Blind Man with a Pistol

by Chester Himes

  The rooms were small. Each was equipped with a built-in washbasin and clothes closet and a radiator, and furnished with a double bed and dressing-table of oak veneer. All the shades were drawn on the windows on the other side, and the rooms were hot and airless as though sealed. All were alike with the exception of the front room which had a second window on the street, from which the tenant could have stolen the hats from the heads of passersby to go along with all his suits and shirts. With the addition of four detectives they were crowded.

  A couple by the name of Mr and Mrs Tola Onan Ramsey occupied the front room. Tola was a presser at a downtown cleaners and his wife, Bee, ironed shirts at the laundry next door. Tola said the suits and shirts were his own which he had bought and paid for with his own money, and he didn’t need any hats. The local detectives kept quiet, but they wondered why the Ramseys paid the extra rent for the front room when any of the back rooms would have served them just as well. All they were doing was stealing from their bosses and the extra front window was an unnecessary expense. Bee called Coffin Ed aside to ask him if he wanted to buy some shirts cheap, while Tola was denying to Sergeant Ryan seeing anything, hearing anything or knowing anything. He and Bee had been in bed sound asleep, as hard as they had worked all day, and they hadn’t even heard the neighbors in the hall or the people on the sidewalk who, as a rule, sounded as though they were passing through their room.

  Sergeant Ryan soon gave up on them. They were too innocent for him. They were the most law-abiding, hardworking, know-nothing colored people he had ever seen. Neither Grave Digger nor Coffin Ed batted an eye.

  The couple in the middle room called themselves Mr and Mrs Socrates X. Hoover. He was a tall, lanky black man with buck teeth and dusty-colored burred hair. His stringy muscles jerked like dying snakes beneath his sweating black skin and his small red eyes glowed with agitation under the scrutiny of the detectives. He sat on the edge of the bed clad only in the dirty jeans he’d slipped on hurriedly to open the door for the law, while his woman lay naked beneath the sheet, which she had drawn up to her mouth. She was a big yellow woman with red hair, straightened by a pressing-iron, sticking out from her head in all directions.

  He said there was no need of them sniffing so mother-raping suspiciously, that smell came from the cubebs he smoked for his asthma. And she had been straightening her hair, she added, as they could oughta tell from the iron on the dresser. When Grave Digger continued to look skeptical, she flew salty and said if they smelt where she’d been making love with her own husband, that was only natural. What kind of minds did they have? Far as she knew, only white folks knew how to make love without its smelling.

  Sergeant Ryan turned bright red.

  Socrates said he made an honest living parking cars at the Yankee Stadium. Last winter? He hadn’t been here last winter. Sergeant Ryan dropped it and asked what she did. She said she kept appointments. What kind of appointments? Do they have to be some special kind? Just appointments, that’s all. Sergeant Ryan tried to catch the eye of one of the colored detectives, but they refused to be caught.

  About what had gone on outside their room that night, or any other night, they knew less than their neighbors at the front. They always kept their shades drawn and their window closed to keep out the noise and the smells and they couldn’t hear anything inside, not even their neighbors. Sergeant Ryan was silent for a moment while they all listened to the sound of a drawer being opened and the exchange of voices in the adjoining room, but he didn’t pursue it. What about when one of them went to the toilet? he asked instead. Poon became so agitated she sat up in bed, exposing two big drooping breasts encircled by deed red marks where her brassière had cut her and tipped by tough brown teats like the stalks of pumpkins cut from the vine. Go to the crapper? What for? They weren’t children, they didn’t pee in bed. Grave Digger glanced at the washbasin with such obvious suggestion her face swelled with indignation and the sheet flew from the rest of her, revealing her big hairy nest. Suddenly the room was flooded with the strong alkaloid scent of continuous sexual intercourse. Sergeant Ryan threw up his hands.

  When things had calmed down he listened to them deny any knowledge of the cellar at all. They might have noticed the door at the side, but neither remembered. If they were directly over the cellar and boiler room, they had never heard any sounds from down there. They weren’t living there in the winter. They didn’t know who had lived there before them. They never saw anybody going or coming from around the side. No, they had never seen any strange white men in the whole neighborhood. Nor strange white women either.

