THEY HAD THE ROOF FIGURED. They were waiting. Lonnie Dotts died with his arms thrown out as in supplication, a black minor christ nailed to a rusty television antenna with .45-caliber spikes. Half of Preston Peerce’s head vanished in that red cloud of the explosion that shattered him. Beyman Newfield was cut through with a line of perforation that looked like a mistake by a giant machine turning out paper people on huge rolls. Two sentries who had tried to prevent this lay lifeless in the street below. But Ben Buford lived. So did John Shaft.
Shaft guessed they had exactly three minutes when the shooting stopped, the footsteps echoed up and then down the stairs. Three minutes for the nearest radio car to get to the building and begin sealing it off. Three minutes to run.
He crawled quickly out from under the swaybacked bed, slithering across the gritty linoleum floor, pulling Buford after him. A spring caught at his suit, near the left shoulder. He swore, jerked hard and tore loose, ripping the fabric. In five seconds, he was out, dragging Buford out, standing up, jerking Buford to his feet by the lapels of the fancy suit. The woman sitting on the bed seemed dazed. She was whimpering in fright and confusion, near hysteria and about to let her mind leap over the edge into a howling abyss of madness. She had been half torn from the stupor of sleep by a gun battle in the hallways of her home. Two men had kicked their way into her apartment. One man had. One was a body. She couldn’t even scream, she was too frightened. They were black. And the man had said to just sit and be quiet and it would be all right. They crawled under her bed. The man stuffed the body under her bed and got under there with it. The shooting, all the shooting, it stopped and somebody ran up the stairs and back down again. Swearing. Now they were crawling out from under her bed. It never happened. She was in that bed, sleeping, having the worst nightmare of her life. It never happened.
“Come on, goddamnit,” Shaft said, jerking Buford to his feet, slapping the thin, slack-jawed face lightly with his left hand, trying to bring him around. “Wake up, Ben. We got to run.”
Buford came around. He started to struggle as his eyes bulged open and rolled. Shaft held his arms.
“Stop that shit,” he said. “You’re all right. The party’s over. We got to run.”
Buford’s anger settled into focus. He oozed hatred. That took twenty seconds.
“No time to argue,” Shaft said. “I just saved your fucking life. They’re gone. Now we got to run. You going to run with me or do I carry you? You got any mother wit, use it, man.”
He was poised to clip Buford again. But Buford heard something in the silence that had returned to the building, something in Shaft’s urgency, that pressed harder than his distrust. He nodded. Shaft plunged his left hand into his pocket, came out with a small wad of bills. He dropped them into the woman’s lap.
“Try to forget you saw us,” he said. She would want to very much. She never would.
One minute. Move. Run. If they were smart enough to be waiting out there, it was over. If they weren’t, it was the only way. He couldn’t let the cops have Buford. Shaft spun around from the dazed woman, who was looking down now at the crumpled pile of money in her lap, green against the thin pink fabric of her nightgown. He couldn’t worry how Buford followed him now. It had to be now. It was years ago and they were running. They were together, but everybody was on his own. The blue was coming, coming with a scream of sirens and a flash of red to match the blood that might still be spilled. His blood. Buford’s blood. Any black blood. Run, goddamnit, run!
Shaft missed about eight of the stairs going down, kicked a corpse stretched out along the railing.
“Watch it there!” he hissed at Buford, skipping the body, barely slowing. He saved those seconds for the doorway. Shaft stopped. The remaining glass was a handful of silvery shards on the floor of the small vestibule. Ragged holes pockmarked the frame. He stopped and looked out. Buford was right behind him, touching him, looking also. The street was empty. But lights were blinking on in the rooms of the tenements across the street. In another minute, heads would come poking out those windows to see what had happened. The streets would fill. The law would be there.
“I’m going out there so goddamned fast nothing can get me,” he whispered. “Stay with me.”
One great leap. He landed running at the bottom of the snaggle-face concrete steps. Running and crouched. He hoped to hell Buford was in shape, hadn’t been standing up to throw so many words that he had forgotten how to run. He landed and was away in a blur of motion. Now nobody could catch him. Nobody could hurt him. This was his way in the world. These dark streets were his place. An exultation of power fed his body from the pit of his stomach. He missed that. He ran, flew. They would find the alley, the doorway, the hidden place in the moment that they needed it. They might be cornered in the rooms of Harlem, but not in the streets. This was really home. His three minutes were up.
