The Real Cool Killers (13 page)

“Yes?”

“I would like to question him.”

“I will call Dr. Banks. You may talk to him. Please be seated.”

Grave Digger prodded Ready in the direction of chairs surrounding a table with magazines. They sat silently, like relatives of a critical case.

Dr. Banks came in silently, crossing the linoleum-tiled floor on rubber-soled shoes. He was a tall, athletic-looking young colored man dressed in white.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr. Jones,” he said to Grave Digger whom he knew by sight. “You want to know about the case with the severed arm.” He had a quick smile and a pleasant voice.

“I want to talk to him,” Grave Digger said.

Dr. Banks pulled up a chair and sat down. “He’s dead. I’ve just come from him. He had a rare type of blood – Type O – which we don’t have in our blood bank. You realize transfusions were imperative. We had to contact the Red Cross blood bank. They located the type in Brooklyn, but it arrived too late. Is there anything I can tell you?”

“I want to know who he was.”

“So do we. He died without revealing his identity.”

“Didn’t he make a statement of any kind before he died?”

“There was another detective here earlier, but the patient was unconscious at the time. The patient regained consciousness later, but the detective had left. Before leaving, he examined the patient’s effects, however, but found nothing to establish his identity.”

“He didn’t talk at all, didn’t say anything?”

“Oh yes. He cried a great deal. One moment he was cursing and the next he was praying. Most of what he said was incoherent. I gathered he regretted not killing the man whom he had attacked – the white man who was killed later.”

“He didn’t mention any names?”

“No. Once he said ‘the little one’ but mostly he used the word
mother-raper
which Harlemites apply to everybody, enemies, friends and strangers.”

“Well, that’s that,” Grave Digger said. “Whatever he knew he took with him. Still I’d like to examine his effects too, whatever they are.”

“Certainly; they’re just the clothes he wore and the contents of his pockets when he arrived here.” He stood up. “Come this way.”

Grave Digger got to his feet and motioned his head for Ready to walk ahead of him.

“Are you an officer too?” Dr. Banks asked Ready.

“No, he’s my prisoner,” Grave Digger said. “We’re not that hard up for cops as yet.”

Dr. Banks smiled. He led them down a corridor smelling strongly of ether to a room at the far end where the clothes
and personal effects of the emergency and ward patients were stored in neatly wrapped bundles on shelves against the walls. He took down a bundle bearing a metal tag and placed it on the bare wooden table.

“Here you are.”

From the adjoining room an anguished male voice was heard reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

Ready stared as though fascinated at the number 219 on the metal tag fastened to the bundle of clothes and whispered, “Death row.”

Dr. Banks flicked a glance at him and said to Grave Digger, “Most of the attendants play the numbers. When an emergency patient arrives they put this tag with the death number on his bundle and if he dies they play it.”

Grave Digger grunted and began untying the bundle.

“If you discover anything leading to his identity, let us know,” Dr. Banks said. “We’d like to notify his relatives.” He left them.

Grave Digger spread the blood-caked mackinaw and overalls on the table. It contained two incredibly filthy one-dollar bills, some loose change, a small brown paper sack of dried roots, two Yale keys and a skeleton key on a rusty key ring, a dried rabbit’s foot, a dirty piece of resin, a cheese cloth rag that had served as a handkerchief, a putty knife, a small piece of pumice stone, and a scrap of dirty writing paper folded into a small square. The putty knife and pumice stone indicated that the man had worked somewhere as a porter, using the putty to scrape chewing gum from the floor and the pumice stone for cleaning his hands. That didn’t help much.

He unfolded the square of paper and found a note on cheap school paper written in a childish hand.

Grave Digger folded it again and slipped it into his pocket.

“Is your girl called Bee?” he asked Ready.

“Naw, suh, she called Doe.”

“Do you know any girl called Bee – a school girl?”

“Naw suh.”

“GB?”

“Naw suh.”

Grave Digger turned out the pockets of the clothes but found nothing more. He wrapped the bundle and attached the tag. He noticed Ready staring at the number on the tag again.

“Don’t let that number catch up with you,” he said. “Don’t you end up with that tag on your fine clothes.”

