The Real Cool Killers Part 5

He hesitated before opening the door. "You ain't expecting n.o.body?"

"Me? No. Who could I expect?"

"You're acting mighty funny."

"I'm just nervous."

The signal was rapped again.

Sheik stepped to the door and said, "Gaza."

"Suez," a girl's lilting voice replied.

Sheik gave Sissie a threatening look as he unlocked the door.

A small-boned chocolate-brown girl dressed like Sissie slipped hurriedly into the room.

At sight of Sissie she stopped and said, "Oh!" in a guilty tone of voice.

Sheik looked from one to the other. "I thought you said she was at home," he accused Sissie.

"I thought she was," Sissie said.

He turned his gaze on Sugart.i.t. "What the h.e.l.l's the matter with you? What the h.e.l.l's going on here?"

"A Moslem's been killed and I thought it was you," she said.

"All you little b.i.t.c.hes were hoping it was me," he said.

She had sloe eyes with long black lashes that looked secretive. She threw a quick defiant look at Sissie and said, "Don't include me in that."

"Did you tell Granny?" Sheik asked.

"Of course not."

"It was your lover, Caleb," Sheik said brutally.

She gave a shriek and charged at Sheik, clawing and kicking.

"You dirty b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" she cried. "You're always picking at me."

Sissie pulled her off. "Shut up and keep your mouth shut," she said tightly.

"You tell her," Sheik said.

"It was Caleb, all right," Sissie said.

"Caleb!" Sugart.i.t screamed and flung herself face down across the bed. She was up in a flash, hurling accusations at Sheik. "You did it. You got him killed. On account of me. 'Cause he had the best go and you couldn't get me to do what you made Sissie do."

"That's a lie," Sissie said.

"Caleb!" Sugart.i.t screamed at the top of her voice.

"Shut up, Granny will hear you," Choo-Choo said.

"Granny! Caleb's dead! Sheik killed him!" she screamed again.

"Stop her," Sheik commanded Sissie. "She's getting hysterical and I don't want to have to hurt her."

Sissie clutched her from behind, put one hand over her mouth and twisted her arm behind her back with the other.

Sugart.i.t looked furiously at Sheik over the top of Sissie's hand.

"Granny can't hear," Inky said.

"The h.e.l.l she can't," Choo-Choo said. "She can hear when she wants to."

"Let me go!" Sugart.i.t mumbled and bit Sissie's hand.

"Stop that!" Sissie said.

"I'm going to him," Sugart.i.t mumbled. "I love him. You can't stop me. I'm going to find out who shot him."

"Your old man shot him," Sheik said brutally. "The monster, Coffin Ed."

"Did I hear someone calling Caleb?" Granny asked from the other side of the door.

Sheik closed his hands quickly about Sugart.i.t's throat and choked her into silence.

"Naw, Granny," he called. "It's just these silly girls arguing about their cubebs."

"Hannh?"

"Cubebs!" Sheik shouted.

"You chillen make so much racket a body can't hear herself think," she muttered.

They heard her shuffling back to the kitchen.

"Jesus, she's sitting up waiting for him," Sissie said.

Sheik and Choo-Choo exchanged glances.

"She don't even know what's happening in the street," Choo-Choo said.

Sheik took his hands away from Sugart.i.t's throat.

5.

"How soon can you find out what he was killed with?" the chief of police asked.

"He was killed with a bullet, naturally," the a.s.sistant medical examiner said.

"You're not funny," the chief said. "I mean what caliber bullet."

His brogue had begun thickening and the cops who knew him best began getting nervous.

The deputy coroner snapped his bag shut with a gesture of coyness and peered at the chief through magnified eyeb.a.l.l.s encircled by black gutta-percha.

"That can't be known until after the autopsy. The bullet will have to be removed from the corpse's brain and subjected to tests --"

The chief listened in red-faced silence.

"I don't perform the autopsy. I'm the night man. I just pa.s.s on whether they're dead. I marked this one as D.O.A. That means dead on arrival -- my arrival, not his. You know more about whether he was dead on his arrival than I do, and more about how he was killed, too."

"I asked you a civil question."

"I'm giving you a civil answer. Or, I should say, a civil service answer. The men who do the autopsy come on duty at nine o'clock. You ought to get your report by ten."

"That's all I asked you. Thanks. And d.a.m.n little good that'll do me tonight. And by ten o'clock tomorrow morning the killer ought to be h.e.l.l and gone to another part of the United States if he's got any sense."

