“Strictly Business”
by
Chester Himes
What his real name was, no one knew or cared.
At various times, during his career of assaults, homicides, and murders, he had been booked under the names of Patterson, Hopkins, Smith, Reilly, Sanderson, and probably a dozen others.
People called him “Sure.”
He was twenty-five years old, five feet, eleven inches tall, weighed one-eighty-seven, had light straw-colored hair and wide, slightly hunched shoulders. His pale blue eyes were round and flat as poker chips, and his smooth, white face was wooden.
He wore loose fitting, double-breasted, drape model suits, and carried his gun in a shoulder sling.
His business was murder.
At that time he was working for Big Angelo Satulla, head of the numbers mob.
The way Big Angelo’s mob operated was strictly on the muscle. They took their cut in front—forty per cent gross, win, lose, or draw—and the colored fellows operated the business on what was left.
Most of the fellows in the mob were relatives of Big Angelo’s. There were about forty of them and they split a million or more a year.
Sure was there because Big Angelo didn’t trust any of his relatives around the corner. He was on a straight salary of two hundred and fifty dollars a week, and got a bonus of a grand for a job.
Business was good. He could remember when at eighteen he had worked for fifty bucks a throw, and if you got caught with the body you were just S.O.L.
He and Big Angelo were at the night drawing of the B&B house, a little before midnight, when the word came about Hot Papa Shapiro. Pipe Jimmy Sciria, the stooge Big Angelo had posted in the hotel as a bellhop to keep tabs on Hot Papa, called and said it looked as if Hot Papa was going to spill because a police escort had just pulled up to the hotel to take him down to the court house where the Grand Jury was holding night sessions during the DA’s racket-busting investigation.
Big Angelo had had the feeling all along that Hot Papa had rat in his blood, but now when he got the word that the spill was on the turn, he went green as summer salad.
He called Sure in the office and gasped, “Get out there and take that rat before he dumps. I shoulda let you done it a long time ago.”
“Sure,” Sure said, and tapped back his cater.
It was thirty minutes to the hotel where Hot Papa lived. Sure made it in twelve flat. The red was hanging over Central and a streetcar was going East. There was an eleven foot gap between it and a following truck. He pushed that long La Salle through those eleven feet at sixty-three without even grazing, burst into Cedar at eighty-five. The light at Carnegie showed red but he was still seeing green when he turned at a dragging sixty. All the way out he rode her, sitting on the radiator cap.
Pipe Jimmy was waiting at the hotel garage entrance. “I’ll take her away, Sure,” he said, crawling under the wheel.
Sure gave him a glance, turned quickly through the garage, went up back stairs three at a time. When he came out on the twelfth floor, he was sucking for breath.
He fingered the knob of room 1207. The door was locked. He rapped.
“Who is it?” came a slightly accented, shaky voice.
“Calahan!” Sure rumbled, gasped another breath and added, “From headquarters.”
“Oh!” The voice sounded relieved. “They told me you were here . . .” The lock clicked open.
Sure leaned against the door and rode it inward, kicked it shut. “Hello, Papa,” he panted. “Those stairs got me.”
Benny Hot Papa Shapiro was a big, foppish man of about thirty-five with thinning dark hair and a winged, Hollywood mustache. He had been the mouthpiece for the mob, but ever since he had seen Sure shoot Sospirato through the back, his stomach had turned sour on the job.
At sight of Sure he went putty gray and his eyes popped out like skinned bananas. “Listen—” he choked, blood spotting in his throat and neck. “For God’s sake, listen—”
“Sure,” Sure said and pulled out his gun. “What you got to say?”
“Don’t—” Hot Papa gulped, raising his hands and half ducking as a man will from a truck about to hit him. “Don’t kill me—” He had on his trousers and undershirt; the rest of his clothes lay on the bed.
“I ain’t got nothing against you,” Sure said and shot him in the belly. “It’s business with me.”A little black hole showed in Hot Papa’s undershirt where the bullet went in and his eyes began running like melting glass. He spun around slightly and hung there as if frozen.
Sure shot him in the side. He crumpled into the dresser, doubled over to the floor . . . “Don’t kill me . . .” he gasped. Sure stepped closer and shot him in the back of the head.
Then he stood there, juggling the gun, debating whether to leave it there or take it with him. His flat eyes were unsmiling and his wooden face was unchanged. He decided to take the gun with him, slipped it back into the sling and stepped quickly into the corridor, pulling the door closed behind him.
