Chester Himes - The big gold dream

They returned to the precinct station and got on the telephones.

Coffin Ed called the morgue and got a description of the corpse and the clothes it had been wearing at the time of death. He then called the downtown Homicide Bureau, got Sergeant Frick on the phone and asked him to send up a photograph of the corpse; but he knew he wouldn't need it. Now he knew the corpse's other name was Rufus Wright.

Grave Digger telephoned the Bronx police to get a line on the location of the Jew's warehouse. He got more than he had expected.

After they had pooled their information, they reached an unspoken accord.

"We had better slip her out the back way," Coffin Ed said. "The lieutenant won't like it."

Grave Digger smiled. "Her and her private God."

They drove, with Alberta between them, crosstown toward the Harlem River. In that section of Park Avenue in back of the 125th Street Station, prostitutes and muggers lurked in the dark shadows of the stanchions of the railway trestle, waiting to take some sucker's money-or his life.

"Where are you taking me?" Alberta asked finally.

"To get your furniture that Rufus stole," Grave Digger replied.

She didn't say another word.

They crossed over on the Ellis Street Bridge and picked up Third Avenue in the Bronx at the subway junction at 149th Street.

When they came to the Jew's warehouse, the moving van was parked at the curb and the wooden gate had been leaned against the iron grille of the store front.

Two uniformed cops were on duty, and a patrol car was parked across the street.

"We're from Harlem," Grave Digger said.

"Yeah, the inspector telephoned us you were coming," one of the harness bulls said.

They took Alberta round to the back door and down into the basement room.

"There was more than this," she said.

"Look around," Coffin Ed suggested.

They turned on all the lights and watched her search the basement, then the whole main floor. She seemed more interested in mattresses than in anything else. When she had finished she asked, "Ain't there no place else?"

"This is all," Grave Digger said.

Tears welled up in her eyes.

"What is it you're looking for?" Coffin Ed asked.

But she didn't say. All she said was, "The Lord is going to make them pay for this."

"If they haven't paid now, they never will," Grave Digger said. "The Jew has been murdered, too."

Her dark face turned slowly gray.

"The Lord struck them dead," she said.

"Not The Lord," Grave Digger corrected. "Somebody down here. Do you want to tell us about it now?"

"I want to talk to my preacher," she said.

"Well, you had better have him get in touch with your friend, The Lord," Grave Digger suggested. "You are going to need Him."

They took her back to the precinct station and had her transferred downtown to the city jail.

Sugar stood beside a felt-covered kidney-shaped table in a room back of a grocery store on Lenox Avenue near 118th Street, watching the stud poker game.

"What time is it?" he asked the game keeper.

The game keeper pulled out an old-fashioned Elgin watch.

"Twenty-eight minutes and fifty-seven seconds past two o'clock," he replied, gold crowns flashing as he talked.

"I got to go," Sugar said.

"What's stopping you?" the game keeper asked.

Sugar picked his way through the dark store, and the door keeper let him out into the street.

He hurried back toward Eighth Avenue, warily approaching the scene where Alberta had been arrested. The crowds had disappeared, and the dark street was practically deserted.

The wrecked cars had been pushed to the curb, and a lone patrolman guarded the supermarket. Otherwise the coast was clear. He found a colored man who had witnessed the rumpus sitting on a tenement stoop, as though waiting for something else to happen. The man told him the cops had found the murder knife on the lady they arrested.

Sugar couldn't figure that one. He knew she hadn't killed him, but what was she doing with the knife? He couldn't think of a single reason. But that could wait. Whatever she was doing with it didn't make any difference now. It spelled trouble, big trouble with a capital T.

He felt in his pocket for a cigarette. He didn't have any. He was hungry, but he didn't have the price of a feed. He didn't know anybody he could borrow so much as half a dollar from. The jokers he played tonk with didn't have any more money than he had ordinarily, and that was only what their women gave them; and he knew they wouldn't lend him any if they had. He didn't have anything valuable enough to sell. He didn't have the talent to pick pockets, if there had been anybody's pocket to pick. He didn't have the nerve to rob anybody. He wasn't strong enough to mug. He hadn't made any connections with other women since he had had Alberta; he had been too lazy. He was a naturally lazy man.

And now he didn't even have any place to sleep, as tired and worn out as he was, having been up all the night before and running around all day long.

That was when he came to realize how much Alberta meant to him.

There was no need now of thinking about ways and means of stealing her money.

The main thing now was to get his woman back. Let her do the worrying. She'd find them some place to stay and something to eat. She might even find her money back. She was a strong, resourceful woman. He could depend on her.

But it would take money to get her out on bail.

He thought of Cassie. She was another kitchen slave, like Alberta. If she could afford to keep that Dummy in chips, maybe she had something cached away. And she and Alberta were such good friends maybe she would dig some of it up.

He went over to Cassie's on 112th Street, but nobody answered.

He stood in the street, feeling low and disgusted. Harlem was rough, he thought. If you didn't have money, you didn't have friends. He thought of the time he had been in jail down South. He had seen a hungry rat lapping up red pepper and sitting in a pan of water to keep its stomach cool.

He saw a man coming from the direction of Seventh Avenue. As the man came nearer Sugar saw that he was big, and wearing an old cap and clean starched overalls. But Sugar's eyes lit on the lunch pail the man was carrying. If he had had a knife, he would have tried to mug the man for his lunch. But he hadn't been able to borrow a knife. No one had been willing to lend him a knife. It wasn't what he might have done with it; it was just that nobody wanted to be without a knife. It wasn't that people wanted to use their knives on other people; it was just that they wanted to have their knives in case other people started cutting on them.

The big workman passed, keeping at a distance, his free hand in his pocket gripping his knife. Not that he suspected Sugar of any bad intentions; he just wanted to be prepared.

Sugar's feet started moving him in the direction of home. It was empty; the furniture was gone; the door was locked; his woman was in jail; and what was more the home didn't belong to him, and he didn't have the key. But it was home, the only one he had.

"Pssst!"

He came near jumping out of his skin.

The big fat black lady was invisible in the dark window.

"Who that?" he asked in a frightened whisper.

She came closer, and he could make out the whites of her eyes in the dim light from the distant street lamp.

"It's me-Miz Teabone."

"Hell," Sugar said evilly. "Why don't you go to bed."

"The police been here looking for you," she informed him in a stage whisper.

"Looking for me?" He was ready to light out and run a crooked mile.

"Grave Digger and Coffin Ed," she whispered theatrically. "Where's your woman?"

"She's in jail."

"I knowed it," Mrs. Teabone said triumphantly. "When I heard over the radio that a Jew-man named Abie had been killed up in the Bronx, I knowed she done it. I got second sight."