“Fill us in,” Grave Digger said. “And don’t start begging for sympathy.”
Lady Gypsy flipped back the covers and wiped his face with the top end of the sheet. “He’s a rough boy,” he said. “A square, but really ragged.” There were threads of desire and admiration in his voice. “And he’s carrying a rusty forty-five.”
“If you go patsy on me, I’ll kick out your teeth,” Grave Digger said.
Again the white cops looked at him curiously.
“You don’t have any compassion for anybody,” Lady Gypsy said in his cultivated voice.
“It’s how you look at it,” Grave Digger said. He turned to Coffin Ed. “Get out your stop watch, Ed. I’m going to give him ninety seconds.”
Lady Gypsy regarded him impassively through glazed, yellow-speckled brownish eyes that had the slight blue cast of age.
“You are an animal,” he said.
Grave Digger hit him in the mouth. It made a sound like water splashing, and blood drops spurted from the corners of Lady Gypsy’s mouth. But his big, flaccid body didn’t move, and his flat, stoical expression went unruffled.
“I’m not scared of you, Digger,” he said. “But I’m going to tell you what I know because I don’t want to get beat up.” He wiped the blood from his bruised and swelling lips with the vinegary sheet end. “You’re forgetting it was me who tipped you.”
“Yeah, and you let him sap you and get away while you was making a pass at him,” Grave Digger accused.
“That’s not so. He followed me in here and heard me phoning.” He nodded toward the telephone on the night table. “Not that I wouldn’t have if I had known what was coming,” he added.
“Forty seconds,” Coffin Ed said.
“He worked for a year as an able-bodied seaman for the South American Shipping Line.” He spoke steadily but unhurriedly. “On the SS Costa Brava. Saved all his money. Bought a new Cadillac from a man called Mister Baron—”
“Baron again,” Grave Digger said, exchanging looks with Coffin Ed.
“Paid six thousand, five hundred for it,” Lady Gypsy went on unemotionally. “Got it for a thousand dollars under the list price. A Cadillac with a golden finish—”
The white cops’ mouths had come open.
“He had just paid the money and got his bill of sale, and he was taking it for a tryout when he hit an old woman—”
“Alongside the convent?”
Lady Gypsy flicked him an upward look, then dropped his gaze and. stared at nothing again.
“Then you know about it?”
“You tell us.”
“I’m just telling you what he told me—”
The man on the floor stirred slightly and moaned.
“Won’t you put Mister Gypsy on the bed,” Lady Gypsy said.
“Let him lay where he is,” Grave Digger said.
“So they hit this old lady and ran,” he went on tonelessly. “They didn’t get far before they were stopped by three men in cops’ uniforms driving a Buick—”
“It begins to click,” Grave Digger said.
“Check,” Coffin Ed replied.
Lady Gypsy told the rest of the story in the same toneless voice. “Then, when Mister Baron got away, they came to me,” he concluded. “They wanted me to tell them where to find the Cadillac.”
“Did you tell them?” a white cop asked, eyes popping.
“If I could do that I wouldn’t be living in this dump,” Lady Gypsy said. “I’d be riding in a yacht on the Riviera.”
The man on the floor groaned again, and two white cops lifted him and laid him across the foot of the bed.
“How did he know about you?” Grave Digger asked.
“He didn’t. His girl friend told him. Brought him, rather.”
“Who is she?”
“Sassafras Jenkins. A girl on the town.”
“Did she steer him into Baron?”
“He doesn’t think so. He said he met Mister Baron at the docks in Brooklyn—where the Line has their warehouse. On his last trip in, two months ago. Mister Baron gave him a lift into Harlem; he was driving his own Cadillac convertible. Roman told him he was saving up his money to buy a car, and Mister Brown asked him how much he had saved, and he said he’d have six thousand, five hundred dollars when he came back from his next trip and Mister Baron said he’d get him a Cadillac convertible like the one he was driving for that amount—”
“He was driving a gold-finished Cadillac himself?”
