Ms. Etta's Fast House

by McGlothin, Victor

22

  CRAWFISHES

  With the grim reaper tucked in his pocket, Willie B. Bernard busted in the front door hollering for his wife, wearing contempt on his face because she’d sneaked off with Baltimore and Penny while he waited outside of the hospital for her. Willie B. said he felt like a fool having a wife running around with another man. Etta tried to explain but he had his mind set on wreaking havoc. Seeing that he wouldn’t listen, she ran to the kitchen area to get Baltimore. Several of Etta’s customers shrieked when three shots rang out upstairs. Bang! Bang! bang!

  Penny flew down the staircase, frightened, saddened and shaking her head the entire way. “It’s that undertaker’s son. He’s shooting up the room with Mistah M.K. and that nurse lady.”

  Baltimore rushed past her with a full head of steam. He sprinted up the stairs so fast his feet barely touched any of them. Willie B.’s black revolver was still smoking as Baltimore entered the room with his pistol drawn. Offering no resistance, the shooter wore a vacant expression that spoke volumes. “They had it coming,” he told Baltimore. “I figured she was giving it to one of them doctors. You can’t blame me for doing what a husband’s got the right to. I told Henry ’n ’em what’d happen if it came to this. I told ’em.”

  Out of his periphery, Baltimore saw M.K. move his fingers after taking one slug to the chest. He snatched Willie B.’s gun from his hand and sent him downstairs. “Wait on the police, they’ll want to talk to you, but this man is still alive. I’m taking him over to Homer G. Phillips myself. Get in my way and you’ll join your wife directly.” The man was understandably shaken but was more than coherent enough to know what that meant so he stepped aside agreeably.

  Baltimore hoisted M.K. in his arms and staggered with him out to his convertible. “Come on, M.K.!” he cried, when his friend lost consciousness. “Hang in, just a tick longer.” He maneuvered his roadster through the emergency room loading dock and leaned on the horn until two white-jacketed orderlies raced out with a gurney.

  “We’ll take it from here,” one of them shouted at Baltimore.

  “The hell you will,” he objected. “He’s a pal of mine. I’m coming with him.”

  “If you really care for him, you’ll let us get him inside with the doctors.”

  As soon as they entered the emergency room area, the attending nurse called out to the men wheeling the gurney passed. “What you got there?”

  “A gun shot wound, male, around twenty-seven.”

  “I’ll call for the surgeon on duty. Hold on a minute.” The nurse ran her finger across the schedule and read the name of the attending emergency room doctor for the evening. “Paging Dr. Phipps,” she announced over the public address system. “Paging Dr. M.K. Phipps to the ER dock.”

  Dr. Hiram Knight sucked on the moist end of an expensive cigar as he marched up to the check-in nurse. “Don’t tell me M.K. isn’t back on duty yet?”

  In an effort to comfort the man who’d just been wheeled in, the nurse stood from her desk and circled it. When she saw the patient’s face and his clothes soaked with blood, she lowered her head. “Sorry, Dr. Knight, but Dr. Phipps won’t be reporting this evening.”

  The chief surgeon followed her eyes to the victim’s face. He rushed to check his vitals, but there was no pulse, no signs of life whatsoever. M.K.’s eyes were opened, still and gazing up at nothing at all. Painstakingly, Dr. Knight pulled the sheet over his protégé’s head. He took a deep breath and choked back on the thought of sending that young man to his death. “My God,” he sighed. “Please have mercy on us all.”

  Baltimore remained at the hospital for hours after M.K. was pronounced dead on arrival and taken to the morgue in the basement. A shockwave spread throughout Homer G. Phillips. Nurses gathered to comfort one another and console the young lady who had a baby to carry without a man to help raise it. Baltimore ran down what happened to Delbert and the surgery director. However, he conveniently left out the incriminating details of M.K.’s drug overdose, merely stating that the doctor was too sick to be moved and implied he’d experienced a severe bout of food poisoning. Baltimore went on to explain that when the nurse’s jealous husband heard that she’d sped away for Ms. Etta’s, he was enraged and immediately assumed the worst. Helen was leaning over M.K. trying to hold him still when Willie B. broke the door down. Imagining how it must have appeared, Baltimore couldn’t fault him one bit. He’d have done the same if snared by a similar set of circumstances.

