De Vivani gave the girl a brief glance. “Just leave your name and address, miss. We’ll contact you.” Then, turning to Red, “We’d appreciate a statement from you on your whereabouts yesterday evening, Mr. Haloways. You don’t mind?”
“Certainly not.”
“Just step this way then,” De Vivani instructed him, at the same time indicating, by touching Dovie-Jean, that she was to remain where she was. “He’ll be right back, miss.”
“I saw you fight in Union City a couple of years ago, Red,” De Vivani became suddenly informal and friendly. “You looked pretty good in there.”
The state trooper was already preparing the polygraph, had Red’s arms adjusted before Red had given full consent.
“Do you know a man named Dude Leonard?”
“No.”
“Do you know a man named Nick Vincio?”
“No.”
“Do you know a woman named Helen Shane?”
“No.”
“Have you ever been in the Melody Bar and Grill?”
“No.”
The needle remained firm.
The trooper later confided to De Vivani: “The redhead did better than Calhoun. He comes up negative. Calhoun possesses guilty knowledge.”
De Vivani nodded.
“I believe,” De Vivani added thoughtfully, “that if you put Red on the machine again, he’ll turn up to have guilty knowledge too.”
When De Vivani dispatched an officer, two days later, to invite Red in for another lie test, Red had pleaded delay because of his father’s funeral.
Dovie-Jean Dawkins stood at graveside between Red and Hardee. Calhoun and Jennifer stood on the grave’s other side. Billy Boggs and Floyd Calhoun, among other relatives and friends, also attended the rites. Floyd Calhoun wept.
Immediately after the funeral Red consulted Gregory Oritano, a white attorney, who advised him against going back on the machine.
“Don’t submit to arrest without an arrest warrant,” Oritano further advised Red.
“Dont submit?” Hardee mocked Oritano to Red. “What does the man mean—not submit? You’re in New Jersey, man. If De Vivani wants you to submit, you’ll submit. Don’t Oritano know you’re black? He’s giving you advice for a white client, not a black.”
Hardee sat behind the front bar of the Paradise and Red sat, like a customer, at the bar. He had a bottle at his hand and occasionally reached over for a piece of ice. He had the feeling of being in deepening water and feeling the bottom giving way. He poured himself a heavy shot.
“What in God’s name, Red, you went for that lie test for is something I’m still trying to figure. What were you thinking of?”
Red stirred his Scotch thoughtfully. “Two reasons, Hardee. First, I didn’t want to arouse De Vivani’s suspicions. Second, I thought I could beat it.” He didn’t add that he’d found himself undergoing the poly-graph test before he’d had time to figure out anything.
“De Vivani’s suspicions, for one thing,” Hardee assured him, “are already aroused. With or without a lie test you’re a prime suspect because of Le Forti.”
“So are you, Hardee.”
“I have no criminal record, Red. You have. A long one. You’ve been busted for crimes of violence: assault, armed robbery, mugging. You’ve been busted for carrying a concealed weapon. I don’t know one end of a gun from another. I’m not a violent man. You are. That’s the record.”
“I beat the lie test, Hardee.”
Hardee put his head into his hands and shook it slowly and sadly. “Dummy, dummy, dummy, ’’Red heard him saying into his hands. When Hardee looked up again he was pale with anger: “You dumdum, dumdum sonofabitch. Don’t you ever learn anything? They let you go so you beat them, is that it? I suppose because they give Ruby his car back he’s running around thinking he beat it too? I’ll tell you something. You didn’t beat that test. Neither did Ruby. There’s an awful lot of things in this world you think you can beat, Red. The trouble seems to be that they keep beating you. Now you got yourself involved in a triple homicide with your ex-con buddy, Calhoun. There’s only one nigger in this town crazier than you and that’s him. How is this going to reflect on me—a man preparing to practice law?”
Red’s face cleared. “I didn’t do that shooting, Hardee.”
“You’re saying Calhoun did.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t know what to say, Hardee.”
