“I want to see my lawyer,” he was saying for the hundredth time.
“Your lawyer is asleep at this time of night,” Coffin Ed said with a straight face.
“He’d be mad if we woke him,” Grave Digger added.
Lieutenant Anderson had let them have him first. They were in a jovial mood. They had Deke where they wanted him.
It wasn’t funny to Deke. “Don’t get your britches torn,” he warned. “All you got against me is suspicion of homicide; and I have a perfect right to see my lawyer.”
Coffin Ed slapped him with his cupped palm. It was a light slap but it sounded like a firecracker and rocked Deke’s head.
“Who’s talking about homicide?” Grave Digger said as though he hadn’t noticed it.
“Hell, all we want to know is who’s got the money,” Coffin Ed said.
Deke straightened up and took a deep breath.
“So we can go and get it and give it back to those poor people you swindled,” Grave Digger added.
“Swindled my ass,” Deke said. “It was all legitimate.”
Grave Digger slapped him so hard his body bent one-sided like a rubber man, and Coffin Ed slapped him back. They slapped him back and forth until his brains were addled, but left no bruises.
They let him get his breath back and gave him time for his brains to settle. Then Grave Digger said, “Let’s start over.”
Deke’s eyes had turned bright orange in the glaring light. He closed his lids. A trickle of blood flowed from the corner of his mouth. He licked his lips and wiped his hand across his mouth.
“You’re hurting me,” he said. His voice sounded as though his tongue had thickened. “But you ain’t killing me. And that’s all that counts.”
Coffin Ed drew back to hit him but Grave Digger caught his arm. “Easy, Ed,” he said.
“Easy on this mother-raping scum?” Coffin Ed raved. “Easy on this incestuous sister-raping thief?”
“We’re cops,” Grave Digger reminded him. “Not judges.”
Coffin Ed restrained himself. “The law was made to protect the innocent,” he said.
Grave Digger chuckled. “You heard the man,” he said to Deke.
Deke looked as though he might reply to that but thought better of it. “You’re wasting your time on me,” he said instead. “My Back-to-Africa movement was on the square and all I know about this shooting caper is what I saw in passing. I saw the man was dying and tried to save his life.”
Coffin Ed turned and walked into the shadow. He slapped the wall with the palm of his hand so hard it sounded like a shot. It was all Grave Digger could do to keep from breaking Deke’s jaw. His neck swelled and veins sprouted like ropes along his temples.
“Deke, don’t try us,” he said. His voice had turned light and cotton dry. “We’ll take you out of here and pistol-whip you slowly to death — and take the charge.”
It showed on Deke’s face he believed him. He didn’t speak.
“We know the set-up of the Back-to-Africa movement. We got the FBI records on Four-Four and Freddy. We got the Cook County Bertillon report on Barry and Elmer. We got your prison record too. We know you haven’t got the money or you wouldn’t still have been around. But you got the key.”
“Got what key?” Deke asked.
“The key to the door that leads to the money.”
Deke shook his head. “I’m clean,” he said.
“Punk, listen,” Grave Digger said. “You’re going up any way. We got the proof.”
“Got it from where?” Deke asked.
“We got it from Iris,” Grave Digger said.
“If she said the Back-to-Africa movement was crooked she’s a lying bitch, and I’ll tell her to her teeth.”
“All right,” Grave Digger said.
Three minutes later they had Iris in the room. Lieutenant Anderson and two white detectives had come with her.
She stood in front of Deke and looked him dead in the eyes. “He killed Mabel Hill,” she said.
Deke’s face distorted with rage and he tried to leap at her but the white detectives held him.
“Mabel found out that the Back-to-Africa movement was crooked and she was going to the police. Her husband had been killed and she had lost her money and she was going to get him.” She sounded as if it was good to her.
“You lying whore!” Deke screamed.
“When I stood up for him, she attacked me,” Iris continued. “I was struggling to defend myself. He grabbed me from behind and put the pistol in my hand and shot her. When I tried to wrestle the pistol away from him, he knocked me down and took it.”
