The Heat's On (13 page)

Now he began feeling elated. He had it made now. He removed the funnel and fitted the fuse into the end of the rubber tube. He started to gather up the drill and bit and the empty bottle, but then he thought, “What the hell for?”

He picked up his loaded shotgun and started to strike a match. He heard someone at the kitchen door. He swung the shotgun around and cocked both barrels and stepped into the kitchen. But it was only the nanny goat trying to get back inside. In a sudden squall of rage, he reversed the gun and started to club her across the head. But he was struck by a sudden idea.

“You want to come in, come on in,” he muttered and opened the door wide for her to enter.

She stared at him appraisingly, then came inside slowly and looked around as though she had never been there before.

He chuckled evilly as he returned to the bedroom and struck the match. The goat followed him out of curiosity and was bending her neck to peer around his leg when he lit the fuse. He hadn’t seen the goat follow him into the bedroom. The instant the fuse began to burn he wheeled about and started to run. The goat thought he was after her and wheeled about to run also. But she wheeled the wrong way, and he didn’t see her until it was too late. I-Ie tripped over her and fell face forward toward the floor.

“Goat, beware!” he cried as he was falling.

He had forgotten to uncock the shotgun, which he still held with the butt forward as when he had intended clubbing her in the head.

The butt struck the floor and both barrels went off. The heavy charge of buckshot struck the front of the safe, behind which was one-half pint of nitroglycerin.

Strangely enough, the house disintegrated in only three directions — forward, backward and upward. The front went out across the street, and such items as the bed, tables, chest of drawers and a handpainted enamel chamber pot crashed into the front of the neighbor’s house. Sister Heavenly’s clothes, some of which dated back to the 1920s, were strewn over the street like a weird coverlet of many colors. The back of the house, along with the kitchen stove, refrigerator, table and chairs, Uncle Saint’s bunk and lockbox, crockery and kitchen utensils, went over the back fence into the vacant lot. Afterwards the hoboes who camped out in that section prepared their Mulligan stews in unheard-of luxury for months to come. The corrugated iron garage was moved in one piece a hundred feet away, leaving the Lincoln Continental standing naked in the sunshine. While the top of the house, attic included, along with the old upright piano, Sister Heavenly’s throne and souvenir trunk, sailed straight up into the air, and long after the sound of the blast had died away the piano could be heard playing up there all alone.

The outer door of the safe was blown off and went out the back way along with the kitchen stove. The steel inner door was punctured like a blown-up paper sack hit by a hard fist, and the safe proper went out the front. Scraps of hundred-dollar bills floated in the air like green leaves in a hurricane. Later in the day, people were picking them up as far as ten blocks away and some of the neighbors spent all winter trying to fit the pieces together.

But the floor of the house remained intact. It had been swept clean of every loose scrap, every pin and needle, every particle of dust, but the smooth surface of the wood and linoleum went undamaged.

It was hard to determine afterwards which way Uncle Saint and the nanny goat went, but whichever way they went, they went together, because the two assistants from the Medical Examiner’s Office of Bronx County couldn’t distinguish the bits of goat meat from the bits of Uncle Saint’s meat, which was all there was left for them to work on.

The trouble was, Uncle Saint had never blown a safe before. One-fifth of the nitro would have blown the safe without taking him and the house along with it.

Sister Heavenly figured there was more than one way to skin a cat. If Pinky didn’t show up soon, she was going to trick Uncle Saint into making like he had found the stuff, and force Pinky to show his hand.

Then she heard the shots. Nothing sounds like pistol shots but pistol shots. She had heard too many of them to be mistaken.

She sat up on the park bench across from Riverside Church and screwed her head around.

Next she heard the screaming.

In the back of her old jaded mind she thought cynically that the sequence was logical — when men shot off pistols, women screamed.

But the front of her mind was alive with conjectures. If anyone else got killed the stuff was going to get so hot it couldn’t be touched, she thought.

