Chester Himes - The crazy kill

"You don't like Mamie Pullen's cooking," Brody suggested.

"Oh, sure, I like it fine, but I was hungry."

"You're a hungry girl."

She giggled. "Talking always makes me hungry."

"Where did you go for your fried chicken?"

"We got a taxi and went over to the College Inn at 151st Street and Broadway. We just stayed there for an hour, and then he looked at his watch and said it was two-thirty and he was going by Johnny's and would meet me at the wake in about an hour. We got a taxi and he dropped me off at Mamie's and kept on downtown to Johnny's."

"What was his racket?" Brody shot at her.

"Racket? He didn't have any. He was a gentleman."

"Who were his enemies?"

"He didn't have any, unless it was Johnny."

"Why Johnny?"

"Johnny might have got tired of having him around all the time. Johnny's funny and awfully hot-headed."

"How about Chink? Didn't Val resent Chink's familiarity with his fiancee?"

"He didn't know about it."

Brody showed her the knife. She denied ever having seen it at any time.

He released her.

Dulcy was brought in next. She was accompanied by Johnny's attorney, Ben Williams.

Ben was a brown-skinned man of about forty, slightly on the fat side, with neatly barbered hair, and a heavy moustache. He was wearing the double-breasted gray flannel suit, horn-rimmed spectacles and conservative black shoes of the Harlem professional man.

Brody skipped the routine questions and asked Dulcy, "Were you the first one to discover the body?"

"You don't have to answer that," the attorney said quickly.

"Why the hell doesn't she?" Brody flared.

"The Fifth Amendment," the attorney stated.

"This isn't any Communist investigation," Brody said disgustedly. "I can hold her as a material witness and let her talk to the Grand Jury, if that's what you want."

The attorney appeared to meditate. "Okay, you can answer," he said to Dulcy. After that he kept quiet; he had earned his money.

She said that Chink was standing beside the bread basket when she came out of the door.

"Are you certain of that?" Brody asked.

"I ain't blind," she retorted. "That's what made me look down to see what he was looking at, and then I saw Val."

Brody left it for a moment and started at the beginning of her career in Harlem. The gist of what he got had already been given.

"Did your husband give him an allowance?" Brody asked.

"Naw, he just slipped him money from his pocket whenever Val asked for a loan, and sometimes he'd let him win in the game. Then I gave him what I could."

"How long had he been engaged to Doll Baby?"

She laughed sarcastically. "Engaged! He was just keeping himself regular with that slut."

Brody dropped it and repeated the questions about Val's racket, enemies, whether he was carrying a large sum of money when he was killed, and asked her to describe the jewelry he was wearing. The wrist watch, gold ring and cuff links checked with what had been found on the body. She said the thirty-seven dollars found in his wallet would be about right.

Then Brody worked on the time element.

She said Val had left home about ten o'clock. He had said he was going to see a show at the Apollo Theatre-Billy Eckstein's band was doubling with the Nicholas brothers-and had asked to come with him, but she had an appointment with her hairdresser. So he'd decided to drop by the club and come with Johnny to the wake, and said they'd pick her up there.

She'd left home at twelve midnight with Alamena, who lived in a rented room downstairs in the same building.

"How long were you and Mamie locked in the bathroom?" Brody asked.

"Oh, a half hour, more or less. I can't be sure. When I looked at my watch it was four-twenty-five, and Reverend Short began knocking on the door right then."

Brody showed her the knife and repeated what Reverend Short had said.

"Did Chink Charlie give you this knife?" he asked.

The attorney broke in to say she didn't have to answer that.

She began laughing hystencally, and it was five minutes before she had calmed down sufficiently to say, "He ought to get married, watching them Holy Rollers every Sunday and wanting to roll himself."

Brody turned red.

Grave Digger grunted. "I thought a Holy Roller preacher got the call to roll with all the sisters," he said.

"Most of 'em is," Dulcy said. "But Reverend Short's too full of visions to roll with anyone, unless it be a ghost."

"Well, that's all for now," Brody said. "I'm going to have you held in five-thousand-dollar bail."

"Don't worry about that," the attorney said to her.

"I ain't," she said.

Johnny was fifteen minutes late in appearing. His attorney had to telephone the bail-bondsman to arrange for Dulcy's bail, and he refused to be questioned without him.

Before Brody could fire his first question, the attorney produced affidavits given by Johnny's two helpers, Kid Nickels and Pony Boy, to the effect that Johnny had left his Tia Juana Club at the corner of 124th Street and Madison Avenue at 4:45 A.M., alone, and that Val had not been inside of the club all evening.

Without waiting to be questioned, Johnny volunteered the information that he hadn't seen Val since leaving his flat at nine the night before.

"How did you feel about supporting a brother-in-law who did nothing to deserve it?" Brody asked.

"It didn't bother me," Johnny said. "If I hadn't taken him in she'd have been slipping him money, and I didn't want to put her in the middle."

"You didn't resent it?" Brody persisted.

"It's just like I already said," Johnny stated in his toneless voice. "It didn't bother me. He wasn't a square, but he wasn't sharp, neither. He didn't have any racket, he couldn't gamble, he couldn't even be a pimp. But I liked to have him around. He was funny, always ready for a gag."

Brody showed him the knife.

Johnny picked it up, opened and closed it, turned it over in his hand and put it back.

"You could turn a mother-raper every way but loose with that chiv," he said.

"You never saw it before?" Brody asked.

"If I had I'd have gotten me one like it," Johnny said. Brody told him what Reverend Short had said about Chink Charlie giving Dulcy the knife.

When Brody had finished talking, there was no expression of any kind on Johnny's face.

"You know that preacher's off his nut," he said. His voice was toneless and indifferent.

They exchanged stares for a moment, both poker-faced and unmoving.

Then Brody said, "Okay, boy, you can go now."

"Fine," Johnny said, getting to his feet. "Just don't call me boy."

Brody reddened. "What the hell do you want me to call you-Mr. Perry?"

"Everybody else calls me Johnny-ain't that enough of a handle for you?" Johnny said.

Brody didn't answer.

Johnny left with his attorney at his heels.

Brody stood up and looked from Grave Digger to Coffin Ed. "Have we got any candidates?"

"You might try to find out who bought the knife," Grave Digger said.

"That was done the first thing this morning. Abercrombie and Fitch put six knives in stock a year ago, and so far they haven't sold any."

"Well, they're not the only store that sells hunting equipment in New York," Grave Digger argued.

"That won't get us nothing anyway," Coffin Ed said. "There's no way of telling who did it until we find out why it was done."

"That's, going to be the lick that killed Nick," Grave Digger said. "That's the hard one."

"I don't agree," Brody said. "One thing is certain. He wasn't stabbed for money, so he must have been stabbed about a woman. Churchy lay dame, as the French say. But that don't mean another woman didn't do it."

Grave Digger took off his hat and rubbed his short kinky hair.

"This is Harlem," he said. "Ain't no other place like it in the world. You've got to start from scratch here, because these folks in Harlem do things for reasons nobody else in the world would think of. Listen, there were two hard working colored jokers, both with families, got to fighting in a bar over on Fifth Avenue near a hundred-eighteenth Street and cut each other to death about whether Paris was in France or France was in Paris."