Blind Man with a Pistol

by Chester Himes

  “For Christsake, Digger! You argue with this stooge,” he shouted furiously, getting into his seat and slamming the door. “All he’s trying to do is hold us.”

  Grave Digger hurried about the car and climbed beneath the wheel. “He’s the people,” he said defensively.

  “Screw the people!” Coffin Ed said, adding: “And justice ain’t the point. It’s order now.”

  Before the car took off, Lomax called with sly malice, “Anyway, they beat the shit out of you.”

  “Don’t let it fool you,” Coffin Ed grated.

  “We’ll come up behind them,” Grave Digger said, referring to the fighting groups.

  The only traffic lane open was the one to the north. He had decided to drive north to 130th Street, which he thought would be open, then east to Park Avenue, and follow the railroad trestle back to 125th Street and approach Seventh Avenue from that direction.

  But as he pulled away from the curb he caught sight in his rearview mirror of the command car being driven by the leader of the Brotherhood group running wild into the remnants of the Black Power group. It had pushed ahead with the engine racing north on the left side of Seventh Avenue, scattering the Black Power marchers, and had jumped the curb and ploughed through the midst of the spectators in front of the cigar store and was headed toward the plate-glass front of the pool hall and the fleeing weedheads. The white woman in the rear seat was clinging on for dear life.

  But he and Coffin Ed had no way of going to their rescue. So he raced north and turned east into 130th Street on crying tires, hoping they’d get back in time. In the middle of the block between Seventh and Lenox Avenues they passed a panel delivery truck going in the same direction. They looked at it from force of habit and read the advertisement on the side: LUNATIC LYNDON … I DELIVER AND INSTALL TELEVISION SETS ANY TIME OF DAY OR NIGHT ANY PLACE Telephone Murray Hill 2.… Coffin Ed turned around to look at the license number, but he couldn’t make it out in the dim street light. All he could see was that it was a Manhattan number.

  “My people,” he said. “Buying a television set in the middle of the night.”

  “Maybe the man’s taking one back,” Grave Digger said.

  “The same thing.”

  “Hell, Lunatic ain’t no fool. People got to work in the daytime to pay for them.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking night’s the time for business in Harlem.”

  “Why not? They black, ain’t they? White people do their dirt in the day. That’s when they’re most invisible.”

  Coffin Ed grunted.

  The looting broke out on 125th Street at just the moment they were turning into Park Avenue beside the railroad trestle. The runaway command car had precipitated such confusion the white cops had struggled from their cars and begun shooting in the air. A number of adventuresome young men took advantage of the distraction and began breaking the store windows in the Block and snatching the first thing they could. Seeing them running with their arms filled with loot, the spectators stampeded in wild-eyed panic to get away from them.

  13

  “That’s it. A mother-raping white man gets himself killed up here trying to get his kicks and here we are, two cops of the inferior race, stuck with trying to find out who killed him,” Grave Digger held forth as he drove to the precinct that night in his private car.

  “Too bad there ain’t a mother-raping law against these freaks.”

  “Now, now, Ed, be tolerant. People call us freaks.”

  The grafted skin on Coffin Ed’s face began to twitch. “Yeah, but not sex freaks.”

  “Hell, Ed, it ain’t our business to worry about social morals,” Grave Digger said placatingly, easing up on his friend. He knew folks called him a black Frankenstein, and he felt guilty because of it. If he hadn’t been trying so hard to play tough the hoodlum would have never had a chance to throw the acid into Coffin Ed’s face. “Leave ’em get dead.”

  The night before they had gone straight home from the Cozy Flats and hadn’t seen each other since. They didn’t know what had happened to Lucas Covey, the building superintendent, whom they had beaten half to death.

  “Anyway, the Acme folks probably got him out by now,” Coffin Ed said in answer to their thoughts.

  “Just as well, he’d done all his talking.”

  “John Babson! Hell, you think that’s a name? I thought Covey was just blabbing.”

  “Maybe. Who knows?”

