The blood trail ended at the green door.
“Come out of there,” the sergeant said.
No one answered.
He turned the knob and pushed the door and it opened inward so silently and easily he almost fell into the opening before he could train his light. Inside was a black dark void.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed flattened themselves against the walls on each side of the alley and their big long-barreled .38 revolvers came glinting into their hands.
“What the hell!” the sergeant exclaimed, startled.
His assistants ducked.
“This is Harlem,” Coffin Ed grated and Grave Digger elaborated:
“We don’t trust doors that open.”
Ignoring them, the sergeant shone his light into the opening. Crumbling brick stairs went down sharply to a green iron grille.
“Just a boiler room,” the sergeant said and put his shoulders through the doorway. “Hey, anybody down there?” he called. Silence greeted him.
“You go down, Joe, I’ll light your way,” the sergeant said.
“Why me?” Joe protested.
“Me and Digger’ll go,” Coffin Ed said. “Ain’t nobody there who’s alive.”
“I’ll go myself,” the sergeant said tersely. He was getting annoyed.
The stairway went down underneath the ground floor to a depth of about eight feet. A short paved corridor ran in front of the boiler room at right angles to the stairs, where each end was closed off by unpainted panelled doors. Both the stairs and the corridor felt like loose gravel underfoot, but otherwise they were clean. Splotches of blood were more in evidence in the corridor and a bloody hand mark showed clearly on the unpainted door to the rear.
“Let’s not touch anything,” the sergeant cautioned, taking out a clean white handkerchief to handle the doorknob.
“I better call the fingerprint crew,” the photographer said.
“No, Joe will call them; I’ll need you. And you local fellows better wait outside, we’re so crowded in here we’ll destroy the evidence.”
“Ed and I won’t move,” Grave Digger said.
Coffin Ed grunted.
Taking no further notice of them, the sergeant pushed open the door. It was black and dark inside. First he shone his light over the wall alongside the door and all over the corridor looking for electric light switches. One was located to the right of each door. Taking care to avoid stepping in any of the blood splotches, the sergeant moved from one switch to another, but none worked. “Blown fuse,” he muttered, picking his way back to the open room.
Without having to move, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed could see all they wanted through the open door. Originally made to accommodate a part-time janitor or any type of laborer who would fire the boiler for a place to sleep, the room had been converted into a pad. All that remained of the original was a partitioned-off toilet in one corner and a washbasin in the other. An opening enclosed by heavy wire mesh opened into the boiler room, serving for both ventilation and heat. Otherwise the room was furnished like a boudoir. There was a dressing-table with a triple mirror, three-quarter bed with chenille spread, numerous foam-rubber pillows in a variety of shapes, three round yellow scatter rugs. On the whitewashed walls an obscene mural had been painted in watercolors depicting black and white silhouettes in a variety of perverted sex acts, some of which could only be performed by male contortionists. And everything was splattered with blood, the walls, the bed, the rugs. The furnishings were not so much disarrayed, as though a violent struggle had taken place, but just bloodied.
“Mother-raper stood still and let his throat be cut,” Grave Digger observed.
“Wasn’t that,” Coffin Ed corrected. “He just didn’t believe it is all.”
The photographer was taking pictures with a small pocket camera but the sergeant sent him back to the car for his big Bertillon camera. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed left the cellar to look around.
The apartment was only one room wide but four storeys high. The front was flush with the sidewalk, and the front entrance elevated by two recessed steps. The alleyway at the side slanted down from the sidewalk sufficiently to drop the level of the door six feet below the ground-floor level. The cellar, which could only be entered by the door at the side, was directly below the ground-floor rooms. There were no apartments. Each of the four floors had three bedrooms opening on to the public hall, and to the rear was a kitchen and a bath and a separate toilet to serve each floor. There were three tenants on each floor, their doors secured by hasps and staples to be padlocked when they were absent, bolts and chains and floor locks and angle bars to protect them from intruders when they were present. The doors were pitted and scarred either because of lost keys or attempted burglary, indicating a continuous warfare between the residents and enemies from without, rapists, robbers, homicidal husbands and lovers, or the landlord after his rent. The walls were covered with obscene graffiti, mammoth sexual organs, vulgar limericks, opened legs, telephone numbers, outright boasting, insidious suggestions, and impertinent or pertinent comments about various tenants’ love habits, their mothers and fathers, the legitimacy of their children.
“And people live here,” Grave Digger said, his eyes sad.
“That’s what it was made for.”
“Like maggots in rotten meat.”
“It’s rotten enough.”
Twelve mailboxes were nailed to the wall in the front hall. Narrow stairs climbed to the top floor. The ground-floor hallway ran through a small back courtyard where four overflowing garbage cans leaned against the wall.
“Anybody can come in here day or night,” Grave Digger said. “Good for the whores but hard on the children.”
“I wouldn’t want to live here if I had any enemies,” Coffin Ed said. “I’d be scared to go to the john.”
“Yeah, but you’d have central heating.”
“Personally, I’d rather live in the cellar. It’s private with its own private entrance and I could control the heat.”
