The Heat's On Part 13

Coffin Ed came out walking, a.s.sisted by two ambulance attendants whom he was trying to shake off. They managed to get him into the second ambulance and it drove off.

Sister Heavenly was backing off to leave when she heard someone say, "There's another one, an African with his throat cut."

She backed away fast. As she was leaving she saw two heavy black sedans filled with plainclothesmen from homicide pull up. She figured what she had was too d.a.m.n valuable to sell. It was valuable enough to get her own throat cut.

She walked quickly up the hill to Broadway, looking for a taxicab. She was so disconcerted she forgot to raise her parasol to protect her complexion from the suns.h.i.+ne.

After she had hailed a taxi, got inside and felt it moving, she began to feel secure again. But she knew she had to get rid of Uncle Saint and the red-hot Lincoln, or she was going to find herself up a creek.

When she arrived on the street where she had left her house, she found it filled with fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, and thinly dressed people, for the most part Italians with a sprinkling of Negroes, cooking in the noonday heat, risking sunstroke to satisfy their morbid curiosity.

The whole city was running amok, she thought, from the sugar side to the shabby side.

As the taxi drew nearer, she craned her neck, looking for her house. She didn't see it. From the window of the taxi, looking over the heads of the crowd, she couldn't see the floor that remained. It looked to her as though the entire house had disappeared. The only thing she could see was the Lincoln, standing out like a red thumb in the bright suns.h.i.+ne.

She stopped the taxi before it got too close to the police lines and hailed a pa.s.serby.

"What happened down the street?"

"Explosion!" the bareheaded Italian-looking worker gasped, breathing hard as though he couldn't get enough of the hot dusty air into his lungs. "Blew the house up. Killed the old couple who lived there. Saint Heavenly they were called. No trace of 'em. Musta had a still."

He didn't pause to see her reaction. He was scrabbling around, like scores of others, picking up sc.r.a.ps of paper.

Well now, ain't that just too beautiful for words? she thought. Then she asked the taxi driver, "See what that is they're picking up."

He got out and asked a youth to see a sample. It was the corner of a hundred-dollar bill. He brought it back to show to Sister Heavenly. The youth followed him suspiciously.

"Piece of a C-note," he said. "They must have been making counterfeit."

"That tears it," Sister Heavenly said.

The two of them stood staring at her.

"Give it back to him and let him go," she said.

She knew immediately that Uncle Saint had tried to blow her safe. It didn't surprise her. He must have used an atom bomb, she thought. She wished he had picked a better time for the caper.

The taxi driver climbed back into his seat and looked at her with growing suspicion. "Ain't that the house where you wanted to go?"

"Don't talk foolish, man," she snapped. "You see I can't go there 'cause the house ain't there no more."

"Don't you wanna talk to the cops?" he persisted.

"I just want you to turn around and drive me back to White Plains Road and put me out by the playground."

At that hour the treeless playground was deserted. The sandpits baked in the suns.h.i.+ne and heat radiated from the iron slides. The slatted bench on which Sister Heavenly sat burned stripes up and down her backsides. But she didn't notice it.

She took out her pipe and filled it with the finely ground stems of marijuana from an oilskin pouch and lit it with an old goldinitialed pipe lighter. Then she opened her black-and-white striped parasol and holding it over her head with her left hand, she held the pipe in her right hand and sucked the sweet pungent marijuana smoke deep into her lungs.

Sister Heavenly was a fatalist. If she had ever read _The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_, she might have been thinking of the lines:

The moving finger writes, And having writ moves on; Nor all your piety nor wit Nor all your tears Shall cancel half a line of it.

But instead she was thinking, Well, I'm back on my bare a.s.s where I started, but I ain't yet flat on my back.

It was life that had taught Sister Heavenly not to cry. A crying wh.o.r.e was a liability; and she had started as a wh.o.r.e. At fifteen she had run away from the sharecropper's shack her family had called home, with a pimp to be a wh.o.r.e because she was too cute and too lazy to hoe the corn and chop the cotton. He had told her that what she had to sell would find buyers when cotton and corn were a drug on the market. The memory brought a smile. He was a half-a.s.s pimp but he was sweet, she thought. But in the end he had kicked her out like the others had afterwards with nothing but the clothes she had on her back.

Then her thoughts turned cynical: Even cotton got rotten with age and corn got too wormy to shuck.

Anyway, after she'd got onto the faith healing pitch, she had lived high on the hog, which meant she could eat pork chops and pork roasts instead of pig's feet and chitterlings. It had been the other way around after that; she had been the ruler of the roost and had kicked her lovers out when she got tired of them.

She knocked out her pipe and put it away. The ocher-colored pupils of her eyes had become distended with a marbleized effect and pink splotches had formed beneath her leathery skin.

As she walked up White Plains Road the drab-colored buildings took on blinding bright hues in the suns.h.i.+ne. She hadn't been that high in more than twenty years. Her feet seemed to glide through the air, but she was still in full command of her mind.

She began to suspect she had cased the whole caper wrong from the very beginning. She had figured it as a s.h.i.+pment of H, but maybe it wasn't that at all.

It couldn't be a mother-raping treasure map, she thought with exasperation. That old con game went out when airplanes came in.

Or could it? another part of her mind asked. Could it be that some gang had come up with some treasure somewhere and had made a map of its whereabouts? But what the h.e.l.l kind of treasure? And how the h.e.l.l would the map get into the hands of a square like Gus, a simpleminded apartment house janitor?

The weed jag made her thoughts dance like jitterbugs. She turned into a supermarket drugstore and ordered black coffee.

She didn't notice the man next to her until he spoke. "Are you a model, may I ask?"