  Exhausted and visibly disturbed, Baltimore wandered out to his car. Dinah emerged from a city cab, wearing something she’d thrown on and a stunned expression. The phone call she had received from Delbert sent her rambling out of her apartment dazed and dismayed. “Honey, I’m sorry,” she said, clinging to Baltimore’s shirt, stained beyond repair. “Baltimore, it’s terrible, I know, but Delbert told me there was nothing you could do. He’s a doctor and he was friends with M.K. too.”

  “You shouldn’t have come out this late alone, Dinah,” was his somber response. “It’ll be dangerous around here for a while. Get in, I’m taking you home.”

  “Okay, honey, okay,” she cried. “Whatever you say.” Dinah never did care for the way Willie B. treated Helen, always accusing her of tipping out on him. The nurses used to laugh about it on their dinner breaks because they knew how loyal she was. Helen thought her husband’s jealous insecurity was adorable and a stark indication of his love. “He loves me so much it makes him sick sometimes,” she’d say. “He don’t mean nothing by it, just can’t help hisself.” Dinah reflected on that while Baltimore collapsed on her bed and drifted off to sleep.

  “Yeah, Helen, you were right,” she heard herself say quietly. “That man loved you too much for your own good. Don’t fret. You’re with the angels now. Go on and rest. Put in a word for me if you can.” Dinah propped a pillow against Baltimore and nestled beside him. She wondered what he meant about expecting danger to abound. Why would he get such a ridiculous notion like that?

  Friday morning came too fast for Dinah to arise and greet it. She was asleep when it arrived, but her man had up and gone.

  “Get yourselves together,” Baltimore grunted into the phone receiver once he’d driven back to his apartment building. “I’m a be there in ’bout an hour. We got to turn some corners and I mean fast.”

  Pudge yawned wearily. “Sure, whatever’s clever. Are we about to settle up with that Jew gangster?”

  “Yeah, and I ain’t in the mood to be crawfished neither. We’ll need a work van to cinch it. Pick one up and I’ll tell you all about it when I get there.”

  Baltimore sat on the edge of his bed, cleaning both of his pistols and loading them to the gills. He had a bad feeling about sticking around town, so he plotted a prompt escape while he showered and changed clothes. The colored radio station blasted the story about M.K.’s homicide, reporting that the shooter was one of the police trainees due to graduate later that day. The announcer also went on to say that Willie B. had been arrested for murder and awaited his fate in the county lockup. It was difficult for Baltimore to feel sorry for him, so he didn’t bother faking it.

  By the time Dank had gotten dressed and his hands on something to eat, Pudge was returning to the motel with a newly acquired green panel van. The words Piedmont Yard Services were stenciled on the side of it in white lettering. “What are we supposed to do with that?” Dank inquired, poking his head out of the motel room door.

  “Don’t rightly know, but Baltimore says we need it and that’s good enough for me,” Pudge answered. “That appears to be him pulling up now. You can ask him yourself when he gets out.”

  “Naw, he still looks mighty upset about last night and that doctor friend of his getting all shot up. I’ll hold off ’til he comes out with it on his own.”

  Baltimore didn’t waste any time filling them in on the next order of business. His plan was simple and to the point. The men expected it to be fairly simple to follow but were caught by surprise when he handed them boarding tickets for
the evening train back to Kansas City. “Don’t nobody but Etta know y’alls’ with me and I aim to keep it that a way,” he told them. “So I can’t carry you over to Union Station once we settle up and split. You’ll have a stack of bills to roll with so catch a cab afterwards, catch a meal, and if you have time stop by a cat house on your way out, catch yourselves some mattress bass.” Dank really liked the sound of that and Pudge wasn’t too far behind him. Both of them had been hankering for female companionship.

  “Good, I’m glad we all see eye to eye,” Baltimore said, a mere hint of a smile on his mouth. “But first, here is the address and directions to the place I need y’all to sit on a while. Get there right at a quarter to ten and not a second before. Park on the street for fifteen minutes and then meet me back here. If somebody tries to tail you, shake them first.” Once again, Baltimore didn’t divulge what their part was in the scheme, only what their duties involved. It always worked out better that way and there was no reason to go fixing something that wasn’t broken.

