Two Graves Dug

by Penny Mickelbury

Carmine blushed again. “That part’s none of your business. The part that concerns you is who’s terrorizing the lady.”

  “How’d we get from her getting beat up to her being terrorized?”

  Carmine inhaled deeply and dramatically and exhaled an impressive display of exasperation. “Ain’t you been listening? The beating’s just the last thing. Her office was broken into and trashed and she’s been getting threatening phone calls...”

  I interrupted. “What kind of threatening phone calls? From a male or a female? And what did the caller say? What time of day? And when was her office trashed?”

  “I don’t...what...why...” The fat man sputtered and choked like an almost-out-of-gas pimp mobile. Then he collected himself and his thoughts. That was interesting to observe. Carmine collecting his thoughts. “I can’t answer any of that. You gotta talk to the lady herself. I’m just tellin’ you what I know happened, you know what I’m sayin’? I don’t know all the particulars.”

  “How do you know about any of it? Why would she tell you?”

  He flushed again. “I happened to be there when she got one of the calls. I’d just picked up my daughter. She was the last patient that night and we were just standing there, making small talk, and the phone rings and she excuses herself and picks it up. Then she starts shaking, like all of a sudden it was twenty below zero and she was freezing. She drops the phone and backs up from the desk and starts grabbing at her chest. So I rush over to the desk and grab up the phone and listen and I hear, ‘...they’re dead and you got all that money but you won’t live to spend it.’ And then a click and a dial tone...”

  “So was it a male or a female? And did it sound like one of our people from the ‘hood or like somebody from the Upper East Side? And did it sound like a joke, Carmine? Like whoever it was just after fun and games?”

  He gave me a funny look and his face folded over on itself for a second, then re-opened. “A whisper. It was a whisper, like somebody with a bad cold, ya know what I mean? And there wasn’t nothin’ fun and games about how it sounded. And there sure as fuck wasn’t nothin’ fun and games about how Doc Mason was actin’ after that call. I’m tellin’ you she was scared white.” Then he blushed again and I thought I’d work this case if for no other reason than to cure Carmine of some of the more blatant manifestations of his racism.

  “When did all this happen, Carmine?”

  “That phone call thing, the one I heard, about a month ago, on a Tuesday night. The break-in, before that, and the beating, two nights ago.”

  I drained my cup and shook my head at the waitress before she could make it all the way to the table. Then Carmine and I sat in silence for a while, me pushing every thought from my mind except one: whether I’d really accept money from him. He’d said he wanted to hire me. After hearing why, I very much wanted to know why someone was scaring the shit out of the only shrink crazy enough to hang out a shingle in Alphabet City. And I wanted to beat that someone into the pavement. That part I’d do for free. I was damn tired of every time something good happened in the ‘hood, some asshole looked to find a way to maim or kill it. Poor people in the East Village had as much right to Dr. Jill Mason as rich people on the Upper East Side.

  “If I take this job, Carmine, this is strictly between you and me, capiche?”

  His incongruously dainty mouth curled into a slight snarl. “You people hate me that much you can’t take my money above the table, Rodriguez?”

  “Only about as much as you hate us, Carmine, but with better reason,” I answered him, holding his eyes with mine. I wanted to be sure he understood my words and all the meaning they held, and when I saw that he did— he uncurled his mouth, raised his hands palms up and out, facing me, and then placed them flat on the table— I told him to come by the office at 6:30 and sign the contract.

  “You won’t say nothin’ about my kid, will ya, Rodriquez?” Carmine spoke softly and there was no edge to his voice, no hint of the menace he usually worked to convey.

  I stood up and slid into my jacket, zipped it, and looked down at Carmine. “When you buy my services, Carmine, you buy the client confidentiality that comes with the package. If you hadn’t run your mouth all over the neighborhood, nobody would even know you were lookin’ to talk to me.”

  Before I reached the corner, the wind had sliced into all the warmth I’d garnered in the cozy little pastry shop. No longer chilly, it was flat out cold. I needed to go back home and dress more appropriately. I also needed to chat with Itchy Johnson, which was closer to home than where I was now, so I darted out into traffic and snagged a taxi, not normal behavior for me, but necessary. I was too far from home to take the time to walk and in too much of a hurry to pick Itchy’s brain.

