The Crazy Kill

by Chester Himes

  “Well, after all, I had waited for Val ’til four o’clock, and I just figured he was out chasing.” She giggled. “And what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

  “He’s dead now, or did you forget?” Brody reminded her.

  She sobered suddenly and looked appropriately sad.

  Brody asked her if she’d seen anyone when she left the wake. She said she’d seen a colored cop with the A&P store manager who’d just driven up. She recognized the manager because she shopped in the store, and she knew the cop personally. Both had greeted her.

  “When did you last see Val?” Brody asked.

  “He came to see me at about ten-thirty.”

  “Had he been to the wake?”

  “No, he said he’d just come from home. I phoned Mr. Small and got the night off to attend Big Joe’s wake—I generally work from eleven till four—and then me and Val sat there talking until one-thirty.”

  “Are you certain about the time?”

  “Yeah, he looked at his watch and said it was one-thirty, and he’d have to leave in a hour because he wanted to stop by Johnny’s club before he went to the wake, and I said I wanted some fried chicken.”

  “You don’t like Mamie Pullen’s cooking,” Brody suggested.

  “Oh, sure, I like it fine, but I was hungry.”

  “You’re a hungry girl.”

  She giggled. “Talking always makes me hungry.”

  “Where did you go for your fried chicken?”

  “We got a taxi and went over to the College Inn at 151st Street and Broadway. We just stayed there for an hour, and then he looked at his watch and said it was two-thirty and he was going by Johnny’s and would meet me at the Wake in about an hour. We got a taxi and he dropped me off at Mamie’s and kept on downtown to Johnny’s.”

  “What was his racket?” Brody shot at her.

  “Racket? He didn’t have any. He was a gentleman.”

  “Who were his enemies?”

  “He didn’t have any, unless it was Johnny.”

  “Why Johnny?”

  “Johnny might have got tired of having him around all the time. Johnny’s funny and awfully hot-headed.”

  “How about Chink? Didn’t Val resent Chink’s familiarity with his fiancée?”

  “He didn’t know about it.”

  Brody showed her the knife. She denied ever having seen it at any time.

  He released her.

  Dulcy was brought in next. She was accompanied by Johnny’s attorney, Ben Williams.

  Ben was a brown-skinned man of about forty, slightly on the fat side, with neatly barbered hair, and a heavy moustache. He was wearing the double-breasted gray flannel suit, horn-rimmed spectacles and conservative black shoes of the Harlem professional man.

  Brody skipped the routine questions and asked Dulcy, “Were you the first one to discover the body?”

  “You don’t have to answer that,” the attorney said quickly.

  “Why the hell doesn’t she?” Brody flared.

  “The Fifth Amendment,” the attorney stated.

  “This isn’t any Communist investigation,” Brody said disgustedly. “I can hold her as a material witness and let her talk to the Grand Jury, if that’s what you want.”

  The attorney appeared to meditate. “Okay, you can answer,” he said to Dulcy. After that he kept quiet; he had earned his money.

  She said that Chink was standing beside the bread basket when she came out of the door.

  “Are you certain of that?” Brody asked.

  “I ain’t blind,” she retorted. “That’s what made me look down to see what he was looking at, and then I saw Val.”

  Brody left it for a moment and started at the beginning of her career in Harlem. The gist of what he got had already been given.

  “Did your husband give him an allowance?” Brody asked.

  “Naw, he just slipped him money from his pocket whenever Val asked for a loan, and sometimes he’d let him win in the game. Then I gave him what I could.”

  “How long had he been engaged to Doll Baby?”

  She laughed sarcastically. “Engaged! He was just keeping himself regular with that slut.”

  Brody dropped it and repeated the questions about Val’s racket, enemies, whether he was carrying a large sum of money when he was killed, and asked her to describe the jewelry he was wearing. The wrist watch, gold ring and cuff links checked with what had been found on the body. She said the thirty-seven dollars found in his wallet would be about right.

  Then Brody worked on the time element.

