The Crazy Kill

by Chester Himes

  He stopped talking and they waited for Chink to answer.

  Chink didn’t speak.

  Suddenly, without warning, Coffin Ed stepped forward from the shadows and chopped Chink across the back of his neck with the edge of his hand. It knocked Chink forward, stunning him, and Coffin Ed grabbed him beneath the arms to keep him from falling on his face.

  Grave Digger slid quickly from the desk and handcuffed Chink’s ankles, drawing the bracelets tight just above the ankle bones. Then Coffin Ed handcuffed Chink’s hands behind his back.

  Without saying another word, they opened the door, lifted Chink from the chair and hung him upside down from the top of the door by his handcuffed ankles, so that the top part of the door split his legs down to his crotch. His back lay flat against the bottom edge, with the lock bolt sticking into him.

  Then Grave Digger inserted his heel into Chink’s left armpit and Coffin Ed did the same with his right, and they pushed down gradually.

  Chink thought about the ten thousand dollars that Dulcy was going to get for him that day and tried to stand it. He tried to scream, but he had waited too late. All that came out was his tongue and he couldn’t get it back. He began choking, and his eyes began to bulge.

  “Let’s take him down now,” Grave Digger said.

  They lifted him down and stood him on his feet, but he couldn’t stand. He pitched forward. Grave Digger caught him before he hit the floor and lifted him back onto the stool.

  “All right, spill it,” Coffin Ed said. “And it’d better be straight.”

  Chink swallowed. “Okay,” he said in a gasping voice. “I gave her the knife.”

  Coffin Ed’s burnt face contorted with rage. Chink ducked automatically, but Coffin Ed merely clenched and opened his fists.

  “When did you give it to her?” Grave Digger asked.

  “It was just like the preacher said,” Chink confessed. “One of the club members, Mr. Burns, brought it back from London and gave it to me for a Christmas present, and I gave it to her.”

  “What for?” Coffin Ed asked.

  “Just for a gag,” Chink said. “She’s so scared of Johnny I thought it’d be a good joke.”

  “Damn right,” Grave Digger said sourly. “It would have been awfully funny if you’d found it stuck between your own ribs.”

  “I didn’t figure she’d let Johnny find it,” Chink said.

  “How do you know he found it?” Coffin Ed asked.

  “We haven’t got time for guesses,” Grave Digger said.

  They removed the handcuffs from Chink’s wrists and ankles and booked him on suspicion of murder.

  Then they tried to contact the Mr. Burns whom he said had given him the knife to verify the story. But the night clerk at the University Club said, in reply to their phone call, that Mr. Burns was in Europe somewhere.

  They went back to Johnny’s flat, rang the bell and hammered on the door. No one answered. They tried the service door. Grave Digger listened with his ear to the panel.

  “Quiet as a grave,” he said.

  “Something’s happened to the dog,” Coffin Ed said.

  They looked at one another.

  “If we go in without a search warrant it’s going to be risky,” Grave Digger said. “If he’s in there and he’s already killed her, we’re going to have to kill him. And if he hasn’t done anything to her at all and they’re both in there just keeping quiet and we break in, there’s going to be hell to pay. He’s liable to get us busted down to harness.”

  “I just hate to have Johnny kill his woman and go to the chair on account of a rat-tail punk like Chink,” Coffin Ed said. “For all we know she might have killed Val herself. But if Johnny finds out she got the knife from Chink, her life ain’t worth a damn.”

  “Chink might be lying,” Grave Digger suggested.

  “If he is, he’d better disappear from the face of the earth,” Coffin Ed said.

  “We’d better go in the front way then,” Grave Digger said. “If Johnny’s laying in there in the dark with his heater we’ll have a better chance in that straight hall.”

  The door was framed on both sides and at the top by heavy iron angle-bars, making it impossible to pry open, and it was secured by three separate Yale locks.

  It took Coffin Ed fifteen minutes working with seven master keys before he got it open.

  They stood flanking the door with drawn revolvers while Grave Digger pushed it open with his foot. No sound came from the dark tunnel of the hall.

  There was a chain-bolt on the door which, when fastened, kept it from opening more than a crack, but it hadn’t been fastened.

