Blind Man with a Pistol

by Chester Himes

  The black Cadillac limousine drew to the curb in front of the unfinished lawn. Miraculously the banner across the back which had previously proclaimed BLACK POWER now read: BROTHERHOOD. The two black-coated, black-capped men in front got out first and stood flanking the rear door. Away from the motley crowd at 135th Street and Seventh Avenue, with that quiet, pretentious apartment building in the background, they looked larger, tougher, infinitely more dangerous. The bulges beneath their leather coats on the left sides were more pronounced. There, on the quiet, shady side of the old, wide, historic slum street, they looked unmistakably like bodyguards. The well-dressed people coming and going from and to the apartment entrance gave them a wide berth. But no resentment was shown. They were familiar. Doctor Moore was a noted personage. The residents held him in high esteem. They admired his efforts at integration; they commended his nonviolent, reasonable approach. When Doctor Moore himself alighted, standing between his two clerics, passing residents tipped their hats and smiled obsequiously.

  “You boys come with me,” he said.

  He walked briskly into the building with his retinue at his heels. There were both confidence and authority in his bearing, like that of a man with a purpose and a will to achieve it. Residents passing through the foyer bowed. He smiled amiably but didn’t speak. The doorman kept an empty elevator waiting for him. He rode it to the third floor, where he dismissed his bodyguards and took his clerics inside.

  The entrance hall was sumptuously furnished. A wall-to-wall carpet of a dark purple color covered the floor. On one side was a coat-rack with a full-length mirror attached and beside it an umbrella stand. On the other side a long low table for hats, with twin shaded lamps at each end, flanked by straight-backed chairs of some dark exotic wood with overstuffed needlepoint seats. But Doctor Moore did not linger there. After a brief glance into the mirror he turned right into the salon along the front of the building with two wide windows, followed by his clerics. Except for translucent curtains and purple silk drapes behind white Venetian blinds, the salon was as bare as Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard. But Doctor Moore kept on through to the dining-room with his clerics at his heels. It was equally bare as the salon with similar blinds and curtains. But Doctor Moore did not hesitate, nor did his clerics expect him to hesitate. Into the kitchen they marched in single file. Not a word had been spoken. And as yet still without speech, his clerics shed their coats and clerical collars and donned white cotton jackets and cooks’ caps while Doctor Moore peered into the refrigerator.

  “They’re some neckbones here,” Doctor Moore said. “Make some neckbones and rice and you’ll find some yellow yams somewhere and maybe there’s some of those collards left.”

  “What about some corn bread, Al?” one of the cook-clerics said.

  “All right then, some corn bread, if there’s any butter.”

  “There’s some margarine.”

  Doctor Moore gave a grimace of distaste. “Tap the trunk,” he said “A man’s got to eat.”

  He went quickly back into the hall and opened the door to the first bedroom. It was empty except for an unmade double bed and an unpainted wardrobe.

  “Lucy!” he called.

  A woman stuck her head out of the bath. It was the head of a young woman with a smooth brownskinned face and straightened black hair pulled aslant her forehead over her right ear. It was a beautiful face with a wide straight nose and unflared nostrils above a wide, thick, unpainted mouth with brown lips that looked soft and resilient. Brown eyes magnified by rimless spectacles gave her a sexy look.

  “Lucy’s out; it’s me,” she said.

  “You? Barbara! Somebody with you?” his voice came out in a whisper.

  “Shit, naw, do you think I’d bring ’em here?” she said in a softly modulated voice which jarred shockingly with the words.

  “Well, what the fuck are you doing here?” he said in a loud coarse voice that made him sound like another man altogether, “I sent you to work the cocktail party at the Americana.”

  She came into the room with the waft of woman smell. Her voluptuous brown body was covered loosely by a pink silk robe which showed a line of brown belly and a black growth of pubic hair.

  “I was there,” she said defensively. “There was too much competition from the high-society amateurs. All those hincty bitches fell on those whitey-babies like they was sugar candy.”

  Doctor Moore frowned angrily. “So what? Can’t you out-project those amateurs? You’re a pro.”

