Blind Man With a Pistol (22 page)

     
She was slimmer than she had looked in the sports car. Seen up from under, she was unblemished, tall, voluptuous, like a sculptured sea dream. Her heart-shaped face pointed to thick audacious lips. Her short curly hair gleamed like blued steel. She wore sky-blue eye-shadow above her long-lashed amber-colored eyes encircled in black mascara. She had gone so far with the sex image she had stumbled on indecent exposure.

     
"Throw it to the wind!" You knew a colored man said that. A white man wouldn't want to throw all that fine stuff to the wind.

     
"Go, Cat, go!" And that was a friend. Probably a white friend. Anyway, someone who knew her name.

     
She had unzipped her mini-skirt and was shaking it down. His face averted, their little friend jumped to his feet. They looked at him, startled. As a consequence they didn't see the other lesbian at the stripteaser's table get up at the same time.

     
"Excuse me," he said. "I got to see a man about a dog."

     
"It figures," Coffin Ed said.

     
"Can't you take it?" Grave Digger taunted.

     
He made a face.

     
"Let him go," Coffin Ed growled. "Just envious is all."

     
Foolishly the blond man in the black Suit was trying to push the mini-skirt back into place. The guests whooped with laughter. The stripteasing woman hooked a long brown leg around his neck, encasing his head with the mini-skirt, and pushed her crotch into his face.

     
The angry-faced musicians didn't bat an eye. They played on, beating out a modern rhythm of "Don't Go Joe", as though a blond man's head caught in a brown woman's crotch happened all the time. In the background, the pianist was walking around the platform in a long-sleeved green silk shirt, orange linen pants, with a red and black plaid Alpine hat atop his head, and every time he passed the piano player he reached over his shoulder and hit out a chord.

     
The place had become a madhouse. Those who had had dignity lost it. Those who hadn't became hilarious. Everybody was happy. Except the musicians. The management should have been happy too. But instead there was a bald-headed longfaced man rushing to the rescue of the blond man with his face caught in the stripteaser's crotch. It was debatable whether he wanted to be rescued. Whether he was enjoying it or not, the other white people in the audience were emitting gales of laughter.

     
The baldheaded man clutched a hot brown leg. Immediately she hooked it around his neck. Then she had both their heads beneath her mini-skirt.

     
"At the trough!" someone yelled.

     
"Divide her," another said.

     
"But leave some," a third voice cautioned.

     
The stripteasing woman became hysterical. She began shaking her hips from side to side as though trying to crack the heads beneath her mini-skirt against one another. With a concerted effort they pulled free, red as boiled lobsters. The mini-skirt fell to the table top. The brown legs stepped out of it, the redf aced men backed away. With one deft motion the sweating brown woman took off her black lace panties, triumphantly waving them in the air. Tight black curls ran down to her crotch, forming a patch the size of a fielder's glove against the lighter tint of her belly skin.

     
People roared, shouted, applauded. "Hurrah! Ole! Bravo!"

     
The door to the street was opened. Suddenly the loud urgent screams of police sirens poured into the room. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed jumped to their feet and looked around for their little friend. All they saw were people on the edge of panic. The happy music played by angry musicians suddenly ceased. The naked stripteaser screamed, "Pat! Pat!" From many throats came a wail like a cry of anxiety -- a new sound. Even before they had reached the street, Grave Digger said, "Too late."

     
They knew. Everyone seemed to know. Pretty boy, John Babson, lay dead in the gutter, curled up like a foetus, cut to death by the lesbian, Pat, who had followed him into the street. He had been cut so many times he bore little resemblance to the exhibitionist pansy of a few minutes before.

     
The woman was being put into an ambulance backed up to the curb. She had been cut too, about the arms and face. Blood leaked in streams over her black sweater and slacks. She was a big woman, darker than her sidekick, built like a truck driver who could double for a wet-nurse. But she had lost so much blood she was weak. She moved as though in a daze. Two ambulance attendants had clamped the major cuts and were laying her full-length atop the wheel stretcher inside the ambulance.