  Not just the proprietor of a tonsorial parlor, as the gilt-edged sign above the mirror proclaimed, Itchy was legendary in the neighborhood. He was an old man now, probably pushing eighty, but still tall, lean and trim, and still a flashy dresser, though minus the long, conked hair style so apparent in photos of his past: now he was bald as billiard. In his youth, before migrating downtown from Harlem, he’d been a small-time player— a numbers runner and, later, a bookie operating in the back room of his barber shop on 146th Street. I’d heard him spin the tale so many times I knew all the pertinent details. Now he sold Dick Gregory’s Bahamian Diet and something called Noni Juice from a small desk in the back corner of his shop and leafed through books of photographs from Harlem’s glory days. He no longer cut hair and only rarely shined shoes, since the kind of people who still wore the kinds of shoes that needed waxing and buffing didn’t frequent Itchy’s establishment, and he only rarely talked with the customers, since most of them were young men and women sporting au courant hair styles and attitudes. But throughout the day people like myself, who’d known Itchy forever, or wished they had, stopped in to exchange greetings, to listen to music no longer played in public places, to listen to stories no long told or remembered.

  I nodded to the barbers and customers en route to Itchy’s corner and even before I sat, he was growling at me. I could hear his raspy voice over the only music he allowed to be played in his place— vintage rock and roll and classic jazz and, at my urging, Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, Mongo Santamaria, and Carlos Santana. Today it was Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.

  “And what the hell did he want?” Itchy crossed his long legs at the knee. Today he wore deep cranberry-colored sharkskin slacks, with silk ribbed socks and alligator shoes in the same color, and a long sleeved cream silk shirt.

  “I’m the one doing the wanting, Itchy,” I said quietly. “You feel like talking about the old days?” I didn’t know if Itchy was unusual or not, not being able to count many people his age among my acquaintances; but, like my eighty-something Abuelita, he seemed to vacillate between being driven to remember the past and flat-out refusing to admit that there was such a thing. Sometimes I thought it was because his memory was fading, while other times it seemed that remembering hurt him, saddened him. Now he narrowed his watery eyes, lowered his bald, shiny head, and looked up at me over the tops of his gold-rimmed glasses. Nothing but Smokey’s smooth falsetto crooning for a few very long seconds. I didn’t mind the wait.

  “Depends,” he said.

  I waited but he didn’t say any more. He’d closed up the way old people of color often close up in the presence of the enemy, usually white people in positions of authority, and he sat there giving the wall-eyed stare that accompanied the silence. But, dammit, I wasn’t white or the enemy! And Itchy wasn’t budging. Shit. “He hired me to find out who beat up Jill Mason.” I’d have told the old critter how many Napoleons I’d eaten if he’d asked. No way I was going to risk banishment from Itchy’s good graces, client confidentiality be damned.

  “I knew her grandparents,” Itchy said in his voice from the past. “Both sets. Her Mama’s people came from down South somewhere. Georgia, I believe. But her Daddy’s people been here in New York since slavery. Elijah and Sarah Mason. Lemuel and Eula
Graves. Nice people, all of ‘em. That oldest Mason boy used to work for me. The second oldest was Jill’s daddy. And her Mama was the last born to Lem and Eula Graves. Can’t recall her name, though I can see her face. Pretty brown girl, and smart as a whip. Lot of talk ‘bout her goin’ to City College. Then she met that Mason boy— Robert, I think his name was, or Richard— and that was the end of that.”

  His eyes watered some more, and clouded, and I didn’t know whether to speak or keep quiet. The noisy arrival of two boisterous young men on a blast of cold air decided for me. Itchy rose quickly, eyes now snapping, gait long and loose like that of a young gangster, and strode to the front of his shop with a sense of purpose. He tolerated no rowdiness in his establishment. By the time he got back to me, his face was set and his eyes were flicking like they were looking to get a bead on something alive.

  “How come Carmine came to you with this? She don’t even want her own parents to know about it.”

