Blind Man with a Pistol

by Chester Himes

  Dennis shrugged. “Whatever you like,” he said passively. “I always tried to have supper ready when he came home after midnight. I’d fixed some blue-claw crabs a friend had given me — a chauffeur out on Long Island—and a West Indian dish made of boiled corn meal and okra that I’d taught John to like.”

  The detectives became alert.

  “You West Indian?” Grave Digger was quick to ask.

  “Yes, I was born in the hills behind Kingston.”

  “You know many West Indians here?”

  “Noooo, I don’t have any reason to see any.”

  “Was John?”

  “John! Oh, no, he was from Alabama.”

  “You know voodoo?”

  “I’m from Jamaica? Voodoo is serious.”

  “I believe you,” Grave Digger said.

  “Tell us why she killed him,” Coffin Ed said.

  “I’ve thought of nothing else,” Dennis confessed. “An’ God be my secret judge, I just can’t figure it out. He was the gentlest of persons. He was a baby. He never had a vicious thought. He liked to make people happy —”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “— he wouldn’t have attacked anyone, much less a woman or someone dressed like one.”

  “I thought he hated women.”

  “He liked women — some women. He just liked me better.”

  “But they didn’t like him, at least this one didn’t.”

  “The only way I can figure it, it must have been a mistake,” he said. “Either she mistook him for somebody else or she mistook something he was doing for something else.”

  “He wasn’t doing nothing but walking down the street.”

  “Christ in heaven, why?” he exclaimed. “I’ve racked my brains.”

  “They fought about something.”

  “He wouldn’t have stood up and fought her, he’d have run away if he could have.”

  “Maybe he couldn’t.”

  “Yes, after I saw his body I understood. She must have run up behind him without him seeing her and cut him so deep it had crippled him.”

  Suddenly he clutched his face in his hands and his spongy boneless body heaved convulsively. “She’s a monster!” he cried, tears streaming from beneath his hands. “An inhuman monster! She’s worse than a blind rattlesnake! She’s vile, that woman! Why don’t you make her talk? Beat her up! Stomp on her!”

  For the first time in memory, the detectives were embarrassed by the anguish of a witness in the pigeon’s nest. Coffin Ed backed away as though from a distasteful worm. Automatically Grave Digger dimmed the battery of lights. But his neck had begun to swell from impotent rage.

  “We can’t get to her because Fats Little has got her covered.”

  “Fats Little?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What’s his angle?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Fuck Fats,” Coffin Ed said harshly. “Let’s get back to you. How’d you learn he’d been killed? Someone phone you?”

  “I read about it in the morning News,” Dennis admitted. “About five o’clock this morning. You see, when John didn’t come home I went by the lunch counter and found out he’d been taken by you people — everyone knows you people, of course. I figured you people had taken him to the station here, so I came here and inquired at the desk but no one had seen you people. So then I went back to the lunch counter but no one had seen you people there either — since you people had left with him. I couldn’t imagine what you people wanted with him, but I figured he was safe.”

  “What did you think we wanted with him?”

  “I figured you people was just looking around, looking into things —”

  “What things?”

  “I couldn’t imagine.”

  “Then what’d you do?”

  “I checked the Apollo bar and the record shop and places in the neighborhood.”

  “Sissy hangouts?”

  “Well, if you want to call them that. Anyway, no one had seen you people, so I went home to wait. It wasn’t till almost daybreak that it occurred to me that John might be hurt in an automobile accident or something. I was on my way back here —”

  “You got a telephone, haven’t you?”

  “It’s out of order.”

  “Then what?”

  “I bought a morning News at the Eighth Avenue subway stop and it was in the late news flashes that someone named John Babson had been killed. After that I don’t remember exactly what I did. I must have panicked. The next thing I remember was I was banging on the apartment door on St Nicholas Place where John’s wife has a room, and his evil landlady calling through the door that she wasn’t home. I don’t know why I went there. I must of thought of having her go down and identify the body—they were still legally married.”

  “Were you surprised to find her out at that hour?”

  “No, it wasn’t nothing unusual about her being out all night; it’d have been unusual for her to have been home. It was hard to trick in the room with the little girl there.”

  “Why didn’t you go down and identify the body yourself?”

  “I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing him dead. I knew she wouldn’t care, ’sides which we were giving her money.”

  “You knew the body had to be identified.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way. I just wanted to be sure.”

  Then at noon he’d bought another newspaper and standing on the corner of 145th Street and Eighth Avenue — he couldn’t remember how he’d got there — he had read where John’s body had been identified by some Harlem building superintendent called Lucas Covey. This Covey man had claimed that John was the man called Jesus Baby who he had rented a room to — the room where the white man was killed two nights ago — three nights —

  “And you recognized the name?”

  “What name?”

  “Covey.”

  “I don’t know anyone called Lucas Covey and I’ve never heard the name before in my life.”

  “Did you call John ‘Jesus Baby’?”