Shaft heard the sirens. They were all behind him. Then he saw the pulsating glow of the police car roof flasher lighting the intersection ahead with the throb of its stained-glass brain. The car was running without the siren. He sprang into a doorway, flattened against the shadows and felt more than saw Buford leap in with him. They were breathing hard, sucking wind. The car swept past. They were out of the doorway and running again, close to the building, to avoid so much as a glimpse in the patrol’s rearview mirror. Eyes always looking ahead for the chance cop, the uncommitted squad car. They were near Broadway when Shaft finally flashed on to where they were going and what he was going to do. He pulled up to a walk, noted with satisfaction that Buford was breathing harder than he was and that half-moons of sweat darkened his jacket under the arms.
“Hey, man,” he gasped. “You got any subway tokens?”
Buford began fishing in his pocket. Shock and action had worn him down to a simple reflex without thought. Shaft smiled. Smiled in the chest-heaving, heart-pounding, brain-banging movement in the false dawn of a Harlem street light and acknowledged, to himself and for himself, his capacity to survive. Look at Buford. He talked about this but he wasn’t prepared for it. He was honking so hard his hand was shaking, spilling dimes into the street. Shaft reached out, held Buford’s fistful of change steady and sorted it out with a finger until he found tiny tokens hiding under pennies. There’d be no attendant at the turnstile he wanted to use.
“I’m going to take you to meet some friends of mine,” he told Bufford. “You make one fucking remark about any Tom shit to these people and I’ll break both your legs.”
Then he turned and led the way toward Broadway and the Seventh Avenue IRT. He walked. It was maybe 4:45 or 5 o’clock. Anybody saw them now would figure they were just a couple of studs coming back from a party or a couple of Toms going off to sweep floors. If anybody handed him a broom right then, he thought, he’d climb up on the small end of it and sleep twenty-four hours.
Shaft’s face was gentle, open, snuggled against the pillow. It was more round than oval, more flat and concave than sculptured and convex. The eyes and nose seemed to have been cut into it, rather than built upon it. It was almost a Polynesian carved face, cut into stained balsa or some dark wood. The lips were full, but they lay flat against his teeth. A mask, but not a mask. Even in sleep, there was life in it. Life and strength. It was framed in a modified Afro haircut, notched with unexpectedly delicate and tightly set ears.
The large, wide-set eyes of that face blinked open about noon. It had been an intense deep sleep, taken from the morning hours by necessity as much as desire. He felt bathed in warmth and silence, secure and safe. White people woke up with that feeling almost every day. He had known it only since the discovery of his own power and strength. He could still savor and count its worth as a grubbing trash-picker can count the treasures of unexpected discovery in the unlikely heap. Silence. He could hear Ben Buford’s slow, easy breathing from the narrow rumple of sheets and pillows across the room and see almost a third of a long, angular leg protruding out from under the sheet and light blanket at the bottom of the child’s bed.
Shaft got out of bed without a sound, reached for his pants hung over the back of the chair and pulled them on with the slight clink of keys and change, not enough to awaken Buford. Let the mother sleep for a while. Shaft padded out of the room on bare feet, feeling and enjoying the cleanness of the tiles. He promised himself he would clean up his apartment when he got back to it, to set up a system that would make his floors feel the same way. It was good. The chicks who got out of his bed must feel like they were walking through the Sahara with all the goddamned grit and soot that he forgot to brush away or never had time to worry about. It was nice to feel a floor like this.
The bathroom down the hall was spotless, too. He checked out the bright children’s towels hanging on the racks as he stood urinating, digging the yellow plastic duck on the side of the tub. He could remember somebody soaping, rinsing and drying him off as a kid. Who the hell was that among all the people the Welfare Department had shuffled him to as a foster child? Mrs. Iggleston? Mrs. Johnson? No. He flicked the handle of the toilet. Even that was gleaming, polished. Mrs. Underwood! She was the one. Nice old bitch, drank too much when the check came, but she spent at least part of it on soap and a kettle to heat the water. The rest of them? Fuck the rest of them, he thought, looking at his face in the mirror, twisting the taps together. He wanted to brush his teeth. He’d use one of the kids’ half-size brushes in the rack. The kid would never know. He felt a little guilty. He also felt a twinge of concern. All the married people he knew said that the only thing you got out of the first ten years of kids was a variety of diseases they brought into the house. Which kid had the cold? Fuck it. He picked the least frazzled of the brushes, the bright red plastic one, and brushed while he traced the road-map red that patterned his eyes. Any sleep was enough sleep, but he wished he had been able to go longer. He hoped the kid didn’t have anything serious. Could you catch tooth decay from somebody? No, every time he went tongue-diving with a fox it would mean . . . hell, he wouldn’t have a tooth left. Fuck it. Anybody who had a house this clean wouldn’t have a kid with a lot of diseases anyhow. He spat out the Crest. That was awful-tasting shit, but there was something in it that was good for you. He’d ask Helen, kind of casual, how the kids had been lately. He put the toothbrush back in the rack, sloshed water into his face from the cups of his broad, meaty hands. He would borrow Marvin’s razor later.
