“Put on some clothes, child,” Mamie said compassionately. “You’re shaking from cold.”
“I ain’t cold,” Dulcy denied. “I’m just scared to death, Aunt Mamie.”
“I am, too, child,” Mamie said. “But put on some clothes anyway, you ain’t decent.”
Dulcy got up without replying and went into the bedroom and put on a yellow flannel robe and matching mules. When she returned she picked up the glass and gulped the brandy down. She choked and sat down, gasping for breath.
Mamie dipped another lipful of snuff.
They sat silently without looking at each other.
Then Dulcy poured another drink.
“Don’t, child,” Mamie begged her. “Drinking ain’t going to help none.”
“Well, you got your lip full of snuff,” Dulcy charged.
“That ain’t the same thing,” Mamie said. “Snuff purifies the blood.”
“Alamena must have took her with her,” Dulcy said. “Spookie, I mean.”
“Didn’t Johnny say nothing at all to you?” Mamie asked. A sudden clap of thunder made her shudder and she moaned, “God above, the world’s coming to an end.”
“I don’t know what he said,” Dulcy confessed. “All I know is he came sneaking in the back door and that’s the last thing I remember.”
“Was you alone?” Mamie asked fearfully.
“Alamena was here,” Dulcy said. “She must have taken Spookie home with her.” Then suddenly she caught Mamie’s meaning. “My God, Aunt Mamie, you must think I’m a whore!” she exclaimed.
“I’m just trying to find out why he flew to Chicago all of a sudden,” Mamie said.
“To check up on me,” Dulcy said, gulping her drink defiantly. “For what else? He’s always trying to check up on me. That’s all he ever does, just check up on me.” A roll of thunder rattled the windowpanes. “My God, I can’t stand all that thunder!” she cried, jumping to her feet. “I got to go to bed.”
She grabbed the brandy bottle and glass and fled to the bedroom. Lifting the top of the combination radio and record player, she put on a record, got into the bed and pulled the covers up to her eyes.
Mamie followed after a moment and sat in the chair beside the bed.
The wailing voice of Bessie Smith began to pour into the room over the sound of the rain beating against the windowpanes:
When it rain five days an’ de skies turned dark as night
When it rain five days an’ de skies turned dark as night
Then trouble taken place in the lowland that night
“Don’t you even know why he locked you up?” Mamie asked.
Dulcy reach over and turned the player down.
“Now, what’d you say?” she asked.
“Johnny had you padlocked in this room,” Mamie said. “He phoned me from Chicago to come over and let you out. That’s how come I knew he was in Chicago.”
“That ain’t nothing strange for him,” Dulcy said. “He’s chained me to the bed.”
Mamie began to sob quietly to herself. “Child, what’s happening?” she asked. “What happened here last night to send him off like that?”
“Ain’t nothing happened no more than usual,” Dulcy said sullenly. Then after a moment she added, “You know that knife?”
“Knife? What knife?” Mamie looked blank.
“The knife what killed Val,” Dulcy whispered.
Thunder rolled and Mamie gave a start. Rain slashed at the windows.
“Chink Charlie gave me a knife just like it,” Dulcy said.
Mamie held her breath while Dulcy told her about the two knives, one of which Chink had given to her and the other he’d kept for himself. Then she sighed so profoundly with relief it sounded as though she were moaning again.
“Thank God then we know it was Chink who done it,” she said.
“That’s what I’ve been saying all along,” Dulcy said. “But ain’t nobody wanted to listen to me.”
“But you can prove it, child,” Mamie said. “All you got to do is show the police your knife and then they’ll know it was his that killed him.”
“But I ain’t got mine no more,” Dulcy said. “That’s what I’m so scared of. I always kept it hidden in my lingerie drawer and then about two weeks ago it come up missing. And I been scared to ask anybody about it.”
Mamie’s complexion turned a strange ashy gray, and her face shrank until the skin was stretched tight against the bones. Her eyes looked sick and haggard.
