Harlem Hit & Run

by Angela Dews

  “And she said you and Cecelia fought about what the bank board was not doing to save the bank.”

  “No comment.”

  He moved to stand between me and the stairs. “I hope you found whatever you were looking for because you are not going back upstairs. And I’m not leaving you here.”

  “I’m done for now. I’m on my way to pick up a copy of the newspaper. Have you seen it yet?”

  “No. Why do I imagine I’m going to hate it?”

  When I’m in New York, I always pick up a copy of the paper at Joselyn’s newsstand at 135th and Malcolm X Boulevard, a couple of blocks over. I love the feeling of anticipation at seeing the Harlem Journal the way 200,000 readers in 60,000 households see it (or so they say, since the paper is not audited).

  I watched Gary pick up the paper and skim the front page—stopping to read some of an article, but I couldn’t be sure which one—then flip some pages.

  He turned to me with the paper in his hand. “Your so-called revelations are wild and irresponsible, and you’re affecting things you can’t even imagine. Even the rendering of the Harlem movie theater. I don’t know how you got it, but now every dog and his brother is going to try to get that project on his piece of dirt. They’re already calling 110th Street SoHa, for South Harlem.”

  I snapped my fingers. “Morningside Heights wants to hook up with its dark uptown brothers?”

  He didn’t answer and walked away under his obnoxious umbrella.

  “Good paper today, Pearl,” Joslyn said. “Feels like you got yourself some ads too.”

  Blind Jocelyn passed along mostly what she heard about the edition from customers who bought theirs earlier in the morning. She no doubt could tell about the abundance of Veteran’s Day ads from the paper’s heft. It was nice and thick.

  “Some people are talking about taking their money out the bank. Do you think I should take my money out?”

  “Everything I know about the bank is in the newspaper,” I told her. “Really. I have no idea. Except we don’t want people withdrawing their money.” I heard myself say “we.” Interesting.

  “Folks like the story ’bout poor Ceel,” she said. “They say the paper looks like an advertisement for an action movie. And they like your publisher’s letter and pictures of the vendors, the local lawless entrepreneurs, that’s a good one.”

  “Thanks. I like it myself.”

  What you don’t get without seeing it is the flair Al gave the paper. Once Daddy let him have his way with the layout, I have never been bored with the way the newspaper looks.

  That’s not always true about the way it reads and I flipped through to give the edition a spot check. Often, when my copy arrived in California, it would just lie in my hands like a dead thing full of camera-ready ads generated by liquor and cigarette manufacturers and stories sent by people with something to celebrate or an ax to grind. And then I would know they had missed. But this edition was alive. I put one copy in my tote.

  I also put one each of the Times, the Post, the News and Newsday in one of Jocelyn’s plastic bags, and I took the bag and my tote with Ceel’s lists and notebook up the hill to Viola’s in a gypsy cab.

  C H A P T E R • 22

  * * *

  Viola’s house might have been the kind of showplace the Queen of Harlem would pull together for herself if she liked mock French provincial. There was even a small chandelier in the bathroom.

  I was glad to have time to spend with Virginia before leaving again. Although I was home longer than usual, I had been so busy. She was now an eight-year-old dynamo with a face full of eyes and mouth and a head full of hair. Viola was on one side and I was on the other and we loosened the last few of the tiny braids while Ginny watched a video on a huge television.

  “This is the kind of crap you’re likely to buy on the street now,” Viola said, indicating Ginny’s murky movie and keeping her hands busy in the little girl’s hair.

  “Al is going to make some money with his first-rate copies,” she said.

  “You know about that?”

  “Bobby scooped some of them up from the table yesterday morning,” she said.

  The video images were supposed to keep Virginia occupied while we talked woman talk. Somewhere in our distant girl memories we must have known her ears were tuned to our conversation; our words were all tangling in her crinkles like glitter. She was another black girl in a line of millions, hearing her version of what’s real through the antennae on her regularly and roughly tended head.

  I said as much to Viola who said, “Like boys in barbershops, only mostly all they hear is lies.”

  I asked, “The first thing I want you to tell me is why Daddy withdrew most of his money from Independence National Bank?”

  She stood up. Ginny said, “Ouch.”

  “Honey, let me finish making our brunch. Then we’ll do the last of your hair.”

  Ginny starting singing, “Good-by. Good-by. Gotta go now.”

  “Do you know where that’s from?” I asked her.

  “Fingertips. Little Stevie Wonder. I can play ‘I Wish’ on my guitar.”

  “She loves I Love Lucy and The Temptations too,” Viola said. “You know these kids are reincarnated from the boys from Vietnam. They brought their memories back with them.”

  We heard her singing up the stairs as I joined Viola in her kitchen where she was making chicken and waffles—one of her specialties—and flitting around in an apron. Daddy used to love that shit.

  “I like the idea that maybe some boy or some girl might have returned as this beautiful, curious child,” she said.

  “I don’t know what to think about past lives. But I do believe karma affects moment after moment in this life. For instance, you must be doing something right or something wrong really well. Your bar was all over Ceel’s money lists.”

