Blind Man With a Pistol (12 page)

     
"We dig you, General," said Colonel Duke.

     
"Then I see you-all at the march," General Ham said and left.

     
Outside on 116th Street, a lavender Cadillac Coupe de Ville convertible, trimmed in yellow metal which the black people passing thought was gold, was parked at the curb. A buxom white woman with blue-dyed gray hair, green eyes and a broad flat nose, wearing a décolleté dress in orange chiffon, sat behind the wheel. Huge rose breasts popped from the orange dress as though expanded by the heat, and rested on the steering-wheel. When General Ham approached and opened the door on his side, she looked around and gave him a smile that lit up the night. Her two upper incisors were crowned with shining gold with a diamond between. "Daddy," she greeted. "What took you so long?"

     
"I been cooking with Jesus," he lisped, settling into the seat beside her.

     
She chuckled. It was a fat woman's chuckle. It sounded like hot fat bubbling. She pulled out in front of a bus and drove down the crowded street as though black people were invisible. They got the hell out of her way.

10

     
Sergeant Ryan came up from the cellar to take over the questioning. He brought along his photographer, Ted, who had finished taking pictures, to get him out of the way of the fingerprint crew who were still at work.

     
The rooms were small. Each was equipped with a built-in washbasin and clothes closet and a radiator, and furnished with a double bed and dressing-table of oak veneer. All the shades were drawn on the windows on the other side, and the rooms were hot and airless as though sealed. All were alike with the exception of the front room which had a second window on the street, from which the tenant could have stolen the hats from the heads of passersby to go along with all his suits and shirts. With the addition of four detectives they were crowded.

     
A couple by the name of Mr and Mrs Tola Onan Ramsey occupied the front room. Tola was a presser at a downtown cleaners and his wife, Bee, ironed shirts at the laundry next door. Tola said the suits and shirts were his own which he had bought and paid for with his own money, and he didn't need any hats. The local detectives kept quiet, but they wondered why the Ramseys paid the extra rent for the front room when any of the back rooms would have served them just as well. All they were doing was stealing from their bosses and the extra front window was an unnecessary expense. Bee called Coffin Ed aside to ask him if he wanted to buy some shirts cheap, while Tola was denying to Sergeant Ryan seeing anything, hearing anything or knowing anything. He and Bee had been in bed sound asleep, as hard as they had worked all day, and they hadn't even heard the neighbors in the hall or the people on the sidewalk who, as a rule, sounded as though they were passing through their room.

     
Sergeant Ryan soon gave up on them. They were too innocent for him. They were the most law-abiding, hardworking, knownothing colored people he had ever seen. Neither Grave Digger nor Coffin Ed batted an eye.

     
The couple in the middle room called themselves Mr and Mrs Socrates X. Hoover. He was a tall, lanky black man with buck teeth and dusty-colored burred hair. His stringy muscles jerked like dying snakes beneath his sweating black skin and his small red eyes glowed with agitation under the scrutiny of the detectives. He sat on the edge of the bed clad only in the dirty jeans he'd slipped on hurriedly to open the door for the law, while his woman lay naked beneath the sheet, which she had drawn up to her mouth. She was a big yellow woman with red hair, straightened by a pressing-iron, sticking out from her head in all directions.

     
He said there was no need of them sniffing so mother-raping suspiciously, that smell came from the cubebs he smoked for his asthma. And she had been straightening her hair, she added, as they could oughta tell from the iron on the dresser. When Grave Digger continued to look skeptical, she flew salty and said if they smelt where she'd been making love with her own husband, that was only natural. What kind of minds did they have? Far as she knew, only white folks knew how to make love without its smelling.

     
Sergeant Ryan turned bright red.

     
Socrates said he made an honest living parking cars at the Yankee Stadium. Last winter? He hadn't been here last winter. Sergeant Ryan dropped it and asked what she did. She said she kept appointments. What kind of appointments? Do they have to be some special kind? Just appointments, that's all. Sergeant Ryan tried to catch the eye of one of the colored detectives, but they refused to be caught.

     
About what had gone on outside their room that night, or any other night, they knew less than their neighbors at the front. They always kept their shades drawn and their window closed to keep out the noise and the smells and they couldn't hear anything inside, not even their neighbors. Sergeant Ryan was silent for a moment while they all listened to the sound of a drawer being opened and the exchange of voices in the adjoining room, but he didn't pursue it. What about when one of them went to the toilet? he asked instead. Poon became so agitated she sat up in bed, exposing two big drooping breasts encircled by deed red marks where her brassiere had cut her and tipped by tough brown teats like the stalks of pumpkins cut from the vine. Go to the crapper? What for? They weren't children, they didn't pee in bed. Grave Digger glanced at the washbasin with such obvious suggestion her face swelled with indignation and the sheet flew from the rest of her, revealing her big hairy nest. Suddenly the room was flooded with the strong alkaloid scent of continuous sexual intercourse. Sergeant Ryan threw up his hands.

     
When things had calmed down he listened to them deny any knowledge of the cellar at all. They might have noticed the door at the side, but neither remembered. If they were directly over the cellar and boiler room, they had never heard any sounds from down there. They weren't living there in the winter. They didn't know who had lived there before them. They never saw anybody going or coming from around the side. No, they had never seen any strange white men in the whole neighborhood. Nor strange white women either.