Deke looked sick. He knew it was a good story. He knew if she took it to court, dressed in black, her eyes downcast in sorrow, and spoke in a halting manner — with his record — she could make it stick. She didn’t have any kind of a criminal record. He could see the chair in Sing Sing and himself sitting in it.
He stared at her with resignation. “How much are they paying you?” he asked.
She ignored the question. “The forged documents which prove the Back-to-Africa movement is crooked are hidden in our apartment in the binding of a book called Sex and Race.” She smiled sweetly at Deke. “Good-bye, big shit,” she said and turned towards the door.
The white detectives looked at one another, then looked at Deke. Anderson was embarrassed.
“How does that feel?” Coffin Ed asked Deke in a grating voice.
Grave Digger walked with Iris to the door. When he turned her over to the jailer he winked at her. She looked surprised for an instant, then winked back, and the jailer took her away.
Deke had wilted. He didn’t look hurt, or even frightened; he looked beat, like a condemned man waiting for the electric chair. All he needed was the priest.
Anderson and the two white detectives left without looking at him again.
When the three of them were again alone, Grave Digger said. “Give us the key and we’ll strike off the murder.”
Deke looked up at him as though from a great distance. He looked as though he didn’t care about anything any more. “Frig you,” he said.
“Then give us the eighty-seven grand and we’ll drop the whole thing,” Grave Digger persisted.
“Frig you twice,” Deke said.
They turned him over to the jailer to be taken back to his cell.
“I got a feeling we’re overlooking something,” Grave Digger said.
“That is for sure,” Coffin Ed agreed. “But what?”
They were in Anderson’s office, talking about Iris. As usual, Grave Digger sat with a ham perched on the edge of the desk and Coffin Ed was backed against the wall in the shadow.
“She’ll never get away with it,” Lieutenant Anderson said.
“Maybe not,” Grave Digger conceded. “But she sure scared the hell out of him.”
“How much did it help?”
Grave Digger looked chagrined.
“None,” Coffin Ed admitted ruefully. “She put it on too thick. We didn’t expect her to accuse him of the murder.”
Grave Digger chuckled at that. “She didn’t hold anything back. I thought for a moment she was going to accuse him of rape.”
Anderson colored slightly. “Then how far have you got?”
“Nowhere,” Grave Digger confessed.
Anderson sighed. “I hate to see people tearing at one another like rapacious animals.”
“Hell, what do you expect?” Grave Digger said. “As long as there are jungles there’ll be rapacious animals.”
“Remember the colored taxi driver who picked up the three white men and the colored woman in front of Small’s, right after the trucks were wrecked?” Anderson asked, changing the conversation.
“Took them to Brooklyn. Maybe we ought to talk to him.”
“No use now. Homicide took him down to the morgue. On a hunch. And he identified the bodies of the three white men as the same ones.”
Grave Digger shifted his weight and Coffin Ed leaned forwa
rd. For a moment they were silent, lost in thought, then Grave Digger said, “That ought to tell me something,” adding, “but it don’t.”
“It tells me they ain’t got the money either,” Coffin Ed said.
“What they?”
“How the hell do I know? I didn’t see the ones who got away,” Coffin Ed said.
Anderson thumbed through the report sheets on his desk. “The Lincoln was found abandoned on Broadway, where the subway trestle passes over 125th Street, with the two rifles still inside,” he noted. “It showed where you hit it.”
“So what?”
“The gunmen haven’t been found but Homicide has got leaders out. Anyway, we know who they are and they won’t get far.”
“Don’t worry about those birds, they’ll never fly,” Coffin Ed said.
“Those are not the flying kind,” Grave Digger added. “Those are jailbirds, headed for home.”
“And we’re headed for food,” Coffin Ed said. “My stomach is sending up emergency calls.”
“Damn right,” Grave Digger agreed. “As Napoleon said, ‘A woman thinks with her heart but a man with his stomach.’ And we’ve got some heavy thinking to do.”
