The Real Cool Killers (3 page)

“Who’s got the prayer?” the leader asked with bowed head.

“I’ve got the prayer,” another replied.

“Pray to the great monster,” the leader commanded.

The one who had the prayer turned slowly and presented his white-robed backside to Coffin Ed. A sound like a hound dog baying issued from his rear end.

“Allah be praised,” the leader said, and the loose white sleeves of their robes fluttered in response.

Coffin Ed didn’t get it until Sonny and his friends laughed in amazement. Then his face contorted in black rage.

“Punks!” he grated harshly, somersaulted the bowed Arab with one kick, and leveled on him with his pistol as if to shoot him.

“Easy man, easy,” Grave Digger said, trying to keep a straight face. “You can’t shoot a man for aiming a fart at you.”

“Hold it, monster,” a third Arab cried, and flung liquid from a glass bottle toward Coffin Ed’s face. “Sweeten thyself.”

Coffin Ed saw the flash of the bottle and the liquid flying and ducked as he swung his pistol barrel.

“It’s just perfume,” the Arab cried in alarm.

But Coffin Ed didn’t hear him through the roar of blood in his head. All he could think of was a con man called Hank throwing a glass of acid into his face. And this looked like another acid thrower. Quick scalding rage turned his acid-burnt face into a hideous mask and his scarred lips drew back from his clenched teeth.

He fired two shots together and the Arab holding the half-filled perfume bottle said, “Oh,” softly and folded slowly to the pavement. Behind, in the crowd, a woman screamed as her leg gave beneath her.

The other Arabs broke into wild flight. Sonny broke with them. A split second later his friends took off in his wake.

“God damn it, Ed!” Grave Digger shouted and lunged for the gun.

He made a grab for the barrel, deflecting the aim as it went off again. The bullet cut a telephone cable in two overhead. It fell into the crowd, setting off a cacophony of screams.

Everybody ran.

The panic-stricken crowd stampeded for the nearest doorways, trampling the woman who was shot and two others who fell.

Grave Digger grappled with Coffin Ed and they crashed down on top of the dead white man. Grave Digger had Coffin Ed’s pistol by the barrel and was trying to wrest it from his grip.

“It’s me, Digger, Ed,” he kept saying. “Let go the gun.”

“Turn me loose, Digger, turn me loose. Let me kill ’im,” Coffin Ed mouthed insanely, tears streaming from his hideous face. “They tried it again, Digger.”

They rolled over the corpse and rolled back.

“That wasn’t acid, that was perfume,” Grave Digger said, gasping for breath.

“Turn me loose, Digger, I’m warning you,” Coffin Ed mumbled.

While they threshed back and forth over the corpse, two of the Arabs followed Sonny into the doorway of a tenement. The other people crowding into the doorway stepped aside and let them pass. Sonny saw the stairs were crowded and kept on going through, looking for a back exit. He came out onto a small back courtyard, enclosed with stone walls. The Arabs followed him. One put a noose over his head, knocking off his hat, and drew it tight. The other pulled a
switch-blade knife and pressed the point against his side.

“If you holler you’re dead,” the first one said.

The Arab leader joined them.

“Let’s get him away from here,” he said.

At that moment the patrol cars began to unload. Two harness cops and Detective Haggerty hit the deck and were the first on the murder scene.

“Holy mother!” Haggerty exclaimed.

The cops stared aghast.

It looked to them as though the two colored detectives had the big white man locked in a death struggle.

“Don’t just stand there,” Grave Digger panted. “Give me a hand.”

“They’ll kill him,” Haggerty said, wrapping his arms about Grave Digger and trying to pull him away. “You grab the other one,” he said to the cops.

“To hell with that,” the cop said, swinging his black-jack across Coffin Ed’s head, knocking him unconscious.

The other cop drew his pistol and took aim at the corpse. “One move out of you and I’ll shoot,” he said.

“He won’t move; he’s dead,” Grave Digger said to Haggerty.

“Well, Hell,” Haggerty said indignantly, releasing him. “You asked me to help. How in hell do I know what’s going on?”

Grave Digger shook himself and looked at the third cop. “You didn’t have to slug him,” he said.

“I wasn’t taking no chances,” the cop said.

“Shut up and watch the Arab,” Haggerty said.

The cop moved over and looked at the Arab. “He’s dead, too.”

“Holy Mary, the plague,” Haggerty said. “Look after that woman then.”

