Blind Man with a Pistol

by Chester Himes

  “Some call him lack of respect for law and order, some lack of opportunity, some the teachings of the Bible, some the sins of their fathers,” Grave Digger expounded. “Some call him ignorance, some poverty, some rebellion. Me and Ed look at him with compassion. We’re victims.”

  “Victims of what?” Anderson asked foolishly.

  “Victims of your skin,” Coffin Ed shouted brutally, his own patchwork of grafted black skin twitching with passion.

  Anderson’s skin turned blood red.

  “That’s the mother-raper at the bottom of it,” Grave Digger said. “That’s what’s making these people run rampage on the streets.”

  “All right, all right, let’s skip the personalities —”

  “Ain’t nothing personal. We don’t mean you, personally, boss,” Grave Digger said. “It’s your color —”

  “My color then —”

  “You want us to find the instigator,” Grave Digger contended.

  “All right, all right,” Anderson said resigned, throwing up his hands. “Admitted you people haven’t had a fair roll —”

  “Roll? This ain’t craps. This is life!” Coffin Ed exclaimed. “And it ain’t a question of fair or unfair.”

  “It’s a question of law, if the law don’t feed us, who is?”

  Grave Digger added.

  “You got to enforce law to get order,” Coffin Ed said.

  “What’s this, an act?” Lieutenant Anderson asked. “You said you were the last of the end men, you don’t have to prove it. I believe you.”

  “It ain’t no act,” Coffin Ed said, “Not ours anyway. We’re giving you the facts.”

  “And one fact is the first thing colored people do in all these disturbances of the peace is loot,” Grave Digger said. “There must be some reason for the looting other than local instigation, because it happens everywhere, and every time.”

  “And who’re you going to charge for inciting them to loot?” Coffin Ed demanded.

  19

  The Harlem detectives knew him well. They looked at him. He looked back through his old glazed eyes. No one spoke. They kept their record straight.

  Jonas “Fats” Little came to Harlem from Columbus, Georgia, thirty years before at the age of twenty-nine. It had been an open city then. White people had come in droves to see the happy, exotic blacks, to hear the happy jazz from New Orleans, to see the happy dances from the cotton fields. Negroes had aimed to please. They worked in the white folks’ kitchens, grinning happily all the time; they changed the white folks’ luck and accepted the resulting half-white offspring without protest or embarrassment. They made the best of their ratridden slums, their gingham dresses and blue denim overalls, their stewed chitterlings and pork bones, their ignorance and Jesus. From the very first, Fats was at home. He understood that life; it was all he’d ever known. He understood the people; they were his soul brothers and sisters.

  His first job was shining shoes in a barbershop in the Times Square subway station. But the folks uptown in the rooming house where he lived on 117th Street loved the down-home sausage he made for Aunty Cindy Loo, his landprop, from pork scraps he got from the pork concessionaires in the West Forties around the NYC freight line, Saturday afternoons when they shut for the weekends. Other landprops and soul folks running home-cooking joints heard about his sausages, which were dark gray in color from pepper and spices, and melted in the mouth like shortening bread when fried. His landprop put up the capital and provided her kitchen and meat grinder, and they went into business making the original “Cindy Loo Country Sausage”, which they sold in brown paper sacks to Harlem restaurants and pork stores and professional sponsors of house rent parties. Soon he was famous and sporting a La Salle limousine with a crested hog’s head painted on each of the front doors, a yellow diamond set in a heavy gold band. He was known throughout Harlem as the “Sausage King”. That was long before the days of angry blacks and civil rights and black power. A black man with a white woman and a big car was powerful enough. But Fats didn’t have any white women — he liked boys.

