Blind Man With a Pistol (10 page)

     
"It's the jungle, ain't it?" Coffin Ed growled. "What did you expect?"

     
"The blood, the blood," she moaned. "Everyone was bleeding."

     
Grave Digger waited for her to regain her composure, exchanging looks with Coffin Ed. Both were thinking maybe hers was the solution but was it the time? Would sexual integration start inside the black ghetto or outside in the white community? But it didn't seem as though she would regain her composure, so Grave Digger asked, "Who started the cutting?"

     
"Mister Sam's wife jumped up to attack Mister Sam's little tramp, but suddenly she turned on Doctor Mubuta. I suppose it was because of the money," she added.

     
"What money?"

     
"Mister Sam had a satchel full of money under the bed which he said he was going to give to Doctor Mubuta for making him young."

     
The detectives froze. More blood was shed for money in Harlem than for any other reason.

     
"How much?"

     
"He said it was all he had--"

     
"Have you heard about the money?" Grave Digger asked Coffin Ed.

     
"No. Homicide must know. We'd better check with Anderson."

     
"Later." He turned back to Anny. "Did everyone see it?"

     
"Actually it was in a Gladstone bag," Anny said. "He let Doctor Mubuta look into the hag, but didn't anyone else actually see it. But Doctor Mubuta looked like it was a lot of money--"

     
"Looked like?"

     
"His expression. He seemed surprised."

     
"By the money?"

     
"By the amount, I suppose. The attorney demanded to see it. But Mister Sam -- or maybe it was Doctor Mubuta -- shut the bag and put it back beneath the bed, then Mister Sam said it was just paper, that he was joking. But everything seemed to change after that, as though the air got filled with violence. Mister Sam told Doctor Mubuta to go on with the experiment -- the rejuvenation -- because he wanted to be young again so he could marry. Then Mister Sam's tramp -- Mildred -- said she was his fiancée, and Mister Sam's wife, Viola, jumped up and took a knife out of her bag and ran towards the tramp -- girl -- and she crawled underneath Mister Sam's bed, so Mister Sam's wife turned on Doctor Mubuta, and Mister Sam drank some rejuvenating fluid and began to howl like a dog. I'm sure Doctor Mubuta didn't expect that reaction, he seemed to turn white. But he had the presence of mind to push Mister Sam down on the bed, and shout to us to run--"

     
Grave Digger broke the spell of his absorbed fascination and asked, "Why?"

     
"Why what?"

     
"Why run?"

     
"He said the 'Bird of Youth' was entering."

     
Grave Digger stared at her. Coffin Ed stared at her.

     
"How old are you?" Coffin Ed asked.

     
Her mind was so locked in the terrifying memory she didn't hear the question. She didn't see them. Her vision had turned back to that terrifying moment and she looked as though she were blind. "Then when Johnson X, Mister Sam's chauffeur, began to howl too -- until then he had seemed the sanest one -- we ran. . . ."

     
"Up to your apartment?"

     
"And locked the door."

     
"And you didn't see what happened to the bag of money?"

     
"We didn't see anything else."

     
"When did Van Raff come upstairs?"

     
"Oh, sometime later -- I don't know how long. He knocked on the door a long time before we opened it, then Dick, my husband, peeped out and found him unconscious on the floor and we brought him in--"

     
"Did he have the bag of money?"

     
"No, he had been stabbed all over the head and--"

     
"We know all that. Now who were all the people at this shindig?"

     
"There were me and Dick, my husband --"

     
"We know he's your husband, you don't have to keep on insisting," Coffin Ed interrupted.

     
She tried to see his face through the curtain of shadow and Grave Digger went over to the wall and turned the lights down.

     
"That better?" he asked.

     
"Yes, we're black cops," Coffin Ed said.

     
"Don't insist," she said, getting back some of her own. "I can see it."

     
Grave Digger chuckled. "Your husband --" he prompted.

     
"My husband," she repeated defiantly. "He's Mister Sam's son, you know."

     
"We know."

     
"And Mister Sam's wife, Viola, and Mister Sam's attorney, Van Raff, and Mister Sam's chauffeur, Johnson X, and Mister Sam's tramp -- fiancée -- Mildred--"

     
"What you got against her? You changed your race?" Coffin Ed interrupted.

     
"Leave her be," Grave Digger cautioned.

     
But she wasn't daunted. "Yes, but not to your race, to the human race."

     
"That'll hold him."

     
"Naw, it won't. I got no reverence for these white women going 'round joining the human race. It ain't that easy for us colored folks."

     
"Later, man, later," Grave Digger said. "Let's stick to our business."

     
"That is our business."

     
"All right. But let's cook one pigeon at the time."

     
"Why?"

     
"You're right," Anny said. "It's too easy for us."

     
"That's all I said," Coffin Ed said, and having made his point, withdrew into the shadow.

     
"And Doctor Mubuta," Grave Digger said, taking up where she had left off.

     
"Yes, of course. I haven't got anything against Mildred," she added, reverting to the question. "But when a teen-age girl like her takes up with a dirty' old man like Mister Sam, just for what she can get out of him, she's a tramp, that's all."

     
"All right," Grave Digger conceded.

     
"And Sugartit," she said.

     
"She was the one sent to the hospital? What's her name?"

     
"I don't know her real name, just Sugartit."

     
"She was the teen-age colored girl -- whycome she ain't a tramp?" Coffin Ed said.

     
"She just wasn't, that's all."

     
"I have a daughter they used to call Sugartit," he said.

