All Shot Up (2 page)

“Manslaughter,” the colored cop said harshly.

“Hit and run,” the white cop echoed.

“We ain’t hit nobody,” Sassafras protested in her keening, nerve-scraping voice.

“Tell it to the judge,” the colored cop said.

The white cop opened the outside door of the Cadillac and jerked Mister Baron from his seat. He handled him roughly, gripping the lapels of his chesterfield coat.

Roman had got out on the other side and was standing holding his hands level with his shoulders.

The white cop jerked Mister Baron out of the way so Sassafras could alight.

“Listen to me for a moment,” Mister Baron said in a low, persuasive voice. “There hasn’t anything happened that can’t be settled between the few of us. The woman’s not hurt bad. I could see in the rear view mirror that she was getting up.”

Mister Baron was small and effeminate with unusually expressive eyes for a man. They were a strange shade of light brown, fringed with long, black, curling lashes. But they fitted his girlish, heart-shaped face. His only masculine feature was the small fuzzy mustache and the bebop goatee that looked as though it might have been stuck on his chin with paste.

He was using his eyes now for all they were worth.

“If you want to be reasonable, this doesn’t have to go to court. And,” he added, fluttering his lashes, “you can benefit in more ways than one—if you know what I mean.”

The three cops exchanged glances.

Sassafras shook herself and looked at Mister Baron with infinite scorn. A small-boned, doll-like girl with a bottom like a duck’s, she was wearing a gray imitation fur coat and a red knitted cap which might have belonged to one of the seven dwarfs.

“If you’re including me, you’re barking up the wrong tree,” she said.

“What’s unusual about you, dear,” Mister Baron said cattily.

“How much?” the white cop asked.

Mister Baron hesitated, appraising the cop. “Five hundred,” he offered tentatively.

“Well, what about the old lady, if she ain’t dead,” Sassafras put in. “What you going to give her?”

“Let her lump it,” Mister Baron said brutally.

“Put these two squares in the car,” the white cop said.

One of the colored cops took Sassafras by the arm and steered her to the Buick.

Roman went docilely, still holding his hands shoulder-high. He looked like a joker who’s bet his fortune on a sure thing and lost.

The cop hadn’t troubled to search him. He didn’t search him now. “Get in the back,” he ordered.

Roman began to plead. “If you-all will give me just one more chance—”

The cop cut him off. “I ain’t your mammy.”

Roman got in and sat dejectedly, shoulders drooping, head so bowed his chin rested on his chest. Sassafras came in from the other side. She took one look at him and burst out crying.

The cops ignored them and turned toward Mister Baron who stood confronting the white cop in the beam from the Cadillac’s lamps.

“Douse those lights,” the white cop said.

A colored cop walked over and turned off the lights.

The white cop cased the street. On the south side, old-fashioned residences with high stone steps, which had been converted into rooming houses or cut up into kitchenettes, were squeezed between apartment houses built for the overflowing white population in the 1920’s, all taken over now by Ham’s and Hagar’s children.

On the north side was the high, crumbling stone wall of the convent, topped by the skeletons of trees. None of the convent buildings were visible from the street.

Aside from themselves, there was not a person in sight. Nothing moved but grit in the ice-cold wind.

“Five hundred all you got?” the white cop asked Mister Baron.

Mister Baron licked his lips, and his voice began to lilt. “You and me could talk business,” he whispered.

“Come here,” the white cop said.

Mister Baron walked up close to the white cop as though he were going to nestle in his arms.

The white cop turned him around and closed his windpipe with a half nelson while twisting his right arm behind his back. Mister Baron beat at him futilely with his left hand.

A colored cop closed in and drew a plaited leather sap. The other cop lifted Mister Baron’s Homburg, and the first cop sapped him back of the ear. Mister Baron gave a low soft sigh and went liquid. The white cop lowered him to the street, and the colored cop put the Homburg over Mister Baron’s face.

The white cop went through Mister Baron’s pockets with rapid efficiency. He found two scented white silk handkerchiefs, a case of miscellaneous keys, a diamond engagement ring stuck tightly about a plastic tube of lipstick, an ivory comb containing strands of Mister Baron’s long wavy hair, a black rubber object shaped like a banana attached to an elastic band, and a package of one-hundred-dollar bills wrapped in greasy brown paper.