  It was only natural that he became a policy banker. When Dutch Schultz was rubbed out, every sport in Harlem who had two white quarters to rub together opened a policy house. The difference in Fats’ was he succeeded, mainly because he didn’t stop making sausage. Instead he expanded, taking over the premises of a coal and wood shed on upper Park Avenue, under the NYC railroad trestle, for his factory. And when Cindy Loo died, it was all his own. And he lasted longer than most of the other brothers because he came to terms immediately with the Syndicate, and handed over forty per cent of his gross take to the white man who let him live, without argument. Fats had the advantage over other ambitious brothers, because he always knew who he was. But the Syndicate took all of the hard out of the dick, and soon Fats was earning more from his sausage than his numbers. But the Syndicate didn’t want to lose a good man like Fats, who didn’t make trouble and knew his place, so they made him their connection in Harlem for horse. That was when he had married that tall tan lesbian chick then working in the chorus line at Small’s Paradise Inn, who was still his wife. What with his other affairs, keeping his boys apart and out of the way of his lesbian wife, supervising the manufacture and sales of his sausages, the cutting and distributing of heroin for all the Harlem pushers was too risky; and he got out just one jump ahead of the feds by dumping the shipment for that month into the meat grinder with his sausage moments before they broke in the door. Fats knew his heart wouldn’t stand too many capers like that so he looked around for something less hectic and had got in on the LSD trade at the start. Now the extent of his carousing was to take a trip with his favorite boy.

  He comforted himself like a respectable and dignified citizen. But he was never caught in a police station without his lawyer. His lawyer, James Callender, was white, brisk and efficient.

  Attorney Callender handed the writ of habeas corpus to the Lieutenant and Fats said, “Come on, Katy,” and took the tall mini-skirted, naked-looking, hot-skinned, cold sex-pot by the elbow and marched her toward the door. They looked like Beauty and the Beast.

  The detectives, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, testified that they’d brought the deceased downtown, hoping he might be helpful in tracing a deviate called Jesus Baby. But they had found no trace of Jesus Baby, nor could they think of any reason for John Babson to be killed, Grave Digger, who was the spokesman for the two, confessed. They were unaware that the man and his murderer were acquainted; he had denied knowing her and she had given no sign of knowing him except looking. They hadn’t noticed her leave The Five Spot for their attention had been diverted by the woman who called herself Mrs Catherine Little doing a striptease. It was obvious she did it to cover her friend’s exit, but how could you prove it? Or whether she knew her friend was going to attack the victim, or even guessed it? All they knew for sure was that John Babson was dead; cut to death by the woman, Patricia Bowles, who had confessed the crime. But whether it was self-defense or deliberate homicide was anyone’s guess until the woman was pronounced sufficiently out of danger to be questioned by the police.

  They were instructed to appear next morning at the magistrate’s court to give their testimony, and sent back to their home precinct in Harlem.

  Grave Digger and Coffin Ed went back to their home precinct. Lieutenant Anderson was sitting in the Captain’s office, scanning the morning tabloids. They carried a flash of the latest killing as well as a trailer on the Henderson homicide. An editorial titled THE DANGEROUS NIGHT charged the Harlem police with dragging their feet in searching for the murderer of the white man.

  “I have to read the papers to find out what you’re doing,” the Lieutenant greeted.

  “All we’re doing is losing leads,” Grave Digger confessed. “We’re as bad off as two Harlem prostitutes barefooted and knocked up. First there’s Lucas Covey, who we think rented the room where Henderson was killed, sprung on a writ and now inaccessible. There’s John Babson, who had the same nam
e as the man Covey said he rented the room to, dead now himself; cut to death by a knife-toting lesbian who’d been runnnng around with the wife of Fats Little, a notorious Harlem racket man and sex deviate himself. None of whom we’re allowed to say as much as good morning to. And the papers crying about ‘dragging feet’. It’s a drag all right.”

  “That’s why we have detectives,” Anderson said. “If all people came forward and confessed their crimes all we’d need is jailers.”

  “That’s right, boss, that’s why detectives have lieutenants, to tell them what to do.”

  “Haven’t you got stool pigeons?”

