The Real Cool Killers (8 page)

“I don’t recollect his name, Chief. They driv up in his car and just stopped for a minute like they was looking for somebody and went out and drive away.”

“Don’t play with me,” Grave Digger said with a sudden show of anger. “This ain’t the movies; this is real. A white man has been killed in Harlem and Harlem is my beat. I’ll take you down to the station and turn a dozen white cops loose on you and they’ll work you over until the black comes off.”

“Name’s Ready Belcher, Chief, but I don’t want nobody to know I told you,” Big Smiley said in a whisper. “I don’t want no trouble with that starker.”

“Ready,” Grave Digger said and got down from his stool.

He didn’t know much about Ready; just that he operated up-town on the swank side of Harlem, above 145th Street in Washington Heights.

He drove up to the 154th Street precinct station at the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and asked for his friend, Bill Cresus. Bill was a colored detective on the vice squad. No
one knew where Bill was at the time. He left word for Bill to contact him at Bucky’s if he called within the hour. Then he got into his car and coasted down the sharp incline to St. Nicholas Avenue and turned south down the lesser incline past 149th Street.

Outwardly it was a quiet neighbourhood of private houses and five- and six-story apartment buildings flanking the wide black-paved street. But the houses had been split up into bed-sized one-room kitchenettes, renting for $25 weekly, at the disposal of frantic couples who wished to shack up for a season. And behind the respectable-looking facades of the apartment buildings were the plush flesh cribs and poppy pads and circus tents of Harlem.

The excitement of the dragnet hadn’t reached this far and the street was comparatively empty.

He coasted to a stop before a sedate basement entrance. Four steps below street level was a black door with a shiny brass knocker in the shape of three musical notes. Above it red neon lights spelled out the word
BUCKY’S
.

It felt strange to be alone. The last time had been when Coffin Ed was in the hospital after the acid throwing. The memory of it made his head tight with anger and it took a special effort to keep his temper under wraps.

He pushed and the door opened.

People sat at white-clothed tables beneath pink-shaded wall lights in a long narrow room, eating fried chicken daintily with their fingers. There was a white party of six, several colored couples, and two colored men with white women. They looked well-dressed and reasonably clean.

The walls behind them were covered with innumerable small pink-stained pencil portraits of all the great and the near-great who had ever lived in Harlem. Musicians led nine to one.

The hat-check girl stationed in a cubicle beside the entrance stuck out her hand with a supercilious look.

Grave Digger kept his hat on and strode down the narrow aisle between the tables.

A chubby pianist with shining black skin and a golden smile who was dressed in a tan tweed sport jacket and white silk sport shirt open at the throat sat at a baby grand piano wedged between the last table and the circular bar. Soft white light spilled on his partly bald head while he played nocturnes with a bedroom touch.

He gave Grave Digger an apprehensive look, got up and followed him to the semi-darkness of the bar.

“I hope you’re not on business, Digger. I pay to keep this place off-limits for cops,” he said in a fluttery voice.

Grave Digger’s gaze circled the bar. Its high stools were inhabited by a varied crew: a big dark-haired white man, two slim young colored men, a short heavy-set white man with blond crew-cut hair, two dark women dressed in white silk evening gowns, a chocolate dandy in a box-backed double-breasted tuxedo sporting a shoestring dubonet bow. A high-yellow waitress waited nearby with a serving tray. Another tall, slim ebony young man presided over the bar.

“I’m just looking around, Bucky,” Grave Digger said. “Just looking for a break.”

“Many folks have found a break in here,” Bucky said suggestively.

“I don’t doubt it.”

“But that’s not the kind of break you’re looking for.”

“I’m looking for a break on a case. An important white man was shot to death over on Lenox Avenue a short time ago.”

Bucky gestured with lotioned hands. His manicured nails flashed in the dim light. “What has that to do with us here? Nobody ever gets hurt in here. Everything is smooth and quiet. You can see for yourself. Genteel people dining in leisure. Fine food. Soft music. Low lights and laughter. Doesn’t look like business for the police in this respectable atmosphere.”

In the pause that followed, one of the marcelled ebonies was heard saying in a lilting voice, “I positively did not even look at her man, and she upped and knocked me over the
head with a whisky bottle.”

“These black bitches are so violent,” his companion said.

