Blind Man With a Pistol (8 page)

     
"They're some neckbones here," Doctor Moore said."Make some neckbones and rice and you'll find some yellow yams somewhere and maybe there's some of those collards left."

     
"What about some corn bread, Al ?" one of the cook-clerics said.

     
"All right then, some corn bread, if there's any butter."

     
"There's some margarine."

     
Doctor Moore gave a grimace of distaste. "Tap the trunk," he said "A man's got to eat."

     
He went quickly back into the hall and opened the door to the first bedroom. It was empty except for an unmade double bed and an unpainted wardrobe.

     
"Lucy!" he called.

     
A woman stuck her head out of the bath. It was the head of a young woman with a smooth brownskinned face and straightened black hair pulled aslant her forehead over her right ear. It was a beautiful face with a wide straight nose and unflared nostrils above a wide, thick, unpainted mouth with brown lips that looked soft and resilient. Brown eyes magnified by rimless spectacles gave her a sexy look.

     
"Lucy's out; it's me," she said.

     
"You? Barbara! Somebody with you?"his voice came out in a whisper.

     
"Shit, naw, do you think I'd bring 'em here?" she said in a softly modulated voice which jarred shockingly with the words.

     
"Well, what the fuck are you doing here?" he said in a loud coarse voice that made him sound like another man altogether. "I sent you to work the cocktail party at the Americana."

     
She came into the room with the waft of woman smell. Her voluptuous brown body was covered loosely by a pink silk robe which showed a line of brown belly and a black growth of pubic hair.

     
"I was there," she said defensively. "There was too much competition from the high-society amateurs. All those hincty bitches fell on those whitey-babies like they was sugar candy."

     
Doctor Moore frowned angrily. "So what? Can't you outproject those amateurs? You're a pro."

     
"Are you kidding? Against all those free matrons? You ever see Madame Thomasina with a hot on for whitey?"

     
"Listen, whore, that's your problem. I don't pay to send you to these cocktail parties to let these high-society bitches beat you at the game. I expect you to score. How you do it is your business. If you can't collar a whitey John with them all about, I'll get myself another whore."

     
She went up to him so he could smell her and feel the woman coming from her body. "Don't talk to me like that, Al baby. Ain't I been good all along? It's just these matinees when these bitches are free. I'm sure I'll score tonight." She tried to embrace him but he pushed her away roughly.

     
"You better, girl," he said. "I mean business. The rent isn't paid, and I'm behind with my Caddy."

     
"Ain't your own pitch paying nothing?"

     
"Peanuts. It's split too mother-raping thin. And these Harlem folks ain't serious. All they want to do is boogaloo." He paused and then said reflectively, "I could make a mint if I could just get them mad."

     
"Jesus, can't your apes do that? What you got them for then?"

     
"No. They're useless in an operation like this," he said meditatively. "What I really need is a dead man."

7

     
The assistant Medical Examiner looked like a City College student in a soiled seersucker suit. His thick brown hair needed cutting and his hornrimmed glasses needed wiping. He looked as humorless as befits a man whose business is the dead.

     
He straightened up from examining the body and wiped his hands on his trousers. "This was an easy one," he said, addressing himself to the sergeant from the homicide bureau. "You got the exact time of death from these local men, they saw him die. The exact cause is a cut jugular vein. Male, white and approximately thirty-five years old."

     
The homicide sergeant wasn't satisfied with such a small capsule. He looked as though he was never satisfied with Medical Examiners. He was a thin, tall, angular man wearing what looked like a starched blue serge suit. He had reddish hair of the most repulsive shade, big brown freckles that looked like a bowl full of warts, and a long sharp nose that stuck out from his face like the keel of a racing yacht. His close-set, small blue eyes looked frustrated.

     
"Identifying marks? Scars? Birthmarks?"

     
"Hell, you saw as much as I did," the assistant M.E. said, accidentally stepping into the pool of blood. "Son of a Goddam bitch!" he cried.

     
"Jesus Christ, there's not a thing on him to tell who he is," the sergeant complained. "No papers, no wallet, no laundry mark on this one garment it's wearing --"

     
"How 'bout the shoes?" Coffin Ed ventured.

     
"Marked shoes?"

     
"Why not?"

     
The assistant D.A. gave him a slight nod, whatever it meant. He was a middle-aged man with a white unhealthy look and meticulously combed graying hair. His doughy face and abrupt paunch along with his wrinkled suit and unshined shoes gave him the look of a complete failure. Gathered about him were the ambulance drivers and vacant-faced patrol-car cops as though seeking shelter of his indecision. The homicide sergeant and the assistant M.E. stood apart.

     
The sergeant looked at the photographer he had brought with him. "Take off his shoes," he ordered.

     
The photographer bridled. "Let Joe take 'em off," he said. "All I take is pictures."

     
Joe was the detective first grade who drove for the sergeant. He was a square-built Slav with crew-cut hair that bristled like porcupine quills.

     
"All right, Joe," the sergeant said.

     
Wordlessly Joe knelt on the dirty pavement, unlaced the dead man's brown suede oxfords and drew them from his feet, one after another. He held them to the light and looked inside. The sergeant bent to look into them too.

     
"_Bostonian_," Joe read.

     
"Hell," the sergeant said disgustedly, giving Coffin Ed an appraising look. Then he turned back to the assistant M.E. with a long-suffering manner. "Can you tell me if he's had sexual intercourse -- recently, I mean?"