“But you’d have to put out the garbage cans,” Grave Digger said.
“Whoever occupied that whore’s crib ain’t been putting out any garbage cans.”
“Well, let’s wake up the brothers on the ground floor.”
“If they ain’t already awake.”
8
“You’re assuming that I’m a criminal because I’m married to a Negro and living in a Negro neighbourhood,” Anny said tremulously. She still wore the dazed look from too much nigger and too much blood and the two black detectives weren’t helping it any. She was down in the pigeon’s nest on the bolted stool with the bright lights pouring over her, like any other suspect, but she’d already had a taste of this eye-searing glare and that didn’t bother her as much as the indignity.
Coffin Ed and Grave Digger stood back in the shadow beyond the perimeter of the glare and she couldn’t see their expressions.
“How does it feel?” Grave Digger asked.
“I know what you mean,” she said. “I’ve always said it was unfair.”
“We’re holding you as a material witness,” he explained.
“It’s after midnight now,” Coffin Ed said. “By eight o’clock this morning you’ll be sprung.”
“What he means is we’ve got to get such information as we can before then,” Grave Digger explained.
“I don’t know much,” she said. “My husband’s the one you ought to question.”
“We’ll get to him, we got to you,” Coffin Ed said.
“It all came from Mister Sam wanting to get rejuvenated,” she said.
“Did you believe in that?” Grave Digger asked.
“You sound like his chauffeur, Johnson X,” she said.
He didn’t dispute her.
“All colored people sound alike,” Coffin Ed muttered.
A slow blush crept over her pale face. “It wasn’t so hard,” she confessed. “It was harder for my husband. You see, I have come to believe in a lot of things most people
consider unbelievable.”
Grave Digger continued the questioning. “How long had you known about it?”
“A couple of weeks.”
“Did Mister Sam tell you?”
“No, my husband told me.”
“What did he think about it?”
“He just thought it was a trick his father was playing on his wife, Viola.”
“What kind of trick?”
“To get rid of her.”
“Kill her?”
“Oh, no, he just wanted to be rid of her. You see, he knew she was having an affair with his attorney, Van Raff.”
“Did you know him well?”
“Not well. He considered me his son’s property, and he wouldn’t poach —”
“Although he wanted to?”
“Maybe, but he was so old — that’s why he wanted to be rejuvenated.”
“To have you?”
“Oh, no, he had his own. One white woman was the same as another to him — only younger.”
“Mildred?”
“Yes, the little tramp.” She didn’t say it vindictively, it was just descriptive.
“Anyway, she’s young enough,” Coffin Ed said.
“And he figured his wife and his lawyer were after his money?” Grave Digger surmised.
“That’s what started it,” she said, and then suddenly, as the memory washed over her, she buried her face in her hands. “Oh, it was horrible,” she sobbed. “Suddenly they were savaging one another like wild beasts.”
“It’s the jungle, ain’t it?” Coffin Ed growled. “What did you expect?”
“The blood, the blood,” she moaned. “Everyone was bleeding.”
Grave Digger waited for her to regain her composure, exchanging looks with Coffin Ed. Both were thinking maybe hers was the solution but was it the time? Would sexual integration start inside the black ghetto or outside in the white community? But it didn’t seem as though she would regain her composure, so Grave Digger asked, “Who started the cutting?”
“Mister Sam’s wife jumped up to attack Mister Sam’s little tramp, but suddenly she turned on Doctor Mubuta. I suppose it was because of the money,” she added.
“What money?”
“Mister Sam had a satchel full of money under the bed which he said he was going to give to Doctor Mubuta for making him young.”
The detectives froze. More blood was shed for money in Harlem than for any other reason.
“How much?”
“He said it was all he had—”
“Have you heard about: the money?” Grave Digger asked Coffin Ed.
“No. Homicide must know. We’d better check with Anderson.”
“Later.” He turned back to Anny. “Did everyone see it?”
“Actually it was in a Gladstone bag,” Anny said. “He let Doctor Mubuta look into the bag, but didn’t anyone else actually see it. But Doctor Mubuta looked like it was a lot of money —”
“Looked like?”
“His expression. He seemed surprised.”
“By the money?”
“By the amount, I suppose. The attorney demanded to see it. But Mister Sam — or maybe it was Doctor Mubuta — shut the bag and put it back beneath the bed, then Mister Sam said it was just paper, that he was joking. But everything seemed to change after that, as though the air got filled with violence. Mister Sam told Doctor Mubuta to go on with the experiment — the rejuvenation — because he wanted to be young again so he could marry. Then Mister Sam’s tramp — Mildred — said she was his fiancée, and Mister Sam’s wife, Viola, jumped up and took a knife out of her bag and ran towards the tramp — girl — and she crawled underneath Mister Sam’s bed, so Mister Sam’s wife turned on Doctor Mubuta, and Mister Sam drank some rejuvenating fluid and began to howl like a dog. I’m sure Doctor Mubuta didn’t expect that reaction, he seemed to turn white. But he had the presence of mind to push Mister Sam down on the bed, and shout to us to run —”
Grave Digger broke the spell of his absorbed fascination and asked, “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why run?”
