Red Johnny shook his head.

"If I catch you lying--"

"I hope G.o.d may kill me," Red Marie blurted. "We don't let no pushers come in here. It's just parties we has and folks bring their own stuff. We gets a few skinpoppers but the H they has ain't even strong enough to be habit-forming. Ain't none of 'em real addicts. Most of 'em just blows weed. Just to get a kick. That ain't our racket. We just sells poontang here."

"Pinky is an addict."

"Yes, but--"

"Let him answer."

Red Johnny nodded.

Coffin Ed stepped back from the pool of blood that was reaching toward his feet.

"Lawd be my secret judge, he don't come here for it," Red Marie said. "He don't come for the jags neither. He just buys p.u.s.s.y."

"Has he got any particular choice?"

"He too ugly to score a home here; he's like Jesus, he loves 'em all."

"Was he here today?"

Red Johnny shook his head.

"Last night?"

Again Red Johnny shook his head.

"Know where he lives?"

The answer was the same.

"You've been doing so much talking; talk some now," Coffin Ed said to Marie.

"We don't know nothing 'bout Pinky, I swear 'fore G.o.d; he just come here to see the girls and I wish to heaven he had picked on somebody else for that; I don't need his money and I can't stand his looks."

"Where does he hang out?"

"Hang out?" She started to parry, but one glance at Coffin Ed's face loosened her tongue so that she began to stammer. "Kid Blackie's gym is all I know. I heered him say once he'd just come from there. You know somewheres else, Johnny?"

Red Johnny shook his head.

"All right," Coffin Ed said. "That's Pinky's dog I got. I'm gonna take it through this house and let it sniff around. If I find out you're lying--"

"As G.o.d be my benefactor and protector and my haven-" Marie began, but Coffin Ed cut her off.

"You're making me puke. How is it that all you worn-out wh.o.r.es get so chummy with G.o.d?"

"It ain't really Him," Marie said solemnly. "It's Jesus." He couldn't tell whether she was in earnest or not. He pushed open the door and went toward the front hail and called the dog.

"She's here!" a woman's voice replied.

He went up the front stairs to the second floor and traced the voice to an open bedroom at the rear. A brownskin wh.o.r.e in a negligee was stuffing cream chocolates into the side of the dog's mouth through the muzzle. The b.i.t.c.h loved it.

Coffin Ed took the chain leash and led the dog. He didn't know exactly what he was looking for, but he was playing out a hunch. Nothing came of it but some curses from some wh.o.r.es working at their trade.

"Gawddammmm!" one of the girls said disgustedly when her white customer became suddenly deflated at sight of the big colored man and monstrous dog poking into the room. "As long as it took to get this slow-John started--"

Upon seeing a pay telephone in the front hall, Coffin Ed stopped and telephoned the hospital.

The answer was the same.

Red Johnny and Red Marie were nowhere in sight when he pa.s.sed through the kitchen.

He led the dog around on the other side of the table from the pool of blood, through the back door and around the house. He didn't encounter anyone. The whole block looked deserted.

He put the dog in the back of the Plymouth and got into the front seat behind the wheel. He looked at his watch. It read 4:51.

He had a sudden crazy, desperate feeling that he was looking for a needle in a haystack, wasting time; and that time was the most precious thing on earth.

16.

Kid Blackie was a short black man with a face like a monkey's and a shining bald head. His torso was naked in the dim-lit stinking heat of the small dirty gym. Big flopping b.r.e.a.s.t.s shaped like gourds with rusty-looking teats as big as a woman's hung down to his navel. His flabby muscles seemed about to drop from the bones and his bay window was big enough to give birth to quintuplets.

He had his thumbs hooked in frayed suspenders holding up baggy-seated pants that looked loaded, and was chewing the stub of a cigar in the corner of his mouth, as he watched two young chocolate-skinned middleweights work out on the greasy square of canvas.

"Wait a minute, Ed," he said and blew on a whistle that hung from a string about his neck.

The boys stopped punching and stared at him.

He climbed into the ring and squared off with one of the boys.

"Like this," he said, the cigar b.u.t.t wobbling in the corner of his mouth, and jabbed a left at the boy's face.

When the boy's guard flew up automatically, he crossed a right to the boy's stomach, bringing it down. The boy's right shoulder dropped as he started a looping right hook. Kid Blackie hooked a left to the boy's jaw so fast the boy never saw it. The boy sat down, looking dazed.

Kid Blackie turned to the other boy. "You seen howl done it?"

The boy nodded mutely.

"You try it."

The boy jabbed with his left. Kid Blackie went under it and left-hooked him in the stomach. The boy bent in slightly, dropping his left arm, and tried to cross with his right. But he wasn't fast enough. Kid Blackie threw an overhand right to his jaw and knocked him unconscious.

He spat frayed tobacco to the canvas and climbed down out of the ring. His old gla.s.sy brown eyes looked sad.

"These boys that turn up nowadays," he bemoaned. "If they was chicks they'd never get hatched."

Kid Blackie had been lightweight champion of the world at one time. Rumor had it that he had squandered over a million dollars on white women and Cadillacs. He didn't look as though he regretted it.