“No, his was gray. But he asked Roman what color he wanted, and Roman said he wanted one that looked like solid gold.”
“What was Baron’s business in Brooklyn?” Grave Digger asked.
“Sailors, Digger,” Coffin Ed said. “Where’s your thinking cap?”
Grave Digger half agreed. “Maybe, maybe not. Maybe he was fishing frogs for snakes.”
“It’s the same thing,” Coffin Ed contended. “Sailors are everything to everybody.”
“You know Baron?” Grave Digger said to Lady Gypsy.
“It happens that I don’t.”
“You know Black Beauty.”
“Yes.”
“What was his racket?”
“Pimping.”
“Pimping! That pansy!”
“You said his racket, not his pleasure. And you employed the past tense. Is he dead?”
“He was the old woman who got killed.”
“Killed? They said she wasn’t hurt.”
“That’s another story. But you must know Baron. He’s in the clique.”
“That’s what I told myself,” Lady Gypsy admitted. “But truthfully, I don’t.”
“You know the Jenkins girl, however.”
Lady Gypsy shrugged. “I’ve seen her. I don’t know her. She comes in here from time to time with various tricks. She’s always got some little racket going.”
“With Baron?”
“You can’t trick me, Digger. I’ve told you the truth about Mister Baron. I don’t know him, and I don’t think she knew him, either.”
“Okay! Okay! Where do we find her?”
“Find her? How would I know where to find a chippie whore?”
“You got Findings written on your board downstairs,” Coffin Ed put in.
“Yeah, and you’d better live up to it or you are going to find yourself where you don’t want to be found,” Grave Digger added.
“You know that old courtyard between One-eleventh and One-twelfth Streets?”
“The Alley.”
“Yes. She’s got a man in one of those holes in there somewhere.”
“Who’s the man?”
“Just a man, Digger. I don’t know who he is or what he does. You know I wouldn’t be interested in a man who was interested in a chippie like that.”
“Okay, Ed, let’s get going,” Grave Digger said.
“We’d better call the desk first and let Anderson know the horse got out.”
“You call him.”
Coffin Ed reached for the telephone on the night table.
Grave Digger turned to the cops and said, “You men had better get back to your cars; you’ve been off the street too long as it is.”
Lady Gypsy said, “I want to put in a charge against that man for assault and battery and theft.”
“You’ll have to go to the station,” Grave Digger said. “And you had better wear a suit.”
Chapter 10.
When Roman and Sassafras came running down the stairs from Lady Gypsy’s and made for the Buick parked at the curb, it was a good thing that nobody saw them. They were enough to catch the eyes of the blind. Roman had stuck Lady Gypsy’s fortune-telling turban, with its big glass eye, on the side of his head—so now he had three eyes all looking in different directions. He had draped the rainbow-colored gown over his leather jumper and army pants, but it was too short, and his paratrooper boots were showing. He carried his coonskin cap in his left hand and his big rusty .45 in his right. “If we get caught I’m going to act crazy an
d start running,” he panted hoarsely. “They won’t shoot a crazy fortune teller.”
Sassafras started giggling.
Roman gave her a dirty look as he ran around and climbed in beneath the wheel. He put his pistol and coonskin cap on the seat between them and took off in a hurry. But some sixth sense told him he had a better chance of getting away by driving slowly.
He was driving like a preacher on the way to church when he came to Third Avenue and turned south.
The occupants of the first of the prowl cars coming fast from the north saw the slow-moving Buick just before the prowl car screamed around the corner into 116th Street. They didn’t give it a second thought. They hadn’t seen the driver, and they couldn’t imagine anybody crawling along at that speed in the hottest car east of the Mississippi River.
Roman drove down past 114th Street and parked in front of a mattress factory behind an open-bed truck.
“I got to give this situation some thought,” he said.
