"We're going to hide you from the police," Sheik said.
"I ain't done nothing," Sonny said.
Sheik halted and they all turned and looked at Sonny. His eyes were white half moons in the dark.
"All right then, if you ain't done nothing we'll turn you back to the cops," Sheik said.
"Naw, wait a minute, I just want to know where you're taking me."
"We're taking you home with us."
"Well, that's all right then."
There was no back door to the hall as in the other tenement. Decayed concrete stairs led down to a basement door. Sheik produced a key on his ring for that one also. They entered a dark passage. Foul water stood on the broken pavement. The air smelled like molded rags and stale sewer pipes. They had to remove their smoked glasses in order to see.
Halfway along, feeble yellow light slanted from an open door. They entered a small, filthy room.
A sick man clad in long cotton drawers lay beneath a ragged horse blanket on a filthy pallet of burlap sacks.
"You got anything for old Bad-eye," he said in a whining voice. -
"We got you a fine black gal," Choo-Choo said.
The old man raised up on his elbows. "Whar she at?"
"Don't tease him," Inky said.
"Lie down and shut," Sheik said. "I told you before we wouldn't have nothing for you tonight." Then to his henchmen, "Come on, you jokers, hurry up."
They began stripping off their disguises. Beneath their white robes they wore sweat shirts and black slacks. The beards were put on with make-up gum.
Without their disguises they looked like three high-school students.
Sheik was a tall yellow boy with strange yellow eyes and reddish kinky hair. He had the broad-shouldered, trimwaisted figure of an athlete. His face was broad, his nose flat with wide, flaring nostrils, and his skin freckled. He looked disagreeable.
Choo-Choo was shorter, thicker and darker, with the egg-shaped head and flat, mobile face of the born joker. He was bowlegged and pigeon-toed but fast on his feet.
Inky was an inconspicuous boy of medium size, with a mild, submissive manner, and black as the ace of spades.
"Where's the gun?" Choo-Choo asked when he didn't see it stuck in Sheik's belt.
"I slipped it to Bones."
"What's he going to do with it?"
"Shut up and quit questioning what I do."
"Where you reckon they all went to, Sheik?" Inky asked, trying to be peacemaker.
"They went home if they got sense," Sheik said.
The old man on the pallet watched them fold their disguises into small packages.
"Not even a little taste of King Kong," he whined.
"Naw, nothing!" Sheik said.
The old man raised up on his elbows. "What do you mean, naw? I'll throw you out of here. I'se the janitor. I'll take my keys away from you. I'll-"
"Shut your mouth before I shut it and if any cops come messing around down here you'd better keep it shut too. I'll have something for you tomorrow."
"Tomorrow? A bottle?"
The old man lay back mollified.
"Come on," Sheik said to the others.
As they were leaving he snatched a ragged army overcoat from a nail on the door without the janitor noticing. He stopped Sonny in the passage and took the noose from about his neck, then looped the overcoat over the handcuffs. It looked as though Sonny were merely carrying an overcoat with both hands.
"Now nobody'll see those cuffs," Sheik said. Turning to Inky, he said, "You go up first and see how it looks. If you think we can get by the cops without being stopped, give us the high sign."
Inky went up the rotten wooden stairs and through the doorway to the ground-floor hall. After a minute he opened the door and beckoned.
They went up in single file.
Strangers who'd ducked into the building to escape the shooting were held there by two uniformed cops blocking the outside doorway. No one paid any attention to Sonny and the three gangsters. They kept on going to the top floor.
Sheik unlocked a door with another key on his ring, and led the way into a kitchen.
An old colored woman clad in a faded blue Mother Hubbard with darker blue patches sat in a rocking chair by a coal-burning kitchen stove, darning a threadbare man's woolen sock on a wooden egg, and smoking a corncob pipe.
"Is that you, Caleb?" she asked, looking over a pair of ancient steel-rimmed spectacles.
"It's just me and Choo-Choo and Inky," Sheik said.
"Oh, it's you, Samson." The very note of expectancy in her voice died in disappointment. "Whar's Caleb?"
"He went to work downtown in a bowling alley, Granny. Setting up pins," Sheik said.
