It was an old elevator house, well-kept, and he knew that Madame Cushy lived on the top floor. But the front door was on the latch. His gaze ranged up the list of names above the pushbuttons and settled on one that read: Dr J. C. Douglas, M.D.
There was a house intercom beside the row of buttons and when he got the doctor on he said, “I gotta see you, Doc, I gotta case bad.”
“Let it wait,” the doctor snapped. “Come in tomorrow morning.”
“Can’t wait ’til then. I got a date for tomorrow. It’s my money,” he argued roughly.
“Who is this?” the doctor asked.
“Al Thompson,” Coffin Ed said, taking a chance on the name of a pimp.
“I can’t cure you overnight, Al,” the doctor said. “It takes two days at least.”
“Hell, give me all the units at one time, Doc. I been chippie chasing and I’m in trouble. I don’t wanna have to kill my whore when she comes back.”
Coffin Ed listened to the doctor’s chuckle, and heard him say, “All right, Al, come on up; we’ll see what we can do.”
The latch began to click and Coffin Ed opened the door and pushed Wop into the hall. They rode up to the top floor.
Madame Cushy’s was the black enamel door at the front.
“Have you been here before?” Coffin Ed asked Wop.
“Yassuh. Daddy Haddy has sent me with some stuff.” He was trembling as though he were seeing ghosts himself.
“All right, you ring it,” he said.
He flattened himself against the wall while Wop pushed the button.
After a time there was a faint click and a round peephole opened outward. Wop looked at the reflection of his own eye.
“What do you want, boy?” a woman’s cross and impatient voice came from within.
“I’se Wop; Daddy Haddy sent me,” he stammered.
“No he didn’t, he’s dead,” the voice said sharply. “What are you after?”
Coffin Ed knew he had goofed. He stepped out so he could be seen and said, “I’m with him.”
He was still wearing his beret and it took a moment for the voice to reply, “Oh! Edward! Well, what the hell do you want?”
“I want to talk to you.”
“Well, why didn’t you ring yourself? You ought to know better than to try to front this punk into my house.”
“I know better now,” he said.
“All right, I will let you in, but not as a cop,” she conceded.
“I’ve been suspended,” he said. “Didn’t you know?”
“Yes, I know,” she said.
There were two locks on the door, both equipped with adjustable cables to hold it at any position, one near the bottom and one near the top; and they worked so silently the door began to open before he knew she had unlocked it.
“This dirty little boy stays out,” she said.
“He’s my mascot.”
She eyed Wop distastefully and stepped back so he wouldn’t touch her when he passed.
A wide short entrance hall, flanked by two closed doors, ended at glass double doors of a front lounge and a narrow hallway turned off to the left somewhere. Muted male and female voices, along with the sound of jazz, came from the lounge. There was a faint smell of incense in the overplayed atmosphere of respectability.
After closing and locking the front door she stepped past them and opened the door to the right. Coffin Ed pushed Wop before him into a small sitting room that obviously took turns for other purposes. On one side, behind a glass-topped cocktail table littered with an impressive collection of pornographic picture magazines, was a studio couch equipped with as many odd straps as a torture wrack. On the other were two armchairs with suggestive-looking footstools. An air conditioner fitted in the bottom of the window was flanked by a television set and a console radio-phonograph. All manner of obscene figurines filled a three-tiered bookcase in the near corner. Oil nudes of a voluptuous colored woman and a well-equipped colored man faced each other from opposite walls. The air conditioner was turned off and there was the faint sweetish smell of opium in the air.
Madame Cushy followed them in, closed and locked the door, and turned to stare at the demoniacal tic in Coffin Ed’s face with impersonal fascination.
She was a buxom Creole-looking mulatto woman with sleepy, brown, bedroom eyes, black hair worn in a bun at the nape of her neck, and a faint black moustache. She wore a red decollete cotton cocktail dress and high-heeled black net shoes, and her neck, arms and hands gleamed and glittered with jewelry. She looked on the wrong side of forty, but still beautifully preserved and well-sexed. Her voice was a flat contradiction of her looks.
“Well, what is it, Edward? And don’t ask me anything about criminals, because I don’t know any.”
Coffin Ed said in his constricted voice, “Just a few questions, and I don’t want any mother-raping shit.”
Her face went black with a sudden bloodbursting fury. “Why, you small-time loudmouthed nigger-” she began, but was cut off by a knock on the door.
A woman’s flat unmusical voice from the entrance hall said, “It’s me — Ginny. I may as well go on if you’ll let me out.”
“Just a moment, dear,” Madame Cushy forced herself to say, and the next moment she felt her head jerked back by the bun of her hair, a knee in the small of her back, and the sharp edge of a knife blade across her throat.
Coffin Ed had moved so fast during the flicker of her gaze toward the door she hadn’t seen it.
“Walk slowly toward the door and open it and tell her to come in,” he whispered in her ear, lowering his knee so she could walk.
She didn’t move. Her face was a dull gray-black mask, looking twenty years older than a minute before, and the veins in her temples throbbed like artesian pumps.
“You’re going to get yourself killed,” she said in a low tight voice. “My bodyguard, Spunky, is in the lounge with my husband, and he’s wearing a forty-five. There’s a sawed-off shotgun in the bureau drawer. And Detective Ramsey is with them, and he’s got his police positive.”
“I always thought he was a crooked dick,” Coffin Ed whispered.
“Now you know.”
“But that won’t buy you anything. So help me God, I’ll cut your mother-raping throat.”
He motioned with his head to Wop to open the door. But Wop was paralyzed with terror. Huge obsidian eyes looked out in a hypnotized stare from a face gone battleship gray.
“I wouldn’t do it,” Madame Cushy said.
“Say good-bye,” Coffin Ed said and his arm tightened.
Madame Cushy looked at Wop’s eyes. She raised her voice and said, “Just one moment, Ginny.”
There was the sound of the lounge door opening and a male voice called, “What is it, baby?” Then it added in a lower tone as though the face had turned away, “Go see what’s happening, Spunky.”
Coffin Ed transferred Madame Cushy’s bun from his left hand to his teeth and drew Grave Digger’s pistol from his belt while still holding the knife blade to her throat.
When she moved he moved with her, like a monstrous Siamese twin.
Standing behind the door, she opened it and called out, “It’s nothing, dear. I’m trying to fix a rendezvous.” Then in a voice that sounded normal she added, “Come on in, Ginny.”
Ginny saw Wop’s face and hesitated, then stepped inside.
In one continuous motion Coffin Ed kicked the door shut with the edge of his left foot, spun Madame Cushy out of reach, transferred the knife blade to Ginny’s throat and closed her mouth with his left forearm, snapping back her head.
She felt the knife blade on her throat, tasted cloth, and saw the huge nickel-plated revolver gripped in a hard black hand just before her eyes. The strength went out of her knees and her body began to sag.
Madame Cushy stepped quickly to the door, opened it and went into the hall. Spunky was a step away, trying to look into the room. She pulled the door shut behind her and said, “Let them alone for a while.” Then she turned and called through the closed door, “Call me when you’re ready to leave.”