The Heat's On

by Chester Himes

  Holes popped into the back of the Lincoln’s tonneau and the left-side rearview mirror was shattered.

  Uncle Saint hadn’t been touched, but his nappy hair was standing up like iron filings beneath a magnet.

  Abruptly a woman began to scream in high, piercing, repetitious shrieks.

  Uncle Saint felt as though the top of his head was coming off.

  Then men began to shout; horns blew; a police whistle shrilled, and there was a sudden shower of running feet.

  Both cars took off at once.

  A trailer truck was passing on the left side and a taxi coming from the French Line dock blocked the traffic lane ahead. Porters and stevedores were running up the sidewalk and a uniformed cop with a pistol in his hand was trying to break through.

  Uncle Saint was looking through a blind haze of panic. His brain had stopped working. He was driving instinctively, like a fox encircled by hounds.

  The truck was to his left, the taxi was in front; he pulled to the right, up over the curb, heading behind the taxi. The running men scattered, diving for safety, as the two cars roared down the broad sidewalk, the Buick following the Lincoln bumper to bumper.

  At the entrance to the dock a porter was loading luggage from a taxi onto a four-wheeled cart. He didn’t see the Lincoln until it hit the cart. He sailed into the air, clinging to the suitcase as though running to catch a train waiting somewhere in the sky, while other luggage flew past like startled birds. The cart raced down the pier and dove into the sea. The porter came down feetfirst on top of the following Buick, did a perfect somersault and landed sitting on the suitcase, his astounded black face an ellipsoid of white eyeballs and white teeth.

  In front of the Cunard Line dock Uncle Saint found an opening back to the street. He turned into it but couldn’t straighten out fast enough and crossed in front of the same trailer truck he had already passed on the sidewalk. It was so close the truck bumper passed overtop and left rear fender of the Lincoln as he barely missed the concrete pier of the railroad trestle on the other side.

  Rubber screamed on the dry brick pavement as the truck driver applied air brakes. The truck horn bleated desperately. But it didn’t save the Buick following in the wake of the Lincoln. The truck hit it broadside. The sound of metal rending metal shattered the din. A senseless pandemonium broke out up and down the street.

  The truck had overturned the Buick and the front wheels had run overtop it. Hundreds of people were running in all directions, without rhyme or reason.

  Uncle Saint got away.

  He didn’t see the accident or hear the sound. He was on the inside traffic lane and it was clear for nine straight blocks. Instinctively he looked into the rearview mirror. Behind him the avenue was empty.

  Traffic had been stopped at the scene of the accident. The first two prowl cars to arrive had blocked off the street. For the moment the black Lincoln had been forgotten. By the time the cops got around to gathering evidence, Uncle Saint had passed 42nd Street. None of the witnesses had recognized the make of the car; no one had thought to take the license number; all descriptions of the driver were conflicting.

  Suddenly Uncle Saint found himself caught in one of the clover-leaf approaches to the Lincoln Tunnel. The three traffic lanes were jammed with vehicles, bumper to bumper. There was no turning back.

  As he crawled along in back of a refrigerator truck, his panic cooled to a sardonic, inverted scare. The killing didn’t bother him whatever. “Thought the old darky was tame,” he muttered to himself.

  A subtle change came over him. He reverted to the legendary Uncle Tom, the old halfwit darky, the white man’s jester, the obsequious old white-haired coon without a private thought.

  During one of the stops as the long lines of traffic were halted at the toll gates, he hid the shotgun underneath the back seat and tossed the gunman’s straw hat on top of the seat.

  The toll gates looked like the entrance to a wartime military post housing nuclear weapons. Booted and helmeted cops sat astride high-powered motorcycles beside the toll booths; beyond were the white-and-black police cars that patrolled the tunnel.

  The guard took the fifty cents toll and waved Uncle Saint on, but a motorcycle cop strolled over and stopped him.

  “What are these holes in the back of this car, boy?”

  Uncle Saint grinned, showing stained decayed teeth, and his old bluish-red eyes looked sly.

  “Bullet holes, sah,” he said proudly.