"Lord, that chile is always out working at night," she said with a sigh. "I sho hope God he ain't getting into no trouble with all this night work, 'cause his old Granny is too old to watch over him as a mammy would."
She was so old the color had faded in spots from her dark brown skin so that it looked like the skin of a dried speckled pea, and once-brown eyes had turned milky blue. Her bony cranium was bald at the front and the speckled skin was taut against the skull. What remained of her short gray hair was gathered into a small tight ball at the back of her head. The outline of each finger bone plying the darning needle was plainly visible through the transparent parchment-like skin.
"He ain't getting into no trouble," Sheik said.
Inky and Choo-Choo pushed Sonny into the kitchen and closed the door.
Granny peered over her spectacles at Sonny. "I don't know this boy. Is he a friend of Caleb's too?"
"He's the fellow Caleb is taking his place," Sheik said. "He hurt his hands."
She pursed her lips. "There's so many of you boys coming and going in here all the time I sho hope you ain't getting into no mischief. And this new boy looks older than you others is."
"You worry too much," Sheik said harshly.
"Hannh?"
"We're going on to our room," Sheik said. "Don't wait up for Caleb. He's going to be late."
"Hannh?"
"Come on," Sheik said. "She ain't hearing no more."
It was a shotgun flat, one room opening into the other. The next room contained two small white enameled iron beds where Caleb and his grandmother slept, and a small potbellied stove on a tin mat in one corner. A table held a pitcher and washbowl; there was a small dime-store mirror on top of a chest of drawers. As in the kitchen, everything was spotlessly clean.
"Give me your things and watch out for Granny," Sheik said, taking their bundled-up disguises.
Choo-Choo bent his head to the keyhole.
Sheik unlocked a large old cedar chest with another key from his ring and stored their bundles beneath layers of old blankets and house furnishings. It was Granny's hope chest; there she stored things given her by the white folks she worked for to give Caleb when he got married. Sheik locked the chest and unlocked the door to the next room. They followed him and he locked the door behind them.
It was the room he and Choo-Choo rented. There was a double bed where he and Choo-Choo slept, chest of drawers and mirror, pitcher and bowl on the table, as in the other room. The corner was curtained off with calico for a closet. But a lot of junk lay around and it wasn't as clean.
A narrow window opened to the platform of the redpainted iron fire escape that ran down the front of the building. It was protected by an iron grille closed by a padlock.
Sheik unlocked the grille and stepped out onto the fire escape.
"Look at this," he said.
Choo-Choo joined him; Inky and Sonny squeezed into the window.
"Watch the captive, Inky," Sheik said.
"I ain't no captive," Sonny said.
"Just look," Sheik said, pointing toward the street.
Below, on the broad avenue, red-eyed prowl cars were scattered thickly, like monster ants about an ant-hill. Three ambulances were threading through the maze, two police hearses, and cars from the police commissioner's of
fice and the medical examiner's office. Uniformed cops and men in plain clothes were coming and going in every direction.
"The men from Mars," Sheik said. "The big dragnet. What you think about that, Choo-Choo?"
Choo-Choo was busy counting.
The lower landings and stairs of the fire escape were packed with other people watching the show. Every front window as far as the eye could see on both sides of the street was jammed with black heads.
"I counted thirty-one prowl cars," Choo-Choo said. "That's more than was up on Eighth Avenue when Coffin Ed got that acid throwed in his eyes."
"They're shaking down the buildings one by one," Sheik said.
"What we're going to do with our captive?" Choo-Choo asked.
"We got to get the cuffs off first. Maybe we can hide him up in the pigeon's roost."
"Leave the cuffs on him."
"Can't do that. We got to get ready for the shakedown."
He and Choo-Choo stepped back into the room. He took Sonny by the arm, and pointed toward the street.
"They're looking for you, man."
Sonny's black face began graying again.
"I ain't done nothing. That wasn't a real pistol I had. That was a blank gun."
The three of them stared at him disbelievingly.
"Yeah, that ain't what they think," Choo-Choo said.
Sheik was staring at Sonny with a strange expression. "You sure, man?" he asked tensely.
"Sure I'm sure. It wouldn't shoot nothing but thirty-seven caliber blanks."