  Much like the time before, Baltimore’s car was searched when he approached the wealthy mobster’s estate. He’d called ahead and told Schmitty Rosenberg that the heroin he’d swiped from Barker Sinclair was on its way. Baltimore also warned that under no uncertain terms should he try to back out of their deal. The mobster laughed but Baltimore failed to see the humor in it. In a matter of minutes, Rosenberg would as well.

  “Hand me the bag and come on in,” demanded the big goon when Baltimore walked through the spacious entranceway.

  “I’m not turning this over until I’m square with Schmitty,” Baltimore declared, stone-faced and steady.

  “Stay put then. I’ll tell Mr. Rosenberg you’re here.” The hired thug gave Baltimore a thorough once over.

  “What you stalling for? Run and tell him, unless there’s something you need to get off your chest first?” Baltimore exchanged his icy stare with one of his own until the thug blinked first. “And tell Schmitty I ain’t got all day.” Although it only took a few minutes before he got the O.K. to meet with the boss in his enormous den, it felt like eternity and then some.

  “Mr. Floyd, wonders never cease,” was Rosenberg’s peculiar salutation. He was sipping on a glass of orange juice and reading the latest edition of the Post-Dispatch newspaper as if he didn’t have more pressing issues to facilitate. “Do you have my entire parcel in that satchel?” he asked, neglecting to look up at Baltimore.

  “It’s all here but it’s not yours until you’ve paid me my entire hundred gees.”

  “It seems that I have a dilemma,” Rosenberg said casually, flipping past the front page to an article that interested him. “Some changes have occurred, since we last spoke. While I’m appreciative of your cunning nature and well-thought-out execution, I am undecided on what to do about it. I could compensate you for your efforts, say fifty thousand dollars perhaps?”

  “Fifty? Why should I accept fifty thousand when we have a deal for twice that?” Baltimore said, in a manner of a flat refusal rather than a question. “You wouldn’t be try’n a crawfish and back out on our agreement, now would you?”

  “Well, I could do a number of things I suppose, but I am willing to do either of these—put fifty grand in your hands or cut them off and feed them to my dogs, boy.”

  After hearing two gunmen enter the room and position themselves behind him, Baltimore sighed heavily. “There’s always option three. See, there’re some extras you haven’t calculated from my standpoint. I’m not willing to let some fat pit-faced pusher jerk me around. And before you go underestimating me again, call your mama.”

  Rosenberg looked up from his morning paper then. He knocked the glass of juice off the desk with the back of his hand. His eyes narrowed. “My mother? If you think about touching her ... that woman’s a saint.”

  “If you don’t pony up every dime of the money owed me, she’ll be in the hereafter with lots more of them saints.” Baltimore wasn’t sure if Jews believed in heaven or hell but it sounded like a credible threat so he went with it. “Think I’m bluffing, dial her up.”

  The telephone trembled in Rosenberg’s hand as his placed the call. “Hello, mother, good morning. Is everything there all right?”

  Baltimore glanced at his watch. It was four minutes to ten. “Ask her if the green yard service van is parked out by the curb. Two of my partners are keeping an eye on her for you.” He watched Rosenberg’s jowls contract when his beloved mother confirmed that two colored men were parked on the street outside of her house.

  With all the power Schmitty Rosenberg had amassed, he didn’t have a chance at saving his own mama’s life. He plopped down in his leather wing-back chair defeated. He demanded Baltimore be fully compensated as agreed. When his head henchman objected, he slammed his meaty fist on the desk. “I said, pay the man!” For the second time, Baltimore proved more cunning than the mobster predicted, and it made Rosenberg furious. Despite being guaranteed one hundred percent profit by selling Barker’s drugs back to him for two hundred thousand dollars, he hated being manipulated most of all.

  After Baltimore played his trump card, a briefcase filled with stacks of large bills rested on the passenger seat atop a large ring of M.K.’s blood. He’d never been more happy and sorry at the same time. That’s what he told Etta while stuffing nearly eighty grand in the safe hidden in the floor beneath her office desk. “Don’t be looking at me that way, Jo Etta, ain’t nobody gonna come to get after this money,” he assured her. “I didn’t steal it. Just traded it for something I did steal.”

