All Shot Up (18 page)

“Gooooodammmmm!” George Drake said, pushing open the door with his left hand, while reaching inside of his coat for his pistol with his right.

He had his left foot down on the street, buried in the snow, and his left hand gripping the edge of the door for leverage, when a noose was dropped over his head and he was jerked backward. A knee caught him in the back, and he felt as though his spine was broken. His hat fell off. The sap landed right above his left ear, and lights exploded in his head as he lost consciousness.

“Put him in the back,” the white man said from the other side, of the car. “And put the kiesters in the trunk.”

He turned his head, gave a last look at Big Six and forgot him.

Big Six was walking slowly down the sidewalk, dragging his feet in the snow. The wound bled scarcely any; a thin trickle ran down his cheek from where the point of the knife protruded. His eyes were open; his hat was on his head. But for the bone knife-handle sticking from one temple and two inches of blade from the other, he looked like the usual drunk. He was calling silently for George to help him.

The white man got into the back of the car and took hold of the end of the noose. One of the colored men got behind the wheel; the other was at the back, putting away the Gladstone bags.

A shining black hearse backed carefully from the garage beside the funeral parlor. It straightened up and pulled to the curb. A fat black man in a dark chauffeur’s uniform got out and closed the garage door. He looked across the street toward the Cadillac.

“Blink your lights once,” the white man said from the rear.

The driver hit the bright lights for an instant.

Jackson waved his right hand and got into the hearse.

The snowplows hadn’t got into the small side streets, and the hearse made slow progress until it came to Seventh Avenue. The Cadillac followed half a block behind with the lights dimmed.

The white man turned George Drake over on the floor, placed one foot on his back between the shoulder blades, the other on the back of his head, and drew the noose as tight as it would go. He kept it like that while the Cadillac followed down the cleaned traffic lane of Seventh Avenue and turned into 125th Street.

Scores of colored laborers, willing to pick up a few extra bucks on their off day, were shoveling the piles of snow into city dump trucks.

Cars were out again in the cleaned streets, and gay, laughing drunks were bar-hopping. Jokers were chunking tight, loose snowballs at their girl friends, who ran screaming in delight. A mail truck passed, emptying the boxes.

Big Six kept shuffling slowly toward Seventh Avenue with the knife stuck through his head. He passed a young couple. The woman gasped and turned ashy.

“It’s a joke,” the man said knowingly. “You can buy those things in the toy stores. Magical stuff. You stick ’em on each side of your head.”

The woman shuddered. “It ain’t funny,” she said. “A big grown man like him playing with kid stuff.”

He passed a woman with two children, on their way to the movies to see a horror film. The children shrieked. The woman was indignant.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, frightening little children,” she accused.

Big Six kept on slowly, lost to the world. “George!” he was calling silently in the rational part of his mind. “George. The mother-raper stuck me.”

He started across Seventh Avenue. Snow was banked against the curb, and his feet plowed into the snow bank. He slipped but somehow managed not to fall. He got into the traffic lane. He stepped in front of a fast-moving car. Brakes shrieked.

“Drunken idiot!” the driver cried. Then he saw the knife sticking from Big Six’s head.

He jumped from his car, ran forward and took Big Six gently by the arm.

“My God in heaven,” he said.

He was a young colored doctor doing his internship in Brooklyn hospital. They had had a case similar to that a year ago; the other victim had been a colored man, also. The only way to save him was to leave the knife in the wound.

A woman started to get out of the car.

“Dick, can I help?” She had only seen the handle of the knife. She hadn’t seen the blade coming out the other side.

“No-no, don’t come near,” he cautioned. “Drive to the first bar and telephone for an ambulance—better cross over to Small’s; make a U-turn.”

As she drove off, another car with two men stopped. “Need any help?” the driver called.

“Yeah, help me lay this man on the sidewalk. He’s got a knife stuck through his head.”

“Jumping Jesus!” the second occupant exclaimed, opening the far door to get out. “They think of new ways every day.”