Shaft padded out of the bathroom, poked a head into the bedroom to note that Ben was still out and snoring lightly. He pulled the door almost shut. He wasn’t sure he liked Buford much anymore or that there was anything there to like or dislike. You either joined him or fought him. Who liked Lenin? Probably nobody but his mother. Shaft turned and headed toward the dish-and-water noises from the kitchen at the end of the long, carpeted hallway.
“Hey, baby,” he said to the young woman at the sink. “You got any coffee in this joint?”
Helen Green turned, smiling. She nodded toward the stove.
“It’ll be done dripping in a minute. I heard you in the bathroom. Did you get enough sleep?”
“Enough,” he said, yawning and stretching his arms up and almost touching the ceiling of the apartment’s roomy combination of a place to cook it and a place to eat it. All the muscles of his torso rippled upward and the highest of the bullet scars peeked over the top of his belt like a lost and wandering navel.
“You shouldn’t do that to a grown woman this early in the day,” she said, walking over to the stove with a brown pottery mug, then juggling the hot Chemex filter in two fingers while she poured his coffee with the other hand. He broke the stretch with a laugh.
“Shit,” he said, “all I have to do is look at you wrong and Marvin going to fix up my tax return so good I’ll never see the outside of Danbury jail.”
Shaft sat on the edge of one of the tube-steel chairs, his elbows on the plastic surface of the table, counting the equipment of normalcy in the kitchen. He did it every time he came here. The bright blue canisters on the shelf beneath the cupboards, the cooking timer beside them, the glass and plastic blender plugged into the socket beside the toaster, the swing-out can opener attached to the cupboard beside the window over the sink, the chalked messages on the blackboard beside the door to the hallway. There was a place for everything in his need to see and be a part of this middle-class scene of domesticity. And everything was in its place.
“You got a new frying pan.”
“Green stamps.”
“Green stamps?”
“From the grocery store. You paste them in a little book and then turn them in for frying pans, bathroom scales and things like that.”
“Oh, yeah. That what they teach you up at Vassar?”
“What’s that?” She sat down with her own cup, looking genuinely puzzled.
“They teach you how to lick all them itty-bitty little stamps and paste them in a book?”
“How would you like a hot cup of coffee over the head?”
He laughed. She picked up a pencil from the table and began to make notes on a small pad in housewife’s shorthand.
Cof. Veg. Pap tls. Iv dish.
Shaft chewed on the blunt edge of the coffee mug and watched her make out the shopping list. She was the least black Negro he knew, possibly the most attractive, possibly the most feminine and womanly as well. Marvin Green was a fortunate man to have her as a wife and the mother of his children. He, John Shaft, was equally fortunate to have them both as friends and the caretakers of the one sanctuary to which he might retreat from the churning, snarling city. He couldn’t really stand it for any length of time. The whole domestic scene was a huge pain in the ass, an irritant that grated against everything he felt about conformity and isolation of both spirit and flesh in the soft death of the suburbs. But he also needed occasional draughts of the warmth and viability of it, the continuing stability of its values, however boring. It was the underside of the world, the antithesis and the opposite. It had been the one place to run when there was no place else to go with Ben Buford. Helen paused in mid-vegetable, turned from the shopping list to look up at him seriously and hesitantly.
“There’s been a lot of talk about it on the radio,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Five men were killed. I think they said three on the roof and two in the street.”
He had figured it would be something like that, but the vital statistics of it shook him.
“I wish it had been more,” he said.
Helen Greens eyes widened, her mouth turned down with dismay and shock. Shaft could be brutal and violent; that was his world. But he was not totally brutal and violent a person. Not to her.
