He had gone in with a long nickel-plated revolver in each hand and homicide in his eyes.
He had flushed famous jazzmen, international blues singers, sophisticated socialites both white and colored, prominent people both men and women, mingling with the racketeers and the gamblers, the whores and the thieves and the dregs of humanity; all being rooked together by the peddlers of the five-colored dreams and the cool dry jags and the hot sex licks.
He had encountered the furtive and the indignant, “respectable” women who had burst into tears, puffed-up jokers who claimed political pull; those who couldn’t care less about being caught and those who figured money would settle it.
His entrance had set off panic, engendered terror, triggered rage. Jokers on the lam had jumped from windows, landprops had threatened to call the police, housewives had hidden under beds, drug-crazed starkers had charged him with stickers.
He had tamed the rambunctious and pacified the pacifists. He was not a narcotics man; he didn’t even have a shield. His entrance was illegal and he had no authority. All he had had was muscle, and it hadn’t worked.
He had left a trail of hysteria, screaming jeebies, knotty heads and bloody noses. But it hadn’t meant a thing. He hadn’t gotten any leads, hadn’t found out anything he didn’t know. Just a blank.
No one had admitted to seeing Pinky all that day. No one had admitted to seeing a yellow-skinned cat-eyed woman in a green suit accompanied by two white mobsters looking for Pinky. No one had ever heard of Sister Heavenly. No one had known anything about anything. He couldn’t pull them in and sweat it out.
And yet he knew some of them were lying. He was certain, since talking to Kid Blackie, that Ginny, the janitor’s wife, and the two gunmen were making the same tour. They were either in front of him or behind him, or perhaps more than once they had crossed paths. But he hadn’t seen a sign of them, nothing to indicate whether they were following him or in front of him. He had doubled back and laid in wait and they hadn’t showed
Now it was eleven o’clock at night. Coffin Ed sat in his parked car with the lights off in the middle of a dark block on St Nicholas Avenue opposite the park. He could feel the trembling body of the youth beside him, even though they were separated by two feet of space. He could hear Wop’s teeth chattering in the dark. The youth’s jag had worn off and the smell of terror came from him like a sickening miasma.
Coffin Ed reached into the dark and turned on the dashboard radio to catch the eleven-o’clock news broadcast.
A mealymouthed male voice came on, imitating some big-name newscaster, and blabbed about domestic politics, the Cold War, what the Africans were doing, the latest on the civil rights front and a fistfight between two motion picture actors in El Morocco.
Coffin Ed wasn’t listening but the sound of the voice set his teeth on edge. The top of his head felt like it was coming off. He had long since discarded his goggles but his eyes felt gritty.
He tried to think, but his thoughts didn’t make any sense. They were jumping about in his head like buck-and-wing dancers on their last breath. “Give a little, take a little,” one side of his brain was saying, while the other side was cursing in a blinding rage. He thought for a moment of how he would line the mother-rapers up and shoot them down.
He realized that he was wandering badly and caught himself. “Ain’t no time to blow your top now, son,” he told himself.
They had just one more place to go. It was run by a Harlem society matron, and it wasn’t going to be easy to crash. He didn’t want to hurry it. If it turned out to be another blank, he’d be up shit alley.
“You said you was going to give me my fare to Chicago,” a choked dry voice stammered from the dark beside him.
“You’ll get it,” he said absently, his cluttered thoughts echoing, “He thinks that’s far enough.”
“Kin I get some of my clothes?”
“Why not?” he said automatically, but he didn’t even hear the question. The thought of Chicago had got mixed up with the two gunmen he was hunting and he added aloud, “Mother-rapers better get off the face of the earth.”
Wop shrunk into silence.
The voice from the radio blabbed on: “… when Queen Elizabeth passed over the bridge.…” It sounded to Coffin Ed as though he said “when Queen Elizabeth pissed over the bridge …” and he wondered vaguely what did she do that for.
“You going to take me by my room?” Wop stammered hesitantly.
“What for?”
“They going be laying for me. They going kill me. You know they going kill me. You promised you’d protect me. You said if I steered you to them cribs wouldn’t nobody hurt me. Now you going let ’em-” He began getting hysterical.
Coffin Ed drew back wearily and slapped him across the face.
The voice cut off and the hysteria subsided, followed by snuffling sounds.
Coffin Ed listened to the newscaster report the finding of Daddy Haddy’s body by the patrolman on the beat. The words caught in his brain like red-hot rivets: “… died of gunshot wounds received earlier today while investigating a homicide in the basement of an apartment house on Riverside Drive. Jones, known locally in Harlem as Grave Digger, was one of the famous Harlem Detective team, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. They were on suspension for assaulting an alleged dope peddler named Jake Kubansky who subsequently died. The assailant, or assailants, are unknown. Reports from the homicide bureau-”
He reached out and turned the radio off. It was a reflex action, without thought. Perhaps from a subconscious desire to reject the knowledge by stopping the voice.
His mind fought against acceptance. He sat without moving, without breathing. But finally it sank in.
“That’s it,” he said aloud.
Wop hadn’t heard a word of it. His terrified thoughts were concentrated on himself.
“But you’re going to take me to the station, ain’t you? You going get me safe on the train, ain’t you?”
Coffin Ed turned his head slowly and looked at him. The muscles of his face were jumping almost out of control, but his reflexes were like a sleepwalker’s.
“You’re one of them too,” he said in a constricted voice. “Give you another month or two and you’ll be on junk. You’ll have the monkey on your back that you got to feed by stealing and robbing and murdering.”
As the voice hammered him with deadly intensity, Wop cringed in the corner of his seat and got smaller and smaller.
“I ain’t robbed nobody,” he whimpered. “I ain’t stole nothing. All I done was just work for Daddy Haddy. I ain’t hurt nobody.”
“I’m not going to kill you yet,” Coffin Ed said. “But I’m going to hang on to you, because you’re all I got. And you better hope we turn up something at Madame Cushy’s if you don’t want to get left. Get out.”
Coffin Ed got out on the street side and when he walked around the front of the car he had a sudden feeling that he was being watched from the park. He stepped onto the sidewalk, made a right turn and wheeled about, drawing from the greased holster in the same motion. His gaze raked the sidewalk, flanked by the low stone wall of the park, and above the rocky brush-spotted terrain rising in a steep hill to Hamilton Terrace.
A few scattered couples strolled along the pavement and old people in their shirtsleeves and cotton dresses still occupied the wooden benches. The heat had not let up with the coming of darkness and people were reluctant to turn indoors, but there was no movement within the dangerous confines of the dark grassless park. He saw no one who looked the least bit suspicious.
“I keep feeling ghosts,” he said as he holstered his revolver and pushed Wop before him toward the glass door of the apartment house.