The Big Gold Dream

by Chester Himes

  “Well, that much He sure has done,” Alberta admitted glumly.

  “Do the police know about the money you had hidden?” Sweet Prophet asked her, his thoughts taking another tack.

  “I didn’t tell them,” she said. “I wanted to ask you first whether I ought to.”

  “No, Sister Wright. If you are innocent, don’t tell them about the money,” he advised. “If they learn about the money, they will believe for sure that you are guilty.”

  “But what am I going to do, Sweet Prophet?”

  “Are you dead sure you left the money in your mattress?” he asked.

  “As sure as I’m sure that I’m setting here and you is setting there,” she said.

  “Did anyone see you when you hid it?”

  “Not unless they got eyes that can see through walls,” she contended. “The door was locked and the shades were drawn, and I had put Sugar out of the house for the night.”

  “How did you know he didn’t go back and steal it while you were in your religious trance?” he asked.

  “He wouldn’t have stole all of it,” she declared. “I know my Sugar. He would have been too scared of me to steal all of it. That’s why I love him. If I got to work to support him, the least he can do is be scared of me. Besides which, why did Rufus and the Jew-man steal my furniture if they weren’t looking for the money? I got sense enough to know my furniture weren’t worth nothing to nobody but me.”

  “How would your estranged husband and the Judaist know about the money if you haven’t told anybody, Sister Wright?”

  “I don’t know, Sweet Prophet. You is the only one I have told, and that’s the truth,” she said.

  “Somebody knew you had it,” he persisted.

  “I don’t know who it could have been,” she maintained.

  “The man who delivered it knew it,” he pointed out.

  “But there were three different payoff men, one from each of the houses,” she argued.

  “One of them must have known that you hit in the two other houses,” he stated.

  “He didn’t find it out from me,” she said. “I didn’t tell nobody.”

  “They delivered the money to your home?” he asked.

  “Yes, Sweet Prophet, they sent it as soon as the drawings were over.”

  “But not at the same time?”

  “No, Sweet Prophet. The Dollar house sent theirs first. They were drawing in Harlem on Saturday and didn’t have far to come. A man called Buddy brought it. Then the Monte Carlo house sent theirs next. They were drawing in the Bronx and had farther to come. A man called Bunch Boy brought theirs. And the Tia Juana house sent theirs last because they were drawing away over in Brooklyn. They got a new man called Slick Jenkins who brought theirs.”

  “And this Slick Jenkins was the last one to come?” Sweet Prophet asked.

  “Yes, Sweet Prophet, but he didn’t know I had hit in the other two houses,” Alberta said.

  “It stands to reason that he found it out in some way, came back and stole your money, child,” Sweet Prophet declared.

  “I don’t see how he could have found out,” Alberta contradicted. “He didn’t see the other money because I hid it as soon as I got it, and I didn’t tell him nothing.”

  “You must have given yourself away in some manner,” Sweet Prophet persisted. “If this Slick Jenkins is accustomed to paying off big hits, then he is accustomed to the winners hiding their money, and he would know just where to look. You probably left your mattress uncovered when you hid the other money.”

  “That’s just it. Sweet Prophet, I didn’t hide the money in my mattress at first. I cleaned out a lard can and put the money in that and hid it in the refrigerator. I didn’t put it in the mattress until after Sugar had come home and I had put him out. I got to thinking it would be safer if I slept on it; but there weren’t nobody around when I hid it, and it was still there when I got up yesterday morning because I took out the five hundred dollars to pay for my baptism, and it was there then.”

  “Of course, child,” Sweet Prophet said. “Slick didn’t have a chance to steal it until after you had left for the baptism.”

  “But what about Rufus and the Jew-man stealing my furniture?” she argued stubbornly. “What did they do that for if Slick had already stole my money.”

  “Just think about one thing at the time,” Sweet Prophet said angrily.

  “I’m thinking about it,” she muttered. “And it don’t seem right. He’d be scared to steal the money. The houses wouldn’t have no payoff man who stole back the hits; they’d kill him.”

  “You said he was a new man.”

