A sharp object that looked like a sword dug into his neck. It wasn’t really a sword, but the butcher’s knife was magnified tenfold from his vantage point.
“Geraldine,” he whispered softly. “What are you doing here?”
“You seen my baby, Memphis?” Her voice was intense and deadly serious.
Memphis went silent. He couldn’t think of an immediate response.
“Where’s my baby, Memphis?” She asked again with her voice rising more forcefully.
Memphis couldn’t tear his eyes away from the knife.
“I don’t know, Geraldine. I think she’s at Marcia’s,” he finally said. It was a desperate lie, and he prayed that the trembling apprehension in his voice wouldn’t betray him.
Her expression changed, becoming more thoughtful as she rose up slightly.
“You sure, Memphis?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m sure,” he answered, grateful to escape the blade at his throat.
She stood back with her eyes still fixed on him and allowed him to sit up in bed.
At last he began to relax. He had no desire to hurt Geraldine, and he damned sure didn’t want her to hurt him. There was nothing worse, however, than having a conflict with a crazy person. They were oblivious to rebuffs. They were oblivious to pain. They could walk through bullets and still kill when a normal person would have turned tail and run.
He had known Geraldine Brooks since first moving to Harlem. It was said that she had once been one of the brightest kids in the community. One day, at the age of fourteen, she suddenly snapped, and from then on she was in and out of mental hospitals.
Everybody said that a local cab driver was responsible for her condition. The general consensus was that the man had probably molested the girl, and when the fear of discovery led him to break it off, Geraldine’s mind crumpled like faded flowers. In the mind of a fourteen year old, she wasn’t being molested. She was involved in a relationship.
Anyway, nobody ever pursued it, and Geraldine got crazier and crazier day by day and year after year.
Her baby was a doll that she had lost as a child. Her mind had made it into a real baby, and for the past twenty years she had been searching for it.
“You want some coffee?” Memphis asked, in an effort to redirect her thoughts to more benign pursuits.
“Ye-ah,” she answered in the reacquired voice of a child.
“You want to put my knife back in the kitchen?” he asked, getting bolder as she seemed to retreat into a more passive personality.
“Yes, sir,” she replied and dutifully returned to the small kitchen to put the knife back in its place.
He watched her with sadness. Most of the time she wasn’t dangerous—a thirty-five year old trapped in an adolescence that had been stolen from her, neither willing nor able to escape from a place of both happiness and sadness.
“Will you help me find my baby, Memphis?”
“Maybe later, Geraldine. I’ve got something else I need to do.”
He fed her coffee and donuts, made her bathe and brush her teeth, and let her sleep on his couch while he left to handle some business. When he returned to his apartment, the door was open, and she was gone.
Nine hours later, Travis Redman was three sheets in the wind. He was in Bessie Myers’s after-hours club with all of the friends he had in the world and drinking liquor like there was no tomorrow. His face was numb and he was laughing, but he didn’t know why.
He had known Bobby Bazemore, Cleveland Pittman, Collis Powell, and Melvin Gaynor most of his life. They were Carolina boys who had come to New York City because it was the Promised Land. They were a part of the migration northward to escape the segregated South and the back-breaking drudgery of picking cotton and priming tobacco.
They had ended up in Harlem and quickly learned it was the same world in a different location—all of them except Travis. Unlike the rest, Travis Redman went where he wanted to go.
“Memphis! Memphis!” Bazemore gurgled between gulps of whiskey. “How about doin’ me a favor?”
“What?” Travis answered, still laughing at some fleeting humor.
“I want you to find a gal for me.”
“You got to be kidding. Find your own damned gal.”
“Naw, naw, I’m serious, man. I got this gal. I want you to find where she live.”
“Why you want Memphis to find her?” Cleveland asked with barely understandable slurred speech.
“He a professional, ain’t he?” Bazemore said.
“Yeah,” Memphis interjected. “That means I get paid for what I do, and you ain’t got no money, Negro.”