Then she saw two men come quickly from the apartment house. It was quite a distance to see faces distinctly and both wore their hats pulled low over their eyes, but she knew she’d never forget them.

One was a fat man, definitely fat, with a round greasy face but fair-skinned. His shoulders were broad and he looked as though he might be strong. He wore a dark blue Dacron single-breasted suit. He had the other man by the arm and seemed to be pushing him along.

The other man was thin with a too-white, haggard face and dark circles about his eyes. Even from that distance she made him as a junkie. He wore a light gray summer suit and was shaking as though he had a chill.

They turned and walked quickly in the opposite direction. She saw them get into a Buick Special sedan of ordinary battleshipgray. There was nothing about the car to distinguish it from any car of the same make. From that distance she couldn’t read the license number, but the plates were Empire State issue.

She figured she might have something valuable; something she could sell. She didn’t know how valuable, but she would wait and see.

She didn’t have to wait long. The first of the prowl cars showed up in a little over two minutes. Within five minutes the street was filled with police cars and two ambulances.

By then people were hanging out the windows and the customary crowd had collected. The police had formed lines, keeping the front of the house clear.

She figured it was safe to get closer. She saw a figure on a stretcher brought out and shoved quickly into an ambulance. A third attendant had walked alongside it, holding a bottle of plasma. The siren sounded and the ambulance roared off.

She had recognized the face.

“Grave Digger,” she whispered to herself.

A cold tremor ran down her spine.

Coffin Ed came out walking, assisted by two ambulance attendants whom he was trying to shake off. They managed to get him into the second ambulance and it drove off.

Sister Heavenly was backing off to leave when she heard someone say, “There’s another one, an African with his throat cut.”

She backed away fast. As she was leaving she saw two heavy black sedans filled with plainclothesmen from homicide pull up. She figured what she had was too damn valuable to sell. It was valuable enough to get her own throat cut.

She walked quickly up the hill to Broadway, looking for a taxicab. She was so disconcerted she forgot to raise her parasol to protect her complexion from the sunshine.

After she had hailed a taxi, got inside and felt it moving, she began to feel secure again. But she knew she had to get rid of Uncle Saint and the red-hot Lincoln, or she was going to find herself up a creek.

When she arrived on the street where she had left her house, she found it filled with fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, and thinly dressed people, for the most part Italians with a sprinkling of Negroes, cooking in the noonday heat, risking sunstroke to satisfy their morbid curiosity.

The whole city was running amok, she thought, from the sugar side to the shabby side.

As the taxi drew nearer, she craned her neck, looking for her house. She didn’t see it. From the window of the taxi, looking over the heads of the crowd, she couldn’t see the floor that remained. It looked to her as though the entire house had disappeared. The only thing she could see was the Lincoln, standing out like a red thumb in the bright sunshine.

She stopped the taxi before it got too close to the police lines and hailed a passerby.

“What happened down the street?”

“Explosion!” the bareheaded Italian-looking worker gasped, breathing hard as though he couldn’t get enough of the hot dusty air into his lungs. “Blew the house up. Killed the old couple who lived there. Saint Heavenly they were called. No trace of ‘em. Musta had a still.”

He didn’t pause to see her reaction. He was scrabbling around, like scores of others, picking up scraps of paper.

Well now, ain’t that just too beautiful for words? she thought. Then she asked the taxi driver, “See what that is they’re picking up.”

He got out and asked a youth to see a sample. It was the corner of a hundred-dollar bill. He brought it back to show to Sister Heavenly. The youth followed him suspiciously.

“Piece of a C-note,” he said. “They must have been making counterfeit.”

“That tears it,” Sister Heavenly said.

The two of them stood staring at her.

“Give it back to him and let him go,” she said.

She knew immediately that Uncle Saint had tried to blow her safe. It didn’t surprise her. He must have used an atom bomb, she thought. She wished he had picked a better time for the caper.

The taxi driver climbed back into his seat and looked at her with growing suspicion. “Ain’t that the house where you wanted to go?”