Anderson laughed. “What Napoleon was that?”
“Napoleon Jones,” Grave Digger said.
“All right, Napoleon Jones, don’t forget crime,” Anderson said.
“Crime is what pays us,” Coffin Ed said.
They went to Mammy Louise’s. She had changed her pork store with the tiny restaurant in back into a fancy all-night barbecue joint. Mr Louise was dead and a slick young black man with shiny straightened hair and fancy clothes had taken his place. The English bulldog who used to keep Mr Louise at home was still there, but his usefulness was gone and he looked lonely for the short fat figure of Mr Louise, whom he delighted in scaring. The new young man didn’t look like the type anything could keep home, bulldog or whatnot.
They sat at a rear table facing the front. The barbecue grill was to their right, presided over by a white-clad chef. To their left was the jukebox, blaring out a Ray Charles number.
Mammy Louise’s slick young man came personally to take their orders, playing the role of Patron with mincing arrogance.
“Good evening, gentlemen, what will you gentlemen have tonight?”
Grave Digger looked up. “What have you got?”
“Barbecued ribs, barbecued feet, barbecued chicken, and we got some chitterlings and hog maws and some collard greens with ears and tails–”
“You’d go out of business if hogs had only loins,” Coffin Ed interrupted.
The young man flashed his teeth. “We got some ham and succotash and some hog head and black-eyed peas–”
“What do you do with the bristles?” Grave Digger asked.
The young man was becoming irritated. “Anything you want, gentlemen,” he said with a strained smile.
“Don’t brag,” Coffin Ed muttered.
The smile went out.
“Just bring us two double orders of ribs,” Grave Diger said quickly. “With side dishes of black-eyed peas, rice, okra, collard greens with fresh tomatoes and onions, and top it off with some deep-dish apple pie and vanilla ice cream. Okay?”
The young man smiled again. “Just a light snack.”
“Yeah, we want to think,” Coffin Ed said.
They watched the young man walk away with a switch.
“Mr Louise must be turning over in his grave,” Coffin Ed said.
“Hell, he’s more likely running after some chippy angel, now that he’s got away from that bulldog.”
“If he went in that direction.”
“All chippies were angels to Mr Louise,” Grave Digger said.
The place was filled mostly with young people who peeped at them through the corners of their eyes when they came back to play the jukebox. Everyone knew them. They looked at these young people, thinking they didn’t know what it was all about yet.
Suddenly they were listening.
“Pres,” Grave Digger recognized, cocking his ear. “And Sweets.”
“Roy Eldridge too,” Coffin Ed added. “Who’s on the bass?”
“I don’t know him or the guitar either,” Grave Digger confessed. “I guess I’m an old pappy.”
“What’s that platter?” Coffin Ed asked the youth standing by the jukebox who had played the number.
His girl looked at them through wide dark eyes, as though they’d escaped from the zoo, but the boy replied self-consciously, “ ‘Laughing to Keep from Crying.’ It’s foreign.”
“No, it ain’t,” Coffin Ed said.
No one contradicted him. They were silent with their thoughts until a waiter brought the food. The table was loaded. Grave Digger chuckled. “Looks like a famine is coming on.”
“We’re going to head it off,” Coffin Ed said.
The waiter brought three kinds of hot sauce — Red Devil, Little Sister’s Big Brother, West Virginia Coke Oven — vinegar, a plate of yellow corn bread and a dish of country butter.
“Bone apperteet,” he said.
“Merci, m’sieu,” Coffin Ed replied.
“Black Frenchman,” Grave Digger commented when the waiter had left.
“Good old war,” Coffin Ed said. “It got us out of the South.”
“Yeah, now the white folks want to start another war to get us back.”
That was the last of that conversation. The food claimed their attention. They sloshed the succulent pork barbecue with Coke Oven hot sauce and gnawed it from the bones with noisy relish. It made the chef feel good all over to watch them eat.