“He ain’t bought no cigarettes in a year,” Collis added. “All he do is bum off everybody else.”
“You ain’t even paid for a round of drinks tonight,” Melvin chimed in. “Show me some money, Negro.”
“Kiss my big black ass,” Bazemore retorted. He snatched Cleveland’s glass and gulped down half of its contents before his friend could retrieve it.
“I’m gon’ kick your big black ass if you mess with my drink again,” Cleveland threatened in jest.
“I’m serious, Memphis. I want you to find somebody. Don’t listen to these Negroes. I got money.”
“Who you want me to find, man?” Memphis asked only to get the business out in the open and get it over with.
“Margo Flowers,” Bazemore replied.
The table erupted with laughter. It was infectious. Memphis wanted to laugh, too, but he wasn’t sure what was funny.
“Who’s Margo Flowers?” He asked.
The others couldn’t stop laughing.
“See, you don’t spend enough time in this part of Harlem, Memphis,” Cleveland explained. “Margo Flowers is a dancer at The Cotton Club. They got one of them half-naked posters of her over in Antoine’s. That boy’s been droolin’ ever since he seen it.”
“Well if you know where she is, why don’t you go find her?” Memphis asked Bazemore.
“They ain’t gon’ let his black ass in The Cotton Club,” Collis laughed. “You got to be cooking or sweeping to get in there.”
“Well, I guess you better get a job sweeping, brother; ’cause I ain’t gonna track down no women unless they’re for me.”
“C’mon, Memphis,” Bazemore pleaded.
“He’ll probably settle for you goin’ to the club with him since you passin’, Memphis,” Melvin added. “If he go in with a white man, he figure ain’t nobody gon’ say nothin’ to him.”
“I ain’t passing to get women, man. I’m passing to get money.”
“You ought to see her, Memphis,” Bazemore said with his face looking almost prayerful. “Skin like creamy coffee. I bet she could wrap them bow legs around you and boy-oh-boy.”
“What?” Memphis looked at his friend with incredulity. “Negro, what the hell are you talking about?”
“Don’t act like you don’t know, man.”
“I got to go,” Memphis continued laughing. “This conversation just hit rock bottom.”
“You ain’t gon’ help me, man?” Bazemore asked in a pleading voice.
“Not today,” Memphis replied.
“But I’m in love, man.”
“With your right hand,” Memphis yelled as he staggered away. “I’ll see you boys next week.”
Memphis still got curious stares when he walked down the streets of Harlem even though he had lived upstairs over Fats Morgan’s grocery store for the past few years. Tonight he was a drunken white man in a place where he shouldn’t be. As a police car slowed to scrutinize him more closely, he pulled his coat tightly around himself and tried to give the appearance that he was moving with a purpose.
“Memphis. Memphis. Wake up. There’s somebody here to see you.”
Memphis opened his eyes and squinted at his surroundings trying to recognize something familiar. His head was throbbing, and a hint of nausea churned in his belly.
“Memphis!”
He looked up into Winnie Morgan’s soft b
rown eyes. She was a pretty woman with a sweet smile. Her voice was like warm honey that could take away his headache if he listened to it long enough.
He pulled the cover up over his chest as he gradually got his bearings. He realized that he was naked except for the sheet. His clothes were neatly folded on a nearby chair.
“Winnie, what’s going on here?” He asked apprehensively.
“You were too drunk to open the side door and making all kinda noise. I almost called the police. I was able to get you up here though.”
Her smile, which should have been comforting, only seemed to heighten his anxiety.
“Where’s Fats?”
“He’s in the store. He didn’t hear nothin’,” she added hastily. “He’s like a dead man when he goes to sleep.”
There was a question in Memphis’s head that he didn’t dare to ask. The whiskey had purged his brain cells, and he couldn’t remember anything after leaving Bessie’s. He did remember that Fats Morgan once shot a man for leaning against his 1940 Cadillac. He loved Winnie twice as much as he loved that car and would likely kill a man twice as fast.
