Free Blind Man With a Pistol by Chester Himes

matinees when these bitches are free. I'm sure I'll score tonight." She tried to embrace him but he pushed her away roughly.
          "You better, girl," he said. "I mean business. The rent isn't paid, and I'm behind with my Caddy."
          "Ain't your own pitch paying nothing?"
          "Peanuts. It's split too mother-raping thin. And these Harlem folks ain't serious. All they want to do is boogaloo." He paused and then said reflectively, "I could make a mint if I could just get them mad."
          "Jesus, can't your apes do that? What you got them for then?"
          "No. They're useless in an operation like this," he said meditatively. "What I really need is a dead man."
     
     
    7
     
          The assistant Medical Examiner looked like a City College student in a soiled seersucker suit. His thick brown hair needed cutting and his hornrimmed glasses needed wiping. He looked as humorless as befits a man whose business is the dead.
          He straightened up from examining the body and wiped his hands on his trousers. "This was an easy one," he said, addressing himself to the sergeant from the homicide bureau. "You got the exact time of death from these local men, they saw him die. The exact cause is a cut jugular vein. Male, white and approximately thirty-five years old."
          The homicide sergeant wasn't satisfied with such a small capsule. He looked as though he was never satisfied with Medical Examiners. He was a thin, tall, angular man wearing what looked like a starched blue serge suit. He had reddish hair of the most repulsive shade, big brown freckles that looked like a bowl full of warts, and a long sharp nose that stuck out from his face like the keel of a racing yacht. His close-set, small blue eyes looked frustrated.
          "Identifying marks? Scars? Birthmarks?"
          "Hell, you saw as much as I did," the assistant M.E. said, accidentally stepping into the pool of blood. "Son of a Goddam bitch!" he cried.
          "Jesus Christ, there's not a thing on him to tell who he is," the sergeant complained. "No papers, no wallet, no laundry mark on this one garment it's wearing --"
          "How 'bout the shoes?" Coffin Ed ventured.
          "Marked shoes?"
          "Why not?"
          The assistant D.A. gave him a slight nod, whatever it meant. He was a middle-aged man with a white unhealthy look and meticulously combed graying hair. His doughy face and abrupt paunch along with his wrinkled suit and unshined shoes gave him the look of a complete failure. Gathered about him were the ambulance drivers and vacant-faced patrol-car cops as though seeking shelter of his indecision. The homicide sergeant and the assistant M.E. stood apart.
          The sergeant looked at the photographer he had brought with him. "Take off his shoes," he ordered.
          The photographer bridled. "Let Joe take 'em off," he said. "All I take is pictures."
          Joe was the detective first grade who drove for the sergeant. He was a square-built Slav with crew-cut hair that bristled like porcupine quills.
          "All right, Joe," the sergeant said.
          Wordlessly Joe knelt on the dirty pavement, unlaced the dead man's brown suede oxfords and drew them from his feet, one after another. He held them to the light and looked inside. The sergeant bent to look into them too.
          "_Bostonian_," Joe read.
          "Hell," the sergeant said disgustedly, giving Coffin Ed an appraising look. Then he turned back to the assistant M.E. with a long-suffering manner. "Can you tell me if he's had sexual intercourse -- recently, I mean?"
          The assistant M.E. looked bored with it all. "We can tell by the autopsy whether he's had sexual intercourse up to within an hour of death." Sotto voce, he added, "What a question."
          The sergeant heard him. "It's important," he said defensively. "We got to know something about this man. How the hell we going to find