The Heat's On

by Chester Himes

  “Easy does it,” Grave Digger was repeating.

  Coffin Ed was imploring, “Let the police have him.”

  But their pleas had no effect.

  A fireman hit the giant across the shins. He went down. Firemen swarmed over him, trying to pin his arms behind him. But the muscles beneath his greasy purpling skin were rock hard. Fingers couldn’t get a grip. It was like trying to hold a greased pig at a state fair.

  The giant got to his hands and knees and pushed to his feet, shaking off firemen like a dog shedding water. He put his head down and started to run, plowing through a rain of blows.

  “The son of a bitch ain’t human,” a fireman complained.

  He got across the sidewalk and stepped onto the grass. His foot sunk into the belly of the unconscious dwarf. Globules of vomit spewed from Jake’s mouth. No one noticed.

  He vaulted over the hood of a fire engine and got a lead on his pursuers.

  “Stop him, he’s getting away,” a white cop shouted.

  Grave Digger and Coffin Ed had moved out into the street, anticipating the breakaway. They had the giant blocked.

  The giant drew up as though skidding on his heels. For an instant he stood like a cornered animal, his back to the fire engine, looking for a way out. He had the bruised, bleeding, bewildered look of a bull when the picadors have finished.

  “Shall we take him?” Coffin Ed asked.

  “Hell, let him go if he can make it,” Grave Digger said.

  They drew apart and let the giant through.

  Cops and firemen were closing in from both ends of the fire engine. The detectives’ car stood obliquely in the street and two prowl cars flanked the other side.

  The giant leaped onto the hood of the little black sedan. His rubber-soled sneakers gripped. His next leap took him to the top of a white-and-black prowl car. For a brief instant he was caught in the glare of a fire engine spotlight, a grotesque figure in the strained, shocking, ugly position of panic-stricken flight.

  Automatically, as though the target were irresistible, a cop drew a bead with his service revolver. At the same instant, as though part of the same motion sprung from another source, Coffin Ed knocked his arm up with the long nickel-plated barrel of his own revolver. The cop’s pistol went off. The giant seemed to fly from the roof of the prowl car and crashed into the foliage of the park.

  For a moment everyone was sobered by the sound of the shot and the sight of the giant crashing to earth. All were gripped by the single thought — the cop had shot him. Reactions varied; but all were held in a momentary silence.

  Then Coffin Ed said to the cop who had fired the shot, “You can’t kill a man for putting in a false fire alarm.”

  The cop had only intended to wing him, but Coffin Ed’s rebuke infuriated him.

  “Hell, you killed a man for farting at you,” he charged.

  Coffin Ed’s scarred face twitched in a blind rage. It was the one thing in his career which touched him to the quick.

  “That’s a goddamned lie!” he shouted, his pistol barrel flashing in a vicious arc toward the white cop’s head.

  There was just time for Grave Digger to catch the blow in his hand and spin Coffin Ed around.

  “Goddammit, Ed, control it, man!” he said. “It’s a joke.”

  The white cop was being forcibly held by two of his uniformed mates. “These two black bastards are crazy,” he mouthed.

  Coffin Ed allowed himself to be drawn off by Grave Digger, but he said, “It ain’t no joke to me.”

  Grave Digger knew that it was useless to explain that Coffin Ed had shot a different boy, one who was trying to throw perfume into his face. He had thought the boy was throwing acid; and he already bore the scars of one acid bath in his face. Everyone in the department knew the straight story, but some of the white cops distorted it to needle Coffin Ed.

  The fracas didn’t last more than a minute, but it gave the giant a chance to get away. The park dropped steeply from the manicured fringe bordering Riverside Drive through a rocky jungle of brush down to a wire fence enclosing the tracks of the New York Central Railroad’s freight lines and the elevated platform of the six-lane West Side Highway.

  A cop heard the giant threshing through the brush and shouted, “He’s making for the river!”

  The pursuit commenced again. No one had believed the giant’s story of robbery and murder taking place.

  “Let ’em go,” Grave Digger said bitterly.