“You don’t know what to say and still you stagger into De Vivani’s office, sit down for a two-hour lie test in which you shoot off about everything. Man, if you don’t know what to say to me it has to be because you’ve already said it all to De Vivani. You don’t deserve to have a lawyer in the family.”
Red sat with his face down above his glass, shaking his head unhappily.
“I don’t know what to do, Hardee.”
“Then I’ll tell you what to do. Here.”
Red glanced up to see Hardee handing him a roll of bills. “Make this last, Edward. There won’t be any more. Don’t phone and don’t write. Don’t go near Harlem.”
Hardee wrote a name on a slip of paper, folded it and handed it to Red. “Here’s your connection. I’ll get in touch with you through her. Don’t contact me. Repeat. I’ll contact you.”
Red put the roll of bills in his pocket.
“Hardee,” he asked his half-brother reflectively, “Hardee, who shot those people?”
“There’s only two niggers in this town crazy enough for that,” Hardee assured him. “One is Calhoun. The other is you.”
Dovie-Jean walked in.
Hardee didn’t give her so much as a nod, far less a hello.
Red rose and said, “Let’s get out of here, honey.” She followed him out and up the backstairs to his small flat.
“That man don’t like me,” she assured Red.
Red was throwing shirts into a battered suitcase.
“It’s just his way. Hardee don’t like many people. I think you better start getting your things together, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart?
“What’s up, Tiger?”
He urged her into the big barber’s chair, swung her playfully about as if playing a game, then grew serious.
“We have to move, baby. We have to get out of town.”
“I figure that much,” she told him, “but what about Ruby?”
“Ruby’s in the clear. He beat the lie test. They even give him back his car. He’s out of the case.”
Dovie-Jean shook her head as though struck dumb by incredulity. Then simply studied him a long minute. Her eyes never left his face.
“Tiger,” she told him, “there are times I don’t dig you at all. What do you mean ‘Ruby’s out of the case?’ I told you the argument him and me had with the bartender. Hour and a half later the bartender is dead and two others. What do you mean, ‘Ruby’s out of the case?’ Ruby is going to need help. So am I.”
“It’s why we’re moving, Dovie-Jean. To help you. Also me. Also Hardee.”
“If running is what you need to do, Red, run. I’ll stick.”
“Sweetheart”—he’d never before called her “sweetheart”— “Sweetheart, what good would sticking in Jersey do? Ruby don’t need your help, sweetheart, believe me. He’s been all around the pisspot and he knows where the handle is. He’s better off with you out of the way. You’ll never get loose once De Vivani gets you under his thumb. Start packing, Sweetheart.”
Dovie-Jean shook her head, No. “Red,” she told him, “you can’t expect to beat a homicide rap by crossing a bridge into another town. We’ll look better sticking it out right here. Face up to it, Tiger, if you run you’ll draw attention.”
He took both of her hands into his own and, holding her with his eyes, went slowly down to the floor before her onto his knees.
She recoiled inwardly. She’d never had a man humble himself before her. It didn’t seem right. She didn’t know how to react. Wa
s he miming again? He put his lips to the palms of her hands, one by one. And when he looked up at her his eyes were wet.
“I need you, Dovie-Jean. I need you, sweetheart. You’re all I have to make me feel real. Without you I don’t know who I am. I’m not even sure what color I am. Unless I’m with you I have no hold. No hold on anything. Don’t make me go alone, sweetheart.”
He gave Dovie-Jean her first insight into his two-sided personality. He gave her first chance to be kind to another person in a way that no other person could be kind.
“Tiger. Please get up. Yes, yes, of course if that’s what you want. Just get up off your knees, for God’s sake.” He got up and she went for her clothes.
Along the New Jersey turnpike she looked out the window, in order to avoid looking at Red. If she looked at him, she felt, he would be embarrassed by their recent scene. She didn’t know Red.
At the Port Authority they cabbed to the Hotel Chester, on West Twenty-third. In their room, eight stories up, she looked down at the moving traffic, moving in a kind of pantomime, and felt a curious mockery of her down there.