     
The assistant M.E. looked bored with it all. "We can tell by the autopsy whether he's had sexual intercourse up to within an hour of death." Sotto voce, he added, "What a question."

     
The sergeant heard him. "It's important," he said defensively. "We got to know something about this man. How the hell we going to find out who killed him?"

     
"You can take his prints, of course," Coffin Ed said.

     
The sergeant looked at him with narrowed eyes, as though suspecting him of needling. Of course they were going to take the body's fingerprints and all other Bertillon measurements needed in identification, as the detective well knew, he thought angrily.

     
"Anyway, it wasn't with a woman," the assistant M.E. said, reddening uncontrollably. "At least in a normal way."

     
Everyone looked at him, as though expecting him to say more.

     
"Right," the sergeant concurred, nodding knowingly. But he would have liked to ask the assistant M.E. how he knew.

     
Then suddenly Grave Digger said, "I could have told you that from the start."

     
The sergeant reddened so furiously his freckles stood out like scars. He had heard of these two colored detectives up here, but this was the first time he had seen them. But he could already tell that a little bit of them went a long way; in other words, they were getting on his ass.

     
"Then maybe you can tell me why he was killed, too," he said sarcastically.

     
"That's easy," Grave Digger said with a straight face. "There are only two reasons a white man is killed in Harlem. Money or fear."

     
The sergeant wasn't expecting that answer. It threw him. He lost his sarcasm. "Not sex?"

     
"Sex? Hell, that's all you white people can think of, Harlem and sex -- and you're right, too!" he went on before the sergeant could speak. "You'r right as rain. But sex is for sale. And all the surplus they give away. So why kill a white sucker for that? That's killing the goose that lays the golden egg."

     
Color drained from the sergeant's face and it became white from anger. "Are you trying to tell me there are no sex murders here?"

     
"What I said was there were no white men killed for sex," Grave Digger said equably. "Ain't no white man ever that involved."

     
Color flowed back into the sergeant's face, which was changing color under his guilt complexes like a chameleon. "And no one ever makes a mistake?" He felt compelled to argue just for the sake of arguing.

     
"Hell, sergeant, every murder's a mistake," Grave Digger said condescendingly. "You know that, it's your business."

     
Yes, these black sons of bitches were going to take a lot of getting along with, the sergeant thought, as he grimly changed the conversation.

     
"Well, maybe I should have asked do you know who killed him?"

     
"That ain't fair," Coffin Ed said roughly.

     
The sergeant threw up his hands. "I give up."

     
Including the patrol-car cops, most of whom were white, there were fifteen white officers gathered about the body, and in addition to Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, four colored patrol-car cops. All laughed from relief. It Was a touchy business when a white man was killed in Harlem. People took up sides on racial lines, regardless of whether they were police officers or not. No one liked it, but all were involved. It was personal to them all.

     
"Anything else you want to know?" the assistant M.E. asked.

     
The sergeant looked at him sharply to see if he was being sarcastic. He decided he was innocent. "Yeah, everything," he replied, waxing loquacious. "Who he is? Who killed him? Why? Most of all I want the killer. That's my job."

     
"That's your baby," the assistant M.E. said. "By tomorrow -- or rather this morning -- we'll give you the physiological details. Right now I'm going home." He filled out a DOA tag, which he tied to the right big toe of the body, and podded to the drivers of the police hearse. "Take itto the morgue."

     
The homicide sergeant stood absently watching the body loaded, then looked slowly about from the idle car cops to the congregated black people. "All right, boys," he ordered. "Take them all in."

     
The homicide department always took over investigations of homicide and the highest ranking homicide detective on the scene became the boss. Detectives from the local precinct and patrol-car cops who took instructions either from the precinct captain or a divisional inspector didn't always like this arrangement. But Grave Digger and Coffin Ed didn't care who became boss. "We just get pissed-off with all the red tape," Grave Digger once said. "We want to get down to the nitty-gritty."

     
But there were formalities to protect the rights of citizens and they couldn't just light into a group of innocent people and start whipping head until somebody talked, which they figured was the best and cheapest way to solve a crime. If the citizens didn't like it, they ought to stay at home. Since they couldn't do this, they began to walk away.

     
"Come on," Coffin Ed urged. "This man will have us picked up next."

     
"Look at these brothers flee," Grave Digger noted. "They wouldn't listen to me when I warned them."

     
They went only as far as the littered paved square strewed with overflowing garbage cans beside the front stairs to the nearest rooming house where they could watch the operation without being seen. The smell of rotting garbage was nauseating.

     
"Whew! Who said us colored people were starving?"

     
"That ain't what they say, Digger. They just wonder why we ain't."

     
As the first of the onlookers were loaded in the police wagon, other curious citizens arrived.

     
"Whuss happening?"

     
"Search me, baby. Some whitey was killed, they say."

     
"Shot?"

     
"Washed away."

     
"They got who done it?"

     
"You kidding? They just grabbing off us folks. You know how white cops is."

     
"Less split."

     
"Too late," said a white car cop who thought he dug the soul brother, taking each by the arm.

     
"He thinks he's funny," one of the brothers complained.

     
"Well, ain't he?" the other admitted, looking expressively at their arms in his grip.

     
"Joe, you and Ted bright the power lamps," the sergeant called above the hubbub. "Looks like there's a blood trail here."

     
Followed by his assistants with the battery-powered spot lamps, the sergeant stepped down into the garbage-scented courtyard. "I'll need you men's help," he said. "There must be a blood trail here." He had decided to adopt a conciliatory manner.