Chester Himes - The Heat's on

Sister Heavenly ignored him. After a while the disgruntled voice said, “I hopes the man catches you, stingy mother-raper.”

Sister Heavenly finished her pipe and put it away. Then she rolled up her skirt, exposing her thin bird’s legs, and pinned it above her knees. She peeled off her silk gloves and put on the rubber ones; and hooked the long rubber apron over her head and fastened it securely behind.

She took the package of cotton, the bottle of chloroform and the chair and sat in front of the open window.

“Here, Sheba,” she called.

The dog came and nuzzled her bare feet. She hooked the handle of the leash onto the lower half of the sash lock, tore off a swab of cotton, saturated it with chloroform and held it to the dog’s nose. The dog reared back and broke off the lock. She chased it across the room and stuck the saturated cotton inside the nose of the muzzle. The dog gave a long pitiful howl and broke for the window. She grabbed the end of the chain leash and swung the dog around just before it jumped, then quickly she grabbed the open bottle of chloroform and poured it over the dog’s nose. The howling stopped. The dog gasped for breath and settled slowly to the floor, legs extended stiffly front and back. Its lips drew back, exposing clenched teeth, its eyes became fixed; it shuddered violently and lay still.

Quickly she spread the rubber sheet in the center of the floor and placed the enamel basin on it. She dragged the dog and laid its head in the basin and cut its throat with the scalpel. Then she lifted it by the rear legs and let it bleed.

She dumped the blood into the washbasin, turned on the water and left it running. She brought the enamel basin back and began to disembowel the carcass.

It was bloody, dirty, filthy work. She opened the stomach and split the intestines. She was nauseated beyond description. Twice she vomited into the filth. But she kept on.

Down below, the jukebox blasted; next door the radio blared. Strident voices sounded from the street; horns blared in the jammed traffic. Colored people swarmed up and down the sidewalks; the bars were packed; people stood in line in front of the cafeteria across the street.

The hot poisonous air inside of the room, stinking of blood, chloroform and dog-gut, was enough to suffocate the average person. But Sister Heavenly stood it. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for money.

When finally she had convinced herself there wasn’t anything inside of the dog but blood and filth, she threw the scalpel into the carcass and said, “Well, that’s lovely.”

She crawled to the window, put her arms on the ledge, and sucked in the hot, stinking outside air.

Then she stood up, took off the bloody apron and spread it over the bloody carcass, peeled off her gloves and dropped them beside it. The rubber sheet was covered with blood and filth and some had run off onto the linoleum floor.

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 pertume, 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, put down 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.

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 passwords, 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 sex 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 whores and the thieves and the dregs of humanity; all being rooked together by the peddlers of the five-colored dreams and the cool dry jags and the hot sex 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 bloody 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 space. 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.