“We’re on our own until this blows over,” he told her apologetically. “I can’t contact Hardee until he contacts me.”
“Blows over?” She turned to face him at last. “Blows over? Do you actually think this thing can blow over?”
“I meant until the heat is off.”
“Who is going to turn off the heat when three whites have been shot down, for God’s sake? Tiger, I just can’t figure you. You think something like this can be forgotten? Somebody is going to take the rap, Tiger, and take it hard.”
“You think you can do Ruby any good by doing time yourself? Hardee got his career to think of. I got myself to think of. You got your-self to think of. All me and Hardee are trying to do is to get you to protect yourself, Dovie-Jean. That way we protect ourselves.”
Dovie-Jean lowered her head. You’re born somehow. You live some-how. You play out the hand that’s dealt you somehow. Then you die somehow. Whatever little she had, Red had given her. Whatever she had of friendship, Red had given her. Whatever she had had of trust, had been Red’s trust. She had had nothing and he had taken her in. She looked up.
“I got no way of going against you, Tiger. I think you’re playing your natural part of a fool. But I got no way of going against you.”
He put on a huge cap of black and white checks. It looked like something a burlesque comedian would put on in mockery of a golfer.
“What the hell is that?” she asked. “On your head.”
He took it off and inspected it gravely. “I picked it up on Eighth Avenue opposite the Port Authority. Snappy, eh? I call it my business-man’s cap.” He yanked it down over his ears and looked out at her with shadowed eyes. They were not smiling.
“I can’t tell when you’re serious or when you’re jiving.”
“I got to see a guy,” he told her, “dude name of Moonigan. He can get me on night bartending over on Eighth, he claims.”
“Is he a bartender?”
“No.”
“What does he do?”
“Bouncer.”
And he was gone as though reluctant to say more.
There was someone, in the room next door, who made sucking sounds. Sometimes it sounded like a baby gurgling; other times it just whooked. Then, again, like a woman sucking in breath for dear life.
Oath of God, Dovie-Jean thought, left now alone in the room, What is that?
“Let it alone,” Red had cautioned her, “it ain’t no business of ours.” She had let it alone. But aloud she’d told him, “It turns my stomach just to think what kind of man that could be.”
Now it began again, so she switched on the TV loud to drown him out.
She caught a program called the Uriah Yipkind show. Uriah was a small white-haired fellow wearing a face which appeared to be a kind of mask representing every phase of ingratiation, from simple, straightforward servility to open solicitation. He had a black comedian on.
“I understand you have recently married again, Redd,” Uriah was saying.
“That’s right,” the comedian assured his host, “to a Korean lady.”
“Korean? What does it feel like to marry outside of your race?”
The comedian turned in genuine surprise.
“Outside of my race? What do you think I married? A duck?”
Dovie-Jean fell asleep in her chair and was sleeping soundly long after the station went off the air. When Red came in the set was on, the picture was off and Dovie-Jean was snoring. He carried her to the bed without waking her and fell asleep beside her.
Dovie-Jean was dreaming she was driving a white Buick through crowded traffic. She had never driven a car in her life, yet she felt in perfect control of this one. She saw, on her right, a dark car pull alongside and force her to the curb. An old woman, wearing a mauve veil, was at the wheel. She leaned toward Dovie-Jean, apparently smiling, and asked, “Do you think I’m going the right direction, sweetheart?”
Behind the mauve veil she saw Red’s long, pale face, immensely aged. “I have no idea where you’re going,” Dovie-Jean told the old woman. “Then you better get in with me, sweetheart,” the old woman advised her. “We’re both going the same route.”
“Stop miming!” Dovie-Jean heard herself cry out as she struggled to waken. “Stop miming! Stop miming!”
And knew, at last, that when he had gone to his knees before her he’d been miming.
Miming whom? Himself? Or the man he sometimes pretended to be?
She looked down at him, in the earliest light of morning. And knew that, behind his closed eyes, he was not asleep. He had heard her cry.
He had read her suspicion.
“You’re going to see the big city today,” he told her calmly, opening one eye. “I’m going to show it to you. Get on your duds.”