"That's your affair, not mine. You can send the stiffs to the morgue when you've finished with them. I'm finished with them now. Good night, everyone."

No one answered. He left.

"I never knew why we needed a G.o.dd.a.m.ned doctor to tell us whether a stiff was dead or not," the chief grumbled.

He was a big weather-beaten man dressed in a lot of gold braid. He'd come up from the ranks. Everything about him from the armful of gold hash stripes to the box-toed custommade shoes said "flatfoot." Behind his back the cops on Centre Street called him Spark Plug, after the tender-footed nag in the comic strip "Barney Google."

The group near the white man's corpse, of which he was the hub, had grown by then, to include, in addition to the princ.i.p.als, two deputy police commissioners, an inspector from homicide, and nameless uniformed lieutenants from adjoining precincts.

The deputy commissioners kept quiet. Only the commissioner himself had any authority over the chief, and he was at home in bed.

"This thing's hot as h.e.l.l," the chief said at large. "Have we got our stories synchronized?"

Heads nodded.

"Come on then, Anderson, we'll meet the press," he said to the lieutenant in charge of the 126th Street precinct station.

They walked across the street to join a group of newsmen who were being held in leash.

"Okay, men, you can get your pictures," he said.

Flash bulbs exploded in his face. Then the photographers converged on the corpses and left him facing the reporters.

"Here it is, men. The dead man has been identified by his paper as Ulysses Galen of New York City. He lives alone in a two-room suite at Hotel Lexington. We've checked that. They think his wife is dead. He's a sales manager for the King Cola Company. We've contacted their main office in Jersey City and learned that Harlem is in his district."

His thick brogue dripped like milk and honey through the noisy night. Stylos scratched on pads. Flash bulbs went off around the corpses like an anti-aircraft barrage.

"A letter in his pocket from a Mrs. Helen Kruger, Wading River, Long Island, begins with Dear Dad. There's an unposted letter addressed to Homer Galen in the sixteen hundred block on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. That's a business district. We don't know whether Homer Galen is his son or another relation --"

"What about how he was killed?" a reporter interrupted.

"We know that he was shot in the back of the head by a Negro man named Sonny Pickens who operates a shoe s.h.i.+ne parlor at 134th Street and Lenox Avenue. Several Negroes resented the victim drinking in a bar at 129th Street and Lenox --"

"What was he doing at .a crummy bar up here in Harlem?"

"We haven't found that out yet. Probably just slumming. We know that the barman was cut trying to protect him from another colored a.s.sailant--"

"How did the s.h.i.+ne a.s.sail him?"

"This is not funny, men. The first Negro attacked him with a knife -- tried to attack him; the bartender saved him. After he left the bar Pickens followed him down the street and shot him in the back."

"You expect him to shoot a white man in the front."

"Two colored detectives from the 126th Street precinct station arrived on the scene in time to arrest Pickens virtually in the act of homicide. He still had the gun in his hand," the chief continued. "They handcuffed the prisoner and were in the act of bringing him in when he was s.n.a.t.c.hed by a teenage Harlem gang that calls itself Real Cool Moslems."

Laughter burst from the reporters.

"What, no Mau-Maus?"

"It's not funny, men," the chief said again. "One of them tried to throw acid in one of the detective's eyes."

The reporters were silenced.

"Another gangster threw acid in an officer's face up here about a year ago, wasn't it?" a reporter said. "He was a colored cop, too. Johnson, Coffin Ed Johnson, they called him."

"It's the same officer," Anderson said, speaking for the first time.

"He must be a magnet," the reporters said.

"He's just tough and they're scared of him," Anderson said. "You've got to be tough to be a colored cop in Harlem. Unfortunately, colored people don't respect colored cops unless they're tough."

"He shot and killed the acid thrower," the chief said.

"You mean the first one or this one?" the reporter asked.

"This one, the Moslem," Anderson said.

"During the excitement, Pickens and the others escaped into the crowd," the chief said.

He turned and pointed toward a tenement building across the street. It looked indescribably ugly in the glare of a dozen powerful spotlights. Uniformed police stood on the roof, others were coming and going through the entrance; still others stuck their heads out of front windows to shout to other cops in the street. The other front windows were jammed with colored faces, looking like cl.u.s.ters of strange purple fruit in the stark white light.

"You can see for yourselves we're looking for the killer," the chief said. "We're going through those buildings with a fine-toothed comb, one by one, flat by flat, room by room. We have the killer's description. He's wearing toolproof handcuffs. We should have him in custody before morning. He'll never get out of that dragnet."