  “What!” The cop was taken aback; he had expected Uncle Saint to deny it. “Bullet holes?”

  “Yas sah, gen-you-wine bullet holes.”

  The cop pinned a beetle-brow stare onto Uncle Saint.

  “You make ’em?”

  “Naw sah, Ah was goin’ the other way.”

  The toll guard could not repress a smile, but the cop scowled.

  “Who made ’em?”

  “My boss, sah. Mistah Jeffers. He made ’em.”

  “Who was he shooting at?”

  “Shooting at me, sah. He always shoots at me when he’s had a liddle too much. But he ain’t never hit me though — he-hee.”

  The toll guard laughed out loud, but the cop didn’t like it.

  “Pull over there and wait,” he ordered, indicating the parking space for the patrol cars.

  Uncle Saint drove over and stopped. The cops in the cars looked at him curiously.

  The motorcycle cop went into the glass-enclosed toll booth and studied the list of wanted cars. The Lincoln was not on the list. He fiddled about for fifteen minutes, looking more and more annoyed. Finally he asked the toll guard, “Think I ought to hold him?”

  “Hold him for what?” the guard said. “What’s an old darky like him ever done but steal his boss’s whiskey?”

  The cop came out of the booth and waved him on.

  It was only a quarter past seven when Uncle Saint came out of the tunnel into Jersey City.

  He left the parkway at the first turn-off and went north along the rutted, brick-paved streets that bordered the wharves. He drove slowly and carefully and obeyed all the traffic signs. It took him an hour to reach the first New Jersey approach to the George Washington Bridge. He crossed over into Manhattan and fifteen minutes later crossed the Harlem River back into the Bronx.

  Before arriving at Sister Heavenly’s he threw out the dead gunman’s hat, then retrieved the shotgun, reloaded it, and placed it on the floor of the front seat within reach.

  “Now let’s see which way the cat’s gonna jump,” he said to himself.

  It was about 8:30 o’clock. The clock in the car didn’t work and Uncle Saint didn’t have a watch. But time meant nothing to him one way or another.

  7

  Grave Digger was sound asleep.

  His wife shook him.

  “Telephone. It’s Captain Brice.”

  Grave Digger knuckled the sleep from his eyes. On duty all of his senses were constantly on the alert. Coffin Ed had once summed it up by saying, “Blink once and you’re dead.” To which Grave Digger had rejoined, “Blink twice and you’re buried.”

  But at home, Grave Digger relaxed completely. His wife sometimes called him “Slowpoke”.

  He was still sleep-groggy when he took the phone and said grumpily, “Now what gives?”

  Captain Brice was a disciplinarian. He never fraternized with the men under him and played no favorites. The Harlem precinct was his command. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed were under his supervision, although their hours at night rarely permitted them to see him.

  “Jake Kubansky is dead,” he said in a voice without inflection. “I have orders to present you to the commissioner’s office at nine o’clock.”

  Grave Digger became abruptly alert. “Has Ed been notified?”

  “Yes. I wish we’d had time for you to drop by here and go over this business, but the order just came in. So you had better go straight down to Centre Street.”

  Grave Digger looked at his watch. It read 8:10.

  “Right
, sir,” he said and hung up.

  His wife looked at him anxiously. “Are you in trouble?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  That didn’t answer her question, but she had learned not to press him.

  Grave Digger and Coffin Ed lived only two blocks apart in Astoria, Long Island. Coffin Ed was waiting in his new Plymouth sedan. “It’s going to be another scorcher,” he greeted.

  “Let it burn up,” Grave Digger said.

  Everyone was in shirtsleeves.

  The commissioner, deputy commissioner, inspector in charge of detectives, an assistant D.A., an assistant medical examiner, Captain Brice and Lieutenant Anderson from the Harlem precinct, three firemen and two patrol car cops from the horde who had answered the false fire alarm the previous night.

  The hearing was being held in a big barren room in the headquarters annex across the street from the headquarters building. It had begun at 9:55; now it was 11:13.