  She said Val had left home about ten o’clock. He had said he was going to see a show at the Apollo Theatre—Billy Eckstein’s band was doubling with the Nicholas brothers—and had asked to come with him, but she had an appointment with her hairdresser. So he’d decided to drop by the club and come with Johnny to the wake, and said they’d pick her up there.

  She’d left home at twelve midnight with Alamena, who lived in a rented room downstairs in the same building.

  “How long were you and Mamie locked in the bathroom?” Brody asked.

  “Oh, a half hour, more or less. I can’t be sure. When I looked at my watch it was four-twenty-five, and Reverend Short began knocking on the door right then.”

  Brody showed her the knife and repeated what Reverend Short had said.

  “Did Chink Charlie give you this knife?” he asked.

  The attorney broke in to say she didn’t have to answer that.

  She began laughing hysterically, and it was five minutes before she had calmed down sufficiently to say, “He ought to get married, watching them Holy Rollers every Sunday and wanting to roll himself.”

  Brody turned red.

  Grave Digger grunted. “I thought a Holy Roller preacher got the call to roll with all the sisters,” he said.

  “Most of ’em is,” Dulcy said. “But Reverend Short’s too full of visions to roll with anyone, unless it be a ghost.”

  “Well, that’s all for now,” Brody said. “I’m going to have you held in five-thousand-dollar bail.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” the attorney said to her.

  “I ain’t,” she said.

  Johnny was fifteen minutes late in appearing. His attorney had to telephone the bail-bondsman to arrange for Dulcy’s bail, and he refused to be questioned without him.

  Before Brody could fire his first question, the attorney produced affidavits given by Johnny’s two helpers, Kid Nickels and Pony Boy, to the effect that Johnny had left his Tia Juana Club at the corner of 124th Street and Madison Avenue at 4:45 A.M., alone, and that Val had not been inside of the club all evening.

  Without waiting to be questioned, Johnny volunteered the information that he hadn’t seen Val since leaving his flat at nine the night before.

  “How did you feel about supporting a brother-in-law who did nothing to deserve it?” Brody asked.

  “It didn’t bother me,” Johnny said. “If I hadn’t taken him in she’d have been slipping him money, and I didn’t want to put her in the middle.”

  “You didn’t resent it?” Brody persisted.

  “It’s just like I already said,” Johnny stated in his toneless voice. “It didn’t bother me. He wasn’t a square, but he wasn’t sharp, neither. He didn’t have any racket, he couldn’t gamble, he couldn’t even be a pimp. But I liked to have him around. He was funny, always ready for a gag.”

  Brody showed him the knife.

  Johnny picked it up, opened and closed it, turned it over in his hand and put it back.

  “You could turn a mother-raper every way but loose with that chiv,” he said.

  “You never saw it before?” Brody asked.

  “If I had I’d have gotten me one like it,” Johnny said.

  Brody told him what Reverend Short had said about Chink Charlie giving Dulcy the knife.

  When Brody had finished talking, there was no expression of any kind on Johnny’s face.

  “You know tha
t preacher’s off his nut,” he said. His voice was toneless and indifferent.

  They exchanged stares for a moment, both poker-faced and unmoving.

  Then Brody said, “Okay, boy, you can go now.”

  “Fine,” Johnny said, getting to his feet. “Just don’t call me boy.”

  Brody reddened. “What the hell do you want me to call you—Mr. Perry?”

  “Everybody else calls me Johnny—ain’t that enough of a handle for you?” Johnny said.

  Brody didn’t answer.

  Johnny left with his attorney at his heels.

  Brody stood up and looked from Grave Digger to Coffin Ed. “Have we got any candidates?”

  “You might try to find out who bought the knife,” Grave Digger said.

  “That was done the first thing this morning. Abercrombie and Fitch put six knives in stock a year ago, and so far they haven’t sold any.”

  “Well, they’re not the only store that sells hunting equipment in New York,” Grave Digger argued.

  “That won’t get us nothing anyway,” Coffin Ed said. “There’s no way of telling who did it until we find out why it was done.”

  “That’s going to be the lick that killed Nick,” Grave Digger said. “That’s the hard one.”