  “He’s just new in Harlem. He was doing the same thing for a house in Chicago before he came here, and he’d know better,” she contended.

  Sweet Prophet lost patience. “Can’t you get it through your thick head that he stole your money, woman?” he said angrily. “There is no other way it could have happened.”

  “If you say he stole it, he stole it,” Alberta said, quailing.

  “You go to him and tell him to give you your money back,” Sweet Prophet commanded her. “You tell him that I said so. Tell him that I said I will call down the wrath of heaven on his head if he doesn’t give you back your money. Do you know where he lives?”

  “Yes, Sweet Prophet, he lives at Five Fifty-five.”

  “Then you go up there and get your money back,” he concluded.

  “Yes, Sweet Prophet,” she said docilely.

  21

  “WE SHOULD HAVE THOUGHT of that before,” Grave Digger said.

  “It was the Jew who threw us,” Coffin Ed reflected. “Taking that furniture apart.”

  “He’s still throwing us,” Grave Digger admitted. “But first things first.”

  “Let’s go find her then and lock her up again,” Coffin Ed suggested.

  “And fast, before somebody gets hurt,” Grave Digger said.

  Fifteen minutes after Alberta had left Sweet Prophet, the detectives’ small battered black sedan pulled up before the entrance.

  Sweet Prophet was still sitting behind his desk. He still looked like the rising sun. But the lines of weariness on his pop-eyed countenance had been replaced with a look of fury. He was drinking ice-cold lemonade from a frosted silver pitcher in a cut champagne glass, but the way he gulped it, it didn’t seem cold enough to satisfy him.

  He greeted the detectives irritably. “It took you long enough to get here.”

  “How did you know we were coming?” Coffin Ed demanded.

  Sweet Prophet wiped his face with his yellow silk handkerchief. “I telephoned for you,” he said.

  “We didn’t get your call, but here we are,” Grave Digger said. “What’s the beef?”

  “My secretary was swindled out of three thousand dollars this morning by a confidence man, right outside of my door, and he hasn’t been caught.”

  The detectives stood in front of his desk with their hats pushed back on their heads. They stared down at him.

  Another woman - the gullible secretary - had been added to the scene since Alberta’s departure.

  “And I was just trying to help him,” she said.

  Grave Digger addressed Sweet Prophet, ignoring her. “You reported it, didn’t you? This morning, I mean.”

  “I did,” the secretary said.

  “She reported it,” Sweet Prophet hastened to sustain. “She went to the police right after it happened, but I have just now found out about it.”

  “Then you have done all you can do,” Grave Digger said unsympathetically. “We’re after another matter. Why did you go Alberta Wright’s bail?”

  “That woman! She’s the plague of my life!” Sweet Prophet exclaimed in exasperation. “I did not go her bail. I would not have gone her bail. I do not know how she got out of jail. She thinks I went her bail, and I couldn’t very well disillusion her. But whoever did go her bail did not do me any favor.”

  The detectives tensed. Coffin Ed’s acid-burned face became g
rimmer, and a vein began throbbing in Grave Digger’s temple. Before it had been necessary to find her; now it was urgent.

  “That makes it a horse of another color,” Grave Digger said. “You know she’s been robbed?”

  “Yes, I know all about it,” Sweet Prophet admitted. “She came here straight from jail and told me everything.”

  “She told you that she hit the numbers for thirty-six thousand dollars.”

  “Yes, and you can take it from me that she is as innocent of those killings as I am,” Sweet Prophet said.

  “Anybody would be innocent to you with that much money,” Coffin Ed remarked.

  “That’s for later,” Grave Digger said roughly. “Where is she now?”

  “My God, how do I know?” Sweet Prophet snapped. “I would imagine she’s trying to get her money back, if she’s got any sense. After what she told me about the payoff, it was as plain as the nose on your face that one of the payoff men named Slick Jenkins stole her money. I sent her to his house to get it back.”

  “You sent her,” Coffin Ed echoed.

  The detectives stared at Sweet Prophet incredulously.