  Hard yellow sunlight slanted in from the three windows looking out on Centre Street and the room was sweltering hot.

  The charge of “unwarranted brutality” resulting from the death of Jake had been lodged against Coffin Ed and Grave Digger.

  First the assistant M.E. had testified that the autopsy had shown that Jake had died from a ruptured spleen caused by severe external blows in the region of the stomach. In the opinion of the Examiner’s Office he had either been kicked in the stomach or pummeled by a heavy blunt instrument.

  “I didn’t hit him that hard,” Grave Digger had contradicted from where he sat with one ham perched on the window ledge.

  Coffin Ed, backed against the wall on the shady side of the room, said nothing.

  The commissioner had raised a hand for silence.

  Lieutenant Anderson gave a verbal account of the detectives’ report and produced photostats of the pages of the precinct blotter where the entry had been made.

  Captain Brice explained the special detail to which he had assigned the two detectives, sending them to all trouble spots over Harlem during all hours of the night.

  The three firemen and the two patrol car cops testified reluctantly that they had witnessed Grave Digger hit the victim in the stomach while Coffin Ed held his arms pinned behind him.

  Then Grave Digger and Coffin Ed had taken the stand in their own defense.

  “What we did is routine procedure,” Grave Digger said. “You take these pushers, when they’re peddling dope they work in the street. They carry their decks in a pocket where they are convenient to dispose of. The officer has to apprehend them while they still have the junk on their person, or he has to swear he has seen them dispose of it. So when you close in on a pusher and he sees he can’t get rid of his load, he stuffs it into his mouth and eats it. They all carry some kind of physic which they take a short time afterwards — and there goes your evidence—”

  The commissioner smiled.

  “You know they’ve been selling dope; you’ve seen ’em; but you can’t prove it,” Grave Digger continued. “So Ed and me use this method to make them vomit up the evidence before they take the physic and dissipate it.”

  Again the commissioner smiled at the use of the word dissipate.

  “However, if that were permitted, what is there to prohibit an officer from punching a person in the stomach suspected of drunken driving?” the assistant D.A. remarked.

  “Nothing,” Grave Digger replied in a thick, dry voice. “If he’s run over somebody and killed ’em.”

  “You’re forgetting that you are primarily a peace officer,” the asistant D.A. reminded him. “Your duty is to maintain the peace and the courts will punish the offenders.”

  “Peace at what price?” Coffin Ed put in, and Grave Digger echoed thickly:

  “You think you can have a peaceful city letting criminals run loose?”

  The assistant D.A. reddened. “That’s not the point,” he said sharply. “You’ve killed a man suspected of a minor crime, and not in self-defense.”

  Suddenly the room was filled with tension.

  “You call dope peddling a minor crime?” Grave Digger said, pushing to his feet.

  At the sound of his thick, dry voice, every eye in the room turned in his direction. The arteries in his neck became swollen from rage and veins throbbed in his temples.

  “All the crimes committed by addicts — robberies, murders, rapes.… All the fucked-up lives.… All the nice kids sent down the drain on a habit.… Twenty-one days on heroin and you’re hooked for life.… Jesus Christ, mister, that one lousy drug has murdered more people than Hitler. And you call it minor!” His voice sounded like it was filtered through absorbent cotton.

  The assistant D.A. reddened. “He was merely a peddler,” he stated.

  “And who gets it into the victim’s blood?” Grave Digger raved. “The peddler! He sells the dirty crap. He makes the personal contact. He puts them on the habit. He’s the mother-raper who gets them hooked. He looks into their faces and puts the poison in their hands. He watches them go down from sugar to shit, sees them waste away. He puts them out to stealing, killing, starts young girls to hustling — to get the money to buy the kicks. I’ll take a simple violent murderer any day.”

