Blind Man With a Pistol (16 page)

     
". . . right. . . no pistols. . . keep order. . . "

     
"ARE YOU DEAF?"

     
". . . COMMISSIONER . . . INSPECTOR . . . BE THERE . . ."

     
"Hell's bells!" Coffin Ed muttered to himself, switched off the radio and leaped into the street. Down in the middle of the intersection he saw men rolling in the street like a free-for-all scramble. Two of them wote leather coats. One looked like Grave Digger. He broke in their direction.

     
Men from the Black Power parade were fistfighting in knots with the bare-limbed white and black youths from the Brotherhood. Several of them had surrounded the command car and dragged the two youths from the front seat. Others were trying to drag the white woman and colored man from the back seat. The young man was standing up kicking at their heads. The woman was lashing about with a wooden pole.

     
"Leave them biddies be," a fat woman was screaming.

     
"Whip they asses."

     
The white and black youths were fighting back side by side. Their opponents had the weight but they had the skill. The Black Power brothers were bulling ahead, but reaping black eyes and bloody noses on the way.

     
The mob of celebrants had overflowed into the street and stopped all the traffic. The police cars were stuck in a sea of sweating humanity. These people weren't taking sides in the main fight, they just wanted to chase the white cops. The cops were reluctant to leave their cars without the use of pistols.

     
Assisted by a group of laughing black girls, the harelipped man was endeavoring to drag the statue of the Black Jesus in the path of the police cars. But the cars couldn't move anyway and Jesus was slowly being dismembered in the crush of bodies. Shortly the crush had become so great, the police couldn't open the doors of their cars if they had wanted to. One rolled down his window and stuck his head out and was immediately swatted in the face by a woman's pocketbook.

     
The only fighting which showed any purpose was between the Black Power and the members of the Brotherhood. And when the Black Power fighters penetrated the defenses of the Brotherhood and came upon the interracial mob of followers, the result was a rout. They looked for sissies and prostitutes to beat. And they beat them with such abandon it looked indecent.

     
But the serious fighting was being done by Grave Digger and Coffin Ed against the leather-coated troopers, the silent clerics, and a number of other Black Power sluggers. The detectives had been down at first, but had taken advantage of their opponents, kicking to get their feet tangled up. They had got to their own feet, their clothes torn, noses bleeding, knots springing Out from their heads and faces, and had begun fistfighting their opponents, back to back. Their long holstered pistols were exposed, but they had orders not to draw them. They couldn't have drawn them anyway, in the rain of fists showering over them. But they had one advantage. Every time a brother hit one of the pistols, his fist broke. They were hammering all right. But no one was falling down.

     
"One. . . " Grave Digger panted.

     
After an interval Coffin Ed echoed, "Two...."

     
Instead of saying "three," they covered their heads with their hands and broke for the sidewalk, ploughing through a hail of fists. But once through, having gained the sidewalk in front of the jewelry store, no one tried to follow. Their opponents seemed satisfied with them out of the way, and turned their attention to the youths of the Brotherhood trying to protect the command car.

     
Lomax still stood beside their parked car. While watching the fight with interest he had been joined by a group of Black Muslims from the bookstore. They watched the detectives approach their car, noticing every detail of their appearance: swelling eyes, knotty heads, bruised faces, bloody noses, torn clothes, hard breathing and holstered pistols. Their eyes were fixed, their faces grave.

     
"Why the hell didn't you shoot?" Lomax said as they came abreast.

     
"You can't shoot people petitioning," Grave Digger said harshly, fishing a handkerchief from his pocket.

     
"Praise Allah," a Black Muslim said.

     
"Petitioning my ass," Lomax said. "All of them people are phoney."

     
"Funny," a Black Muslim said.

     
"That's a point of view," Grave Digger argued.

     
"Come on, let's beat it," Coffin Ed said. "Time's wasting."

     
But Lomax wanted to argue. "What point of view?"

     
"They want justice like everybody else," Grave Digger contended.

     
Lomax laughed derisively. "Long as you been in Harlem, you believe that shit. Do those clowns look like they're looking for justice?"

     
"For Christsake, Digger! You argue with this stooge," he shouted furiously, getting into his seat and slamming thedoor. "All he's trying to do is hold us."

     
Grave Digger hurried about the car and climbed beneath the wheel. "He's the people," he said defensively.

     
"Screw the people!" Coffin Ed said, adding: "And justice ain't the point. It's order now."

     
Before the car took off, Lomax called with sly malice, "Anyway, they beat the shit out of you."

     
"Don't let it fool you," Coffin Ed grated.

     
"We'll come up behind them," Grave Digger said, referring to the fighting groups.

     
The only traffic lane open was the one to the north. He had decided to drive north to 130th Street, which he thought would be open, then east to Park Avenue, and follow the railroad trestle back to 125th Street and approach Seventh Avenue from that direction.

     
But as he pulled away from the curb he caught sight in his rearview mirror of the command car being driven by the leader of the Brotherhood group running wild into the remnants of the Black Power group. It had pushed ahead with the engine racing north on the left side of Seventh Avenue, scattering the Black Power marchers, and had jumped the curb and ploughed through the midst of the spectators in front of the cigar store and was headed toward the plate-glass front of the pool hall and the fleeing weedheads. The white woman in the rear seat was clinging on for dear life.

