Chester Himes - All shot up

“What are you two talking about?” Anderson asked.

“We’ll tell you about it later,” Coffin Ed said.

There was no way to drive down 134th Street.

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed left the Plymouth on Seventh Avenue, which had been kept open for the interstate tracks, and waded through snow that came up to their knees.

Mr. Clay was lying on his side on an old couch covered with faded gray velvet in the first-floor-front room that he used for an office. His face was toward the wall and his back was toward the street of falling snow, but he was not asleep.

The dark-shaded floor lamp in the window that he kept lit permanently threw the room in dim relief.

He was a small, dried-up old man with parchmentlike skin, washed-out brown eyes and long, bushy gray hair. As was customary, he was dressed in a frock coat, black-and-gray striped morning pants and old-fashioned black patent-leather shoes with high-button, gray-suede leather tops. He wore a wing collar and a black silk ascot tie held in place by a gray pearl stickpin. Pince-nez glasses, attached to a long black ribbon pinned to the lapel of his coat, were tucked into a pocket of his gray double-breasted vest.

When Grave Digger and Coffin Ed walked into the office, he said without moving, “Is that you, Marcus?”

“It’s Ed Johnson and Digger Jones,” Coffin Ed said.

Mr. Clay turned over, swung his feet to the floor and sat up. He clipped the pince-nez onto his nose and looked at them.

“Don’t shake the snow on my floor,” he said in his thin, querulous voice. “Why didn’t you clean yourselves outside.”

“A little water won’t hurt this place,” Grave Digger lisped. “It’ll help settle all this dust in here.”

Mr. Clay looked at his swollen mouth. “Hah, somebody gave it to you this time,” he said.

“I can’t always be lucky,” Grave Digger replied.

“Hot as you got it in here, you must be making mummies,” Coffin Ed observed.

“You didn’t come here to complain about the heat,” Mr. Clay snapped.

“No, we came to examine the effects of a body you got in here.”

“Whose body?”

“Lucius Lambert.”

Mr. Clay refused flatly. “You can’t see them.”

“Why not?”

“Casper doesn’t want them disturbed.”

“Did Casper claim his body from the morgue?”

“A relative claimed him, but Casper is paying for the funeral.”

“That don’t give him any legal rights,” Coffin Ed said. “We’ll get an order from the relative. Who is he?”

“I don’t have to tell you,” Mr. Clay said peevishly.

“Naw, but you’re going to have to do one or the other,” Grave Digger lisped. “You can’t hold bodies here without the proper authority.”

“What did you want with his effects?”

“We just want to look at them. You can come with us if you want.”

“I don’t want to look at them; I’ve seen them. I’ll send Marcus with you.” He raised his voice and called, “Marcus!”

A tall, light-skinned, loose-lipped man affecting the latest English fashion came into the room. He was the embalmer.

“Show these dicks Lambert’s effects,” Mr. Clay directed. “And see that they don’t take anything.”

“Yes, sir,” Marcus said.

He took them to a basement storeroom, adjacent to the embalming room, where the clothes and effects of the bodies were kept in small wicker baskets until claimed by relatives.

Marcus took one of the baskets from a shelf and placed it on the table.

“Help yourself,” he said, and started from the room. At the door he turned and winked. “There’s nothing in it worth taking, except a box of stockings, and the old man has already spotted them,” he said.

“I’ll bet you know,” Coffin Ed said.

It didn’t take but a few moments. Grave Digger pushed the clothes aside until he found the box of stockings.

It was a black box with a gold stripe across it, intended for twelve pairs of stockings. It was sealed with a tiny bit of Scotch tape.

Grave Digger peeled back the tape and removed two pairs of sheer silk stocking wrapped separately in gold cellophane paper. Underneath was another package wrapped in similar paper. He placed the package on the table and opened it.

It contained fifty brand-new thousand-dollar bills.

“It had to be,” he said. “Snake Hips was the only one he could have passed it to. And we missed it all this time.”

“It was right there in front of our eyes,” Coffin Ed admitted. “This boy would never have been dancing in the street half dressed on a night as cold as Saturday just to bitch off that square bartender. We ought to have known that.”

“And he was in the clique, too. That’s how we should have known. Casper passed him the package as he went by.”

“Why do you think he left it here, Digger?”

“Safer here than anywhere else, and he probably didn’t figure us to dig Snake Hips’ straight moniker as Lucius Lambert.”

“What are we going to do with it?”

“Let’s just seal up this package and put it back and don’t say anything about it,” Grave Digger said.

“And keep the money?”

“Damn right keep the money.”

“Casper’s going to know we got it.”

“Damn right he’s going to know we got it. And there ain’t going to be a damn thing he can do about it. That’s what’s going to hurt him. He’s going to want to job us, but you can’t job two detectives with twenty-five thousand bucks in their kicks. And as much as we know about him now, he knows he’d better not try.”

“I’d like to see his face when he comes for it,” Coffin Ed said.

“Yeah, there’s going to be some arteries bursting for sure.”

Two days later, the New York Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund, which sends New York City boys of all races and creeds on vacations in the country during the summer, received an anonymous cash donation of $50,000. The executives of the fund didn’t bat an eye; they were used to this kind of money.

On the same day, as he was about to leave the hospital, Casper received an anonymous telegram.

It read: Crime doesn’t pay.