  “You mean to say you sent her out alone to demand her money from a hoodlum you don’t even know, knowing that two men have already been killed about it?” Grave Digger asked, the jugular vein swelling in his neck like corded rope.

  “No one is going to hurt that woman,” Sweet Prophet said callously. “God takes care of children and fools.”

  “People will recrucify Jesus Christ for thirty-six grand,” Coffin Ed said harshly.

  “You’re getting alarmed over nothing,” Sweet Prophet said.

  “Leave off!” Grave Digger grated. “Did she say where Jenkins lives?”

  “In the Roger Morris,” Elder Jones volunteered.

  “Let’s go,” Grave Digger said, striding toward the door, but just before leaving he turned and called to Sweet Prophet. “I don’t think much of your Christianity, buddy.”

  It was forty-four city blocks to the house on Edgecombe Drive, and the streets were filled with traffic. They went up Seventh Avenue with the siren open, scattering cars like ninepins and turned over to the Drive on the 155th Street Bridge.

  The elevator was occupied. They took the stairs two at a time.

  The woman in the Chinese gown answered their ring. They stood flanking the door. Coffin Ed had eased his pistol loose in its holster and stood with his hand resting on the butt.

  “Yes?” the woman said, opening the door onto a heavy burglar-proof chain. She looked through the crack, but not directly at either of them.

  Grave Digger flashed his shield. She didn’t look at it.

  “Yes?” she asked again, impatiently.

  “We want to talk to Jenkins,” Grave Digger said.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  Both of them looked at her sharply.

  “Are you trying to be cute?” Coffin Ed challenged.

  “Leave off,” Grave Digger said, and told the woman. “We’re detectives. Do you want to see our identifications?”

  “That’s not necessary,” she said. “Slick isn’t in.”

  “May we come in and look around?” Grave Digger asked.

  “No,” she said. “I said he wasn’t in.”

  “You’re making life hard for yourself,” Coffin Ed said.

  “Slick left at a quarter to eight,” she said. “He hasn’t been back.”

  She closed the door. They heard keys turning and bolts locking.

  Coffin Ed looked at the locks as though he might enjoy shooting them off.

  “I don’t quite dig her,” Grave Digger said.

  They went down to the lobby and found the doorman, a tall, slender man with a winged mustache and a thin rusty-brown face beneath a yachting cap. His gold-braided purple uniform had been pressed so often it shone like waxed paper.

  “We’re the men,” Grave Digger said, flashing his shield.

  “You don’t have to tell me, boss,” the doorman said.

  “When did Slick Jenkins leave?”

  “Before eight, boss.”

  Grave Digger and Coffin Ed exchanged glances.

  “Alone?” Grave Digger asked.

  “No, boss, he had a mugger with him what’s been hanging on to him for the past few days.”

  “Mugger!” Grave Digger echoed. “Give us a rundown.”

  The doorman gave a pinpoint description of Susie, then for good measure threw in a description of Slick, of Slick’s car, and the license number. He conducted a little business on the side peddling marijuana cigarettes, and he figured every little bit he did for the police would help him if he got into a jam.

  Grave Digger described Alberta and asked if she’d been there.

  “I ain’t seen nobody like her, boss, and if I’d seen her I sure wouldn’t have forgot her.”

  “Okay, boy, when Jenkins turns up I want you to telephone the 126th Street Precinct Station and leave word,” Grave Digger ordered.

  “Right, boss. My name is Sam. Don’t forget old Sam, boss.”

  “What’s your racket?” Coffin Ed asked.

  “I ain’t got no racket, boss; I’m just a peace-loving boy.”

  “Damn right,” Coffin Ed said. “Peace at what price?”

  They went back to their car.

  “We’re either too late or too early,” Grave Digger said.

  He got the precinct station on the radio telephone and asked Lieutenant Anderson to put out a pickup for Slick Jenkins, giving a description of his car and the license number.

  Lieutenant Anderson said that Sweet Prophet had telephoned in to say that Alberta Wright’s man, Sugar Stonewall, was there at the Temple.

  “Off again, on again,” Grave Digger muttered.

