes to New York and the wholesalers pay from fifteen thousand dollars to twenty thousand dollars a kilo for it. The U.S. federal agents don’t seem to be able to catch them either. So the wholesalers dilute the stuff, which is about eighty percent pure to begin with — they add enough sugar of milk or quinine to get it down to two percent pure. Just plain shit. And this is the stuff the peddler sells. It grosses a half million dollars a kilo. All of you know that. But who’s stopping it? All Digger and me can do is try to catch the peddlers in our precinct. So one gets hurt—”

“Killed,” the assistant M.E. corrected.

“By accident,” Coffin Ed amended. “If that is what killed him. In all that excitement up there last night he might have been trampled to death for all we know.”

The commissioner looked up. “What excitement?”

“The firemen were trying to detain a firebug who got away.”

“Oh, that.” His glance flicked from Lieutenant Anderson to the red-faced firemen.

“We are going to have these detectives indicted,” the assistant D.A. stated. “There has been too much police brutality in Harlem. The public is indignant.”

The commissioner pressed the tips of his fingers together and leaned back in his chair.

“Give us time to make a more thorough investigation,” he said. The assistant D.A. was reluctant. “What more investigation is needed? They have admitted beating the deceased.”

The commissioner passed over him. “In the meantime, detectives Jones and Johnson, you are suspended from the force until further notice. Captain B rice,” he added, turning his head slightly, “have them turn in their shields and strike their names from the roll.”

Grave Digger’s swollen face turned gray around the mouth and the grafted skin on Coffin Ed’s face twitched like a tic.

“And that’s that,” Grave Digger said to their friend, Lieutenant Anderson, as they stood outside in the glaring hot sunshine. “For a motherraping pusher.”

“It’s just the newspaper pressure. We’re suffering from the customary summer slack in news. It’ll blow over,” Lieutenant Anderson consoled. “The papers are on one of their periodic humanitarian kicks. Don’t worry. Nothing’s coming out of it.”

“Yeah, humanitarian,” Grave Digger said bitterly. “It’s all right to kill a few colored people for trying to get their children an education, but don’t hurt a motherraping white punk for selling dope.”

Lieutenant Anderson winced. As accustomed as he was to these two colored detectives’ racial connotations, that one hurt.

Uncle Saint hung about the garage for a long time before he got up enough nerve to enter the house.

Three of the bullets had made holes which he plugged with putty and sprayed with quick-drying black enamel. But there were two big dents and one long seam atop the left rear fender which couldn’t be concealed. He had no mirror to replace the broken one, so he removed them from both front fenders and sprayed the marks they had left. That didn’t help much either; the bolt holes still remained. The license plates presented no problem. He had several changes of plates, none of which had the legitimate registration number. He put on some Connecticut plates.

Still he kept fiddling about. Once he thought of painting the whole car another color; or at least the upper half. But finally his jag began thinning out and he got jumpy. He knew he’d have trouble sure as hell with Sister Heavenly if he got too jumpy, so he decided to go inside and have it out.

She would just have to look after him, he told himself. She had kept him helpless and homeless for twenty-five years and he wasn’t going to jump up and run off by his lonesome just because he was in a little trouble. If he went down he was going to take her with him. It had been her idea anyway, he justified himself. He had just been trying to do her business.

He slunk up the path toward the house, holding the shotgun cradled in his arm as though stalking an enemy.

Only the screen door was closed. He became wary. When he poked his head into the kitchen, his eyes popped. Sister Heavenly was sitting at the kitchen table drinking sassafras tea and smoking a pipe of marijuana and looking content with the world. For a brief moment he thought she had gotten it and his head exploded with rage. But the next instant he realized she couldn’t have. He stepped inside and closed the door.

The kitchen had windows on the side and back but their shutters were closed tight to keep out the heat and the only light came in through the screened back door. The kitchen table, covered with blue-and-white checked oilcloth, sat before the side window. The stove stood against the inside wall and Uncle Saint’s bunk, covered with army blankets, lay beneath the back window.

Sister Heavenly was dressed as before. She sat sidewise to the table, one leg crossed over the other exposing the ruffles of her petticoats, and her little finger was extended properly as she held the steaming teacup to her lips. Her black beaded bag lay atop the table and her black-and-white striped parasol was propped against the wall beside her.

A small electric fan atop the refrigerator stirred the reeking scent of marijuana and the fragrant aroma of sassafras tea.

She regarded Uncle Saint curiously over the rim of the cup.

“Well, you’re finally back,” she said.

Uncle Saint coughed. “You see me,” he grunted.

Pinky sat across the table from Sister Heavenly, his torso looming so high above her he looked like a barrel-chested midget standing in the chair. He looked from one to the other.

“Did you see Gus?” he asked Uncle Saint in his whining voice.

“I said I would tell you in a minute,” Sister Heavenly snapped at him.

Uncle Saint couldn’t make out her game, so he decided to keep his mouth shut. He sat on his bunk, placed the loaded shotgun close beside him, and reached underneath and dragged out a rusty iron lockbox in which he kept everything he owned. From his side pants pocket he took a single key attached to a long brass chain hanging from his belt and unlocked the tremendous Yale padlock which secured his box.