Four more cops came running. At Haggerty’s order, two turned toward the woman who’d been shot. She was lying in the street, deserted.

“She’s alive, just unconscious,” the cop said.

“Leave her for the ambulance,” Haggerty said.

“Who’re you ordering about?” the cop said. “We know our business.”

“To hell with you,” Haggerty said.

Grave Digger bent over Coffin Ed, lifted his head and put an open bottle of ammonia to his nose. Coffin Ed groaned.

A red-faced uniformed sergeant built like a General Sherman tank loomed above him.

“What happened here?” he asked.

Grave Digger looked up. “A rumpus broke and we lost our prisoner.”

“Who shot your partner?”

“He’s not shot, he’s just knocked out.”

“That’s all right then. What’s your prisoner look like?”

“Black man, about five eleven, twenty-five to thirty years, one-seventy to one-eighty pounds, narrow face sloping down to chin, wearing light gray hat, dark gray hickory-striped suit, white tab collar, red striped tie, beige chukker boots. He’s handcuffed.”

The sergeant’s small china-blue eyes went from the big white corpse to the bearded Arab corpse.

“Which one did he kill?” he asked.

“The white man,” Grave Digger said.

“That’s all right, we’ll get him,” he said. Raising his voice, he called, “Professor!”

The corporal who’d stopped to light a cigarette said, “Yeah.”

“Rope off this whole goddamned area,” the sergeant said. “Don’t let anybody out. We want a Harlem-dressed Zulu. Killed a white man. Can’t have gotten far ’cause he’s handcuffed.”

“We’ll get ’im,” the corporal said.

“Pick up all suspicious persons,” the sergeant said.

“Right,” the corporal said, hurrying off towards the cops that were just arriving.

“Who shot the Arab?” the sergeant asked.

“Ed shot him,” Grave Digger said.

“That’s all right then,” the sergeant said. “We’ll get your prisoner. I’m sending for the lieutenant and the medical examiner. Save the rest for them.”

He turned and followed the corporal.

Coffin Ed stood up shakily. “You should have let me killed that son of a bitch, Digger,” he said.

“Look at him,” Grave Digger said, nodding toward the Arab’s corpse.

Coffin Ed stared.

“I didn’t even know I hit him,” he said as though coming out of a daze. After a moment he added, “I can’t feel sorry for him. I tell you, Digger, death is on any son of a bitch who tries to throw acid into my eyes again.”

“Smell yourself, man,” Grave Digger said.

Coffin Ed bent his head. The front of his dark wrinkled suit reeked with the scent of dime-store perfume.

“That’s what he threw. Just perfume,” Grave Digger said. “I tried to warn you.”

“I must not have heard you.”

Grave Digger took a deep breath. “God damn it, man, you got to control yourself.”

“Well, Digger, a burnt child fears fire. Anybody who tries to throw anything at me when they’re under arrest is apt to get shot.”

Grave Digger said nothing.

“What happened to our prisoner?” Coffin Ed asked.

“He got away,” Grave Digger said.

They turned in unison and surveyed the scene.

Patrol cars were arriving by the minute, erupting cops as though for an invasion. Others had formed blockades across Lenox Avenue at 128th and 126th Streets, and had blocked off 127th Street on both sides.

Most of the people had gotten off the street. Those that stayed were being arrested as suspicious persons. Several drivers trying to move their cars were protesting their innocence loudly.

The packed bars in the area were being rapidly sealed by
the police. The windows of tenements were jammed with black faces and the exits blocked by police.

“They’ll have to go through this jungle with a fine-toothed comb,” Grave Digger said. “With all these white cops about, any colored family might hide him.”

“I’ll want those gangster punks too,” Coffin Ed said.

“Well, we’ll just have to wait now for the men from homicide.”

But Lieutenant Anderson arrived first, with the harness sergeant and Detective Haggerty latched on to him. The five of them stood in a circle in the car’s headlights between the two corpses.

“All right, just give me the essential points first,” Anderson said. “I put out the flash so I know the start. The man hadn’t been killed when I got the first report.”

“He was dead when we got here,” Grave Digger said in a flat, toneless voice. “We were the first here. The suspect was standing over the victim with the pistol in his hand–”

“Hold it,” a new voice said.

A plain-clothes lieutenant and a sergeant from downtown homicide bureau came into the circle.

