"Himes, Chester - The Real Cool Killers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Himes Chester)

Sugartit looked furiously at Sheik over the top of Sissie's hand.
"Granny can't hear," Inky said.
"The hell she can't," Choo-Choo said. "She can hear when she wants to."
"Let me go!" Sugartit mumbled and bit Sissie's hand.
"Stop that!" Sissie said.
"I'm going to him," Sugartit mumbled. "I love him. You can't stop me. I'm going to find out who shot him."
"Your old man shot him," Sheik said brutally. "The monster, Coffin Ed."
"Did I hear someone calling Caleb?" Granny asked from the other side of the door.
Sheik closed his hands quickly about Sugartit's throat and choked her into silence.
"Naw, Granny," he called. "It's just these silly girls arguing about their cubebs."
"Hannh?"
"Cubebs!" Sheik shouted.
"You chillen make so much racket a body can't hear herself think," she muttered.
They heard her shuffling back to the kitchen.
"Jesus, she's sitting up waiting for him," Sissie said.
Sheik and Choo-Choo exchanged glances.
"She don't even know what's happening in the street," Choo-Choo said.
Sheik took his hands away from Sugartit's throat.


5

"How soon can you find out what he was killed with?" the chief of police asked.
"He was killed with a bullet, naturally," the assistant medical examiner said.
"You're not funny," the chief said. "I mean what caliber bullet."
His brogue had begun thickening and the cops who knew him best began getting nervous.
The deputy coroner snapped his bag shut with a gesture of coyness and peered at the chief through magnified eyeballs encircled by black gutta-percha.
"That can't be known until after the autopsy. The bullet will have to be removed from the corpse's brain and subjected to tests --"
The chief listened in red-faced silence.
"I don't perform the autopsy. I'm the night man. I just pass on whether they're dead. I marked this one as D.O.A. That means dead on arrival -- my arrival, not his. You know more about whether he was dead on his arrival than I do, and more about how he was killed, too."
"I asked you a civil question."
"I'm giving you a civil answer. Or, I should say, a civil service answer. The men who do the autopsy come on duty at nine o'clock. You ought to get your report by ten."
"That's all I asked you. Thanks. And damn little good that'll do me tonight. And by ten o'clock tomorrow morning the killer ought to be hell and gone to another part of the United States if he's got any sense."
"That's your affair, not mine. You can send the stiffs to the morgue when you've finished with them. I'm finished with them now. Good night, everyone."
No one answered. He left.
"I never knew why we needed a goddamned doctor to tell us whether a stiff was dead or not," the chief grumbled.
He was a big weather-beaten man dressed in a lot of gold braid. He'd come up from the ranks. Everything about him from the armful of gold hash stripes to the box-toed custommade shoes said "flatfoot." Behind his back the cops on Centre Street called him Spark Plug, after the tender-footed nag in the comic strip "Barney Google."
The group near the white man's corpse, of which he was the hub, had grown by then, to include, in addition to the principals, two deputy police commissioners, an inspector from homicide, and nameless uniformed lieutenants from adjoining precincts.
The deputy commissioners kept quiet. Only the commissioner himself had any authority over the chief, and he was at home in bed.
"This thing's hot as hell," the chief said at large. "Have we got our stories synchronized?"
Heads nodded.
"Come on then, Anderson, we'll meet the press," he said to the lieutenant in charge of the 126th Street precinct station.
They walked across the street to join a group of newsmen who were being held in leash.
"Okay, men, you can get your pictures," he said.
Flash bulbs exploded in his face. Then the photographers converged on the corpses and left him facing the reporters.
"Here it is, men. The dead man has been identified by his paper as Ulysses Galen of New York City. He lives alone in a two-room suite at Hotel Lexington. We've checked that. They think his wife is dead. He's a sales manager for the King Cola Company. We've contacted their main office in Jersey City and learned that Harlem is in his district."
His thick brogue dripped like milk and honey through the noisy night. Stylos scratched on pads. Flash bulbs went off around the corpses like an anti-aircraft barrage.
"A letter in his pocket from a Mrs. Helen Kruger, Wading River, Long Island, begins with Dear Dad. There's an unposted letter addressed to Homer Galen in the sixteen hundred block on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. That's a business district. We don't know whether Homer Galen is his son or another relation --"
"What about how he was killed?" a reporter interrupted.
"We know that he was shot in the back of the head by a Negro man named Sonny Pickens who operates a shoe shine parlor at 134th Street and Lenox Avenue. Several Negroes resented the victim drinking in a bar at 129th Street and Lenox --"