"Then it wasn't you who shot the big white stud?"
"That's what I been telling you. I couldn't have shot him."
A change came over Sheik. His flat, freckled yellow face took on a brutal look. He hunched his shoulders, trying to look dangerous and important.
"The cops are trying to frame you, man," he said. "We got to hide you now for sure."
"What you doing with a gun that don't shoot bullets?" Choo-Choo asked.
"I keep it in my shine parlor as a gag, is all," Sonny said.
Choo-Choo snapped his fingers. "I know you. You're the joker what works in that shoe shine parlor beside the Savoy."
"It's my own shoe shine parlor."
"How much marijuana you got stashed there?"
"I don't handle it."
"Sheik, this joker's a square."
"Cut the gab," Sheik said. "Let's get these handcuffs off this captive."
He tried keys and lockpicks but he couldn't get them open. So he gave Inky a triangle file and said, "Try filing the chain in two. You and him set on the bed." Then to Sonny, "What's your name, man?"
"Aesop Pickens, but people mostly call me Sonny."
"All right then, Sonny."
They heard a girl's voice talking to Granny and listened silently to rubber-soled shoes crossing the other room.
A single rap, then three quick ones, then another single rap sounded on the door.
"Gaza," Sheik said with his mouth against the panel.
"Suez," a girl's voice replied.
Sheik unlocked the door.
A girl entered and he locked the door behind her.
She was a tall sepia-colored girl with short black curls, wearing a turtle-necked sweater, plaid skirt, bobby socks, and white buckskin shoes. She had a snub nose, wide mouth, full lips, even white teeth, and wide-set brown eyes fringed with long black lashes.
She looked about sixteen years old, and was breathless with excitement.
Sonny stared at her and muttered to himself, "If this ain't it, it'll have to do."
"Hell, it's just Sissie. I thought it was Bones with the gun," Choo-Choo said.
"Stop beefing about the gun. It's safe with Bones. The cops ain't going to shake down no garbage collector's house. His old man works for the city same as they do."
"What's this about Bones and the gun?" Sissie asked.
"Sheik's got — "
"It's none of Sissie's business," Sheik cut him off.
"Somebody said an Arab had been shot and at first I thought it was you," Sissie said.
"You hoped it was me," Sheik said.
She turned away, blushing.
"Don't look at me," Choo-Choo said to Sheik. "You tell her. She's your girl."
"It was Caleb," Sheik said.
"Caleb! Jesus!" Sissie dropped onto the bed beside Sonny. She looked stunned. "Jesus! Poor little Caleb. What will Granny do?"
"What the hell can she do?" Sheik said brutally. "Raise him from the dead?"
"Does she know?"
"Does it look like she knqws?"
"Jesus! Poor little Caleb. What did he do?"
"I gave old Coffin Ed the stink gun and — " Choo-Choo began.
"You didn't!" she exclaimed.
"The hell I didn't."
"What did Caleb do?"
"He threw perfume over the monster. It's the Moslem salute for cops. I told you about it before. But the monster must have thought Cal was throwing some more acid into his eyes. He blasted so fast we couldn't tell him any better."
"Jesus!"
"Where's Sugartit?" Sheik asked.
"At home. She didn't come into town tonight. I phoned her and she said she was sick."
"Yeah. Did you have any trouble getting in here?"
"No. I told the cops at the door that I live here."
They heard the signal rapped on the door.
Sissie gasped.
Sheik looked at her suspiciously. "What the hell's the matter with you?" he asked.
"Nothing."
He hesitated before opening the door. "You ain't expecting nobody?"
"Me? No. Who could I expect?"
"You're acting mighty funny."
"I'm just nervous."
The signal was rapped again.
Sheik stepped to the door and said, "Gaza."
"Suez," a girl's lilting voice replied.
Sheik gave Sissie a threatening look as he unlocked the door.
A small-boned chocolate-brown girl dressed like Sissie slipped hurriedly into the room.
At sight of Sissie she stopped and said, "Oh!" in a guilty tone of voice.
Sheik looked from one to the other. "I thought you said she was at home," he accused Sissie.