“Yeah,” he said, getting up and moving toward the stove for more coffee. “Five of their people for five of ours. Maybe something like that.”
She had turned to look at him, twisting around in the dinette chair, not quite believing that she was listening to a man in her kitchen wish for five violent deaths.
“Well, shit, Helen, if we’re going to fight a revolution, if we’re going to start waving guns around like that, why in the name of hell doesn’t somebody learn how to use the damn things? Nowhere in the world should five men die without taking five with them if that’s what it’s going to be.”
“Johnny, are you all right?”
“Hell, no, I’m not all right. And neither is anything else in this fucked-up world.”
He wished he could tell her how grateful he was that there had been a place where he could run from it. From everything else in the fucked-up world, to the calm condition of her home, her kitchen. For some reason, he couldn’t do that. The words stuck in his throat and even the hot strong coffee he gulped was no help in dissolving them. He was even avoiding the concerned and sympathetic hazel eyes with which she followed him across the black and white tile floor. He’d better go get Buford up. He reached for another mug out of the cupboard and poured coffee into it.
“John, who were they trying to kill? You or him?”
Shaft wished he knew. The six-and-a-halffoot egomaniac bent and folded into a five-foot child’s bed down the hallway of this middle-class apartment would awaken with righteous certainty that he alone was the target, the total enemy, the lobo messiah. That was too simple. Shaft was glad she had asked; it reminded him to keep thinking while she wrapped him in the security blanket of the home.
Shaft walked back to the stove with the mugs and poured Ben Buford’s coffee back into the pot. He wanted to make a couple of calls before he renewed the confrontation with Ben. Helen had put the essential question to him. Buford’s answer to it wasn’t going to be good enough.
“What time do the kids get home?” he asked.
“About three-thirty. They want to see you. They were tickled you and Buford were sleeping in their beds. Papa Bear and Angry Bear.”
“Hey, good! What about Marvin?”
“Maybe five-thirty. He’ll call and let me know. Maybe a little earlier because you’re here.”
“Tell him not to change his routine.”
She frowned again.
“Cool,” Shaft said, putting the extra cup in the sink and walking over to touch her shoulder. “Nobody’s coming in here to shoot anybody. I meant he shouldn’t screw up his day. We’ll be going about ten or eleven. Plenty of time to talk.”
Helen Green, who was a Negro girl two or three generations removed from the blackness of skin and soul that had brought Shaft to her kitchen in flight, raised her hand to the one on her shoulder and held it gently for a moment.
“This frightens me,” she said.
“You ain’t the only one. But nobody’s after you, maybe not even me. And nobody knows he’s here. Relax. I got to use the telephone.”
There was an extension telephone in the kitchen. Shaft guessed it would be easier on Helen to hear little or nothing of what he had to say. He filled his mug with a third cup of coffee and started for the living room to make his calls while settled in Marvin Green’s big leather chair.
“John,” she said. “John, I . . . ”
“Hmmmm?”
He paused at the entry from the kitchen into the long hallway past the bedrooms to the living room, turned and faced the questions in her eyes.
“Nothing, I guess. What do you think Ben would like for supper?”
“That mother’s so mean he don’t eat,” Shaft said. “He lives on hate.”
“What about you?”
“Steak,” he said. “Dipped in flour and fried.”
“Ugh!”
Anderozzi and the Commissioner were going back to the municipal termite nest that is the Mayor’s official residence, Gracie Mansion, when the phone buzzed in the back of the Commissioner’s limousine. There had been no sleep for either of them. Anderozzi had stretched out on the leather couch in the Commissioner’s office for about an hour, but they had continued to talk and consider the reports coming in from the various divisions involved in the investigation. The Commissioner insisted on dealing with the reporters personally in the sessions that followed. It was too wild for a lot of talking by uninformed deputies. Homicide said the area around 139th and Amsterdam had been cordoned off and shaken down, room by room, person by person. No witnesses to anything. Nobody knew anything. They heard some noise out there, that was all. Just some noise in the night. They thought it might have been backfire. The Commissioner had turned purple with fury.
“Five of their own people cut down with machine guns and it might have been backfire!” he shouted, wasting energy. Anderozzi kept his mouth shut.
