Cotton Comes to Harlem (16 page)

“Stop for Barry!” Deke yelled to his driver.

The driver tamped the brakes and the car skidded straight to a stop. Deke leaped out and rushed towards the grotesque pile of bodies. The white man who’d been run over was writhing in agony and Deke hit him with the .45 in passing and crushed his brain. Then he tried to pull Barry from beneath the other bodies.

“No!” Barry screamed in pain.

“For God’s sake, the key!” Deke cried.

“Cotton …” Barry whispered, blood coming from his mouth and nose as his big body relaxed in death.

Grave Digger came around the truck so fast the little car slewed sideways and Coffin Ed’s tracer bullet intended for the gasoline tank shattered the rear window of the Lincoln Mark IV and set fire to the lining of the roof. The Lincoln went off in a hard straight line like a missile being fired and began zigzagging perilously in the dark. He threw another tracer and punctured the back door. Then he was shooting at the dark and the Lincoln kept going faster.

Grave Digger dragged the little car down and was out and running towards Deke, gun leveled, before it stopped moving. Coffin Ed hit the ground flat-footed on the other side, prepared to add his one remaining bullet. But it wasn’t necessary. Deke saw them coming towards him. He had seen the Lincoln drive away. He dropped the pistol and raised his hands. He wanted to live.

“Well, well, look who’s here,” Grave Digger said as he went forward to snap on the handcuffs.

“Ain’t this a pleasant surprise?” Coffin Ed echoed.

“I want to phone my lawyer,” Deke said.

“All in good time, lover boy, all in good time,” Grave Digger said.

Now it was 1 a.m. Homicide had been there and gone. The medical examiner had pronounced all four bodies “Dead On Arrival”. The bodies were on their way to the morgue. Both the Colonel’s limousine and the Lincoln had gotten away. A search was being made. The seventeen police cruisers that had bottled up the area to keep them from escaping had been returned to regular duty. The workmen cleaning the Polo Grounds had returned to their work. The city lived and breathed and slept as usual. People were lying, stealing, cheating, murdering; people were praying, singing, laughing, loving and being loved; and people were being born and people were dying. Its pulse remained the same. New York City. The Big Town.

But the heads, the mothers and fathers, of those eighty-seven families who had sunk their savings on a dream of going back to Africa lay awake, worrying, wondering if they’d ever get their money back.

Deke was in the “Pigeons’ Nest” in the precinct station, sitting on the wooden stool bolted to the floor, facing the barrage of spotlights. He looked fragile and translucent in the bright light; his smooth black face was more the purplish-orange color of an overpowdered whore than the normal gray of a black man terrified.

“I want to see my lawyer,” he was saying for the hundredth time.

“Your lawyer is asleep at this time of night,” Coffin Ed said with a straight face.

“He’d be mad if we woke him,” Grave Digger added.

Lieutenant Anderson had let them have him first. They were in a jovial mood. They had Deke where they wanted him.

It wasn’t funny to Deke. “Don’t get your britches torn,” he warned. “All you got against me is suspicion of homicide; and I have a perfect right to see my lawyer.”

Coffin Ed slapped him with his cupped palm. It was a light slap but it sounded like a firecracker and rocked Deke’s head.

“Who’s talking about homicide?” Grave Digger said as though he hadn’t noticed it.

“Hell, all we want to know is who’s got the money,” Coffin Ed
said.

Deke straightened up and took a deep breath.

“So we can go and get it and give it back to those poor people you swindled,” Grave Digger added.

“Swindled my ass,” Deke said. “It was all legitimate.”

Grave Digger slapped him so hard his body bent one-sided like a rubber man, and Coffin Ed slapped him back. They slapped him back and forth until his brains were addled, but left no bruises.

They let him get his breath back and gave him time for his brains to settle. Then Grave Digger said, “Let’s start over.”

Deke’s eyes had turned bright orange in the glaring light. He closed his lids. A trickle of blood flowed from the corner of his mouth. He licked his lips and wiped his hand across his mouth.

“You’re hurting me,” he said. His voice sounded as though his tongue had thickened. “But you ain’t killing me. And that’s all that counts.”

Coffin Ed drew back to hit him but Grave Digger caught his arm. “Easy, Ed,” he said.

“Easy on this mother-raping scum?” Coffin Ed raved. “Easy on this incestuous sister-raping thief?”