  “Are you kidding? Against all those free matrons? You ever see Madame Thomasina with a hot on for whitey?”

  “Listen, whore, that’s your problem. I don’t pay to send you to these cocktail parties to let these high-society bitches beat you at the game. I expect you to score. How you do it is your business. If you can’t collar a whitey John with them all about, I’ll get myself another whore.”

  She went up to him so he could smell her and feel the woman coming from her body. “Don’t talk to me like that, Al baby. Ain’t I been good all along? It’s just these matinees when these bitches are free. I’m sure I’ll score tonight.” She tried to embrace him but he pushed her away roughly.

  “You better, girl,” he said. “I mean business. The rent isn’t paid, and I’m behind with my Caddy.”

  “Ain’t your own pitch paying nothing?”

  “Peanuts. It’s split too mother-raping thin. And these Harlem folks ain’t serious. All they want to do is boogaloo.” He paused and then said reflectively, “I could make a mint if I could just get them mad.”

  “Jesus, can’t your apes do that? What you got them for then?”

  “No. They’re useless in an operation like this,” he said meditatively. “What I really need is a dead man.”

  7

  The assistant Medical Examiner looked like a City College student in a soiled seersucker suit. His thick brown hair needed cutting and his hornrimmed glasses needed wiping. He looked as humorless as befits a man whose business is the dead.

  He straightened up from examining the body and wiped his hands on his trousers. “This was an easy one,” he said, addressing himself to the sergeant from the homicide bureau. “You got the exact time of death from these local men, they saw him die. The exact cause is a cut jugular vein. Male, white and approximately thirty-five years old.”

  The homicide sergeant wasn’t satisfied with such a small capsule. He looked as though he was never satisfied with Medical Examiners. He was a thin, tall, angular man wearing what looked like a starched blue serge suit. He had reddish hair of the most repulsive shade, big brown freckles that looked like a bowl full of warts, and a long sharp nose that stuck out from his face like the keel of a racing yacht. His close-set, small blue eyes looked frustrated.

  “Identifying marks? Scars? Birthmarks?”

  “Hell, you saw as much as I did,” the assistant M.E. said, accidentally stepping into the pool of blood. “Son of a Goddam bitch!” he cried.

  “Jesus Christ, there’s not a thing on him to tell who he is,” the sergeant complained. “No papers, no wallet, no laundry mark on this one garment it’s wearing —”

  “How ’bout the shoes?” Coffin Ed ventured.

  “Marked shoes?”

  “Why not?”

  The assistant D.A. gave him a slight nod, whatever it meant. He was a middle-aged man with a white unhealthy look and meticulously combed graying hair. His doughy face and abrupt paunch along with his wrinkled suit and unshined shoes gave him the look of a complete failure. Gathered about him were the ambulance drivers and vacant-faced patrol-car cops as though seeking shelter of his indecision. The homicide sergeant and the assistant M.E. stood apart.

  The sergeant looked at the photographer he had brought with him. “Take off his shoes,” he ordered.

  The photographer bridled. “Let Joe take ’em off,” he said. “All I take is pictures.”

  Joe was the detective first grade who drove for the sergeant. He was a square-built Slav with crew-cut hair
that bristled like porcupine quills.

  “All right, Joe,” the sergeant said.

  Wordlessly Joe knelt on the dirty pavement, unlaced the dead man’s brown suede oxfords and drew them from his feet, one after another. He held them to the light and looked inside. The sergeant bent to look into them too.

  “Bostonian,” Joe read.

  “Hell,” the sergeant said disgustedly, giving Coffin Ed an appraising look. Then he turned back to the assistant M.E. with a long-suffering manner. “Can you tell me if he’s had sexual intercourse — recently, I mean?”

  The assistant M.E. looked bored with it all. “We can tell by the autopsy whether he’s had sexual intercourse up to within an hour of death.” Sotto voce, he added, “What a question.”

  The sergeant heard him. “It’s important,” he said defensively. “We got to know something about this man. How the hell we going to find out who killed him?”

