The Heat's On (17 page)

“They sound like the ones who sapped me and got Digger.” Kid Blackie clicked his tongue. “Too bad about Digger. Think he’ll make it?”

There wasn’t much sympathy in his voice, but Coffin Ed understood it. Kid Blackie liked Digger, but he was so old he was glad it was somebody else dying and not himself.

“Can’t tell ‘til the deal’s down,” he said.

“Wish I could help you. The woman was dressed sharp, had on a light green suit—”

“I know her.”

“Well, that’s all I seen.”

“Every little bit helps. You ain’t seen Pinky?”

“Not since three days ago. What you think these mobsters want with him?”

“Same as me.”

Kid Blackie looked at Coffin Ed’s face through the corners of his eyes and dropped it.

“Too bad about that big ape,” he said. “He might have made the grade if it wasn’t for his skin.”

“What’s the matter with his skin?” Coffin Ed asked absently. He was thinking of the janitor’s wife, trying to figure this new angle.

“Bruises too easily,” Kid Blackie said. “Touch him with a feather and he’ll turn black-and-blue. In the ring it always looks like he’s getting beat to death when he ain’t even hurt. I remember once the ref stopped the fight and Pinky wasn’t even—”

“I ain’t got much time, Kid,” Coffin Ed cut him off. “You got any idea where I can find him?”

Kid Blackie scratched his shiny bald head. “Well, he’s got a pad somewhere on the Riverside Drive.”

“I know that, but he’s on the lam.”

“Yeah? In that case I couldn’t say.” Kid Blackie screwed up his eyes and gave Coffin Ed a tentative look. “A man can’t ask you no questions, can he?”

“It ain’t that,” Coffin Ed said. “I just ain’t got time to answer.”

“Well, I heered he got an aunt up in the Bronx somewheres,” Kid Blackie volunteered. “Called Sister Heavenly. You ever heered of her?”

Coffin Ed was thinking. “Yeah, once or twice. But I’ve never seen her.”

“From the stone age they say. She got a faith healing pitch. Cover-up they say.”

“For what?”

“Pushing H they say.”

Inside of his blinding headache Coffin Ed’s thoughts were jumping like ants frying on a red-hot stove. Whichever way it went, it came back to H, he was thinking.

“Has she got a temple?” he asked.

“I couldn’t say.” Kid Blackie shook his head. “Pinky says she’s got a pisspot full of money but she wouldn’t give him the sweat off her ass. She must got some kind of joint.”

“Know whereabouts it’s at?”

“I couldn’t say. Somewheres in the sticks.”

“That don’t help much. There’re sticks all over the Bronx.” Kid Blackie decided finally to give up on the cigar butt. He spit it to the floor and carefully picked the shreds from his snaggletooth mouth.

“Who might know is Daddy Haddy,” he said. “You know where he’s at?”

“Yeah,” Coffin Ed said, turning about to leave. “See you.”

“Don’t tell him I told you.”

“I won’t.”

All the time he was there Kid Blackie had been looking him over covertly. His wise old eyes hadn’t missed a thing. He had made the two guns and the sap and he figured they weren’t all.

He let Coffin Ed reach the head of the staircase, then called, “Wait a minute. You got some blood on your shirt cuff.”

He was curious to know whose blood it was but it was too risky to ask outright.

Coffin Ed didn’t even look at his cuff; he didn’t stop walking; he didn’t look around. “Yeah,” he said. “And there’s going to be some more.”

Unlike the opium derivatives and cocaine, marijuana gives one an esoteric appetite.

Sister Heavenly had just come from seeing Daddy Haddy. After listening to Daddy Haddy’s recital of Pinky’s latest brainstorm, she had a sudden wild craving for something she’d never eaten before. She couldn’t even think until she ate; she couldn’t figure out what it meant.

Twenty-five minutes later she left her hired car and the driver on 116th Street and staggered up an alley to a small, dirty “Home-Cooking” restaurant where she knew the cook. It stood in back of a store that advertised:
Seafood — Eggs — Chicken-on-the-Feet — Southern Specialties
. That gave her an idea.

She ordered a half dozen shelled raw oysters, a bottle of sorghum molasses, three raw eggs and a glass of buttermilk.

The big fat black woman who ran the joint had to send next door to fill the order, and she stood over Sister Heavenly and watched her pour sorghum molasses over the oysters and eat them and mix the raw eggs with the buttermilk and drink it.