“Don’t talk foolish, man,” she snapped. “You see I can’t go there ‘cause the house ain’t there no more.”

“Don’t you wanna talk to the cops?” he persisted.

“I just want you to turn around and drive me back to White Plains Road and put me out by the playground.”

At that hour the treeless playground was deserted. The sandpits baked in the sunshine and heat radiated from the iron slides. The slatted bench on which Sister Heavenly sat burned stripes up and down her backsides. But she didn’t notice it.

She took out her pipe and filled it with the finely ground stems of marijuana from an oilskin pouch and lit it with an old goldinitialed pipe lighter. Then she opened her black-and-white striped parasol and holding it over her head with her left hand, she held the pipe in her right hand and sucked the sweet pungent marijuana smoke deep into her lungs.

Sister Heavenly was a fatalist. If she had ever read _The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám_, she might have been thinking of the lines:

The moving finger writes,

And having writ moves on;

Nor all your piety nor wit

Nor all your tears

Shall cancel half a line of it.

But instead she was thinking, Well, I’m back on my bare ass where I started, but I ain’t yet flat on my back.

It was life that had taught Sister Heavenly not to cry. A crying whore was a liability; and she had started as a whore. At fifteen she had run away from the sharecropper’s shack her family had called home, with a pimp to be a whore because she was too cute and too lazy to hoe the corn and chop the cotton. He had told her that what she had to sell would find buyers when cotton and corn were a drug on the market. The memory brought a smile. He was a half-ass pimp but he was sweet, she thought. But in the end he had kicked her out like the others had afterwards with nothing but the clothes she had on her back.

Then her thoughts turned cynical: Even cotton got rotten with age and corn got too wormy to shuck.

Anyway, after she’d got onto the faith healing pitch, she had lived high on the hog, which meant she could eat pork chops and pork roasts instead of pig’s feet and chitterlings. It had been the other way around after that; she had been the ruler of the roost and had kicked her lovers out when she got tired of them.

She knocked out her pipe and put it away. The ocher-colored pupils of her eyes had become distended with a marbleized effect and pink splotches had formed beneath her leathery skin.

As she walked up White Plains Road the drab-colored buildings took on blinding bright hues in the sunshine. She hadn’t been that high in more than twenty years. Her feet seemed to glide through the air, but she was still in full command of her mind.

She began to suspect she had cased the whole caper wrong from the very beginning. She had figured it as a shipment of H, but maybe it wasn’t that at all.

It couldn’t be a motherraping treasure map, she thought with exasperation. That old con game went out when airplanes came in.

Or could it? another part of her mind asked. Could it be that some gang had come up with some treasure somewhere and had made a map of its whereabouts? But what the hell kind of treasure? And how the hell would the map get into the hands of a square like Gus, a simpleminded apartment house janitor?

The weed jag made her thoughts dance like jitterbugs. She turned into a supermarket drugstore and ordered black coffee.

She didn’t notice the man next to her until he spoke. “Are you a model, may I ask?”

She flicked him an absent-minded glance. He looked like a salesman, a house-to-house canvasser type.

“No, I’m one of the devil’s mistresses,” she said nastily.

The man reddened. “Excuse me, I thought maybe you were a model for some advertising agency.” He retired behind a newspaper.

It was the afternoon
Journal American
and she saw the streamer on the page turned toward her:

TWO HARLEM DETECTIVES SUSPENDED FOR BRUTALITY

A column was devoted to the story. To one side the pictures of Grave Digger and Coffin Ed looked like pictures of a couple of Harlem muggers taken from the rogues’ gallery.

She read as much of the story as she could before the man folded the paper.

So they killed Jake, she thought. In front of Riverside Church.

That must have been when Pinky put in the false fire alarm.

Her thoughts churned furiously. She tried to remember everything Pinky had said, how he had looked and acted. A pattern was beginning to take shape, but the answer eluded her.

Suddenly she jumped to her feet. Her table mate drew back in alarm. But she merely paid her bill and rushed outside and started walking rapidly to the nearest taxi stand.