Chester Himes - The Heat's on

Before arriving at Sister Heavenly’s he threw out the dead gunman’s hat, then retrieved the shotgun, reloaded it, and placed it on the floor of the front seat within reach.

“Now let’s see which way the cat’s gonna jump,” he said to himself.

It was about 8:30 o’clock. The clock in the car didn’t work and Uncle Saint didn’t have a watch. But time meant nothing to him one way or another.

Grave Digger was sound asleep.

His wife shook him.

“Telephone. It’s Captain Brice.”

Grave Digger knuckled the sleep from his eyes. On duty all of his senses were constantly on the alert. Coffin Ed had once summed it up by saying, “Blink once and you’re dead.” To which Grave Digger had rejoined, “Blink twice and you’re buried.”

But at home, Grave Digger relaxed completely. His wife sometimes called him “Slowpoke”.

He was still sleep-groggy when he took the phone and said grumpily, “Now what gives?”

Captain Brice was a disciplinarian. He never fraternized with the men under him and played no favorites. The Harlem precinct was his command. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed were under his supervision, although their hours at night rarely permitted them to see him.

“Jake Kubansky is dead,” he said in a voice without inflection. “I have orders to present you to the commissioner’s office at nine o’clock.”

Grave Digger became abruptly alert. “Has Ed been notified?”

“Yes. I wish we’d had time for you to drop by here and go over this business, but the order just came in. So you had better go straight down to Centre Street.”

Grave Digger looked at his watch. It read 8:10.

“Right, sir,” he said and hung up.

His wife looked at him anxiously. “Are you in trouble?”

“Not as far as I know.”

That didn’t answer her question, but she had learned not to press him.

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed lived only two blocks apart in Astoria, Long Island. Coffin Ed was waiting in his new Plymouth sedan. “It’s going to be another scorcher,” he greeted.

“Let it burn up,” Grave Digger said.

Everyone was in shirtsleeves.

The commissioner, deputy commissioner, inspector in charge of detectives, an assistant D.A., an assistant medical examiner, Captain Brice and Lieutenant Anderson from the Harlem precinct, three firemen and two patrol car cops from the horde who had answered the false fire alarm the previous night.

The hearing was being held in a big barren room in the headquarters annex across the street from the headquarters building. It had begun at 9:55; now it was 11:13.

Hard yellow sunlight slanted in from the three windows looking out on Centre Street and the room was sweltering hot.

The charge of “unwarranted brutality” resulting from the death of Jake had been lodged against Coffin Ed and Grave Digger.

First the assistant M.E. had testified that the autopsy had shown that Jake had died from a ruptured spleen caused by severe external blows in the region of the stomach. In the opinion of the Examiner’s Office he had either been kicked in the stomach or pummeled by a heavy blunt instrument.

“I didn’t hit him that hard,” Grave Digger had contradicted from where he sat with one ham perched on the window ledge.

Coffin Ed, backed against the wall on the shady side of the room, said nothing.

The commissioner had raised a hand for silence.

Lieutenant Anderson gave a verbal account of the detectives’ report and produced photostats of the pages of the precinct blotter where the entry had been made.

Captain Brice explained the special detail to which he had assigned the two detectives, sending them to all trouble spots over Harlem during all hours of the night.

The three firemen and the two patrol car cops testified reluctantly that they had witnessed Grave Digger hit the victim in the stomach while Coffin Ed held his arms pinned behind him.

Then Grave Digger and Coffin Ed had taken the stand in their own defense.

“What we did is routine procedure,” Grave Digger said. “You take these pushers, when they’re peddling dope they work in the street. They carry their decks in a pocket where they are convenient to dispose of. The officer has to apprehend them while they still have the junk on their person, or he has to swear he has seen them dispose of it. So when you close in on a pusher and he sees he can’t get rid of his load, he stuffs it into his mouth and eats it. They all carry some kind of physic which they take a short time afterwards — and there goes your evidence-”

The commissioner smiled.

“You know they’ve been selling dope; you’ve seen ’em; but you can’t prove it,” Grave Digger continued. “So Ed and me use this method to make them vomit up the evidence before they take the physic and dissipate it.”

Again the commissioner smiled at the use of the word dissipate .

“However, if that were permitted, what is there to prohibit an officer from punching a person in the stomach suspected of drunken driving?” the assistant D.A. remarked.

“Nothing,” Grave Digger replied in a thick, dry voice. “If he’s run over somebody and killed ’em.”

“You’re forgetting that you are primarily a peace officer,” the asistant D.A. reminded him. “Your duty is to maintain the peace and the courts will punish the offenders.”

“Peace at what price?” Coffin Ed put in, and Grave Digger echoed thickly:

“You think you can have a peaceful city letting criminals run loose?”

The assistant D.A. reddened. “That’s not the point,” he said sharply. “You’ve killed a man suspected of a minor crime, and not in self-defense.”

Suddenly the room was filled with tension.

“You call dope peddling a minor crime?” Grave Digger said, pushing to his feet.

At the sound of his thick, dry voice, every eye in the room turned in his direction. The arteries in his neck became swollen from rage and veins throbbed in his temples.

“All the crimes committed by addicts — robberies, murders, rapes.… All the fucked-up lives.… All the nice kids sent down the drain on a habit.… Twenty-one days on heroin and you’re hooked for life.… Jesus Christ, mister, that one lousy drug has murdered more people than Hitler. And you call it minor! ” His voice sounded like it was filtered through absorbent cotton.

The assistant D.A. reddened. “He was merely a peddler,” he stated.

“And who gets it into the victim’s blood?” Grave Digger raved. “The peddler! He sells the dirty crap. He makes the personal contact. He puts them on the habit. He’s the mother-raper who gets them hooked. He looks into their faces and puts the poison in their hands. He watches them go down from sugar to shit, sees them waste away. He puts them out to stealing, killing, starts young girls to hustling — to get the money to buy the kicks. I’ll take a simple violent murderer any day.”

“Let’s put it this way,” Coffin Ed said, trying to mollify both parties. “Everybody here knows how the big-time operators work. They buy junk abroad — mostly heroin nowadays. They get a lot of it from France — Marseille — for about five thousand dollars a kilo — two pounds and three ounces. The French don’t seem to able to stop the traffic. It comes to New York and the wholesalers pay from fifteen thousand dollars to twenty thousand dollars a kilo for it. The U.S. federal agents don’t seem to be able to catch them either. So the wholesalers dilute the stuff, which is about eighty percent pure to begin with — they add enough sugar of milk or quinine to get it down to two percent pure. Just plain shit. And this is the stuff the peddler sells. It grosses a half million dollars a kilo. All of you know that. But who’s stopping it? All Digger and me can do is try to catch the peddlers in our precinct. So one gets hurt-”