When they had finished, Mammmy Louise came from the kitchen. She was shaped like a weather balloon on two feet, with a pilot balloon serving as a head. The round black face beneath the bandanna which encased her head was shiny with sweat, but still she wore a heavy sweater over a black woollen dress. She claimed she had never been warm since coming north. Her ancestors were runaway slaves who had joined a tribe of southern Indians and formed a new race known as “Geechies”. Her native language was a series of screeches punctuated by grunts, but she spoke American with an accent. She smelled like stewed goat.
“How’s y’all, nasty ’licemen?” she greeted them jovially.
“Fine, Mammy Louise, how’s yourself?”
“Cold,” she confessed.
“Don’t your new love keep you warm?” Coffin Ed asked.
She cast a look at the mincing dandy flashing his teeth at two women at a front table. “ ’Oman lak me tikes w’ut de good Lawd send ’thout question, I’se ’fied.”
“If you are satisfied, who’re we to complain?” Grave Digger said.
A man poked his head in the door and said something to her fine young man and he hurried back to their table and said, “Your car’s calling.”
They jumped up and hurried out without paying.
15
Lieutenant Anderson said, “A man was found dead in a junkyard underneath 125th Street approach to the Triborough Bridge.”
“What about it?” Coffin Ed replied.
“What about it?” Anderson flared. “Have you guys quit the force? Go over and look at it. You might learn that killing is a crime. Just the same as robbery.”
Coffin Ed felt his ears burning. “Right away,” he said respectfully.
“What about it?” he heard Anderson muttering as he switched off.
Grave Digger was chuckling as he wheeled the car into the traffic. “Got your ass torn, eh, buddy?”
“Yeah, the boss man got salty.”
“Let that be a lesson to you. Don’t play murder cheap.”
“All right, I’m outnumbered,” Coffin Ed said.
They found Sergeant Wiley in charge of the crew from Homicide. His men were casting footprints, dusting for fingerprints, and taking photographs. A young pink-faced assistant medical examiner was tagging the body DOA and whistling cheerfully.
“My old friends, the lion tamers,” Sergeant Wiley greeted
them. “Have no fear, the dog is dead.”
They looked at the dead dog, then glanced casually about.
“What’ve you got here?” Grave Digger asked.
“Just another corpse,” Wiley said. “My fifth for the night.”
“So you covered the caper at the Polo Grounds?”
“Caper! Hell, when I arrived there were only four stiffs. You men got the live one.”
“You can have him.”
“For what? If he wasn’t any good for you what the hell I want him for?”
“Who knows? Maybe he’ll like you better.”
Wiley smiled. He looked more like a professor of political science at the New School than a homicide detective-sergeant but Grave Digger and Coffin Ed knew him for a cool clever cop. “Let’s look around,” he said, leading the way into the shed where the body was found. “Here’s the score. We got a social security card from his wallet which gives his name as Joshua Peavine and an address on West 121st Street. He was stabbed once in the heart. That’s all we know.”
The detectives looked carefully over the junk-filled shed. Three aisles, flanked by junk stacked to the corrugated-iron ceiling, branched off from the main aisle that led in from the door. All available space was filled except an empty spot at the end of the main aisle beside the back wall.
“Somebody got something,” Coffin Ed remarked.
“What the hell would anybody want from here?” Wiley asked, gesturing towards the stacks of flattened cardboard, old books and magazines, rags, radios, sewing-machines, rusty tools, battered mannequins and unidentifiable scraps of metal.
“The man got killed for something, much less the dog,” Coffin Ed maintained.
“Might have been a sex crime,” Grave Digger ventured. “Suppose he came here with a white man. It’s happened before.”
“I thought of that,” Wiley said. “But the dead dog contradicts it.”
“He’d kill the dog if it was worth it,” Coffin Ed said.
Wiley raised his eyebrows. “All that secrecy in Harlem?”
“He’d do what was necessary if the pay was right.”
Cotton Comes to Harlem Page 13