Two pairs of eyes followed his every movement, but he studiedly ignored them. He had his own alcohol lamp, teaspoon and spike, and he would use no other.

Silently they watched him mix a deck of heroin and a deck of cocaine, light the lamp and cook it in a spoon, load the spike. He banged himself in a vein just above his left wrist. His brown decayed teeth bared like an animal’s when the spike went in, but his mouth went loose and sloppy in a soft sighing sound as he drew out the spike.

Sister Heavenly finished her cup of tea and waited a few minutes for his speedball to work, slowly swallowing the sweet marijuana smoke.

“What happened to the trunk?” she asked finally.

Uncle Saint looked around as though expecting to find it in the kitchen. He hadn’t made up any kind of a story and all his furtive looks at her didn’t tell him anything. Outwardly she looked indifferent and serene, but he knew from past experience that didn’t mean a thing. Finally he decided to lie to the bitter end. He had lost the motherraping trunk and had blown some motherraper’s brains out to boot, and wasn’t nothing going to change that. He was too motherraping old to worry about every little thing that came along.

He licked his dry lips and muttered, “We been barking up the wrong tree. There wasn’t nothing in that trunk. Them expressmen come and got it and took it straight to the docks and left it there. I followed them, but when I seen there wasn’t nothing in it I figured there had been a switch, so I turned around and highballed it back uptown looking for you, but you has gone. So I figures you has already got it — if there was anything to get.”

“That’s what I thought,” she said enigmatically. “We been on a wild-goose chase.”

Pinky’s battered face contorted in a fit of rage. “You was after Gus’s treasure map,” he accused. “That’s why you give me that knockout shot. You was trying to steal Gus’s treasure map and you done let him get kilt.”

“He ain’t no more dead than you is,” Sister Heavenly said calmly. “I saw him talking to the expressmen when—”

“You saw Gus alive!” Pinky exclaimed. His eyes bugged out in an expression of horror.

Sister Heavenly went on as though she hadn’t noticed. “Not only saw him but I felt him. He talked to the expressmen when they came for the trunk and gave them the treasure map to mail.”

Pinky stared at her in disbelief. “You saw Gus give the expressmen the treasure map?” he echoed stupidly.

“What are you so het up about?” she asked sharply. “Ain’t you the one who said he was going to give them the treasure map to mail to him in Ghana?”

“But I thought he was already kilt by now,” Pinky stammered in confusion.

Uncle Saint was staring from one to another with a fixed expression of imbecility. He wondered if he was hearing right.

“He might be killed by now but he was alive when I was there,” she said. “And Ginny and the African was getting the bags ready to leave. Ginny was straightening up for the new couple what comes in today.”

Pinky looked flabbergasted. He opened his mouth to say something but was stopped by the sound of an automobile horn from the street in front.

“That’s Angelo,” she said casually, and looked sharply from one to the other to see their reactions.

Both looked suddenly guilty and trapped.

She smiled cynically. “Sit still,” she said. “I’ll go out and see what he wants this early in the morning.”

“But it ain’t his day,” Pithy whined.

Uncle Saint threw him a black look.

But Sister Heavenly merely said, “It sure ain’t,” as she got to her feet.

The front door was never opened, so she went out the back door and circled the house by the path. Her long skirt caught in the high dry weeds and burs clung to the hem but she paid it no attention.

A thickset, swarthy, black-haired man wearing a navy blue straw hat with a fluted gray silk band, Polaroid sunglasses in a heavy black frame, a charcoal-gray suit of shantung silk, white silk shirt and knitted maroon tie, sat behind the wheel of a shiny black MGA sports car with white-wall tires. He was a precinct detective sergeant.

Rows of even white teeth showed in his heavily tanned face at sight of her.

“How’s tricks, Sister H?” he greeted in a jovial voice.

She rested her black-gloved hands on the door of the car and looked at him questioningly. “Same as usual.” In the bright sunshine, her black straw hat atop the gray wig glittered like a cockroach.

“Are you sure?” His voice was insinuating.

“Now what do you mean by that?”

“I just came from the station,” he said. “As soon as I got the reader I came straight to see you. It’s the least I could do for an old friend.”

She looked at the dark green lens of his sunglasses, trying to see his eyes, but she only saw her own reflection. She felt trouble coming on and looked across the street to see if they were being watched.

The villa opposite was the only other house in the block. It was occupied by a large Italian family, but they were so accustomed to seeing the sergeant’s flashy car parked in front of Sister Heavenly’s, and to all the other strange goings-on in that house, they paid it no attention. At the moment none of the brood was in sight.

“Let’s finish with the bullshit,” Sister Heavenly said.

“Finished,” he agreed. “There was a shotgun killing took place down near the French Line dock at about half past six this morning,” he went on, watching her expression sharply from behind his trick glasses, but her expression didn’t change.

“It seems that a man standing on the sidewalk was shotgunned to death by a man sitting in a parked car. They found a derringer with a silencer attached on the sidewalk near the victim. It had recently been fired. Homicide figures the man with the derringer tried to gun the man in the car and got himself shotgunned instead. This sort of rod is a professional’s tool. Anyway, the killer got away,” he added offhandedly, waiting for her reaction.

She didn’t show any reaction. All she said was, “What’s that mean to me?”