Chester Himes - The Heat's on

“He told her there were five kilos of eighty-two percent pure heroin in it.”

A cacophony of whistling sounded spontaneously.

“That’s one hell of a load,” the homicide lieutenant said.

Calculating rapidly, the T-man said, “He pays about fifteen thousand dollars per kilo for the junk. Say around seventy-five thousand for the shipment. And after he cuts it down with lactose to about two percent pure, he can retail it for around a half a million dollars a kilo. Say, give or take a little, it’s worth two and a half million dollars on the retail market.”

“Now we’ve got the motive for this massacre,” the homicide lietuenant said.

“But where did the junk disappear to?” the narcotics lieutenant echoed.

“That’s the question Benny asked. But she couldn’t help him. She said Gus wasn’t on good terms with any of the tenants; in fact his relations were on the bad side.”

“No wonder,” the narcotics lieutenant said. “He didn’t need this job.”

“Then Benny asked her about Pinky. She told him all she knew but he wasn’t interested in Pinky’s life. He wanted to know if Pinky could have got the stuff from Gus and hidden it somewhere in the house. She said he’d have to wait until Gus could talk and ask him, she hadn’t seen either him or Pinky since before midnight. Then he confessed that when they didn’t find the shipment in the trunk they had killed Gus and thrown his body in the river.”

“That sounds to me like he was lying,” the T-man said, and turned to the narcotics lieutenant. “Do you believe that?”

“Hell no! They wouldn’t kill Gus, even by accident, as long as the five-kilo bundle of H was missing.”

“That’s the way I see it.”

“But where is Gus?”

“Who knows?”

“Maybe he’s still somewhere in the house,” the homicide lieutenant ventured.

“No, he’s not,” the narcotics lieutenant stated flatly.

“Then maybe Benny was leveling with her.”

“No, he was probably trying to scare her,” the homicide lieutenant said.

“He scared her all right,” Coffin Ed said. “But right away he offered her five thousand dollars if she would help them find him — Pinky that is.”

“Generous bastard,” the T-man said.

“That’s when she got on their side,” Coffin Ed said. “With Gus dead and five G’s in her apron, and now the farm was hers too, she could marry the African. She didn’t know he was dead. So she put her mind to it, and then she remembered noticing the night before that the trunk had been moved from the storage room into the hall. And as a rule Pinky did all the heavy moving. So she said maybe Pinky had it with him.

“But Benny discarded that too. He had investigated Pinky along with Gus, and he had him cased as a pure halfwit, incapable of handling that much H; he wouldn’t know what to do with it. She argued that Pinky had the habit and maybe he took it for personal use. But Benny’s lookout had seen Pinky leave here when he went to put in the false fire alarm, and he couldn’t have concealed a handkerchief in ragged clothes he was wearing. And he hasn’t been back here since.

“Then she remembered Sister Heavenly’s visit. She told him that Sister Heavenly was Pinky’s aunt, and that she sold decks of heroin under the guise of a faith healing racket. Then Benny remembered his lookout reporting that Sister Heavenly had left here shortly after the trunk was picked up. He conceded that maybe she was right, maybe Sister Heavenly was the connection, and maybe Pinky had hijacked the bundle. That would be just like a halfwit.

“They took her down to the car and all of them drove up to the Bronx to look for Sister Heavenly. But by the time they got there the house had been blown up and Sister Heavenly had disappeared. But they found out about Uncle Saint and they saw the Lincoln. It was one of Benny’s guards whom Uncle Saint had shot over by the French Line dock and they began putting two and two together.”

“We made a line on that,” the homicide lieutenant said. “We tied it all together after Sister Heavenly’s body was identified by the boy, Wop. And we already had a report on the car from an officer stationed at the Lincoln Tunnel.”

“Yeah. Well, they figured Sister Heavenly had already gotten the bundle and had blown up the house to kill Uncle Saint and destroy her tracks-”

“It was just the old joker trying to crack her safe,” the homicide lieutenant said drily. “The experts made it.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t long before they dug that too. Benny had kept lookouts on this house all day, and one of them remembered Sister Heavenly nosing around here after Digger was shot. So Benny figured by that she hadn’t made the connection. After then they concentrated on finding Pinky.”

“We kept a line on all of you after that,” the homicide lieutenant said. “No need of going into detail now.”

“There’s just one question I’d like to ask,” the T-man said. “How was it they didn’t spot you, Ed, when you planted your bag on top the elevator?”

“They saw me all right, but they didn’t make me. You see, I didn’t come in here. I went to the second house from here and went up to the roof and crossed over. I dropped the bag from the top access to the elevator shaft. Besides which I was wearing painter’s coveralls and carrying the small bag inside of a large paint-smeared bag the last painters had left in my house. And when I went back outside the same house I’d entered, I was carrying the same big bag.”

“All that is well and good and you deserve credit for it,” the narcotics lieutenant said. “But where in the hell is the junk?”

The T-man said to Coffin Ed, “You’re the only one here who knew Pinky. Do you think he’s capable of that?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Coffin Ed said. “I figure him for a halfwit too. But so was Al Capone.”

“All that this proves is one thing,” the narcotics lieutenant said. “That this case is not finished; not by a damn sight. Not with a fortune in heroin floating around.”

“For us it’s just begun,” the T-man said.

“I’ve got a hunch we’ll find it,” Coffin Ed said.

“A hunch? What hunch?” the homicide lieutenant asked.

“If I told you, you’d laugh.”

“Laugh!” the homicide lieutenant exploded angrily. “Laugh! With eleven people whom we know of already dead from this one caper, and five kilos of pure poison loose in New York City, and we haven’t even scratched the bottom of it. Laugh? What the hell’s the matter with you? What’s your hunch? Let’s hear it.”

“I’ve got a hunch that Gus is coming back and then we’ll find out where it’s at.”

In the dead silence which followed, the detectives could feel their hackles rise. They stared at him wih blank, deadpan expressions.

Finally the T-man said, “Well, at least no one is laughing.”

The dick stationed on the front door came in and said, “A Railway Express truck just pulled up out front. I think they’re delivering something here.”

“Get back and keep out of sight,” the homicide lieutenant said quickly.

“If it’s what I think, we ought to clean up here,” Coffin Ed said.

The detectives looked at him curiously, but they did as he suggested. Quickly they moved the table and chairs back into the janitor’s flat and then split into two groups. Some remained there and the others rushed to the other end of the corridor and stationed themselves in the laundry.

Ears were pressed to the closed doors, listening for footsteps. But after the faint sounds made by the opening and closing of the front door, the silence was prolonged.

Then they heard a faint rap on the basement floor, followed by a slight scraping sound as though some small object had been place there stealthily.