It ain't any worse than some of the tricks I've turned, she thought.

She went to the basin and washed her hands, arms and feet. She took a fresh handkerchief from her bag, saturated it with perfume, and wiped her bald head, face, neck and arms, and feet. She remade her face, put on her gray wig and black straw hat, sat on the bed and put on her shoes and stockings, putdown her skirt, picked up her beaded bag and parasol, and left the room, locking the door behind her and taking the key along.

The proprietor was coming in from the street as she went out.

"You left your dog," he said.

"I'm coming back."

"Will she be quiet while you're gone?"

For the first time in more than thirty years Sister Heavenly felt slightly hysterical.

"She's the quietest dog in the city," she said.

19.

First, Coffin Ed and the youth called Wop had driven out to the Bronx and looked at the remains of Sister Heavenly's house. A police barricade had been thrown about it and experts from the safe and loft squad were still digging in the wreckage. One look had been enough for Coffin Ed.

Afterwards, employing Wop as his guide, he made a junkie's tour of Harlem. Wop was known to all the landprops as Daddy Haddy's runner and had the entree. Coffin Ed had the persuader.

Pushing Wop in front of him to ring the doorbells and give the pa.s.swords, with the muzzle of Grave Digger's pistol poking in his spine, he had crashed all the notorious shooting galleries in Harlem, the joints where the addicts met to take their kicks and greet their chicks; where the skinpoppers and the schmeckers (those who used the needle and those who sniffed the powder), the pushers and the weedheads gathered for s.e.x circuses and to listen to the real cool jive.

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 wh.o.r.es and the thieves and the dregs of humanity; all being rooked together by the peddlers of the fivecolored dreams and the cool dry jags and the hot s.e.x 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 s.h.i.t alley.

"You said you wasgoing 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 pa.s.sed over the bridge...." It sounded to Coffin Ed as though he said "when Queen Elizabeth _p.i.s.sed_ 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 n.o.body 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 a.s.saulting an alleged dope peddler named Jake Kubansky who subsequently died. The a.s.sailant, or a.s.sailants, 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 n.o.body," he whimpered. "I ain't stole nothing. All I done was just work for Daddy Haddy. I ain't hurt n.o.body."

"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 gra.s.sless 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 gla.s.s door of the apartment house.

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 pushb.u.t.tons and settled on one that read: DrJ. C. Douglas, M.D.

There was a house intercom beside the row of b.u.t.tons 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."

"h.e.l.l, 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 wh.o.r.e 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. "Ya.s.suh. 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 b.u.t.ton.

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 h.e.l.l 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 ad justable 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 pa.s.sed.

A wide short entrance hall, flanked by two closed doors, ended at gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s-topped c.o.c.ktail table littered with an impressive collection of p.o.r.nographic 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 c.o.c.ktail 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-s.e.xed. 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 s.h.i.t."

Her face went black with a sudden bloodbursting fury. "Why, you small-time loudmouthed n.i.g.g.e.r--" 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, s.p.u.n.ky, 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 d.i.c.k," Coffin Ed whispered.

"Now you know."

"But that won't buy you anything. So help me G.o.d, I'll cut your mother-raping throat."