“We’re cops,” Grave Digger reminded him. “Not judges.”

Coffin Ed restrained himself. “The law was made to protect the innocent,” he said.

Grave Digger chuckled. “You heard the man,” he said to Deke.

Deke looked as though he might reply to that but thought better of it. “You’re wasting your time on me,” he said instead. “My Back-to-Africa movement was on the square and all I know about this shooting caper is what I saw in passing. I saw the man was dying and tried to save his life.”

Coffin Ed turned and walked into the shadow. He slapped the wall with the palm of his hand so hard it sounded like a shot. It was all Grave Digger could do to keep from breaking Deke’s jaw. His neck swelled and veins sprouted like ropes along his temples.

“Deke, don’t try us,” he said. His voice had turned light and cotton dry. “We’ll take you out of here and pistol-whip you slowly to death — and take the charge.”

It showed on Deke’s face he believed him. He didn’t speak.

“We know the set-up of the Back-to-Africa movement. We got the FBI records on Four-Four and Freddy. We got the Cook County Bertillon report on Barry and Elmer. We got your prison record too. We know you haven’t got the money or you wouldn’t still have been around. But you got the key.”

“Got what key?” Deke asked.

“The key to the door that leads to the money.”

Deke shook his head. “I’m clean,” he said.

“Punk, listen,” Grave Digger said. “You’re going up any way. We got the proof.”

“Got it from where?” Deke asked.

“We got it from Iris,” Grave Digger said.

“If she said the Back-to-Africa movement was crooked she’s a lying bitch, and I’ll tell her to her teeth.”

“All right,” Grave Digger said.

Three minutes later they had Iris in the room. Lieutenant Anderson and two white detectives had come with her.

She stood in front of Deke and looked him dead in the eyes. “He killed Mabel Hill,” she said.

Deke’s face distorted with rage and he tried to leap at her but the white detectives held him.

“Mabel found out that the Back-to-Africa movement was crooked and she was going to the police. Her husband had been killed and she had lost her money and she was going to get him.” She sounded as if it was good to her.

“You lying whore!” Deke screamed.

“When I stood up for him, she attacked me,” Iris continued. “I was struggling to defend myself. He grabbed me from behind and put the pistol in my hand and shot her. When I tried to wrestle the pistol away from him, he knocked me down and took it.”

Deke looked sick. He knew it was a good story. He knew if she took it to court, dressed in black, her eyes downcast in sorrow, and spoke in a halting manner — with his record — she could make it stick. She didn’t have any kind of a criminal record. He could see the chair in Sing Sing and himself sitting in it.

He stared at her with resignation. “How much are they paying you?” he asked.

She ignored the question. “The forged documents which prove the Back-to-Africa movement is crooked are hidden in our apartment in the binding of a book called
Sex and Race
.” She smiled sweetly at Deke. “Good-bye, big shit,” she said and turned towards the door.

The white detectives looked at one another, then looked at Deke. Anderson was embarrassed.

“How does that feel?” Coffin Ed asked Deke in a grating voice.

Grave Digger walked with Iris to the door. When he turned her over to the jailer he winked at her. She looked surprised for an instant, then winked back, and the jailer took her away.

Deke had wilted. He didn’t look hurt, or even frightened; he looked beat, like a condemned man waiting for the electric chair. All he needed was the priest.

Anderson and the two white detectives left without looking at him again.

When the three of them were again alone, Grave Digger said. “Give us the key and we’ll strike off the murder.”

Deke looked up at him as though from a great distance. He looked as though he didn’t care about anything any more. “Frig you,” he said.

“Then give us the eighty-seven grand and we’ll drop the whole thing,” Grave Digger persisted.

“Frig you twice,” Deke said.

They turned him over to the jailer to be taken back to his cell.

“I got a feeling we’re overlooking something,” Grave Digger said.

“That is for sure,” Coffin Ed agreed. “But what?”

They were in Anderson’s office, talking about Iris. As usual, Grave Digger sat with a ham perched on the edge of the desk and Coffin Ed was backed against the wall in the shadow.

“She’ll never get away with it,” Lieutenant Anderson said.

“Maybe not,” Grave Digger conceded. “But she sure scared the hell out of him.”

“How much did it help?”

Grave Digger looked chagrined.