  The question surprised me. It also annoyed me a little, though I wasn’t exactly sure why. “You know what Jill Mason wants and doesn’t want?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, like I’d asked him if he knew how to sharpen a straight razor on a leather strop. “I’m still connected up on the old neighborhood, still go to the same church as I used to, big Baptist church up St. Nicholas Avenue and 135th. Some of those folks been going to that church for sixty years or more. Older than me, a lot of ‘em.”

  I couldn’t take it any longer. “Itchy.” I said it quietly and, I hoped, respectfully enough to conceal my mounting exasperation. “What do you know about Jill Mason, about her family? Anything that might give a reason for somebody to want to hurt her?”

  “They had to leave from Uptown. Middle of the night. Didn’t take nothin’ but what they were wearin’. Left the car, too, though it wasn’t worth much. But, of course, that didn’t satisfy ‘em. Didn’t do nothin’ but make ‘em madder.” He shook his head and pursed his lips and said “umh” the way old people do, and then looked up at me, waiting.

  “Maybe if you told me what you were talking about, Itchy?”

  He grinned at me then, and slapped his thigh, and talked about a time more than fifty years ago as if it were last week. A time when the mob controlled life at all levels in New York City, and when it could be as dangerous to be Colored here as in any part of the South. Back then, most Blacks and Puerto Ricans lived well north of the East Village— up in Harlem and in Spanish Harlem. Didn’t even think about getting off the subway until it got north of Central Park. It was up in that Harlem, in those days, that Itchy had his first tonsorial parlor and was a bookmaker and a numbers runner— I knew all this because he’d told me enough times, but he’d never before mentioned the names of friends or associates, except that of his cousin, Bumpy Johnson. Now he said it was in that Harlem that he was friends with the Masons and the Graveses. It was in that Harlem that the oldest Mason boy defied the mob and to set up an independent numbers operation. And died for it.

  Itchy, on the other hand, was a cousin of the legendary Bumpy Johnson, who ran the largest and most well-organized numbers operation in Harlem and who defied the mob to do it and lived to tell the tale. The Mason boy was a hot-head, not satisfied to work for Itchy who worked for Bumpy who worked for the even more legendary Queen of Harlem, Stephanie St. Clair. One day, young Mason stood on the corner of 134th Street and Lenox Avenue and told Lucky Luciano’s goons to take their Wop asses back downtown where they belonged. Then he fired on them with a machine gun he’d stolen from one those same goons a month or so earlier. His family moved away from Harlem that very night, as did all their close relatives and friends, the Graves family included. That was in the middle 1940’s, as Itchy “recollected.”

  “Next time I saw Elijah Mason, he walked through that front door there and sat in my chair. Cut, shave, and shine and not a word about what had happened.” That was in 1955, Itchy recalled. Elijah was driving a produce wagon from which he also sold half pints of whiskey. His wife took in sewing. And his second boy had just married the Graves girl. Their first child, Jill, was born that next spring. “I remember because Elijah got killed just before the baby was born— maybe a couple of months— and Sarah passed on just after.” He got quiet and his gaze lengthened as he looked into the past.

  I looked around the shop while I waited for him to swing back to the present and tried to imagine how it would have looked in 1955. Some of it I could see: the aged cordovan leather chairs and the silver-capped, swirling barber pole and the gilt-edged mirror. But the floor was a shiny new hardwood; the sinks behind each of the four chairs were modern pedestals; vibrant, healthy ferns hung suspended from the ceiling; and a huge television was mounted on the wall, permanently tuned to ESPN. The place looked and felt modern, like the chairs and the pole and the sign had been carefully selected purchases from an antique store. Only the elevated shoe shine chair and pedestal and Itchy himself looked as if they belonged in the past.

  “They moved into Elijah and Sarah’s place right around the corner there on Avenue B. Robert and Leola! That’s it! Robert and Leola Graves Mason, and they still live right around the corner. That’s why Jill came back downtown, to keep an eye on them. They’re pretty old now.”

  I couldn’t stop the look I gave him. Calling somebody old, of all the nerve. He caught the look, chuckled, and flexed his muscles in a weightlifter’s pose. Impressive still.

