Cotton Comes to Harlem (6 page)

“Yeah, it’s like the sidewalks trying to speak in a language
never heard. But they can’t spell it either.”

“Naw,” Coffin Ed said. “Unless there’s an alphabet for emotion.”

“The emotion that comes out of experience. If we could read that language, man, we would solve all the crimes in the world.”

“Let’s split,” Coffin Ed said. “Jazz talks too much to me.”

“It ain’t so much what it says,” Grave Digger agreed. “It’s what you can’t do about it.”

They left the white and black couples in their frenetic embrace, guided by the talking of the jazz, and went back to their car.

“Life could be great but there are hoodlums abroad,” Grave Digger said, climbing beneath the wheel.

“You just ain’t saying it, Digger; hoodlums high, and hoodlums low.”

They turned off on 132nd Street beside the new housing development and parked in the darkest spot in the block, cut the motor and doused the lights and waited.

The stool pigeon came in about ten minutes. He was the shinyhaired pimp wearing a white silk shirt and green silk pants who had sat beside them at the bar, with his back turned, talking to a tan-skinned blonde. He opened the door quickly and got into the back seat in the dark.

Coffin Ed turned around to face him. “You know Early Riser?”

“Yeah. He’s a snatcher but I don’t know no sting he’s made recently.”

“Who does he work with?”

“Work with? I never heard of him working no way but alone.”

“Think hard,” Grave Digger said harshly without turning around.

“I dunno, boss. That’s the honest truth. I swear ’fore God.”

“You know about the rumble on ’37th Stret?” Coffin Ed continued.

“I heard about it but I didn’t go see it. I heard the syndicate robbed Deke O’Hara out of a hundred grand he’d just collected from his Back-to-Africa pitch.”

That sounded straight enough so Coffin Ed just said, “Okay. Do some dreaming about Early Riser,” and let him go.

“Let’s try lower Eighth,” Grave Digger said. “Early was on shit.”

“Yeah, I saw the marks,” Coffin Ed agreed.

Their next stop was a dingy bar on Eighth Avenue near the corner of 112th Street. This was the neighborhood of the cheap addicts, whisky-heads, stumblebums, the flotsam of Harlem; the end of the line for the whores, the hard squeeze for the poor
honest laborers and a breeding ground for crime. Blank-eyed whores stood on the street corners swapping obscenities with twitching junkies. Muggers and thieves slouched in dark doorways waiting for someone to rob; but there wasn’t anyone but each other. Children ran down the street, the dirty street littered with rotting vegetables, uncollected garbage, battered garbage cans, broken glass, dog offal — always running, ducking and dodging. God help them if they got caught. Listless mothers stood in the dark entrances of tenements and swapped talk about their men, their jobs, their poverty, their hunger, their debts, their Gods, their religions, their preachers, their children, their aches and pains, their bad luck with the numbers and the evilness of white people. Workingmen staggered down the sidewalks filled with aimless resentment, muttering curses, hating to go to their hotbox hovels but having nowhere else to go.

“All I wish is that I was God for just one mother-raping second,” Grave Digger said, his voice cotton-dry with rage.

“I know,” Coffin Ed said. “You’d concrete the face of the mother-raping earth and turn white folks into hogs.”

“But I ain’t God,” Grave Digger said, pushing into the bar.

The bar stools were filled with drunken relics, shabby men, ancient whores draped over tired laborers drinking ruckus juice to get their courage up. The tables were filled with the already drunk sleeping on folded arms.

No one recognized the two detectives. They looked prosperous and sober. A wave of vague alertness ran through the joint; everyone thought fresh money was coming in. This sudden greed was indefinably communicated to the sleeping drunks. They stirred in their sleep and awakened, waiting for the moment to get up and cadge another drink.

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed leaned against the bar at the front and waited for one of the two husky bartenders to serve them.

Coffin Ed nodded to a sign over the bar. “Do you believe that?”

Grave Digger looked up and read:
NO JUNKIES SERVED HERE
! He said, “Why not? Poor and raggedy as these junkies are, they ain’t got no money for whisky.”

The fat bald-headed bartender with shoulders like a woodchopper came up. “What’s yours, gentlemen?”

Coffin Ed said sourly, “Hell, man, you expecting any gentlemen in here?”

The bartender didn’t have a sense of humor. “All my customers is gentlemen,” he said.

“Two bourbons on the rocks,” Grave Digger said.

