The Heat's On

by Chester Himes

  The youth started to obey but Coffin Ed reached out again and took him by the arm. “You want to talk, don’t you, sonny?”

  The youth glanced again at the tic in Coffin Ed’s face and choked, “Yessuh.”

  18

  “It’s here,” Sister Heavenly told her red-eyed chauffeur.

  He pulled the Mercury to the curb beside a red-painted fireplug in front of the Harlem Hospital, cut the motor and reached behind his car for the marijuana butt. There were spaces to park in front and behind.

  “Pull away from this fireplug, you lunatic,” Sister Heavenly said. “You want the cops to nab you?”

  “Fireplug?” He turned his head and stared. “I didn’t seen it.”

  Nonchalantly he shifted into gear and pulled up a space.

  “Watch my dog and don’t let nobody steal it,” Sister Heavenly said and got out.

  She didn’t hear him mutter “Who’d want it?” She went across the street to a glass-fronted, white-trimmed surgical supply store.

  They were getting ready to close but she told the white clerk it was urgent.

  She ordered a large package of absorbent cotton, an eight-ounce bottle of chloroform, a scalpel, elbow-length rubber gloves, a full-length rubber apron, a rubber sheet, and a large enamel basin.

  “You forgot the forceps,” the clerk said.

  “I don’t need any forceps,” she said.

  The clerk looked her up and down. She was still carrying her parasol along with her beaded bag, but it was closed. He wanted to be sure to remember her in case of an investigation.

  “You ought to leave these things to the hospitals,” he said seriously. “There’re hospitals in the city where they’ll do it if it’s necessary.”

  He thought she was planning to perform an abortion. She dug him.

  “It’s my daughter,” she said. “I’ll do it myself.”

  He shrugged and wrapped up the bundle. She paid him and left.

  When she returned to the Mercury, the dog was whining, either from thirst or hunger. She got in and put the bundle on the floor and stroked the bitch’s head. “It won’t be long now,” she said gently.

  She had her chauffeur drive her to a fleabag hotel on 125th Street, a block distant from the 125th Street railroad station, and wait for her while she went inside.

  A glass-paneled door hanging askew permitted a hazardous entry into a long, narrow hall with a worn-out linoleum floor and peeling wallpaper, smelling of male urine, whore stink, stale vomit and the cheapest of perfume. What was left on the wallpaper was decorated with graffiti that would have embarrassed the peddlers of obscene pictures in Montmartre.

  At the back, underneath the staircase, was a scarred wooden counter barricading a padded desk chair behind which hung a letter box holding identical dime store skeleton keys. A hotel bell stood on the counter; above it on the wall was a pushbutton with the legend NIGHT BELL.

  No one was in sight.

  Sister Heavenly slapped her gloved palm on the hotel bell. No sound came forth. She picked it up and looked underneath. The clapper was missing. She leaned her thumb on the night bell. Nothing happened. She took the handle of her parasol and banged the side of the hotel bell. It sounded like a fire truck.

  A long time later a man emerged from a half-door in the dark recess behind the desk chair. He was a middle-aged brownskin man with a face full of boils, a head full of tetter, and glazed brown eyes. He had a thick, fat, powerful-looking torso; his collarless shirt was open showing a chest covered with thick nappy hair.

  He limped forward, his heavy body moving sluggishly, and put his hands on the counter.

  “What can I do for you, madame?” he said in the voice of a baritone singer. His diction was good and his enunciation distinct.

  Sister Heavenly was past being surprised by anything.

  “I want a quiet room with a safe lock,” she said.

  “All of our rooms are quiet,” he said. “And you are as safe here as in the lap of Jesus.”

  “You have a vacancy?”

  “Yes, madame, we have vacancies all the time.”

  “I’ll bet you do,” she said. “Just a minute while I go get my luggage.”

  She went out and paid off her chauffeur and took the dog by the leash and her bundle by the string. When she returned, the proprietor was waiting at the foot of the stairs.

  He had an atrophied leg, evidently from polio, and he looked like a spider climbing the stairs. Sister Heavenly followed patiently behind him.