"I thought she was," Sissie said.
He turned his gaze on Sugartit. "What the hell's the matter with you? What the hell's going on here?"
"A Moslem's been killed and I thought it was you," she said.
"All you little bitches were hoping it was me," he said.
She had sloe eyes with long black lashes that looked secretive. She threw a quick defiant look at Sissie and said, "Don't include me in that."
"Did you tell Granny?" Sheik asked.
"Of course not."
"It was your lover, Caleb," Sheik said brutally. She gave a shriek and charged at Sheik, clawing and kicking. "You dirty bastard!" she cried. "You're always picking at me." Sissie pulled her off. "Shut up and keep your mouth shut," she said tightly. "You tell her," Sheik said. "It was Caleb, all right," Sissie said. "Caleb!" Sugartit screamed and flung herself face down across the bed. She was up in a flash, hurling accusations at Sheik. "You did it. You got him killed. On account of me. 'Cause he had the best go and you couldn't get me to do what you made Sissie do." "That's a lie," Sissie said. "Caleb!" Sugartit screamed at the top of her voice. "Shut up, Granny will hear you," Choo-Choo said. "Granny! Caleb's dead! Sheik killed him!" she screamed again. "Stop her," Sheik commanded Sissie. "She's getting hysterical and I don't want to have to hurt her." Sissie clutched her from behind, put one hand over her mouth and twisted her arm behind her back with the other. Sugartit looked furiously at Sheik over the top of Sissie's hand. "Granny can't hear," Inky said. "The hell she can't," Choo-Choo said. "She can hear when she wants to." "Let me go!" Sugartit mumbled and bit Sissie's hand. "Stop that!" Sissie said. "I'm going to him," Sugartit mumbled. "I love him. You can't stop me. I'm going to find out who shot him." "Your old man shot him," Sheik said brutally. "T
he monster, Coffin Ed." "Did I hear someone calling Caleb?" Granny asked from the other side of the door. Sheik closed his hands quickly about Sugartit's throat and choked her into silence. "Naw, Granny," he called. "It's just these silly girls arguing about their cubebs." "Hannh?" "Cubebs!" Sheik shouted. "You chillen make so much racket a body can't hear herself think," she muttered. They heard her shuffling back to the kitchen. "Jesus, she's sitting up waiting for him," Sissie said. Sheik and Choo-Choo exchanged glances. "She don't even know what's happening in the street," Choo-Choo said. Sheik took his hands away from Sugartit's throat.
5
"How soon can you find out what he was killed with?" the chief of police asked. "He was killed with a bullet, naturally," the assistant medical examiner said. "You're not funny," the chief said. "I mean what caliber bullet." His brogue had begun thickening and the cops who knew him best began getting nervous. The deputy coroner snapped his bag shut with a gesture of coyness and peered at the chief through magnified eyeballs encircled by black gutta-percha. "That can't be known until after the autopsy. The bullet will have to be removed from the corpse's brain and subjected to tests — " The chief listened in red-faced silence. "I don't perform the autopsy. I'm the night man. I just pass on whether they're dead. I marked this one as D.O.A. That means dead on arrival — my arrival, not his. You know more about whether he was dead on his arrival than I do, and more about how he was killed, too." "I asked you a civil question." "I'm giving you a civil answer. Or, I should say, a civil service answer. The men who do the autopsy come on duty at nine o'clock. You ought to get your report by ten." "That's all I asked you. Thanks. And damn little good that'll do me tonight. And by ten o'clock tomorrow morning the killer ought to be hell and gone to another part of the United States if he's got any sense." "That's your affair, not mine. You can send the stiffs to the morgue when you've finished with them. I'm finished with them now. Good night, everyone." No one answered. He left. "I never knew why we needed a goddamned doctor to tell us whether a stiff was dead or not," the chief grumbled. He was a big weather-beaten man dressed in a lot of gold braid. He'd come up from the ranks. Everything about him from the armful of gold hash stripes to the box-toed custommade shoes said "flatfoot." Behind his back the cops on Centre Street called him Spark Plug, after the tender-footed nag in the comic strip "Barney Google." The group near the white man's corpse, of which he was the hub, had grown by then, to include, in addition to the principals, two deputy police commissioners, an inspector from homicide, and nameless uniformed lieutenants from adjoining precincts. The deputy commissioners kept quiet. Only the commissioner himself had any authority over the chief, and