  They did the forty-four blocks back to 116th Street with the siren blaring.

  Sweet Prophet was sitting as though he hadn’t moved.

  He greeted them with, “He left. I couldn’t hold him.”

  “We’ve got to get a new car,” Grave Digger said, then asked, “What did he want, did he say?”

  “He wanted me to go his woman’s bail because I had baptized her, but I told him that someone had beat me to it.”

  “Yeah, somebody wants her out bad,” Grave Digger said. Slowly his voice was getting thick. “Did he say where he was going?”

  “I sent him up to see Slick Jenkins,” Sweet Prophet said. “I told him that I had sent his woman up there, and that was where he was most likely to find her. After that I couldn’t hold him.”

  “You’re sitting there trying to play God with these little people,” Grave Digger said in a voice that sounded as though his mouth were stuffed with cotton. “And all you’re doing is shilling for Clay, the undertaker.”

  “I’m a busy man,” Sweet Prophet said defensively.

  “Yeah, but not so busy as you would be breaking up rocks,” Grave Digger said, then asked, “What does Stonewall look like, if you weren’t too busy to have looked.”

  Sweet Prophet kept an offended silence, but the two women and Elder Jones gave a composite description.

  “Gone again, John again,” Grave Digger muttered as he climbed behind the wheel.

  They went back up the way they had come; but traffic had thinned considerably on Seventh Avenue, and everyone with a guilty conscience had got in off the street.

  In answer to their questions, Sam the doorman said, “Ain’t nobody looked like him been through this door, boss, or I would have seen him, and I ain’t blind.”

  “All right, stand out on the sidewalk where we can watch you,” Coffin Ed ordered.

  “I ain’t going to try to tip nobody off,” Sam said aggrievedly.

  “I don’t want to have to worry about it,” Coffin Ed said. “I got other things to worry about.”

  The doorman came out, stood in the center of the sidewalk and didn’t move to open the door when the tenants came in and out.

  Grave Digger got into their car and eased it to th
e curb between the racketeers’ big shiny cars. It looked out of place. He sat behind the wheel, watching the people pass. He looked out of place. Coffin Ed took up his station on the other side of the entrance, leaning with one hand propped against the top of another big shiny car. He didn’t look as though he went with the car, but the people who passed acted as though they didn’t notice.

  Grave Digger talked to Lieutenant Anderson again, but nothing new had come in.

  There was nothing to do but wait. Half of a detective’s working time was spent in waiting and watching. They waited and watched.

  Twenty minutes later they saw Sugar Stonewall alight from a Fifth Avenue bus and cross the street. Coffin Ed intercepted him and took him by the arm.

  “I’m the man,” he said.

  “First time I was ever glad to see the man,” Sugar confessed.

  Coffin Ed took him to the car and frisked him. Sugar was as docile as a lamb. They put him on the back seat and Coffin Ed sat with him while they drove down to the precinct.

  Sugar spoke only once, to ask, “You got a cigarette, chief?”

  “Afterwards,” Coffin Ed grunted.

  They took him in to the Pigeon’s Nest and installed him on the wooden stool, beneath the glaring light.

  “Talk fast and straight,” Grave Digger ordered.

  “Yassuh, boss, where do you want me to begin?” Sugar asked.

  “You look like a bright boy,” Grave Digger said. “Just lead up to it slowly, so we can get the picture. Everything is needed now.”

  Sugar didn’t need any further prompting. Sweat flowed from the creases of his face, and the smell of animal fear emanated from his skin. He talked fast and eagerly.

  “It began like this, boss - me and Alberta has been shacking up together for about eight months. Most times when she came home from work at about eight o’clock, I’d be there waiting for her. Weekdays she’d start drinking as soon as she got in - she liked to drink, but she weren’t no lush. She’d just sip enough to knock herself out by ten o’clock and I’d help her get to bed. But shucks, I’d just be getting wide awake myself, so I’d go down to the corner and play tonk, and, if I didn’t get home ’til three or four the next morning, it wouldn’t make any difference to her because she’d be so dead asleep couldn’t nothing wake her -”