Cars were double-parked on Lexington Avenue in front of the hospital, and a large crowd of people milled about on the slushy sidewalks. Photographers and newsmen guarded the front door and the ambulance driveway looking sharply at everyone who left. Somehow word had got out that Casper Holmes was leaving the hospital, and they were determined he wouldn’t get past.

Two prowl cars were parked across the street; uniformed cops stood about, beating their gloved hands together.

The heavy snow drifted down, leaving a mantle of white on hats and overcoats and umbrellas.

When the hearse drew up the cops cleared the entrance to the driveway.

A reporter opened the door of the driver’s compartment and flashed a light into Jackson’s face.

“It’s just the chauffeur,” he called over his shoulder to his colleagues; then he asked, “Who are you taking, Jack?”

“The late Mister Clefus Harper, a pneumonia victim,” Jackson replied with a straight face.

“Anybody know a Clefus Harper?” the reporter asked.

No one knew him.

“Don’t let me hold you up, Jack,” he said.

The hearse purred slowly down the driveway toward the back exit.

“Keep on going,” the white man in the rear of the Cadillac limousine said. “They’re going to take a little time to get him out, and we got to get rid of this stiff.”

The driver stepped it up, went past the double-parked cars and crossed 121st Street.

“Is he dead?” his companion asked.

“He ain’t alive,” the white man said as he bent over and began removing the noose from George Drake’s neck.

When he had finished he began emptying all of Drake’s pockets.

“Where we going to dump him?” the driver asked, as they approached 119th Street.

The white man looked about. He was not very familiar with Harlem.

“Turn down this street,” he said. “It looks all right.” The big car floundered in inches of snow.

“Can you get through to Third Avenue?” the white man asked.

“Sure,” the driver said confidently. “A little snow like this won’t stop a Cadillac.”

The white man looked, up and down the street. There was no one in sight. He opened the curb-side door.

“Pull in a little,” he said.

The driver brushed the curb.

The white man rolled the body of George Drake out into the deep snow on the sidewalk. He closed the door and looked back once. The body looked like that of a fallen drunk, only there were no footsteps.

“Step it up,” he said.

Jackson pulled up before the back door of the hospital from which the dead were removed. He was no stranger there.

He got out, went around, opened the back of the hearse and began dragging out a long wicker basket. Two grinning colored attendants came from within the hospital and took the wicker basket inside with them.

Jackson got back into the driver’s seat and waited. He listened to an argument going on inside.

“You can’t come back here and poke your nose into these dead baskets,” an indignant voice was saying.

“Why not,” a laconic voice replied. “It’s a city hospital, ain’t it?”

“I’ll get the supervisor,” the first voice threatened.

“All right, I’ll go,” the laconic voice acceded. “I wasn’t looking for anyone; I was just curious as to how many people die in this joint during an average day.”

“More than you think,” the first voice said.

Eight minutes passed before the attendants reappeared, staggering beneath the weight of the loaded wicker basket. The lid was sealed with a metal clamp, to which was attached a name-card in a metal frame:

CLEFUS HARPER—male Negro

FOR
: H. Exodus Clay Funeral Parlor

134th Street

They slid the basket into the coffin compartment and started to shut the doors.

“Let me do it,” Jackson said.

The attendants grinned and re-entered the hospital.

“Where you want to go, Mister Holmes?” Jackson asked in a stage whisper.

“We’re alone?” Casper asked in a low voice from within the basket.

“Yes, sir.”

“Joe Green’s boys are following in the Cadillac?”

“Yes, sir, they’s waiting outside in the street.”

“No one knows they’re tailing us?”

“No, sir, not as far as I know of. They’s keeping about a half a block behind.”

“Okay. Then drive me to my office on 125th Street. You know where that is?”

“Yes, sir, up over the Paris Bar.”

“Double-park somewhere close,” Casper instructed. “Then get out and come back and open the basket. Then stand there as if you’re doing something and watch the street. When it’s safe for me to get out without being seen, give me the word. You got that?”

“Yessir.”

“All right, let’s go.”

Jackson closed the back door and climbed back into the driver’s seat. The hearse purred slowly up the driveway.