he was at home in bed. "This thing's hot as hell," the chief said at large. "Have we got our stories synchronized?" Heads nodded. "Come on then, Anderson, we'll meet the press," he said to the lieutenant in charge of the 126th Street precinct station. They walked across the street to join a group of newsmen who were being held in leash. "Okay, men, you can get your pictures," he said. Flash bulbs exploded in his face. Then the photographers converged on the corpses and left him facing the reporters. "Here it is, men. The dead man has been identified by his paper as Ulysses Galen of New York City. He lives alone in a two-room suite at Hotel Lexington. We've checked that. They think his wife is dead. He's a sales manager for the King Cola Company. We've contacted their main office in Jersey City and learned that Harlem is in his district." His thick brogue dripped like milk and honey through the noisy night. Stylos scratched on pads. Flash bulbs went off around the corpses like an anti-aircraft barrage. "A letter in his pocket from a Mrs. Helen Kruger, Wading River, Long Island, begins with Dear Dad. There's an unposted letter addressed to Homer Galen in the sixteen hundred block on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. That's a business district. We don't know whether Homer Galen is his son or another relation — " "What about how he was killed?" a reporter interrupted. "We know that he was shot in the back of the head by a Negro man named Sonny Pickens who operates a shoe shine parlor at 134th Street and Lenox Avenue. Several Negroes resented the victim drinking in a bar at 129th Street and Lenox — " "What was he doing at. a crummy bar up here in Harlem?" "We haven't found that out yet. Probably just slumming. We know that the barman was cut trying to protect him from another colored assailant-" "How did the shine assail him?" "This is not funny, men. The first Negro attacked him with a knife — tried to attack him; the bartender saved him. After he left the bar Pickens followed him down the street and shot him in the back." "You expect him to shoot a white man in the front." "Two colored detectives from the 126th Street precinct station arrived on the scene in time to arrest Pickens virtually in the act of homicide. He still had the gun in his hand," the chief continued. "They handcuffed the prisoner and were in the act of bringing him in when he was snatched by a teenage Harlem gang that calls itself Real Cool Moslems." Laughter burst from the reporters. "What, no Mau-Maus?" "It's not funny, men," the chief said again. "One of them tried to throw acid in one of the detective's eyes." The reporters were silenced. "Another gangster threw acid in an officer's face up here about a year ago, wasn't it?" a reporter said. "He was a colored cop, too. Johnson, Coffin Ed Johnson, they called him." "It's the same officer," Anderson said, speaking for the first time. "He must be a magnet," the reporters said. "He's just tough and they're scared of him," Anderson said. "You've got to be tough to be a colored cop in Harlem. Unfortunately, colored people don't respect colored cops unless they're tough." "He shot and killed the acid thrower," the chief said. "You mean the first one or this one?" the reporter asked. "This one, the Moslem," Anderson said. "During the excitement, Pickens and the others escaped into the crowd," the chief said. He turned and pointed toward a tenement building across the street. It looked indescribably ugly in the glare of a dozen powerful spotlights. Uniformed police stood on the roof, others were coming and going through the entrance; still others stuck their heads out of front windows to shout to other cops in the street. The other front windows were jammed with colored faces, looking like clusters of strange purple fruit in the stark white light. "You can see for yourselves we're looking for the killer," the chief said. "We're going through those buildings with a fine-toothed comb, one by one, flat by flat, room by room. We have the killer's description. He's wearing toolproof handcuffs. We should have him in custody before morning. He'll never get out of that dragnet." "If he isn't already out," a reporter said. "He's not out. We got here too fast for that." The reporters then began to question him. "Is Pickens one of the Real Cool Moslems?" "We know he was rescued by seven of them. The eighth was killed." "Was there any indication of robbery?" "Not unless the victim had valuables we don't know about. His wallet, watch and rings are intact." "Then what was the motive? A woman?" "Well, hardly. He was an important man, well off financially. He didn't have to chase up here." "It's been done before." The chief spread his hands. "That's right. But in this case