The Big Gold Dream
Page 13
Four bodyguards took seats about the lobby, one of them in the chair beside Dummy. He leaned over and whispered through his cupped hand, “Don’t dig your grave, stoolie.”
Dummy got up and moved to another chair. He knew the setup, and he was not interfering. Upstairs in the two-room suite, the office staff would set up four adding machines and an electric addressograph. There were eight pickup men, who collected the play slips and money from two hundred number writers. The pickup men turned in the books to the women operating the adding machines. The totals were tabulated and checked against the money turned in.
While this was taking place, two men set up the drawing machine. It was a small felt-lined keg with a sliding door, mounted on a winch and turned by a crank. Small black balls made of gutta-percha, lettered in luminous white paint from 0 to 9 - three of each number, making thirty figures altogether - were put into the keg, and the door securely closed. The crank was turned over ten times, the door was opened and a blindfolded man put his hand in the keg and drew out one ball. This was repeated three times, and the three numbers thus drawn, in the order in which they were drawn, comprised the winning number for that day.
The blindfolded man who drew the number was not a member of the staff. A different man was picked each day from among the two hundred writers or from the regular players.
When the number was drawn the play slips were rapidly checked and the winning slips put aside for the payoff.
Then the addressograph was set with the name of the house and the winning number:
Tia Juana
321
As many slips - called hit-slips - were printed as time would allow.
The winning play slips were paid off and assembled in eight collections. The equipment was repacked. The office staff, the man who drew and the eight pickup men left hurriedly. The operator and his two lieutenants remained to wait for the eight payoff men, who took the place of the pickup men. The payoff men arrived, collected the payoffs and left. The operator and his lieutenants came out last with the take.
Dummy watched them come and go. He knew that, in addition to the four bodyguards in the lobby, there were two more in the Mercury sedan outside and probably others stationed out of sight. He didn’t make any sudden moves, but he timed his movements so that he was just leaving as Slick came down and started out the door.
He slipped Slick a sheet of paper from his scratch pad on which was written: the punk is doublecrossin you.
Slick glanced at it, looked up quickly at Dummy and said, “Come on,” with the quick, sure decision of a man who knew the score. The pale yellow eyes sent a chill down Dummy’s spine. He obeyed automatically.
They went down the stairs, and Slick nodded in the direction of 154th Street. He walked a little apart from Dummy, on the right side and a little apart. The two guards in the Mercury sedan never took their eyes from them. Nothing was said.
They walked in silence to the corner, and Dummy glanced at Slick for directions. Slick bent his head in the direction of his car, parked two doors up the street.
They arrived at the Chrysler hardtop, and Slick said in a low, controlled voice, “Stand still a moment.”
Dummy had his back turned and was facing the car. He didn’t see the motion of Slick’s lips, and he had taken it for granted that Slick wanted him to get into the car. He put his hand on the door handle and he had started to open the door when suddenly he felt a hand grip his shoulder and his body spun violently around.
Up the street a motor roared, and a car sped down the incline and cut in front of the Chrysler with dragging brakes. A big scar-faced Negro in a red sport shirt and a Panama straw was out of the door and in the street with a snub-barreled .38 revolver in his hand before the car stopped skidding.
Dummy felt his guts shrink.
“I’ll handle it,” Slick said coldly to the gunman. “It’s a private matter.”
“You’re new here, son, so I’ll tell you,” the gunman said in a flat Southern voice. “There ain’t no private matter when you’re carryin’ the house money.”
Slick ignored him. “You’re a dummy, eh?” he said to Dummy.
Dummy nodded.
“You can read lips, though.”
Again Dummy nodded.
“Put your fingertips on your shoulders and your elbows out,” Slick ordered.
Dummy did as he was ordered.
Slick frisked him with quick, sure movements.
“He’s clean,” he said to the gunman.
“Watch out for him,” the gunman said, getting back into the car. “He might be a stoolie.”
Slick gave him a thin, cold smile.