  By the time the sergeant got to the tenants in the last room he was well browned off. These people called themselves Mr and Mrs Booker T. Washington. Booker said he was the manager of a recreation hall on upper Seventh Avenue. What kind of recreation? Recreation, where people play. Play what? Play pool. So you’re a hustler around the pool hall? I’m the manager. What’s the name of it? Acey-Deucey’s? What’s that? Onesy-twosy’s. Oh, you said ace and deuce’s. Nawsuh, I said Acey-Deucey’s. All right, all right, and what’s your wife’s name? Madame Booker, she answered for herself. She was another big-titted yellow woman with straightened red hair. And he was lean, black and red-eyed like his neighbor. The sergeant wondered what it was about these lean, hungry-looking red-eyed black men that these big yellow women liked so well. And what did Madame Booker do for her living? She didn’t have to do nothing but look after her husband but she told fortunes ever now and then just to pass away the time ’cause her husband worked at nights. The sergeant looked at the television set on the deal table and the transistor radio on the end of the dressing-table next to the bed. But he let it go. Who were her customers — clients? People. What kind of people? Just people is all. Men? Women? Men and women. Did she have any white men among her clients? No, she never told white men’s fortunes. Why, were the augurs bad in Harlem? She didn’t know whether the augurs were bad or good, just none had ever asked her.

  Further questioning elicited the facts that they had seen, heard, and knew even less than both their neighbors put together. They didn’t have anything to do with the other people who lived in that house, not that they were hincty, but there were some bad people who lived there. Who? They didn’t know exactly. Well, where, then? On this floor? The second floor? The third floor? They couldn’t say exactly, sommers in the building. Well, how did they know they were bad if they didn’t know them? They could tell by looking at them. Sergeant Ryan reminded them that they had just claimed they never saw anyone. What they meant was going sommers; ’course they saw people in the hall but they didn’t know where they were going or where they had been. And they never saw any white men in the hall going somewhere or coming from somewhere? Never, only once a month the man came around for the rent. Well, what was his name? the sergeant asked quickly, thinking he was getting somewhere. They didn’t know. Did they mean to tell him they paid a man the rent whom they didn’t know? They meant they didn’t know his name but they knew he was the man, all right; he was the same man who had been there ever since they had been there. And how long had they been there? They had been there going on for three years. Then they had been there during the winter? Two winters. Then they knew about the cellar? Knew what about the cellar? That there was one? Their eyes popped. ’Course there was a cellar, how else could the superintendent fire the boiler if there wasn’t no cellar? It was a question, the sergeant admitted. And who was the superintendent? A West Indian named Lucas Covey. Is he colored? Colored? Whoever heard of a white West Indian? The sergeant admitted they had him there. And did this, er, Mr Covey live in the cellar? Live in the cellar! How could he? There wasn’t no place for him to live there, les’ it was ’side the boiler. What about the empty room? Empty room! What empty room? Well, then when was the last time they had been in the cellar? They hadn’t never been in the cellar, they just knew there had to be one to hold the boiler ’cause they had central heating, and it came from somewhere.

  The serge
ant took out his handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his face, but remembered he had used it to open the bloodstained door in the cellar and put it back into his pocket, wiping his forehead with his coat sleeve instead.

  Well, then, where did Mr Covey live if he didn’t live in the cellar? he asked desperately. He lived in his other house on 122nd Street. What was the number? They didn’t know the number, but it was a brick house just like this one only it was twice as wide and it was the second house from the corner of Eighth Avenue. He couldn’t miss it, the name was over the door. It was called Cozy Flats.

  The sergeant figured he’d had enough of that. He saw no reason to take any of them in as yet. The next thing was to find Lucas Covey. But when they got out in the hall the photographer discovered his pocket camera was missing. So they started over with the Washingtons. But they hadn’t seen his camera. Then they went back to the Hoovers.

  “Bless my soul, I wondered where this Kodak came from,” Poon said. “I was reaching for a cigarette and found it lying there on the floor.”

  The red-faced photographer took his camera and put it back into his pocket and opened his mouth to state his mind, but Grave Digger cut him off.

  “That could get you ninety days,” he told Socrates.

  “For what? I ain’t done nothing.”

  “Oh, hell, skip it,” the sergeant said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  They stopped on the street to wait for the fingerprint crew who were just coming up from the cellar, and he asked the colored detectives, “Do you believe any of that horse manure?”

  “Hell, it ain’t a question of believing it. We found them all at home, in bed, asleep for all we know. How do we know they heard, saw or know anything? All we can do is take their word.”

  “I mean that shit about their occupations.”

  “If you’re worried about that you may as well go home,” Coffin Ed said.

