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

"What was he doing at .a crummy bar up here in Harlem?"
"We haven't found that out yet. Probably just slumming. We know that the barman was cut trying to protect him from another colored assailant--"
"How did the shine assail him?"
"This is not funny, men. The first Negro attacked him with a knife -- tried to attack him; the bartender saved him. After he left the bar Pickens followed him down the street and shot him in the back."
"You expect him to shoot a white man in the front."
"Two colored detectives from the 126th Street precinct station arrived on the scene in time to arrest Pickens virtually in the act of homicide. He still had the gun in his hand," the chief continued. "They handcuffed the prisoner and were in the act of bringing him in when he was snatched by a teenage Harlem gang that calls itself Real Cool Moslems."
Laughter burst from the reporters.
"What, no Mau-Maus?"
"It's not funny, men," the chief said again. "One of them tried to throw acid in one of the detective's eyes."
The reporters were silenced.
"Another gangster threw acid in an officer's face up here about a year ago, wasn't it?" a reporter said. "He was a colored cop, too. Johnson, Coffin Ed Johnson, they called him."
"It's the same officer," Anderson said, speaking for the first time.
"He must be a magnet," the reporters said.
"He's just tough and they're scared of him," Anderson said. "You've got to be tough to be a colored cop in Harlem. Unfortunately, colored people don't respect colored cops unless they're tough."
"He shot and killed the acid thrower," the chief said.
"You mean the first one or this one?" the reporter asked.
"This one, the Moslem," Anderson said.
"During the excitement, Pickens and the others escaped into the crowd," the chief said.
He turned and pointed toward a tenement building across the street. It looked indescribably ugly in the glare of a dozen powerful spotlights. Uniformed police stood on the roof, others were coming and going through the entrance; still others stuck their heads out of front windows to shout to other cops in the street. The other front windows were jammed with colored faces, looking like clusters of strange purple fruit in the stark white light.
"You can see for yourselves we're looking for the killer," the chief said. "We're going through those buildings with a fine-toothed comb, one by one, flat by flat, room by room. We have the killer's description. He's wearing toolproof handcuffs. We should have him in custody before morning. He'll never get out of that dragnet."
"If he isn't already out," a reporter said.
"He's not out. We got here too fast for that."
The reporters then began to question him.
"Is Pickens one of the Real Cool Moslems?"
"We know he was rescued by seven of them. The eighth was killed."
"Was there any indication of robbery?"
"Not unless the victim had valuables we don't know about. His wallet, watch and rings are intact."
"Then what was the motive? A woman?"
"Well, hardly. He was an important man, well off financially. He didn't have to chase up here."
"It's been done before."
The chief spread his hands. "That's right. But in this case both Negroes who attacked him did so because they resented his presence in a colored bar. They expressed their resentment in so many words. We have colored witnesses who heard them. Both Negroes were intoxicated. The first had been drinking all evening. And Pickens had been smoking marijuana also."
"Okay, chief, it's your story," the dean of the police reporters said, calling a halt.
The chief and Anderson recrossed the street to the silent group.
"Did you get away with it?" one of the deputy commissioners asked.
"God damn it, I had to tell them something," the chief said defensively. "Did you want me to tell them that a fifteen-thousand-dollar-a-year white executive was shot to death on a Harlem street by a weedhead Negro with a blank pistol who was immediately rescued by a gang of Harlem juvenile delinquents while all we got to show for the efforts of the whole god-damned police force is a dead adolescent who's called a Real Cool Moslem?"
"Sho' 'nuff cool now," Haggerty slipped in _sotto voce_.
"You want us to become the laughing stock of the whole goddamned world," the chief continued, warming up to the subject. "You want it said the New York City police stood by helpless while a white man got himself killed in the middle of a crowded nigger street?"
"Well, didn't he?" the homicide lieutenant said.
"I wasn't accusing you," the deputy commissioner said apologetically.
"Pickens is the one it's rough on," Anderson said. "We've got him branded as a killer when we know he didn't do it."
"We don't know any such goddamned thing," the chief said, turning purple with rage. "He might have rigged the blanks with bullets. It's been done, God damn it. And even if he didn't kill him, he hadn't ought to've been chasing him with a goddamned pistol that sounded as if it was firing bullets. We haven't got anybody to work on but him and it's just his black ass."
"Somebody shot him, and it wasn't with any blank gun," the homicide lieutenant said.
"Well, God damn it, go ahead and find out who did it!" the chief roared. "You're on homicide; that's your job."
"Why not one of the Moslems," the deputy commissioner offered helpfully. "They were on the scene, and these teenage gangsters always carry guns."
There was a moment of silence while they considered this.
"What do you think, Jones?" the chief asked Grave Digger. "Do you think there was any connection between Pickens and the Moslems?"
"It's like I said before," Grave Digger said. "It didn't look to me like it. The way I figure it, those teenagers gathered around the corpse directly after the shooting, like everybody else was doing. And when Ed began shooting, they all ran together, like everybody else. I see no reason to believe that Pickens even knows them."
"That's what I gathered too," the chief said disappointedly.
"But this is Harlem," Grave Digger amended. "Nobody knows all the connections here."
"Furthermore, we don't have but one of them and that one isn't carrying a gun," Anderson said. "And you've heard Haggerty's report on the statement he took from the bartender and the manager of the Dew Drop Inn. Both Pickens and the other man resented Galen making passes at the colored women. And none of the Moslem gang were even there at the time."