Two colored men were passing on the opposite side of the street. They made as though they hadn’t seen a thing.
The front car backed up and pulled up by the corner.
Slick went around and got behind the wheel of his Chrysler and turned south on Saint Nicholas Avenue. Far down the incline of the black-topped avenue, stretching toward the east, rooftops in the Valley of Harlem could be seen.
Slick turned toward Dummy as they purred past the basement entrance to Bucky’s Cabaret and asked, “What makes you think so?”
Dummy made motions like writing and pointed toward his pocket. He wasn’t taking any chances. Slick smiled thinly and nodded. Dummy fished out his stub of pencil and dirty scratch pad.
He wrote: he got the mattress in his room all cutupmoney was in it, and held it up for Slick to read.
“How do you know that?” Slick asked.
i seen it Dummy wrote.
“No, I mean the money,” Slick said.
it figgersthe money was gone before the jew got there, Dummy wrote.
Slick pulled up for a red light at 145th Street. A real cool black chick in a beige blouse and aqua slacks gave him the eye. But he had business on his mind.
“How do you figure that?” he asked Dummy as he started up again.
Dummy wrote rapidly: nobody aint found it he didn get mattress from the jewmust got it afore the jew got thererufus didn get itthat for sure.
“It ain’t for sure he got it, either,” Slick said. “The bitch might have hid it somewhere else. She might still have it - how do you know?”
Dummy began grunting with excitement, no she aint got it she lookin for it.
“How do you know she’s looking for it?” Slick asked. “She’s in jail. Can you read minds?”
Dummy made sounds like a stopped-up drain. He started to write, but he didn’t have space on that sheet and tore it off. Slick reached for it, drew it from his fingers and slipped it into his side coat pocket.
Dummy wrote on the clean sheet: i seen her fore she got restedshe come see my cassielooking for rufus she sayi know better she looking for money.
Slick’s face didn’t show any signs of heightened interest, but his hands tightened on the steering wheel.
“Did she tell your woman she had hid the money in the mattress?” he asked.
she didn tell nothinbut we knew had to be sumthin sides just her furniter the way she look, Dummy wrote.
“That still don’t figure absolutely that he got it,” Slick said.
somebody got it and he the only one could of, Dummy wrote.
“Why hasn’t he cut out if he’s got it?” Slick asked. “What’s he hanging around for?”
what he got the civil war money for, Dummy countered.
Slick laughed. “You’re doing the talking,” he said.
he trying to con you to thinkin he aint got it, Dummy wrote.
Slick’s face got cold and hard. “That’s easier said than done,” he concluded, reached over, tore the sheet from Dummy’s pad and put it into his pocket with the other sheet. “Now just sit here and be still,” he ordered. “I got work to do.”
They were approaching 125th Street, and Slick became alert to his surroundings. He was the payoff man for the district between 125th Street and 116th Street, bound on the west by Manhattan Avenue and on the east by Len
ox Avenue.
“And if you spot any snoopers, point them out,” he added. “If you’re a stool pigeon like they say, you ought to know them all.”
Dummy made as if he were looking somewhere else and didn’t get it.
Slick wore a money belt divided into pockets, in which he carried the payoff money, the winning slips and hit-slips. He stopped off at the numbers drops in barber shops, pool rooms, tobacco stores and shoe-shine parlors along the way, and met the roving writers in hallways and parked cars or in their flats. He kept five per cent of the payoff for his end on the small, everyday hits, but on the big hits, which he had to deliver in person to the winner, he kept ten per cent. The writers delivered the small payoffs and kept ten per cent for their end. Only the office staff, the pickup men and the guards were on salaries; the others took their commissions out of the winnings.
It was two-seventeen by the clock in the window of the credit jeweler’s on 116th Street when Slick finished his rounds. He pulled up on the opposite side of the street, a half block’s entrance from Sweet Prophet’s Temple of Wonderful Prayer, and parked. He wasn’t concerned about the woman they had beat earlier. She would be looking for a man in a black Buick sedan, the car beside which he had been standing when she first saw him. The way he thought about it, if he had to hide from all the squares he had beat, he could never show himself on the street.