  “I don’t agree,” Brody said. “One thing is certain. He wasn’t stabbed for money, so he must have been stabbed about a woman. Churchy lay dame, as the French say. But that don’t mean another woman didn’t do it.”

  Grave Digger took off his hat and rubbed his short kinky hair.

  “This is Harlem,” he said. “Ain’t no other place like it in the world. You’ve got to start from scratch here, because these folks in Harlem do things for reasons nobody else in the world would think of. Listen, there were two hard working colored jokers, both with families, got to fighting in a bar over on Fifth Avenue near a hundred-eighteenth Street and cut each other to death about whether Paris was in France or France was in Paris.”

  “That ain’t nothing,” Brody laughed. “Two Irishmen over in Hell’s Kitchen got to arguing and shot each other to death over whether the Irish were descended from the gods or the gods descended from the Irish.”

  8

  ALAMENA WAS WAITING for them in the back seat of the car. Johnny and Dulcy got in the front, and the attorney got in the back beside Alamena.

  A few doors down the street, Johnny pulled to the curb and turned about to bring both Dulcy and Alamena into vision.

  “Listen, I want you women to keep buttoned up about this business. We’re going to Fats’s, and I don’t want either one of you to start making waves. We don’t know who did it.”

  “Chink did it,” Dulcy said positively.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “The hell I don’t.”

  He looked at her so long she began fidgeting.

  “If you know it, then you know why.”

  She bit off a manicured nail and said with sullen defiance, “I don’t know why.”

  “Did you see him do it?”

  “No,” she admitted.

  “Then keep your goddam mouth shut and let the cops find out who did it,” he said. “That’s what they get paid for.”

  Dulcy began to cry. “You don’t even care ’bout him being dead,” she accused.

  “I got my own ways about caring, and I don’t want to see nobody framed if he didn’t do it.”

  “You’re always trying to play little Jesus Christ,” Dulcy blubbered. “Why do all of us have to take the cop’s gaff if I know Chink did it?”

  “Because anybody might have done it. He’s been asking for it all his mother-raping life. Him and you both.”

  No one said anything. Johnny kept looking at Dulcy. She bit off another manicured nail and looked away. The attorney squirmed about in his seat as if ants were stinging him. Alamena stared at Johnny’s profile without expression.

  Johnny turned about in his seat, eased the car from the curb and drove slowly off.

  Fats’s Down Home Restaurant had a narrow front, with a curtained plate-glass window beneath a neon sign depicting the outline of a man shaped like a bull hippopotamus.

  Before the big Cad had pulled to a full stop, it was surrounded by skinny black children, clad in scant cotton clothes, crying, “Four Ace Johnny Perry … Fishtail Johnny Perry …”

  They touched the sides of the car and the gleaming fishtails with bright-eyed awe, as though it were an altar.

  Dulcy jumped out quickly, pushing the children aside, and hastened across the narrow sidewalk, her high heels tapping angrily, toward the curtained glass door.

  Alamena and the attorney followed at a more leisurely pace, but neither bothered to smile at the children.

  Johnny took his time, turned off the ignition and pocketed the keys, watching the kids caress his car. His face was dead-pan, but his eyes were amused. He stepped out to the sidewalk, leaving the top down with the sun beating on the black leather upholstery, and was mobbed by the kids, who pulled at his clothes and stepped on his feet as he crossed the sidewalk toward the door.

  He patted the Topsy-plaited heads of the skinny black girls, the burred heads of the skinny black boys. Just before entering he dug into his pockets and turned to scatter the contents of change over the street. He left the kids scrambling.

  Inside it was cool, and so dark he had to take off his sun glasses on entering. The unforgettable scent of whisky, whores and perfume filled his nostrils, making him feel relaxed.

  Wall light spilled soft stain over shelves of bottles and a small mahogany bar that was presided over by a giant black man in a white sport shirt. At sight of Johnny, he stood silently without moving, holding the glass he’d been polishing.

  Three men and two women turned on their high bar stools to greet Johnny. Everything about them said gamblers and their women, whorehouse madams.

