The big gold dream cjagdj-4

by Chester Himes

  He hurried back toward Eighth Avenue, warily approaching the scene where Alberta had been arrested. The crowds had disappeared, and the dark street was practically deserted.

  The wrecked cars had been pushed to the curb, and a lone patrolman guarded the supermarket. Otherwise the coast was clear. He found a colored man who had witnessed the rumpus sitting on a tenement stoop, as though waiting for something else to happen. The man told him the cops had found the murder knife on the lady they arrested.

  Sugar couldn't figure that one. He knew she hadn't killed him, but what was she doing with the knife? He couldn't think of a single reason. But that could wait. Whatever she was doing with it didn't make any difference now. It spelled trouble, big trouble with a capital T.

  He felt in his pocket for a cigarette. He didn't have any. He was hungry, but he didn't have the price of a feed. He didn't know anybody he could borrow so much as half a dollar from. The jokers he played tonk with didn't have any more money than he had ordinarily, and that was only what their women gave them; and he knew they wouldn't lend him any if they had. He didn't have anything valuable enough to sell. He didn't have the talent to pick pockets, if there had been anybody's pocket to pick. He didn't have the nerve to rob anybody. He wasn't strong enough to mug. He hadn't made any connections with other women since he had had Alberta; he had been too lazy. He was a naturally lazy man.

  And now he didn't even have any place to sleep, as tired and worn out as he was, having been up all the night before and running around all day long.

  That was when he came to realize how much Alberta meant to him.

  There was no need now of thinking about ways and means of stealing her money.

  The main thing now was to get his woman back. Let her do the worrying. She'd find them some place to stay and something to eat. She might even find her money back. She was a strong, resourceful woman. He could depend on her.

  But it would take money to get her out on bail.

  He thought of Cassie. She was another kitchen slave, like Alberta. If she could afford to keep that Dummy in chips, maybe she had something cached away. And she and Alberta were such good friends maybe she would dig some of it up.

  He went over to Cassie's on 112th Street, but nobody answered.

  He stood in the street, feeling low and disgusted. Harlem was rough, he thought. If you didn't have money, you didn't have friends. He thought of the time he had been in jail down South. He had seen a hungry rat lapping up red pepper and sitting in a pan of water to keep its stomach cool.

  He saw a man coming from the direction of Seventh Avenue. As the man came nearer Sugar saw that he was big, and wearing an old cap and clean starched overalls. But Sugar's eyes lit on the lunch pail the man was carrying. If he had had a knife, he would have tried to mug the man for his lunch. But he hadn't been able to borrow a knife. No one had been willing to lend him a knife. It wasn't what he might have done with it; it was just that nobody wanted to be without a knife. It wasn't that people wanted to use their knives on other people; it was just that they wanted to have their knives in case other people started cutting on them.

  The big workman passed, keeping at a distance, his free hand in his pocket gripping his knife. Not that he suspected Sugar of any bad intentions; he just wanted to be prepared.

  Sugar's feet started moving him in the direction of home. It was empty; the furniture was gone; the door was locked; his woman was in jail; and what was more the home didn't belong to him, and he didn't have the key. But it was home, the only one he had.

  "Pssst!"

  He came near jumping out of his skin.

  The big fat black lady was invisible in the dark window.

  "Who that?" he asked in a frightened whisper.

  She came closer, and he could make out the whites of her eyes in the dim light from the distant street lamp.

  "It's me-Miz Teabone."

  "Hell," Sugar said evilly. "Why don't you go to bed."

  "The police been here looking for you," she informed him in a stage whisper.

  "Looking for me?" He was ready to light out and run a crooked mile.

  "Grave Digger and Coffin Ed," she whispered theatrically. "Where's your woman?"

  "She's in jail."

  "I knowed it," Mrs. Teabone said triumphantly. "When I heard over the radio that a Jew-man named Abie had been killed up in the Bronx, I knowed she done it. I got second sight."

  "The Jew!" Sugar exclaimed. "He dead?"

  "He ain't alive," she said juicily. "She beat his head in with a hammer."

