The Heat's On Part 15

"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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sisted. 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 facade flanked by Ionic columns and a hand-carved mahogany door with crystal gla.s.s 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 part.i.tioned into flats, then the flats were divided into rooms. Then the madams took over and filled the rooms with prost.i.tutes.

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 G.o.d, 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 wh.o.r.e, still active and competing, dreams of diamonds and furs. But an old wh.o.r.e, 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 wingtipped 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 n.o.body 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 wh.o.r.e not quite to death. Then when she got back on the bricks she streerwalked for a chickens.h.i.t 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."

"You said that before. What mistake?"

Coffin Ed let the handle to the dog chain drop to the floor. "I ain't playing," he said.

Red Johnny folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. His gaze dropped slightly to the impression of the gun stick in Coffin Ed's belt.

"Course you ain't rightly got no authority to come in here and ast me no questions 'bout n.o.body," he began, and from across the table Red Marie warned, "Don't push him, Johnny."

"I ain't pushing him and I ain't going to let him push me neither. I done already told him I don't know no Pinky and he can-"

He never got to say what Coffin Ed could do. One whole side of Coffin Ed's face convulsed in a muscular spasm as his right hand flashed toward his hip. Red Johnny moved out of animal reflex; his head jerked about, eyes following the movement of Coffin Ed's hand; his left foot braced against the floor; his left arm flew up instinctively to ward off the blow. He didn't see the motion of Coffin Ed's left hand at all as it came from the front with Grave Digger's pistol and smashed the barrel in a backhanded swing straight across his loose-lipped mouth.

The whole front line of Red Johnny's teeth caved into his mouth, two of the bottom teeth flew out sidewise like corn topping, and Red Johnny spun over backward in the tubular chair. The back of his head hit the linoleum floor with a dull thud while at the same instant his feet flew upward and kicked the bottom of the enamel table. The whiskey bottle rose six inches in the air and shattered the drinking gla.s.s when it came down.

The abrupt ear-shattering din panicked the dog. She leapt over Red Johnny's face, making for the inner door. Red Johnny thought she was leaping for his throat and tried to scream. Nothing came out but a spray of blood and he choked on his teeth.

Coffin Ed didn't see it. He had swung back to take a left-handed bead on Red Marie's stomach, and had frozen her in midstnde, her right hand waving out in front, left hand floating out behind, her big sloppy fat body poised on the ball of her right foot like a rip-roarious burlesque of a ballerina executing a movement in Swan Lake.

But no one thought it was funny. Her face was distorted with terror and Coffin Ed looked like a homicidal maniac.

The chair sc.r.a.ped as Red Johnny rolled over, clawing at his throat, making choking sounds.

The inside of Coffin Ed's head was one great flaming-red blast of pain, through which sound trickled like curses. From somewhere came the thought that Red Johnny was trying to draw a gun. He wheeled back and kicked Red Johnny on the base of the jaw.

"Ugh!" Red Johnny grunted and fainted.

The dog pushed open the inner door and ran down the hall, her chain clanking behind her.

Red Marie grabbed at the table edge for support; her fingers slipped off and she fell to the floor with a crash.

From the front of the house came the sound of women screaming.

Coffin Ed stood in the center of the floor with the long-barreled nickel-plated pistol in one hand and the sap in the other, looking as dazed as though he had just emerged from a shock treatment for insanity.

On the television screen three shrunken lunatics, arms about one another's shoulders, were dancing frantically back and forth, eyes rolling and lips flapping but no sound coming out.

Coffin Ed's head suddenly cleared; only a shrill, almost imperceptible whistling in both ears still remained.

He pocketed the sap, stuck the pistol back into his belt, and reached down and rolled Red Johnny over onto his stomach.

"Lawd, don't kill him," Red Marie wailed. "I'll talk."

"Give me a tablespoon and shut up," Coffin Ed grated. "He'll do his own mother-raping talking."

She crawled on all fours around the table and got a spoon from the drawer.

"Bring it here," Coffin Ed said, kneeling beside Red Johnny and lifting his head.

Red Johnny had swallowed his tongue. Coffin Ed stuck the spoon down Red Johnny's throat and kept levering until he got enough tongue out so he could reach in with his other hand and grab hold of the tip. The tongue was so slippery with blood it took half a dozen tries before he got hold of the tip and yanked it back into position. Blood gushed over his hands onto the floor and four broken teeth fell out.

"Here, you hold his tongue down until he gets his breath," he ordered Red Marie and made her take the handle of the spoon.

He got up and went to the sink and washed the blood from his hands with cold water from the tap, dried them on a kitchen towel. There was a small bloodstain on the cuff of his blue shirt, but he didn't bother it.

He came back and stood over the two people on the floor. "I'm going to ask some questions--"

"I'll answer 'em," Marie said.

"Let him answer them. When the answer is yes, nod your head. You hear me?"

Red Johnny's head nodded carefully.

"When the answer is no, shake your head. And don't make any more mistakes."

Again Red Johnny nodded.

"It hurts him," Red Marie said.

"I want it to hurt him," Coffin Ed said. "You run a shooting gallery in here?"

Red Johnny nodded.

"It ain't really no regular shooting gallery," Red Marie said defensively. "It's just we have some jags here sometimes, just folks with a chicken habit--"

"And pushers," Coffin Ed cut in.