  It was ten minutes to eight p.m. when they stopped in the detectives’ locker room to change into their old black working coats. They found Lieutenant Anderson sitting at the Captain’s desk, looking extremely worried as usual. Part of this was due to the fact that the Lieutenant was indoors so much his skin remained an unhealthy white, like that of a man who has been sick, and part due to the fact that Anderson’s face was too sensitive for police work. But they were used to it. They knew the Lieutenant didn’t worry as much as he seemed to, and that he was hip.

  “It’s a damn good thing the commissioner don’t like pederasts,” he greeted them.

  Grave Digger looked sheepish. “Did the joint get steamed up?”

  “It boiled over.”

  Coffin Ed was defiant. “Who was beefing?”

  “The Acme Company’s lawyers. They cried murder, brutality, anarchy, and everything else you can think of. They’ve filed charges with the police board of inquiry, and if they don’t act they threaten to file a petition in the common pleas court.”

  “What the old man say?”

  “Said he’d look into it, winking at the D.A.”

  “Woe is us,” Grave Digger said. “Every time we brush a citizen gently with the tip of our knuckles, there’s shysters on the sidelines to cry brutality, like a Greek chorus.”

  Anderson bowed his head to hide his smile. “You shouldn’t play Theseus.”

  Grave Digger nodded in acknowledgement, but Coffin Ed’s thoughts were on other matters.

  “You’d think they’d want the killer caught,” he said. “Being as the man was killed on their property.”

  “Who was he, anyway?” Grave Digger asked. “Did the boys downtown make him?”

  “Yes, he was a Richard Henderson who had an apartment on lower Fifth Avenue, near Washington Square.” Suddenly Anderson had become completely impersonal.

  “Couldn’t he find anything he wanted down there?” Coffin Ed put in.

  “Married,” Anderson continued as though he hadn’t heard. “No children —”

  “No wonder.”

  “A producer of new plays in off-Broadway theaters. For that, he had to have money.”

  “All the more reason they’d want to find his murderer,” Grave Digger said thoughtfully.

  “If by they, you mean the commissioner, the District Attorney and the courts, they do. It’s the slum owners who’re beefing. They don’t want their employees killed in the process, it ain’t worth it to them.”

  “Well, boss, it’s as the French say, you can’t make a ragout without cutting the meat.”

  “Well, that doesn’t mean grinding it into beef hash.”

  “Ah, well, the more it’s ground, the faster it cooks. I suppose our boy was well cooked?”

  “Too well cooked. They took him out the pot. They got him out this morning on a writ of habeas corpus. I think they took him to a private hospital somewhere.”

  Both detectives looked at him solemnly. “You don’t know where?” Grave Digger asked.

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you. Lay off. For your own good. That boy spells trouble.”

  “What of it? Trouble is our business.”

  “Trouble for everyone.”

  “Oh, well, homicide will get him. They need him.”

  “Anyway, you can have a go at the other witnesses.”

  “Don’t throw us no bones, boss. If any of those people picked up last night had known anything, they would have been to hell and gone away from there.”

  “Then you can have the men with
the red fezzes.”

  “Lieutenant, let me tell you something. Most black men in Harlem who wear red fezzes are Black Muslims, and they’re the most bitterly against this shit. Or else they’re playing like they’re Black Muslims, and they’d be risking their lives running down the street with a stolen pair of pants.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, be discreet. Don’t rake any more muck than necessary.”

  Grave Digger’s neck began to swell and the tic went off in Coffin Ed’s face.

  “Listen, Lieutenant,” Grave Digger said thickly. “This mother-raping white man gets himself killed on our beat chasing black sissies and you want us to whitewash the investigation.”

  Anderson’s face got pink. “No, I don’t want you to whitewash the investigation,” he denied. “I just don’t want you raking up manure for the stink.”

  “We got you; white men don’t stink. You can depend on us, boss, we’ll just go to the public gardens and watch the pansies bloom.”

  “Without manure,” Coffin Ed said.