  “Never in my life and I’ve never heard him called that by anyone. I’ve never even heard the name Jesus Baby. Jesus Baby and Lucas Covey and the rented room and all that, him being killed by someone named Pat Bowles — I’d never heard of her either, and I’d never heard John speak of her, not to me anyway, and I don’t believe he even knew her — I knew then it was a case of mistaken identity. Just a plain mistake that got him killed. She mistook him for somebody else. And then Lucas Covey saying he rented him the room where the white man was killed — either another mistake on Covey’s part or he was just plain lying. I was standing there on the sidewalk in the blazing sun and I blacked out. Life is so insecure one can get killed any moment through a mistake. And all the time when whatever it was was going on, he was home in bed,”

  “You’ll testify to that under oath?”

  “Testify under oath? I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles nine feet high. There was no question about it, he couldn’t have killed anyone that night — unless it was me. I can account for every minute of his time. His body was touching my body every minute of that night.”

  “In bed?”

  “Yes, all right, in bed, we were in bed together.”

  “You were lovers?”

  “Yes, yes, yes, if you just got to make me say it. We were lovers, lovers — I’ve said it. We were man and wife, we were whatever you want to call us.”

  “Did his wife know all this?”

  “Irene? She knew everything. She could have cleared his name of all those charges, murdering a white man and calling himself Jesus Baby. She came by the house that night and found us in bed. And she sat on the edge of the bed and said she wanted to see us make love.”

  “Did you?”

  “No, we’re not — weren’t — exhibitionists. I told her if she wanted to watch someone make love, she could fix up a mirror so she could watch herself.”

  “Did you find her?”

  “Find her
?”

  “Today.”

  “Oh, no. She hadn’t come home last time I was by there; her landlady is taking care of her little girl. So I had to go down and look at John’s body by myself. That’s when I knew for sure the killing had been a case of mistaken identity — when I saw the way he’d been cut. He’d been hamstrung from the back so he couldn’t have run and that was the end. The only one who can prove this is the — the person who cut him —”

  “We can’t get to her.”

  “That’s what you told me. You can’t get to see her and I had a lot of trouble getting into the morgue to see his body when I’m — was — his only friend. That’s the way it is when you’re poor. The police didn’t believe nothing I said — they brought me back here and I been held in solitary ever since. But I can prove every word I said.”

  “How?”

  “Well, anyway along with his wife. If she’ll talk. They’ll have to believe her — legally she’s his wife. And then legally she’ll have to claim his body, although I’ll pay for the funeral and everything myself.”

  “What about your own wife — if you’ve got a wife? How does she feel about your love life?”

  “My wife? I put her down before I came to the World. She ain’t no help. It’s John’s wife you need”

  “All right, we’ll look up John’s wife,” Grave Digger said, writing down the address of Irene Babson on St Nicholas Place. “And we’ll have you confront Lucas Covey too.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “No, we’ll leave you here and bring him to you.”

  “I want to go with you.”

  “No, you’re safer here. We don’t want to lose you too, through a mistake.”

  Interlude

  The word “LOVE” was scrawled on the door in dark paint.

  The room smelled of cordite.

  The body lay face down on the carpeted floor, at right angles with the bed from which it had fallen.

  “Too late,” Grave Digger said.

  “From some gun with love,” Coffin Ed echoed.

  It was the last thing they had expected. They were shocked.

  Lucas Covey had left the world. But not of his own volition.

  Someone had pressed the muzzle of a small-caliber revolver against the flesh of his left temple and pulled the trigger. It had to have been a revolver. An automatic pistol would not have fired pressed against the flesh. The body had pitched forward to the floor. The killer had bent over and put a second bullet into the base of his skull, but from a greater distance, merely singeing the hair.

  The TV set was playing. A mellifluous voice spoke of tights that never bagged. Coffin Ed stepped over and turned it off. Grave Digger opened the drawer of the night table and saw the AS Colt automatic.

  “Never had a chance to get at it. ”

  “He didn’t believe it,” Coffin Ed said. “Someone he knew and trusted stuck a pistol against his temple, looked into his eyes and blew out his brains.”

  Grave Digger nodded. “It figures. He thought they were joking.”

  “That could be said of half the victims in the world.”

  Interlude

  And then the little orphan boy asked the question in all their minds, “But why? why? why?”

  Solemnly he replied: “It was the God in me.”

  20

  Other than the caper with the big white sex freak involving a gang called “The Real Cool Moslems” and some teen-age colored girls —including his own daughter, Sugartit—Coffin Ed had had very few brushes with juvenile delinquency. The few young hoodlums with whom they had butted heads from time to time hadn’t been representative of anyone — but young hoodlums of any race. But this new generation of colored youth with its spaceage behavior was the quantity X to them.

  What made them riot and taunt the white police on one hand, and compose poetry and dreams complex enough to throw a Harvard intellectual on the other? All of it couldn’t be blamed on broken homes, lack of opportunities, inequalities, poverty, discrimination — or genius either. Most were from the slums that didn’t breed genius and dreams, but then some were from good middle-class families that didn’t suffer so severely from all the inequalities. And the good and the bad and the smart and the squares alike were a part of some kind of racial ferment: all of them members of the opposition. And there wasn’t any damn need of talking about find the one man responsible: there wasn’t any one man responsible.