Before reaching the street it was stopped again by newspaper reporters. They looked at the name tag on the basket. One of them made a note of it. The others didn’t bother.

The hearse turned toward 125th Street. Half a block distant it passed Joe Green’s black Cadillac limousine. Jackson glanced at the Cadillac. It looked unoccupied He began to worry. He drove slowly, watching it in his right-side fender mirror. When he had gone another half block, the Cadillac’s bright lights blinked once and went off. He was relieved. He blinked his own lights in reply and kept driving slowly until he had made the turn into 125th Street and saw the black Cadillac make the turn half a block behind him.

He crossed Park, Madison, Lenox, keeping to the right, letting the fast traffic pass him.

At Seventh Avenue he waited for a snowplow to pass, pulled around a dump truck, parked in front of the clock, that was being loaded by a gang of well-liquored men. They stopped and watched the hearse cross the avenue.

“Somebody going by way of H. Clay,” one of them remarked.

“Don’t ask who it is,” another replied. “It might be your mammy.”

“Don’t I know it,” the first one replied.

A Cadillac limousine pulled around the truck in the wake of the hearse and carefully crossed the avenue.

“That’s Joe Green’s big Cat,” a third laborer stated.

“Warn’t his men in it,” another replied.

“How you know? You running Joe’s business?”

“Most generally he got George Drake driving and Big Six sitting in the front.”

“Warn’t Joe in the back, neither.”

“Come on, you sports, and bend your backs,” the truck driver said. “You ain’t getting paid to second-guess Joe Green.”

The hearse double-parked beside a Ford station wagon in front of the drugstore adjacent to the Paris Bar. The drugstore was open for business, and a few customers were moving about inside. The Paris Bar seemed crowded as usual. Its plate-glass windows were steamed over, and from within came the muted sound of a jump tune issuing from the juke box.

The Cadillac double-parked at the corner in front of the United Cigar Store.

Jackson got out on the driver’s side, came around the front of the hearse and looked up and down the street. A couple of men issued from the Paris Bar, glanced at the hearse and went the other way.

Jackson went to the back, opened the doors and cut the metal seal on the wicker basket with his pocket-knife.

Casper lay in the basket, fully dressed except for a hat. He wore the same dark clothes he had worn into the hospital. A soft black hat with the crown crushed in lay atop his stomach.

“Want me to help you up?” Jackson asked in a whisper.

“I can get up,” Casper said roughly. “Close the doors and watch the street.”

Jackson left the doors slightly ajar and looked one way and the other and then across the street. Cars passed in the street, a bus went by; people came and went along the sidewalks, trampling the deep snow into slush.

“Where’s Joe’s car parked?” Casper asked from the crack between the doors.

Jackson jumped. He wasn’t used to people talking to him from the back of the hearse. He looked down the street and said, “In front of the Cigar Store.”

“When you leave, give ’em a blink,” Casper instructed. “How is it now?”

For a moment there was no one nearby; no one seemed to be looking in that direction.

“All right, if you come fast,” Jackson said.

Casper came fast. He was down on the street in one jump, the black hat pulled low over his silver white hair. He cleared the back end of the station wagon in two strides, leaped over the snow banked along the curb, slipped in the slush but caught himself, and the next instant was close to the doorway of the stairs leading to his offices above. His back was to the street as he inserted the key in the lock; no one had noticed him jump from the hearse; no one had recognized him; no one was paying him the least bit of attention. He got the door open and went inside, turned once and glanced at Jackson through the upper glass panel, signaled him to go on.

Jackson got back into the driver’s seat, blinked his bright lights and looked into the rear-view mirror.

The Cadillac’s bright lights blinked in reply.

The hearse drove slowly away.

The Cadillac pulled up and double-parked in the same position beside the station wagon.

“What you going to do with this heap?” the driver asked.

“Leave it right here, with the motor running,” the white man said. “If Joe Green’s a big shot, which he’s gotta be, ain’t nobody going to bother with it.”

He took his short-barreled police special from his right overcoat pocket, held it in his lap and spun the chamber, then put it back into his pocket.