“It turned up Eighth!”
He was already on top of Eighth Avenue, on the inside lane, pushing past 50 miles an hour. But he made another do-or-die turn, going in between a yellow taxi and a cabin truck with not more than a few inches give-or-take each way; tires screaming, drivers cursing. He came into the avenue so fast he almost climbed up in the back seat of a beat-up convertible carrying ten passengers.
The women in the back seat screamed.
Somewhere behind, a police whistle was blowing frantically.
“Don’t stop!” Sister Heavenly cried.
“Is I stopping?” he threw over his shoulder as he wrenched the car around the back of the convertible and gave it the gas.
The bug-eyed driver of the convertible looked out from his galaxy of chicks and shouted threateningly, “Don’t you run into my car, nigger!”
But the Mercury was past and closing rapidly in behind Coffin Ed’s Plymouth.
“It’s the car!” Sister Heavenly hollered. “Don’t get too close.”
“Hell, I gonna pass it,” he said.
Coffin Ed noticed the beat-up Mercury when it passed. At another time he might have taken on the duties of a traffic cop and run it down. But he didn’t have the time.
It was just another automobile racer, a black Stirling Moss trying out his car for a “Grand Prix” somewhere. Harlem was full of ’em. They got teaed on weed and imagined they could drive those old V-8 gas gluttons straight up in the sky, he thought. He noticed that the back seat was empty. He figured some cop up the line would get him if he didn’t get himself killed. He put it from his mind.
The Mercury was out of sight when he pulled up before Daddy Haddy’s joint.
The little hole-in-the-wall had a red painted front like the big chain of United Tobacco Stores. But Daddy Haddy had named his Re-United Tobacco Store; there wasn’t anything anybody could do about that.
The shades were drawn.
Coffin Ed glanced at his watch. It read 6:07.
The tenement across the street threw a shadow on the store. But it was too early for it to be closed. Coffin Ed felt his stomach knot.
He got out of his car, walked across the sidewalk and tried the door. It was locked. A sixth sense told him to wipe his prints from the doorknob, get back into his car and drive — he wouldn’t get anything here. He was a civilian on a manhunt; he had no authority to investigate what he suspected might reveal a crime; he was outside of the law himself. “Phone the station, report your suspicions, and let it go at that,” an inner voice told him.
But he couldn’t let it go. He was in it; he was committed; he was like the airplane over the middle of the ocean that had passed the point of no return. He thought fleetingly of Grave Digger, but that wouldn’t bear thinking about. The pain in his head and the brackish taste in his mouth had become normal, as though he had always had them.
He took a deep breath and looked up and down the street to see if there were any police in sight. He took out his Boy Scout knife, opened the round, needle-point pry, and began fiddling with the Yale lock.
The door had been closed on the latch. Whoever had last left had just pulled it shut. In a moment it was open. He closed and locked it behind him, groped about until he found the light switch, and turned on the light.
There were no surprises.
He found the body of Daddy Haddy behind the glass-enclosed counter. There was a hole in the center of his forehead filled with a glob of blackish blood. It was encircled by powder burns more than an inch in diameter. He put his toe beneath the shoulder and turned the body just enough to see the back of the head. There was a small hard lump at the base of the hairline where the bullet had come out of the skull without force to penetrate the skin and had coursed downward and stopped.
A clean job! he thought without any emotion whatever. No blood. No noise. Someone had held a pistol with a silencer a few inches in front of Daddy Haddy’s head and had pulled the trigger. Daddy Haddy had not expected it. So much for that. Daddy Haddy had had it.
The joint had been searched hurriedly but thoroughly. Shelves, drawers, cases, boxes had been turned out, the contents dumped helter-skelter over the floor. Among the unopened packages of cigarettes, scattered cigars, matches, lighters, flints, fluids, pipes and cigarette and cigar holders was a sprinkling of neatly folded decks of heroin and carefully rolled marijuana cigarettes of bomber size. There was still the faint odor of cordite fumes in the hot, close, stinky air.
He waded through the debris and opened the door at the rear. It showed a tiny storeroom containing two padded straight-backed chairs. The air was redolent with marijuana smoke. The treatment was the same.
It was obvious the searchers hadn’t found what they were looking for.
Two people already dead. And Digger-? The thought broke off, then came on again: Small-time dog-ass little Harlem hustlers on the fringe of the narcotics racket. Pee-wee colored scrabblers for a dirty buck. How do they get mixed up in this business? This is mob stuff from downtown. Hired gunmen from a syndicate.…
He hadn’t discovered any lead to Uncle Saint, so he didn’t know there were already three others dead from the caper.
He wondered if he oughtn’t back out before it got to be more than he could handle. Drop it back into the lap of homicide and the narcotics squad. Let ’em call in the feds.
Then he thought if he reported the crime he’d be detained, held up for hours, questioned. His superiors were going to want to know what he was doing in this business when he had been warned by all of them to keep out.
“They ain’t going to like it, Ed.” He didn’t realize he had spoken aloud.
But on the other hand, they were going to dig him anyway. He hadn’t made any effort at concealment; his prints were everywhere. They’d find witnesses to testify he had been there. On one side was the devil, on the other the deep blue sea.
He thought of Grave Digger again. He thought of having to break in a new partner — that is, if he ever got back on the force. He knew the Harlem hoodlums would make life rough with Grave Digger gone. He thought of how Grave Digger had tracked down the hoodlum who had thrown acid in his face; how he had shot him through both eyes. He thought of the effect on the Harlem gunslingers. He knew if he backed down now, he’d never live it down.
There was nothing in there that he found of any use. Nothing he didn’t know before he came inside.
I can’t find them, so the only thing for me to do now is let ’em find me, he thought and went outside and pulled the door shut behind him.
A little girl about eleven or twelve years old had the back door of his car open and was trying to entice the dog onto the sidewalk. But she was too scared of the dog to reach inside and get the leash. She stood back a distance on the sidewalk and said, “Here, Sheba. Here, Sheba. Come on, Sheba.”
It struck Coffin Ed as odd that she knew the dog’s name but didn’t know the dog.
But before his mind had a chance to work on this, he caught a picture from the corners of his eyes that reacted instinctively on his brain. A youth was standing on the other side of Eighth Avenue at the corner of 137th Street looking up at the sky. Coffin Ed knew automatically there wasn’t anything in the sky at that moment to attract the attention of a Harlem youth.
“Let her alone,” he told the little girl and closed the car door.
The little girl ran up the street. He didn’t give her another thought.
He walked around the car as though he were going to get in behind the wheel. He had the door open. Then he seemed to think of something and closed the door and turned and started to cross Eighth Avenue.
Two cars were coming along the other side and he had to stop and let them pass.
The youth turned and began sauntering slowly up 137th Street toward St Nicholas Avenue as though he didn’t have a thing on his mind.