Ready licked his dry lips.

They didn’t see Dr. Banks on their way out. Grave Digger stopped at the reception desk to tell the nurse he hadn’t found anything to identify the corpse.

“Now we’re going to look for the Greek’s car,” he said to Ready.

They found the big green Cadillac beneath a street lamp in the middle of the block on 130th Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues. It had an Empire State license number–UG-16 – and it was parked beside a fire hydrant. It was as conspicuous as a fire truck.

He pulled up behind it and parked.

“Who covered for him in Harlem?” he asked Ready.

“I don’t know, Mista Jones.”

“Was it the precinct captain?”

“Mista Jones, I–”

“One of our councilmen?”

“Honest to God, Mista Jones–”

Grave Digger got out and walked toward the big car.

The doors were locked. He broke the glass of the left-side wind screen with the butt of his pistol, reached inside past the wheel and unlocked the door. The interior lights came
on.

A quick search revealed the usual paraphernalia of a motorist: gloves, handkerchiefs, Kleenex, half-used packages of different brands of cigarettes, insurance papers, a woman’s plastic overshoes and compact. A felt monkey dangled from the rear view mirror and two medium-sized dolls, a black-faced Topsy and a blonde Little Eva, sat in opposite corners on the back seat.

He found the miniature bull whip and a Manila envelope of postcard-sized photos in the right-hand glove compartment. He studied the photos in the light. They were pictures of nude colored girls in various postures, each photo revealing another developed technique of the sadist. On most of the pictures the faces of the girls were distinct although distorted by pain and shame.

He put the whip in his leather-lined coat pocket, kept the photos in his hand, slammed the door, walked back to his own car and climbed beneath the wheel.

“Was he a photographer?” he asked Ready.

“Yas suh, sometime he carry a camera.”

“Did he show you the pictures he took?”

“Naw suh, he never said nothing ’bout any pictures. I just seen him with the camera.”

Grave Digger snapped on the top light and showed Ready the photos.

“Do you recognize any of them?”

Ready whistled softly and his eyes popped as he turned over one photo after another.

“Naw suh, I don’t know none of them,” he said, handing them back.

“Your girl’s not one of them?”

“Naw suh.”

Grave Digger pocketed the envelope and mashed the starter.

“Ready, don’t let me catch you in a lie,” he said again, letting out the clutch.

He parked directly in front of the Dew Drop Inn and pushed Ready through the door. On first sight it looked just as he had left it; the two white cops guarding the door and the colored patrons celebrating noisily. He ushered Ready between the bar and the booths, toward the rear. The varicolored faces turned toward them curiously as they passed.

But in the last booth he noticed an addition. It was crowded with teenagers, three school boys and four school girls, who hadn’t been there before. They stopped talking and looked at him intently as he and Ready approached. Then at sight of the bull whip all four girls gave a start and their young dark faces tightened with sudden fear. He wondered how they’d got past the white cops on the door.

All the places at the bar were taken.

Big Smiley came down and asked two men to move.

One of them began to complain. “What for I got to give up my seat for some other niggers.”

Big Smiley thumbed toward Grave Digger. “He’s the man.”

“Oh, one of them two.”

Both rose with alacrity, picked up their glasses and vacated the stools, grinning at Grave Digger obsequiously.

“Don’t show me your teeth,” Grave Digger snarled. “I’m no dentist. I don’t fix teeth. I’m a cop. I’ll knock your teeth out.”

The men doused their grins and slunk away.

Grave Digger threw the bull whip on top of the bar and sat on the high bar stool.

“Sit down,” he ordered Ready, who stood by hesitantly. “Sit down, Goddamn it.”

Ready sat down as though the stool were covered with
cake icing.

Big Smiley looked from one to another, smiling warily.

“You held out on me,” Grave Digger said in his thick cottony voice of smoldering rage. “And I don’t like that.”

Big Smiley’s smile got a sudden case of constipation. He threw a quick look at Ready’s impassive face, found nothing there to reassure him, then fell back on his cut arm which he carried in a sling.