Sassafras couldn’t stop giggling. Every time she looked at him it got worse.
“This ain’t no laughing time,” he said hoarsely. “You’re going to make me mad.”
“I know it ain’t, sugar,” she admitted, half choking. “But ain’t nobody looking at you in that get-up going to burst out crying.”
“Well, it’s your fault,” he accused. “Taking me to see that stool pigeon—”
“How was I to know he was a stool pigeon,” she flared. “I been there lots of times before with other mens and he ain’t never—” She caught herself.
“I know you has,” he said. “You don’t have to rub it in. I ain’t expected you to get all rusty while I’ve been away. I ain’t no fool.”
She put her arm about his neck and tried to pull his head down to her. “I has been true to you, sugar,” she said. “I swear it on a stack of Bibles.”
He pulled his head back. “Listen, baby, this ain’t no time for sweet talk. Here I is, done blowed a whole year’s pay, and you is swearing to bald-face lies on stacks of Bibles.”
“It ain’t no lie,” she said. “If you’d taken the trouble to test it, instead of buying Cadillacs—”
“You wanted the car as much as me.”
“What if I did? That don’t mean I think a Cadillac is the only thing God made.”
“This ain’t no time to argue,” he said. “We has got to do something—and fast. I got a notion we has been awfully lucky so far, but it ain’t going to last forever. The cops is going to catch us in this hot car and then—”
She cut him off. “We could go see a man I know who’s in the automobile business. He might can help us.”
“I done seen all the men in the automobile business I needs to see,” he said. “I has had it. What I’m thinking of doing is see if I can find some of my ship-buddies and get them to help me look for my car.”
“This man I’m talking about could do more good than them,” she contended. “If that big bright Cadillac is anywhere in Harlem, he is more likely to find it than anybody I know of.”
“If all these mens you know—” he began, but she wouldn’t let him finish.
“What mens?”
“This bald-headed pappy passing himself off as a fortune teller—”
Her lips curled. “You ain’t jealous of him, I hope.”
“Well, he damn sure wasn’t no woman.”
“This man ain’t a bit like him.”
“If you think that makes me happy—”
“It ain’t like that,” she said. “I hardly know him. He’s just a business acquaintance.”
“What kind of business?”
But she ignored that. “We can ask him to look around and see what he might find,” she said. “And also we can stay in his house whilst he’s looking. You ain’t got nowhere to stay.”
“I was depending on staying with you the time I wasn’t staying in my car. Is you got some man staying in your room?”
“You make me sick,” she said. “You know can’t no man stay in my room, as respectable as those people is I room with.”
“Well, how is us going to pay this man for staying in his house and searching for our car?” he wanted to know. “I gave Mister Baron my last dollar.”
“We can sell him the tires off this car,” she said, “He’s in the used-tire business.”
“I get it,” he said. “I ain’t as dumb as you think. He’s tire thief.”
“Well, what if he is,” she said. “He’s got to know where cars is at in order to steal their tires. And that’s just who you need, somebody who knows something.”
“Well, all right then, let’s go give him the tires off this car and get started looking. Where is he at?”
“He lives in the Alley. He’s got a big place of his own.”
He started the car and drove down to 112th Street and turned back toward Lexington. Just back of the buildings facing on Third Avenue was a narrow passageway that turned at a right angle and ran between the crosstown streets.
It was a tight squeeze for a big car—there wasn’t space on either side to open the door and get out—and he had to back up three times to turn the corner.
“I’d hate to get caught in here,” he said. “Ain’t no way to go but up.”
The Alley was flanked by rows of two-story brick buildings, in varying degrees of decay, that had once been carriage-houses for the residents of 112th and 111th Streets. Now families lived on the second floors that had been servants quarters, and the carriage stalls were filled with long-forgotten junk, in which rats bred and children played and little girls lost their maidenheads.
