The Heat's On

by Chester Himes

  He put the Silex coffee maker on the gas stove, with enough coffee in it to make mud. While waiting for it to boil he stripped off his clothes and piled them on the chair beside the bed. In the bathroom medicine cabinet he found a bottle of Benzedrine tablets. He took two and drank water from the washbowl faucet in his cupped hand. He heard the coffee maker boiling and went into the kitchen and turned off the fire.

  After that he took a shower, turning it from lukewarm to as cold as he could bear. He held his breath and his teeth chattered as the cold needles bit into his skin. His head felt as though sheets of lightning were going off in his brain, but the lethargy left his limbs.

  He toweled and went into the bedroom and put on jockey shorts, nylon socks, lightweight black shoes with rubber soles, the pants to his brand-new dark gray summer suit, and a blue oxford cloth shirt with a button-down collar. He omitted the tie. He didn’t want anything to be in his way when he reached for the handle of his revolver.

  His shoulder holster hung from a hook inside the door of the clothes closet. The special-made, long-barreled, nickel-plated .38-caliber revolver, that had shot its way to fame in Harlem, was in the holster. He took it out, spun the chamber, rapidly ejecting the five brass-jacketed cartridges, and quickly cleaned and oiled it. Then he reloaded it, putting a U.S. army tracer bullet into the last loaded chamber and leaving the one under the trigger empty so there wouldn’t be an accident in case he had to club some joker across the head with the butt.

  He placed the revolver on the bed and took down the holster. From the shelf in the closet he took a can of seal fat and smeared a thick coating on the inside of the holster. He wiped the excess off with a clean handkerchief, tossed the hankerchief into the soiled-clothes hamper, and strapped on the shoulder sling. When he had cradled the revolver, he strapped a stopwatch to his left wrist.

  He chose a knockout sap from the collection in his dresser drawer. It was made of plaited cowhide covering a banana-shaped hunk of soft solder, with a whalebone handle. He stuck this into a hip pocket made especially for that purpose.

  He slipped a Boy Scout knife into his left pants pocket. As an afterthought he stuck a thin flat hunting knife with a grooved hard-rubber handle, sheathed in soft pigskin, inside the back of his pants alongside his spinal column, and snapped the sheath to his belt. Not that he thought he would need it, but he didn’t want to overlook anything that might keep him living until his job was done.

  I’d drink some everlasting water if I knew where some was at, he thought grimly.

  Then he put on his coat. He had chosen that suit because the coat was bigger than any of his others and it had been tailor-made to accommodate his shoulder sling.

  He dropped a new box of cartridges into the leather-lined pocket on the left side, then put a handful of cartridges with tracer bullets into the leather-lined pocket on his right side.

  He went into the kitchen and drank two cups of scalding hot, mud-thick coffee. It recoiled in his empty stomach like cold water on a hot stove, but stayed down. The Benzedrine had killed his appetite and left a dry brackish taste in his mouth. He scarcely noticed it.

  Just as he was about to leave the house the telephone rang. For a moment he debated whether to ignore it, then went back into the bedroom and picked up the receiver.

  “Johnson,” he said.

  “This is Captain Brice,” the voice said from the other end. “Homicide wants you to get in touch — Lieutenant Walsh. And keep out of this. Stay home. Let the men with the shields have it. If you get in any deeper I’m not going to be able to help you.” After a pause he added, “Nobody is.”

  “Yes sir,” Coffin Ed said. “Lieutenant Walsh.”

  “They got the blood from Brooklyn, in case you haven’t heard,” the captain added.

  Coffin Ed held on to the receiver, but he didn’t have the nerve to ask.

  “He’s still hanging on,” Captain Brice said, as though reading his thought.

  “Yes sir,” Coffin Ed said.

  The phone began to ring again as soon as he cradled the receiver. He picked it up again.

  “Johnson.”

  “Ed, this is Lieutenant Anderson.”

  “How goes it, Lieutenant?”

  “I called to ask you.”

  “He’s still in there fighting,” Coffin Ed said.