     
But he and Coffin Ed had no way of going to their rescue. So he raced north and turned east into 13 0th Street on crying tires, hoping they'd get back in time. In the middle of the block between Seventh and Lenox Avenues they passed a panel delivery truck going in the same direction. They looked at it from force of habit and read the advertisement on the side: LUNATIC LYNDON ... I DELIVER AND INSTALL TELEVISION SETS ANY TIME OF DAY OR NIGHT ANY PLACE Telephone Murray Hill 2.... Coffin Ed turned around to look at the license number, but he couldn't make it out in the dim street light. All he could see was that it was a Manhattan number.

     
"My people," he said. "Buying a television set in the middle of the night."

     
"Maybe the man's taking one back," Grave Digger said.

     
"The same thing."

     
"Hell, Lunatic ain't no fool. People got to work in the daytime to pay for them."

     
"I wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking night's the time for business in Harlem."

     
"Why not? They black, ain't they? White people do their dirt in the day. That's when they're most invisible."

     
Coffin Ed grunted.

     
The looting broke out on 125th Street at just the moment they were turning into Park Avenue beside the railroad trestle. The runaway command car had precipitated such confusion the white cops had struggled from their cars and begun shooting in the air. A number of adventuresome young men took advantage of the distraction and began breaking the store windows in the Block and snatching the first thing they could. Seeing them running with their arms filled with loot, the spectators stampeded in wild-eyed panic to get away from them.

13

     
"That's it. A mother-raping white man gets himself killed up here trying to get his kicks and here we are, two cops of the inferior race, stuck with trying to find out who killed him," Grave Digger held forth as he drove to the precinct that night in his private car.

     
"Too bad there ain't a mother-raping law against these freaks."

     
"Now, now, Ed, be tolerant. People call us freaks."

     
The grafted skin on Coffin Ed's face began to twitch. "Yeah, but not sex freaks."

     
"Hell, Ed, it ain't our business to worry about social morals," Grave Digger said placatingly, easing up on his friend. He knew folks called him a black Frankenstein, and he felt guilty because of it. If he hadn't been trying so hard to play tough the hoodlum would have never had a chance to throw the acid into Coffin Ed's face. "Leave 'em get dead."

     
The night before they had gone straight home from the Cozy Flats and hadn't seen each other since. They didn't know what had happened to Lucas Covey, the building superintendent, whom they had beaten half to death.

     
"Anyway, the Acme folks probably got him out by now," Coffin Ed said in answer to their thoughts.

     
"Just as well, he'd done all his talking."

     
"John Babson! Hell, you think that's a name? I thought Covey was just blabbing."

     
"Maybe. Who knows?"

     
It was ten minutes to eight p.m. when they stopped in the detectives' locker room to change into their old black working coats. They found Lieutenant Anderson sitting at the Captain's desk, looking extremely worried as usual. Part of this was due to the fact that the Lieutenant was indoors so much his skin remained an unhealthy white, like that of a man who has been sick, and part due to the fact that Anderson's face was too sensitive for police work. But they were used to it. They knew the Lieutenant didn't worry as much as he seemed to, and that he was hip.

     
"It's a damn good thing the commissioner don't like pederasts," he greeted them.

     
Grave Digger looked sheepish. "Did the joint get steamed up?"

     
"It boiled over."

     
Coffin Ed was defiant. "Who was beefing?"

     
"The Acme Company's lawyers. They cried murder, brutality, anarchy, and everything else you can think of. They've filed charges with the police board of inquiry, and if they don't act they threaten to file a petition in the common pleas court."

     
"What the old man say?"

     
"Said he'd look into it, winking at the D.A."

     
"Woe is us," Grave Digger said. "Every time we brush a citizen gently with the tip of our knuckles, there's shysters on the sidelines to cry brutality, like a Greek chorus."

     
Anderson bowed his head to hide his smile. "You shouldn't play Theseus."

     
Grave Digger nodded in acknowledgement, but Coffin Ed's thoughts were on other matters.

     
"You'd think they'd want the killer caught," he said. "Being as the man was killed on their property."

     
"Who was he, anyway?" Grave Digger asked. "Did the boys downtown make him?"

     
"Yes, he was a Richard Henderson who had an apartment on lower Fifth Avenue, near Washington Square." Suddenly Anderson had become completely impersonal.

     
"Couldn't he find anything he wanted down there?" Coffin Ed put in.

     
"Married," Anderson continued as though he hadn't heard. "No children --"

     
"No wonder."

     
"A producer of new plays in off-Broadway theaters. For that, he had to have money."

     
"All the more reason they'd want to find his murderer," Grave Digger said thoughtfully.

     
"If by _they_, you mean the commissioner, the District Attorney and the courts, _they_ do. It's the slum owners who're beefing. They don't want their employees killed in the process, it ain't worth it to them."

     
"Well, boss, it's as the French say, you can't make a ragout without cutting the meat."

     
"Well, that doesn't mean grinding it into beef hash."

     
"Ah, well, the more it's ground, the faster it cooks. I suppose our boy was well cooked?"

     
"Too well cooked. They took him out the pot. They got him out this morning on a writ of habeas corpus. I think they took him to a private hospital somewhere."

     
Both detectives looked at him solemnly. "You don't know where?" Grave Digger asked.

     
"If I knew, I wouldn't tell you. Lay off. For your own good. That boy spells trouble."

     
"What of it? Trouble is our business."

     
"Trouble for everyone."

     
"Oh, well, homicide will get him. They need him."

     
"Anyway, you can have a go at the other witnesses."

     
"Don't throw us no bones, boss. If any of those people picked up last night had known anything, they would have been to hell and gone away from there."

     
"Then you can have the men with the red fezzes."