Chester Himes - The crazy kill

Everyone rushed toward the outside door to be the first downstairs. But before Mamie and Alamena could get out the telephone began to ring.

"Who in the hell could that be at this hour?" Alamena said roughly.

"You go ahead, I'll answer it," Mamie said. Alamena went on without replying. Mamie went back into the bedroom and lifted the receiver of the telephone on the nightstand beside the bed.

"Hello."

"Are you Mrs. Pullen?" a muffled voice asked. It was so blurred she could scarcely distinguish the words.

"Yes."

"There's a dead man out in front of your house."

She could have sworn the voice held a note of laughter.

"Who are you?" she asked suspiciously.

"I ain't nobody."

"It ain't so goddam funny that you got to make a joke about it," she said roughly.

"I ain't joking. If you don't believe me, go to the window and take a look."

"Why the hell didn't you call the police?"

"I reckoned that maybe you wouldn't want them to know."

Suddenly the whole conversation stopped making sense to Mamie. She tried to collect her thoughts, but she was so tired her head buzzed. And all this monkey business of Reverend Short's, and then Val's getting stabbed to death with Big Joe lying dead there in the coffin, left her feeling as though she had stepped off the edge of sanity.

"Why the hell wouldn't I want the police to know?" she asked savagely.

"Because he came from your apartment."

"How do you know he came from my apartment? I ain't seen him in my house tonight."

"I did. I saw him fall out of your window."

"What? Oh, you're talking about Reverend Short. And you sure enough seen him fall?"

"That's what I'm telling you. And he's lying down on the sidewalk in the A amp;P bread basket, dead as all hell."

"That ain't Reverend Short. He didn't even get hurt. He come back upstairs."

The voice didn't say anything, so she went on. "It's Val. Valentine Haines. And he was stabbed to death."

She waited for an answer, but the voice still didn't speak.

"Hello," she said. "Hello! You still there! You're so goddam smart how come you didn't see that?"

She heard a very soft click.

"The bastard hung up," she mumbled to herself, then added, "Now if that ain't almighty strange-"

She stood still for a moment, trying to think, but her mind wouldn't work. Then she crossed to the dressing table and picked up a can of snuff. Using a cotton dauber, she dipped a lipful, leaving the dauber in the pocket of her lip with the stick protruding. It quieted her growing sense of panic. Out of respect for her guests, she hadn't taken a dip all night, and as a rule she lived with a dip in her lip.

"Lord, if Big Joe was alive, he'd know what to do," she said to herself as she went with slow, dragging steps back into the sitting room.

It was littered with dirty glasses and plates containing scraps of food, ashtrays overflowing with smoldering cigarette and cigar butts. The maroon-carpeted floor was a mess. Burning cigarettes had left holes in the upholstery, burned scars on the tabletops. The ashy skeleton of a cigarette lay intact atop the grand piano. There was a resemblance to a fairground after a circus has gone, and the smell of death and lilies of the valley and man-made stink was overpowering in the hot, close room.

Mamie dragged herself across the room and looked down into the bronze-painted coffin at the body of her late husband.

Big Joe was dressed in a cream-colored Palm Beach suit, pale green crepe de Chine shirt, brown silk tie with hand-painted angels held in place by a diamond horseshoe stickpin. His big square dark-brown face was clean shaven, with deep creases encircling the wide mouth. It looked freshly massaged. His eyes were closed. His stiff gray kinky hair had been cut short after death and had been painstakingly combed and brushed. She had done it herself, and she had dressed him, too. His hands were folded across his chest, exhibiting a diamond ring on his left hand and his lodge signet ring on his right.

She removed all of the jewelry and put it down into the deep front pocket of her long black satin Mother Hubbard dress that swept the floor. Then she closed the coffin.

"One hell of a wake this turned out to be," she said.

"He's dead," Reverend Short said suddenly in his new croaking voice.

Mamie gave a start. She hadn't seen Reverend Short.

He sat slouched on the end of his spine in an overstuffed armchair, staring with a fixed expression toward the opposite wall.

"What the hell do you think," she said roughly. All her social affections had left since the discovery of Val's body. "You think I'd bury him if he was alive?"

"I saw it happen," Reverend Short continued as though she hadn't spoken.

She stared at him in perplexity. "Oh, you mean Val."

"A woman filled with the sin of lust and adultery came from the pit of hell and stabbed him in the heart."

His words sunk slowly into Mamie's clogged thoughts.

"A woman?"

" And I gave her space to repent of her fornication, and she repented not."

"You saw her do it?"

" For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities."

Mamie saw the room tilt.

"May the Lord have mercy," she said.

She saw Big Joe in his coffin, the grand piano and the console radio-television set begin a slow ascent toward heaven. Then the dark maroon carpet rose slowly until it spread out before her eyes like a sea of dark, congealed blood into which she buried her face.

"Sin and lust and abomination in the sight of the Lord," Reverend Short croaked, then added in a small dry whisper, "She ain't nothing but a whore, O Lord."

The automatic elevator was on the ground floor, and most of the curious mourners chose to run down the stairs rather than wait for it. But they were not the first to arrive.

Dulcy and Chink stood facing each other across the basket of bread containing the body. He was a big yellow man, young but going to fat, dressed in a beige summer suit. He leaned over tensely.

The first to approach heard Dulcy exclaiming, "Jesus Christ, you didn't have to kill him!" and Chink replying in a voice choked with sudden passion, "Not even for you-" Then he broke off and cautioned in a tense whisper, speaking between set lips, "Shut up and play it dumb."

She didn't speak again until all the mourners from the wake had gathered and had their look and said their say.

"It's Val, and he's dead all right."

"If he ain't, Saint Peter's going to be mighty surprised." Alamena had wormed close enough to get a clear view of the body. She heard a dining-car waiter say, "You reckon he was stabbed where he's at?"

A voice behind her replied, "Must have been-there ain't no blood nowhere else."

The body lay at full length on the mattress of soft wrapped loaves of bread as though the basket had been fitted to its measure. The left hand, exhibiting the band of a single gold ring, lay palm upward across a heavy, black silk knitted tie knotted about the collar of a soft sandcolored linen silk shirt; the right hand lay palm downward across the center button of the jacket of an olive drab sheen gabardine suit. The feet pointed straight up, exposing the slightly worn crepe-rubber soles of lightweight Cordovan English-made shoes.

The knife protruded from the jacket just beneath the breast pocket, which was adorned with a quarter-inch stripe of white handkerchief. It was a stag-handle knife with a push-button opener and handguard, such as used by hunters to skin game.

Blood made irregular patterns over the jacket, shirt and tie. Splotches were on the waxed-paper wrappings of the loaves of bread, and on one side of the woven rattan basket. There was none on the sidewalk.