  “A bar is a cash business. You’re liable to see a lot of activity from my bar at that bank.”

  “How long have you had your account?”

  “My first husband had it when I got here and I kept it when he died.”

  “That’s right. You came from Ohio.”

  “Ohio was where my ancestors came across from enslavement in Kentucky.”

  “You and Daddy had that in common. What made you leave and come to New York?”

  “They counseled me to find my good elsewhere.”

  “Your ancestors speak to you?”

  “Yours too. They all do. You all just don’t listen.”

  “One more thing,” I said. “I saw you with Bobby Bop on the street. How do you know him?”

  “I’m a club. He plays at the Kat. It looked like he needed an intervention yesterday.” She laughed. “It was fortunate for him that I decided to be on the street.”

  “I called you yesterday to ask you about it when I was writing the story.”

  “Pearl, I hope you’re not going to keep investigating all this bank business and what happened to Cecelia. You seem to keep forgetting you’re not a real cop. You’ve been out in Hollywood pretending to be a police woman. That’s acting. That doesn’t make this your job.”

  “I was ready to let Obsidian do it. But he can’t now.”

  “Neither can you, Pearl. Get the glasses please. I’m making mimosas.”

  I went to the cherry cabinet with the stemware showing through glass. “House renovations? They must have cost you some money.”

  “They did.”

  “You all are doing quite well up here in Harlem. Cecelia has some lovely art pieces. Was she making that kind of money at the bank?”

  Viola walked closer. “Pearl, I know you. You think you got where you are because you’re smarter than any black person who lived before you showed up with Charles Washington as your daddy. But you need to let me know what you’re doing. You really can’t do this alone.”

  “Maybe,” I said. And I made a decision that took me across the space I usually kept between her business and mine. “I found another withdrawal list Cecelia
made. Can you tell me anything about these companies? They’re not familiar to me.”

  I handed her the lists I had just taken from Cecelia’s Chinese trunk and when she saw them she squealed, actually squealed. “I love this. You know some of these are music names. Let me make a copy.”

  “Why would she have a separate envelope with withdrawals from September until now?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Did you find anything else?”

  “What do you mean? Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Anything else?”

  “Did you see the newspaper?” I asked. “Everything else is in the paper,” I lied. And I handed her the copy of the Journal out of my tote.

  “I haven’t seen the paper yet. Let’s sit down and I’ll look it over while you talk to Virginia. I’m sure she has a story to tell. I love her stories. But, you know.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  As I was leaving, she gave me back the original of the lists and I counted to make sure I had them all.

  She held up the front page of the paper. “This front page is so real it’s hard to look at. You took pictures of the car when he killed Ceel. But you don’t have a photograph of the driver?”

  “No. I was focused on her and he was driving away when I turned back to capture the car.”

  “I’ll call you when I get back from Chi.”

  C H A P T E R • 23

  * * *

  After brunch, it had stopped raining and I stepped across the street to the Kit Kat. Stevie was on the jukebox singing “Isn’t She Lovely” and I didn’t recognize the bartender. Deliverymen were moving things in and out. I ordered a Heineken.

  “Vy’s bartenders are all kind of special these days,” I offered by way of conversation.

  He didn’t answer me. Reticence is a tricky thing in a bartender in front of a drinker who wants to talk. Then again, maybe he didn’t have to be a talker with those defined muscles in his brown arms below the sleeves of his Rick James t-shirt.

  He came back with my Heineken. “You’re Pearl Washington the actress, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. And I’ll call you Rick.”

  He had a killer smile on him.

  I sat and watched him and the deliveries long enough to be in the way.

  When I got outside, I decided to get the establishing shot of the stately sisters of connected sandstones that included the damaged building two doors away from Viola’s house. It was still being secured and protected by tarps. But whoever was doing the work had left after erecting some scaffolding and posting danger signs.

  I walked across the street and stepped around a police barrier and then stepped inside. It wasn’t easy to navigate the site, but I took several pictures of the piece of brass with the house number that had shaken loose from the façade. The camera was as good as Karl promised and I could imagine a cluster of photos in a spread in the newspaper about this address where some of the fake companies on Ceel’s list were supposed to be doing business.

  Not wanting to broadcast my trespassing, I stopped before I stepped out, and I was careful to peek up and down the sidewalk. Then I flattened against the wooden support for cover and from there I watched Al, the newspaper’s production manager, walking with Bobby Bop, the jazz man. As they reached the area where I was hiding, I held my breath until I heard their footsteps moving away. I saw them walk into the building next door.

  Odd. Playing music at the Kit Kat Klub must have brought them together after the fight I witnessed out the window just before Cecelia was killed.

  I walked around to the alley to get some pictures of the back of the stricken building. I noticed the back window was open in the building where Bobby and Al went in. Obie had identified the house as the site of the black-market factory which is probably why they needed the extra power of the generator that sat under a large 3-sided box. I left my bag with the newspapers beside the box, pulled over a milk crate and climbed up with my camera in my tote.