  “The chain’s off,” Grave Digger said. “He’s not here.”

  “Don’t take any chances,” Coffin Ed warned.

  “What the hell! Johnnys no lunatic,” Grave Digger said, and walked into the dark hall. “It’s me, Digger, and Ed Johnson, if you’re in here, Johnny,” he said quietly, felt for the light switch and turned on the hall light.

  Their eyes went straight to a hasp and staple fitted to the outside of the master-bedroom door. It was fastened with a heavy brass Yale padlock. Coffin Ed closed the outside door, and they went down the hall and listened with their ears against the panel of the bedroom door. The only sound from within came from a radio tuned to an all-night disk jockey program of swing music.

  “Anyway, she ain’t dead,” Grave Digger said. “He wouldn’t lock up a corpse.”

  “But he’s got hold of something or else he’s blowing his top,” Coffin Ed replied.

  “Let’s see what’s in the rest of the house,” Grave Digger suggested.

  They started with the sitting room across the front and worked back to the kitchen. None of the rooms had been cleaned or straightened. The broken glass from the overturned cocktail table lay on the sitting-room carpet.

  “Looks like it got kind of rough,” Coffin Ed observed.

  “It could be he’s beaten her up,” Grave Digger conceded.

  The two bedrooms were across the hall from the kitchen and were separated by the bathroom. There, doors from each opened into the bathroom, which could be bolted from both sides. The door leading into the room Val had occupied was ajar, but the one to the master bedroom was bolted. Grave Digger slipped the bolt and they went in.

  The shades were drawn and the room was dark save for a faint glow from the radio dial.

  Coffin Ed switched on the light.

  Dulcy lay on her side with her knees drawn up and her hands between her legs. She had kicked the covers off, and her nude sepia body had the dull sheen of metal. She was breathing silently, but her face was greasy from sweat and saliva had drooled from the bottom corner of her mouth.

  “Sleeping like a baby,” Grave Digger said.

  “A drunken baby,” Coffin Ed amended.

  “Smells it, too,” Grave Digger admitted.

  There was an empty brandy bottle on the carpet beside the bed and an overturned glass in the center of a wet stain.

  Coffin Ed crossed to the single window opening onto the inside fire escape and parted the drapes. The heavy iron grille on the outside of the window was padlocked.

  He turned and came back to the bed. “Do you think this sleeping beauty knows she’s been locked in?” he asked.

  “Hard to say,” Grave Digger admitted. “How do you figure it?”

  “The way I figure it is Johnny’s on to something, but he doesn’t know what,” Coffin Ed said. “He’s out scouting about trying to find out something, and he’s locked her up just in case he finds out the wrong thing.”

  “Do you think he knows about the knife?”

  “If he does, he’s out looking for Chink, and that’s for sure,” Coffin Ed said.

  “Let’s see what she’s got to say,” Grave Digger suggested, shaking her by the shoulder.

  She awakened and brushed at her face drunkenly.

  “Wake up, little sister,” Grave Digger said.

  “Go way,” she muttered without opening h
er eyes. “Done give you all I got.” Suddenly she giggled. “All but you-know-what. Ain’t never going to give you none of that, nigger. That’s all for Johnny.”

  Grave Digger and Coffin Ed looked at each other.

  “I don’t figure this at all,” Grave Digger admitted.

  “Maybe we’d better take her in,” Coffin Ed ventured.

  “We could, but if it turns out later that we’re wrong and Johnny hasn’t got anything against her other than just being normally jealous—”

  “What do you call being normally jealous?” Coffin Ed interrupted. “You call locking up your woman being normally jealous?”

  “For Johnny, anyway,” Grave Digger said. “And if he comes back and finds we’ve broken into his house and arrested his woman—”

  “On suspicion of murder,” Coffin Ed interrupted again.

  “Not even that would save us from a suspension. It’s not as if we were picking her up off the street. We’ve broken into her house, and there’s no evidence of a crime having been committed in here. And we’d need a warrant even if the charge were murder itself.”

  “Well, the only thing to do is to find him before he finds out what he’s looking for,” Coffin Ed acceded.

