"No, I mean the money," Slick said. it figgers the 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 jew must got it afore the jew got there rufus didn get it that 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 rested she come see my cassie looking for rufus she say i 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 nothin but 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 Lenox 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 distance 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 message, 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-colored 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 t
ubing 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 nerves. 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.
"What do you think of this?" he asked in a conversational tone of voice, took the first of the three pages from Dummy's scratch pad and held it out toward Susie.
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.
A hair-raising noise issued from Dummy's tongueless mouth, sounding like a wild horse screaming in terror. But his body moved automatically from an instinct born in the ring. He gripped the arms of the chair and pushed back with both feet, shifting his full weight to his shoulder blades braced against the back of the chair, and kicked out with his feet tight together. The canvas sneakers didn't carry the impact that hard-soled shoes would have, but the pushing power did the trick. They caught Susie at the top of the thighs and sent him crashing backward into the television set as the arc of the slashing blade passed within a fraction of an inch of Dummy's eyes.
With the same motion, Dummy came down on his feet as Susie bounced from the heavy television set as though his flesh were made of rubber. Susie came in, stabbing sideways in strictly an amateur's thrust, and Dummy wove beneath it and right-handed him in the solar plexus. Spit-drenched air spewed from Susie's stretched mouth in a rush of whining sound, and his eyes bugged out.
"Cut it out," Slick said in a level voice as he picked up the automatic pistol.
Dummy didn't see him, and Susie didn't hear him. Susie moved in a rage that didn't need breath and stabbed backhanded at Dummy's crouching figure. It was a desperate, unbalanced, half-aimed thrust, but it would have caught Dummy in the back of the neck if he hadn't made a blind, headlong dive. He dove into the cocktail table and smashed to the floor, landing, belly flat, on top of the broken glass.
"Cut it out, I said," Slick repeated without moving from his seat. He acted as though he had seen a lot of fights and had command of the situation.
But still Susie didn't hear him. The blood was beating in his ears, and his vision was blurred. He doubled to the floor, retching, his neck muscles swollen and corded from his effort to get his breath.
For a moment the tableau held.
At that moment the woman opened the door and took one step into the room. Her gaze darted about as though to locate the source of the commotion, but she didn't look at anyone in particular.
A sudden pool of silence dropped into the room like an air pocket in a raging storm, and she said in an anxious voice, "Honey, you all right?"
Lying on his belly, Dummy read her lips and felt his hair rise.
Susie got his breath with a sound like hissing steam and straightened up. He saw Dummy and started toward him. Dummy pushed to his feet and ran, doubled over, past the woman and through the door. She didn't look at him, but when he ran past her she screamed.
"I'll kill you," Slick said in a flat, absolute voice.
Susie pulled up as though he had run full tilt into an invisible wall.
"Put that knife away and sit down," Slick ordered. Then he said to the woman, "It's all right, baby."
Susie folded the knife, stuck it into the watch pocket of his corduroy pants, went back to his chair and sat down. But he wasn't looking at Slick; he was looking at the woman and frowning.
"The other one," the woman said hesitantly.
"He's all right," Slick said, adding as though by way of explanation, "he's a dummy."
"Oh," the woman said.
Dummy could be heard working with the locks on the outside door.
The woman returned through the door she had entered and closed it behind her. She lay on the bed, reached over to the bed table and turned up the small gilt radio she had been listening to.
Dummy had passed through the room to the hall, but he couldn't get the outside door open.
Finally Slick got up from his seat and went through the other door and down the hall, carrying the pistol loosely at his side. He touched Dummy on the shoulder and said, "You can't get out without a key."
It was too dark in the hall for Dummy to read his lips, but Dummy knew what he wanted. He turned, walked docilely ahead of Slick back to the front room and resum
ed his seat.
Slick returned to the chaise longue, ignoring the broken table.
"Let's don't have any more of that," he said. "It disturbs baby." He placed the automatic on the floor beside him, then took the other two pages from Dummy's pad and held them out toward Susie.
"Now read these and let's talk about it," he said.
Susie got up, took the pages, sat down and read them, his lips moving as he spelled out the words.
"Well, what about it?" Slick demanded.
"About what?" Susie muttered sullenly.
"Where's the money?"
"I ain't talking in front of this dummy," Susie said. "He's a stool pigeon."
"So what?"
Susie began to puff up; his neck began swelling as though he were choking, and his cheeks puffed out. "Look, man, what is you trying to do?" he challenged. "You and him ain't trying nothing like a frame on me, is you?"
"Not me," said Slick indifferently. "I just want the money."
"Because if you is," Susie went on, "you're going to have to use that rod 'stead of just waving it 'round."
Slick nodded toward Dummy. "Ask him what he's trying to do."
Both of them turned and stared at Dummy. He sat forward on the edge of his seat, gripping his knees with his hand, and looked from one to the other.
"What you want?" Susie asked in a threatening tone of voice.
Dummy shrugged and made a V with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.
"What's that mean?" Susie asked.
Slick turned his stare back to Susie. "You're not very bright, rockhead," he said. "He wants to cut himself a slice of our pie."
"He's going to get more slices than he's looking for," Susie threatened.
"You worry too much," Slick said. "I know what I'm doing."
"Maybe you does, but I don't," Susie said.
"Let him alone," Slick said. "We might need him."
"Need a stool pigeon?" Susie echoed.
"Why not? If he's really a stool pigeon, it's a damn good thing we got hold of him in time, with what he already knows," Slick pointed out.
"I just ask you, don't oversport yourself," Susie said. "I ain't nobody to play with."
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