Chester Himes - The crazy kill

His knees were locked about Reverend Short's middle as he put the pressure on his throat. Reverend Short's nearsighted eyes began bulging like bananas being squeezed from their skins, and all they could see was the livid scar on Johnny's blood-purple forehead, puffing and wriggling like a maddened octopus.

But he showed no signs of fear.

Just short of breaking the skinny neck Johnny caught himself. He took a deep breath, and his whole body shuddered as though from an electric shock to his brain. Then he took his hands from Reverend Short's throat and straightened up, still straddling him, and looked down soberly at the blue-tinted face beneath him on the bed.

"Preacher," he said slowly. "You're going to make me kill you."

Reverend Short returned his stare as he gasped for breath. When finally he could speak, he said in a defiant voice, "Go ahead and kill me. But you can't save her. They're going to get her anyway."

Johnny backed from the bed and got to his feet, stepping on Reverend Short's spectacles. He kicked them angrily from underfoot and looked down at Reverend Short lying supine in the same position.

"Listen, I want to ask you just one question," he said in his toneless, gambler's voice. "Why would she want to kill her own brother?"

Reverend Short returned his look with malevolence.

"You know why," he said.

Johnny stood dead still, as though listening, looking down at him. Finally he said, "You've tried to kill me. I ain't going to do nothing about that. You've called her a murderess. I ain't going to do nothing about that, either. I don't think you're crazy, so we can rule that out. All I want to ask you is why?"

Reverend Short's near-sighted eyes filled with a look of malignant evil.

"There's only two of you who would have done it," he said in a thin dry voice no louder than a whisper. "That's you and her. And if you didn't do it, then she did. And if you don't know why, then ask her. And if you think you're going to save her by killing me, then go ahead and do it."

"I ain't got much of a hand," Johnny said. "But I'll call it."

He turned and picked his way through the church benches toward the door. Light from the street lamps came in through the unpainted upper rim of the dingy front windows, showing him the way.

It was eight o'clock, but still light.

"Let's go for a ride," Grave Digger said to Coffin Ed, "and look at some scenery. See the brown gals blooming in pink dresses, smell the perfume of poppies and marijuana."

"And listen to the stool pigeons sing," Coffin Ed supplied.

They were cruising south on Seventh Avenue in the small battered black sedan. Grave Digger eased the little car behind a big slow-moving trailer truck, and Coffin Ed kept his eyes skinned along the sidewalk.

A numbers writer standing in front of Madame Sweetiepie's hairdressing parlor, flashing a handful of paper slips with the day's winning numbers, looked up and saw Coffin Ed's baleful eyes pinned on him and began eating the paper slips as though they were taffy candy.

Hidden behind the big truck trailer, they sneaked up on a group of weedheads standing in front of the bar at the corner of 126th Street. Eight young hoodlums dressed in tight black pants, fancy straw hats with mixed-colored bands, pointed shoes and loud-colored sport shirts, wearing smoked glasses, and looking like an assemblage of exotic grasshoppers, had already finished one stick and were passing around the second one when one of them exclaimed, "Split! Here comes King Kong and Frankenstein." The boy smoking the stick swallowed it so fast the fire burnt his gullet and he doubled over, strangling.

The one called Gigolo said, "Play it cool! Play it cool! Just clean, that's all."

They threw their switchblade knives onto the sidewalk in front of the bar. Another boy palmed the two remaining sticks and stuck them quickly in his mouth, ready to eat them if the detectives stopped.

Grave Digger smiled grimly.

"I could hit that punk in his belly and make him vomit up enough evidence to give him a year in the cooler," he said.

"We'll teach him that trick some other time," Coffin Ed said.

Two of the boys were beating the strangling boy on the back, the others began talking with big gestures as though discussing a scientific treatise on prostitution. Gigolo stared at the detectives defiantly.

Gigolo was wearing a chocolate-colored straw hat with a wide yellow band polka-dotted with blue. When Coffin Ed fingered his right coat lapel with the first two fingers of his right hand, Gigolo pushed his straw hat back on his head and said, "Nuts to them mother-rapers, they ain't got nothing on us."

Grave Digger drove on slowly without stopping, and in the rear-view mirror he saw the punk take the wet marijuana sticks from his mouth and start blowing on them to dry them.

They kept on down to 119th Street, turned back to Eighth Avenue, went uptown again and parked before a dilapidated tenement house between 126th and 127th Streets. Old people were sitting on the sidewalk in kitchen chairs propped against the front of the building.

They climbed the dark steep stairs to the fourth floor. Grave Digger knocked on a door at the rear, three single raps spaced exactly ten seconds apart.

For the space of a full minute no sound was heard. There was no sound of locks being opened, but slowly the door swung inward five inches, held by two iron cables at top and bottom.

"It's us, Ma," Grave Digger said.

The ends of the cables were removed from the slots and the door opened all the way.

A thin old gray-haired woman with a wrinkled black face, who looked to be about ninety years old, wearing a floor length Mother Hubbard dress of faded black cotton, stood to one side and let them pass into the pitchdark hallway and closed the door behind them.

They followed her without further comment down to the far end of the hall. She opened a door and sudden light spilled out, showing a snuff stick in the corner of her wrinkled mouth.

"There he," she said, and Coffin Ed followed Grave Digger into a small back bedroom and closed the door behind him.

Gigolo sat on the edge of the bed with his fancy hat pushed to the back of his head, biting his dirty nails to the quick. The pupils of his eyes were big black disks in his tight, sweaty brown face.

Coffin Ed sat facing him, straddling the single straightbacked wooden chair, and Grave Digger stood glaring down at him and said, "You've had a bang of heroin."

Gigolo shrugged. His skinny shoulders jerked beneath the canary-colored sport shirt.

"Don't get him excited," Coffin Ed warned, and then asked Gigolo in a confidential tone of voice, "Who made the sting last night, sport?"

Gigolo's body began jerking as though someone had slipped a hot poker down the seat of his pants.

"Poor Boy got new money," he said in a rapid blurred voice.

"Who kind of money?" Grave Digger asked.

"Hard money."

"No green money?"

"If he is, he ain't showed it."

"Where's he likely to be at this time?"

"Acey-Deucey's poolroom. He's a pool freak."

Grave Digger asked Coffin Ed, "Do you know him?"

"This town is full of Poor Boys," Coffin Ed said, turning back to the stool pigeon. "What's he look like?"

"Slim black boy. Plays it cool. Working stiff jive. Don't never flash. Looks a little like Country Boy used to look 'fore they sent him to the pen."

"How does he dress?" Grave Digger asked.

"Like I just said. Wears old blue jeans, T-shirt, canvas sneakers, always looks raggedy as a bowl of yakamein."

"Has he got a partner?"

"Iron Jaw. You know Iron Jaw."

Grave Digger nodded.

"But he don't seem to be in on this sting. He ain't showed outside today," Gigolo added.

"Okay, sport," Coffin Ed said, standing up. "Lay off the heroin."