  He admitted his concern to Grave Digger as they rode to work.

  “What’s come over these young people, Digger, while we been chasing pappy thugs?”

  “Hell, Ed, you got to realize times have changed since we were sprites. These youngsters were born just after we’d got through fighting a war to wipe out racism and make the world safe for the four freedoms. And you and me were born just after our pappies had got through fighting a war to make the world safe for democracy. But the difference is that by the time we’d fought in a jim-crow army to whip the Nazis and had come home to our native racism, we didn’t believe any of that shit. We knew better. We had grown up in the Depression and fought under hypocrites against hypocrites and we’d learned by then that whitey is a liar. Maybe our parents were just like our children and believed their lies but we had learned the only difference between the homegrown racist and the foreign racist was who had the nigger. Our side won so our white rulers were able to keep their niggers so they could yap to their heart’s content about how they were going to give us equality as soon as we were ready.”

  “Digger, let them tell it it’s harder to grant us equality than it was to free the slaves.”

  “Maybe they’re right, Ed, maybe they ain’t lying this time.”

  “They lying all right, and that’s for sure.”

  “Maybe. But what saves colored folks our age is we ain’t never believed it. But this new generation believes it. And that’s how we get riots.”

  Lieutenant Anderson could tell by the first look at them when they came to work that they weren’t in a very cooperative state of mind, so he sent them over to the bookstore to check out the Black Muslims.

  “Why the Black Muslims?” Grave Digger wanted to know.

  “If somebody was to shit on the street you white folks would send for the Black Muslims,” Coffin Ed grated.

  “Jesus Christ!” Anderson complained. “Once upon a time you guys were cops — and maybe friends: now you’re black racists.”

  “It’s this assignment. You hadn’t ought to have put us on this assignment. You ought to know more than anyone else we’re not subtle cops. We’re tough and heavy-handed. If we find out there’s some joker agitating these young people to riot, and we find out who it is, and if we find him, we’re gonna beat him to death —”

  “We can’t have that!”

  “And you can’t have that.”

  “Just see what you can learn,” Anderson ordered.

  It was a Black-Art bookstore on Seventh Avenue dedicated to the writing of black people of all times and from all places. It was in the same category of black witchcraft, black jazz and Black Nationalism. It was run by a well-known black couple with some black people helping out and aside from selling books by black people to black people it served as a kind of headquarters for all the black nationalist movements in Harlem.

  There were books everywhere. The main store, entered from Seventh Avenue, had books lining both walls, books back to back in chest-high stalls down the center of the floor. The only place there weren’t any books was the ceiling.

  “If I had read all these books I wouldn’t be a cop,” Coffin Ed said.

  “Just as well, just as well,” Grave Digger said enigmatically.

  Mr Grace, the short black proprietor, greeted them. “What brings the arm of the law to this peaceful place?”

  “Not you, Mr Grace — you’re the cleanest man in Harlem as far as the law is concerned,” Grave Digger said.

  “Must have friends on high,” Coffin Ed muttered.

 
Mr Grace heard him. “That I have,” he conceded, whether by way of threat or confirmation they couldn’t tell. “That I have.”

  “We thought you could help us talk to Michael X, the minister of the Harlem Mosque,” Grave Digger explained.

  “Why don’t you go to the Mosque?” Mr Grace asked.

  “You know what they think about cops,” Grave Digger said. “We’re not trying to stir up trouble. We’re trying to simmer it down.”

  “I don’t know if I can help you,” Mr Grace said. “The last time I saw Michael X was about a week ago, and he said he was dropping out of sight for a time: the CIA were sniffing around. But he might see you. Just what do you want with him?”

  “We just want to ask him if he knows anything about someone stirring up these chickenshit riots. The boss thinks there’s some one person behind it, and he thinks Michael X might know something about it.”

  “I doubt if Michael X knows anything about that,” Mr Grace said. “You know they blame him for everything bad that happens in Harlem.”

  “That’s what I told the boss,” Coffin Ed said.

  Mr Grace looked doubtful. “I know you men don’t agree with that. At least I don’t think so. You’ve been on the Harlem scene too long to attribute all the anti-white feelings here to the Black Muslims. But I don’t know where he is.”

  They knew very well that Mr Grace kept in contact with Michael X, wherever he was, and that he acted as Michael X’s seeing eye. But they knew there wasn’t any way to push him. They could go down and burst into the Mosque with force, but they couldn’t find Michael X and the only reason they wouldn’t lose their jobs was because police officialdom hated the Black Muslims so much. It would be too much like taking advantage of their “in” with whitey. So all they could do was appeal to Mr Grace.

  “We’ll talk to him right here if he’ll come here,” Grave Digger said. “And if you don’t trust us we’ll give you our pistols to hold.”

  “And you can have all the witnesses you want on hand,” Coffin Ed said. “And anybody can say anything they want.”

  “All we want is just to get a statement from Michael X that we can take back to the boss,” Grave Digger elaborated, knowing Michael X’s vanity. “Me and Ed don’t believe none of this shit, but Michael X can state it better than we can.”