The Real Cool Killers Part 25

Everybody turned and looked at him. They were solemn for a moment.

"Nothing's ever going to wake her up again," the lieutenant from homicide said. "She must have been dead for hours."

"All right, all right, all right," the chief shouted. "Let's clean up here and get away. We've got this case tied up tighter than d.i.c.k's hatband." Then he added in a pleased tone of voice, "That wasn't too difficult, was it?"

17.

It was eleven o'clock the next morning.

Inky and Bones had spilled their guts.

It had gone hard for them and when the cops got through with them they were as knotty as fat pine.

The remaining members of the Real Cool Moslems -- Camel Mouth, Beau Baby, Punkin Head and Slow Motion -- had been rounded up, questioned and were now being held along with Inky and Bones.

Their statements had been practically identical: They had been standing on the corner of 12 7th Street and Lenox Avenue.

Q. What for?

A. Just having a dress rehearsal.

Q. What? Dress rehearsal?

A. Yas suh. Like they do on Broadway. We was practicing wearing our new A-rab costumes.

Q. And you saw Mr. Galen when he ran past?

A. Yas suh, that's when we seed him.

Q. Did you recognize him?

A. Naw suh, we didn't know him.

Q. Sheik knew him.

A. Yas suh, but he didn't say he knew 'im and we'd never seen him before.

Q. Choo-Choo must have known him, too.

A. Yas suh, must'ave. Him and Sheik usta room together.

Q. But you saw Sheik shoot him?

A. Yas suh. He said, "Watch this," and pulled out his new zip gun and shot at him.

Q. How many times did he shoot?

A. Just once. That's all a zip gun will shoot.

Q. Yes, these zip guns are single shots. But you knew he had the gun?

A. Yas suh. He'd been working on it for 'most a week.

Q. He made it himself?

A. Yas suh.

Q. Had you ever seen him shoot it previously?

A. Naw suh. It were just finished. He hadn't tried it out.

Q. But you knew he had it on his person?

A. Yas suh. He were going to try it out that night.

Q. And after he shot the white man, what did you do?

A. The man fell down and we went up to see if he'd hit him.

Q. Were you acquainted with the first suspect, Sonny Pickens?

A. Naw suh, we seed him for the first time too when he come past there shootin'.

Q. When you saw the white man had been killed, did you know Sheik had shot him?

A. Naw suh, we thought the other fellow had did it.

Q. Which one of you, er, pa.s.sed the wind?

A. Suh?

Q. Which one of you broke wind?

A. Oh, that were Choo-Choo, suh, he the one fatted.

Q. Was there any special significance in that?

A. Suh?

Q. Why did he do it?

A. That were just a salute we give to the cops.

Q. Oh! Was the perfume throwing part of it?

A. Yas suh, when they got mad Caleb thew the perfume on them.

Q. To allay their anger, er, ah, make them jolly?

A. Naw suh, to make them madder.

Q. Oh! Well, why did Sheik kidnap Pickens, the other suspect?

A. Just to put something over on the cops. He hated cops.

Q. Why?

A. Suh?

Q. Why did he hate cops? Did he have any special reason to hate cops?

A. Special reason? To hate cops? Naw suh. He didn't need none. Just they was cops, is all.

Q. Ah, yes, just they was cops.. Is this the zip gun Sheik had?

A. Yas suh. Leastwise it looks like it.

Q. How did Bones come to be in possession of it?

A. He gave it to Bones when he was running off. Bones's old man work for the city and he figgered it was safe with Bones.

Q. That's all for you, boy. You had better be scared.

A. Ah is.

That was the case. Open and shut.

Sonny Pickens could not be implicated in the murder. He was being held temporarily on a charge of disturbing the peace while a district attorney's a.s.sistant was studying the New York State criminal code to see what other charge could be lodged against him for shooting a citizen with a blank gun.

His friends, Lowtop Brown and Rubberlips Wilson had been hauled in as suspicious persons.

The cases of the two girls had been referred to the probation officers, but as yet nothing had been done. Both were supposedly at their respective homes, suffering from shock.

The bullet had been removed from the victim's brain and given to the ballistics bureau. No further autopsy was required. Mr. Galen's daughter, Mrs. Helen Kruger of Wading River, Long Island, had claimed the body for burial.

The bodies of the others, Granny and Caleb, Choo-Choo and Sheik, lay unclaimed in the morgue. Perhaps the Baptist church in Harlem, of which Granny was a member, would give her a decent Christian burial. She had no life insurance and it would be financially inconvenient for the church, unless the members contributed to defray the costs.

Caleb would be buried along with Sheik and Choo-Choo in potters field, unless the medical college of one of the universities obtained their bodies for dissection. No college would want Choo-Choo's, however, because it had been too badly damaged.

Ready Belcher was in Harlem Hospital, in the same ward where Charlie Richardson, whose arm had been chopped off, had died earlier. His condition was serious, but he would live. He would never look the same, however, and should his teenage wh.o.r.e ever see him again she wouldn't recognize him.

Big Smiley and Reba were being held for contributing to the delinquency of minors, manslaughter, operating a house of prost.i.tution, and sundry other charges.

The woman who was shot in the leg by Coffin Ed was in Knickerbocker Hospital. Two ambulance-chasing shysters were vying with each other for her consent to sue Coffin Ed and the New York police department on a fifty-fifty split of the judgement, but her husband was holding out for a sixty-percent cut.

That was the story; the second and corrected story. The late editions of the morning newspapers had gone hog wild with it: The prominent New York Citizen hadn't been shot, as first reported, by a drunken Negro who had resented his presence in a Harlem bar. No, not at all. He had been shot to death by a teenage Harlem gangster called Sheik, who was the leader of a teenage gang called the Real Cool Moslems. Why? Well, Sheik had wanted to find out if his zip gun would actually shoot.

The copy writers used a book of adjectives to describe the bizarre aspects of the three-ring Harlem murder; meanwhile they tossed a bone of commendation to the brave policemen who had worked through the small hours of the morning, tracking down the killer in the Harlem jungle and shooting him to death in his lair less than six hours after the fatal shot had been fired.

The headlines read:

POLICE PUT HEAT ON REAL COOL MOSLEMS.

DEATH IS THE KISS-OFF FOR THRILL KILL.

HARLEM MANIAC RUNS AMUCK.

But already the story was a thing of the past, as dead as the four main characters.

"Kill it," ordered the city editor of an afternoon paper. "Someone else has already been murdered somewhere else."

Uptown in Harlem, the sun was shining on the same drab scene it illuminated every other morning at eleven o'clock. No one missed the few expendable colored people being held on various charges in the big new granite skyc.r.a.per jail on Centre Street that had replaced the old New York City tombs.

In the same building, in a room high up on the southwest corner, with a fine clear view of the Battery and North River, all that remained of the case was being polished off.

Earlier the police commissioner and the chief of police had had a heart-to-heart talk about possible corruption in the Harlem branch of the police department.

"There are strong indications that Galen was protected by some influential person up there, either the police department or in the city government," the police commissioner said.

"Not in the department," the chief maintained. "In the first place, that low license number of his -- UG-Sixteen -- tells me he had friends higher up than a precinct captain, because that kind of license number is issued only to the specially privileged, and that don't even include me."

"Did you find any connections with politicians in that area?"

"Not connecting Galen; but the woman, Reba, telephoned a colored councilman this morning and ordered him to get down here and get her out on bail."