  From behind a door on the second floor came loud voices raised in argument: “Who you talking to, you blue-gum nigger!”

  “You better shut up, you piss-colored whore.…”

  From behind another came the sound of pots and pans banging around and the smell of boiling ham hocks and cabbage.

  From a third the sound of bodies crashing against furniture, objects falling to the floor, feet scuffling, panting grunts and a woman’s voice shrilling, “Just wait ’til I get loose—”

  The proprietor limped slowly ahead without giving the slightest notice as though he were stone-deaf.

  They ascended slowly to the third floor and he opened a door with one of the ten-cent skeleton keys and said, “Here you are, madame, the quietest room in the house.”

  A window looked down on 125th Street. It was the rush hour. The roar of the traffic poured in. Directly below was a White Rose bar. A jukebox was blasting and the loud strident voice of Screaming Jay Hawkins was raised in song. From the room next door came the blaring of a radio tuned up so loud the sound was frayed.

  The room contained a single bed, straight-backed chair, chest of drawers, six eight-penny nails driven into a board on the inner wall to serve as a clothes closet, a chamber pot, and a washbasin with two taps.

  Sister Heavenly went across the room and tried the taps. The cold water ran but the hot water tap was dry.

  “Who wants hot water in this weather?” the proprietor said, carefully touching his face with a dirty handkerchief.

  “I’ll take it,” Sister Heavenly said, tossing her bundle onto the bed.

  “That will be three dollars, please,” the proprietor said.

  She gave him three dollars in small change.

  He thanked her and snapped the inside bolt back and forth suggestively and limped off.

  She closed the door, locked it on the inside, and snapped the bolt. Then she laid her bag and parasol on the bed beside the bundle, removed her hat and wig, sat on the side of the bed and took off her shoes and stockings. When she stood up she was baldheaded and barefooted.

  The dog began to whine again.

  “In just a moment, honey,” she said.

  She took out her pipe, loaded it with the finely ground stems of marijuana and lit it with her gold-plated lighter. The dog laid its head in her lap and she stroked it gently as she sucked the smoke deep into her lungs.

  Someone knocked on the door and a slick, ingratiating voice said, “Hey Jack, I hears you, man. Leave me blow a little with you. This is old Playboy.”

  Sister Heavenly ignored him. After a while the disgruntled voice said, “I hopes the man catches you, stingy mother-raper.”

  Sister Heavenly finished her pipe and put it away. Then she rolled up her skirt, exposing her thin bird’s legs, and pinned it above her knees. She peeled off her silk gloves and put on the rubber ones; and hooked the long rubber apron over her head and fastened it securely behind.

  She took the package of cotton, the bottle of chloroform and the chair and sat in front of the open window.

  “Here, Sheba,” she called.

  The dog came and nuzzled her bare feet. She hooked the handle of the leash onto the lower half of the sash lock, tore off a swab of cotton, saturated it with chloroform and held it to the dog’s nose. The dog reared back and broke off the lock. She chased it across the room and stuck the saturated cotton inside the nose of the muzzle. The dog gave a long pitiful howl and broke for the window. She grabbed the end of the
chain leash and swung the dog around just before it jumped, then quickly she grabbed the open bottle of chloroform and poured it over the dog’s nose. The howling stopped. The dog gasped for breath and settled slowly to the floor, legs extended stiffly front and back. Its lips drew back, exposing clenched teeth, its eyes became fixed; it shuddered violently and lay still.

  Quickly she spread the rubber sheet in the center of the floor and placed the enamel basin on it. She dragged the dog and laid its head in the basin and cut its throat with the scalpel. Then she lifted it by the rear legs and let it bleed.

  She dumped the blood into the washbasin, turned on the water and left it running. She brought the enamel basin back and began to disembowel the carcass.

  It was bloody, dirty, filthy work. She opened the stomach and split the intestines. She was nauseated beyond description. Twice she vomited into the filth. But she kept on.