“It just don’t have to be Johnny what took it, does it?” she asked piteously.
“No, it don’t have to be for sure,” Dulcy said. “But there ain’t nobody else who could have took it but Alamena. I don’t know why she’d have taken it unless just to keep Johnny from finding it. Or else to have something to hold over me.”
“You has a woman to come in here to clean,” Mamie said.
“Yes, she could have taken it too,” Dulcy admitted.
“It don’t sound like Meeny,” Mamie said. “So it must have been her. You tell me who she is, child, and if she took it I’ll get it out of her.”
They looked at one another through frightened, white-circled eyes.
“We just kidding ourselves, Aunt Mamie,” Dulcy said. “Ain’t nobody took that knife but Johnny.”
Mamie looked at her and the tears rolled down her old ashy-black cheeks.
“Child, did Johnny know any reason to kill Val?” she asked.
“What reason could he have had?” Dulcy countered.
“I didn’t ask what reason he could have had,” Mamie said. “I asked what reason he might have known about.”
Dulcy slid down into the bed until only her eyes were showing above the covers, but still she couldn’t meet Mamie’s gaze. She looked away.
“He didn’t know of none,” she said. “He liked Val.”
“Tell me truth, child,” Mamie insisted.
“If he did,” Dulcy whispered. “He didn’t learn it from me.”
The record played out and Dulcy started it over again.
“Did you ask Johnny to give you ten thousand dollars to get rid of Val?” Mamie asked.
“Jesus Christ no!” Dulcy flared. “That whore’s just lying about that!”
“You’re not holding anything back on me, are you, child?” Mamie asked.
“I might ask you the same thing,” Dulcy said.
“About what, child?”
“How could Johnny have found out, if he did find out, if you didn’t tell him?”
“I didn’t tell him,” Mamie said. “And I know Big Joe didn’t tell him because he’d just found out himself and he up and died before he had a chance to tell anybody.”
“Somebody must have told him,” Dulcy said.
“Then maybe it was Chink,” Mamie said.
“It wasn’t Chink ’cause he don’t know,” Dulcy said. “All Chink knows about is the knife and he’s trying to blackmail me for ten grand. He claims if I don’t get it for him he’s going to tell Johnny.” Dulcy began laughing hysterically. “As if that’d make any difference if Johnny knows about the other.”
“Stop that laughing,” Mamie said sharply and reached over and slapped her.
“Johnny will kill him,” she added.
“I wish Johnny would,” Dulcy said viciously. “If he don’t really know about the other then that would settle everything.”
“There must be some other way,” Mamie said. “If the Lord will just show us the light. You can’t just settle everything by killing people.”
“If he just doesn’t already know,” Dulcy said.
The recording played out and she put it on again.
“For God’s sake, child, can’t you play something else,” Mamie said. “That tune gives me the willies.”
“I like it,” Dulcy said. “It’s just as blue as I feel.”
They listened to the wailing voice and the intermittent sound of thunder from without.
The afternoon wore on. Dulc
y kept on drinking, and the level of the bottle went down and down. Mamie dipped snuff. Every now and then one of them would speak and the other would answer listlessly.
No one telephoned. No one called.
Dulcy played the one recording over and over and over.
Bessie Smith sang:
Backwater blues done cause me to pack mah things an’ go
Backwater blues done cause me to pack mah things an’ go
Cause mah house fell down an’ I cain’ live there no mo’
“Jesus Christ, I wish he’d come on home and kill me and get it over with if that’s what he wants to do!” Dulcy cried.
The front door was unlocked and Johnny came into the flat. He walked into the bedroom wearing the same green silk suit and rose crepe shirt he’d worn to the club the night before, but now it was wrinkled and soiled. His .38 caliber automatic pistol made a lump in his right coat-pocket. His hands were empty. His eyes burned like live coals but looked tired, and the veins stood out like roots from his graying temples. The scar on his forehead was swollen but still. He needed a shave, and the gray hairs in his beard glistened whitely against his dark skin. His face was expressionless.