“And strong, honey.”

Grave Digger smiled sourly.

“The man who was killed was a patron of yours,” he said. “Name of Ulysses Galen.”

“My God, Digger, I don’t know the names of all the ofays who come into my place,” Bucky said. “I just play for them and try to make them happy.”

“I believe you,” Grave Digger said. “Galen was seen about town with Ready. Does that stir your memory?”

“Ready?” Bucky exclaimed innocently. “He hardly ever comes in here. Who gave you that notion?”

“The hell he doesn’t,” Grave Digger said. “He panders out of here.”

“You hear that!” Bucky appealed to the barman in a shrill horrified voice, then caught himself as the silence from the diners reached his sensitive ears. With hushed indignation he added, “This flatfoot comes in here and accuses me of harboring panderers.”

“A little bit of that goes a long way, son,” Grave Digger said in his flat voice.

“Oh, that man’s an ogre, Bucky,” the barman said. “You go back to your entertaining and I’ll see what he wants.” He switched over to the bar, put his hands on his hips and looked down at Grave Digger with a haughty air. “And just what can we do for you, you mean rude grumpy man?”

The white men at the bar laughed.

Bucky turned and started off.

Grave Digger caught him by the arm and pulled him back. “Don’t make me get rough, son,” he muttered.

“Don’t you dare manhandle me,” Bucky said in a low tense whisper, his whole chubby body quivering with indignation. “I don’t have to take that from you. I’m covered.”

The bartender backed away, shaking himself. “Don’t let him hurt Bucky,” he appealed to the white men in a frightened voice.

“Maybe I can help you,” the white man with the blond crew cut said to Grave Digger. “You’re a detective, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Grave Digger said, holding on to Bucky. “A white man was killed in Harlem tonight and I’m looking for the killer.”

The white man’s eyebrows went up an inch.

“Do you expect to find him here?”

“I’m following a lead, is all. The man has been seen with a pimp called Ready Belcher who hangs out here.”

The white man’s eyebrows subsided.

“Oh, Ready; I know him. But he’s merely–”

Bucky cut him off: “You don’t have to tell him anything; you’re protected in here.”

“Sure,” the white man said. “That’s what the officer is trying to do, protect us all.”

“He’s right,” one of the evening-gowned colored women said. “If Ready has killed some trick he was steering to Reba’s the chair’s too good for him.”

“Shut your mouth, woman,” the barman whispered fiercely.

The muscles in Grave Digger’s face began to jump as he let go of Bucky. He stood up with his heels hooked into the rungs of the barstool and leaned over the bar. He caught the barman by the front of his red silk shirt as he was trying to dance away. The shirt ripped down the seam with a ragged sound but enough held for him to jerk the barman close to the bar.

“You got too goddamned much to say, Tarbelle,” he said in a thick cottony voice, and slapped the barman spinning across the circular enclosure with the palm of his open hand.

“He didn’t have to do that,” the first woman said.

Grave Digger turned on her and said thickly, “And you, little sister, you and me are going to see Reba.”

“Reba!” her companion replied. “Do I know anybody named Reba. Lord no!”

Grave Digger stepped down from his high stool.

“Cut that Aunt Jemima routine and get up off your ass,” he said thickly, “or I’ll take my pistol and break off your teeth.”

The two white men stared at him as though at a dangerous animal escaped from the zoo.

“You mean that?” the woman said.

“I mean it,” he said.

She scrunched out of the stool and said, “Gimme my coat, Jule.”

The chocolate dandy took a coat from the top of the jukebox behind them.

“That’s putting it on rather thick,” the blond white man protested in a reasonable voice.

“I’m just a cop,” Grave Digger said thickly. “If you white people insist on coming up to Harlem where you force colored people to live in vice-and-crime-ridden slums, it’s my job to see that you are safe.”

The white man turned bright red.

The sergeant knocked at the door. He was flanked by two uniformed cops and a corporal.

Another search party led by another sergeant was at the door across the hall.

Other cops were working all the corridors starting at the bottom and sealing off the area they’d covered.

“Come in,” Granny called in a querulous voice. “The door ain’t locked.” She bit the stem of her corn-cob pipe with toothless gums.

The sergeant and his party entered the small kitchen. It was crowded.