  "She didn't do it," he said loyally. "It must have been somebody else."

  "You is the only other somebody else," she said.

  Again his feet got the message before it arrived at his brain. He was running. He didn't know where he was going, but he was on his way.

  Something came up fast behind him and grabbed him by the sleeve. It sounded like a winded animal. His scalp rolled. It was late at night, he was alone on the street and he didn't have a knife. He tried to put on speed. He was afraid to look around.

  "Let go!" he gasped in terror.

  The thing tightened its grip and pulled up beside him. They turned the corner into Lenox Avenue, neck and neck. The thing grunted urgently. He looked about and saw a gaping mouth circled with even white teeth in a broad flat face. But behind the teeth was a gaping black hole where normally a tongue should have been.

  "Dummy!" he exclaimed, panting.

  He stopped and sucked in air.

  "Jesus Christ, man, don't scare me like that," he complained.

  Dummy kept grunting. His soft brown eyes, peering out from beneath knobs of scar tissue, were urgent.

  "Man, stop making those noises," Sugar said.

  Dummy clutched his hand and stuck a dirty scrap of writing paper in it.

  Sugar took it and turned to let the light fall over his shoulder. He read: the mens wants you /lay low/go to mammy stormy/she safe.

  He looked up.

  Dummy's head jerked anxiously up and down.

  He nodded and said, "Okay."

  Dummy grinned, and his mouth looked like an exhibit of dental plates.

  He was a short, heavy-set Hawaiian-looking man with thick, gray-shot, curly hair. His coarse, lumpy face was interlaced with tiny scars. He had cauliflowers for ears and pile hammers for hands. Muscles bulged from his dark brown T-shirt, but fat put him in the heavyweight division. He might have been any age from thirty to fifty.

  He made an O with his right thumb and forefinger and turned down Lenox toward 116th Street. Sugar watched him for a moment, He had the half-sliding, bent-over gait of a full-grown gorilla.

  Sugar wondered how he knew the police were looking for him. Where did he come into the story? What was his pitch? Did he know about the money?

  On sudden impulse he decided to follow Dummy. But it wasn't easy. Dummy kept looking to both sides and over his shoulder with the instinctive caution of a man who can't hear. Sugar stepped into a doorway and let Dummy turn the corner into 116th Street. Then he ran after him in his high-kneed, churning, double-jointed gait.

  He rounded the corner just in time to see Dummy disappear into the shadows beneath the entrance to Sweet Prophet's Temple of Wonderful Prayer.

  Mammy Stormy's was over on Seventh Avenue near 115th Street. If Dummy saw him walking down 116th Street, he would naturally figure he was on his way to Mammy Stormy's. But if Dummy had gone into the Temple, he would soon know.

  Above a narrow entrance, wedged between a dismal grocery store and a curtained hair-dressing parlor, was a small sign hanging in a glass box with the faintly discernible word: Hotel. At night the hotel entrance served the resident prostitutes as a sentry box and transient drunks as a water closet. During the day dogs dropped in to find out what the neighboring dogs had been eating.

  As Sugar approached, a teenage girl came down the steep flight of stairs. Her cotton dress was rumpled and torn, and her straightened hair was mussed and stuck out from her s
kull like a mangled cactus plant. She was a thin girl, with small breasts, and her thin black face was wet with tears and ugly from crying,

  Dummy came quickly from the entrance to the Temple and trotted across the street. Sugar kept coming toward them, trying to look as though it wasn't any business of his.

  "He Georgiaed me," the girl told Dummy hysterically. "He sent me to Georgia."

  Sugar couldn't help but hear her. He knew she meant that a man she had taken to her room had shown her some money, but afterwards had refused to pay her. He was surprised to learn that Dummy was trying to pimp.

  Dummy told the girl to shut up with sign language, but she didn't understand. She thought he didn't understand what she was trying to tell him. She tried to demonstrate with gestures how the man had used her and put her out of the room without paying her.

  "You ought to lay for him and rob him," she said. "He got a big roll of money; I saw it."

  Dummy grabbed her and shook her, trying to make her hush. He didn't want Sugar to know what was happening. But the girl thought he was going to beat her because she had let herself be cheated.