"All old people say the same thing," Coffin Ed dissented. "There're always some good and some bad. You don't expect everybody to be like you."

"Maybe you're right." He watched the two boys helping one another up. "What's on your a.s.s?"

"I'm looking for Pinky."

Kid Blackie scratched his bald head. "That's funny. Some b.i.t.c.h was just in here looking for him too. Cat-eyed woman. Ain't been more'n ten minutes ago."

Coffin Ed tensed and his tic started jumping.

"By herself?"

Kid Blackie wasn't looking directly at him, but he didn't miss the sudden change.

"Yeah," he said. "She come up by herself but I got curious. Only reason for a b.i.t.c.h like her be looking for Pinky would be to shoot him, so when she left I looked out the window. She got in a car with two white jokers -- looked like mobsters." He let it go at that.

Coffin Ed felt his heart constrict and his breath turned rockhard in his lungs. I'm on your tail now, you mother-rapers, he thought. Pain flooded his head like a sudden hemorrhage and his tic went spasmodic. He tried to control his voice.

"Get a look at 'em?"

"Not much. Come on, let's take a gander. Maybe they're still hanging around."

They walked to the grimy flyspecked window and looked down on 116th Street.

"Had a gray Buick -- little one," Kid Blackie added.

Their gazes searched the parked cars lining the curbs.

The sun was on the south side and the street lay in shadow. Colored people dressed for the heat milled about on the wide sidewalks, shiny black faces peering from beneath a variety of headgear, black arms protruding from light cotton fabrics.

A two-wheel pushcart loaded with slices of watermelon packed in ice and covered with wet gunnysacks was parked behind an empty ice truck. A hand-lettered sign on one side read: SUGAR TooF GORGIA MELON, with the S turned around. Water dripped from the bottom.

Farther down an old man with a smaller pushcart was selling gla.s.ses of flavored ice. The varicolored bottles stood in a rack about a block of ice covered with wet newspaper. Fronting on the sidewalk behind it was an open hot-dog counter with big gla.s.s bottles of orange-flavored ice water and a grill covered with franks like soldiers on parade.

Venetian blinds covered the windows of the bars. Signboards in the lobby of a movie theater depicted gangsters never seen on land or sea shooting it out with blasting rods. On the street in front of it, skinny black children wearing loincloths romped in a stream of water gushing from a fire hydrant.

Coffin Ed had left the dog in his Plymouth and she had her head out of the window, panting. A crowd had collected to stare at her. They kept a respectful distance despite her muzzle.

One little boy was holding up his mongrel in his arms to see the big dog. The mongrel didn't like that business.

There was no sign of a gray Buick.

Kid Blackie shook his head. "They musta gone."

The distant blaring of a jukebox came from a bar somewhere below. A bottle fly buzzed against the grimy windowpane.

"You didn't get a look at 'em?" Coffin Ed asked finally, trying to keep the disappointment from his voice.

"I didn't see 'em too good," Kid Blackie confessed. "The mugs looked like mugs look anywhere. One looked sort of bony, whitefaced, like he was sick, a hopheaded-looking character. Other was a fatty, too light to be a greaser, maybe a Swede. Both of 'em was wearing straw hats and smoked gla.s.ses. That mean anything to you?"

"They sound like the ones who sapped me and got Digger." Kid Blackie clicked his tongue. "Too bad about Digger. Think he'll make it?"

There wasn't much sympathy in his voice, but Coffin Ed understood it. Kid Blackie liked Digger, but he was so old he was glad it was somebody else dying and not himself.

"Can't tell 'til the deal's down," he said.

"Wish I could help you. The woman was dressed sharp, had on a light green suit--"

"I know her."

"Well, that's all I seen."

"Every little bit helps. You ain't seen Pinky?"

"Not since three days ago. What you think these mobsters want with him?"

"Same as me."

Kid Blackie looked at Coffin Ed's face through the corners of his eyes and dropped it.

"Too bad about that big ape," he said. "He might have made the grade if it wasn't for his skin."

"What's the matter with his skin?" Coffin Ed asked absently. He was thinking of the janitor's wife, trying to figure this new angle.

"Bruises too easily," Kid Blackie said. "Touch him with a feather and he'll turn black-and-blue. In the ring it always looks like he's getting beat to death when he ain't even hurt. I remember once the ref stopped the fight and Pinky wasn't even--"

"I ain't got much time, Kid," Coffin Ed cut him off. "You got any idea where I can find him?"

Kid Blackie scratched his shiny bald head. "Well, he's got a pad somewhere on the Riverside Drive."

"I know that, but he's on the lam."

"Yeah? In that case I couldn't say." Kid Blackie screwed up his eyes and gave Coffin Ed a tentative look. "A man can't ask you no questions, can he?"

"It ain't that," Coffin Ed said. "I just ain't got time to answer."

"Well, I heered he got an aunt up in the Bronx somewheres," Kid Blackie volunteered. "Called Sister Heavenly. You ever heered of her?"

Coffin Ed was thinking. "Yeah, once or twice. But I've never seen her."