  “Yeah, and we’d better get going because time is getting short,” Grave Digger said.

  They went back through the bathroom, leaving the door wide open, and locked the front door with only the automatic lock.

  First they went to the garage on 155th Street where Johnny kept his fishtail Cadillac, but he hadn’t been in. Then they went by his club. It was dark and closed.

  Next they began touring the cabarets, the dice games, the after-hours joints. They dropped the word they were looking for Chink Charlie.

  The bartender at Small Paradise Inn said, “I ain’t seen Chink all evening. He must be in jail. You looked for him there?”

  “Hell, that’s the last place cops ever look for anybody,” Grave Digger said.

  “Let’s see if he’s gone home yet,” Coffin Ed suggested finally.

  They went back to the flat, rang the bell. Receiving no answer they went in again. It was just as they had left it. Dulcy was sleeping in the same position. The radio station was signing off.

  Coffin Ed looked at his watch. “It’s four o’clock,” he said. “Nothing for it now but to call it a day.”

  They drove back to the precinct station and made out their report. The lieutenant on charge at night sent for them and read the report before letting them off.

  “Hadn’t we better pick up the Perry woman?” he said.

  “Not without a warrant,” Grave Digger said. “We haven’t been able to verify Chink Charlie Dawson’s story about the knife, and if he’s lying she can sue us for false arrest.”

  “What the hell,” the lieutenant said. “You sound like she’s Mrs. Vanderbilt.”

  “Maybe she’s not Mrs. Vanderbilt, but Johnny Perry carries his weight in this town,” Grave Digger said. “And that’s out of our precinct, anyway.”

  “Okay, I’ll have the 152nd Street precinct station put a couple of men in the building to arrest Johnny when he shows,” the lieutenant said. “You fellows get some sleep. You’ve earned it.”

  “Anything yet from Chicago on Valentine Haines?” Grave Digger asked.

  “Not a thing,” the lieutenant said.

  The sky was overcast when they left the station, and the air was hot and muggy.

  “It looks like it’s going to rain cats and dogs,” Grave Digger said.

  “Let it come down,” Coffin Ed said.

  18

  MAMIE PULLEN WAS having breakfast when the telephone rang. She had a plate full of fried fish and boiled rice, and was dipping hot biscuits into a mixture of melted butter and blackstrap sorghum molasses.

  Baby Sis had finished her breakfast an hour before, and was filling Mamie’s cup from a pot of leftover coffee that had been boiling on the stove.

  “Go answer it,” Mamie said sharply. “Just don’t stand there like a lump on a log.”

  “I just don’t seem to be able to get myself together this mawning,” Baby Sis said as she shuffled from the kitchen, through the sitting room, into the bedroom at the front.

  When she returned Mamie was sipping jet-black coffee hot enough to scald a fowl.

  “It’s Johnny,” she said.

  Mamie was holding her breath as she got up from the table.

  She was dressed in a faded red-flannel kimono and a pair of Big Joe’s old working shoes. On her head she wore a black cotton stocking, knotted in the middle and hanging down her back.

  “What you doing up so soon?” she asked into the phone. “Or has you gone to bed yet?”

  “I’m in Chicago,” Johnny said. “I flew here this morning.”

  Mamie’s thin old body began trembling violently beneath the slack folds of the rusty old kimono, and the telephone shook in her hands as though she had the palsy.

  “Trust her, son,” she pleaded in a whining voice. “Trust her. She loves you.”

  “I trust her,” Johnny said in his flat toneless voice. “How much trust am I supposed to have?”

  “Then let it alone son,” she begged. “You got her all for yourself. Ain’t that enough?”

  “I don’t know whether I got her all for myself or not,” he said. “That’s what I want to find out.”

  “Ain’t no good ever come from digging up the past,” she warned.

  “You tell me what it is and I’ll stop digging,” he said.

  “Tell you what, son?”

  “Whatever in the hell it is,” he said. “If I knew I wouldn’t be here.”

  “What is you want to know?”

  “I just want to know what it is she thinks I’ll pay ten grand for her to tell me,” he said.