Winnie was a quiet storm. Her smiles were always a little too warm. Her conversations were a little too personal. He had suspected that the slightest response on his part could get him in her pants faster than a heartbeat. He just wondered if that heartbeat had already occurred.
“Cleveland’s downstairs. I told him you didn’t feel good, but he said he had to talk to you.”
“Yeah, yeah. Tell him to come on up.”
He watched the sway of her hips as she walked toward the door, and it terrified him. As she backed out of the door, her full red lips left him struggling in vain for his missing memory.
Cleveland Pittman was obviously distraught when he barreled through Memphis’s door.
“Memphis, Bazemore’s dead!”
Memphis sat up abruptly, intensifying his headache.
“What happened?”
“Somebody shot him. They found him in an alley near Broadway and 48th Street.”
“That’s up by The Cotton Club.”
Surely Bazemore wasn’t that stupid, Memphis thought as the memory of some of the events of the previous night began to return. Surely he didn’t take his drunken self up to The Cotton Club looking for that dancer they were b.s.ing about.
“He might not have been that stupid, but he damned sure was that drunk,” Cleveland replied as Memphis gave voice to his thoughts.
People died in the city every day, but this was different. Memphis knew Bobby Bazemore’s family. He couldn’t react as if it was just another death.
No one noticed when he walked through the back of The Cotton Club. He simply blended in with the workers going about the business of making sure the club would be ready for the coming night.
He wasn’t surprised to see Nick Genovese sitting at a table and nursing a drink like he owned the place. Although it wasn’t open, people with the right connections could always get access when it suited their purposes.
“Memphis Red,” Genovese greeted him as he came closer. “Ahoskie Red, Texas Red, Chicago Red,” he added facetiously. “You got more names than the cops got files on you, so I hear.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear.”
“You must be moving up in the world. Most of the people in here this time of day either got long money or long reach.”
Genovese was right. He saw small groups of people too well dressed to be employees and recognized a couple of local politicians, a cop, and a few city officials. Strange bedfellows, he thought.
“A friend of mine got himself shot near here last night,” Memphis explained. “I came by to see if any of the boys working here might have heard anything.”
“Seems like I did hear some talk about a shooting,” Genovese informed him. “Couldn’t have been anybody important if I didn’t do it.” He roared with laughter until the whiskey in his mouth caused him to cough. “Who was the guy anyway?”
“Colored fella I’ve been knowing for a while,” Memphis answered.
“Yeah? Maybe you need to choose your friends a little better. Those people kill their own like animals.”
“Yeah? Not like anybody we know, huh?”
“What you tryin’ to say, smart guy?”
“Nothing special,” Memphis replied while flashing an insincere smile. “Some other time, Nick.”
Memphis moved on to a door that would lead him backstage. Nick Genovese was as phony as the rest of them were. He was living a lie just like Memphis; only it was a different lie. He hung around The Cotton Club most nights flashing enough money to persuade the management to ignore the chorus girls adorning his table, and some even left with him. He pretended to hate the thing he loved because he didn’t have the courage to deal with it.
Memphis understood because he also led the double life. He lived both lives making fluid transitions and taking maximum advantage of both worlds.
The backstage seemed to buzz with much more activity than expected at that time of day and with clusters of eye-catching women at every turn.
Susie Momon was barking orders a mile a minute. Susie made people jump, and nobody balked at her orders. She was a seamstress who repaired and maintained the elaborate costumes of the performers, a position that made her indispensable.
“Sort of early for the dancers, isn’t it?” he observed, as his eyes got stuck on various interesting body parts.
“Health department crap,” she replied. “It happens every year or so. It’s the price for having all of these young girls in here, but what can you do? Nobody wants to see us old broads bare our behinds. I was wondering when one of y’all was gonna show up.”