  "Don't beat me," she begged. "I'll help you. We can both rob him easy; he ain't got nothing but a knife."

  Dummy pushed her back into the hotel entrance. She fell on the stairs and didn't try to get up. In his excitement he was trying to talk. The sounds made Sugar's flesh crawl.

  Dummy took a dirty scratch pad and a pencil stub from his hip pocket and scrawled hurriedly: git goin man / the gunmens be here soon, and gave it to Sugar.

  "How do you know the cops is looking for me if you been here all night with this chippy whore?" Sugar asked suspiciously.

  Dummy wrote, they found the knife you throwed away on alburda.

  Sugar's eyes popped. "The knife I throwed away! What knife?"

  Dummy wrote: the one you stabbed rufus with.

  "Man, Jesus Christ, look here," Sugar began, but Dummy grabbed him by the arm and pointed.

  At the end of the block the dim lights of a small black sedan were turning slowly into 116th Street. It was now close to four o'clock.

  A gargling sound issued from Dummy's mouth as he tried desperately to talk. But Sugar got the message anyway. From that distance he couldn't recognize the car nor see the faces of its occupants. But only Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson could raise that look on Dummy's face.

  The only way to go without being seen was up the stairs. Sugar leaped over the huddled figure of the little prostitute and started quickly up the steep flights of stairs. Dummy stuck a foot inside and kicked the girl, and she jumped to her feet and followed Sugar.

  "Ain't you coming, too," Sugar called softly down the stairs.

  But Dummy sprinted across the street and vanished in the shadows of the entrance to the Temple.

  10

  Grave Digger and Coffin Ed had what they called their "stool pigeon route," which took them through the congested slum area of Harlem known as The Valley. Whenever possible they covered this route in the early hours of morning, shortly before going off duty, and contacted their stool pigeons.

  Each stool pigeon had a place of contact and a time. They were not expected to show up every night, because neither did the detectives; but, if they missed three nights straight running, it was their little hip pockets, as they say in Harlem, which meant they were in trouble. Care was taken that no stool pigeon ever got to know another stool pigeon.

  When they showed in their battered black sedan, idling slowly along the street, the stool pigeon at his post would give the signal. The signal was for him to cut whatever he was doing and duck into the nearest doorway, as though he were ducking the cops. After which the detectives would turn into the first dark street and park unobtrusively in the shadows with the lights cut. Then wait. Sometimes the stool pigeon could make it in a few minutes. Sometimes it took more than a half hour. The stool pigeon had to be given time to shake his companions and make a clean getaway. There was no sense in having a stool pigeon who was known to be a stool pigeon.

  After returning from the Bronx with Alberta Wright, the detectives got on their route. They needed information about Rufus and the Jew. The Medical Examiner's report, photographs, fingerprints, the findings of the criminal laboratory and all the results of modern police techniques-including police theories-were generally useless in solving murders in Harlem. Interrogations helped but little because the criminal and lowerclass elements of Harlem were for the most part natural-born and highly talented liars. Third-degree methods were useful, but they couldn't beat the truth out of everybody. If there were no eyewitness accounts, the detectives had to depend on stool pigeons.

  On this case, they didn't know where to start. The Jew had been killed for robbery. That was the only reason that particular Jew would ever be killed, they reasoned. Rufus might have got his from Alberta, but they didn't believe it. With the number of stab wounds he had on him, she should have had at least some bloodstains on her white uniform-which she hadn't.

  Grave Digger summed it up by saying, "There is no need of thinking about this business until we get more to think about."

  "Such as what did the Jew find in this poor domestic worker's furniture of sufficient value to make somebody knock him off," Coffin Ed added.

  "And why did Rufus get croaked after he had already completed his part of the deal," Grave Digger threw in.

  "Let's find somebody with a roll of fresh money and work back from that," Coffin Ed said. "Our folks will kill one another for damn near anything, but whenever they kill a Jew it's for money."

  "Right," Grave Digger said.