  “I’m going over there now,” Anderson said.

  “I ain’t any use. He don’t know anybody yet.”

  “Right. I’ll wait ’til it’s time.” A pause, then, “Keep out of this, Ed. I know how you feel, but keep out of this. You don’t have any authority now and anything you do is going to make it worse.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “What?” Anderson was startled. Coffin Ed had never said yes sir to him before.

  But Coffin Ed had hung up.

  He telephoned the West Side homicide bureau and asked for Lieutenant Walsh.

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Just tell him Ed Johnson.”

  After a while a deliberate, scholarly-sounding voice came on.

  “Johnson, I’d like to know what you think about this.”

  “Up until we found the African’s corpse, I didn’t think anything about it. We couldn’t figure that from any angle. Then when they got Digger, that changed the story. There must have been two—”

  “We know that,” Lieutenant Walsh cut him off. “Two professional gunmen. We know they were after something. The whole place is being gone over by a crew from the safe and loft squad. But they haven’t found anything, or even anything to indicate what they’re looking for. What do you think it might be? If we knew that, we might know where to start.”

  “I think it might be H; a shipment of H that’s taken off.”

  “We thought of that. The narcotics squad is working on it. But a shipment of heroin, even as pure as it comes, large enough to induce murder is not easy to hide. A really valuable shipment, considering all the wrappings it would need, would run to about the size of a football. By this time anything that size would have been found by the crew at work on it.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a shipment. It can be a key.”

  “A key. I hadn’t thought of that; I don’t know about the searchers. Just a key to a plant somewhere. Maybe you’re right. I’ll pass the suggestion on. Anyway, they’re going to keep after it until they’re satisfied there’s nothing there.”

  “If it isn’t that I don’t know what it is.”

  “Right. By the way, what do you think has happened to the janitor and his wife? Gus and Ginny Harris, they are called. And they had a helper, an ex-pug called Pinky.”

  “Gus and Ginny were supposed to sail on the Queen Mary today and Pinky’s on the lam.”

  “They had booked passage but they didn’t sail. All three of them have just dropped out of sight.”

  “They can’t stay hidden forever.”

  “They can if they’re at the bottom of the river.”

  Coffin Ed waited. He had said all he had to say.

  “That’s all for the time, Johnson. Stick around. We might want to get in touch with you again. And Johnson—”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Keep out of this. Let us handle it. Okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Coffin Ed went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water from the refrigerator bottle. His throat felt bone dry.

  Then he went into the garage and put a suit of paint-smeared coveralls into a large canvas bag left behind by the painters who had worked on his house. He put the bag into the back of his car and got in and drove down the street to Grave Digger’s house.

  He knew the doors would be locked so he walked around to the back and jimmied the kitchen window. His body had a light weightlessness that put an edge on his reflexes, making them a shade too quick. He’d have to be careful, he cautioned himself. He’d kill someone before he knew it.

  Two of the neighborhood children, a little boy and girl, stopped playing in the yard next door and looked at
him, accusingly.

  “You’re breaking into Mister Jones’s house,” the little boy piped up, then shouted at the top of his voice, “Mama, there’s a burglar breaking into Mister Jones’s house.”

  A woman came quickly from the back door of the next-door house just as Coffin Ed got one leg over the window ledge.

  He nodded toward her and she smiled. They were all colored people on that street and the grownups knew one another; but the children seldom got sight of the detectives, who were sleeping most of the day.

  “That’s just Mister Jones’s partner,” she told the children. “Mister Jones has been hurt.” She figured that explained it.

  Coffin Ed closed and locked the window and went into the bedroom and opened the clothes closet. A long-barreled nickel-plated .38-caliber revolver identical with his own was cradled in a holster hanging from an identical hook inside the door. He slipped it from the holster, spun the cylinder to make certain it was loaded, then stuck the barrel down inside the waistband of his trousers with the handle angled toward the left side.

  “Almost ready,” he said out loud, and inside of his splitting head he felt the tension mount.

