The Real Cool Killers (18 page)

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 assistant 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 whore 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 prostitution, 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:

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 skycraper 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.”

The commissioner sighed. “Perhaps we’ll never know the extent of Galen’s activities up there.”

“Maybe not, but one thing we do know,” the chief said. “The son of a bitch is dead, and his money won’t corrupt anybody else.”

Afterward the police commissioner reviewed the suspension of Coffin Ed. Grave Digger and Lieutenant Anderson were present along with the chief at this conference. Coffin Ed had exercised his privilege to be absent.

“In the light of subsequent developments in this case, I am inclined to be lenient toward Detective Johnson,” the commissioner said. “His compulsion to fire at the youth is understandable, if not justifiable, in view of his previous unfortunate experience with an acid thrower.” The commissioner had come into office by way of a law practice and could handle those jaw-breaking words with much greater ease than the cops, who’d learned their trade pounding beats.

“What’s your opinion, Jones?” he asked.

Grave Digger turned from his customary seat, one ham propped on the window ledge and one foot planted on the floor, and said, “Yes sir, he’s been touchy and on edge ever
since that con-man threw the acid in his eyes, but he was never rough on anybody in the right.”

“Hell, I wasn’t disciplining Johnson so much as I was just taking the weight off the whole God damned police department,” the chief said in defense of his action. “We’d have caught holy hell from all the sob sisters, male and female, in this town if those punks had turned out to be innocent pranksters.”

“So you are in favor of his reinstatement?” the commissioner asked.

“Why not?” the chief said. “If he’s got the jumps let him work them off on those hoodlums up in Harlem who gave them to him.”

“Right ho,” the commissioner said, then turned to Grave Digger again: “Perhaps you can tell me, Jones; one aspect of the case has me puzzled. All of the reports state that there was a huge crowd of people present at the victim’s death, and witnessed the actual shooting. One report states–” he fumbled among the papers on his desk until he found the page he wanted. “ ‘The street was packed with people for a distance of two blocks when deceased met death by gunfire.’ Why is this? Why do the people up in Harlem congregate at the scene of a killing as though it were a three-ring circus?”

“It is,” Grave Digger said tersely. “It’s the greatest show on earth.”

“That happens everywhere,” Anderson said. “People will congregate at a killing wherever it takes place.”

“Yes, of course, out of morbid curiosity. But I don’t mean that exactly. According to reports, not only the reports on this case, but all reports that have come into my office, this, er, phenomenon, let us say, is more evident in Harlem that any place else. What do you think, Jones?”

“Well, it’s like this, Commissioner,” Grave Digger said. “Every day in Harlem, two and three times a day, the colored people see some colored man being chased by another colored man with a knife or an axe or a club. Or else being chased by a white cop with a gun, or by a white man
with his fists. But it’s only once in a blue moon they get to see a white man being chased by one of them. A big white man at that. That was an event. A chance to see some white blood spilled for a change, and spilled by a black man, at that. That was greater than Emancipation Day. As they say up in Harlem, that was the greatest. That’s what Ed and I are always up against when we try to make Harlem safe for white people.”

“Perhaps I can explain it,” the commissioner said.

“Not to me,” the chief said drily. “I ain’t got the time to listen. If the folks up there want to see blood, they’re going to see all the blood they want if they kill another white man.”

“Jones is right,” Anderson said. “But it makes for trouble.”

“Trouble!” Grave Digger echoed. “All they know up there is trouble. If trouble was money, everybody in Harlem would be a millionaire.”

The telephone rang. The commissioner picked up the receiver.

“Yes …? Yes, send him up.” He replaced the receiver and said, “It’s the ballistics report. It’s coming up.”

“Fine,” the chief said. “Let’s write it in the record and close this case up. It was a dirty business from start to finish and I’m sick and God damned tired of it.”

“Right ho,” the commissioner said.

Someone knocked.

“Come in,” he said.

The lieutenant from homicide who had worked on the case came in and placed the zip gun and the battered lead pellet taken from the murdered man’s brain on the commissioner’s desk.

The commissioner picked up the gun and examined it curiously.

“So this is a zip gun?”