The ballistics crew said all the slugs had been .45s and fired from any one of a variety of automatic weapons. They had a bushel basket of the ejected casings, painstakingly gathered from the street, the hallway of the building where Shaft had gone to see Buford and the rooftops of the tenements on each side. A pile of the slugs that had come from those casings had also been collected, dug from the tired walls of the buildings and from the flesh of five young men. The preliminary reports said merely that the bullets had come from the vast underground of weaponry. No one had expected them to say more. With calipers and microscopes and micrometers, the lab men would take the bullets along the path of record to the origin of the guns. Eventually. Weeks from now. It wouldn’t mean much of anything when they reached the destination except to say that the guns had been lost or stolen years ago and deposited against the moment of this need. What the hell was the difference? Anderozzi thought cynically as he went through the reports. A machine gun was a machine gun, a dead man was a dead man.
The Commissioner picked up the telephone when it buzzed the rasping signal of a call. The black Mercury was turning off the East Side Drive just beyond the glimmering United Nations building and Anderozzi was letting his grainy eyes rest on the reflections swirling on the East River when the Commissioner nudged him lightly with an elbow and handed over the phone.
“It’s John Shaft. Tell that sonofabitch I’m not your secretary.”
Anderozzi fought back a smile as he took the receiver and found the speak-listen control button with his thumb. The Commissioner would have misinterpreted the smile. He was weary, too. The circumstances and the city were pressing on him, but his inner smile was a signal of his own relief. As he had moved from one to another of the torn black bodies early in the torn black morning, Anderozzi had expected one of them to be John Shaft’s.
“The Police Commissioner is not my secretary,” he said into the telephone. “Uh-huh. Yes. Well, I’ll tell him that. But let’s talk about you before the FCC cancels our broadcasting license . . . ”
Anderozzi glanced at the Commissioner as he listened, then back to the cool early dusk that was settling on the streets through which their driver tooled with the careless confidence of a cop, hardly stopping for the red lights, letting the official look of the car help clear the way for them.
“No,” Anderozzi said. “We don’t. Not a thing. What about you?”
The car was coming up to the mansion now, pulling into the drive to seek a place among the other black vehicles that indicated the Mayor’s impatience with memos and telephones. A lot of his top people were there already.
“Where are you?” Anderozzi asked. “I don’t think it’s the best idea you ever had, but I’ll check.”
The car stopped. The Commissioner’s glance was a signal that the conversation had to end. They had to get inside.
“No, really, nobody is after Buford that I know of.” He listened for a moment, then put the phone back with a quiet agreement. “Okay, talk to you later.”
Anderozzi climbed out after the Commissioner.
“Shaft wants a line to the Mafia,” he said to the Commissioner’s back.
“Why?”
“He isn’t sure.”
“He’s crazy.”
“Maybe.”
“Can you give it to him?”
“No.”
“Are you going to find somebody who can?”
“The Mafia. Good Christ, what’s the Mafia got to do with this?”
“Who knows . . . for sure?”
The Commissioner was about half a foot shorter than Anderozzi and had to cock his head back and peer up as he considered the question, standing on the entrance steps of the mansion.
“This is what I’m going to tell the Mayor. One. Those five men were killed by experts. How do we know? They left no clues or casualties behind. They could have been white, they could have been black. We don’t know. I think the idiot is smart enough to accept that and use it to get off the hook. But if he presses the point, I’m going to tell him that everything points to white. Black men don’t kill that way, not when they’re killing each other. I never saw a black killing that wasn’t a crime of one passion or another. This wasn’t. This was a goddamned massacre in the closing of a trap as only a white man would do it. Second. I’ll tell him Buford was the only logical target of the assassination. Those five people were all tied to him. There was no reason to kill them except that they meant Buford. What he has then is a white attack on the most inflammatory and vital of the black militant leadership. Is he prepared for that? Is he going to tell the city that? God knows.”
The Commissioner spun around and flung himself up the steps toward the entrance, where a uniformed cop stood guard and now raised his hand in salute. Anderozzi followed, thinking about the Mafia. He remembered the confidential report that had circulated after Watts about the insurance policies on those charred slums. There was a trace of olive oil in the smoke. Nobody could tell how much. But here? What was the bridge in Shaft’s mind that went from a black nationalist gun battle to the mob?
Cars were moving out of parking spaces and the underground garages of apartments at 7:35. Good, thick darkness was settling on Riverdale with the sun disappearing behind the Palisades in Jersey across the Hudson. The cars would be carrying couples down the West Side Highway, past the glimmering reflection on the river of the Palisades Amusement Park and the Crisco sign that were New Jersey’s contribution to the river view. Riverdale was heading for the theater, some of it to catch a quick dinner first, but most to struggle with the hunt for a parking place. There were a lot of them making the trip. The intense young people who spoke of theater but went to musicals.