“These are the arresting officers,” Anderson said.

“Where’s the prisoner?” the homicide lieutenant asked.

“He got away,” Grave Digger said.

“Okay, start over,” the homicide lieutenant said.

Grave Digger gave him the first part then, went on:

“There were two friends with him and a group of teenage gangsters around the corpse. We disarmed the suspect and handcuffed him. When we started to frisk the gangster punks we had a rumble. Coffin Ed shot one. In the rumble the suspect got away.”

“Now let’s get this straight,” the homicide lieutenant said.

“Were the teenagers implicated too?”

“No, we just wanted them as witnesses,” Grave Digger said. “There’s no doubt about the suspect.”

“Right.”

“When I got here Jones and Johnson were fighting, rolling all over the corpse,” Haggerty said. “Jones was trying to disarm Johnson.”

Lieutenant Anderson and the men from homicide looked at him, then turned to look at Grave Digger and Coffin Ed in turn.

“It was like this,” Coffin Ed said. “One of the punks turned up his ass and farted toward me and–”

Anderson said, “Huh!” and the homicide lieutenant said incredulously, “You killed a man for farting?”

“No, it was another punk he shot,” Grave Digger said in his toneless voice. “One who threw perfume on him from a bottle. He thought it was acid the punk was throwing.”

They looked at Coffin Ed’s acid-burnt face and looked away embarrassedly.

“The fellow who was killed is an Arab,” the sergeant said.

“That’s just a disguise,” Grave Digger said. “They belong to a group of teenage gangsters who call themselves Real Cool Moslems.”

“Hah!” the homicide lieutenant said.

“Mostly they fight a teenage gang of Jews from The Bronx,” Grave Digger elaborated. “We leave that to the welfare people.”

The homicide sergeant stepped over to the Arab corpse and removed the turban and peeled off the artificial beard. The face of a colored youth with slick conked hair and beardless cheeks stared up. He dropped the disguises beside the corpse and sighed.

“Just a baby,” he said.

For a moment no one spoke.

Then the homicide lieutenant asked, “You have the homicide gun?”

Grave Digger took it from his pocket, holding the barrel by the thumb and first finger, and gave it to him.

The lieutenant examined it curiously for some moments. Then he wrapped it in his handkerchief and slipped it into his coat pocket.

“Had you questioned the suspect?” he asked.

“We hadn’t gotten to it,” Grave Digger said. “All we know is the homicide grew out of a rumpus at the Dew Drop Inn.”

“That’s a bistro a couple of blocks up the street,” Anderson said. “They had a cutting there a short time earlier.”

“It’s been a hot time in the old town tonight,” Haggerty said.

The homicide lieutenant raised his brows enquiringly at Lieutenant Anderson.

“Suppose you go to work on that angle, Haggerty,” Anderson said. “Look into that cutting. Find out how it ties in.”

“We figure on doing that ourselves,” Grave Digger said.

“Let him go on and get started,” Anderson said.

“Right-o,” Haggerty said. “I’m the man for the cutting.”

Everybody looked at him. He left.

The homicide lieutenant said, “Well, let’s take a look at the stiffs.”

He gave each a cursory examination. The teenager had been shot once, in the heart.

“Nothing to do but wait for the coroner,” he said.

They looked at the unconscious woman.

“Shot in the thigh, high up,” the homicide sergeant said. “Loss of blood but not fatal – I don’t think.”

“The ambulance will be here any minute,” Anderson said.

“Ed shot at the gangster twice,” Grave Digger said. “It must have been then.”

“Right.”

No one looked at Coffin Ed. Instead, they made a pretense of examining the area.

Anderson shook his head. “It’s going to be a hell of a job finding your prisoner in this dense slum,” he said.

“There isn’t any need,” the homicide lieutenant said. “If this was the pistol he had, he’s as innocent as you and me.
This pistol won’t kill anyone.” He took the pistol from his pocket and unwrapped it. “This is a thirty-seven caliber blank pistol. The only bullets made to fit it are blanks and they can’t be tampered with enough to kill a man. And it hasn’t been made over into a zip gun.”

“Well,” Lieutenant Anderson said at last. “That tears it.”

There was a rusty sheet-iron gate in the concrete wall between the small back courts. The gang leader unlocked it with his own key. The gate opened silently on oiled hinges.

He went ahead.

“March!” the henchman with the knife ordered, prodding Sonny.