Chester Himes - All shot up

Sassafras went ahead of Mister Baron, elbowing through the jam. She stopped and turned around.

“Where is the phones?”

“In the restaurant,” Mister Baron said. “We have to go all the way to the back.”

“You go ahead,” she said, pulling aside so he could pass.

A joker on a bar stool reached out and tugged the tassels of her cap.

“Little Red Riding Hood,” he cooed. “How about you.”

She snatched her cap from his hand and said, “How about your baby sister?”

The man drew back in mock affront. “I don’t play that.”

“Then pat your feet,” she said.

The man grinned. “What you drinking, baby.”

Her glance had caught the smoky oil paintings of two brownskin amazon nudes reclining on Elysian fields above the mirror behind the bar. She tried not to laugh, but she couldn’t help it.

The man followed her glance. “Hell, baby, you don’t need much as what they got.”

She gave herself a shake. “At least what I got moves,” she said.

Suddenly she remembered Mister Baron. She started off. The man grabbed her by the arm.

“What’s the rush, baby?”

She tore herself loose and squeezed hurriedly to the rear. Glass doors opened into the restaurant, and she bumped into a waitress going through. The phone booth was to the rear on the left. The door was closed. She snatched it open. A man was phoning, but it wasn’t Mister Baron.

“’Scuse me,” she said.

“Come on in,” the man said, grabbing at her.

She jerked away and looked about wildly. Mister Baron was nowhere in sight.

She stopped the waitress coming back.

“Did you see a little prissy man with wavy hair come through here?” she asked.

The waitress looked her over from head to feet.

“You that hard up, baby?”

“Oh shoo you!” she cried and dashed through the swinging doors into the kitchen.

“Did a man come through here?” she asked.

The big, sweating, bald-headed cook was up a tree.

“Git out of here, whore!” he shouted in a rage.

The dishwasher grinned. “Come ’round to the back door,” he said.

The cook grabbed a skillet and advanced on her, and she backed through the doorway. She looked through the dining room and bar again, but Mister Baron had disappeared.

She went outside and told Roman, “He’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“I don’t know. He got away.”

“Where in the hell was you?”

“I was watching him all the time, but he just disappeared.”

She looked like she was about to cry.

“Get in the car,” he said. “I’ll look for him.”

She took her turn sitting in the hottest car in all of New York State while he searched the bar and restaurant for Mister Baron. He didn’t have any better luck with the cook.

“He must have got out through the kitchen,” he said when he returned to the car.

“The cook would have seen him.”

“It’d take a shotgun to talk to that evil man.”

He climbed in behind the wheel and sat there looking dejected. “You let him get away, now what us going to do?” he said accusingly.

“It ain’t my fault that we is in this mess,” she flared. “If you hadn’t been acting such a fool right from the start might not none of this happened.”

“I knew what I was doing. If he’d tried to pull off something crooked, I was trying to trick him by making him think I was a square.”

“Well, you sure made him,” she said. “Asking do it use much gas and then looking at the oil stick and saying you guessed the motor was all right.”

He defended himself. “I wanted all those people who was watching us to know I was buying the car so they could be witnesses in case anything happened.”

“Well, where is they now? Or has some more got to happen?”

“Ain’t no need of us arguing between ourselves,” he said. “We got to do something.”

“Well, let’s go see a fortune teller,” she said. “I know one who tells folks where to find things they has lost.”

“Let’s hurry then,” he said. “We got to get rid of this car ’fore daylight. It’s hotter than a West Virginia coke oven.”

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed were buttoning up their coats when the telephone rang in the captain’s office.

Lieutenant Anderson took the call and looked up. “It’s for one of you.”

“I’ll take it,” Grave Digger said and picked up the receiver. “Jones speaking.”

The voice at the other end said, “It’s me, Lady Gypsy, Digger.”

He waited.

“You’re looking for a certain car, ain’t you? A black Buick with Yonkers plates?”

“How do you know that?”

“I’m a fortune teller, ain’t I?”

Grave Digger signaled Coffin Ed to cut in, and jiggled the hook.

Coffin Ed picked up one of the extensions on the desk and Lieutenant Anderson the other. The switchboard operator knew what to do.

“Where is it?” Grave Digger asked.

“It’s sitting as big as life down on the street in front of my place,” Lady Gypsy said.

Grave Digger palmed the mouthpiece and whispered an address on 116th Street

Anderson picked up the intercom and ordered the sergeant on the switchboard to alert all prowl cars and await further instructions.

“Who’s in it?” Grave Digger asked.

“Ain’t nobody in it at the moment,” Lady Gypsy said. “I got a square and his girl friend up here in my seance chamber who drove up in it. They got a wild story about a lost Cadillac-”

“Hold the story,” Grave Digger said. “And keep them there, even if you have to use ghosts. Me and Ed will be there before you can say Jack Robinson.”

“I’ll send the cars on,” Anderson said.

“Give us three minutes and seal off the block,” Grave Digger said. “Have them come in quietly with the blinkers off.”

Lady Gypsy’s joint was on the second floor of a tenement on 116th Street, midway between Lexington and Third Avenues. On the ground floor was an ice and coal store.

The painted tin plaque in a box beside the entrance read:

Lady Gypsy

Perceptions-Divinations

Prophesies-Revelations

Numbers Given

The word Findings had been recently added. Business had been bad.

Once upon a time Lady Gypsy had lived an ultrarespectable private life in an old dark house on upper Convent Avenue with her two bosom associates: Sister Gabriel, who sold tickets to heaven and begged alms for nonexistent charities; and Big Kathy, who ran a whorehouse on East 131st Street. They were knows in that upper-crust colored neighborhood as “The Three Black Widows.” But when Sister Gabriel got his throat cut by one of the trio of con men responsible for the acid-throwing caper that permanently scarred Coffin Ed’s face, the two remaining “Widows” let the house go, relinquished respectability and holed up in their dens of vice.

Now Lady Gypsy was seldom seen outside the junk-crammed five-room apartment where she contacted the spirits and sometimes gave messages to the initiate that were out of this world.

It was a normal five-minute drive on open streets from the 126th Street precinct station, but Grave Digger made it in his allotted three. Sleet blew along the frozen streets like dry sand, making the tires sing. The car didn’t skid, but it shifted from side to side of the street, as though on a sanded spot of slick ice. Grave Digger drove from memory of the streets, with the bright lights on, more to be seen than to see, because sighting through his windshield was like looking through frosted glass. His siren was silent.

A prowl car was parked in front of Lady Gypsy’s but no sign of the Buick.

“Anderson jumped the gun,” Coffin Ed said.