  “You can take his prints, of course,” Coffin Ed said.

  The sergeant looked at him with narrowed eyes, as though suspecting him of needling. Of course they were going to take the body’s fingerprints and all other Bertillon measurements needed in identification, as the detective well knew, he thought angrily.

  “Anyway, it wasn’t with a woman,” the assistant M.E. said, reddening uncontrollably. “At least in a normal way.”

  Everyone looked at him, as though expecting him to say more.

  “Right,” the sergeant concurred, nodding knowingly. But he would have liked to ask the assistant M.E. how he knew.

  Then suddenly Grave Digger said, “I could have told you that from the start.”

  The sergeant reddened so furiously his freckles stood out like scars. He had heard of these two colored detectives up here, but this was the first time he had seen them. But he could already tell that a little bit of them went a long way; in other words, they were getting on his ass.

  “Then maybe you can tell me why he was killed, too,” he said sarcastically.

  “That’s easy,” Grave Digger said with a straight face. “There are only two reasons a white man is killed in Harlem. Money or fear.”

  The sergeant wasn’t expecting that answer. It threw him. He lost his sarcasm. “Not sex?”

  “Sex? Hell, that’s all you white people can think of, Harlem and sex — and you’re right, too!” he went on before the sergeant could speak. “You’r right as rain. But sex is for sale. And all the surplus they give away. So why kill a white sucker for that? That’s killing the goose that lays the golden egg.”

  Color drained from the sergeant’s face and it became white from anger. “Are you trying to tell me there are no sex murders here?”

  “What I said was there were no white men killed for sex,” Grave Digger said equably. “Ain’t no white man ever that involved.”

  Color flowed back into the sergeant’s face, which was changing color under his guilt complexes like a chameleon. “And no one ever makes a mistake?” He felt compelled to argue just for the sake of arguing.

  “Hell, sergeant, every murder’s a mistake,” Grave Digger said condescendingly. “You know that, it’s your business.”

  Yes, these black sons of bitches were going to take a lot of getting along with, the sergeant thought, as he grimly changed the conversation.

  “Well, maybe I should have asked do you know who killed him?”

  “That ain’t fair,” Coffin Ed said roughly.

  The sergeant threw up his hands. “I give up.”

  Including the patrol-car cops, most of whom were white, there were fifteen white officers gathered about the body, and in addition to Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, four colored patrol-car cops. All laughed from relief. It was a touchy business when a white man was killed in Harlem. People took up sides on racial lines, regardless of whether they were police officers or not. No one liked it, but all were involved. It was personal to them all.

  “Anything else you want to know?” the assistant M.E. asked.

  The sergeant looked at him sharply to see if he was being sarcastic. He decided he was innocent. “Yeah, everything,” he replied, waxing loquacious. “Who he is? Who killed him? Why? Most of all I want the killer. That’s my job.”

  “That’s your baby,” the assistant M.E. said. “By tomorrow — or rather this morning — we’ll give you the physiological details. Right now I’m going home.” He filled out a DOA tag, which he tied to the right big toe of the body, and nodded to the drivers of the police hearse. “Take it to the morgue.”

  The homicide sergeant stood absently watching the body loaded, then looked slowly about from the idle car cops to the congregated black people. “All right, boys,” he ordered. “Take them all in.”

  The homicide department always took over investigations of homicide and the highest ranking homicide detective on the scene became the boss. Detectives from the local precinct and patrol-car cops who took instructions either from the precinct captain or a divisional inspector didn’t always like this arrangement. But Grave Digger and Coffin Ed didn’t care who became boss. “We just get pissed-off with all the red tape,” Grave Digger once said. “We want to get down to the nitty-gritty.”

  But there were formalities to protect the rights of citizens and they couldn’t just light into a group of innocent people and start whipping head until somebody talked, which they figured was the best and cheapest way to solve a crime. If the citizens didn’t like it, they ought to stay at home. Since they couldn’t do this, they began to walk away.

  “Come on,” Coffin Ed urged. “This man will have us picked up next.”

