Cotton Comes to Harlem (8 page)

“This is God’s will,” she repeated trance-like.

When he penetrated her she believed it was God’s will and she cried, “Oh-oh! I think you’re wonderful!”

Grave Digger drove east on 113th Street to Seventh Avenue and Harlem showed another face. A few blocks south was the north end of Central Park and the big kidney-shaped lagoon; north of 116th Street was the “Avenue” — the lush bars and night clubs, Shalimar, Sugar Ray’s, Dickie Well’s, Count Basie’s, Small’s, The Red Rooster; the Hotel Theresa, the National Memorial Book Store (
World History Book Outlet on 600,000,000 Colored People
); the beauty parlors (hairdressers); the hash joints (home cooking); the undertakers and the churches. But here, at 113th Street, Seventh Avenue was deserted at this late hour of the night and the old well-kept stone apartment buildings were dark.

Coffin Ed telephoned the station from the car and got Lieutenant Anderson. “Anything new?”

“Homicide got a colored taxi driver who picked up three white men and a colored woman outside of Small’s and drove them to an address far out on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. He said the men didn’t look like people who go to Small’s and the woman was just a common prostitute.”

“Give me his address and the firm he works for.”

Anderson gave him the information but said, “That’s Homicide’s baby. We got nothing on O’Hara. What’s your score?”

“We’re going to Hijenks’ shooting gallery looking for a junkie called Loboy who might know something.”

“Hijenks. That’s up on Edgecombe at the Roger Morris, isn’t it?”

“He’s moved down on Eight. Why don’t the Feds knock him off? Who’s he paying?”

“Don’t ask me; I’m a precinct lieutenant.”

“Well, look for us when we get there.”

They drove down to 110th Street and turned back to Eighth Avenue and filled in the square. Near 112th Street they passed an old junk man pushing his cart piled high with the night’s load.

“Old Uncle Bud,” said Coffin Ed. “Shall we dig him a little?”

“What for? He won’t co-operate; he wants to keep on living.”

They parked the car and walked to the bar on the corner of 113th Street. A man and a woman stood at the head of the bar, drinking beer and swapping chatter with the bartender. Grave Digger kept on through to the door marked “Toilet” and went inside. Coffin Ed stopped at the middle of the bar. The bartender looked quickly towards the toilet door and hastened towards Coffin Ed and began wiping the spotless bar with his damp towel.

“What’s yours, sir?” he asked. He was a thin tall, stoopedshouldered, light-complexioned man with a narrow moustache and thinning straight hair. He looked neat in a white jacket and black tie; far too neat for that neck of the woods, Coffin Ed thought.

“Bourbon on the rocks.” The bartender hesitated for an instant and Coffin Ed added, “Two.” The bartender looked relieved.

Grave Digger came back from the toilet as the bartender was serving the drinks.

“You gentlemen are new around here, aren’t you?” the bartender asked conversationally.

“We aren’t, but you are,” Grave Digger said.

The bartender smiled noncomittally.

“You see that mark down there on the bar?” Grave Digger said. “I made it ten years ago.”

The bartender looked down the bar. The wooden bar was covered with marks — names, drawings, signatures. “What mark?”

“Come here, I’ll show you,” Grave Digger said, going down to the end of the bar.

The bartender followed slowly, curiosity overcoming caution. Coffin Ed followed him. Grave Digger pointed at the only unmarked spot on the entire bar. The bartender looked. The couple at the front of the bar had stopped talking and stared curiously.

“I don’t see nothing,” the bartender said.

“Look closer,” Grave Digger said, reaching inside his coat.

The bartender bent over to look more closely. “I still don’t see nothing.”

“Look up then,” Grave Digger said.

The bartender looked up into the muzzle of Grave Digger’s long-barreled, nickel-plated .38. His eyes popped from their sockets and he turned yellow-green.

“Keep looking,” Grave Digger said.

The bartender gulped but couldn’t find his voice. The couple at the head of the bar, thinking it was a stickup, melted into the
night. It was like magic, one instant they were there the next instant they were gone.