A man stuck his head out of the room next door. His mouth was propped open and his eyes were stretched. But before he could speak, Sure yelled, “Where was that shooting? You shot somebody?”
The man’s eyes blinked. “Who me? No sir! It came from, right next door!” He pointed at tho room which Sure had just left.
“Call the house detective!” Sure barked, brittle-voiced and thin-lipped, then turned as if to reenter the room. “I’ll go in and see what’s happening.”
The man stopped back into his room to make the phone call. Sure dashed for the stairway, made it before anyone else came out into the hall. He went down to the tenth floor and came out into the corridor. There was a woman waiting for the elevator and he said to her, “Are you having trouble with hot water, too?”
She gave him a quick, startled glance. “Why, er-er—”
“Mine’s cut off again,” Sure explained. “I thought maybe everybody’s was cut off.”
“Oh!” Sho smiled. “No, the water in our suite is running all right. Why don’t you put in a complaint?”
“Lady, if I had a dollar for every complaint—”
The elevator came and cut him off. He rode down to the mezzanine, got out and sauntered over to the writing desk, trying to dope an out. By then the stopper would be on the place, he knew. Calahan and the squad from headquarters would have every doorway blocked.
He sat down and pulled out a sheet of paper, began scratching words. Through the corner of his eye he could see activity breaking out in the lobby below. Uniformed police swarmed about like flies at a picnic, grabbing off guys right and left and shaking them down.
Sure propped his chin on his thumb as if thinking and looked about. There was a man a couple of desks away, otherwise the place was momentarily deserted.
Sure took out the gun, keeping his eyes on the guy at the second desk. He broke the gun, and discharged the bullets into his hand.
Then he took out his handkerchief and carefully wiped each bullet, wiped the gun inside and out, wrapped them together in a couple of sheets of writing paper and pushed them down to the bottom of the waste paper container.
Next he folded the sheet of paper on which he had been writing, held it in his hand and went downstairs. Two policemen at the foot of the stairs stopped him, shook him down. Neither of them knew him by sight. Finding him clean they thumbed him on his way.
He went over to the desk and bought a stamped envelope. He addressed it to Mr. Herbie Crump, 3723 Clark Avenue, Chicago, Ill., put the folded letter paper inside, sealed it and started casually toward the outside doorway, holding the letter in his hand.
He had almost made it when someone shouted, “That’s him! Going out the door!”
It was the guy he had told to call the house detective.
A policeman surged from behind a palm, tugging at his gun.
Sure broke through the doorway, pushing but not panicky, bumped over a little guy with a goatee and roughed aside a couple coming up the stairs. At the bottom step a drunk got in his way. He stiff-jabbed him across the sidewalk into the gutter and made the corner while the police were making up their minds about risking a shot.
A late show crowd filled the street, giving him a top. He wormed in and out, hurried but not hasty, casing the lay as he went.
The street was glass-fronted and solid as far as he could see, but he knew that as long as he stayed in the crowd and kept moving the police couldn’t shoot.
Some fellows came out of a bar and tried to stop him, forcing him to cut left, obliquely across the street through the auto traffic.
Police whistles shrilled! People shouted! A woman screamed . . .
He ran in front of a taxi, cut behind a Buick. A curse lashed at him. He jumped across in front of a streetcar, wheeled quickly to keep from being run down by a big fast moving Packard. Rubber burnt asphalt in a splitting shriek as the driver stood on his brakes. The car behind bumped into the Packard with a crash, locking bumpers. Men began to swear.
Sure stepped on the locked bumpers, jumped across, dashed down the sidewalk, cut up an alley without looking back. Sweat filmed on his forehead like a hundred degrees in the sun.
The alley stopped dead at the back of a garage. Panic went off in him like a flare. He felt cornered and stark naked without his gun. Behind him the coppers closed in with a shower of feet.
The back of an apartment loomed to his right. He hit the back steps and scuttled upward, stiff-jointed from a growing fright. His nerves began breaking through his skin like an outcropping rash and his heart did triple taps.
On the fourth floor he spied an open kitchen window, heard the thunder of following feet. He turned, dove through the window, landed in the kitchen on his hands and knees. He came up without a loss of motion and ran into the back hallway.
There was a light and the sound of voices in the front room. He ran through the short hallway, came out into the lighted room, bumped into a man who had gotten up to investigate the commotion. The man fell backwards into the lap of a woman sitting in a chair. The woman screamed.
Sure grabbed for the door, his hand full of sweat. The knob slipped in his grasp. He kept grabbing, trying to get a hold. Behind him the woman kept screaming in high, monotonous yelps. His hair stuck straight up.
