Chester Himes - All shot up

“He oughtn’t to be hard to find. Any son out tire-thieving on a night like this has got some pretty hot skirt to support.”

The lieutenant listened to their findings with interest but no particular concern.

“What I want to know is how this woman got killed,” he said. “Then we’ll know what to look for.”

A car turned in from Convent Avenue, and Coffin Ed said, “We ought to soon know; that looks like Doc’s struggle-buggy.”

Doctor Fullhouse was bundled up as though on an expedition to the South Pole. He was an old, slow-moving man, and what could be seen of his face between an astrakhan cap and a thick yellow cashmere muffler made one think of a laughing mummy.

His spectacles steamed over the instant he stepped from his overheated car, and he had to take them off. He peered about from watery blue eyes, searching for the body.

“Where’s the cadaver?” he asked in a querulous voice.

The lieutenant pointed. “Stuck to the wall.”

“You didn’t tell me it was a vampire bat,” he complained.

The lieutenant laughed dutifully.

“Well, get it down,” Doc said. “You don’t expect me to climb up there and examine it.”

Grave Digger clutched one arm, Coffin Ed the other; the two detectives from Homicide took a leg apiece. The body was stiff as a plaster cast. They tried to move it gently, but the face was firmly stuck. They tugged, and suddenly the body fell.

They laid the corpse on its back. The black skin of the cheeks framing the cockscomb of frozen blood had turned a strange powdery gray. Drops of frozen blood clung to the staring eyeballs.

“My God!” one of the Homicide detectives muttered, stepped to the curb and vomited.

The others swallowed hard.

Doc got a lamp from his car with a long extension cord and focused the light on the body. He looked at it without emotion.

“That’s death for you,” he said. “She was probably a goodlooking woman.”

No one said anything. Even Haggerty’s tongue had dried up.

“All right, give me a hand,” Doc said. “We got to undress her.”

Grave Digger lifted her shoulders, and Doc peeled off the coat. The other detectives got off her gloves and shoes. Doc cut open the thick black dress with a pair of shears. Underneath she wore only a black uplift bra and lace-trimmed nylon panties. Her limbs were smooth, and well-rounded, but muscular. Falsies came off with the bra, revealing a smooth, flat, mannish chest. Underneath the nylon panties was a heavily padded, yellow satin loincloth.

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed exchanged a quick, knowing glance. But the others didn’t get it until the loincloth had been cut and stripped from the hard narrow hips.

“Well, I’ll be God-damned!” the Homicide lieutenant exclaimed. “She’s a man!”

“There ain’t any doubt about that,” Haggerty said, finding his voice at last.

Doc turned the body over. Across the back, at the base of the spine, was a tremendous welt, colored dark grape-purple.

“Well, that’s what did it,” Doc said. “He was struck here by great force and catapulted into the wall.”

“By what, for chrissake?” the lieutenant asked.

“Certainly not by a baseball bat,” Haggerty said.

“My conjecture is that he was hit by an automobile from behind,” Doc ventured. “I couldn’t say positively until after the autopsy; and maybe not then.”

The lieutenant looked from the street to the convent wall. “Frankly, Doc, I don’t believe he was knocked from the street against that wall in the position that we found him,” he said. “Isn’t there a possibility that he was run over and then stuck up there afterwards?”

Doc made a bundle of the clothes, covered the body with its coat and stood up.

“Everything is possible,” he said. “If you can imagine a driver running over him, then stopping his car and getting out and propping the body against the wall, and pushing its face into that crevice until it was stuck, then-”

The lieutenant cut him off. “Well, goddammit, I can imagine that better than I can imagine the body being knocked up there from the street, no matter what hit it. Besides which, people have been known to do things worse than that.”

Doc patted him on the shoulder, smiling indulgently. “Don’t try to make your job any harder than it is,” he said. “Look for a hit-and-run driver, and leave the maniacs to Bellevue’s psychiatrists.”

It was past two o’clock Sunday morning. Sand-fine sleet was peppering the windshield of the small black sedan as it hustled down the East Side Drive. There was just enough heat from the defroster to make the windshield sticky, and a coating of ice was forming across Grave Digger’s vision.

“This heater only works in the blazing hot summer,” he complained. “In this kind of weather it just makes ice.”

“Turn it off,” Coffin Ed said.

The car skidded on a glazed spot on the asphalt, and from the back seat Detective Tombs from Homicide Bureau yelled, “Watch it, man! Can’t you drive without skidding?”

Grave Digger chuckled. “You work with murder every day, and here you are-scared of getting scratched.”

“I just don’t want to wind up in East River with a car on my back,” Tombs said.

The witness giggled.

That settled it. Conversation ceased. They didn’t want outsiders horning in on their own private horseplay.

When they drew up before the morgue downtown on 29th Street, they all looked grim and half-frozen.

An attendant sitting at a desk in the entrance foyer checked them in, recording their names and badge numbers.

The barman from the Paris Bar gave his name as Alfonso Marcus and his address as 217 Formosa Street, Yonkers, N.Y.

They walked through corridors and downstairs to the “cold room.” Another attendant opened a door and turned on a switch.

He grinned. “A little chilly, eh?” he said, getting off his standard joke.

“You ain’t been outside, son,” Coffin Ed said.

“We want to see the victim of a hit-and-run driver from Harlem,” Grave Digger said.

“Oh yes, the colored man,” the attendant said.

He led them down the long, bare room, lit by cold, white light, and glanced at a card on what looked like the drawer of a huge filing cabinet.

“Unidentified,” he said, pulling out the drawer.

It rolled out smoothly and soundlessly. He removed a coarse white sheet covering the body.

“It hasn’t been autopsied yet,” he said, adding with a grin, “got to take its turn like everybody else. It’s been a busy night-two asphyxiations from Brooklyn; one ice pick stabbing, also from Brooklyn; three poisonings, one by lye-”

Grave Digger cut him off. “You’re holding us spellbound.”

Coffin Ed took the bartender by the arm and shoved him close.

“My God,” the bartender whimpered, covering his face with his hands.

“Look at it, goddammit!” Coffin Ed flared. “What the hell you think we brought you down here for-to start gagging at sight of a stiff?”

Despite his horror, the bartender giggled.

Grave Digger reached over and pulled his hands from his face.

“Who is he?” he asked in a flat, emotionless voice.

“Oh, I couldn’t say.” The bartender looked as though he might burst out crying. “Jesus Christ in heaven, look at his face.”

“Who is he?” Grave Digger repeated flatly.

“How can I tell? I can’t see his face. It’s all covered with blood.”

“If you come back in an hour or two they’ll have it all cleaned up,” the morgue attendant said.

Grave Digger gripped the bartender by the back of his neck and pushed his head toward the nude body.

“Goddammit, you don’t need to see his face to recognize him,” he said. “Who is he? And I ain’t going to ask you no more.”