Chuckling, Coffin Ed went through the “Toilet” and opened the “Closet” and gave the signal on the nail holding a dirty rag. The nail was a switch and a light flashed in the entrance hallway upstairs where the lookout sat, reading a comic book. The lookout glanced at the red bulb which should flash the bartender’s signal that strangers were downstairs. It didn’t flash. He pushed a button and the back door in the closet opened with a soft buzzing sound. Coffin Ed opened the door to the bar and beckoned to Grave Digger, then jumped back to the door upstairs to keep it from closing.

“Good night,” Grave Digger said to the bartender.

The bartender was about to reply but lights went on in his head and briefly he saw the Milky Way before the sky turned black. A junkie was coming from outside when he saw Grave Digger hit the bartender alongside the head and without putting down his foot turned on his heel and started to run. The bartender slumped down behind the bar, unconscious. Grave Digger had only hit him hard enough to knock him out. Without another look, he leapt towards the “Toilet” and followed Coffin Ed through the concealed door in the “Closet” up the narrow stairs.

There was no landing at the top of the stairs and the door was the width of the stairway. There was no place to hide.

Halfway up, Grave Digger took Coffin Ed by the arm. “This is too dangerous for guns; let’s play it straight,” he whispered.

Coffin Ed nodded.

They walked up the stairs and Grave Digger knocked out the signal and stood in front of the peephole so he could be seen.

Inside was a small front hallway furnished with a table littered with comic books; above hung a rack containing numerous pigeonholes where weapons were placed before the addicts were allowed into the shooting gallery. A padded chair was drawn up to the table where the lookouts spent their days. On the left side of the door there were several loose nails in the doorframe. The top nail was the switch that blinked the lights in the shooting gallery in case of a raid. The lookout peered at Grave Digger with a finger poised over the the blinker. He didn’t recognize him.

“Who’re you?” he asked.

Grave Digger flashed his shield and said, “Detectives Jones and Johnson from the precinct.”

“What you want?”

“We want to talk to Hijenks.”

“Beat it, coppers, there ain’t nobody here by that name.”

“You want me to shoot this door open?” Coffin Ed flared.

“Don’t make me laugh,” the lookout said. “This door is bulletproof and you can’t butt it down.”

“Easy, Ed,” Grave Digger cautioned, then to the lookout: “All right, son, we’ll wait.”

“We’re just having a little prayer meeting, with the Lord’s consent,” the lookout said, but he sounded a little worried.

“Who’s the Lord in this case?” Coffin Ed asked harshly.

“Ain’t you,” the lookout said.

After that there was silence. Then they heard him moving around inside. Finally they heard another voice ask, “What is it, Joe?”

“Some nigger cops out there from the precinct.”

“I’ll see you sometime, Joe; see who’s the niggermost,” Coffin Ed grated.

“You can see me now —” Joe began to bluster, grown brave in the presence of his boss.

“Shut up, Joe,” the voice said. Then they heard the slight sound of the peephole being opened.

“It’s Jones and Johnson, Hijenks,” Grave Digger said. “We just want some information.”

“There’s no one here by that name,” Hijenks said.

“By whatever name,” Grave Digger conceded. “We’re looking for Loboy.”

“For what?”

“He might have seen something on that caper where Deke O’Hara’s Back-to-Africa group got hijacked.”

“You don’t think he was involved?”

“No, he’s not involved,” Grave Digger stated flatly. “But he was in the vicinity of 137th Street and Seventh Avenue when the trucks were wrecked.”

“How do you know that?”

“His sidekick was run over and killed by the hijackers’ truck.”

“Well —” Hijenks began, but the lookout cut him off.

“Don’t tell those coppers nothing, boss.”

“Shut up, Joe; when I want your advice I’ll ask it.”

“We’re going to find him anyway, even if we have to get the Feds to break in here to look for him. So if he’s here, you’d be doing yourself a favor as well as us if you send him out.”

“At this hour of the night you might find him in Sarah’s crib on 105th Street in Spanish Harlem. Do you know where it is?”

“Sarah is an old friend of ours.”

“I’ll bet,” Hijenks said. “Anyway, I don’t know where he lives.”

That ended the conversation. No one expected any gratitude
for the information; it was strictly business.