  “You got it all wrong, Johnny,” she argued in a moaning voice. “That’s just Doll Baby lying to try to make herself look big. If Val was alive he’d tell you she was lying.”

  “Yeah. But he ain’t alive,” Johnny said. “And I got to find out for myself whether she’s lying or not.”

  “But Val must have told you something,” she said, sobbing deep in her thin old chest. “He must of told you something or else—” She broke off and began to swallow as though to swallow the words she’d already said.

  “Or else what?” he asked in his toneless voice.

  She kept swallowing until she could say finally, “Well, it’s got to be something that you went all the way to Chicago for, ’cause it can’t just be what a lying little bitch like Doll Baby says.”

  “All right then, what about you?” he said. “You ain’t been lying. What you keep pleading Dulcy’s case for then, if there ain’t nothing to plead for?”

  “I just don’t want to see no more trouble, son,” she moaned. “I just don’t want to see no more blood spilt. Whatever it might have been, it’s over with and she’s all yours now, you can believe that.”

  “You ain’t doing nothing but just adding to the mystery,” he said.

  “There ain’t never been any mystery,” she argued “Not on her part. Not unless you made it.”

  “Okay, I made it,” he said. “Let’s drop it. What I called to tell you was I got her locked up in the bedroom—”

  “Good Lord above!” she exclaimed. “What good you think that’s going to do?”

  “Just listen to me,” he said. “The door’s padlocked from the outside with a Yale lock. The key is on the kitchen shelf. I want you to go and let her out long enough to get something to eat and then lock her up again.”

  “Lord have mercy, son,” she said. “How long do you think you can keep her locked up like that?”

  “Until I straighten out some of these mysteries,” he said. “That ought to be before the day’s over.”

  “Don’t forget one thing, son,” she pleaded. “She loves you.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and hung up.

  Mamie dressed quickly in her black satin Mother Hubbard and her own men
’s shoes, dipped her bottom lip full of snuff and took the snuff stick and box of snuff along with her.

  The sky was black-dark like an eclipse of the sun, and the street lights were still burning. Not a grain of dust nor a scrap of paper moved in the still close air. People walked about silently, in slow motion, like a city full of ghosts, and cats and dogs tiptoed from garbage can to garbage can as though afraid their footsteps might be heard. Before she found an empty taxi she felt herself suffocating from the exhaust fumes that didn’t rise ten feet above the pavement.

  “It’s going to rain tadpoles and bull frogs,” the colored driver said.

  “It’ll be a blessing,” she said.

  She had her own set of keys to the apartment, but it took her a long time to get in because Grave Digger and Coffin Ed had left the locks unlocked and she locked them thinking she was opening them.

  When finally she got inside she had to sit for a moment in the kitchen to steady her trembling. Then she took the key from the shelf and unlocked the bedroom door from the hall. She noticed that the bathroom door was standing open but her thoughts were so confused it held no meaning for her.

  Dulcy was still asleep.

  Mamie covered her with a sheet and took the empty brandy bottle and glass back to the kitchen. She began cleaning the house to occupy her mind.

  It was ten minutes to twelve and she was scrubbing the kitchen floor when the thunderstorm broke. She drew the shades, put away the scrub brush and pail and sat at the table with her head bowed low and began to pray,

  “Lord, show them the way, show them the light, don’t let him kill nobody else.”

  The sound of the thunder had awakened Dulcy, and she stumbled toward the kitchen, calling in a frightened voice, “Spookie. Here, Spookie.”

  Mamie looked up from the table. “Spookie ain’t here,” she said.

  Dulcy gave a start at sight of her. “Oh, it’s you!” she exclaimed. “Where’s Johnny?”

  “Didn’t he tell you?” Mamie asked.

  “Tell me what?”

  “He flew to Chicago.”

  Dulcy’s eyes widened with terror and her face blanched to a muddy yellow. She flopped into a chair, but got up the next instant, got a bottle of brandy and a glass from the cabinet and gulped a stiff drink to quiet her trembling. But she kept on trembling. She brought the bottle and glass back to the table and sat down again and poured herself half a glass and started to drink it. Then she caught Mamie’s look and put it down on the table. Her hand was trembling so violently the glass rattled on the enameled table top.