  He went into the living room, searched about in the writing desk, and scribbled on a sheet of stationery: STELLA, I’ve taken Digger’s gun. ED.

  He brought it back and propped it on top of the dressing table.

  He was turning away to leave when a sudden thought struck him. He stepped over to the night table and picked up the telephone and dialed homicide again.

  When he got Lieutenant Walsh, he asked, “What happened to the janitor’s dog?”

  “Ah yes, she was turned over to the S.P.C.A. Why?”

  “I just remembered that it was hurt and I wondered if anybody was taking care of it.”

  “That’s what I forgot to ask,” Lieutenant Walsh said. “Do you happen to know how she got that wound in the head?”

  “We saw the African take her down toward the river early this morning and then come back without her. That was early this morning — a little after five. We didn’t have any reason to be suspicious, so we didn’t question him. When we got back to the place around one o’clock she was lying in front of the side gate with that hole in her head.”

  “That clears up that,” Walsh said. “How’s Jones coming on?”

  “He’s still breathing — the last I heard.”

  “Right,” Walsh said.

  They both hung up at the same instant.

  Coffin Ed telephoned the hospital. He identified himself.

  “I’m calling to find out how is Detective Jones.”

  “His condition is grave,” the impersonal woman’s voice replied.

  Pain flashed in Coffin Ed’s head.

  “I know that,” he said through clenched teeth, trying to control his unreasonable rage. “Is it any graver?”

  The impersonal voice thawed slightly. “He has been placed in an oxygen tent and has passed into a coma. We are doing all we can for him.”

  “I know that,” Coffin Ed said. “Thank you.”

  He hung up and went outside through the front door, locking it on the snap latch, and got into his Plymouth sedan.

  He stopped in the neighborhood pharmacy to get four and a half pounds of sugar of milk. The pharmacist had only half the amount in supply, so Coffin Ed told him to fill it out with quinine.

  The pharmacist stared at him goggle-eyed, torn between suspicion and amazement.

  “It’s for a gag,” Coffin Ed said. “I’m playing a joke on a friend.”

  “Oh,” the pharmacist said, relaxing, then added with a grin, “As a matter of fact, this mixture is good for a cold.”

  Coffin Ed had him wrap it securely and seal all the seams with Scotch tape.

  From there he drove into Brooklyn and stopped in a sporting goods store. He bought a square yard of rubberized silk, in which he carefully wrapped the package from the pharmacy. The clerk assisted. They sealed the seams with rubber cement.

  “That’ll keep it dry on the bottom of the sea,” the clerk said proudly.

  “That’s what I want,” Coffin Ed said.

  He bought a small blue canvas utility bag and put the package inside of it. Then he bought a pair of dark green goggles and a soft woolen Scotch beret large enough so that it wouldn’t press too hard on the knot on his head.

  On first glance he looked like a beatnik escaped from Greenwich Village. But that impression was quickly dispelled by the bulge beneath his breast pocket and the frightening tic in his dangerous-looking face.

  “Good luck, sir,” the clerk said doubtfully.

  “I’ll need it,” Coffin Ed said.

  15

  It was one of those big, old-fashioned, four-story houses on 139th Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues. It had a limestone façade flanked by Ionic columns and a hand-carved mahogany door with crystal glass panels which had been enameled black. There was a carriage entrance on one side. The carriage house had been converted into a garage.

  Years back, when the street had been inhabited by the nouveau riche, it had claimed pretensions. Then during the 1920s a smart colored real estate promoter filled the old mansions with socially ambitious Negro professionals, and it became known throughout the length and breadth of Harlem as “Strivers’ Row”.

  But during the depression of the 1930s, hard times came upon the strivers like a storm of locusts and the street went rapidly down from sugar to shucks. The houses were first partitioned into flats, then the flats were divided into rooms. Then the madams took over and filled the rooms with prostitutes.

  Coffin Ed parked his Plymouth in front of the house, got out and opened the back door. He reached inside and grasped the handle to a chain and pulled out the oversize dog. She was muzzled again but the wound on her head had been neatly bandaged and she looked more respectable.