“Doubles,” Coffin Ed added.

The bartender served them with the elaborate courtesy he reserved for all well-paying customers. He rang up the bill and slapped down the change. His eyes flickered at the fifty-cent tip. “Tnank you, gentlemen,” he said, and strolled casually down the bar, winking at a buxom yellow whore at the other end clad in a tight red dress.

Casually she detached herself from the asbestos joker she was trying to kindle and strolled to the head of the bar. Without preamble she squeezed in between Grave Digger and Coffin Ed and draped a big bare yellow arm about the shoulders of each. She smelled like unwashed armpits bathed in dime-store perfume and overpowering bed odor. “You wanna see a girl?” she asked, sharing her stale whisky breath between them.

“Where’s any girl?” Coffin Ed said.

She snatched her arm from about his shoulder and gave her full attention to Grave Digger. Everyone in the joint had seen the obvious play and were waiting eagerly for the result.

“Later,” Grave Digger said. “I got a word first for Early Riser’s gunsel.”

Her eyes flashed. “Loboy! He ain’t no gunsel, he the boss.”

“Gunsel or boss, I got word for him.”

“See me first, honey. I’ll pass him the word.”

“No, business first.”

“Don’t be like that, honey,” she said, touching his leg. “There’s no time like bedtime.” She fingered his ribs, promising pleasure. Her fingers touched something hard; they stiffened, paused, and then she plainly felt the big .38 revolver in the shoulder sling. Her hand came off as though it had touched something red hot; her whole body stiffened; her eyes widened and her flaccid face looked twenty years older. “You from the syndicate?” she asked in a strained whisper.

Grave Digger fished out a leather folder from his right coat pocket, opened it. His shield flashed in the light. “No, I’m the man.”

Coffin Ed stared at the two bartenders.

Every eye in the room watched tensely. She backed further away; her mouth came open like a scar. “Git away from me,” she almost screamed. “I’m a respectable lady.”

All eyes looked down into shot glasses as though reading the answers to all the problems in the world; ears closed up like safe doors, hands froze.

“I’ll believe it if you tell me where he’s at,” Grave Digger said.

A bartender moved and Coffin Ed’s pistol came into his hand. The bartender didn’t move again.

“Where who at?” the whore screamed. “I don’t know where nobody at. I’m in here, tending to my own business, ain’t bothering nobody, and here you come in here and start messing with me. I ain’t no criminal, I’m a church lady —” she was becoming hysterical from her load of junk.

“Let’s go,” Coffin Ed said. One of the sleeping drunks staggered out a few minutes later. He found the detectives parked in the black dark in the middle of the slum block on 113th Street. He got quickly into the back and sat in the dark as had the other pigeon.

“I thought you were drunk, Cousin,” Coffin Ed said.

Cousin was an old man with unkempt, dirty, gray-streaked, kinky hair, washed-out brown eyes slowly fading to blue, and skin the color and texture of a dried prune. His wrinkled old thrown-away summer suit smelled of urine, vomit and offal. He was strictly a wino. He looked harmless. But he was one of their ace stool pigeons because no one thought he had the sense for it.

“Nawsah, boss, jes’ waitin’,” he said in a whining, cowardly-sounding voice.

“Just waiting to get drunk.”

“Thass it, boss, thass jes’ what.”

“You know Loboy?” Grave Digger said.

“Yassah, boss, knows him when I sees him.”

“Know who he works with?”

“Early Riser mostly, boss. Leasewise they’s together likes as if they’s working.”

“Stealing,” Grave Digger said harshly. “Snatching purses. Robbing women.”

“Yassah, boss, that’s what they calls working.”

“What’s their pitch? Snatching and running or just mugging?”

“All I knows is what I hears, boss. Folks say they works the
holy dream
.”

“
Holy dream
! What’s that?”

“Folks say they worked it out themselves. They gits a church sister what carries her money twixt her legs. Loboy charms her lak a snake do a bird telling her this holy dream whilst Early Riser kneel behind her and cut out the back of her skirt and nip off de money sack. Must work, they’s always flush.”

“Live and learn,” Coffin Ed said and Grave Digger asked: “You seen either one of them tonight?”

“Jes’ Loboy. I seen him ’bout an hour ago looking wild and scairt going into Hijenks to get a shot and when he come out he stop in the bar for a glass of sweet wine and then he cut out in a hurry. Looked worried and movin’ fast.”