“Yes sir. It’s made from an ordinary toy cap pistol. The barrel of the toy pistol is sawed off and this four-inch section
of heavy brass pipe is fitted in in its place. See, it’s soldered to the frame, then for greater stability it’s bound with adjustable cables in place. The shell goes directly into the barrel, then this clip is inserted to prevent it from backfiring. The firing pin is soldered to the original hammer. On this one it’s made from the head and a quarter-inch section of an ordinary Number Six nail, filed down to a point.”

“It is more primitive than I had imagined, but it is certainly ingenious.”

The others looked at it with bored indifference; they had seen zip guns before.

“And this will project a bullet with sufficient force to kill a man, to penetrate his skull?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, well, so this is the gun which killed Galen and led the boy who made it to be killed in turn.”

“No sir, not this gun.”

“What!”

Everybody sat bolt upright, eyes popping and mouths open. Had the lieutenant said the Empire State Building had been stolen and smuggled out of town, he couldn’t have caused a greater sensation.

“What do you mean, not that gun!” the chief roared.

“That’s what I came to tell you,” the lieutenant said. “This gun fires a twenty-two caliber bullet. It contained the case of a twenty-two shell when the sergeant found it. Galen was killed with a thirty-two caliber fired from a more powerful pistol.”

“This is where we came in,” Anderson said.

“I’ll be God damned if it is!” the chief bellowed like an enraged bull. “The papers have already gotten the story that he was killed with this gun and they’ve gone crazy with it. We’ll be the laughingstock of the world.”

“No,” the commissioner said quietly but firmly. “We have made a mistake, that is all.”

“I’ll be God damned if we have,” the chief said, his face turning blood red with passion. “I say the son of a bitch was
killed with that gun and that punk lying in the morgue killed him, and I don’t give a God damn what ballistics show.”

The commissioner looked solemnly from face to face. There was no question in his eyes, but he waited for someone else to speak.

“I don’t think it’s worth re-opening the case,” Lieutenant Anderson said. “Galen wasn’t a particularly lovable character.”

“Lovable or not, we got the killer and that’s the gun and that’s that,” the chief said.

“Can we afford to let a murderer go free?” the chief said.

The commissioner looked again from face to face.

“This one,” Grave Digger said harshly. “He did a public service.”

“That’s not for us to determine, is it?” the commissioner said.

“You’ll have to decide that, sir,” Grave Digger said. “But if you assign me to look for the killer, I resign.”

“Er, what? Resign from the force?”

“Yes sir. I say the killer will never kill again and I’m not going to track him down to pay for this killing even if it costs me my job.”

“Who killed him, Jones?”

“I couldn’t say, sir.”

The commissioner looked grave. “Was he as bad as that?”

“Yes sir.”

The commissioner looked at the lieutenant from homicide.

“But this zip gun was fired, wasn’t it?”

“Yes sir. But I’ve checked with all the hospitals and the precinct station in Harlem and there has been no gunshot injury reported.”

“Someone could have been injured who was afraid to report it.”

“Yes sir. Or the bullet might have landed harmlessly against a building or an automobile.”

“Yes. But there are the other boys who are involved. They might be indicted for complicity. If it is proved that they were his accomplices, they face the maximum penalty for murder.”

“Yes sir,” Anderson said. “But it’s been pretty well established that the murder – or rather the action of the boy firing the zip gun – was not premeditated. And the others knew nothing of his intention to fire at Galen until it was too late to prevent him.”

“According to their statements.”

“Well, yes sir. But it’s up to us to accept their statements or have them bound over to the grand jury for indictment. If we don’t charge complicity when they go up for arraignment the court will only fine them for disturbing the peace.”

The commissioner looked back at the lieutenant from homicide. “Who else knows about this?”

“No one outside of this office, sir. They never had the gun in ballistics; they only had the bullet.”

“Shall we put it to a vote?” the commissioner asked.

No one said anything.

“The ayes have it,” the commissioner said. He picked up the small lead pellet that had murdered a man. “Jones, there is a flat roof on a building across the park. Do you think you can throw this so it will land there?”

“If I can’t sir, my name ain’t Don Newcombe,” Grave Digger said.

The old stone apartment house at 2702 Seventh Avenue was heavy with pseudo-Greek trimmings left over from the days when Harlem was a fashionable white neighbourhood and the Negro slums were centred around San Juan Hill on West 42nd Street.