  “I ain’t stopping ’em,” Coffin Ed said. “With the start he’s got now they won’t catch him anyway.”

  Grave Digger took off his heavy felt hat and rubbed his palm across his sweat-wet short kinky hair.

  They looked at one another with the unspoken communication they had developed during the years they had served as partners.

  “You think there’s anything in it?” Grave Digger asked.

  “We’d better try to find out. It’d be a hell of a note if somebody was being murdered during all this comedy we’re having.”

  “That would be the story.”

  Coffin Ed walked over and looked down at the unconscious dwarf. He bent over and felt his pulse.

  “What about our friend Jake?”

  “He’ll keep,” Grave Digger said. “Let’s go. This halfwit Pinky may be right.”

  2

  By that time Riverside Drive was wide-awake. Vaguely human shapes hung from the dark open windows of the front apartments like an amphitheater of ghosts; and the windows of the back apartments were ablaze with lights as though the next war had begun.

  The apartment house they sought was a nine-story brick building with plate-glass doors opening into a dimly lit foyer. The night latch was on. There was a bell to one side above a shiny chrome plate announcing: SUPERINTENDENT. Coffin Ed reached toward it, but Grave Digger shook his head.

  Even though the street was packed with fire engines, prowl cars, uniformed cops and firemen, the residents peering from the upper windows watched the two black men suspiciously.

  Coffin Ed noticed them and remarked, “They think we’re burglars.”

  “Hell, what else they going to think about two spooks like us prowling about in a white neighborhood in the middle of the night?” Grave Digger said cynically. “If I was to see two white men in Harlem at this time of night I’d figure they were looking for whores.”

  “You would be right.”

  “No more than them.”

  At the side of the building was a narrow cement walk closed off by a barred iron gate. The gate was locked.

  Grave Digger grabbed the top bar with one hand, put a foot on the middle crossbar, and went up and over. Coffin Ed followed.

  From somewhere above came the sound of an outraged gasp. They ignored it.

  Halfway down the side of the building was a barred window on a level with the sidewalk. Purple light poured out onto the opposite wall in a rectangular bar. They approached it quietly and knelt, one on each side.

  The window opened into a room that appeared to have been furnished by the castoffs of decades of tenants. Nothing had escaped. Lowboys and highboys were stacked against the walls, interspersed with marble statuettes, grandfather clocks, iron jockey hitching posts, empty birdcages, a broken glass aquarium, two moth-eaten stuffed squirrels and a molted stuffed owl. On one side was a round-topped dining table, surrounded by a variety of dilapidated chairs, and covered by a faded red silk curtain. Between two doors opening to the kitchen and bedroom respectively stood an old-fashioned organ, atop which was a menagerie of china animals. Opposite were two out-of-date television sets, one atop the other, crowned by a radio from the pre-television age. An overstuffed davenport, flanked by two overstuffed armchairs, were drawn up before the television sets close enough to reach through the screens and manhandle the performers. The linoleum floor was piled with threadbare scatter rugs.

  A lamp with a blue bulb burned on a lowboy, vying with a red-bulbed lamp on the dining table. A small fan atop an oak-stained highb
oy was stirring up the hot air.

  The television screen was dark but the radio was playing. It was tuned to a late record program. The voice of Jimmy Rushing issued from the metallic sounding speaker, singing: “I got that old-fashioned love in my heart.…”

  A young black man wearing a soiled white turban and a flowing robe of bright-colored rags sat in the center of the davenport, eating a pork chop sandwich and looking over his shoulder with an animated leer.

  Behind him a high-yellow woman was doing a chickentail shuffle around the dining table with a dark Jamaica rum highball in one hand. She was wearing a garment that looked like a bleached flour sack with holes cut out for the arms and head. She was a tall, skinny woman with the high sharp hips of a cotton chopper and the big loaded breasts of a wet nurse. As she shuffled barefooted on the pile of rugs, her bony knees poked out the sack in front while her sharp shaking buttocks poked it out in the back like the tail feathers of a laying hen. Up above, her breasts poked out the top of the sack like the snouts of two hungry shoats.