  They were on the second lap of their route when they got the first message of interest. A small-time hoofer from The Celebrity Club on 125th Street told them about a punk who had shown up an hour earlier flashing a roll for the benefit of the chorus girls, trying to score. The hoofer sat in the back seat while the detectives cross-examined him.

  "What was his name?" Coffin Ed asked.

  "I didn't get it, boss; he's a stranger around here."

  "What does he do?"

  "I don't know, boss."

  "You could tell his pitch from the way he looked."

  "I didn't see him, boss. Just heard the girls talking about him. They said he looked like a starker, a real down home mugger. Blowing gage and talking underneath their clothes like as if they were hustlers. They didn't like it."

  "What size roll?" Grave Digger asked.

  "They didn't count it, boss."

  "They saw it."

  "Just the edges, boss. He kept it gripped tight in his fist and just flashed the edges."

  Grave Digger and Coffin Ed exchanged looks.

  "Did he score with any other chippy?" Coffin Ed asked.

  "Didn't nobody say, boss. Anyway, he left."

  "You're not much good," Coffin said harshly.

  "I do the best I can, boss."

  "Yeah, if you get caught peddling marijuana to teenagers, you get life under the new Federal law," Grave Digger said. "You know that, don't you?"

  "I knows it, boss, but I ain't peddling no weed."

  "All right, get out-you stink," Coffin Ed said.

  The stoolie got from the car as though it had caught on fire.

  Grave Digger and Coffin Ed looked at one another.

  "What do you make of it?" Grave Digger asked.

  "From here it looks like some punk found some stage money and is trying to have a ball on it," Coffin Ed said.

  "Yeah, but that's such an old gag for a town like Harlem."

  "You know, Digger, Harlem's full of squares," Coffin Ed said.

  "Maybe this punk is a square himself," Grave Digger mused. "But we should look into the play just the same-when we get time."

  "Right now I want to hear somebody talk about a Jew," Coffin Ed said.

  "Right," Grave Digger said, and started up the car.

  The next message was a blank. It came from a slap-happy wino whose claim to fame was that once he had fou
ght on the card at Madison Square Garden as a heavyweight. True, he had only been a four-rounder in the prelims and nobody had ever heard of him before or since, but he had been there.

  He started out of the Braddock Bar over on Eighth Avenue, saw the dicks' car coming and ducked back in.

  "Shall we pass him?" asked Grave Digger, who was driving.

  "We haven't got much time," Coffin Ed admitted. "But sometimes out of the mouths of fools comes the solid tip."

  Grave Digger smiled to himself.

  They waited for the wino. He didn't keep them waiting. He approached their car as if he didn't care who saw him, opened the back door without waiting for Coffin Ed and crawled up on the seat. His foul breath filled the car with the smell of stockyards.

  "Spit it out and scram," Coffin Ed said brutally. "You are suffocating us."

  "You want to know who stuck up that United Cigar store?" the wino asked.

  "Who?" Coffin Ed grated.

  "Me," the wino said jubilantly, and started laughing like hell.

  Coffin Ed was out of the car, big feet planted on the pavement; he had his gun club-fashion in his hand, the back door open; he reached in, grabbed the ex-pug by the collar of his shirt and was yanking him bodily through the door before Grave Digger realized what was happening.

  "Don't hurt him, Ed!" Grave Digger cried. "Don't hurt him-he's simple-minded."

  Coffin Ed's burn-scarred face was diabolical with fury. But he caught the descending gun butt before it crashed against the wino's skull. He pushed the wino back against the car and slapped him across the mouth.

  "You're not funny," he said in a voice so dangerous it sent cold shivers down Grave Digger's spine.

  The ex-pug fainted from terror.

  Coffin Ed pushed him to one side with his foot.

  "Where is your sense of humor, Ed?" Grave Digger asked.

  "I haven't got any," Coffin Ed admitted as he holstered his revolver and got back into the car. "They burned it out of me."

  Grave Digger started the car, but Coffin Ed halted him by a touch of the arm.

  "What do we do with this punk?"

  "Leave him there," Grave Digger said. "If he stuck up that cigar store, I'm Cupid."