“He said the ‘Bird of Youth’ was entering.”
Grave Digger stared at her. Coffin Ed stared at her.
“How old are you?” Coffin Ed asked.
Her mind was so locked in the terrifying memory she didn’t hear the question. She didn’t see them. Her vision had turned back to that terrifying moment and she looked as though she were blind. “Then when Johnson X, Mister Sam’s chauffeur, began to howl too — until then he had seemed the sanest one — we ran.…”
“Up to your apartment?”
“And locked the door.”
“And you didn’t see what happened to the bag of money?”
“We didn’t see anything else.”
“When did Van Raff come upstairs?”
“Oh, sometime later — I don’t know how long. He knocked on the door a long time before we opened it, then Dick, my husband, peeped out and found him unconscious on the floor and we brought him in —”
“Did he have the bag of money?”
“No, he had been stabbed all over the head and —”
“We know all that. Now who were all the people at this shindig?”
“There were me and Dick, my husband —”
“We know he’s your husband, you don’t have to keep on insisting,” Coffin Ed interrupted.
She tried to see his face through the curtain of shadow and Grave Digger went over to the wall and turned the lights down.
“That better?” he asked.
“Yes, we’re black cops,” Coffin Ed said.
“Don’t insist,” she said, getting back some of her own. “I can see it.”
Grave Digger chuckled. “Your husband —” he prompted.
“My husband,” she repeated defiantly. “He’s Mister Sam’s son, you know.”
“We know.”
“And Mister Sam’s wife, Viola, and Mister Sam’s attorney, Van Raff, and Mister Sam’s chauffeur, Johnson X, and Mister Sam’s tramp — fiancée — Mildred —”
“What you got against her? You changed your race?” Coffin Ed interrupted.
“Leave her be,” Grave Digger cautioned.
But she wasn’t daunted. “Yes, but not to your race, to the human race.”
“That’ll hold him.”
“Naw, it won’t. I got no reverence for these white women going ’round joining the human race. It ain’t that easy for us colored folks.”
“Later, man, later,” Grave Digger said. “Let’s stick to our business.”
“That is our business.”
“All right. But let’s cook one pigeon at the time.”
“Why?”
“You’re right,” Anny said. “It’s too easy for us.”
“That’s all I said,” Coffin Ed said, and having made his point, withdrew into the shadow.
“And Doctor Mubuta,” Grave Digger said, taking up where she had left off.
“Yes, of course. I haven’t got anything against Mildred,” she added, reverting to the question. “But when a teen-age girl like her takes up with a dirty old man like Mister Sam, just for what she can get out of him, she’s a tramp, that’s all.”
“All right,” Grave Digger conceded.
“And Sugartit,” she said.
“She was the one sent to the hospital? What’s her name?”
“I don’t know her real name, just Sugartit.”
“She was the teen-age colored girl — whycome she ain’t a tramp?” Coffin Ed said.
“She just wasn’t, that’s all.”
“I have a daughter they used to call Sugartit,” he said.
“This girl’s not your daughter,” Anny said, looking at him. “This girl’s sick.”
He didn’t know whether she meant it as a jibe or a compliment.
“Is she a relative of Mister Sam’s?” Grave Digger asked.
“I don’t think so. I don’t know why she was there.”
“Maybe, I don’t know. All I know about her is what people say, that she’s ‘covered’. It seems she’s the girl friend of the Syndicate’s district boss — if that’s what he’s called. Anyway the top man.”
“How’d you get to know her?”
“I didn’t really know her. She’d wander into the flat sometimes — always when Dick was out. I think it might have been when the Syndicate boss was seeing Mister Sam downstairs.”
Grave Digger’s head moved slowly up and down. An idea was knocking at his mind, trying to get in. He looked at Coffin Ed and saw he was disturbed by a nagging idea too. The Syndicate didn’t have any business in a joke like this. If an old man with a cheating, scheming wife wanted to risk his life with a charlatan like Doctor Mubuta, that was his business. But the Syndicate wouldn’t have a lookout staked unless there was more to it than that.
“And the last you saw of the Gladstone bag full of money was when Doctor Mubuta put it back underneath the bed?” he asked. Coffin Ed gave a slight nod.
“Oh, it was there all the time, when Viola rushed at Mildred and when she turned on Doctor Mubuta and it was there when he yelled for us to run —”
“Maybe the ‘Bird of Youth’ took it,” Coffin Ed said.
“You know he was killed too—Doctor Mubuta?”
“Yes.”
“Who told you?” he shot the question at her.
“Why you did,” she said. “Don’t you remember? When you brought me and Dick here? You asked him were we present when the doctor was killed.”
“I’d forgotten,” he confessed sheepishly.
“I hated for him to be killed more than anyone,” she said. “I knew he was a fake —”
“How’d you know it?”
“He had to be—”
“Earlier you said —”
“I know what I said. But he touched me.”
Both of them looked at her with new interest.
“How so?” Grave Digger asked.
Blind Man with a Pistol Page 7