“So you know about Bazemore,” he said.
“Yeah. I wish I could say I was surprised, but I’m not. He came in here last night. Told them white boys on the back door he was with the band. You know them musicians, always stepping out to shoot up some dope or something between sets. I saw him when he came backstage, as drunk as a skunk. He had the nerve to be tryin’ to hit on that Flowers girl. She’s a headliner, you know. I said, ‘Bazemore, is you crazy?’ He looked at me like I was a Hebrew slave and kept on talkin’. I don’t know what he said to her, but she let him hang around her dressing room until the last show and left with him.”
“She left with Bazemore?” Memphis asked, completely incredulous. “Why would a woman like that leave with Bobby Bazemore? When is she supposed to be back?”
“Tonight—a couple of hours before the first show. And, Memphis, I’m sorry about Bazemore,” she added with genuine sincerity. “I liked that old big-headed Negro, but a drunk walking around at that time of night is easy pickings.”
“Yeah,” Memphis replied. “You’re probably right.” He didn’t mean a word of it. Easy pickings for what? Everybody in Harlem knew Bazemore didn’t carry any money. He hustled everybody else for what he needed. Any of the usual suspects intent on robbing someone would have recognized Bazemore and ignored him.
After a few unrevealing conversations, he left the club and started down the street wondering how he was going to solve his other dilemma. He was still trying to figure out if he had accidentally screwed the fat man’s wife, chuckling audibly. How the hell do you do that? He still couldn’t remember what happened, but he knew he didn’t undress himself and place his clothes neatly on that chair. Hell, he didn’t do that when he was sober.
“Travis Redman!”
Normally he was acutely aware of his surroundings, but he had accumulated too damned many distractions. Two suits in a cheap nondescript car had double-parked a few feet from him. One of the men got out flashing a badge and brushed his coat back revealing his pistol.
“Take a ride with us, Mr. Redman. We have some things we’d like to discuss with you.”
The man’s tone assured Memphis he didn’t have a choice. When he approached the car, he was shoved facedown on the backseat and searched for weapons.
“We can ride ar
ound a bit, or we can take you to the station. Your choice,” the policeman said in a very matter-of-fact fashion.
Memphis didn’t answer.
“Let’s ride for a bit, Joe,” the man said to the driver as he joined Memphis in the backseat.
“What’s this about?” Memphis asked.
“Colored boy named Robert Bazemore was killed last night just a coupla blocks from here. Somebody said he was a friend of yours. Now I’ve been wondering what somebody like you had in common with a small-time colored hustler. Joe here thinks you’re a stone-cold killer, but I can see how different people can sometimes forge friendships. I got a few colored friends.”
“Why do you care what happens to a small-time hustler?”
“Oh. Hey, Joe. This guy’s a thinker. He asks questions.”
Suddenly the cop dug his fist into Memphis’s belly, doubling him up with the unexpected blow. He felt as if his abdomen had been ripped apart.
“Okay, let’s try this again. You know Robert Bazemore, and you and some of your colored friends went drinking with him last night. For all I know, you got a little pissed over something and killed him.”
“What the hell are you trying to do? I didn’t kill anybody, and you know it.”
“You killed somebody if we say you killed somebody,” the cop replied.
“What do you want?”
They had to want something. These guys needed something, and they only knew how to get things through intimidation. They had intimidated somebody into calling his name, giving him up to get them off his back. All Memphis wanted was to get out of the car. If he got out of this, they would be hard pressed to catch him unaware again.
“Look, Redman,” the cop began in a sober and more patient tone. “This is more serious than you know. There’s a girl missing—Bazemore’s girlfriend.”
“Bazemore’s girlfriend,” Memphis repeated in an effort to assure himself his ears weren’t fooling him.
“Yeah, he left The Cotton Club with her just before he was killed. We figure whoever killed him took the girl.”
“So you don’t think I killed him?”
“You did if we don’t find somebody else,” the cop said.
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