He grunted. The colored cops watched him with silent concentration. He put the package of bills into his side coat pocket and stuffed the remaining items back into Mister Baron’s side overcoat pocket.

“Leave him here?” a colored cop asked.

“Naw, let’s put him in the car,” the white cop said.

“We’d better get going,” the other cop urged. “We’re wasting too much time.”

“No need to hurry now,” the white cop said. “We got it made.”

Without replying, the two colored cops picked up Mister Baron and carried him toward the Buick, while the white cop held the back door open.

Neither Roman nor Sassafras had seen a thing.

“What’s happened to him?” Sassafras stopped crying long enough to ask.

“He fainted,” the white cop said. “Get over.”

She moved toward the middle, and they propped Mister Baron in the corner of the seat.

“Hey, boy,” the white cop called to Roman.

Roman looked around.

“I’m going to impound your car, and my partners are going to stay here until the ambulance comes and then bring you to the station. And I don’t want any trouble out of you folks; you understand?”

“Yassuh,” Roman said duly, as though the world had come to an end.

“All right,” the white cop said. “Just let this be a lesson; you can’t buy justice.”

“It weren’t him,” Sassafras said.

“You just keep him quiet if you know what’s good for you,” the cop said, and slammed the door.

He walked unhurriedly back to the Cadillac. One of the colored cops was sitting behind the wheel, the other sitting beside him. The white cop sat on the outside and slammed the door.

The cop driving started the motor and began easing off without turning on the lights. The big golden Cadillac crept silently around the back end of the Buick and had started past before Sassafras noticed it.

“Look, they is taking our car,” she cried.

Roman was too dejected to look up. “He’s impounding it,” he muttered.

“It ain’t just him; it’s all of them,” she said.

Roman’s cocked eyes came up in a startled face. “Why you reckon they is doing that?” he asked stupidly.

“I bet my life they is stealing it,” she said.

Roman jumped as though a time bomb had gone off in his pants. “Stealing my car!” he shouted, his hard, cable-like muscles coming into violent life.

He had the door open and was out on the pavement and pursuing the golden Cadillac before she could start screaming. She opened her mouth and let loose a scream that caused windows to pop open all up and down the street.

Roman was the only one who didn’t hear her. His big, muscle-bound body was rolling as he ran, as though the sloping black pavement were the deck of a ship caught in a storm at sea. He was tugging at something stuck down his pants leg, beneath his leather jacket. Finally he came out with a big, rusty .45 caliber revolver, but before he had a chance to fire it the Cadillac had turned the corner and disappeared from sight.

A joker on a motorcycle with a sidecar was pulling out from the curb when the big Cadillac suddenly bore down on him and the driver switched on the lights. He did a quick turn back toward the curb. From the corners of his eyes he saw a golden Cadillac pass at a blinding speed. The silhouettes of three cops occupying the front seat lashed briefly across his vision. His brain did a double take and flipped.

This joker had seen this Cadillac a short time before. At that time the occupants had been two civilians and a woman. There couldn’t be but one Cadillac like that in Harlem, he was sure. If there was such a Cadillac. If he wasn’t just blowing his top.

This joker was wearing dark-brown coveralls, a woolen-lined army fatigue jacket and a fur-lined, dark-plaid hunter’s cap. There wasn’t but one joker looking like this outside on this bitter cold night.

“No, it ain’t true,” the joker said to himself. “Either I ain’t me or what I seen ain’t that.”

While he was trying to figure out which was which a big black sedan screamed around the corner with its bright lights splitting open the black-dark night.

It was a Buick sedan, and it looked familiar. But not nearly so familiar as the woman he’d seen a short time before in the golden Cadillac. However, now the freak with the coonskin cap who had been driving the Cadillac was driving the Buick.

All of it was so crazy it was reassuring. He bent over the handlebars of his motorcycle and began laughing as though he had gone crazy himself.

“Haw haw haw.” He laughed, and then began talking to himself. “Whatever it is I is dreaming, one thing is for sure—ain’t none of it true.”

The switchboard in the precinct station was jammed.

The switchboard sergeant relayed the reports to Desk Lieutenant Anderson in a bored, monotonous voice: “There’s a woman who lives across the street from the convent says murder and rape taking place in the street...”

