Chester Himes - The Heat's on

He realized that he was wandering badly and caught himself. “Ain’t no time to blow your top now, son,” he told himself.

They had just one more place to go. It was run by a Harlem society matron, and it wasn’t going to be easy to crash. He didn’t want to hurry it. If it turned out to be another blank, he’d be up shit alley.

“You said you was going to give me my fare to Chicago,” a choked dry voice stammered from the dark beside him.

“You’ll get it,” he said absently, his cluttered thoughts echoing, “He thinks that’s far enough.”

“Kin I get some of my clothes?”

“Why not?” he said automatically, but he didn’t even hear the question. The thought of Chicago had got mixed up with the two gunmen he was hunting and he added aloud, “Mother-rapers better get off the face of the earth.”

Wop shrunk into silence.

The voice from the radio blabbed on: “… when Queen Elizabeth passed over the bridge.…” It sounded to Coffin Ed as though he said “when Queen Elizabeth pissed over the bridge …” and he wondered vaguely what did she do that for.

“You going to take me by my room?” Wop stammered hesitantly.

“What for?”

“They going be laying for me. They going kill me. You know they going kill me. You promised you’d protect me. You said if I steered you to them cribs wouldn’t nobody hurt me. Now you going let ’em-” He began getting hysterical.

Coffin Ed drew back wearily and slapped him across the face.

The voice cut off and the hysteria subsided, followed by snuffling sounds.

Coffin Ed listened to the newscaster report the finding of Daddy Haddy’s body by the patrolman on the beat. The words caught in his brain like red-hot rivets: “… died of gunshot wounds received earlier today while investigating a homicide in the basement of an apartment house on Riverside Drive. Jones, known locally in Harlem as Grave Digger, was one of the famous Harlem Detective team, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. They were on suspension for assaulting an alleged dope peddler named Jake Kubansky who subsequently died. The assailant, or assailants, are unknown. Reports from the homicide bureau-”

He reached out and turned the radio off. It was a reflex action, without thought. Perhaps from a subconscious desire to reject the knowledge by stopping the voice.

His mind fought against acceptance. He sat without moving, without breathing. But finally it sank in.

“That’s it,” he said aloud.

Wop hadn’t heard a word of it. His terrified thoughts were concentrated on himself.

“But you’re going to take me to the station, ain’t you? You going get me safe on the train, ain’t you?”

Coffin Ed turned his head slowly and looked at him. The muscles of his face were jumping almost out of control, but his reflexes were like a sleepwalker’s.

“You’re one of them too,” he said in a constricted voice. “Give you another month or two and you’ll be on junk. You’ll have the monkey on your back that you got to feed by stealing and robbing and murdering.”

As the voice hammered him with deadly intensity, Wop cringed in the corner of his seat and got smaller and smaller.

“I ain’t robbed nobody,” he whimpered. “I ain’t stole nothing. All I done was just work for Daddy Haddy. I ain’t hurt nobody.”

“I’m not going to kill you yet,” Coffin Ed said. “But I’m going to hang on to you, because you’re all I got. And you better hope we turn up something at Madame Cushy’s if you don’t want to get left. Get out.”

Coffin Ed got out on the street side and when he walked around the front of the car he had a sudden feeling that he was being watched from the park. He stepped onto the sidewalk, made a right turn and wheeled about, drawing from the greased holster in the same motion. His gaze raked the sidewalk, flanked by the low stone wall of the park, and above the rocky brush-spotted terrain rising in a steep hill to Hamilton Terrace.

A few scattered couples strolled along the pavement and old people in their shirtsleeves and cotton dresses still occupied the wooden benches. The heat had not let up with the coming of darkness and people were reluctant to turn indoors, but there was no movement within the dangerous confines of the dark grassless park. He saw no one who looked the least bit suspicious.

“I keep feeling ghosts,” he said as he holstered his revolver and pushed Wop before him toward the glass door of the apartment house.

It was an old elevator house, well-kept, and he knew that Madame Cushy lived on the top floor. But the front door was on the latch. His gaze ranged up the list of names above the pushbuttons and settled on one that read: Dr J. C. Douglas, M.D.

There was a house intercom beside the row of buttons and when he got the doctor on he said, “I gotta see you, Doc, I gotta case bad.”

“Let it wait,” the doctor snapped. “Come in tomorrow morning.”

“Can’t wait ’til then. I got a date for tomorrow. It’s my money,” he argued roughly.

“Who is this?” the doctor asked.

“Al Thompson,” Coffin Ed said, taking a chance on the name of a pimp.

“I can’t cure you overnight, Al,” the doctor said. “It takes two days at least.”

“Hell, give me all the units at one time, Doc. I been chippie chasing and I’m in trouble. I don’t wanna have to kill my whore when she comes back.”

Coffin Ed listened to the doctor’s chuckle, and heard him say, “All right, Al, come on up; we’ll see what we can do.”

The latch began to click and Coffin Ed opened the door and pushed Wop into the hall. They rode up to the top floor.

Madame Cushy’s was the black enamel door at the front.

“Have you been here before?” Coffin Ed asked Wop.

“Yassuh. Daddy Haddy has sent me with some stuff.” He was trembling as though he were seeing ghosts himself.

“All right, you ring it,” he said.

He flattened himself against the wall while Wop pushed the button.

After a time there was a faint click and a round peephole opened outward. Wop looked at the reflection of his own eye.

“What do you want, boy?” a woman’s cross and impatient voice came from within.

“I’se Wop; Daddy Haddy sent me,” he stammered.

“No he didn’t, he’s dead,” the voice said sharply. “What are you after?”

Coffin Ed knew he had goofed. He stepped out so he could be seen and said, “I’m with him.”

He was still wearing his beret and it took a moment for the voice to reply, “Oh! Edward! Well, what the hell do you want?”

“I want to talk to you.”

“Well, why didn’t you ring yourself? You ought to know better than to try to front this punk into my house.”

“I know better now,” he said.

“All right, I will let you in, but not as a cop,” she conceded.

“I’ve been suspended,” he said. “Didn’t you know?”

“Yes, I know,” she said.

There were two locks on the door, both equipped with adjustable cables to hold it at any position, one near the bottom and one near the top; and they worked so silently the door began to open before he knew she had unlocked it.

“This dirty little boy stays out,” she said.

“He’s my mascot.”

She eyed Wop distastefully and stepped back so he wouldn’t touch her when he passed.

A wide short entrance hall, flanked by two closed doors, ended at glass double doors of a front lounge and a narrow hallway turned off to the left somewhere. Muted male and female voices, along with the sound of jazz, came from the lounge. There was a faint smell of incense in the overplayed atmosphere of respectability.

After closing and locking the front door she stepped past them and opened the door to the right. Coffin Ed pushed Wop before him into a small sitting room that obviously took turns for other purposes. On one side, behind a glass-topped cocktail table littered with an impressive collection of pornographic picture magazines, was a studio couch equipped with as many odd straps as a torture wrack. On the other were two armchairs with suggestive-looking footstools. An air conditioner fitted in the bottom of the window was flanked by a television set and a console radio-phonograph. All manner of obscene figurines filled a three-tiered bookcase in the near corner. Oil nudes of a voluptuous colored woman and a well-equipped colored man faced each other from opposite walls. The air conditioner was turned off and there was the faint sweetish smell of opium in the air.