  “Look at these brothers flee,” Grave Digger noted. “They wouldn’t listen to me when I warned them.”

  They went only as far as the littered paved square strewed with overflowing garbage cans beside the front stairs to the nearest rooming house where they could watch the operation without being seen. The smell of rotting garbage was nauseating.

  “Whew! Who said us colored people were starving?”

  “That ain’t what they say, Digger. They just wonder why we ain’t.”

  As the first of the onlookers were loaded in the police wagon, other curious citizens arrived.

  “Whuss happening?”

  “Search me, baby. Some whitey was killed, they say.”

  “Shot?”

  “Washed away.”

  “They got who done it?”

  “You kidding? They just grabbing off us folks. You know how white cops is.”

  “Less split.”

  “Too late,” said a white car cop who thought he dug the soul brother, taking each by the arm.

  “He thinks he’s funny,” one of the brothers complained.

  “Well, ain’t he?” the other admitted, looking expressively at their arms in his grip.

  “Joe, you and Ted bright the power lamps,” the sergeant called above the hubbub. “Looks like there’s a blood trail here.”

  Followed by his assistants with the battery-powered spot lamps, the sergeant stepped down into the garbage-scented courtyard. “I’ll need you men’s help,” he said. “There must be a blood trail here.” He had decided to adopt a conciliatory manner.

  People gathered on the adjoining rooming-house steps, trying to see what they were doing. A patrol car drew to the curb, the two uniformed cops in the front seat looking on with interest.

  The sergeant became exasperated. “You officers get these people out the way,” he ordered irritably.

  The cops got sullen. “Hey, you folks get over there with the others,” one ordered.

  “I lives here,” a buxom light-complexioned woman wearing gilt mules and a stained blue nightgown muttered defiantly. “I just got out of bed to see what the noise was all about.”

  “Now you know,” the homicide photographer said slyly.

  The woman grinned gratefully.

  “Do as you’re ordered!” the car cop shouted angrily, stepping to the sidewalk.

  The woman’s plaits shook in outrage.
“Who you talking to?” she shouted back. “You can’t order me off my own steps.”

  “You tell ’em sister Berry,” a pajama-clad brother behind her encouraged.

  The cop was getting red. The other cop climbed from beneath the wheel on the other side and came around the car threateningly. “What was that you said?” he challenged.

  She looked toward Grave Digger and Coffin Ed for support.

  “Don’t look at me,” Grave Digger said. “I’m the law too.”

  “That’s a nigger for you,” the woman said scornfully as the white cops marched them off.

  “All right, now bring the light here,” the sergeant said, returning to the dark purple pool of congealing blood where the murdered man had died.

  Before joining the others, Grave Digger went back to their car and turned off the lights.

  The trail wasn’t hard to follow. It had a pattern. An irregular patch of scattered spots that looked like spots of tar in the artificial light was interspersed every fourth or fifth step by a dark gleaming splash where blood had spurted from the wound. Now that all the soul people had been removed from the street, the five detectives moved swiftly. But they could still feel the presence of teeming people behind the dilapidated stone façades of the old reconverted buildings. Here and there the white gleams of eyes showed from darkened windows, but the silence was eerie.

  The trail turned from the sidewalk into an unlighted alleyway between the house beyond the rooming house, which described itself by a sign in a front window reading: Kitchenette Apts. All conveniences, and the weather-streaked red-brick apartment beyond that. The alleyway was so narrow they had to go in single file. The sergeant had taken the power light from his driver, Joe, and was leading the way himself. The pavement slanted down sharply beneath his feet and he almost lost his step. Midway down the blank side of the building he came to a green wooden door. Before touching it, he flashed his light along the sides of the flanking buildings. There were windows in the kitchenette apartments, but all from the top to the bottom floor had folding iron grilles which were closed and locked at that time of night, and dark shades were drawn on all but three. The apartment house had a vertical row of small black openings one above the other at the rear. They might have been bathroom windows but no light showed in any of them and the glass was so dirty it didn’t shine.