Lieutenant Anderson yawned. “Every time a man beats his wife some busybody calls in and says she’s being raped and murdered—the wife, I mean. And God knows some of them could use a little of it—the busybodies, I mean.”

“...another woman from the same vicinity. Says someone is torturing a dog...”

“Tell her we’re sending an officer over right away,” Anderson said. “Tell her dogs are our best friends.”

“She hung up. But here’s another one. Claims the nuns are having an orgy.”

“Something’s going on,” Anderson conceded. “Send Joe Abrams and his partner over to take a look.”

The sergeant switched on the radio. “Come in, Joe Abrams.”

Joe Abrams came in.

“Take a look along the south side of the convent.”

“Right,” Joe Abrams said.

“Patrolman Stick calling from a box on 125th Street,” the sergeant said to Anderson. “Claims he and his partner, Sam Price were attacked and unfooted by a flying saucer some one has released in the neighborhood.”

“Order them to report here before going off duty for an alcohol test,” Anderson said sternly.

The sergeant chuckled as he relayed the order. Then he plugged in another call, and his face went grim.

“Man giving his name as Benjamin Zazuly, calling from the Paris Bar on 125th Street, reporting a double murder. Says two men dead on the sidewalk in front of the bar. One a white man. A third man unconscious. Thinks he’s Casper Holmes....”

Anderson’s fist came down on the desk, and his lean, hard face went bitter. “Goddammit, everything happens to me,” he said, but the moment he had said it he regretted it.

“Get the other two cars over there,” he directed in a steady voice. The veins throbbed in his temples, and his pale-blue eyes looked remote.

He waited until the sergeant had contacted the two prowl cars and dispatched them to the scene. Then he said, “Get Jones and Johnson.”

While the sergeant was calling for Jones and Johnson to come in, Anderson said anxiously, “Let us hope nothing has happened to Holmes.”

The sergeant couldn’t get Jones and Johnson.

Anderson stood up. “Keep trying,” he ordered. “I’m going to run over and take a quick look for myself.”

The reason the sergeant couldn’t get Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson is that they were in the back room of Mammy Louise’s pork store eating hot “chicken feetsy,” a Geechy dish of stewed chicken feet, rice, okra and red chili peppers. On a cold night like this it kept a warm fire burning in the stomach, and the white, tender gristle of the chicken feet gave a solid packing to the guts.

There were three wooden tables covered with oilcloth of such a bilious color that only the adhesive consistency of Mammy Louise’s Geechy stews could hold the food in the stomach. Against the side wall was a coal-burning stove flanked by copper water tasks. Pots of cooking foods bubbled on the hot lids, giving the small, close room the steamy, luxurious feeing of a Turkish bath.

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed were sitting at the table farthest from the stove, their coats draped over the backs of wooden chairs. Their beat-up black hats hung above their overcoats on nails in the outside wall. Sweat beaded on their skulls underneath their short-cropped, kinky hair and streamed down their dark, intent faces. Coffin Ed’s hair was peppered with gray. He had a crescent-shaped scar on the right-side top of his skull, where Grave Digger had hit him with his pistol barrel, the time he had gone berserk after being blinded by acid thrown into his face. That had been more than three years ago, and the acid scars had been covered by skin, grafted from his thigh. But the new skin was a shade or so lighter than his natural face skin and it had been grafted on in pieces. The result was that Coffin Ed’s face looked as though it had been made up in Hollywood for the role of the Frankenstein monster. Grave Digger’s rough, lumpy face could have belonged to any number of hard, Harlem characters.

Grave Digger sucked the gristle from his last chicken foot and spat the small white bones onto the pile on his plate.

“I’ll bet you a bottle he don’t make it,” he said in a low voice, barely audible.

Coffin Ed looked at his wrist watch. “What kind of bet is that,” he replied in a similar tone of voice. “It’s already five minutes to twelve, and she got off at eleven-thirty. You think she’s waiting for him.”

“Naw, but he thinks so.”

They glanced surreptitiously at a man sitting in a worn wooden armchair in the corner beside the stove. He was a short, fat, bald-headed man with the round, black, mobile face of a natural-born comedian. Except for an overcoat, he was dressed for the street. He was staring across at them with a pleading look.