  She had a long bony face with a flat nose and jutting chin. Masses of crinkly black hair, dripping with oil, hung down to the middle of her back. Her slanting yellow eyes were doing tricks in the African’s direction.

  Grave Digger rapped on the window.

  The woman gave a start. Liquid sloshed from the glass over the table cover.

  The African saw them first. His eyes got white-rimmed.

  Then the woman turned and saw them. Her big, wide, cushion-lipped mouth swelled with fury.

  “You niggers better get away from that window or I’ll call the police,” she shouted in a flat unmusical voice.

  Grave Digger fished a felt-lined leather folder from his side coat pocket and showed his buzzer.

  The woman went sullen. “Nigger cops,” she said scornfully. “What you whore-chasers want?”

  “In,” Grave Digger said.

  She looked at the drink in her hand as though she didn’t know what to do with it. Then she said, “You cain’t come in here. My husband ain’t at home.”

  “That’s all right, you’ll do.”

  She looked around at the African. He was getting to his feet as though preparing to leave.

  “You stay, we want to talk to you too,” Grave Digger said.

  The woman jerked her gaze back toward the window. Her eyes were slits of suspicion. “What you want to talk to him for?”

  “Where’s the door, woman?” Coffin Ed said sharply. “Let us ask the questions.”

  “It’s in the back; where you think it’s at?” she said.

  They stood up and went around to the back of the building.

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a real cat-eyed woman,” Coffin Ed remarked.

  “I wouldn’t have one for my own for all the tea in China,” Grave Digger declared.

  “You just ain’t saying it.”

  Steps led down to the green-painted basement door. The woman had it open and was waiting for them, arms akimbo.

  “Gus ain’t in no trouble, is he?” she asked. She didn’t look worried; she looked downright evil.

  “Who is Gus?” Grave Digger asked, stopping on the bottom.

  “He’s my husband, the super.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “How would I know? Trouble is your sugar. What would you be doing messing around here at this time of night unless—” She broke off; her slitted yellow eyes became malevolent. “I just hope ain’t none of these grudging-assed white folks has accused us of stealing something, just ’cause we is going to Ghana,” she said in her flat outraged voice. “It’d be just like ’em.”

  “Ghana!” Grave Digger exclaimed. “Ghana in Africa? You’re going to Ghana?”

  Her expression became suddenly triumphant. “You heard me.”

  “Who’s we?” Coffin Ed asked over Grave Digger’s shoulder.

  “Me and Gus, that’s who.”

  “Let’s go inside and get this straightened out,” Grave Digger said.

  “If you think we has stole something, you’re beating up the wrong bush,” she said. “We ain’t took nothing from nobody.”

  “We’ll see.”

  She wheeled and went down the brightly lighted, white-washed corridor, her square bony shoulders held high and stiff while her hard sharp buttocks wiggled like a tadpole.

  A dark green steamer trunk stood against the wall beside the elevator doors. It bore luggage stickers reading: SS QUEEN MARY—CUNARD LINE—Hold.” Both handles were tagged.

  The detectives’ interest went up another notch.

  The door to the janitor’s suite opened directly into the overstuffed parlor. When they entered, the African was sitting on the edge of a straight-backed chair with the rum highball shaking in his hand.

  The radio was silent.

  As she turned to close the door, an animal appeared silently in the kitchen doorway.

  The detectives felt their scalps twitch.

  At first sight it appeared to be a female lion. It was tawny-colored with a massive head, upright ears and lambent eyes. Then a low growl issued from its throat and they knew it was a dog.

  Coffin Ed slipped his revolver from its holster.

  “She won’t hurt you,” the woman said scornfully. “She’s chained to the stove.”

  “Are you taking this animal with you?” Grave Digger asked in amazement.

  “It don’t belong to us; it belongs to an albino nigger called Pinky who Gus had around here to help him,” she said.

  “Pinky. He’s your son, ain’t he?” Grave Digger needled.