  “Well, it’s half-true, like everything else,” Grave Digger said pacifyingly. “We know Booker T. Washington hangs around Acey-Deucey’s poolroom where he earns a little scratch racking balls when he hasn’t snatched a purse that paid. And we know that Socrates Hoover watches parked cars at night on the side streets around Yankee Stadium to keep them from being robbed of anything he can rob himself. And what else can two big yellow whores do but hustle? That’s why those sports make themselves scarce at night. But Tola Ramsey and his wife do just what they say. It’s easy enough to check. But all you got to do is look at all those suits and shirts which don’t fit him.”

  “Anyway, none of them work in white folks’ kitchens,” Coffin Ed said gruffly.

  Faces turned red all over the place.

  “Why would anyone live here who was honest?” Grave Digger said. “Or how could anyone stay honest who lived here? What do you want? This place was built for vice, for whores to hustle in and thieves to hide out in. And somebody got a building permit, because it’s been built after the ghetto got here.” He paused for a moment. They were all silent. “Anything else?” he asked.

  The sergeant let the subject drop. He ordered the fingerprint crew to stick around and they followed his car in their car while Coffin Ed and Grave Digger brought up the rear. The three cars of detectives descended on 122nd Street like the rat exterminators, but not a soul was in sight, not even a rat. Coffin Ed checked with his watch. It was 3:37. He buzzed Lieutenant Anderson at the precinct station.

  “It’s me and Digger, boss. You find any fez-headed men?”

  “Plenty of them. Seventeen to be precise. But none with extra pants. You still with Ryan?”

  “Right behind him.”

  “Find out anything?”

  “Nothing that can’t keep.”

  “All right, stick with him.”

  When he had rung off, Grave Digger said, “What did he think we were going to do, go fishing?”

  Coffin Ed grunted.

  Take two crumbling, neglected, overcrowded brick buildings like the one they had just left, slam them together with a hallway down the middle like a foul-air sandwich, put two cement columns flanking a dirt-darkened glass-panelled door, and put the words, COZY FLATS, on the transom, and you have an incubator of depravity. There one could find all the vices of Harlem in microcosm: sex perversions, lesbians, pederasts, pot smokers, riders of the LSD, street hustlers and their cretinistic pimps sleeping in the same beds where they turned their tricks, daisy chains, sex circuses, and caterers to the society trade: wife-swappers, gang-fuckers, seekers of depravity — name it, they had it.

  But all the detectives found were closed doors, bedroom and toilet odors, the nose pinching smell of marijuana, the grunting and groaning of skin poppers and homosexuals, the muted whine of old blues played low.

  The graffiti on the walls of the ground-floor hall gave the illusion of primitive painting of pygmies affected with elephantiasis of the genitals. A sign over a small green door beneath the staircase read: SUPERINTENDENT.

  Sniffing the smells suggested by the graffiti, the sergeant said cynically, “Sin made easy.”

  “You call this easy?” Grave Digger flared. “You mean hot!”

  Five minutes of hammering brought the superintendent up the stairs to open his door. He gave the appearance of having been asleep. He was clad in an old blue flannel robe with a frayed belt worn over wrinkled cotton pajamas with wide violently clashing red and blue stripes. His short kinky hair was burred from contact with the pillow and his smooth black skin had a tracery of lines as though the witches had been riding him. He held a blued steel .45 Colt automatic in his right hand and it was pointed on the level of their stomachs. He raked them with furious red eyes.

  “What you want?”

  The sergeant hastened with his shield. “We’re the police.”

  “So what! You woke me out of a dead sleep.”

  “All right,” Grave Digger said roughly. “You’ve made your point.”

  Slowly the man returned the automatic to the pocket of his robe, still holding it.

  “You’re Mr Covey, the superintendent?” the sergeant verified.

  “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “You always answer your door with a pistol?”

  “You never know who’s knocking at this time o’ morning.”

  “Back up, buster, and let us in,” Grave Digger said.

  “You’re the law,” the man acknowledged, turning to precede them down the flight of brick stairs.

  Grave Digger’s first impression was he looked too arrogant to be the super of a joint like this, unless he had all the tenants working for him, like a sort of black Fagin. In which case, his being black would account for his arrogance.

  To the average eye he was a thin superior-acting black man with a long smooth narrow face and a cranium that was almost a perfect ellipsoid. His thick-lipped mouth was as wide as his face and when he talked his lips curled back from even white teeth. His eyes had a slight Mongolian slant, giving his face a bitsa look, a bit of African, a bit of Nordic, a bit of Oriental. He was proud and handsome but there was a bit of effeminacy in his carriage. He looked very sure of himself.

  The only thing missing was the sleep in the corners of his eyes.

  Flinging open the door of his bedroom, he said, “Entrez.”