  Down below, the jukebox blasted; next door the radio blared. Strident voices sounded from the street; horns blared in the jammed traffic. Colored people swarmed up and down the sidewalks; the bars were packed; people stood in line in front of the cafeteria across the street.

  The hot poisonous air inside of the room, stinking of blood, chloroform and dog-gut, was enough to suffocate the average person. But Sister Heavenly stood it. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for money.

  When finally she had convinced herself there wasn’t anything inside of the dog but blood and filth, she threw the scalpel into the carcass and said, “Well, that’s lovely.”

  She crawled to the window, put her arms on the ledge, and sucked in the hot, stinking outside air.

  Then she stood up, took off the bloody apron and spread it over the bloody carcass, peeled off her gloves and dropped them beside it. The rubber sheet was covered with blood and filth and some had run off onto the linoleum floor.

  It ain’t any worse than some of the tricks I’ve turned, she thought.

  She went to the basin and washed her hands, arms and feet. She took a fresh handkerchief from her bag, saturated it with pertume, and wiped her bald head, face, neck and arms, and feet. She remade her face, put on her gray wig and black straw hat, sat on the bed and put on her shoes and stockings, put down her skirt, picked up her beaded bag and parasol, and left the room, locking the door behind her and taking the key along.

  The proprietor was coming in from the street as she went out.

  “You left your dog,” he said.

  “I’m coming back.”

  “Will she be quiet while you’re gone?”

  For the first time in more than thirty years Sister Heavenly felt slightly hysterical.

  “She’s the quietest dog in the city,” she said.

  19

  First, Coffin Ed and the youth called Wop had driven out to the Bronx and looked at the remains of Sister Heavenly’s house. A police barricade had been thrown about it and experts from the safe and loft squad were still digging in the wreckage. One look had been enough for Coffin Ed.

  Afterwards, employing Wop as his guide, he made a junkie’s tour of Harlem. Wop was known to all the landprops as Daddy Haddy’s runner and had the entree. Coffin Ed had the persuader.

  Pushing Wop in front of him to ring the doorbells and give the passwords, with the muzzle of Grave Digger’s pistol poking in his spine, he had crashed all the notorious shooting galleries in Harlem, the joints where the addicts met to take their kicks and greet their chicks; where the skinpoppers and the schmeckers (those who used the needle and those who sniffed the powder), the pushers and the weedheads gathered for sex circuses and to listen to the real cool jive.

  He had gone in with a long nickel-plated revolver in each hand and homicide in his eyes.

  He had flushed famous jazzmen, international blues singers, sophisticated socialites both white and colored, prominent people both men and women, mingling with the racketeers and the gamblers, the whores and the thieves and the dregs of humanity; all being rooked together by the peddlers of the five-colored dreams and the cool dry jags and the hot sex licks.

  He had encountered the furtive and the indignant, “respectable” women who had burst into tears, puffed-up jokers who claimed political pull; those who couldn’t care less about being caught and those who figured money would settle it.

  His entrance had set off panic, engendered terror, triggered rage. Jokers on the lam had jumped from windows, landprops had threatened to call the police, housewives had hidden under beds, drug-crazed starkers had charged him with stickers.

  He had tamed the rambunctious and pacified the pacifists. He was not a narcotics man; he didn’t even have a shield. His entrance was illegal and he had no authority. All he had had was muscle, and it hadn’t worked.

  He had left a trail of hysteria, screaming jeebies, knotty heads and bloody noses. But it hadn’t meant a thing. He hadn’t gotten any leads, hadn’t found out anything he didn’t know. Just a blank.

  No one had admitted to seeing Pinky all that day. No one had admitted to seeing a yellow-skinned cat-eyed woman in a green suit accompanied by two white mobsters looking for Pinky. No one had ever heard of Sister Heavenly. No one had known anything about anything. He couldn’t pull them in and sweat it out.