At 7:35 a black Cadillac limousine slipped into the Riverdale street of Marvin Green’s apartment, found a door marked Service Entrance behind a row of shrubs and paused there with the engine breathing lightly. Two figures moved out of the confusion of landscape gardening, down the walk and folded themselves into the back seat. The vehicle moved away as soon as the door clicked shut and Shaft settled back against the cushions at Ben Buford’s side, thinking that these big cars were as warm and soft as an unholstered pussy.
“Be a mighty surprised chauffeur if we got into the wrong car,” he said, nodding toward the dark-skinned uniformed driver who was pretending not to be checking them out in the rearview mirror. Buford grunted. There had been little time for them to talk in the afternoon and the nationalist leader had shown no eagerness to seek conversation. He had seemed disoriented, jarred loose from the firm foundation of his ego by the echoes of the machine-gun rattles that were now vibrating through the city.
Shaft had been through with his telephone calls and was back in the kitchen; talking with Helen Green when Buford came out of the children’s bedroom. Helen was just then suggesting that Shaft should get married and move to the suburbs; he had been suggesting in return that she take up sky diving as a hobby. He would if she would, he said, but they were both too young to die. She threw a potato at him, he caught it and they laughed, a spatter of chuckles that drowned in the first wave of Buford’s gloomy presence.
Shaft’s glance at the tall man was speculative, measuring. Helen asked, “Did you sleep all right curled up in that bed?”
“Yes,” Buford said.
“Here, have a cup of coffee.”
“I’ll get it,” Shaft said, moving to the cupboard for a cup, then to the stove. “You want milk and sugar?”
“Yes.”
Yes, please, you sonofabitch, Shaft thought. That bastard must think the world’s nothing but a bunch of white coeds, hungry for the punishment of his fire, ready to wait on him. He put the cup down at a place on the table, the coffee black.
“Milk’s in the icebox,” he said. Goddamnit, pour it in your ear for all I care, he thought.
Helen said she would get it, for Ben to sit down and wake up. Buford sat. Shaft thought he looked like a big skinny bug in a museum exhibit without his jacket on and the gold-rimmed spectacles glittering a reflection of the kitchen lights. All antenna and elbows, like a praying mantis that had been trained to wear a turtleneck. Shaft’s mind began to run away with the images. It wasn’t his kind of thinking, but he was enjoying it, pouring out a secret or maybe not-sosecret resentment on the onetime friend of the streets. Then he pulled himself up short with a question that must have come from the last shred of his conscience, poking through to his overriding sense of reality: Why did he dislike Buford now? For going his own route? For doing more than he had done or ever considered doing about the black identity they shared?
Buford may have sensed the vulnerability of Shaft’s sell-examination. He chose the moment to ask, “How many people did I lose?”
“Five,” said Shaft. The numeral scraped and grated on his throat, coming out ragged and choked. Jesus Christ, that was it. “Dotts, Peerce and Newfield on the roof. Two downstairs.” The big hard face behind the spectacles was blank with the pain of it, then turned down to the coffee. That was it. They were Buford’s people, not his. Shaft thought that if he had been anybody else but the thing he had become, he would walk across the kitchen, put his arms around Ben Buford and weep with the man for their brothers. Instead, he offered the cold half inch of reality.
“I want you to go with me this evening, Ben, to see a man who knows some answers about how and why.”
Buford nodded and was silent, as he sat silent now in the car, scanning the river and the Jersey shoreline and the liners berthed at the piers for freight or the fat cargo of spring’s tourists. As he had been silent through the dinner with Marvin Green, his wife and children. As he might remain silent until he found the podium and the audience of his hatred for the voice of his violence.
Shaft lit another cigarette. He had bummed a pack of Salems from Helen. He dropped the match in an ashtray that was bigger than the radio in most cars and told Buford something of the story of Beatrice and how he was trying to find her. It was the first chance he’d had. But was Ben listening? He couldn’t tell. The Cadillac suddenly, quietly, pulled up in front of Knocks Persons’ castle. He wanted Buford to go in carrying the knowledge that this little bitch he’d never seen, not John Shaft, was the cause of six deaths so far. Maybe a lot more to come.