At the sight of the very old woman working innocently at her darning, the sergeant started to remove his cap, then
remembered he was on duty and kept it on.

“You don’t lock your door, Grandma?” he observed.

Granny looked at the cops over the rims of her ancient spectacles and her old fingers went lax on the darning egg.

“Naw suh, Ah ain’t got nuthin’ for nobody to steal and ain’t nobody want nuthin’ else from an old ’oman like me.”

The sergeant’s beady blue eyes scanned the kitchen. “You keep this place mighty clean, Grandma,” he remarked in surprise.

“Yes suh, it don’t kill a body to keep clean and my old missy used to always say de cleaness is next to the goddess.”

Her old milky eyes held a terrified question she couldn’t ask and her thin old body began to tremble.

“You mean goodness,” the sergeant said.

“Naw suh, Ah means goddess; Ah knows what she said.”

“She means cleanliness is next to godliness,” the corporal interposed.

“The professor,” one of the cops said.

Granny pursed her lips. “Ah know what my missy said; goddess, she said.”

“Were you in slavery?” the sergeant asked as though struck suddenly by the thought.

The others stared at her with sudden interest.

“Ah don’t rightly know, suh. Ah ’spect so though.”

“How old are you?”

Her lips moved soundlessly; she seemed to be trying to remember.

“She must be all of a hundred,” the professor said.

She couldn’t stop her body from trembling and slowly it got worse.

“What for you white ’licemen wants with me, suh?” she finally asked.

The sergeant noticed that she was trembling and said reassuringly, “We ain’t after you, Grandma; we’re looking for an escaped prisoner and some teenage gangsters.”

“Gangsters!”

Her spectacles slipped down on her nose and her hands
shook as though she had the palsy.

“They belong to a neighbourhood gang that calls itself Real Cool Moslems.”

She went from terrified to scandalized. “We ain’t no heathen in here, suh,” she said indignantly. “We be God-fearing Christians.”

The cops laughed.

“They’re not real Moslems,” the sergeant said. “They just call themselves that. One of them, named Sonny Pickens, is older than the rest. He killed a white man outside on the street.”

The darning dropped unnoticed from Granny’s nerveless fingers. The corncob pipe wobbled in her puckered mouth; the professor looked at it with morbid fascination.

“A white man! Merciful hebens!” she exclaimed in a quavering voice. “What’s this wicked world coming to?”

“Nobody knows,” the sergeant said, then changed his manner abruptly. “Well, let’s get down to business, Grandma. What’s your name?”

“Bowee, suh, but e’body calls me Granny.”

“Bowee. How do you spell that, Grandma?”

“Ah don’t rightly know, suh. Hit’s just short for boll weevil. My old missy name me that. They say the boll weevil was mighty bad the year Ah was born.”

“What about your husband, didn’t he have a name?”

“Ah neber had no regular ’usban’, suh. Just whosoever was thar.”

“You got any children?”

“Jesus Christ, sarge,” the professor said. “Her youngest child would be sixty years old.”

The two cops laughed; the sergeant reddened sheepishly.

“Who lives here with you, Granny?” the sergeant continued.

Her bony frame stiffened beneath her faded Mother Hubbard. The corncob pipe fell into her lap and rolled unnoticed to the floor.

“Just me and mah grandchile, Caleb, suh,” she said in a
forced voice. “And Ah rents a room to two workin’ boys; but they be good boys and don’t neber bother nobody.”

The cops grew suddenly speculative.

“Now this grandchild, Caleb, Grandma–” the sergeant began cunningly.

“He might be mah great-grandchile, suh,” she interrupted.

He frowned, “Great, then. Where is he now?”

“You mean right now, suh?”

“Yeah, Grandma, right this minute.”

“He at work in a bowling alley downtown, suh.”

“How long has he been at work?”

“He left right after supper, suh. We gennally eats supper at six o’clock.”

“And he has a regular job in this bowling alley?”

“Naw suh, hit’s just for t’night, suh. He goes to school – Ah don’t rightly ’member the number of his new P.S.”

“Where is this bowling alley he’s working at tonight?”

“Ah don’t know, suh. Ah guess you all’ll have to ast Samson. He is one of mah roomers.”

“Samson, yeah.” The sergeant stored it in his memory. “And you haven’t seen Caleb since supper – about seven o’clock, say?”