Dummy saw the starker when he turned in from Seventh Avenue. He was wearing the same ensemble - beaver hat, tweed jacket, mustard-colored corduroy pants and cowboy boots.
Slick saw him, too, in the rear-view mirror.
The starker crossed the street, jaywalking through the traffic, and rounded the Chrysler to get into the front seat beside Slick. Then he saw Dummy and seemed to freeze.
“Get in the back seat,” Slick said.
He got into the back seat.
“Dummy, this is Susie,” Slick said. “Susie, this is Dummy.”
Neither moved or made a sound to acknowledge the introduction.
“We’re going uptown to my pad and have a little talk about a matter of interest to us all,” Slick said, and put the ignition key in the lock, starting the motor.
Susie took a marijuana butt from behind his ear and lit it.
Dummy sat with his hands on his knees and his head moving continuously from one side to the other.
Slick accelerated the car slowly and slid into the stream of traffic.
19
A WOMAN LET THEM in to the third-floor apartment in Roger Morris. Dummy’s hope of catching sight of his deaf porter friend in the vestibule hadn’t borne fruit. He would have signaled him a messages if no more than to say “Watch out.”
He experienced an infinite dread of going unarmed to a strange apartment with Slick and Susie. The woman did nothing to allay it.
Dummy thought that she was a very strange woman. Ordinarily she would have looked like any other sepia-colored well-kept women, of which there were millions. But her hair was dyed bright yellow and pulled so tightly in a severe bun at the nape of her neck that it stretched the skin about her eyes, making the lids slant like an Oriental’s. She wore a high-necked, tight-fitting Chinese gown of deep purple silk. She was thin, but she didn’t look anemic. Her nostrils had a pale pinched look, and the pupils of her brown eyes were so distended her eyes looked almost black. She carried her head unnaturally high, and she didn’t speak. Silently she led them down a close-smelling, almost pitch-dark hall, past several closed doors, to the front sitting room.
It was a big room with three windows overlooking Edgecombe Drive and the rocky clifflike park dropping to the flats bordering Harlem River; in the distance the streets of West Bronx could be seen, rising like a terraced landscape fashioned of bricks.
In the brighter light Dummy saw at a glance that she was a junky; that she sniffed cocaine; that she had been sniffing it for so long she didn’t know what life was without it and couldn’t live such a life for one full day. That didn’t worry him; but her silence did. That and something else about her that he couldn’t figure. She never looked directly at anyone.
“Sit down,” Slick ordered the two of them, and sprawled onto a chaise longue flanked by a glass-topped cocktail table. To the woman he said, “Fix my pipe and bring my rod.”
The woman moved, as though flowing, through another door into another room.
Susie and Dummy found chairs on opposite sides of Slick, as far apart from each other as possible. Dummy sat on the edge of his seat with his feet drawn back and his leg muscles tense, as though prepared to leap in any direction the occasion demanded. But Susie sat sprawled out in his seat - his legs extended, his cowboy boots crossed and the brim of the beaver hat pulled down over his eyes, as though to give the impression he had been there before and was not impressed.
However, it was an impressive room. The furniture didn’t match and didn’t fit, but every piece was expensive and unusual. Everything, including the curtains and drapes - with the exception of the console radio-record player-television set - had been stolen at one time or another, and Slick had bought it hot.
Dummy’s gaze roved from one piece to another. The furniture seemed to be trying to tell him something, but he didn’t know what.
No one spoke. The silence oppressed Dummy and put his nerves on a screaming edge. Susie lit a fresh stick of marijuana, took out his knife and began strapping the blade on his boot. Slick didn’t seem to be bothered at all.