They drove across town on 110th Street, past the well-kept old apartment houses overlooking the north end of Central Park and the lagoon where the more affluent colored people lived. It was a quiet street, renamed Cathedral Parkway in honor of the Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York’s most beautiful church, which fronted on it — a street of change. The west end, in the vicinity of the cathedral, was still inhabited by whites; but the colored people had taken over that section of Morningside which fronts on the park.

At Fifth Avenue they came to the circle where Spanish Harlem begins. Suddenly the street goes squalid, dirty, teeming with the many colors of Puerto Ricans — so many packed into the incredible slums it seems as though the rotten walls are bursting wtih human flesh. The English language gives way to Spanish, colored Americans give way to colored Puerto Ricans. By the time they reached Madison Avenue, they were in a Puerto Rican city with Puerto Rican customs, Puerto Rican food; with all stores, restaurants, professional offices, business establishments and such bearing signs and notices in Spanish, offering Puerto Rican services and Puerto Rican goods.

“People talk about Harlem,” Grave Digger said. “These slums are many times worse.”

“Yeah, but when a Puerto Rican becomes white enough he’s accepted as white, but no matter how white a spook might become he’s still a nigger,” Coffin Ed replied.

“Hell, man, leave that for the anthropologists,” Grave Digger said, turning south on Lexington towards 105th Street.

Sarah had the top flat in an old-fashioned brick apartment building that had seen better days. Directly beneath her top-floor crib lived a Puerto Rican clan of so many families the apartments on the floor could not hold them all; therefore eating, sleeping, cooking and making love was done in turns while the others stayed outside in the street until those inside were finished. Radios blared at top volume all day and night. Combined with the natural sounds of Spanish speech, laughter and quarreling, the din drowned all sounds that might come from Sarah’s above. How the families below fared was of no concern.

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed parked down the street and walked. No one gave them a second look. They were men and that’s all that interested Sarah: white men, black men, yellow men, brown men, straight men, crooked men and squares. Sarah said she only barred women; she didn’t run a joint for “freaks”.
She paid for protection. Everyone knew she was a stool pigeon; but she pigeoned on the police too.

The first thing that hit the detectives when they entered the dimly lit downstairs hallway was the smell of urine.

“What American slums need is toilets,” Coffin Ed said.

Smelling odors of cooking, loving, hair frying, dogs farting, cats pissing, boys masturbating and the stale fumes of stale wine and black tobacco, Grave Digger said, “That wouldn’t help much.”

Next they noticed the graffiti on the walls.

“Hell, no wonder they make so many babies; that’s all they think about,” Coffin Ed concluded.

“If you lived here, what else would you think about?”

They ascended in silence. The stink lessened as they climbed the six flights, the walls became less tatooed. The whorehouse floor was practically clean.

They knocked at a red-painted door at the front. It was opened by a grinning Puerto Rican girl who didn’t bother to look through the peephole. “Welcome, señors,” she said. “You’re at the right place.”

They entered a vestibule and looked at the hooks on the walls.

“We want to talk to Sarah,” Grave Digger said.

The girl waved towards a door. “Come on in. You don’t have to see her.”

“We want to see her. You go in like a good little girl and send her out.”

The girl stopped grinning. “Who’re you?”

Both detectives flashed their shields. “We’re the law.”

The girl sneered and turned quickly into the big front room, leaving the door ajar. They could see into what Sarah called her “reception room”. The floor was covered with polished red linoleum. Chairs lined the walls: overstuffed chairs for the Johns, straight-backed chairs for the girls; but most of the time the girls were either sitting in the laps of the Johns or bringing them food and drink.

The girls were all dressed alike in one-piece shifts showing their shapes, and high-heeled shoes of different colors. They were all light-complexioned Puerto Rican girls with hair shades ranging from blonde to black; all were young. They looked gay and natural and picturesque flitting about the room, peddling their bodies.

Against the back wall a brilliantly lighted jukebox was playing Spanish music and two couples were dancing. The others were sitting, drinking whisky highballs and eating, saving their energy
for the real thing.

Alongside the jukebox was a long dimly lit hallway, flanked by the small bedrooms for business. The bathroom and the kitchen were at the rear. A dark brown motherly-type woman fried the chicken, dished out the potato salad and mixed the drinks, keeping a sharp eye on the money.

Two apartments had been put together to make Sarah’s crib and the back apartment was her private residence.