     
Police cruisers were parked along the curb on Third Avenue and St Marks Place. People had come from everywhere; from within the houses, from the streets, from private cars stopping in the street. The intersection was jammed, traffic was stopped. Uniformed police screamed and cursed, frantically blew their whistles, trying to clear the way for the Medical Examiner, the DA's assistant, the man from homicide, who had to come and record the scene, gather up the witnesses, and pronounce the body dead before it would be removed.

     
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed followed the ambulance to Bellevue, but they weren't permitted to interview the woman. Only a detective from the homicide bureau was allowed to speak to her. All she would say was, "I cut him." The doctors took her away.

     
The detectives went back to the Cooper Square precinct station on Lafayette Street. The body had been taken to the morgue but the witnesses were being questioned. When they offered themselves as witnesses, the precinct captain let them sit in on the questioning. The five young people they had noticed on their arrival, the two black boys and the three white girls who looked like spaceage witches, made the best witnesses. They had been returning up St Marks Place from Second Avenue when he came out of the rear of The Five Spot and set off down the street, switching his ass. They had known he was heading for The Arabian Baths. Where else? He walked like it. Then she came out the rear of The Five Spot too, running after him like an angry black mother bear, shouting, "Police fink ... stool pigeon sissy spy. . ." and other things they couldn't repeat. What things? About his sex habits, his mother, his anatomy -- they could guess. Nothing that shed more light. She had just run up behind him and cut him straight across the ass with all her might. His ass had popped wide open like a sliced frankfurter. Then she had slashed him as far as she could and by the time he had drawn his own knife and turned to fight her off, it was too late.

     
"She turned him every way but loose," one of the black boys said in awe.

     
"Cut him two-way side and flat," the other corroborated.

     
"Why didn't you two boys stop her?" the questioning lieutenant asked.

     
Grave Digger looked at Coffin Ed but said nothing.

     
"I was scared," the black boy confessed guiltily.

     
"You don't have to feel ashamed," his colored friend assured him. "Nobody runs betwixt a man and a woman knife-fighting."

     
The lieutenant looked at the other black boy.

     
"It was funny," he said simply. "She was chivving his ass like beating time and he was dancing about like an adagio dancer."

     
"What you boys do?" the lieutenant asked.

     
"We go to school," the black boy said.

     
"NYU," a white girl elaborated.

     
"All of you?"

     
"Sure. Why not?"

     
"We called the police," the other girl volunteered.

     
The stripteaser was next, back in her mini-skirt. But she sat with her legs so close together they couldn't tell if she had put her panties back on. She looked cold, even though it was hot. She gave her name as Mrs Catherine Little, and her address as the Clayton Apartments on Lenox Avenue. Her husband was in business. What kind of business? The meat-packing industry, like Cudahy and Swift. He made and packed country sausage for sale to retail stores.

     
She and her friend, Patricia Davis, had come from a birthday party at the Dagger Club on upper Broadway and they'd stopped by The Five Spot to catch the Thelonius Monk and Leon Bibb show. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed knew the joint, in Harlem it was called the "Buildaggers" Club; but they said nothing, they were there to observe. Nothing had happened there to shed any light on why her friend cut the man; there hadn't been any men present; it had been a closed affair for the "Mainstreamers" -- that was the name of their club. She had no idea why her friend had cut him, he must have assaulted her, or maybe he insulted her, she added, instantly realizing how silly the first had sounded. Her friend had a high temper and was quick to take offense. No, she didn't know of any case where she had cut anyone before, but quite often she had seen her pull her knife on men who insulted her. Well, the kind of insults men usually threw at women who looked like her, as if she could help how she looked. It was her own business how she dressed, she didn't have to dress to please men. No, you wouldn't call her mannish, she was just independent. No, she personally didn't know the victim, she didn't remember ever having seen him before. She couldn't imagine what exactly he had said or done to have started the fight, but she felt certain Pat hadn't started it; Pat -- Patricia -- would flash her knife but she wouldn't cut anybody unless they made her. Yes, she had known her for a long time; they had been friends before she was married. She'd been married nine years. How old she was? That'd be telling, besides, what difference did it make?