He grunted as his eyes took in the scene, but he didn’t speak. The two women watched him with fear-stricken eyes, unmoving, as he crossed the room and turned off the record player, then parted the drapes and raised the window. The storm had stopped, and the afternoon sun was reflected from the windows across the airwell.
Finally he came around the bed, kissed Mamie on the forehead and said, “Thanks, Aunt Mamie, you can go home now.” His voice was expressionless.
Mamie didn’t move. Her old, bluish-tinted eyes remained terror-stricken as they searched his face, but it revealed nothing.
“No,” she said. “Let’s talk it over now, while I’m here.”
“Talk what over?” he said.
She stared at him.
Dulcy said defiantly, “Ain’t you going to kiss me?”
Johnny looked at her as though studying her under a microscope. “Let’s wait until you get sober,” he said in his toneless voice.
“Don’t do nothing, Johnny, I beg you on bending knees,” Mamie said.
“Do what?” Johnny said, without taking his gaze from Dulcy.
“For God’s sake, don’t look at me as though I crucified Christ,” Dulcy whimpered. “Go ahead and do whatever you want to do, just quit looking at me.”
“I don’t want you to say I took advantage of you while you were drunk,” he said. “Let’s wait until you get sober.”
“Son, listen to me—” Mamie began, but Johnny cut her off. “All I want to do is sleep,” he said. “How long do you think I can go without sleeping?”
He took the pistol from his pocket, put it beneath his pillow and began stripping off his clothes before Mamie had got up from the chair.
“Leave these in the kitchen as you go out,” he said, giving her the near-empty brandy bottle and glass.
She took them away without further comment. He piled his clothes on the chair she’d vacated. His heavy brown muscles were tattoed with scars. When he’d stripped naked he set the radio alarm for ten o’clock, rolled Dulcy over and got into bed beside her. She tried to caress him but he pushed her away.
“There’s ten G’s in C-notes in my inside coat pocket,” he said. “If that’s what you want, just don’t be here when I wake up.”
He was asleep before Mamie left the house.
19
WHEN CHINK ENTERED the flat where he roomed, the telephone was ringing. He was grimy with dirt, unshaven, and his beige summer suit showed that he’d slept in it. His yellow skin looked like a greasy paste lined with wrinkles where the witches had ridden him in his sleep. There were big black half moons beneath his beaten muddy eyes.
His lawyer had taken all the money he’d gotten from Dulcy to get him out on bail again. He felt like a whipped cur, chagrined, deflated and humiliated. Now that he was out, he wasn’t sure whether it wouldn’t have been better for him to have stayed in jail. If the cops hadn’t picked up Johnny he’d have to keep on the run, but no matter how much he ran there was no place in Harlem where he could hide. Everybody would be against him when they found out he’d turned rat.
“It’s for you, Chink,” the landlady called to him.
He went into the bedroom where she kept her telephone, with a padlock on the dial.
“Hello,” he said in a mean voice and gave his landlady a mean look for lingering in the room.
She went out and closed the door.
“It’s me, Dulcy,” the voice from the telephone said.
“Oh!” he said and his hands began to shake.
“I’ve got the money,” she said.
“What!” He looked as though someone had stuck a gun in his belly and asked him if he wanted to bet it wasn’t loaded. “Ain’t he been arrested?” he asked involuntarily before he could catch himself.
“Arrested?” Her voice sounded suddenly suspicious. “Why the hell should he be arrested? Unless you’ve ratted about the knife.”
“You know damn well I ain’t ratted,” he declared. “You think I’m going to blow away ten grand?” Thinking fast, he added, “It’s just I ain’t seen him around all day.”
“He’s gone to Chicago to check up on me and Val,” she said.
“Then how’d you get the ten grand?” he wanted to know.