  He led her around the side of the house, past the carriage entrance, and rang the back door bell.

  The kitchen door was wide open. Only the heavy screen outer door was locked. Coffin Ed watched a fat kimono-clad woman waddle in his direction.

  She peered through the screen and said, “My God, it’s Coffin Ed.”

  She unlocked the door and opened it for him to enter, then drew back quickly at sight of the dog. “What’s that thing?”

  “It’s a dog.”

  Her eyebrows went up. She had hennaed hair almost the same shade as her eyes, and wrinkled skin which was heavily coated with Max Factor pancake makeup and copper-red suntan powder. She was called Red Marie.

  “It won’t bite, will it?” she asked. Her voice sounded as though she had something down her throat, and her thickly painted, greasy red lips curled and popped, exposing gold teeth smeared with lipstick.

  “It can’t bite,” he said, pushing into the kitchen.

  It was a modern electrical kitchen. Everything was spotlessly clean and dazzling white. A young whore, still active and competing, dreams of diamonds and furs. But an old whore, no longer active and competing, whether she’s gone down to a toothless hag or up to a rich landprop, dreams of a kitchen like this. It contained every kind of electrical gadget imaginable, including a big white enamel electric clock over the stove.

  Coffin Ed looked at the clock. It read 4:23. Time was getting short.

  On a small white enamel table to one side a white enamel radio stood on top of a blond oak television set. A television program was showing but the sound was turned off.

  A big slouchy man with short kinky red hair growing in burs about a bald spot sat in a tubular stainless-steel chair with his elbows propped on top of a large white enamel kitchen table.

  “We was just listening to the radio,” he said. “It said Digger has been shot up and you both is off the force.”

  He sounded happy about it; but not happy enough to get his teeth knocked out.

  Coffin Ed stood in the center of the floor, holding the dog loosely by the chain.

  “Listen,” he said. “You can make
it light on yourselves. I ain’t got much time. Where can I find Pinky?” His voice sounded forced, as though he had a stricture in his throat, and the tic was running away.

  The man glanced at him, then looked back at the bottle of whiskey before him on the table and reaching out, touched it with the fingertips of both hands.

  He had a broad flat face, rough reddish skin and little reddish eyes from which tears leaked continuously. He was called Red Johnny. He might have been related to Pinky.

  He wore a white silk shirt open at the throat, green-and-red checked suspenders, tan gabardine pants, white-and-tan wing-tipped shoes, and the usual heavy gold jewelry denoting a successful pimp: gold ring with a huge milky stone of unknown origin, gold ring with three-quarter-carat yellow diamond, and a gold lodge ring with the outline of an owl with two ruby eyes.

  He crossed glances with Red Marie, standing to the left and behind Coffin Ed, then he spread his thick-fingered hands and looked at the gun bulge on Coffin Ed’s shoulder.

  “We’re clean,” he muttered. “We keeps squared off with the captain and you ain’t rightly got no authority no more.”

  “We don’t even know nobody called Pinky,” Red Marie spoke up.

  “All you’re doing is asking for trouble,” Coffin Ed said. His jaw muscles rippled beneath the tic as he tried to control his rage. “You ain’t got one mother-raping reason on earth to cover for Pinky. It’s just that I’m the law and you resent me. Now you can show it. But you’re making a mistake.”

  “What mistake?” Red Johnny asked. He could barely keep the insolence from his voice.

  “You’re over fifty,” Coffin Ed said. “You spent thirteen years in stir on a second-degree murder rap. Now you’re doing all right. You got this house through a lucky hit on the numbers and you set this ex-hustler up as a madam. I know you both. She did her bit too in stir for stabbing a teen-age whore not quite to death. Then when she got back on the bricks she streetwalked for a chickenshit pimp called Dandy who got his throat cut by a square for playing around with the deck in a five-and-ten-cent blackjack game. Now you’re both going great. Times are good. Tricks are walking. The streets are full of lains. Squares everywhere. The money’s rolling in. You’re paying off the man. You’re sitting pretty. But you’re making one mistake.”