  “Let’s put it this way,” Coffin Ed said, trying to mollify both parties. “Everybody here knows how the big-time operators work. They buy junk abroad — mostly heroin nowadays. They get a lot of it from France — Marseille — for about five thousand dollars a kilo — two pounds and three ounces. The French don’t seem to able to stop the traffic. It comes to New York and the wholesalers pay from fifteen thousand dollars to twenty thousand dollars a kilo for it. The U.S. federal agents don’t seem to be able to catch them either. So the wholesalers dilute the stuff, which is about eighty percent pure to begin with — they add enough sugar of milk or quinine to get it down to two percent pure. Just plain shit. And this is the stuff the peddler sells. It grosses a half million dollars a kilo. All of you know that. But who’s stopping it? All Digger and me can do is try to catch the peddlers in our precinct. So one gets hurt—”

  “Killed,” the assistant M.E. corrected.

  “By accident,” Coffin Ed amended. “If that is what killed him. In all that excitement up there last night he might have been trampled to death for all we know.”

  The commissioner looked up. “What excitement?”

  “The firemen were trying to detain a firebug who got away.”

  “Oh, that.” His glance flicked from Lieutenant Anderson to the red-faced firemen.

  “We are going to have these detectives indicted,” the assistant D. A. stated. “There has been too much police brutality in Harlem. The public is indignant.”

  The commissioner pressed the tips of his fingers together and leaned back in his chair.

  “Give us time to make a more thorough investigation,” he said.

  The assistant D.A. was reluctant. “What more investigation is needed? They have admitted beating the deceased.”

  The commissioner passed over him. “In the meantime, detectives Jones and Johnson, you are suspended from the force until further notice. Captain Brice,” he added, turning his head slightly, “have them turn in their shields and strike their names from the roll.”

  Grave Digger’s swollen face turned gray around the mouth and the grafted skin on Coffin Ed’s face twitched like a tic.

  “And that’s that,” Grave Digger said to their friend, Lieutenant Anderson, as they stood outside in the glaring hot sunshine. “For a mother-raping pusher.”

  “It’s just the newspaper pressure. We’re suffering from the customary summer slack in news. It’ll blow over,” Lieutenant Anderson consoled. “The papers are on one of their periodic humanitarian kicks. Don’t worry. Nothing’s coming out of it.”

  “Yeah, humanitarian,” Grave Digger said bitterly. “It’s all right to kill a few colored people for trying to get their children an education, but don’t hurt a mother-raping white punk for selling dope.”

&
nbsp; Lieutenant Anderson winced. As accustomed as he was to these two colored detectives’ racial connotations, that one hurt.

  8

  Uncle Saint hung about the garage for a long time before he got up enough nerve to enter the house.

  Three of the bullets had made holes which he plugged with putty and sprayed with quick-drying black enamel. But there were two big dents and one long seam atop the left rear fender which couldn’t be concealed. He had no mirror to replace the broken one, so he removed them from both front fenders and sprayed the marks they had left. That didn’t help much either; the bolt holes still remained. The license plates presented no problem. He had several changes of plates, none of which had the legitimate registration number. He put on some Connecticut plates.

  Still he kept fiddling about. Once he thought of painting the whole car another color; or at least the upper half. But finally his jag began thinning out and he got jumpy. He knew he’d have trouble sure as hell with Sister Heavenly if he got too jumpy, so he decided to go inside and have it out.

  She would just have to look after him, he told himself. She had kept him helpless and homeless for twenty-five years and he wasn’t going to jump up and run off by his lonesome just because he was in a little trouble. If he went down he was going to take her with him. It had been her idea anyway, he justified himself. He had just been trying to do her business.

  He slunk up the path toward the house, holding the shotgun cradled in his arm as though stalking an enemy.

  Only the screen door was closed. He became wary. When he poked his head into the kitchen, his eyes popped. Sister Heavenly was sitting at the kitchen table drinking sassafras tea and smoking a pipe of marijuana and looking content with the world. For a brief moment he thought she had gotten it and his head exploded with rage. But the next instant he realized she couldn’t have. He stepped inside and closed the door.

  The kitchen had windows on the side and back but their shutters were closed tight to keep out the heat and the only light came in through the screened back door. The kitchen table, covered with blue-and-white checked oilcloth, sat before the side window. The stove stood against the inside wall and Uncle Saint’s bunk, covered with army blankets, lay beneath the back window.