“None,” Coffin Ed admitted ruefully. “She put it on too thick. We didn’t expect her to accuse him of the murder.”

Grave Digger chuckled at that. “She didn’t hold anything back. I thought for a moment she was going to accuse him of rape.”

Anderson colored slightly. “Then how far have you got?”

“Nowhere,” Grave Digger confessed.

Anderson sighed. “I hate to see people tearing at one another like rapacious animals.”

“Hell, what do you expect?” Grave Digger said. “As long as there are jungles there’ll be rapacious animals.”

“Remember the colored taxi driver who picked up the three white men and the colored woman in front of Small’s, right after the trucks were wrecked?” Anderson asked, changing the conversation.

“Took them to Brooklyn. Maybe we ought to talk to him.”

“No use now. Homicide took him down to the morgue. On a hunch. And he identified the bodies of the three white men as the same ones.”

Grave Digger shifted his weight and Coffin Ed leaned forward. For a moment they were silent, lost in thought, then Grave Digger said, “That ought to tell me something,” adding, “but it don’t.”

“It tells me they ain’t got the money either,” Coffin Ed said.

“What they?”

“How the hell do I know? I didn’t see the ones who got away,” Coffin Ed said.

Anderson thumbed through the report sheets on his desk. “The Lincoln was found abandoned on Broadway, where the subway trestle passes over 125th Street, with the two rifles still inside,” he noted. “It showed where you hit it.”

“So what?”

“The gunmen haven’t been found but Homicide has got leaders out. Anyway, we know who they are and they won’t get far.”

“Don’t worry about those birds, they’ll never fly,” Coffin Ed said.

“Those are not the flying kind,” Grave Digger added. “Those are jailbirds, headed for home.”

“And we’re headed for food,” Coffin Ed said. “My stomach is sending up emergency calls.”

“Damn right,” Grave Digger agreed. “As Napoleon said, ‘A woman thinks with her heart but a man with his stomach.’ And we’ve got some heavy thinking to do.”

Anderson laughed. “What Napoleon was that?”

“Napoleon Jones,” Grave Digger said.

“All right, Napoleon Jones, don’t forget crime,” Anderson said.

“Crime is what pays us,” Coffin Ed said.

They went to Mammy Louise’s. She had changed her pork store with the tiny restaurant in back into a fancy all-night barbecue joint. Mr Louise was dead and a slick young black man with shiny straightened hair and fancy clothes had taken his place. The English bulldog who used to keep Mr Louise at home was still there, but his usefulness was gone and he looked lonely for the short fat figure of Mr Louise, whom he delighted in scaring. The new young man didn’t look like the type anything could keep home, bulldog or whatnot.

They sat at a rear table facing the front. The barbecue grill was to their right, presided over by a white-clad chef. To their left was the jukebox, blaring out a Ray Charles number.

Mammy Louise’s slick young man came personally to take their orders, playing the role of Patron with mincing arrogance.

“Good evening, gentlemen, what will you gentlemen have tonight?”

Grave Digger looked up. “What have you got?”

“Barbecued ribs, barbecued feet, barbecued chicken, and we
got some chitterlings and hog maws and some collard greens with ears and tails–”

“You’d go out of business if hogs had only loins,” Coffin Ed interrupted.

The young man flashed his teeth. “We got some ham and succotash and some hog head and black-eyed peas–”

“What do you do with the bristles?” Grave Digger asked.

The young man was becoming irritated. “Anything you want, gentlemen,” he said with a strained smile.

“Don’t brag,” Coffin Ed muttered.

The smile went out.

“Just bring us two double orders of ribs,” Grave Diger said quickly. “With side dishes of black-eyed peas, rice, okra, collard greens with fresh tomatoes and onions, and top it off with some deep-dish apple pie and vanilla ice cream. Okay?”

The young man smiled again. “Just a light snack.”

“Yeah, we want to think,” Coffin Ed said.

They watched the young man walk away with a switch.

“Mr Louise must be turning over in his grave,” Coffin Ed said.

“Hell, he’s more likely running after some chippy angel, now that he’s got away from that bulldog.”

“If he went in that direction.”

“All chippies were angels to Mr Louise,” Grave Digger said.

The place was filled mostly with young people who peeped at them through the corners of their eyes when they came back to play the jukebox. Everyone knew them. They looked at these young people, thinking they didn’t know what it was all about yet.