  Nine p.m. found them sitting at the lunch counter in the Theresa building, watching the Harlem citizens pass along the intersection of Seventh Avenue and 125th Street.

  “Two steak sandwiches,” Grave Digger ordered.

  The prissy brownskinned counterman with shiny conked curls gave them an all-inclusive look and batted his eyes. It was only two steps to the grill but he managed to swish on the way. He had a slender graceful neck, smooth brown arms and a wide ass in tight white jeans. He grilled two hamburgers and put them between two toasted buns on paper plates and placed them daintily before his customers. “Kraut or ketchup?” he asked seductively, lowering long black lashes over liquid brown eyes.

  Grave Digger looked from the hamburgers to the counterman’s lowered lashes. “I ordered steak sandwiches,” he said belligerently.

  The counterman fluttered his lashes. “This is steak,” he said. “Ground steak.”

  “Steak in one piece.”

  The counterman regarded him appraisingly through the corners of his eyes.

  “And I mean steak off the steer,” Grave Digger added. “I ain’t talking no doubletalk.”

  The counterman opened his eyes wide and looked straight into Grave Digger’s eyes. “We don’t have steak in one piece.”

  “Don’t ask him,” Coffin Ed cautioned out the corner of his mouth.

  The counterman gave him a wide, white, scintillating smile. “I dig you,” he murmured.

  “Then dig up some ketchup and black coffee,” Coffin Ed grated harshly.

  Grave Digger winked at him as the counterman switched off. Coffin Ed looked disgusted.

  “It wasn’t a bad idea to call this Malcolm X Square,” Grave Digger said aloud, to divert the counterman’s attention.

  “Could have just as well called it Khrushchev Place or Castro Corner,” Coffin Ed replied, falling in with the maneuver.

  “No, Malcolm X was a black man and a martyr to the black cause.”

  “You know one thing, Digger. He was safe as long as he kept hating the white folks — they wouldn’t have hurt him, probably made him rich; it wasn’t until he began including them in the human race they killed him. That ought to tell you something.”

  “It does. It tells me white people don’t want to be included in a human race with black people. Before they’ll be included they’ll give ’em the whole human race. But it don’t tell me who you mean by they.”

  “They, man, they. They’ll kill you and me too if we ever stop being colored cops.”

  “I wouldn’t blame them,” Grave Digger said. “It’d bring about a hell of a lot of confusion.” Noticing the counterman listening with rapt attention, he asked him, “What you think, Sugar Baby?”

  The counterman lifted his upper lip and looked at him scornfully. “My name ain’t Sugar Baby, I got a name.”

  “Well, what is it then?”

  The counterman grinned slyly and said teasingly, “Don’t you wish you knew?”

  “Sweet as you are, what you need with a name?” Grave Digger needled.

  “Don’t hand me that shit. I know who you mother-rapers are. I’m here tending strictly to my own business.”

  “Good for you, Honey Baby; it’d be a damn sight better if everybody did that. But our business is to meddle into other people’s business. That’s why we’re meddling into yours.”

  “Go ahead, I won’t scream; see anything green, lick it up clean.”

  Grave Digger was stumped for the moment, but Coffin Ed took over for him.

  “What Black Muslims eat here?”

  The counterman was stumped. “Black Muslims?”

  “Yeah, what Black Muslims you have as customers?”

  “Those squares? They only eat their own food ’cause they claim all other food is dirty.”

  “You sure it ain’t because they object to something else?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “It seems strange they wouldn’t eat here when your food’s so cheap and clean too.”

  The counterman didn’t get it. He had a sneaking notion that Coffin Ed meant something else and he frowned angrily because he didn’t understand and turned away. He went down the counter to serve a customer on the 125th Street side. There were only three of them at the counter, but he stayed away from the two detectives. He looked into the faces of the passing people; he stared at the passing traffic. Then suddenly he switched back and placed himself directly in their faces and put his hands on his hips and looked straight into Coffin Ed’s eyes.