  “How’d they die, Itchy?” I sensed he didn’t want to answer that one and I prepared myself to push him if necessary.

  “Sarah had a heart attack and was gone like that!” He snapped his fingers. “And they say Elijah’s horse stomped him to death.”

  Something about the way he said, “they say.” I raised my eyebrows and my open palms at him and he shrugged. “Come on, Itchy,” I said, patience all but gone. “Either the horse killed him or it didn’t. You could tell, you know, if a horse stomped somebody to death.” I hoped I sounded dry.

  “Oh, the horse killed him all right, no doubt about that. It’s just that nobody never could figure how Elijah got himself under the horse’s feet.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Warmer now, with a turtle neck sweater, heavy corduroy slacks, and a scarf hugging my chest beneath a leather bomber jacket, my feet happily and cozily encased in their Doc Martens, I hurried back to the office. What I’d planned to be a leisurely morning of paperwork had just become a push to prepare for an early afternoon meeting with one of our half dozen on-retainer corporate clients. At Yolanda’s insistence, we catered to them unabashedly when the time came— in this case, quarterly for New York University, for which we performed a series of elaborate security checks and balances at sensitive locations, like the admissions office and laboratories and the computer center.

  Because we’d once intercepted a deliberately planted virus at the main computer in the admissions office— actually Yolanda had intercepted it; I’m barely computer literate— we were beloved at NYU. They knew how much we’d saved them in time, money, and destroyed records, and groveled at our feet almost as much as we groveled at theirs. Not only did we detect the virus before it was able to spread and do real damage, we also were able to identify the cretin who introduced it, and I’ll claim that honor since Yo despises jerks, bad guys, hoodlums and lowlifes in all forms. He was a former student dismissed for stalking three female classmates.

  So, we busied ourselves preparing for our meeting with NYU’s administrative vice president and its security chief, Jeffrey Dahl. But all either of us wanted to talk about was Jill Mason and the tale Itchy Johnson had spun, which is rare for Yo. She’s much more interested in the corporate world; but she had listened with ever-widening eyes while I related the details of my meeting with Carmine and later with Itchy, and she had reached the same conclusion that I had: surely the mob wouldn’t be busting Jill Mason’s chops because of something her dead uncle did before she was born! At least we hoped not, but we didn’t have time to knock it around, either before or
after the NYU meeting; because afterward, while Yo drafted a contract for Carmine, I had to rush to the home of a couple on Avenue A whose nine-year old daughter didn’t come home from school as usual. And then I had to help the cops tell them that she never would.

  I was late for my meeting with Carmine but he was so busy leering at Yo that he didn’t care. He signed the contract without reading it and wrote out a check for double the retainer. “So I don’t have to keep comin’ back here,” he growled, though we both knew he was just showing off for Yolanda.

  “I had a chat with Itchy Johnson,” I said to Carmine while Yo poured him a beer and he ogled her sideways.

  He nodded thanks when she gave him the beer, swallowed half of it in one gulp, sighed and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. Yo gave him a napkin and he placed his glass on top of it and wiped his mouth with his hand again. “That’s a good thing, Rodriquez. Itchy knows a lotta stuff.”

  “He doesn’t know how long your people hold a grudge. Maybe you could enlighten me?”

  He was truly puzzled. When, after several seconds, he hadn’t even attempted a response, I supplied the bare bones facts of my conversation with Itchy and Carmine looked even more puzzled. Then the anger crept in.

  “You think I would do somethin’ to that lady and then hire you to—”

  Oh shit. “No, Carmine!” I stood up quickly, raised my palms upward, and walked over to where he was seated on the couch. “I truly do not think that. I’m only looking to understand all the possibilities. I have to do that, you know. I have to rule out stuff, no matter how crazy it may sound. I have to rule out the possibility that a grudge could be held for so long. Capiche?”

  Carmine had been watching me closely, looking to see, I knew, whether I was shitting him, and finally I could see the satisfaction on his face and I let him see the relief on mine. We both relaxed and drank some more beer. Yolanda looked at us as if we were a rare museum exhibit or some extinct species. I could hear her calling men and our behavior pre-historic. Pre-Neanderthal is what she always said.