  And yet he knew some of them were lying. He was certain, since talking to Kid Blackie, that Ginny, the janitor’s wife, and the two gunmen were making the same tour. They were either in front of him or behind him, or perhaps more than once they had crossed paths. But he hadn’t seen a sign of them, nothing to indicate whether they were following him or in front of him. He had doubled back and laid in wait and they hadn’t showed

  Now it was eleven o’clock at night. Coffin Ed sat in his parked car with the lights off in the middle of a dark block on St Nicholas Avenue opposite the park. He could feel the trembling body of the youth beside him, even though they were separated by two feet of space. He could hear Wop’s teeth chattering in the dark. The youth’s jag had worn off and the smell of terror came from him like a sickening miasma.

  Coffin Ed reached into the dark and turned on the dashboard radio to catch the eleven-o’clock news broadcast.

  A mealymouthed male voice came on, imitating some big-name newscaster, and blabbed about domestic politics, the Cold War, what the Africans were doing, the latest on the civil rights front and a fistfight between two motion picture actors in El Morocco.

  Coffin Ed wasn’t listening but the sound of the voice set his teeth on edge. The top of his head felt like it was coming off. He had long since discarded his goggles but his eyes felt gritty.

  He tried to think, but his thoughts didn’t make any sense. They were jumping about in his head like buck-and-wing dancers on their last breath. “Give a little, take a little,” one side of his brain was saying, while the other side was cursing in a blinding rage. He thought for a moment of how he would line the mother-rapers up and shoot them down.

  He realized that he was wandering badly and caught himself. “Ain’t no time to blow your top now, son,” he told himself.

  They had just one more place to go. It was run by a Harlem society matron, and it wasn’t going to be easy to crash. He didn’t want to hurry it. If it turned out to be another blank, he’d be up shit alley.

  “You said you was going to give me my fare to Chicago,” a choked dry voice stammered from the dark beside him.

  “You’ll get it,” he said absently, his cluttered thoughts echoing, “He thinks that’s far enough.”

  “Kin I get some of my clothes?”

  “Why not?” he said automatically, but he didn’t even hear the question. The thought of Chicago had got mixed up with the two gunmen he was hunting and he added aloud, “Mother-rapers better get off the face of the earth.”

  Wop shrunk into silence.

  The voice from the radio blabbed on: “… when Queen Elizabeth passed over the bridge.…” It sounded to Coffin Ed as though he said “when Queen Elizabeth pissed over the bridge …” and he wondered vaguely what did she do
that for.

  “You going to take me by my room?” Wop stammered hesitantly.

  “What for?”

  “They going be laying for me. They going kill me. You know they going kill me. You promised you’d protect me. You said if I steered you to them cribs wouldn’t nobody hurt me. Now you going let ’em—” He began getting hysterical.

  Coffin Ed drew back wearily and slapped him across the face.

  The voice cut off and the hysteria subsided, followed by snuffling sounds.

  Coffin Ed listened to the newscaster report the finding of Daddy Haddy’s body by the patrolman on the beat. The words caught in his brain like red-hot rivets: “… died of gunshot wounds received earlier today while investigating a homicide in the basement of an apartment house on Riverside Drive. Jones, known locally in Harlem as Grave Digger, was one of the famous Harlem Detective team, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. They were on suspension for assaulting an alleged dope peddler named Jake Kubansky who subsequently died. The assailant, or assailants, are unknown. Reports from the homicide bureau—”

  He reached out and turned the radio off. It was a reflex action, without thought. Perhaps from a subconscious desire to reject the knowledge by stopping the voice.

  His mind fought against acceptance. He sat without moving, without breathing. But finally it sank in.

  “That’s it,” he said aloud.

  Wop hadn’t heard a word of it. His terrified thoughts were concentrated on himself.

  “But you’re going to take me to the station, ain’t you? You going get me safe on the train, ain’t you?”

  Coffin Ed turned his head slowly and looked at him. The muscles of his face were jumping almost out of control, but his reflexes were like a sleepwalker’s.

  “You’re one of them too,” he said in a constricted voice. “Give you another month or two and you’ll be on junk. You’ll have the monkey on your back that you got to feed by stealing and robbing and murdering.”

  As the voice hammered him with deadly intensity, Wop cringed in the corner of his seat and got smaller and smaller.