  The bedroom held a three-quarter bed that had been slept in; a rolltop desk with a green blotter, telephone, and desk chair; night-table with ashtray; television set on its separate stand and overstuffed leather armchair facing it, dressing table with black and white dolls flanking the mirror. Beyond the boiler room was a room used for a kitchen-dining-room and a shower room off from it with a toilet.

  “You’re fixed up cozy enough,” Sergeant Ryan said. He had brought a fingerprint man and his photographer with him, and they grinned dutifully.

  “That bother you?” Covey challenged.

  The sergeant dropped all pleasantries, and began asking questions. Covey said he had been to the Apollo Theater and seen a gangster film called Double or Nothing and a stag
e show which had The Supremes and Martha and The Vandellas and television comedian Bill Cosby, along with the house orchestra. Afterwards he had stopped at the bar of Frank’s Restaurant and had a bean and cornbeef sandwich and had walked home down Eighth Avenue.

  “You can check that?” Ryan said to the precinct detectives.

  “Not easily,” Grave Digger admitted. “Everybody goes to the Apollo and Frank’s bar is so crowded at that time of night only celebrities stand out.”

  Covey hadn’t seen anyone on entering the apartment and he lived alone so that once he was down in his hole he didn’t see anyone until he came up the next day. If it wasn’t for the garbage stinking if he didn’t put it out, he could be down here dead for weeks and no one would notice. Didn’t he have other duties besides putting out the garbage? In the winter he fired the boilers. Didn’t he have any relatives? Sure, plenty, but they were all in Jamaica and he hadn’t seen any of them since he had come to New York three years previous. Friends? Money was a man’s only friend. Women? “What a question,” Coffin Ed muttered, looking at the dolls. The sergeant reddened. Covey got on his dignity. There were women everywhere, he said. “Damn right,” Grave Digger said. The sergeant dropped it. Who cleaned up, then? The tenants cleaned in front of their doors and the wind blew the dirt off the street. Well, all right, did he know about the cellar in the other house? Cellar? Basement? What about the basement? About the furnished room? Naturally he knew about the furnished room, he was the superintendent, wasn’t he? Well, then, who did he rent it to? Rent it to? He didn’t rent it to nobody. Who lived in it, then? Didn’t nobody live in it in the summer; the company built it for a helper to sleep in in the winter — someone to fire the boiler. What company was that? The owners, Acme Realty; they owned lots of buildings in Harlem. Was he the superintendent for them all? No, just these two. Did he know the officials of the company? No, just the building manager and the rent collector. Well, where were they located? They had an office on lower Broadway, in the Knickerbocker Building, just south of Canal Street. And what were the names of the men he knew? Well, Mr Shelton was the building manager and Lester Chambers was the rent collector. West Indians too? No, they were white. The sergeant dropped it. Well, to get back to the room in the other basement, could anyone live there without his knowing it? Not hardly, he was over there every morning to put out the garbage. But it was possible? Everything was possible, but it wasn’t likely anybody would be living there with him not knowing; ’cause first they’d have to get in and the outside door had a Yale lock and he had the only two keys. He went across the room and took a large ring of keys from a hook on the wall beside the door and exhibited two brass Yale keys. And if they was to break in, he would see it first thing he got there to put out the garbage. But they could have had a key made? the sergeant persisted. Covey ran a hand over his burrs. What was he trying to get at? The sergeant asked his own question in reply. He had looked into the basement recently? Covey looked around impatiently; his gaze met Coffin Ed’s; he looked away. What for? he countered. The place was only used in the winter; it was kept closed and locked in the summer to keep young punks from taking girls down there to rape them. He was a mighty distrustful man, the sergeant observed. Meeting people at the door with a pistol in his hand, thinking of teen-agers as rapists. The colored detectives joined Covey in a condescending smile. The sergeant noticed it, but passed it by. Did he, Covey, know what kind of people lived in these buildings he served? Naturally, he was the superintendent; all respectable, hard-working, honest, married people, like all Harlem tenants of Acme Realty. The sergeant’s face was a picture of incredulity; he didn’t know whether Covey was making fun of him or not. Coffin Ed and Grave Digger kept their faces absolutely blank. Well, someone had been living in the furnished room of that other basement, the sergeant announced abruptly. Impossible! Covey denied promptly. If anyone had been down there all the tenants on the ground floor would know about it for you could hear through that floor as good as you could hear through those walls. Then somebody was lying, the sergeant said, because not only had someone been living there but a man had been killed there only a few hours ago. Covey’s eyes widened slowly until all the other features looked disarranged in his narrow face.