“Honey, if I didn’t know you I’d swear you was knocked up,” she said.

“I ain’t knocked up,” Sister Heavenly said. “But I’m barefooted.” To herself she added, “And that ain’t no lie.”

Suddenly she jumped up and rushed outside in the alley and was sick. Even the hungry dogs wouldn’t touch the mess. She came back and ordered fried chicken.

“Thass more like it,” the big fat cook said.

When Sister Heavenly had finished with the chicken she pushed back her chair and opened her beaded bag below the level of the table to check its contents. Aside from cosmetics it contained a billfold with five one-hundred-dollar bills, three tens and two ones, a handful of loose change rattling around in the bottom, her pipe and pouch of marijuana, a key ring with 13 keys, a .38 Owl’s Head revolver with the barrel sawed off to an inch in length and loaded with dumdum bullets, a spring-blade knife with a bone handle, a box of calling cards reading
Sister Heavenly — Healing by Faith
, three lavender initialed linen handkerchiefs, three French teasers that looked like miniature beartooth necklaces, a picture of a slick-haired black man with buck teeth inscribed,
To Choochy from Hoochy
, and an imitation deputy sheriff’s badge.

“That don’t spell
whore
,” she said bitterly to herself. “It don’t spell nothing.”

She didn’t think about Uncle Saint, her blown-up cache or her lost house. She was too old to regret.

It was time that was worrying her now. She knew her time was short. If the devil don’t get me, the cops will, she thought. If the cops hadn’t already made the hot Lincoln, they would soon. She gave herself until morning. If she hadn’t scored by then it would be too late. She couldn’t let the sun catch her again in these parts.

After talking to the pleasant-voiced woman at the S.P.C.A. she had figured that the dick who took Pinky’s dog was looking for Pinky. She had started looking for Pithy in the hopes of finding the dog.

Her next stop was Kid Blackie’s gym.

She had hired an old Mercury sedan driven by a rape-fiendlooking colored man who worked it as a taxi without buying a license. He was a lean, rusty-black, nervous-looking joker with bright red buck-wild eyes. He was a weedhead and she figured she could trust him.

He was drowsing behind the wheel, sucking on a stick of weed, when she came out and got into the back.

“Turn around and go back toward Lenox,” she said.

He shifted into gear and executed the U-turn with flourishes like a maestro.

“I know you can drive; you don’t have to prove it,” she said cynically.

He grinned at her in the rearview mirror, narrowly missing a woman with a baby buggy crossing the street.

They had got past Eighth Avenue and were headed east when she casually noticed a Plymouth sedan passing on the other side of the street, headed west. At just that moment the dog stuck its head out of the window on her side.

“Sheba!” she screamed. “Turn around!”

The driver was teaed to the gills and on a livewire edge and her sudden scream scared the living hell out of him. He knew his name wasn’t
Sheba
and he didn’t know who
Sheba
was. But he figured if
Sheba
was enough to scare the old witch he was chauffeuring about, that was enough for him. He didn’t stop to see.

He put his shoulders to the wheel and turned.

Tires squealed. People screamed. Two cars behind him telescoped. A crosstown bus coming from the opposite direction braked so hard it scrambled the passengers into the aisle.

The Mercury lurched and went up over the opposite curb. A sad-looking cripple leaped like a kangaroo through the door of a bar. An old lady was run over by a black-clad preacher shouting, “Praise God and run for your lives!”

The front bumper knocked over a wooden stand displaying religious booklets and twenty-four marijuana cigarettes were scattered about the sidewalk.

The driver didn’t see a thing. He was standing on the gas and trusting to fate.

“Follow that car!” she screamed.

“What car?” The street was full of cars.

“It turned up Eighth!”

He was already on top of Eighth Avenue, on the inside lane, pushing past 50 miles an hour. But he made another do-or-die turn, going in between a yellow taxi and a cabin truck with not more than a few inches give-or-take each way; tires screaming, drivers cursing. He came into the avenue so fast he almost climbed up in the back seat of a beat-up convertible carrying ten passengers.

The women in the back seat screamed.

Somewhere behind, a police whistle was blowing frantically.

“Don’t stop!” Sister Heavenly cried.

“Is I stopping?” he threw over his shoulder as he wrenched the car around the back of the convertible and gave it the gas.