The woman returned, moving so silently across the carpeted floor that no one saw her until she stood beside the cocktail table flanking Slick’s chair. She placed a round, ivory-coloured plastic tray on the glass top. The tray held a small nickel-plated alcohol lamp and a water-cooled pipe. The metal bowl rested on the alcohol lamp, and the bit was stuck into a coil of transparent tubing like the head of a sleeping snake. Nestled among the rest was a flat, vicious looking, blued-steel eleven-shot .38 caliber Colt automatic pistol.
The gazes of both Susie and Dummy focused on the pistol and didn’t leave it.
The woman took the opium pill from her pocket, kneaded it skillfully with slim, delicate fingers and shaped it into a tiny ball. She fitted the ball into the shallow cavity of the metal bowl and lighted the alcohol lamp, and at the first bubbling of the pill she picked up the bit, unfurling the tube, and placed it between Slick’s lips.
Four puffs and it was finished.
The woman cleaned up and removed the tray, leaving the pistol on the glass top. She flowed silently from the room without having once looked directly at anyone.
Slick lay back with his eyes half closed and seemed lost to the world. The silence ran on. He didn’t give the impression of having any intention of breaking it.
Dummy swallowed nervously, making a sound like a baby burping. Susie gave a violent start and jerked up the knife. Slick looked over at Dummy sleepily.
“Don’t make so much noise,” he said in a slow lazy voice.
They sat waiting. The silence got on Susie’s serves. The windows were closed against the heat, and the room was in the shade. But the air was motionless, and a haze of marijuana smoke collected about Susie’s head.
Dummy could sense the silence, although he couldn’t hear it. His eyes rolled in their sockets, and his head turned slowly from side to side as though controlled by an eccentric gear. He looked at the knife in Susie’s hand; his gaze traveled upward to Susie’s face, then turned and ran along the wall, passed over pieces of furniture and focused for a time on Slick’s face; it traveled down the length of Slick’s reclining body, then slowly returned over the same orbit.
Slick gave himself twenty minutes for the hop to settle comfortably in his head. Then he came suddenly to life.
“Now,” he said briskly, sitting up.
He picked up the automatic pistol, ejected the clip, saw that it was fully loaded, looked at the cartridge in the chamber and reinserted the clip. The safety was on; he snapped it off and laid the pistol back atop the table within easy reach.
Susie stared at it. His babyish face did not change expression. No intelligence showed in his dilated eyes.
The play took Dummy by surprise. He hadn’t expected that development. He had overplayed his hand. Now he was caught running a bluff, facing two armed men - and all he had were his fists. The fists of a prize fighter are considered lethal weapons in New York, but they won’t stand up to a gun and a knife.
His body froze and his intestines knotted into a hard lump of gristle. Except for his gaze jerking back and forth from the sheet of paper to Susie’s face, he might have been petrified. Now was the time when he needed all his wits, but his brain felt frozen, too.
“Here, rockhead, take it and read it,” Slick said to Susie. “And get your brains thawed out; you’re going to need them.”
Susie stood up slowly, stepped over to Slick and took the paper in his left hand. He looked vaguely puzzled. The dead marijuana butt was glued to his bottom lip like a shred of stained paper, and he held the open knife in his right hand like a riding crop. From a sitting position he looked bigger than he actually was; his shoulders looked a mile wide, and his legs resembled building piles.
His lips moved as his slow, drugged mind spelled out the words: the punk is doublecrossin you.
He frowned and looked down at Slick. The cold, repelling expression on Slick’s face made him blink. It was obvious that he didn’t get it. He read the line again.
“Do it mean me?” he asked incredulously.
Slick didn’t answer.
Susie’s gaze swung to Dummy. He pointed with the forefinger of the hand in which he held the note as though aiming a pistol. “He wrote it,” he said thickly.
All of a sudden he went berserk. His babyish face contorted with insensate rage. He leaped at Dummy and cut at his face with a slashing motion. It went so fast no one was prepared. The big brutal blade moved faster than sight.