  “It ain’t that, it’s their religion,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Black Muslims.”

  “That’s right. You must see a lot of jokers who look like Black Muslims.”

  “Sure.” He raised his gaze and nodded toward the bookstore diagonally across the street. Several black men wearing red fezzes were gathering on the sidewalk. “There’re some now.”

  Coffin Ed glanced around and looked back. “We don’t want those, we’re looking for fakes.”

  “Fake what?”

  “Fake Muslims.”

  The counterman broke into sudden laughter. His long-lashed eyes regarded them indulgently. “You policemen, you don’t know what you want. Coffee? Pie? Ice cream?”

  “We got coffee.”

  The counterman pouted. “You want some more?”

  Their attention was diverted by two women in a foreign sports car that turned the corner from 125th Street and passed at a crawl south on Seventh Avenue. Both were large amazonian types with strong bold features and mannish-cut hair. Their brownskinned faces were handsome. The one driving wore a man’s shirt of green crêpe de chine and a yellow silk knitted tie; while the other one beside her wore a sun-back dress without shoulder straps and the front so low she looked stark naked sitting there. They stared in the direction of the lunch counter.

  “Friends of yours?” Grave Digger asked.

  “Those queers?”

  “Didn’t look queer to me. One was a man; a good-looking man at that.”

  “Man my ass, they were lesbos.”

  “How do you know? You been out with them?”

  “Don’t be insulting. I don’t associate with those kind of people.”

  “No Beaux Arts ball? No garden parties?”

  The counterman curled his upper lip. He was good at it. “You’re so crude,” he said.

  “Where’s everybody?” Coffin Ed asked to get Grave Digger out of trouble.

  Willing to call quits, the counterman replied soberly, “It’s always slack at this time.”

  But Coffin Ed wouldn’t let him off. “That ain’t what I mean.”

  The counterman stared at him hostilely. “What do you mean, then?”

  “You know, everybody.”

  Then suddenly the counterman flew coy. “I’m here,” he cooed. “Ain’t that enough?”

  “Enough for what?”

  “Don’t play square.”

  “You’
re forgetting we’re policemen.”

  “I like policemen.”

  “Ain’t you scared?”

  “Why, I ain’t been caught.”

  “Policemen are brutes.”

  The counterman raised his eyebrows superciliously. “I beg your pardon?”

  “BRUTES!”

  “You’re just fanning his interest,” Grave Digger said.

  He looked at Grave Digger with a smirk. “You know everything, tell me what I’m thinking?”

  “When do you get off work?” Grave Digger countered.

  His eyelashes fluttered uncontrollably as he went all unnecessary. “Twelve o’clock.”

  “Then you weren’t here last night after twelve?”

  His face fell. “You sadistic son of a bitch!”

  “So you couldn’t have seen Jesus Baby when he stopped by?”

  “Come again?”

  “Jesus Baby?”

  Neither detective caught a flicker of recognition in his demeanor. “Jesus Baby? That someone?”

  “A friend of yours.”

  “Not mine, I don’t know no one named Jesus Baby.”

  “Sure you do. You’re just scared to admit it.”

  “Oh, Him! I love Him. And he loves me too.”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  “I’m religious.”

  “All right, all right, now cut out the bullshit. You know exactly who we mean. The colored one. The one who lives right here in Harlem.”

  They noticed a subtle change in his manner but they couldn’t tell what it meant. “Oh, him?”

  They waited suspiciously. It was coming too easy.

  “You mean the one who lives on 116th Street? You don’t go for him, do you?”

  “Where on 116th Street?”

  “Where?” The counterman tried to look hip. “You know where. That little door beside the movie; between it and the lunch counter. You kidding me?”

  “What floor?”

  “You just go straight on through. You’ll find him.”

  They had a strong suspicion they were being taken, but there wasn’t any choice.

  “What’s his straight name?”

  “Straight name? Jesus Baby, that’s all.”

  “If we don’t find him, we’ll be back,” Coffin Ed threatened.