He got the door open as he heard the police piling through the kitchen window, went down the stairs in a power dive. It was quiet on the side street where he came out, but before he got halfway across the police began shooting at him from the apartment window.
He ran down the opposite alley, came out beside a night club and hailed a cruising taxi.
“Union station,” he croaked, piling in.
The driver turned around and took off.
Sure settled back, fished out a cigarette.
Then he went to pieces—just like that. He began trembling all over, his knees knocked together, even his head began to jerk as if he had d.t.’s. He couldn’t get the cigarette between his lips. Mashing it, he threw it out the window.
Suddenly he began to sweat; it came off of him like showers of rain, came out of his ears, out of his mouth. All he could see was the electric chair with himself sitting in it.The cab slowed for a red light and he opened the door and jumped out. He ran down the street with the driver yelling at him, ducked up the first dark alley. Keeping to the alleys and darkest streets, running without stopping, he finally came to an abandoned coal shed in the back yard of a broken down house on 49th Street in the Negro slums.
He crawled inside, sat down in the dirt and darkness, feeling nauseated from his terror and utterly exhausted. His heart was beating like John Henry driving steel. Then he bent over and vomited.
After that his terror began passing. He got up and walked over to Central and went into a colored bar. A boy called Blue asked, “How’s business, Sure?”
He thought of the grand he had just made and got back his nerve. “Not bad, not bad attall, Blue, how’s things breaking for you?”
“They ain’t walking,” Blue said. “They ain’t walking, Sure.”
“You’ll get ’em,” Sure said, turning toward the street. “See you, Blue, I got some ends need pulling in.”
“If’n I live and nuthin’ doan happen,” Blue said.
Sure went out to Little Brother’s on 57th Street and borrowed his Studebaker. Then he drove by his downtown room on 37th Street and picked up another gun. From there he drove out to 89th where Pipe Jimmy Sciria lived.
Pipe Jimmy was getting into the La Salle. He was hopped to the gills and kept brushing imaginary specks from his clothes.
Sure got out of the Studebaker and climbed in with Pipe Jimmy. “I’m going a pieceway with you, kid,” he said.
“I’m going south,” Pipe Jimmy grinned. “Mexico. That way I stay clear.”
“I know,” Sure said.
“How’d you know?” Pipe Jimmy asked, turning to look at him.
“I’m helping you,” Sure said. They drove out the Boulevard to route 26 and followed it over to 43. “You don’t have to worry about me, Sure,” Pipe Jimmy said. “I’m your pal.”
“I ain’t,” Sure said.
About twelve miles out, Sure said, “Pull up.”
“Huh?”
“You heard me! Pull up!”
Pipe Jimmy wheeled over and dragged down. Sure drew his gun and stuck it against Pipe Jimmy’s ribs. “Get out!”
Pipe Jimmy went a sick white and his hands shook so he could not get open the door. Sure leaned over and opened it for him.
“Look, Sure, I’m your pal,” Pipe Jimmy said, standing on the pavement and licking his lips. His knees kept buckling.
“Come over on this side,” Sure said, getting out into the gully.
Pipe Jimmy came around the car, walking wobbly, stepped into the gully and backed up against the running board, “Say, you ain’t thinking about—”
Sure reached over and grabbed him by the collar, slung him into the gully.
“Nix, Sure, nix, pal . . .” Pipe Jimmy cried, rolling over and trying to crawl away.
“I ain’t got nothing against you, kid,” Sure said, shooting him in the back. “It’s business with me.”
Pipe Jimmy spun like a stick from the punch of the slug . . . “Nix, buddy . . .”
Sure shot him in the chest . . . “I’m your pal, Sure . . .” Sure stepped closer and shot him through the head.
He broke the gun and carefully wiped it with his handkerchief, inside and out. He wiped the bullets, scattered them over Pipe Jimmy’s body, tossed the gun into the brush, got back in the car and headed toward Chicago, intending to establish an alibi and double back the next week.
But a hoosier cop in Terre Haute who didn’t like his looks picked him up and ran him in. Charge of Suspicious Person.
They made him from the “wanted” circular that had just come in and sent him back to be tried for the murder of Benny “Hot Papa” Shapiro. The state produced twenty-seven witnesses who had seen him in and about the hotel the night of the murder.
But he had a defense . . . “I didn’t have nothing against the guy,” he whined by way of justification. “I liked the guy, he was a friend of mine. It was just business with me.”
Biblioklept 