  “My son!” she exploded. “Do I look like that nigger’s ma? He’s already older than I is.”

  “He calls your husband his father.”

  “He ain’t no such thing, even if he is old enough. Gus just found him somewhere and took pity on him.”

  Coffin Ed nudged Grave Digger to show him four tan plastic suitcases which had been hidden from their view by the dining table.

  “So where is Gus?” Grave Digger asked.

  She got sullen again. “I don’t know where he’s at. Out watching the fire up the street, I suppose.”

  “He didn’t go out to get a fix, did he?” Grave Digger took a shot in the dark, remembering their prisoner, Jake.

  “Gus!” She appeared indignant. “He ain’t got the habit — no kind of habit, unless it’s the churchgoing habit.” She thought for a moment and added, “I guess he must have went to take the trunk from the storage room; I see somebody put in in the hall.”

  “Who’s got the habit?” Coffin Ed insisted.

  “Pinky’s got the habit. He’s on H.”

  “How can he afford it?”

  “Don’t ask me.”

  Grave Digger let his gaze rest on the nervous African.

  “What’s this man doing here?” he asked her suddenly.

  “He’s an African chief,” she said proudly.

  “I believe you; but that don’t answer my question.”

  “If you just must know, he sold the farm to Gus.”

  “What farm?”

  “The cocoa plantation in Ghana where we is going.”

  “Your husband bought a cocoa plantation in Ghana from this African?” Coffin Ed said incredulously. “What kind of racket is this?”

  “Show him your passport,” she told the African.

  The African fished a passport from the folds of his robe and held it out toward Grave Digger.

  Grave Digger ignored it, but Coffin Ed took it and examined it curiously before handing it back.

  “I don’t dig this,” Grave Digger confessed, removing his hat to scratch his head. “Where’s all this money coming from? Your husband can afford to buy a cocoa plantation in Ghana on a superintendent’s salary, and his helper can afford a heroin habit.”

  “Don’t ask me where Pinky gets his money from,” she said. “Gus got his on the legit. His wife died and left him a tobacco farm in North Carolina and he sold it.” />
  Grave Digger and Coffin Ed looked at one another with raised brows.

  “I thought you were his wife,” Grave Digger said to the woman.

  “I is now,” she said triumphantly.

  “Then he’s a bigamist.”

  She tittered. “He ain’t no more.”

  Grave Digger shook his head. “Some folks have all the luck.”

  From outside came the sound of fire engines starting and beginning to move away.

  “Where was the fire?” she asked.

  “There wasn’t any fire,” Grave Digger said. “It was Pinky who turned in the fire alarm. He wanted to call the police.”

  Her slanting yellow eyes stretched into the shape of almonds. “He did! What did he want to do that for?”

  “He said that you and this African were murdering and robbing his father.”

  She turned a dirty muddy color. The African jumped to his feet as though he had been stung in the rear by a wasp; he started sputtering denials in a guttural-sounding, strangely accented English. She cut him off harshly, “Shut up! Gus will take care of him. The dirty mother-raping white nigger! After all we has done for him, trying to make trouble for us on our last day.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “He don’t like Africans is all. He’s just envious ’cause he ain’t got no color in his own fishbelly skin.”

  Grave Digger and Coffin Ed shook their heads in unison.

  “Now I’ve heard everything,” Grave Digger said. “Here’s a white colored man who puts in a false fire alarm that Riverside Church is on fire, getting half the fire equipment in New York City on the roll and all the police in the neighborhood up here — and why? I ask you why?”

  “Because he don’t like black colored people,” Coffin Ed said.

  “You can’t blame that on the heat,” Grave Digger said.

  The front doorbell began to ring. It rang long and insistently, as though someone was trying to jab the button through the wall.

  “Now who in the hell is that at this hour of the night?” the woman said.

  “Maybe it’s Gus,” Coffin Ed said. “Maybe he’s lost his key.”

  “If Pinky done put in another false fire alarm, he better watch out,” the woman threatened.

  She opened the door to the corridor and went to answer the bell. The detectives followed her up the stairs into the front foyer.