  That’s how I found myself standing, looking in the window at two rooms of a parlor floor apartment, which were stuffed with equipment and boxes. I recognized enough to figure out I was looking at audiocassette recorders and color photocopiers and the stuff you need to make hundreds of fake tapes at a time with fake packaging.

  I thought the junk hid me because it kept me from seeing all the way into the front room. I took some pictures and was getting ready to climb down when the music stopped and I could hear their voices through the open window.

  “I’m going to keep my two large to pay for what you stole yesterday off my table.” I recognized Al’s voice.

  “We’ll call that loan even,” Bobby said. “But that includes the next movie. The deal is we’ll buy your product and distribute it.”

  “I’m not doing a freelance business with you,” Al said. “And that’s not nearly enough money if I was. We’re not talking about a tray of dance mixes or some crap shot in a movie theater with a camera in a backpack.”

  “Freelance is the only business you’re going to do,” Bobby said. “I don’t have partners.”

  I took another picture of the scene, but then I had to include Al as he got bigger in the next shot when he covered the distance from the front to the back.

  Al said, “Give me that camera.”

  “I don’t think so,” I told him.

  He frowned. “This ain’t no Hollywood movie, Pearl. You’re going to get us killed.”

  “Got yourself a little problem?” Bobby Bop said as he walked from the front room.

  “We’ve both got ourselves a little problem,” Al told him. “This is Pearl Washington from the newspaper.”

  “Sounds like she needs to be persuaded to give up her camera.”

  When he got to us, I could see he had a 9 millimeter in his hand. Not good.

  He was an understated crowd pleaser in a Zegna suit and a big gold Rolex watch. Although he’d probably never been called Red because he was a deep dark brown, there was red in his skin.

  He got close and looked into my face. “I saw you in the movies. You look better in the movies. I almost hate to shoot you.”

  Al intervened. “You can’t shoot her.”

  “Actually, I can,” he said. “Give me the camera. And know you can’t put any of this in your newspaper. You know that?”

  I didn’t know that, but it wasn’t something to say. And I thought about what might buy me an exit from an impetuous action gone very bad. It was somewhat shameful to do it, but I decided to expose and therefore enlist the troops.

  “This isn’t a good place to make mischief,” I said. “The movie police from L.A. have been watching this location and several others. You won’t get away.”

  “I know about that. That’s why there’s no work happening and we have this space to ourselves today. But my people inside tell me we have a couple of weeks. We can get a lot done in two weeks.”

  Some noise might have warned me that the cops had arrived if I hadn’t been so engrossed in the business on the other side of the window. Instead, the knocking at the street door downstairs made us all jump. It got louder, and then it turned into a battering sound that was not about permission.

  The Hollywood P.I.s were breaking through the heavy reinforced front door downstairs.

  Bobby ran toward the front. Al climbed out the window and we both climbed down from the wooden box. That’s why the New York police people caught us on the ground in the alley.

  “Put your hands in the air,” was the first I heard from my police woman. I turned. She was probably in better shape than she seemed in the chunky bulletproof vest.

  “I said put your hands up. Now!” she said to me.

  That was a surprise. “Me?” I sounded shrill even to my own ears. Since when did the police make me nervous?

  Al was not having a conversation with the New York City policemen who were pushing him toward the alley opening.

  “You were maybe crawling into that window? Maybe you forgot your keys?” she said to me. />
  Sarcasm wasn’t one of the things the sister was good at. But she was armed, so it probably didn’t matter. The thing that disturbed me was that I couldn’t tell whether she was serious about me being a suspect. I decided I’d better play it straight.

  “I was eavesdropping on the conversation they were having inside from the top of the generator outside. You saw me climbing down.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  C H A P T E R • 24

  * * *

  I had to do the perp walk through a gauntlet of paparazzi at the 28th Precinct. I must say, I finally understood the impulse to put a coat over your head.

  But my training and natural instincts kicked in, and I gave them a little smile, tossed my hair and squared my shoulders. Because I was posing, they caught me at it again and again. It didn’t take long for someone to recognize me.

  “Lt. Knight! Over here!”

  “You’ve got something for him,” one reporter said and shot his finger at me in Lt. Knight’s trademark wisecrack. They all laughed.

  “Thought you were a good guy.”

  I gave them the poster smile and would have stopped. But the police kept pushing me along, rather roughly actually. I suspect there’s some resentment about cops who get a ridiculous salary and a happy ending. I left a message for Attorney Robinson who wasn’t in the office when I called.

  It appeared the big counterfeit movie bust happened while I was climbing on and off my spy box. The Hollywood militia were bragging about breaking a piracy ring in West and Central Harlem, Washington Heights and the South Bronx where they discovered duplicating machines and bootlegged copies of current hits, like Godfather III, Ghost, Home Alone, Misery and last year’s Driving Miss Daisy and Last Stop Harlem.

  I wrote it all down.

  It took a while to straighten things out, longer than it would have if the police had been willing to cut me some slack. The only message the detective who questioned me conveyed to me directly was that he was in charge and I was in trouble. Too bad it wasn’t my friend Officer Stanley. At least we wouldn’t have had to go through all the preliminaries.