“That’s none of your business,” she said.
He suspected a trap, but the thought of getting ten thousand dollars filled him with a reckless greed. He had to hold himself in. He felt as though he were going to explode with exultation. All his life he’d wanted to be a big shot, and now was his chance if he played his cards right.
“Okay,” he said. “I don’t give a damn how you got it, whether you stole it or cut his throat for it, just so long as you’ve got it.”
“I’ve got it,” she said. “But you’ll have to bring me your knife before I’ll give it to you.”
“What the hell do you think I am?” he said. “You bring me the money here and we’ll talk about the knife.”
“No, you’ve got to come here to the house and get the money and bring me the knife,” she said.
“I ain’t that crazy, baby,” he said. “It ain’t that I’m scared of Johnny, but I don’t have to take no rape-fiend chance like that. It’s your little tail that’s in the vise, and you’re goin’ to have to pay to get it out.”
“Listen, honey, there ain’t no chance in it,” she said. “He can’t get back before tomorrow night because it’s going to take him all day tomorrow to find out what he’s looking for, and when he gets back I got to be gone myself.”
“I don’t dig you,” Chink said.
“You ain’t so smart then, honey,” she said. “What he’s going to find out is what caused Val to wind up dead.”
Suddenly Chink began to see the light. “Then it was you—”
She cut him off. “What difference does it make now? I got to be gone when he gets back, and that’s for sure. I just want to leave him a souvenir.”
An expression of triumph lit Chink’s face. “You mean you want me, there in his own house?”
“In his own bed,” she said. “The mother-raper always suspected me of cheating on him when I wasn’t. Now I’m going to fix him.”
Chink gave a low vicious laugh. “You and me, baby, we’re going to fix him together.”
“Well, hurry up then,” she said.
“Give me half an hour,” he said.
She had unhooked the extension in the bedroom and was talking from the extension in the kitchen. When she hung up she said to herself, “You asked for it.”
Dulcy was watching from the peephole and opened the door before he rang. She wore her robe with nothing underneath.
“Come on in, honey,” she said. “The place is ours.”
“I knew I’d get you,” he said, making a grab at her, but she slipped neatly out of his arms and sa
id, “All right then, don’t make me wait.”
He looked into the kitchen.
“If you’re scared, search the house.” she said.
“Who’s scared?” he said belligerently.
The bedroom which Val had used was directly across from the kitchen and the master bedroom beyond the bathroom, adjoining the sitting room.
She started to lead Chink into Val’s room, but he went up to the front and looked into the sitting room, then he hesitated before the door to the master bedroom. Dulcy had padlocked it with the heavy Yale lock Johnny had used to lock her in.
“What’s in there?” Chink asked.
“That was Val’s room,” Dulcy said.
“What’s it doing locked?” he wanted to know.
“The police locked it,” she said. “If you want it open, go ahead and break down the door.”
He laughed, then looked into the bathroom. The water was running in the tub.
“I’m going to take a bath first,” she said. “Do you mind?”
He kept on laughing to himself with a crazy sort of exultation.
“You’re a real bitch,” he said, taking her by the arms and pushing her into Val’s bedroom and back across the bed. “I knew you were a bitch, but I didn’t know how much bitch you really are.”
He began kissing her.
“Let me take a bath first,” she said. “I stink.”
He laughed jubilantly, as though laughing to himself at his own private joke.
“A real solid-gold bitch,” he said as though talking to himself. Then suddenly he sat up straight. “Where’s the money?”
“Where’s the knife?” she countered.
He took it from his pocket and held it in his hand.
She pointed to an envelope on the dressing table.
He picked it up, opened it with one hand while holding onto the knife with the other and shook hundred dollar bills onto the bedspread. She eased the knife from his hand and slipped it into the pocket of her robe, but he didn’t notice. He was rooting his face in the money like a hog in swill.
The Crazy Kill Page 15