All Shot Up_ The Classic Crime Thriller - Chester Himes [19]
“Well, I’ll be God-damned!” the Homicide lieutenant exclaimed. “She’s a man!”
“There ain’t any doubt about that,” Haggerty said, finding his voice at last.
Doc turned the body over. Across the back, at the base of the spine, was a tremendous welt, colored dark grape-purple.
“Well, that’s what did it,” Doc said. “He was struck here by great force and catapulted into the wall.”
“By what, for chrissake?” the lieutenant asked.
“Certainly not by a baseball bat,” Haggerty said.
“My conjecture is that he was hit by an automobile from behind,” Doc ventured. “I couldn’t say positively until after the autopsy; and maybe not then.”
The lieutenant looked from the street to the convent wall. “Frankly, Doc, I don’t believe he was knocked from the street against that wall in the position that we found him,” he said. “Isn’t there a possibility that he was run over and then stuck up there afterwards?”
Doc made a bundle of the clothes, covered the body with its coat and stood up.
“Everything is possible,” he said. “If you can imagine a driver running over him, then stopping his car and getting out and propping the body against the wall, and pushing its face into that crevice until it was stuck, then—”
The lieutenant cut him off. “Well, goddammit, I can imagine that better than I can imagine the body being knocked up there from the street, no matter what hit it. Besides which, people have been known to do things worse than that.”
Doc patted him on the shoulder, smiling indulgently. “Don’t try to make your job any harder than it is,” he said. “Look for a hit-and-run driver, and leave the maniacs to Bellevue’s psychiatrists.”
Chapter 7.
It was past two o’clock Sunday morning. Sand-fine sleet was peppering the windshield of the small black sedan as it hustled down the East Side Drive. There was just enough heat from the defroster to make the windshield sticky, and a coating of ice was forming across Grave Digger’s vision.
“This heater only works in the blazing hot summer,” he complained. “In this kind of weather it just makes ice.”
“Turn it off,” Coffin Ed said.
The car skidded on a glazed spot on the asphalt, and from the back seat Detective Tombs from Homicide Bureau yelled, “Watch it, man! Can’t you drive without skidding?”
Grave Digger chuckled. “You work with murder every day, and here you are—scared of getting scratched.”
“I just don’t want to wind up in East River with a car on my back,” Tombs said.
The witness giggled.
That settled it. Conversation ceased. They didn’t want outsiders horning in on their own private horseplay.
When they drew up before the morgue downtown on 29th Street, they all looked grim and half-frozen.
An attendant sitting at a desk in the entrance foyer checked them in, recording their names and badge numbers.
The barman from the Paris Bar gave his name as Alfonso Marcus and his address as 217 Formosa Street, Yonkers, N.Y.
They walked through corridors and downstairs to the “cold room.” Another attendant opened a door and turned on a switch.
He grinned. “A little chilly, eh?” he said, getting off his standard joke.
“You ain’t been outside, son,” Coffin Ed said.
“We want to see the victim of a hit-and-run driver from Harlem,” Grave Digger said.
“Oh yes, the colored man,” the attendant said.
He led them down the long, bare room, lit by cold, white light, and glanced at a card on what looked like the drawer of a huge filing cabinet.
“Unidentified,” he said, pulling out the drawer.
It rolled out smoothly and soundlessly. He removed a coarse white sheet covering the body.
“It hasn’t been autopsied yet,” he said, adding with a grin, “got to take its turn like everybody else. It’s been a busy night—two asphyxiations from Brooklyn; one ice pick stabbing, also from Brooklyn; three poisonings, one by lye—”
Grave Digger cut him off. “You’re holding us spellbound.”
Coffin Ed took the bartender by the arm and shoved him close.
“My God,” the bartender whimpered, covering his face with his hands.