Rudolph Fisher - The Conjure-Man Dies - A Harlem Mystery

‘I’ll be thinking over my findings.’

Through the next room they scuffled and into the back of the long first-floor suite. There they abruptly came to a halt and again looked at each other, but now for an entirely different reason. Along one side of this room, hidden from view until their entrance, stretched a long narrow table draped with a white sheet that covered an unmistakably human form. There was not much light. The two young men stood quite still.

‘Seem like it’s—occupied,’ murmured Bubber.

‘Another one,’ mumbled Jinx.

‘Where’s the phone?’

‘Don’t ask me. I got both eyes full.’

‘There ’tis—on that desk. Go on—use it.’

‘Use it yo’ own black self,’ suggested Jinx. ‘I’m goin’ back.’

‘No you ain’t. Come on. We use it together.’

‘All right. But if that whosis says “Howdy” tell it I said “Goo’by.”’

‘And where the hell you think I’ll be if it says “Howdy”?’

‘What a place to have a telephone!’

‘Step on it, slow motion.’

‘Hello!—Hello!’ Bubber rattled the hook. ‘Hey operator! Operator!’

‘My Gawd,’ said Jinx, ‘is the phone dead too?’

‘Operator—gimme the station—quick … Pennsylvania? No ma’am—New York—Harlem—listen, lady, not railroad. Police. Please, ma’am … Hello—hey—send a flock o’ cops around here—Frimbo’s—the fortune teller’s—yea—Thirteen West 130th—yea—somebody done put that thing on him! … Yea—O.K.’

Hurriedly they returned to the front room where Dr Archer was pacing back and forth, his hands thrust into his pockets, his brow pleated into troubled furrows.

‘They say hold everything, doc. Be right over.’

‘Good.’ The doctor went on pacing.

Jinx and Bubber surveyed the recumbent form. Said Bubber, ‘If he could keep folks from dyin’, how come he didn’t keep hisself from it?’

‘Reckon he didn’t have time to put no spell on hisself,’ Jinx surmised.

‘No,’ returned Bubber grimly. ‘But somebody else had time to put one on him. I knowed sump’m was comin’. I told you. First time I seen death on the moon since I been grown. And they’s two mo’ yet.’

‘How you reckon it happened?’

‘You askin’ me?’ Bubber said. ‘You was closer to him than I was.’

‘It was plumb dark all around. Somebody could’a’ snook up behind him and crowned him while he was talkin’ to me. But I didn’t hear a sound. Say—I better catch air. This thing’s puttin’ me on the well-known spot, ain’t it?’

‘All right, dumbo. Run away and prove you done it. Wouldn’t that be a bright move?’

Dr Archer said, ‘The wisest thing for you men to do is stay here and help solve this puzzle. You’d be called in anyway—you found the body, you see. Running away looks as if you were—well—running away.’

‘What’d I tell you?’ said Bubber.

‘All right,’ growled Jinx. ‘But I can’t see how they could blame anybody for runnin’ away from this place. Graveyard’s a playground side o’ this.’

OF the ten Negro members of Harlem’s police force to be promoted from the rank of patrolman to that of detective, Perry Dart was one of the first. As if the city administration had wished to leave no doubt in the public mind as to its intention in the matter, they had chosen, in him, a man who could not have been under any circumstances mistaken for aught but a Negro; or perhaps, as Dart’s intimates insisted, they had chosen him because his generously pigmented skin rendered him invisible in the dark, a conceivably great advantage to a detective who did most of his work at night. In any case, the somber hue of his integument in no wise reflected the complexion of his brain, which was bright, alert, and practical within such territory as it embraced. He was a Manhattanite by birth, had come up through the public schools, distinguished himself in athletics at the high school he attended, and, having himself grown up with the black colony, knew Harlem from lowest dive to loftiest temple. He was rather small of stature, with unusually thin, fine features, which falsely accentuated the slightness of his slender but wiry body.

It was Perry Dart’s turn for a case when Bubber Brown’s call came in to the station, and to it Dart, with four uniformed men, was assigned.

Five minutes later he was in the entrance of Thirteen West 130th Street, greeting Dr Archer, whom he knew. His men, one black, two brown, and one yellow, loomed in the hallway about him large and ominous, but there was no doubt as to who was in command.

‘Hello, Dart,’ the physician responded to his greeting. ‘I’m glad you’re on this one. It’ll take a little active cerebration.’

‘Come on down, doc,’ the little detective grinned with a flash of white teeth. ‘You’re talking to a cop now, not a college professor. What’ve you got?’

‘A man that’ll tell no tales.’ The physician motioned to the undertaker’s front room. ‘He’s in there.’

Dart turned to his men. ‘Day, you cover the front of the place. Green, take the roof and cover the back yard. Johnson, search the house and get everybody you find into one room. Leave a light everywhere you go if possible—I’ll want to check up. Brady, you stay with me.’ Then he turned back and followed the doctor into the undertaker’s parlour. They stepped over to the sofa, which was in a shallow alcove formed by the front bay windows of the room.

‘How’d he get it, doc?’ he asked.

‘To tell you the truth, I haven’t the slightest idea.’

‘Somebody crowned him,’ Bubber helpfully volunteered.

‘Has anybody ast you anything?’ Jinx inquired gruffly.

Dart bent over the victim.

The physician said:

‘There is a scalp wound all right. See it?’

‘Yea—now that you mentioned it.’

‘But that didn’t kill him.’

‘No? How do you know it didn’t, doc?’

‘That wound is too slight. It’s not in a spot that would upset any vital centre. And there isn’t any fracture under it.’

‘Couldn’t a man be killed by a blow on the head that didn’t fracture his skull?’

‘Well—yes. If it fell just so that its force was concentrated on certain parts of the brain. I’ve never heard of such a case, but it’s conceivable. But this blow didn’t land in the right place for that. A blow at this point would cause death only by producing intracranial haemorrhage—’

‘Couldn’t you manage to say it in English, doc?’

‘Sure. He’d have to bleed inside his head.’

‘That’s more like it.’

‘The resulting accumulation of blood would raise the intra—the pressure inside his head to such a point that vital centres would be paralysed. The power would be shut down. His heart and lungs would quit cold. See? Just like turning off a light.’

‘O.K. if you say so. But how do you know he didn’t bleed inside his head?’

‘Well, there aren’t but two things that would cause him to.’

‘I’m learning, doc. Go on.’

‘Brittle arteries with no give in them—no elasticity. If he had them, he wouldn’t even have to be hit—just excitement might shoot up the blood pressure and pop an artery. See what I mean?’

‘That’s apoplexy, isn’t it?’

‘Right. And the other thing would be a blow heavy enough to fracture the skull and so rupture the blood vessels beneath. Now this man is about your age or mine—somewhere in his middle thirties. His arteries are soft—feel his wrists. For a blow to kill this man outright, it would have had to fracture his skull.’

‘Hot damn!’ whispered Bubber admiringly. ‘Listen to the doc do his stuff!’