     
By the time the sergeant got to the tenants in the last room he was well browned off. These people called themselves Mr and Mrs Booker T. Washington. Booker said he was the manager of a recreation hall on upper Seventh Avenue. What kind of recreation? Recreation, where people play. Play what? Play pool. So you're a hustler around the pool hall? I'm the manager. What's the name of it? Acey-Deucey's? What's that? Onesy-twosy's. Oh, you said ace and deuce's. Nawsuh, I said Acey-Deucey's. All right, all right, and what's your wife's name? Madame Booker, she answered for herself. She was another big-titted yellow woman with straightened red hair. And he was lean, black and red-eyed like his neighbor. The sergeant wondered what it was about these lean, hungry-looking red-eyed black men that these big yellow women liked so well. And what did Madame Booker do for her living? She didn't have to do nothing but look after her husband but she told fortunes ever now and then just to pass away the time 'cause her husband worked at nights. The sergeant looked at the television set on the deal table and the transistor radio on the end of the dressing-table next to the bed. But he let it go. Who were her customers -- clients? People. What kind of people? Just people is all. Men? Women? Men and women. Did she have any white men among her clients? No, she never told white men's fortunes. Why, were the augurs bad in Harlem? She didn't know whether the augurs were bad or good, just none had ever asked her.

     
Further questioning elicited the facts that they had seen, heard, and knew even less than both their neighbors put together. They didn't have anything to do with the other people who lived in that house, not that they were hincty, but there were some bad people who lived there. Who? They didn't know exactly. Well, where, then? On this floor? The second floor? The third floor? They couldn't say exactly, sommers in the building. Well, how did they know they were bad if they didn't know them? They could tell by looking at them. Sergeant Ryan reminded them that they had just claimed they never saw anyone. What they meant was going sommers; 'course they saw people in the hall but they didn't know where they were going or where they had been. And they never saw any white men in the hall going somewhere or coming from somewhere? Never, only once a month the man came around for the rent. Well, what was his name? the sergeant asked quickly, thinking he was getting somewhere. They didn't know. Did they mean to tell him they paid a man the rent whom they didn't know? They meant they didn't know his name but they knew he was the man, all right; he was the same man who had been there ever since they had been there. And how long had they been there? They had been there going on for three years. Then they had been there during the winter? Two winters. Then they knew about the cellar? Knew what about the cellar? That there was one? Their eyes popped. 'Course there was a cellar, how else could the superintendent fire the boiler if there wasn't no cellar? It was a question, the sergeant admitted. And who was the superintendent? A West Indian named Lucas Covey. Is he colored? Colored? Whoever heard of a white West Indian? The sergeant admitted they had him there. And did this, er, Mr Covey live in the cellar? Live in the cellar! How could he? There wasn't no place for him to live there, les' it was 'side the boiler. What about the empty room? Empty room! What empty room? Well, then when was the last time they had been in the cellar? They hadn't never been in the cellar, they just knew there had to be one to hold the boiler 'cause they had central heating, and it came from somewhere.

     
The sergeant took out his handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his face, but remembered he had used it to open the bloodstained door in the cellar and put it back into his pocket, wiping his forehead with his coat sleeve instead.

     
Well, then, where did Mr Covey live if he didn't live in the cellar? he asked desperately. He lived in his other house on 122nd Street. What was the number? They didn't know the number, but it was a brick house just like this one only it was twice as wide and it was the second house from the corner of Eighth Avenue. He couldn't miss it, the name was over the door. It was called _Cozy Flats_.

     
The sergeant figured he'd had enough of that. He saw no reason to take any of them in as yet. The next thing was to find Lucas Covey. But when they got out in the hall the photographer discovered his pocket camera was missing. So they started over with the Washingtons. But they hadn't seen his camera. Then they went back to the Hoovers.

     
"Bless my soul, I wondered where this Kodak came from," Poon said. "I was reaching for a cigarette and found it lying there on the floor."

     
The red-faced photographer took his camera and put it back into his pocket and opened his mouth to state his mind, but Grave Digger cut him off.

     
"That could get you ninety days," he told Socrates.

     
"For what? I ain't done nothing."

     
"Oh, hell, skip it," the sergeant said. "Let's get out of here."

     
They stopped on the street to wait for the fingerprint crew who were just coming up from the cellar, and he asked the colored detectives, "Do you believe any of that horse manure?"

     
"Hell, it ain't a question of believing it. We found them all at home, in bed, asleep for all we know. How do we know they heard, saw or know anything? All we can do is take their word."

     
"I mean that shit about their occupations."

     
"If you're worried about that you may as well go home," Coffin Ed said.

     
"Well, it's half-true, like everything else," Grave Digger said pacifyingly. "We know Booker T. Washington hangs around Acey-Deucey's poolroom where he earns a little scratch racking balls when he hasn't snatched a purse that paid. And we know that Socrates Hoover watches parked cars at night on the side streets around Yankee Stadium to keep them from being robbed of anything he can rob himself. And what else can two big yellow whores do but hustle? That's why those sports make themselves scarce at night. But Tola Ramsey and his wife do just what they say. It's easy enough to check. But all you got to do is look at all those suits and shirts which don't fit him."

     
"Anyway, none of them work in white folks' kitchens," Coffin Ed said gruffly.

     
Faces turned red all over the place.

     
"Why would anyone live here who was honest?" Grave Digger said. "Or how could anyone stay honest who lived here? What do you want? This place was built for vice, for whores to hustle in and thieves to hide out in. And somebody got a building permit, because it's been built after the ghetto got here." He paused for a moment. They were all silent. "Anything else?" he asked.

     
The sergeant let the subject drop. He ordered the fingerprint crew to stick around and they followed his car in their car while Coffin Ed and Grave Digger brought up the rear. The three cars of detectives descended on 122nd Street like the rat exterminators, but not a soul was in sight, not even a rat. Coffin Ed checked with his watch. It was 3:37. He buzzed Lieutenant Anderson at the precinct station.

     
"It's me and Digger, boss. You find any fez-headed men?"

     
"Plenty of them. Seventeen to be precise. But none with extra pants. You still with Ryan?"

     
"Right behind him."

     
"Find out anything?"

     
"Nothing that can't keep."