  “This is another world.”

  “Every world’s another world. You men have been too long in Harlem is all. Crime is simple here. All of it is violent. If you were on a midtown beat you’d have a dozen worlds of crime.”

  “Maybe. But that’s neither here nor there. Who killed Charlie is our problem. Or Charlotte? And we need to see our witness. What ones that’re living.”

  “I’m beginning to suspect you fellows hate white people,” Anderson said surprisingly.

  They froze as though listening for a sound so vague it might never be heard again but which warned of such great danger it was imperative they hear it. Anderson had their full attention now.

  “It’s the fashion,” he added sadly.

  “Don’t bet on it,” Grave Digger warned.

  Anderson shook his head.

  “Then why can’t we have Covey?” Grave Digger persisted. “He’s got to be shown the body, anyway, whether he likes it or not.”

  “You had Covey, remember. That’s what the trouble is.”

  “That! Hell, he can still see. He should have been shown the body of Henderson.”

  “He was shown the pictures of the body of Henderson taken by the homicide photographer, and he said he didn’t recognize him.”

  “Then have homicide send us some pictures of Babson and we’ll take them and have him look at them, wherever he is.”

  “No, it’s not your job. Let homicide do it.”

  “You know we can find Covey if we want—if he’s in Harlem.”

  “I’ve told you to lay off Covey.”

  “All right, we’ll work on Fats Little instead. The woman who killed Babson was with his wife at The Five Spot.”

  “Lay off Little and his wife. There’s nothing to show she was involved in the knife fight or was even aware of it, from what you told me. And Little stands very high on the political front, higher than anyone knows.”

  “We know.”

  “Then you know he’s one of the congressman’s biggest campaign contributors.”

  “All right, give us two weeks’ vacation and we’ll go to Bimini and get in a little fishing.”

  “In the middle of these killings? I think that’s a bad joke.”

  “Hell, boss, we can’t work up any sweat over these killings. We’re hogtied at every turn.”

  “Do the best you can.”

  “You sound like a statesman, boss.”

  “Just take your own advice, and don’t make waves.”

  “You can say it, boss, ain’t nobody here but us chickens. You mean nobody really wants Henderson’s killer brought to trial, it might uncover an interracial homosexual scandal that nobody wishes known.”

  Pink came into Anderson’s face. “Let the chips fall where they may,” he said.

  Grave Digger’s face went scornful and Coffin Ed looked away in embarrassment. Their poor boss. What he had to endure from his race.

  “We got you, boss,” Grave Digger said.

  They called it a day.

  The next morning they went to the magistrate’s court and heard Patricia Bowles bound over to the Grand Jury and put in five thousand dollars’ bond in her absence. They didn’t report for duty at the precinct station that evening until nine o’clock and Lieutenant Anderson greeted them.

  “While you were sleeping, the case was closed. Your troubles are over.”

  “How so?”

  “Lucas Covey came in with his lawyer about ten this morning and said he’d read in the paper that a man named John Babson had been killed and he wanted to look at the body and see if it was the same John Babson he had rented the basement room to where Henderson had been killed. The Captain had them taken down to the morgue and he identified the body as the same John Babson, known as Jesus Baby, who was known to take white men to his room. So the Captain and homicide and everyone concerned are satisfied that he was the one killed Henderson.”

  “Satisfied? You mean jubilant!”

  “So the case is closed.”

  “If you’re satisfied, who’re we to complain? The woman killed him in self-defense, I suppose?”

  “Not as we know of. But she has been released in five thousand dollars’ bail put up by Fats Little, and moved out of the prison ward at Bellevue into a private room at forty-eight dollars per day.”

  “Ain’t that something?”

  “The only fly in the pudding is a man named Dennis Holman who came in here about seven o’clock this evening and said he was John Babson’s landlord on Hamilton Terrace and John Babson couldn’t possibly have killed anyone night before last because John Babson was at home all night and he could vouch for practically every minute.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Neither the Captain nor homicide nor any of the others concerned like that very much.”

