Chester Himes - For love of Imabelle

She pushed the button. After a time the Judas window clicked open.

“Oh, it’s you, honey,” said a deep feminine voice, strangely pleasant.

The door was unlocked.

Grave Digger held his .38 in his right hand, put his left hand on the doorknob, and rode it in.

A vague shape in the almost pitch-dark hall moved slowly to one side to let him enter, and the deep voice said to Imabelle, not so pleasantly, “Well, come on inside and shut the door.”

Imabelle pushed in behind Grave Digger, and the front of the dark hall was crowded. The faint sound of her teeth chattering could be heard in the silence.

The woman closed the door and locked it without speaking.

“You got some friends I want, Billie,” Grave Digger said.

“Come into my office a moment, Digger.”

She unlocked the first door to the left with a Yale key attached to a chain about her neck. A copper-shaded lamp spilled a soft glow on a blond-oak writing desk. When she switched on the bright overhead light, a luxurious bedroom suite, planted in the deep pile of a vermilion rug, sprang into view. She quickly closed the door behind them.

Grave Digger searched the room with one quick glance, looked an instant longer at the knobs of the doors to the closet and bathroom, then moved out into the room so that Billie was a target against the hall door.

“Talk fast,” he said. “It’s getting late.”

She was a brown-skinned woman in her middle forties, with a compact husky body filling a red gabardine dress. With a man’s haircut and a smooth, thick, silky mustache, her face resembled that of a handsome man. But her body was a cross. The top two buttons of the dress were open, and between her two immense uplifted breasts was a thick growth of satiny black hair. When she talked a diamond flashed between her two front teeth.

She flicked a glance at Imabelle’s swollen, purple-tinted cheek, across Imabelle’s scared-sick eyes, and then gave her whole attention to Grave Digger.

“Don’t take them in the house, Digger. I’ll send them out.”

“Are they all together?”

“All? There’s only two here now. Hank and Jodie.”

“Slim ought to be here too,” Imabelle said in a breathless voice. Both Grave Digger and Billie turned to stare at her.

“Maybe he’s out looking for me.”

Billie looked away from her first. Grave Digger stared an instant longer. Then both turned back toward each other.

“I’ll take those two,” Grave Digger said.

“Not in the house, Digger. They’re hopped to the gills and kill-happy. I’ve got two of my best girls with them.”

“That’s the chance you take running this kind of joint.”

“I don’t run it for free, you know. I pay like hell. And the captain promised me there wouldn’t be any rumbles in here.”

“Where are they?”

“The captain won’t like it, Digger.”

Grave Digger looked at her thoughtfully.

“Billie, they threw acid in Ed’s eyes.”

Billie shuddered.

“Listen, Digger, I’ll set them up. I’ll take them down to the foyer myself and hand them over to you with their hands full of air.”

“You know goddamn well they don’t intend to leave that way. They’re planning on going over the roof and coming out of the house next door.”

“All right. Listen. I’ll trade you. I’ll give you three purse-snatchers, a prowler you’ve been wanting for a long time—”

“It’s getting late, Billie.”

“—and the Wilson murderer. The one who killed the liquor-store man during that stickup last month.”

“I’m going to come back for them. But I’ll take these two now.”

She turned quickly and pulled open a top bureau-drawer.

Grave Digger drew a bead on the middle of her spine.

She pulled the drawer clear out, threw it on the bed. It was filled evenly with stacks of brand-new twenty-dollar bills.

“There’s five grand. It’s yours.”

He didn’t look at the money.

“Where are they, Billie? There isn’t much time.”

“They’re in the pad. But they’ve got themselves locked in and they won’t open even for me.”

“They’ll open for her,” Grave Digger said, nodding toward Imabelle.

Billie turned to stare at Imabelle.

Imabelle had turned a sour-cream yellow with blue-black half-moons beneath her dog-sick eyes. She was trembling like a leaf.

“Don’t make me do it. Please don’t make me do it.”

Tears streamed down her face. She knelt on the floor, clutched Grave Digger about the legs.

“I’ll do anything. I’ll be your woman, or a circus girl—”

“Get up,” Grave Digger said without mercy. “Get up, or I’ll blast open the door, holding you in front of me as a shield.”

She got to her feet like an old woman.

Billie looked at her without pity.

“You know Hank when you see him?” Imabelle asked Grave Digger, talking in gasps. “The one who threw the acid?”

“I’d know that bastard in hell.”

“He’s the one who’s got the gun.”

“Digger, for God’s sake be careful,” Billie pleaded. “They got two of my best young girls in there. Jeanie’s only sixteen and she’s with Jodie—”

“You’re talking yourself out of business.”

“—and Jodie’s on a kill-crazy edge with that knife. And Carol’s only nineteen herself.”

“Let’s just hope neither of their numbers comes up,” Grave Digger said.

He turned to Imabelle. “Go down and knock on the door.”

When they came out of the room, a white man came from the bathroom next door, buttoning his fly, gave them a drunken look, and staggered quietly back to the sitting room.

Imabelle went down the hall as to her death.

There were six rooms and a bath in the flat, the four bedrooms facing across the long center-hall, the bath between Billie’s office and the small bedroom called the pad. The hall ran into a big front combination dining-sitting room with shaded windows overlooking both 155th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue; a small electrically equipped kitchen was to the right.

There was a jukebox playing softly at one end of the sitting room; two white men sat on divans with three colored girls. At the other end, toward the kitchen, two colored men and a colored woman sat at a large mahogany dining table eating fried chicken and potato salad. The lights were low, the air faintly tinted with incense.

In one of the bedrooms a white man and a colored girl lay embraced between sky-blue sheets. In another, five colored men played a nearly wordless game of stud poker in the smoke-filled air, drinking cold beer from bottles and eating sandwiches.

The pad had a door opening into the hall, and another on the side at the back which opened into one end of the kitchen. Both doors were locked, with the keys in the locks. There was a single window opening onto the landing of the fire escape, but it was hidden behind heavy drapes drawn over Venetian blinds.

Hank lay on a couch, dressed in his blue suit, his head propped on two sofa pillows. He was slowly puffing opium through a water pipe. The shallow bowl with the bubbling opium pill rested on a brazier on a glass-covered cocktail table. The smoke passed through a short curved stem, bubbled in a glass decanter half-filled with tepid water, was drawn through a long transparent plastic tube into the amber mouthpiece which Hank held loosely between slack lips.

His .38 automatic lay beside him, out of sight against the wall.

A young girl wearing a white blouse over full, ripened breasts and tight-fitting slacks sat on the green carpet, her knees drawn up and her head resting back against the sofa. She had a smooth seal-brown face, big staring eyes, and a wide-lipped, flower-like mouth.

Jodie sat across the room, on a green leather ottoman. His head was bent over almost inside of the speaker of a console combination as he listened to a Hot Lips Page recording of Bottom Blues , playing it over and over so low that the notes were heard distinctly only by his drug-sharpened sense of hearing.