     
"This girl's not your daughter," Anny said, looking at him. "This girl's sick."

     
He didn't know whether she meant it as a jibe or a compliment.

     
"Is she a relative of Mister Sam's?" Grave Digger asked.

     
"I don't think so. I don't know why she was there."

     
"Doctor Mubuta?"

     
"Maybe, I don't know. All I know about her is what people say, that she's 'covered'. It seems she's the girl friend of the Syndicate's district boss -- if that's what he's called. Anyway the top man."

     
"How'd you get to know her?"

     
"I didn't really know her. She'd wander into the flat sometimes -- always when Dick was out. I think it might have been when the Syndicate boss was seeing Mister Sam downstairs."

     
Grave Digger's head moved slowly up and down. An idea was knocking at his mind, trying to get in. He looked at Coffin Ed and saw he was disturbed by a nagging idea too. The Syndicate didn't have any business in a joke like this. If an old man with a cheating, scheming wife wanted to risk his life with a charlatan like Doctor Mubuta, that was his business. But the Syndicate wouldn't have a lookout staked unless there was more to it than that.

     
"And the last you saw of the Gladstone bag full of money was when Doctor Mubuta put it back underneath the bed?" he asked. Coffin Ed gave a slight nod.

     
"Oh, it was there all the time, when Viola rushed at Mildred and when she turned on Doctor Mubuta and it was there when he yelled for us to run--"

     
"Maybe the 'Bird of Youth' took it," Coffin Ed said.

     
"You know he was killed too-- Doctor Mubuta?"

     
"Yes."

     
"Who told you?" he shot the question at her.

     
"Why you did," she said. "Don't you remember? When you brought me and Dick here? You asked him were we present when the doctor was killed."

     
"I'd forgotten," he confessed sheepishly.

     
"I hated for him to be killed more than anyone," she said. "I knew he was a fake--"

     
"How'd you know it?"

     
"He had to be--"

     
"Earlier you said--"

     
"I know what I said. But he touched me."

     
Both of them looked at her with new interest.

     
"How so?" Grave Digger asked.

     
"When he was telling Mister Sam he'd discovered the solution for the Negro problem was for Negroes to outlive the white people."

     
They looked at her curiously. "You're a strange woman," Grave Digger said.

     
"Because I was moved by the idea?" she asked surprisedly. "I was just ashamed."

     
"Well, he's found the final solution now," Grave Digger said.

     
Next they interviewed Dick. He answered their questions with a lackadaisical indifference. He didn't seem affected by either the death of his father or his stepmother, and he couldn't care less about the others. Sure, he knew Doctor Mubuta was a con man, all the hepcats in Harlem had him made. Of course his father knew, he and Doctor Mubuta were in cahoots. They probably staged the act for Mister Sam to cache some money away. His father was senile but he wasn't a square, he knew his wife and Van Raff were teaming up on him. The way he figured it, it looked like Doctor Mubuta crossed the old man, he felt certain the Gladstone bag was filled with money. But he couldn't figure what went wrong at the end, there had to be another person.

     
"Who?" Grave Digger asked.

     
"How the hell do I know?" he answered.

     
He'd never had any part in Mister Sam's rackets. All he knew was his old man fronted for four numbers houses; he would appear at the houses when the tallies were made and the hits paid off. But other people ran the show. The numbers were like a Wall Street brokerage these days. There were girls with calculators and clerks operating adding machines and a supervisor at each house directing the business. The runners collected the plays from the writers and collected the hits from the house and paid them back to the writers who paid off the players and the staffs at the houses never saw the players. In fact they were like high-paid clerks; they bought big cars and houses on credit and lived it up. His father was just a figurehead and a fall guy in case someone had to take a rap, the Syndicate was the real boss. He didn't know whether his father got a salary or a commission, anyway, he did all right for himself considering his age, but the Syndicate took forty percent of the gross.

     
"Good picking," Grave Digger said drily.

     
"Multimillion-dollar business," Dick agreed.

     
"Why didn't you take a cut?" Coffin Ed asked curiously.

     
"I'm a musician," Dick said as though that were the answer.

     
He didn't know anything about Sugartit, he said. He saw her the first time at the seance, if that's what you want to call it. The only way he knew her name was hearing Anny call her Sugartit.

     
"Does you wife know much about the Harlem scene?" Grave Digger asked.

     
For the first time Dick gave a question thought.

     
"I don't really know," he confessed. "She's at home alone a lot. Most nights she catches the show at The Spot and we go home together. But I don't know what she does with her days. I'm generally asleep or out. Maybe Viola came to see her, I don't know who she saw; it was her time and she had to fill it."

     
"Did you trust her up there with all the soul brothers?" Coffin Ed asked curiously. "Smalls almost just around the corner and sharp cats cruising up the Avenue all day long in their Cadillacs and Buicks red-hot for a big Southern blonde."

     
"Hell, if you got to worry about your white chick, you can't afford her," Dick said.

     
"And you never saw Sugartit before last night?" Grave Digger persisted.

     
"If you so worried about this mother-raping chick, why don't you go and see her?" Dick asked peevishly.

     
Coffin Ed looked at his watch. "Three-fourteen," he announced.

     
"It's too late tonight," Grave Digger said.

     
Dick looked from one detective to the other, perplexed. "You guys working on this murder case?" he asked.

     
"Nope, that's homicide, baby," Grave Digger said. "Me and Ed are trying to find out who incited the riot."

     
Dick's hysterical outburst of laughter seemed odd indeed from so cynical a man.