  Grave Digger chuckled. “Just wished he’d go away and disappear.”

  “Something like that. But he’s all het up. Says John Babson was like a brother. Says he’s had a room in his house for three years and that he’s supported his wife and child.”

  “Let’s get those he’s straightened out. Who he with the wife and child, and who he supporting them?”

  “Well, the wife and child were John Babson’s —”

  “He was a wife, himself.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What maybe?”

  “And it was Dennis Holman who was supporting them.”

  “With that kind of investment, it don’t seem natural he’d let John hustle white men, not even for the money.”

  “The Captain and homicide don’t agree. You want to talk to him?”

  “Why not?”

  They went down and took him out of his cell and carried him to the pigeon’s nest, a soundproof, windowless room with a floor-bolted seat beneath a battery of lights where suspects were questioned. Dennis had just been down there in the hands of two of the Captain’s men and he wasn’t happy to be taken back. He was a big spongy man in a sweat-stained white shirt rolled up at the sleeves and black pants hanging low from a paunch; not fat exactly but without muscles, like a slug. He had a round boyish face, smooth black skin with a red underglow, and large popping maroon-colored eyes; he always looked surprised. He wasn’t an ugly man, just strange-looking as though he belonged to a race of jelly men. He didn’t have a white lawyer to front for him and he had already been pushed around. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed pushed him around some more. They turned up the lights so high he seemed to turn into smoke.

  “You don’t have to do that,” he said. “I want to talk.”

  He was chauffeur for a very wealthy white man who spent most of his time abroad, so he had little to do. Once a day, generally ground five o’clock after John had gone to work, he checked into his employer’s Fifth Avenue apartment to see it hadn’t been burgled. But most of the time he was at home, he was a home man. Home was a four-room apartment on Hamilton Terrace and 142nd Street. John Babson rented a room and ate with him when he wasn’t at work. He did the cooking and cleaning himself, made the bed — beds — emptied the garbage and such. John didn’t like housework, he got enough of it at the lunch counter.

  “Too cute?”

  “No, he wasn’t like that, he wasn’t mean; he was a sweet boy. He was just lazy out of bed is all.”

  “But you got along?”

  “Oh, we got along fine, we were good for one another;
we never had an argument.”

  “He was married, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, he had a wife and child—little girl. But he shouldn’t have never married that woman —”

  “Any woman.”

  “Her in particular. She’s a slut, just a chickenshit whore. She’ll hop in the bed with anybody with a thing.”

  “Is it his child?”

  “I suppose so, she says it is anyway. He could make a child, if that’s what you mean. He was a man.”

  “Was he?”

  “In that way anyway.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Who?”

  “His child.”

  “Oh, about three and a half.”

  “How long had he been living with you?”

  “About four years.”

  “Then he’d already left her when the child was born?”

  “Yes, he’d come to live with me.”

  “Then you took him away from her?”

  “I didn’t take him from her, he came of his own free will.”

  “But she knew about you?”

  “She knew about us from the first. She didn’t mind. She’d have taken him back if he’d gone back to her, or she’d have shared him with me if he’d stood for it.”

  “She wasn’t very particular.”

  “Women!” he sneered. “They’ll do anything.”

  “Let’s get back to the day Henderson was killed.”

  “Henderson?”

  “The white man.”

  “I read about him.”

  “To hell with that.”

  “Well, John left for work at four o’clock, as usual. He worked from four to twelve —”

  “He was late then.”

  “It didn’t matter. Four o’clock’s a slack time.”

  “How’d he go?”

  “He always walked, it wasn’t far.”

  “And you stayed at home?”

  “No, I went downtown and checked my boss’s apartment and got something for supper — John wouldn’t eat that crap at the lunch counter if he could help it —”

  “Tender bowels, eh?” Coffin Ed said gratingly.