both Negroes who attacked him did so because they resented his presence in a colored bar. They expressed their resentment in so many words. We have colored witnesses who heard them. Both Negroes were intoxicated. The first had been drinking all evening. And Pickens had been smoking marijuana also." "Okay, chief, it's your story," the dean of the police reporters said, calling a halt. The chief and Anderson recrossed the street to the silent group. "Did you get away with it?" one of the deputy commissioners asked. "God damn it, I had to tell them something," the chief said defensively. "Did you want me to tell them that a fifteen-thousand-dollar-a-year white executive was shot to death on a Harlem street by a weedhead Negro with a blank pistol who was immediately rescued by a gang of Harlem juvenile delinquents while all we got to show for the efforts of the whole god-damned police force is a dead adolescent who's called a Real Cool Moslem?" "Sho' 'nuff cool now," Haggerty slipped in _sotto voce_. "You want us to become the laughing stock of the whole goddamned world," the chief continued, warming up to the subject. "You want it said the New York City police stood by helpless while a white man got himself killed in the middle of a crowded ni
gger street?" "Well, didn't he?" the homicide lieutenant said. "I wasn't accusing you," the deputy commissioner said apologetically. "Pickens is the one it's rough on," Anderson said. "We've got him branded as a killer when we know he didn't do it." "We don't know any such goddamned thing," the chief said, turning purple with rage. "He might have rigged the blanks with bullets. It's been done, God damn it. And even if he didn't kill him, he hadn't ought to've been chasing him with a goddamned pistol that sounded as if it was firing bullets. We haven't got anybody to work on but him and it's just his black ass." "Somebody shot him, and it wasn't with any blank gun," the homicide lieutenant said. "Well, God damn it, go ahead and find out who did it!" the chief roared. "You're on homicide; that's your job." "Why not one of the Moslems," the deputy commissioner offered helpfully. "They were on the scene, and these teenage gangsters always carry guns." There was a moment of silence while they considered this. "What do you think, Jones?" the chief asked Grave Digger. "Do you think there was any connection between Pickens and the Moslems?" "It's like I said before," Grave Digger said. "It didn't look to me like it. The way I figure it, those teenagers gathered around the corpse directly after the shooting, like everybody else was doing. And when Ed began shooting, they all ran together, like everybody else. I see no reason to believe that Pickens even knows them." "That's what I gathered too," the chief said disappointedly. "But this is Harlem," Grave Digger amended. "Nobody knows all the connections here." "Furthermore, we don't have but one of them and that one isn't carrying a gun," Anderson said. "And you've heard Haggerty's report on the statement he took from the bartender and the manager of the Dew Drop Inn. Both Pickens and the other man resented Galen making passes at the colored women. And none of the Moslem gang were even there at the time." "It could have been some other man feeling the same way," Grave Digger said. "He might have seen Pickens shooting at Galen and thought he'd get in a shot, too." "These people!" the chief said. "Okay, Jones, you begin to work on that angle and see what you can dig up. But keep it from the press." As Grave Digger started to walk away, Coffin Ed fell in beside him. "Not you, Johnson," the chief said. "You go home." Both Grave Digger and Coffin Ed turned and faced the silence. "Am I under suspension?" Coffin Ed asked in a grating voice. "For the rest of the night," the chief said. "I want you both to report to the commissioner's office at nine o'clock tomorrow morning. Jones, you go ahead with your investigation. You know Harlem, you know where you have to go, who to see." He turned to Anderson. "Have you got a man to work with him?" "Haggerty," Anderson offered. "I'll work alone," Grave Digger said. "Don't take any chances," the chief said. "If you need help, just holler. Bear down hard. I don't give a goddamn how many heads you crack; I'll back you up. Just don't kill any more juveniles." Grave Digger turned and walked with Coffin Ed to their car. "Drop me at the Independent Subway," Coffin Ed said. Both of them lived in Jamaica and rode the E train when they didn't use the car. "I saw it coming," Grave Digger said. "If it had happened earlier I could have taken my daughter to a movie," Coffin Ed said. "I see so little of her it's getting so I hardly know her."
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