Chester Himes - All shot up

Casper gave in. “All right, then. But just don’t try to needle me, because I don’t needle. Now I’ll tell you what I know, and, if that don’t satisfy you, you can ask me questions.

“First, I didn’t recognize any of the mother-raping bandits, and I know goddam near everybody in Harlem, either by name or by face. There ain’t nobody in this town who could pull a caper like that I wouldn’t know, and that about goes for you, too.”

Grave Digger nodded.

“So I figure they’re from out of town. Got to be. Now how would they know I was getting a fifty-G payoff? That’s the fifty-thousand-dollar question. First of all, I haven’t told nobody, none of my associates, my wife, nobody. Secondly, I didn’t know exactly when I was going to get it myself. I knew I was getting it sometime, but I didn’t know when until the committee secretary, Grover Leighton, came into my office last night and plunked it down on my desk.”

“Rather early for it, wasn’t it? Early in the year, I mean,” Coffin Ed said.

“Yeah. I didn’t expect it until April or May. That would be sooner than usual. It don’t generally come through until June. But they wanted to get an early start this year. It’s going to be a rough election, with all these television deals and war issues and the race problem and such crap. So how they got to know about it before I knew about it myself-I mean the exact time of the delivery-is something I can’t figure.”

“Maybe the secretary let it slip,” Grave Bigger suggested

“Yeah. Maybe frogs are eating snakes this season,” Casper conceded. “I wouldn’t know. But don’t you boys tackle him. Let him work it out with the other white folks — ” he winked-“The Pinkertons and the commissioners and the inspectors. Me-I don’t give a goddam how they found out. You boys know me-I’m a realist. I don’t want no out-of-town mother-rapers robbing me. I want ’em caught-you get the idea. And if you kill ’em that’s fine. You understand. I want everybody to know-everybody on this goddam green earth-that can’t no mother-rapers rob Casper Holmes in Harlem and get away with it.”

“We got you, boss,” Coffin Ed said. “But we don’t have any leads. You know everything forward and backward, we thought maybe you might have some ideas. That’s why we got here ahead of the confederates.”

Casper allowed himself a grim smile. Then it vanished. “What’s wrong with your stool pigeons?” he asked. “They got the word around in Harlem that can’t nobody have the runs without your stool pigeons telling you about it.”

“We’ll get to them,” Grave Digger lisped.

“Weil, get to them, then,” Casper said. “Get to the whorehouses and the gambling joints and the dope pushers and the call girls. Goddam! Two hoods with fifty G’s are going to splurge on some vice or other.”

“If they’re still in town,” Coffin Ed said.

“If they’re still in town!” Casper echoed. “Two of ’em are niggers, and the white boy’s a cracker. Where the hell they going to go? Where would you go if you pulled a caper for fifty G’s? Where else would you look for kicks? Harlem’s the greatest town on earth. You think they’re going to leave it?”

Both detectives subdued the impulse to exchange looks.

Coffin Ed said dispassionately, “Don’t think we’re not on it, Casper. We’ve been on it from the moment it jumped. People got hurt, and some got killed. You’ll read about it in the newspapers. But that’s neither here nor there. We took our lumps, but we ain’t got thrown.”

Casper looked at Grave Digger’s swollen mouth. “It’s a job,” he said.

The apartment was on the fifth and top floor of an old stone-fronted building on 110th Street, overlooking the lagoon in upper Central Park.

Colored boys and girls in ski ensembles and ballet skirts were skating the light fantastic at two o’clock when Grave Digger and Coffin Ed parked their half-wrecked car before the building.

The detectives paused for a moment to watch them.

“Reminds me of Gorki,” Grave Digger lisped.

“The writer or the pawnbroker?” Coffin Ed asked.

“The writer, Maxim. In his book called The Bystander. A boy breaks through the ice and disappears. Folks rush to save him but can’t find him-can’t find any trace of him. He’s disappeared beneath the ice. So some joker asks, ‘Was there really a boy?’”

Coffin Ed looked solemn. “So he thought the hole in the ice was an act of God?”

“Must have.”

“Like our friend Baron, eh?”

They went silently up the old marble steps and pushed open the old, exquisitely carved wooden doors with cut-glass panels.

“The rich used to live here,” Coffin Ed remarked.

“Still do,” Grave Digger said. “Just changed color. Colored rich folks always live in the places abandoned by white rich folks.”

They walked through a narrow, oak-paneled hallway with stained-glass wall lamps to an old rickety elevator.

A very old colored man with long, kinky gray hair and parchmentlike skin, wearing a mixed livery of some ancient, faded sort, rose slowly from a padded stool and asked courteously, “What floor, gentlemens?”

“Top,” Coffin Ed said.

The old man drew his cotton-gloved hand back from the lever as though it had suddenly turned red hot.

“Mister Holmes ain’t in,” he said.

“Missus Holmes is,” Coffin Ed said. “We have an appointment.”

The old man shook his cotton-boll head. “She didn’t tell me about it,” he said.

“She doesn’t tell you everything she does, grandfather,” Coffin Ed said.

Grave Digger drew a soft leather folder from his inside pocket and lashed his shield. “We’re the men,” he lisped.

Stubbornly the old man shook his head. “Makes no difference to Mister Holmes. He’s The Man.”

“All right,” Coffin Ed compromised. “You take us up. If Missus Holmes doesn’t receive us, you bring us down. Okay?”

“It’s a gentleman’s agreement,” the old man said.

Grave Digger belched as the ancient elevator creaked upward.

“That lets us out,” Coffin Ed said. “Gentlemen don’t belch.”

“Gentlemen don’t eat pig ears and collard greens,” Grave Digger said. “They don’t know what they’re missing.”

The old man gave the appearance of not hearing.

Casper had the whole top floor to himself. It had originally been built for two families with facing doors across a small elevator foyer, but one had been closed and plastered over and there was only the one red-lacquered one left, with a small, engraved brass nameplate in the middle of the upper panel, announcing: Casper Holmes.

“Might just as well say Jesus Christ,” Grave Digger said.

“Go light on this lady, Digger,” Coffin Ed cautioned as he pushed the bell buzzer.

“Don’t I always?” Grave Digger said.

A young black man in a spotless white jacket opened the door. It opened so silently Grave Digger blinked. The young man had shining black curls that looked as though they had been milled from coal tar, a velvet-smooth forehead slightly greasy, and dark-brown eyes, with whites like muddy water, devoid of all intelligence. His flat nose lay against low, narrow cheeks slashed by a thin-lipped mouth of tremendous width. The mouth was filled with white, even teeth.

“Mister Jones and Mister Johnson?” he inquired.

“As if you didn’t know,” Grave Digger said.

“Please come right this way, sirs,” he said, leading them to a front room off the front of the hall.

He came as far as the doorway and left them.

It was a big room with windows overlooking Central Park. In the distance, over treetops, the towers of Rockefeller Center and the Empire Sate Building loomed in the murky haze. It remind in Ed of the lounge of the City Club.