Chester Himes - All shot up

“He’s Black Beauty,” the bartender whispered. “What’s left of him.”

Grave Digger released him and let him straighten up.

The bartender shuddered.

“Get yourself together,” Grave Digger said.

The bartender looked at him from big, pleading eyes.

“What’s his square moniker?” Grave Digger asked.

The bartender shook his head.

“I’m giving you a chance,” Grave Digger told him.

“I really don’t know,” the bartender said.

“The hell you don’t!”

“No, sir, I swear. If I knew I’d tell you.”

The morgue attendant looked at the bartender with compassion. He turned toward Grave Digger and said indignantly, “You can’t third-degree a prisoner in here.”

“You can’t help him,” Grave Digger replied. “Even if you are a member of the club.”

“What club?”

“Let’s take him out of here,” Coffin Ed said.

Detective Tombs listened to the byplay with fascination.

They took the witness outside to their car and put him in the back seat beside Detective Tombs.

“Who’s Mister Baron?” Grave Digger asked.

The bartender turned pleadingly to the white detective. “If I knew, sir, I’d tell them.”

“Don’t appeal to me,” Tombs said. “Half of this is Greek to me.”

“Listen, son,” Coffin Ed said to the bartender. “Don’t make it hard on yourself.”

“But I just know these people from the bar, sir,” the bartender contended. “I don’t know what they do.”

“It’s going to be just too bad,” Grave Digger said. “What you don’t know is going to hang you.”

Again the bartender appealed to the white detective. “Please, sir, I don't want to get mixed up in all this bad business. I’ve got a wife and family.”

The windows of the small, crowded car had steamed over. The face of the detective couldn’t be seen, but his embarrassment was tangible. “Don’t cry to me,” he said harshly. “I didn’t tell you to get married.”

Suddenly the bartender giggled. Emotions exploded. The white detective cursed. Grave Digger banged the metal edge of his hand against the steering wheel. The muscles in Coffin Ed’s face jumped like salt on a fresh wound as he reached across the back of the seat and double-slapped the bartender with his left hand.

Grave Digger rolled down a window.

“We need some air in here,” he said.

The bartender began to cry.

“Give me a fill-in,” the white detective said.

“The one who got killed in the heist and the one we just saw are newlyweds,” Grave Digger said. “This one-” He nodded toward the bartender-“is Snake Hips’ used-to-be.”

“How did you dig that?”

“Just guessing. They’re all just one big club. But you got to know it. It’s like when I was in Paris at the end of the war. All of us colored soldiers, no matter what rank or from what army or division, belonged to the same set. We all hung out at the same joints, ate the same food, told the same jokes, laid the same poules. There wasn’t anything that one of us could do that the whole God-damned shooting party didn’t know about.”

“I see what you mean. But what’s the angle here?”

“We haven’t guessed that far,” Grave Digger admitted. “Probably none. We’re just trying to get all these people in position. And this one is going to help us. Or he’s going to get something even he can’t handle.”

“Not before I get done with him,” the detective said. “My boss man wants him to look at some pictures in the gallery. Maybe he can identify the heistmen-one of them at least.”

“How long do you think that will take?” Coffin Ed asked.

“A few hours, maybe, or a few days. We can’t employ your techniques; all we can do is keep him looking until he goes blind.”

Grave Digger mashed the starter. “We’ll take you down to Centre Street.”

The detective and his witness got out in front of the Headquarters Annex, a loft building across the street from the domed headquarters building.

Coffin Ed leaned out of the window and said, “We’ll be waiting for you, lover.”

By the time they got back uptown, the windshield was frosted over with a quarter-inch coating of ice. Approaching headlights resembled hazy spectrums coming out of the sea.

They had a new dent in their right fender and a claim against their insurance company from the irate owner of a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce whom they had attempted to pass on a stretch of slick ice just north of the U.N. Building.

Coffin Ed chuckled. “He was mad, wasn’t he.”

“Can you blame him?” Grave Digger said. “He felt the same as Queen Elizabeth would if we tramped into Buckingham Palace with muddy feet.”

“Why don’t you turn off that heater? You’ve said yourself it don’t make nothing but ice.”

“What, and catch pneumonia!”

They had been tippling a bottle of bourbon, and Grave Digger felt sort of witty.

“Anyway, you might slow down if you can’t see,” Coffin Ed said.

“It’s nights like this that cause wars,” Grave Digger philosophized without slacking speed.

“How so?”

“Increases the population. Then when you get enough prime males they start fighting to kill them off.”

“Look out for that garbage truck!” Coffin Ed cried as they turned on two wheels into 125th Street.

“Is that what that was?” Grave Digger asked.

It was past three o’clock. They worked a special detail from eight until four, and this was the hour they usually contacted stool pigeons.

But tonight even stool pigeons had gone under cover. The 125th Street railroad station was closed and locked, and next door the all-night cafeteria was roped off except for a few tables at the front, occupied by bums clinging to bone-dry coffee cups and keeping one foot moving to prove they weren’t asleep.

“Going back to the case, or rather cases-the trouble with these people is they lie for kicks,” Grave Digger said seriously.

“They want to be treated rough; brings out the female in them,” Coffin Ed agreed.

“But not too rough; they don’t want to lose any teeth.”

“That’s how we’re going to get them,” Coffin Ed summed up.

Lieutenant Anderson was waiting for them. He had taken over the captain’s office, and was mulling over reports.

He greeted them, as they came in bunched up and ashy from cold, with: “We got a line on the private eye who was killed. Paul Zalkin.”

Coffin Ed backed up against the radiator, and Grave Digger perched a ham on the edge of the desk. The rough whisky humor was knocked out of them, and they looked serious and intent.

“Casper talk?” Grave Digger asked.

“No, he’s still in a coma. But Lieutenant Brogan got through to the Pinkerton Agency and got a fill-in on Zalkin’s assignment. The secretary of the national committee of Holmes’ party stopped by his office earlier last night and left him fifty grand in cash, for organizational expenses for the presidential election this fall. Holmes hinted that he might take the money home with him rather than leave it in his office safe over the weekend. You know he lives in one of those old apartment houses on 110th Street, overlooking Central Park.”

“We know where he lives,” Coffin Ed said.

“Well, the secretary got to thinking about it after he had left, so he called the Pinkerton Agency and asked them to send a man up to cover Holmes on his way home. But he didn’t want Holmes to think he was spying on him, so he asked that the man keep out of sight. That’s how come Zalkin was there when the heist was staged.”

“How long was it before the secretary left Casper?” Grave Digger asked, frowning with an idea.

“The agency got the call at ten-twenty o’clock.”