They cabbed to the foot of West Forty-second and boarded a Circle Line boat for the three-hour trip around Manhattan.
Dovie-Jean had never before seen a big river. It was a morning in which sun and cloud alternated on the water, blinding her momentarily with flashes of light on the waves. She sat, dazzled, trying to follow the flights of the big gulls along the docks, then trying to grasp the height of the great towers they were passing.
Red brought her an ice cream cone and she licked at it as the boat pulled along.
“On your left,” the spieler filled them in, “is the site of the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr in which Hamilton was killed.”
“Who was Alexander Hamilton, Tiger?”
“Early president. One of them between Washington and Lincoln.”
“Who was Aaron Burr?”
“A very big man in the government. He’d run against Hamilton and Hamilton had beaten him.”
“Is that why he shot him?”
“He couldn’t stand defeat.”
“Did he do time?”
“Not a day.”
“How come?”
“You’ve seen yourself how it works. When you’re high up enough the government can’t touch you. It’s like you’re the government. All they can do is impeach you.”
“Impeach?”
“It means getting tried by a jury of your peers, in this case the Senate and the House of Representatives.”
“And what if he’s found guilty?”
“He has to resign.”
“Did Burr get impeached?”
“No. He quit so he wouldn’t lose his pension.”
“He got away with murder then, didn’t he?”
“He surely did.”
Dovie-Jean finished her ice cream while studying the skyline of Manhattan.
“Which is the Empire State, Tiger?”
Red pointed to the spire of the Empire State building.
“I’d like to go up there, Tiger.”
“On your right,” the spieler continued, “is the pier that was featured in the film On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Bra
ndo. It is the old Hoboken pier. Hoboken is Frank Sinatra’s hometown.”
Red brought her an orangeade, then sat holding her hand. He had never been so attentive.
“Two weeks ago,” the spieler filled them in when passing under the Verrazano Bridge, “two trucks collided in the middle of the bridge. One was carrying chicken, the other was loaded with barbecue sauce. Fortunately, neither driver was hurt. But the gas tank of one truck exploded, roasting a thousand chickens under rivers of barbecue sauce. Thank you, we are now approaching the Statue of Liberty.
“Give me your tired, your poor,”
The spieler recited.
“Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me
I lift my lamp before the golden door.”
She was sitting alone as they passed the great monument. Red came to her, carrying a paper cup of coffee; he was puzzled to see tears in her eyes. He did not ask her for a reason.
The reason was simple, albeit mistaken. The girl thought she had been included among the homeless and tempest-tossed yearning to be free.
She hadn’t even been invited.
“I want to ride the subway, Tiger.”
They took the Seventh Avenue line and the ride was as exciting to Dovie-Jean, as a ride in an amusement park. Stations flashed past like stations on some gigantic Ferris wheel. She felt dizzied by its speed and roar and was at last glad, when they reached Canal Street, to get out into the sun of Little Italy.
They took a couple of chairs outside a capuccino café on the north-east corner of Mulberry and Hester.
Ropes of golden tinsel, arching high above Mulberry Street, shook in the September wind and flashed back the sun of September. A great Italian clamor rose on every side, challenging them to games of chance, to kebab and sausage stands while smoke drifted above bright pennons: the festival of San Gennaro.
Grandiosa Festa Annuale—Omaggio al Nostro Miraculo—they walked past the stuffed shell and baked ziti stands, where the smells of calamari, calzone, zeppole manicotti and braccioli merged in the smoke and the gaiety. Cries for ice cream, for games, challenges to try this then that, rose on either hand. Red stopped before the Duck-Water-Balloon game, and paid fifty cents for a chance to win a prize. He was given a water pistol, with half a dozen competitors, and when the woman running the game said, ‘‘Go!” he took steady aim at the target on the duck and a blue balloon began rising, and inflating as it rose, behind the duck. The balloon which burst first won the prize and Red won it. It was a fist-sized puppy made of cotton, which Dovie-Jean fastened proudly to her coat. Red looked proud too.
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