The bug-eyed driver of the convertible looked out from his galaxy of chicks and shouted threateningly, “Don’t you run into my car, nigger!”

But the Mercury was past and closing rapidly in behind Coffin Ed’s Plymouth.

“It’s the car!” Sister Heavenly hollered. “Don’t get too close.”

“Hell, I gonna pass it,” he said.

Coffin Ed noticed the beat-up Mercury when it passed. At another time he might have taken on the duties of a traffic cop and run it down. But he didn’t have the time.

It was just another automobile racer, a black Stirling Moss trying out his car for a “Grand Prix” somewhere. Harlem was full of ‘em. They got teaed on weed and imagined they could drive those old V-8 gas gluttons straight up in the sky, he thought. He noticed that the back seat was empty. He figured some cop up the line would get him if he didn’t get himself killed. He put it from his mind.

The Mercury was out of sight when he pulled up before Daddy Haddy’s joint.

The little hole-in-the-wall had a red painted front like the big chain of United Tobacco Stores. But Daddy Haddy had named his
Re-United Tobacco Store
; there wasn’t anything anybody could do about that.

The shades were drawn.

Coffin Ed glanced at his watch. It read 6:07.

The tenement across the street threw a shadow on the store. But it was too early for it to be closed. Coffin Ed felt his stomach knot.

He got out of his car, walked across the sidewalk and tried the door. It was locked. A sixth sense told him to wipe his prints from the doorknob, get back into his car and drive — he wouldn’t get anything here. He was a civilian on a manhunt; he had no authority to investigate what he suspected might reveal a crime; he was outside of the law himself. “Phone the station, report your suspicions, and let it go at that,” an inner voice told him.

But he couldn’t let it go. He was in it; he was committed; he was like the airplane over the middle of the ocean that had passed the point of no return. He thought fleetingly of Grave Digger, but that wouldn’t bear thinking about. The pain in his head and the brackish taste in his mouth had become normal, as though he had always had them.

He took a deep breath and looked up and down the street to see if there were any police in sight. He took out his Boy Scout knife, opened the round, needle-point pry, and began fiddling with the Yale lock.

The door had been closed on the latch. Whoever had last left had just pulled it shut. In a moment it was open. He closed and locked it behind him, groped about until he found the light switch, and turned on the light.

There were no surprises.

He found the body of Daddy Haddy behind the glass-enclosed counter. There was a hole in the center of his forehead filled with a glob of blackish blood. It was encircled by powder burns more than an inch in diameter. He put his toe beneath the shoulder and turned the body just enough to see the back of the head. There was a small hard lump at the base of the hairline where the bullet had come out of the skull without force to penetrate the skin and had coursed downward and stopped.

A clean job! he thought without any emotion whatever. No blood. No noise. Someone had held a pistol with a silencer a few inches in front of Daddy Haddy’s head and had pulled the trigger. Daddy Haddy had not expected it. So much for that. Daddy Haddy had had it.

The joint had been searched hurriedly but thoroughly. Shelves, drawers, cases, boxes had been turned out, the contents dumped helter-skelter over the floor. Among the unopened packages of cigarettes, scattered cigars, matches, lighters, flints, fluids, pipes and cigarette and cigar holders was a sprinkling of neatly folded decks of heroin and carefully rolled marijuana cigarettes of bomber size. There was still the faint odor of cordite fumes in the hot, close, stinky air.

He waded through the debris and opened the door at the rear. It showed a tiny storeroom containing two padded straight-backed chairs. The air was redolent with marijuana smoke. The treatment was the same.

It was obvious the searchers hadn’t found what they were looking for.

Two people already dead. And Digger—? The thought broke off, then came on again: Small-time dog-ass little Harlem hustlers on the fringe of the narcotics racket. Pee-wee colored scrabblers for a dirty buck. How do they get mixed up in this business? This is mob stuff from downtown. Hired gunmen from a syndicate.

He hadn’t discovered any lead to Uncle Saint, so he didn’t know there were already three others dead from the caper.

He wondered if he oughtn’t back out before it got to be more than he could handle. Drop it back into the lap of homicide and the narcotics squad. Let ‘em call in the feds.

Then he thought if he reported the crime he’d be detained, held up for hours, questioned. His superiors were going to want to know what he was doing in this business when he had been warned by all of them to keep out.