She flicked him an absent-minded glance. He looked like a salesman, a house-to-house canva.s.ser type.

"No, I'm one of the devil's mistresses," she said nastily.

The man reddened. "Excuse me, I thought maybe you were a model for some advertising agency." He retired behind a newspaper.

It was the afternoon _Journal American_ and she saw the streamer on the page turned toward her:

TWO HARLEM DETECTIVES SUSPENDED FOR BRUTALITY.

A column was devoted to the story. To one side the pictures of Grave Digger and Coffin Ed looked like pictures of a couple of Harlem muggers taken from the rogues' gallery.

She read as much of the story as she could before the man folded the paper.

So they killed Jake, she thought. In front of Riverside Church.

That must have been when Pinky put in the false fire alarm.

Her thoughts churned furiously. She tried to remember everything Pinky had said, how he had looked and acted. A pattern was beginning to take shape, but the answer eluded her.

Suddenly she jumped to her feet. Her table mate drew back in alarm. But she merely paid her bill and rushed outside and started walking rapidly to the nearest taxi stand.

She looked at her locket-watch when she had paid off the taxi driver in front of Riverside Church. It read 3:37.

She looked up and down the street. The prowl cars had gone and there was no sign left of the police unless it was the black sedan parked down the street from the entrance to the apartment.

She had a sinking sensation in her stomach as the thought occurred to her that it might already be too late.

She opened her parasol and holding it in her left hand and her heavy black beaded bag on her right arm, took hold of her skirt on the right side and lifting it slightly, sailed down the street and turned into the apartment house.

A big stolid-looking white cop was on guard at the door. He did a double take.

"Hey, whoa there, ma'am," he said, stopping her. "You can't go in here."

On second thought he added, "Unless you live here."

"Why not?" she countered. "Is it quarantined?"

"What do you want in here, if you don't live here?" he reiterated.

"I'm taking up subscriptions for the colored peoples' Old Folks Home," she said blandly.

But he was a conscientious cop. "Do you have a license?" he demanded. "Or at least any identification or something to show who you are?"

She arched her eyebrows. "Do I need any? After all, I'm a sponsor."

"Well, you'll have to come back later, I'm afraid. You see, the police are conducting a search in there right now and they don't want any strangers in the house."

"A search!" she exclaimed, giving the impression of horrified shock. "For a body buried in the bas.e.m.e.nt?"

The cop grinned. She reminded him of a character out of a stage play he had seen once.

"Well, not exactly a body, but a buried treasure," he said.

"My land!" she said. "What's the world coming to?"

His grin widened. "Ain't it awful?"

She started to turn away. "Well, if they find it, don't forget the old colored people," she said.

He laughed out loud. "Never!" he said.

She went into the next-door apartment house and took up a station in the foyer from which she could watch the entrance next door. Pa.s.sing tenants looked at her curiously, but she paid them no attention.

One thing was for sure, she was thinking; if it was there, the police would find it. But on the other hand, why hadn't the two gunmen found it, since they would know exactly what they were looking for?

Her head swam with doubts.

I wish to Jesus Christ! knew what the h.e.l.l I was looking for, she thought.

She saw a small panel truck pull up before the house next door. It had the letters S.P.C.A. painted on the sides.

Now what the h.e.l.l is this? she thought.

She saw two men wearing heavy leather gloves and long white dusters alight from the compartment and enter the house.

A few minutes later they returned, leading Pinky's dog Sheba by a heavy chain leash.

And all of a sudden it exploded in her head. All this G.o.dd.a.m.n time wasted! she thought disgustedly. And there it was all the time.

It fitted like white on rice.

She watched the attendants put the dog into the body of the S.P.C.A. truck and drive away. She had tofight back the impulse to rush out and call the b.i.t.c.h by name and claim her. But she knew she'd wind up in the pokey and they'd still have the dog. It was like watching a friend go down in the middle of the sea, she thought. You could feel for him but you couldn't reach him.

She started racking her memory trying to figure out what S.P.C.A. stood for. It couldn't be _Special Police for Collaring Animals_. That didn't make any sense. What would they have special police to collar animals for when any policeman could do it?

Then suddenly she remembered: _Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals_. Where she had heard about it she didn't know, but there it was.

She left her station and walked over to Broadway and entered the first bar. It took a little time to find the telephone number of the Manhattan branch of S.P.C.A.

A woman's pleasant, impersonal voice answered her call.

"I've heard you sell stray dogs," Sister Heavenly said. "I'd like to buy a dog."

"We don't actually sell the stray dogs that are brought in to us," the woman explained. "We try to find congenial homes for them where they will fit in with the families, and we ask for a donation of two dollars to help carry on the work of the foundation."

"Well, that's all right," Sister Heavenly said. "I can spare two dollars. Have you got any dogs on hand?"

"Well, yes, but is there any particular kind of dog you would like?"

"I want a big dog. A dog as big as a lion," Sister Heavenly said.

"We seldom have dogs that size," the woman said doubtfully. "And we are very particular about whom we let take them. Could you give me an idea of your reasons for wanting a dog that size?"

"It's like this," Sister Heavenly said. "I have a roadhouse in New Jersey. It's not far from Hoboken. And to be frank with you, it's not the most law-abiding place you can find. But there's a big fenced-in yard for the dog to run. And of course there're always plenty of bones, not to mention meat, for him to eat."

"I see. You need it for a watchdog?"

"Yes. And he can't be too big. Our last watchdog was fairly big. He was a German dog. But prowlers killed him."

"I see. You say _him_. Does it make any difference if the dog is female?"

"That's all the better. As long as she's big."

"It so happens that you have called at an opportune time," the pleasant-voiced woman said. "There might be a large female dog available within a few days. Would you mind giving me your name and address?"