“He was dead when we got here,” Grave Digger said in a flat, toneless voice. “We were the first here. The suspect was standing over the victim with the pistol in his hand–”
“Hold it,” a new voice said.
A plain-clothes lieutenant and a sergeant from downtown homicide bureau came into the circle.
“These are the arresting officers,” Anderson said.
“Where’s the prisoner?” the homicide lieutenant asked.
“He got away,” Grave Digger said.
“Okay, start over,” the homicide lieutenant said.
Grave Digger gave him the first part then, went on:
“There were two friends with him and a group of teenage gangsters around the corpse. We disarmed the suspect and handcuffed him. When we started to frisk the gangster punks we had a rumble. Coffin Ed shot one. In the rumble the suspect got away.”
“Now let’s get this straight,” the homicide lieutenant said.
“Were the teenagers implicated too?”
“No, we just wanted them as witnesses,” Grave Digger said. “There’s no doubt about the suspect.”
“Right.”
“When I got here Jones and Johnson were fighting, rolling all over the corpse,” Haggerty said. “Jones was trying to disarm Johnson.”
Lieutenant Anderson and the men from homicide looked at him, then turned to look at Grave Digger and Coffin Ed in turn.
“It was like this,” Coffin Ed said. “One of the punks turned up his ass and farted toward me and–”
Anderson said, “Huh!” and the homicide lieutenant said incredulously, “You killed a man for farting?”
“No, it was another punk he shot,” Grave Digger said in his toneless voice. “One who threw perfume on him from a bottle. He thought it was acid the punk was throwing.”
They looked at Coffin Ed’s acid-burnt face and looked away embarrassedly.
“The fellow who was killed is an Arab,” the sergeant said.
“That’s just a disguise,” Grave Digger said. “They belong to a group of teenage gangsters who call themselves Real Cool Moslems.”
“Hah!” the homicide lieutenant said.
“Mostly they fight a teenage gang of Jews from The Bronx,” Grave Digger elaborated. “We leave that to the welfare people.”
The homicide sergeant stepped over to the Arab corpse and removed the turban and peeled off the artificial beard. The face of a colored youth with slick conked hair and beardless cheeks stared up. He dropped the disguises beside the corpse and sighed.
“Just a baby,” he said.
For a moment no one spoke.
Then the homicide lieutenant asked, “You have the homicide gun?”
Grave Digger took it from his pocket, holding the barrel by the thumb and first finger, and gave it to him.
The lieutenant examined it curiously for some moments. Then he wrapped it in his handkerchief and slipped it into his coat pocket.
“Had you questioned the suspect?” he asked.
“We hadn’t gotten to it,” Grave Digger said. “All we know is the homicide grew out of a rumpus at the Dew Drop Inn.”
“That’s a bistro a couple of blocks up the street,” Anderson said. “They had a cutting there a short time earlier.”
“It’s been a hot time in the old town tonight,” Haggerty said.
The homicide lieutenant raised his brows enquiringly at Lieutenant Anderson.
“Suppose you go to work on that angle, Haggerty,” Anderson said. “Look into that cutting. Find out how it ties in.”
“We figure on doing that ourselves,” Grave Digger said.
“Let him go on and get started,” Anderson said.
“Right-o,” Haggerty said. “I’m the man for the cutting.”
Everybody looked at him. He left.
The homicide lieutenant said, “Well, let’s take a look at the stiffs.”
He gave each a cursory examination. The teenager had been shot once, in the heart.
“Nothing to do but wait for the coroner,” he said.
They looked at the unconscious woman.
“Shot in the thigh, high up,” the homicide sergeant said. “Loss of blood but not fatal – I don’t think.”
“The ambulance will be here any minute,” Anderson said.
“Ed shot at the gangster twice,” Grave Digger said. “It must have been then.”
“Right.”
No one looked at Coffin Ed. Instead, they made a pretense of examining the area.
Anderson shook his head. “It’s going to be a hell of a job finding your prisoner in this dense slum,” he said.
“There isn’t any need,” the homicide lieutenant said. “If this was the pistol he had, he’s as innocent as you and me. This pistol won’t kill anyone.” He took the pistol from his pocket and unwrapped it. “This is a thirty-seven caliber blank pistol. The only bullets made to fit it are blanks and they can’t be tampered with enough to kill a man. And it hasn’t been made over into a zip gun.”
“Well,” Lieutenant Anderson said at last. “That tears it.”
4
There was a rusty sheet-iron gate in the concrete wall between the small back courts. The gang leader unlocked it with his own key. The gate opened silently on oiled hinges.
He went ahead.
“March!” the henchman with the knife ordered, prodding Sonny.
Sonny marched.
The other henchman kept the noose around his neck like a dog chain.
When they’d passed through, the leader closed and locked the gate.
One of the henchman said, “You reckon Caleb is bad hurt?”
“Shut up talking in front of the captive,” the leader said. “Ain’t you got no better sense than that.”
The broken concrete paving was strewn with broken glass bottles, rags and diverse objects thrown from the back windows: a rusty bed spring, a cotton mattress with a big hole burnt in the middle, several worn-out automobile tires, the half-dried carcass of a black cat with its left foot missing and its eyes eaten out by rats.
They picked their way through the debris carefully.
Sonny bumped into a loose stack of garbage cans. One fell with a loud clatter. A sudden putrid stink arose.
“God damn it, look out!” the leader said. “Watch where you’re going.”
“Aw, man, ain’t nobody thinking about us back here,” Choo-Choo said.
“Don’t call me man,” the leader said.
“Sheik, then.”
“What you jokers gonna do with me?” Sonny asked.
His weed jag was gone; he felt weak-kneed and hungry; his mouth tasted brackish and his stomach was knotted with fear.
“We’re going to sell you to the Jews,” Choo-Choo said.
“You ain’t fooling me, I know you ain’t no Arabs,” Sonny said.
“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.
&nb
sp; “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, trim-waisted 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 red-painted 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 office 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 hi
m.”
“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.
The Real Cool Killers Page 3