  “I didn’t say nothing,” she replied, well aware that Baltimore’s countenance didn’t convey one inkling of remorse. After safely putting the money aside, Baltimore didn’t care who might have come looking for him.

  “Maybe you don’t say nothing with your mouth but with that look that’s burning a hole through me, you’re saying more than enough.”

  “When are you leaving?” she asked, after her apprehension waned. “You know how you do, make your mark and then move on. I thought you’d blow out today until you showed up with all that money. More money than is supposed to be lumped together at the same time.”

  Baltimore didn’t respond to Etta’s comment about the vast fortune he recently amassed. “Don’t worry, I’ll say goodbye before I get in the wind. I was thinking on taking Penny with me.”

  “Penny? Uh-uh, she can’t go gallivanting all over tarnation with you. She ain’t even full grown yet.”

  “And I ain’t stud’n on bedding her neither. Penny is a lamb and always will be, as far as I’m concerned, Etta. Look, I just want to show her some of the things she’ll never get to see staying here in St. Louis. There’s a lot of beauty out there, a lot to behold.” He hadn’t once taken into account what Etta might like to behold and neither did she, until then.

  “Well, why shouldn’t the same go for me? I mean, I like beautiful things too. Besides, Gussy done went and keeled over, so I don’t have a decent bartender and I’d just as soon not have to go out and hunt one up.” When Baltimore offered Etta a loving smile, her expression dripped with intensity and anticipation.

  “Well, I’ll be, I’m flabbergasted. ‘Couldn’t guess you’d be willing to tramp around with me and leave the Fast House behind.”

  “Pret’ near as I can tell, there’s over fifty thousand or more you just shoved in that hole. Now, I could be wrong, but that ain’t nowhere close to trampin’. Don’t hold me to it but I wouldn’t might mind a change or two coming my way.”

  Baltimore saw something in her he hadn’t before. There was a fire behind her eyes, a blaze he’d witnessed coming from other women, one that cried out to be quenched by striking out toward new, bold and unknown territory. Etta was afraid to miss out on something she’d never had, a wide-opened trail and close friends to help her experience it.

  “We’ll have to sit down and discuss it then,” Baltimore agreed. “Right now, I’ve got two fellas itching to go fishing. M.K.’s body needs to be sent
home to his folks and that girl carrying his baby is going to need some money when it gets here.” Baltimore didn’t come right out and say he’d be the one paying to have his friend’s remains flown back to the east coast or he’d make a substantial donation to help support the child, but Etta knew his heart was made of gold. “Tell Penny I’ll be around later. Don’t worry, everything will be fine,” he said persuasively. “Trust me.” Etta was pleasantly although nervously optimistic, and she had reason to be. Baltimore was still lightning in the jar. Unfortunately, the lid had already been removed.

  23

  WHAT’S GOT INTO YOU?

  What should have been one of the happiest days of Henry’s life turned on him like a woman whose love had grown cold. He awoke to breakfast in bed, a wonderfully prepared plate of pan-seared fish and grits. After his wife Roberta served the delicious platter, she climbed in the bed with him and then served up a good old-fashioned stack of hot loving to top it off. Henry didn’t want to run the risk of throwing a wet blanket on the moment, but a troubling thought nagged at him while he relaxed beneath the sheets, running his fingers along the curvy contours of Roberta’s ample hips.

  “Ah, now that’s the kind of stroll through the garden a man won’t soon forget,” Henry cooed, as his wife rested her head on his thick dampened chest. “’Berta, I can’t remember you taking hold of things like this before. Not that I’m complaining mind you but it is mighty peculiar. What’s got into you?”

  Roberta pulled the cotton bed sheet over her shoulder then she slid her leg out from underneath it. “Ooh, I just caught a chill. You got me running like a furnace on the blink, hot and cold all at once,” she said before answering his question. “Whew! I’ve been watching you, pacing about and bottled up over the past three months. It’s been rough on me too. The more thought I lent to it, the harder it got with me not knowing if you’d get tired of those ornery white boys making it tougher than it has to be. I didn’t want you to get hurt or throw in the towel either, so I kept it to myself. This morning I felt the time came to open up and let loose.”