For a moment there was only the sound of their footsteps going toward the lounge and the closing of a door.
Inside the room the sound of Wop’s teeth chattering was as loud as castanets.
“Stand up!” Coffin Ed grated in Ginny’s ear.
Her knees straightened and she tried to talk. The movement of her head pressed her long black oily hair into his face.
“Shut up!” he whispered, turning his head to get his face out of the thick, perfumed, rancid, suffocating mass of hair.
The tight, close, abnormal contact of their bodies was aphrodisiacal in a sadistic manner, and both were shaken with an unnatural lust.
“Strip her,” Coffin Ed ordered Wop.
She heard the uncontrollable threads of desire in his voice and thought she was about to be raped. She shook her head and tried again to talk, mumbling what sounded like, “You don’t have to-”
Wop stared in petrified stupidity. “Strip her?” he echoed as though he didn’t understand the words.
“Take her mother-raping clothes off,” Coffin Ed said through clenched teeth. “Ain’t you never done that?”
Wop moved toward her as though she were a lioness with cubs. She was passive, raising each foot in turn for him to remove her shoes and stockings. No one spoke. Only their heavy breathing and the chattering of Wop’s teeth were audible. But he took so long to remove her sheen gabardine suit and chartreuse underclothes the silence became excruciating.
When she was stark naked, Coffin Ed released her.
She turned and saw him for the first time. “Oh, it’s you!” she said in her jarring voice.
“It’s me all right.”
She dropped to her knees and clasped his thighs in a tight embrace. “Just don’t hurt me,” she said.
“What the hell!” he said, and grabbed a fistful of her hair and dragged her onto the couch.
Her thick cushiony mouth opened in pain as she sucked in breath, but she didn’t dare scream. He rolled her over and carefully examined her for needle marks, but didn’t find any.
“Tie her down,” he ordered Wop.
Wop moved like a robot, joints stiff and eyes senseless.
When he had finished, Coffin Ed said, “Get her compact from her handbag.” Then he leaned over and took her by the hair again. Pulling her head back until her throat was taut, he cut the skin in a thin line six inches across her throat.
She didn’t move, didn’t breathe. Her eyes were limpid pools of terror set in a fixed stare.
“Give me the mirror,” he said.
He held it before her eyes. “See your throat.”
A thin line of blood showed where he had cut. She fainted.
He tossed away the compact and said with a choked impotent fury, “Let anybody’s blood flow but their own!”
Then he slapped her until she came to.
He knew that he had gone beyond the line; that he had gone outside of human restraint; he knew that what he was doing was unforgivable. But he didn’t want any more lies.
She lay rigid, looking at him with hate and fear.
“Next time I’ll cut it to the bone,” he said.
A shudder ran over her body as though a foot had stepped on her grave.
“All right, I’ll tell you,” she said. “I’ll tell you how to get it. It’s what you want, isn’t it?”
He looked at her without answering.
“We’ll split it,” she went on. “We’ll cut your partner in two. There’s enough for all three of us. You don’t want me but you can have me too. You’ll want me when you’ve had me. You won’t be able to get enough of me. I can make you scream with joy. I can do it in ways you never dreamed of. You’re cops. You’ll be safe. They can’t hurt you. You can kill them.”
He was caught for a moment in a hurt as terrible as any he had ever known. “Is everybody crooked on this mother-raping earth?” It came like a cry of agony torn out of him.
Then he said in a voice so tight it was barely audible, “You think because I’m a cop I’ve got a price. But you’re making a mistake. You’ve got only one thing I want. The truth. You’re going to give me that. Or I’m going to fix you so that no man will ever want anything else you got to give. And I ain’t playing.”
“They’ll kill me.”
“They’re going to kill you anyway if I don’t kill them first.”
Twenty-three minutes later he had her story. He had no way of knowing whether it was true. Only time would tell.
He looked at his watch. It read 11:57.
He untied her and told her to get up and dress.
He figured he knew as much as he was ever going to know. Before the payoff, anyway. If what she said was true, he had cased it right himself. If it wasn’t true, they were all going down together.
While she was dressing he listened to the sound of a recording coming from the lounge. Other recordings had been playing before, but he hadn’t heard them.
It was a saxophone solo by Lester Young. He didn’t recognize the tune, but it had the “Pres” treatment. His stomach tightened. It was like listening to someone laughing their way toward death. It was laughter dripping wet with tears. Colored people’s laughter.
His thoughts took him back to the late 1930s — the “depression” years. When he and Digger had attended a P.S. on 112th Street. They’d heard Lester playing with the Count Basie group at the Apollo, swapping fours and eights with Herschel Evans on their tenor horns.
Pres! He was the greatest, he thought.
“I’m ready,” Ginny said.
“Open the door and call Madame Cushy,” he said.
When Madame Cushy entered the room, he looked her over carefully. Satisfied she was unarmed, he said to Ginny, “You go out first, I’ll follow you,” and then to Wop, “You come behind me and if you see anybody with a gun, just scream.”
Madame Cushy’s lips curled. “If we were going to hurt you, you’d be dead by now. You won’t be hurt around here.”
Silently he sheathed the knife and stuck Grave Digger’s pistol back inside his waistband. He looked at her again. “Digger’s dead,” he said, then added, “And you’re living.”
He motioned with his hand and they left in single file.
Madame Cushy held the door open. When Coffin Ed passed her, she said quietly, “I won’t forget you.”
He didn’t answer.
He smelled the stink of terror coming from their bodies as they descended in the elevator. He thought bitterly, They’re all scared as hell when it’s their own lives they’re playing around with.
Before crossing the sidewalk to his car, he stood for a moment in the doorway, casing the street, his gun in his hand. He didn’t expect any gunplay. If what she had said was true, the gunmen would not be in sight. It was just a precaution. He had learned the hard way not to believe anybody entirely when it’s your own life at stake.
He didn’t see anyone or anything that looked suspicious.
They walked to the car in the same position as they had left the flat. He got into the front seat from the inside and slid over. The other two came in after him, Ginny in the middle and Wop on the outside.
I wish Digger was here, he thought without thinking.
He didn’t think that thought anymore.
20
It took only seven minutes to get there and he didn’t hurry. The hurry was off.
He made a U-turn on St Nicholas Avenue, went down the incline to 125th Street, and turned west toward the Hudson River.
For a couple of blocks more, 125th Street was still in the colored section: jukeboxes blared from the neon-lighted bars, loudmouthed people milled up and down the sidewalks, shrill-voiced pansies crowded in front of the Down Beat where the dusky-skinned female impersonators held forth, weedheads jabbered and gesticulated in front of Pop’s Billiards Parlor. And then the big new housing project loomed dark and silent.
He turned south on Broadway, west again on 124th Street, and climbed the steep hill of Clermont Avenue behind the high stone wall of International House. Another turn toward the river and he came out into the quiet confines of Riverside Drive beside Riverside Church.