“It’s here,” she said, indicating a rotten wooden carriage-house door spotted with patches of rusty tin. “Let me see if he’s in.”
The door was fastened by iron bars bolted to the rotten wood and a brass lock the size of a hitching block.
He stopped the car, and she got out and peered through a spyhole beside the lock.
“He ain’t in,” she said. “His motorcycle ain’t here.”
“What’s us going to do?” he said.
“Let me think,” she said, putting the tips of her mittened fingers to a dusty gray cheek and looking absent. “Oh!” she said brightly. “That reminds me. He gave me a key to the door.”
She started digging in her handbag.
“What’s he doing giving you a key to his door?” he asked suspiciously.
“It’s for his girl friend,” she said lightly. “She and I is pals. And he said if she come by and he was out for me to let her in.”
To the right of the carriage-house doors was a small door that opened on to a staircase leading to the quarters above. She inserted a key in the Yale lock and said, “There! Now we can just go inside and wait for him.”
“You know this man mighty well,” he said.
“His girl friend and me is just like that,” she said, holding up a hand with the thumb pressed tightly to the first mittened finger. “I’ll just run up and get the key to the big lock so you can put the car inside where won’t nobody see it.”
“If I likes this, I likes oats in my ice cream,” he said. “And I ain’t no mule.”
But she didn’t wait to hear him. She ran up, got the key and opened the big doors, and he maneuvered the car into a dark, damp room with bare beams and a flagstoned floor smelling of tire rubber and earth mold. Hanging to toolboards on the walls were the various equipment for changing and repairing tires, but no tires were in sight.
He got out, grumbling to himself. She closed and locked the gate, switching about with a bright, excited insouciance, as though her pants were crawling with seventeen thousand queen ants.
“Now we’ll just go upstairs and wait,” she said, moving as though all the ants were biting her lightly.
The upstairs was one room. There were sets of windows at both back and front, the panes covered with oiled brown paper. In the center, on one side, was a coal-burning, pot-bellied stove. The nearest corner was filled by a double bed
with a chipped, white-enameled iron frame. The opposite corner was curtained off for a clothes closet. On the other side of the stove was a chest of drawers with a cracked marble top, on which sat a two-burner gas plate. A square table with dirty dishes occupied the center of the floor. Before the inside windows was a third table with a cracked white porcelain washbowl and pitcher. Water was supplied by a hose coming from a single tap at the level of the baseboards. The toilet was outside, behind the carriage house. The only covering for the bare wooden floor was a variety of men’s garments.
In addition to a single drop light in the center of the room, hanging from one of the uncovered beams were several tiny wall lamps from the ten-cent stores.
Sassafras turned on the bright drop light and flung her coat across the unmade bed. She was wearing a red knitted dress to match her cap, and black lace stockings.
It was so cold in the room their breath made vapor.
“I’m going to make a fire,” she said. “You just set down and make yourself comfortable.”
He gave her an evil and suspicious look, but she didn’t notice it.
She bent over and looked into the potbellied stove, her duck-shaped bottom tightening the seat of her dress.
He put his coonskin cap on the table beside a dirty plate and placed the rusty pistol on top of it.
“There’s a trap already laid,” she said, and got a box of kitchen matches from the chest of drawers.
“You don’t know where he keeps his money, too, do you?” he asked.
She lit the fire and opened the draft, then turned around and looked at him. “What’re you grumbling about to yourself?”
“You’re acting more at home here than a hen in a nest,” he said. “You’re sure your business with this man ain’t what I’m thinking?”
She took off her cap and shook loose her short, straightened hair.
“Oh, don’t be so jealous,” she said. “You’re frowning up enough to scare out the fire.”
“I ain’t jealous,” he denied. “I’m just thinking.”
She began clearing the dirty dishes from the table and stacking them beside the gas hot plate.
“You sailors is all just alike,” she said. “If you had your way you’d handcuff a girl’s legs together and take the key to sea.”
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