     
The uptown detectives asked only one question. Grave Digger asked her, "Was he _Jesus Baby?_"

     
She stared at him from wide, startled eyes. "Are you kidding? Is that a name? _Jesus Baby?_"

     
He let it pass.

     
The lieutenant said he'd have to hold her as a material witness. But before they had time to lock her up her husband appeared with a lawyer and a writ of habeas corpus. He was a short, fat, elderly black man with a night tan. His skin had grown lighter and become a shade of mottled brown from the absence of sunlight. He had a bald spot in the back of his skull, around which his kinky mixed gray hair was cut short. His dull brown eyes were glazed, like candied fruit, with thick wrinkled lids. He looked out at the world from these old, half-closed, expressionless eyes as though nothing would surprise him any more. His wide, thin-lipped, sloppy mouth connected with a sharp-angled jaw like a hog's and stuck out like an ape's. But some of his flabbiness was concealed by the very expensive-looking double-breasted suit he wore. He spoke in a low, blurred, Negroid voice. He sounded positive and uneducated; and his teeth were bad.

18

     
When Grave Digger and Coffin Ed arrived at Barbara Tyne's apartment in the Amsterdam Apartments, they found she had been housecleaning. She had a green scarf tied about her head and was wearing a sweaty pink silk robe when she opened the door. She had a dishcloth in her hand.

     
They were as startled at sight of her as she was at sight of them. Coffin Ed had said they could clean up at his wife's cousin's; he didn't expect to find Barbara looking like a charwoman. And Grave Digger didn't believe his wife had a cousin who lived in the Amsterdam Apartments, much less one who looked like this and smelled so unmistakably of her trade. She smelled of sweat, too, which was plastering her pink silk robe to her voluptuous brown body, and of a perfume that fitted both her trade and her sweat.

     
Seemingly, her steaming femality had no effect on Coffin Ed. He was just startled to find her scrubbing in the middle of the night. But at sight of her, sexual urge went off in Grave Digger like an explosion.

     
She had never seen Grave Digger and for the moment she didn't recognize Coffin Ed. The acid-burnt, terrifying face, with its patchwork of grafted skin, was there, but it was out of context. It was beat up, bloody, bruised. It had a body with torn clothing. It was accompanied by another man who looked the same at first glance. Her eyes stretched in terror. Her mouth flew open, showing the screams gathering in her throat. But they didn't get past her lips. Coffin Ed poked an uppercut through the crack in the door and caught her in the solar plexus. Air exploded from her mouth and she went down on her pratt. Her pink silk robe flew open and her legs flew apart as though it were her natural reaction to getting punched. Grave Digger noticed that the pubic hair in the seam of her crotch was the color of old iron rust, either from unrinsed soap or unwashed sweat.

     
Coffin Ed snatched a half-filled bottle of whiskey from the cocktail table and held it to her lips. She strangled and blew a spray of whiskey into his face. But she didn't see because her eyes had filled with tears and her glasses misted.

     
Grave Digger entered the room and closed the door. He looked at his partner, shaking his head.

     
At that moment, Barbara said, "You didn't have to hit me."

     
"You were going to scream," Coffin Ed said.

     
"Well, Jesus Christ, what you expect? Y'alI ought to see yourselves."

     
"We just want to clean up a little," Grave Digger said, adding unnecessarily: "Ed said it'd be all right."

     
"It's all right," she said. "You just ought to warned me. 'Tween you and them pistols you don't look like the Meek twins." She didn't show any inclination to get up from the floor; she seemed to like it there.