  “Death always doubles off,” one of the madams said sympathetically.

  Johnny stood loosely, his big sloping-shouldered frame at perfect ease.

  “We all gotta fall when we’re on the turn,” he said.

  Their voices were low-pitched and without inflection, with the flat toneless quality of Johnny’s. They talked in the casual manner of their trade.

  “Too bad about Big Joe,” one of the hustlers said. “I’m going to miss him.”

  “Big Joe was a real man,” a madam said.

  “You ain’t just saying it,” the others confirmed.

  Johnny stuck his hand across the bar and shook the giant bartender’s hand.

  “What say, Pee Wee.”

  “Just standing here and moaning low, pops.” He made a small gesture with the hand holding the half polished glass. “It’s on the house.”

  “Bring us a pitcher of lemonade.”

  Johnny turned toward the arch leading toward the dining room at the rear.

  “See you at the funeral, pops,” a voice said behind him.

  He didn’t reply, because a man living up to his notices had stopped him with his belly. He resembled the balloon that had discovered stratosphere, but hundreds of degrees hotter. He wore an old-fashioned white silk shirt without the collar, fastened about the neck with a diamond-studded collar button, and black alpaca pants; but his legs were so large they seemed joined together, and his pants resembled a funnel-shaped skirt. His round brown head, which could have passed for a safety balloon in case his stomach burst, was clean-shaven. Not a hair showed above his chest—either on his face, nostrils, ears, eyebrows or eyelashes—giving the impression that his whole head had been scalded and scraped like the carcass of a pork.

  “How’s it going to chafe us, pops?” he asked, sticking out a huge, spongy hand. His voice was a wheezing whisper.

  “Nobody knows ’til the deal goes down,” Johnny said. “Everybody’s just peeping at their hole cards now.”

  “The betting comes next.” He looked down, but his felt-slippered feet, planted on the sawdust-covered floor, were hidden from his view by his belly. “
I sure hate to see Big Joe go.”

  “Lost your best customer,” Johnny said, rejecting the consolation.

  “You know, Big Joe never ate nothing here. He just come in to gape at the chippies and beef about the cooking.” Fats paused, then added, “But he was a man.”

  “Hurry up, Johnny, for God’s sake,” Dulcy called from across the room. “The funeral starts at two, and it’s almost near one o’clock.” She had kept on her sun glasses and looked strictly Hollywoodish in her pink silk dress.

  The room was small, its eight square kitchen tables covered with white-and-red checked oilcloth planted in the inch of fresh, slightly damp sawdust covering the floor.

  Dulcy sat at the table in the far corner, flanked by Alamena and the attorney.

  “I’ll let you go eat,” Fats said. “You must be hungry.”

  “Ain’t I always?”

  The sawdust felt good beneath Johnny’s rubber-soled shoes, and he thought fleetingly of how good life had been when he was a simple plough boy in Georgia, before he’d killed a man.

  The cook stuck his head through the opening from the kitchen where the orders were filled and called, “Hiyuh, pops.”

  Johnny waved a hand.

  Three other tables were occupied by men and women in the trade. It was strictly a hangout for the upper-class Harlem hustlers, those in the gambling and prostitution professions, and none others were allowed. Everybody knew everybody else, and all the diners greeted Johnny as he passed.

  “Sad about Big Joe, pops.”

  “You can’t stop the deal when the dealer falls.”

  Nobody mentioned Val. He’d been murdered, and nobody knew who did it. It was nobody’s business but Johnny’s, Dulcy’s and the cops’s; and everybody was letting it strictly alone.

  When Johnny sat down the waitress came with the menu, and Pee Wee brought in a big glass pitcher of lemonade, with slices of lemons and limes and big chunks of ice floating about in it.

  “I want a Singapore Sling,” Dulcy said.

  Johnny gave her a look.

  “Well, brandy and soda then. You know good and well that ice-cold drinks give me indigestion.”

  “I’ll have iced tea,” the attorney said.

  “You get that from the waitress,” Pee Wee said.