Free The Heat's On by Chester Himes

is to maintain the peace and the courts will punish the offenders.”
    “Peace at what price?” Coffin Ed put in, and Grave Digger echoed thickly:
    “You think you can have a peaceful city letting criminals run loose?”
    The assistant D.A. reddened. “That’s not the point,” he said sharply. “You’ve killed a man suspected of a minor crime, and not in self-defense.”
    Suddenly the room was filled with tension.
    “You call dope peddling a minor crime?” Grave Digger said, pushing to his feet.
    At the sound of his thick, dry voice, every eye in the room turned in his direction. The arteries in his neck became swollen from rage and veins throbbed in his temples.
    “All the crimes committed by addicts — robberies, murders, rapes… . All the fucked-up lives… . All the nice kids sent down the drain on a habit.… Twenty-one days on heroin and you’re hooked for life… . Jesus Christ, mister, that one lousy drug has murdered more people than Hitler. And you call it minor! ” His voice sounded like it was filtered through absorbent cotton.
    The assistant D.A. reddened. “He was merely a peddler,” he stated.
    “And who gets it into the victim’s blood?” Grave Digger raved. “The peddler! He sells the dirty crap. He makes the personal contact. He puts them on the habit. He’s the motherraper who gets them hooked. He looks into their faces and puts the poison in their hands. He watches them go down from sugar to shit, sees them waste away. He puts them out to stealing, killing, starts young girls to hustling — to get the money to buy the kicks. I’ll take a simple violent murderer any day.”
    “Let’s put it this way,” Coffin Ed said, trying to mollify both parties. “Everybody here knows how the big-time operators work. They buy junk abroad — mostly heroin nowadays. They get a lot of it from France — Marseille — for about five thousand dollars a kilo — two pounds and three ounces. The French don’t seem to able to stop the traffic. It comes to New York and the wholesalers pay from fifteen thousand dollars to twenty thousand dollars a kilo for it. The U.S. federal agents don’t seem to be able to catch them either. So the wholesalers dilute the stuff, which is about eighty percent pure to begin with — they add enough sugar of milk or quinine to get it down to two percent pure. Just plain shit. And this is the stuff the peddler sells. It grosses a half million dollars a kilo. All of you know that. But who’s stopping it? All Digger and me can do is try to catch the peddlers in our precinct. So one gets hurt—”
    “Killed,” the assistant M.E. corrected.
    “By accident,” Coffin Ed amended. “If that is what killed him. In all that excitement up there last night he might have been trampled to death for all we know.”
    The commissioner looked up. “What excitement?”
    “The firemen were trying to detain a firebug who got away.”
    “Oh, that.” His glance flicked from Lieutenant Anderson to the red-faced firemen.
    “We are going to have these detectives indicted,” the assistant D.A. stated. “There has been too much police brutality in Harlem. The public is indignant.”
    The commissioner pressed the tips of his fingers together and leaned back in his chair.
    “Give us time to make a more thorough investigation,” he said. The assistant D.A. was reluctant. “What more investigation is needed? They have admitted beating the deceased.”
    The commissioner passed over him. “In the meantime, detectives Jones and Johnson, you are suspended from the force until further notice. Captain B rice,” he added, turning his head slightly, “have them turn in their shields and strike their names from the roll.”
    Grave Digger’s swollen face turned gray around the mouth and the grafted skin on Coffin Ed’s face twitched like a tic.
    “And that’s that,” Grave Digger said to their friend, Lieutenant Anderson, as they stood outside in the glaring hot sunshine. “For a