“Where does Loboy live?”

“I dunno, boss, ’round here sommers. Hijenks oughta know.”

“How ’bout that whore who makes like he’s hers?”

“She just big-gatin’, boss, tryna run up de price. Loboy got a fay chick sommers.”

“All right, where can we find Hijenks?”

“Back there on the corner, boss. Go through the bar an’ you come to a door say ‘Toilet’. Keep on an’ you see a door say ‘Closet’. Go in an’ you see a nail with a cloth hangin’ on it. Push the nail twice, then once, then three times an’ a invisible door open in the back of the closet. Then you go up some stairs an’ you come to ’nother door. Knock three times, then once, then twice.”

“All that? He must be a connection.”

“Got a shooting gallery’s all I knows.”

“All right, Cousin, take this five dollars and get drunk and forget what we asked you,” Coffin Ed said, passing him a bill.

“Bless you, boss, bless you.” Cousin shuffled about in the darkness, hiding the bill in his clothes, then he said in his whining cowardly voice, “Be careful, boss, be careful.”

“Either that or dead,” Grave Digger said.

Cousin chuckled and got out and melted in the dark.

“This is going to be a lot of trouble,” Grave Digger said. “I hope it ain’t for nothing.”

Reverend Deke O’Malley didn’t know it was Grave Digger’s voice over the telephone, but he knew it was the voice of a cop. He got out of the booth as though it had caught on fire. It was still raining but he was already wet and it just obscured his vision. Just the same he saw the light of the taxi coming down the hill on St Nicholas Avenue and hailed it. He climbed in and leaned forward and said, “Penn Station and goose it.”

He straightened up to wipe the rain out of his eyes and his back hit the seat with a thud. The broad-shouldered young black driver had taken off as though he were powering a rocket ship to heaven.

Deke didn’t mind. Speed was what he needed. He had got so far behind everyone the speed gave him a sense of catching up. He figured he could trust Iris. Anyway, he didn’t have any choice. As long as she kept his documents hidden, he was relatively safe. But he knew the police would keep her under surveillance and there’d be no way to reach her for a time. He didn’t know what the police
had on him and that worried him as much as the loss of the money.

He had to admit the robbery had been a cute caper, well organized, bold, even risky. Perhaps it had succeeded just because it was risky. But it had been too well organized for a crime of that dimension, for $87,000, or so it seemed to him; it couldn’t have been any better organized for a million dollars. But there seemed a lot of easier ways to get $87,000. One interpretation, of course, was that the syndicate had staged it not only to break him but to frame him. But if it had been the syndicate, why hadn’t they just hit him?

Penn Station came before he had finished thinking.

He found a long line of telephone booths and telephoned Mrs John Hill, the wife of the young recruiting agent who had been killed. He didn’t remember her but he knew she was a member of his church.

“Are you alone, Mrs Hill?” he asked in a disguised voice.

“Yes,” she replied tentatively, fearfully. “That is — who’s speaking, please?”

“This is Reverend O’Malley,” he announced in his natural voice.

He heard the relief in hers. “Oh, Reverend O’Malley, I’m so glad you called.”

“I want to offer my sympathy and condolences. I cannot find the words to express my infinite sorrow for this unfortunate accident which has deprived you of your husband —” He knew he sounded like an ass but she’d understand that kind of proper talk.

“Oh, Reverend O’Malley, you are so kind.”

He could tell that she was crying.
Good!
he thought. “May I be of help to you in any way whatsoever?”

“I just want you to preach his funeral.”

“Of course I shall, Mrs Hill, of course. You may set your mind at peace on that score. But, well, if you will forgive my asking, are you in need of money?”

“Oh, Reverend O’Malley, thank you, but he had life insurance and we have a little saved up — and, well we haven’t any children.”

“Well, if you have any need you must let me know. Tell me, have the police been bothering you?”

“Oh, they were here but they just asked questions about our life — where we worked and that kind of thing — and they asked about our Back-to-Africa movement. I was proud to tell them all I knew.…” Thank God that was nothing, he thought. “Then, well, they left. They were — well, they were white and I knew they
were unsympathetic — I could just feel it — and I was glad when they left.”

“Yes, my dear, we must be prepared for their attitude, that is why our movement was born. And I must confess I have no idea who the vicious white bandits are who murdered your fine … er … upstanding husband. But I am going to find them and God will punish them. But I have to do it alone. I can’t depend on the white police.”