“Guess I must be runnin’ some fever, Chief, ’cause I don’t remember what I told you.”

“You told me you didn’t know who Galen was looking for in here,” Grave Digger said thickly.

Big Smiley stole another look at Ready, but all he got was a blank. He sighed heavily.

“Who he were looking for? Is dat what you ast me?” he stalled, trying to meet Grave Digger’s smoldering hot gaze. “I dunno who he were looking for, Chief.”

Grave Digger rose up on the bar stool rungs as though his feet were in stirrups, snatched the bull whip from the bar and slashed Big Smiley across one cheek after another before Big Smiley could get his good hand moving.

Big Smiley stopped smiling. Talk stopped suddenly along the length of the bar, petered out in the booths. In the vacuum that followed, Lil Green’s voice whined from the jukebox:

Grave Digger sat back on the stool, breathing hard, struggling to control his rage. Veins stood out in his temples, growing out of his short-cropped kinky hair like strange roots climbing toward the brim of his misshapen hat. His brown eyes laced with red veins generated a steady white heat.

The white manager, who’d been working the front end of the bar, hastened down toward them with a face full of outrage.

“Get back,” Grave Digger said thickly.

The manager got back.

Grave Digger stabbed at Big Smiley with his left forefinger and said in a voice so thick it was hard to understand, “Smiley, all I want from you is the truth. And I ain’t got long to get it.”

Big Smiley didn’t look at Ready any more. He didn’t smile. He didn’t whine.

He said, “Just ask the questions, Chief, and I’ll answer ’em the best of my knowledge.”

Grave Digger looked around at the teenagers in the booth. They were listening with open mouths, staring at him with popping eyes. His breath burned from his flaring nostrils. He turned back to Big Smiley. But he sat quietly for a moment to give the blood time to recede from his head.

“Who killed him?” he finally asked.

“I don’t know, Chief.”

“He was killed on your street.”

“Yas suh, but I don’t know who done it.”

“Do Sissie and Sugartit come in here?”

“Yas suh, sometimes.”

Out of the corners of his eyes Grave Digger noticed Ready’s shoulders begin to sag as though his spine were melting.

“Sit up straight, God damn it,” he said. “You’ll have plenty of time to lie down if I find out you’ve been lying.”

Ready sat up straight.

Grave Digger addressed Big Smiley. “Galen met them in here?”

“Naw suh, he met Sissie in here once but I never seen him with Sugartit.”

“What was she doing in here then?”

“She come in here twice with Sissie.”

“How’d you know her name?”

“I heard Sissie call her that.”

“Was Sheik with her when Galen met her?”

“You mean with Sissie, when she met the big man? Yas
suh.”

“He paid Sheik the money?”

“I couldn’t be sure, Chief, but I seen money being passed. I don’t know who got it.”

“He got it. Did they both leave with him?”

“You mean both Sheik and Sissie?”

“That’s what I mean.”

Big Smiley took out a blue bandana handkerchief and mopped his sweating black face.

The four school girls in the booth began going through the motions of leaving. Grave Digger wheeled toward them.

“Sit down! I want to talk to you later,” he ordered.

They began a shrill protest: “We got to get home … Got to be at school tomorrow at nine o’clock … Haven’t finished homework … Can’t stay out this late … Get into trouble …”

He got up and went over to show them his gold badge. “You’re already in trouble. Now I want you to sit down and keep quiet.”

He took hold of the two girls who were standing and forced them back into their seats.

“He can’t hold you ’less he’s got a warrant,” the boy in the aisle seat said.

Grave Digger slapped him out of his seat, reached down and lifted him from the floor by his coat lapels and slammed him back into his seat.

“Now say that again,” he suggested.

The boy didn’t speak.

Grave Digger waited for a moment until they had settled down and were quiet, then he returned to his bar stool.

Neither Big Smiley nor Ready had moved; neither had looked at the other.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Grave Digger said.

“When he took Sissie off Sheik stayed in his seat,” Big Smiley said.

“What kind of a goddamned answer is that?”

“That’s the way it was, Chief.”

“Where did he take her?”

Rivers of sweat poured from Big Smiley’s face. He sighed.