Chester Himes - The big gold dream

"The Jew!" Sugar exclaimed. "He dead?"

"He ain't alive," she said juicily. "She beat his head in with a hammer."

"She didn't do it," he said loyally. "It must have been somebody else."

"You is the only other somebody else," she said.

Again his feet got the message before it arrived at his brain. He was running. He didn't know where he was going, but he was on his way.

Something came up fast behind him and grabbed him by the sleeve. It sounded like a winded animal. His scalp rolled. It was late at night, he was alone on the street and he didn't have a knife. He tried to put on speed. He was afraid to look around.

"Let go!" he gasped in terror.

The thing tightened its grip and pulled up beside him. They turned the corner into Lenox Avenue, neck and neck. The thing grunted urgently. He looked about and saw a gaping mouth circled with even white teeth in a broad flat face. But behind the teeth was a gaping black hole where normally a tongue should have been.

"Dummy!" he exclaimed, panting.

He stopped and sucked in air.

"Jesus Christ, man, don't scare me like that," he complained.

Dummy kept grunting. His soft brown eyes, peering out from beneath knobs of scar tissue, were urgent.

"Man, stop making those noises," Sugar said.

Dummy clutched his hand and stuck a dirty scrap of writing paper in it.

Sugar took it and turned to let the light fall over his shoulder. He read: the mens wants you /lay low/go to mammy stormy/she safe.

He looked up.

Dummy's head jerked anxiously up and down.

He nodded and said, "Okay."

Dummy grinned, and his mouth looked like an exhibit of dental plates.

He was a short, heavy-set Hawaiian-looking man with thick, gray-shot, curly hair. His coarse, lumpy face was interlaced with tiny scars. He had cauliflowers for ears and pile hammers for hands. Muscles bulged from his dark brown T-shirt, but fat put him in the heavyweight division. He might have been any age from thirty to fifty.

He made an O with his right thumb and forefinger and turned down Lenox toward 116th Street. Sugar watched him for a moment, He had the half-sliding, bent-over gait of a full-grown gorilla.

Sugar wondered how he knew the police were looking for him. Where did he come into the story? What was his pitch? Did he know about the money?

On sudden impulse he decided to follow Dummy. But it wasn't easy. Dummy kept looking to both sides and over his shoulder with the instinctive caution of a man who can't hear. Sugar stepped into a doorway and let Dummy turn the corner into 116th Street. Then he ran after him in his high-kneed, churning, double-jointed gait.

He rounded the corner just in time to see Dummy disappear into the shadows beneath the entrance to Sweet Prophet's Temple of Wonderful Prayer.

Mammy Stormy's was over on Seventh Avenue near 115th Street. If Dummy saw him walking down 116th Street, he would naturally figure he was on his way to Mammy Stormy's. But if Dummy had gone into the Temple, he would soon know.

Above a narrow entrance, wedged between a dismal grocery store and a curtained hair-dressing parlor, was a small sign hanging in a glass box with the faintly discernible word: Hotel. At night the hotel entrance served the resident prostitutes as a sentry box and transient drunks as a water closet. During the day dogs dropped in to find out what the neighboring dogs had been eating.

As Sugar approached, a teenage girl came down the steep flight of stairs. Her cotton dress was rumpled and torn, and her straightened hair was mussed and stuck out from her skull like a mangled cactus plant. She was a thin girl, with small breasts, and her thin black face was wet with tears and ugly from crying,

Dummy came quickly from the entrance to the Temple and trotted across the street. Sugar kept coming toward them, trying to look as though it wasn't any business of his.

"He Georgiaed me," the girl told Dummy hysterically. "He sent me to Georgia."

Sugar couldn't help but hear her. He knew she meant that a man she had taken to her room had shown her some money, but afterwards had refused to pay her. He was surprised to learn that Dummy was trying to pimp.

Dummy told the girl to shut up with sign language, but she didn't understand. She thought he didn't understand what she was trying to tell him. She tried to demonstrate with gestures how the man had used her and put her out of the room without paying her.

"You ought to lay for him and rob him," she said. "He got a big roll of money; I saw it."

Dummy grabbed her and shook her, trying to make her hush. He didn't want Sugar to know what was happening. But the girl thought he was going to beat her because she had let herself be cheated.

"Don't beat me," she begged. "I'll help you. We can both rob him easy; he ain't got nothing but a knife."

Dummy pushed her back into the hotel entrance. She fell on the stairs and didn't try to get up. In his excitement he was trying to talk. The sounds made Sugar's flesh crawl.

Dummy took a dirty scratch pad and a pencil stub from his hip pocket and scrawled hurriedly: git goin man / the gunmens be here soon, and gave it to Sugar.

"How do you know the cops is looking for me if you been here all night with this chippy whore?" Sugar asked suspiciously.

Dummy wrote, they found the knife you throwed away on alburda.

Sugar's eyes popped. "The knife I throwed away! What knife?"

Dummy wrote: the one you stabbed rufus with.

"Man, Jesus Christ, look here," Sugar began, but Dummy grabbed him by the arm and pointed.

At the end of the block the dim lights of a small black sedan were turning slowly into 116th Street. It was now close to four o'clock.

A gargling sound issued from Dummy's mouth as he tried desperately to talk. But Sugar got the message anyway. From that distance he couldn't recognize the car nor see the faces of its occupants. But only Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson could raise that look on Dummy's face.

The only way to go without being seen was up the stairs. Sugar leaped over the huddled figure of the little prostitute and started quickly up the steep flights of stairs. Dummy stuck a foot inside and kicked the girl, and she jumped to her feet and followed Sugar.

"Ain't you coming, too," Sugar called softly down the stairs.

But Dummy sprinted across the street and vanished in the shadows of the entrance to the Temple.

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed had what they called their "stool pigeon route," which took them through the congested slum area of Harlem known as The Valley. Whenever possible they covered this route in the early hours of morning, shortly before going off duty, and contacted their stool pigeons.

Each stool pigeon had a place of contact and a time. They were not expected to show up every night, because neither did the detectives; but, if they missed three nights straight running, it was their little hip pockets, as they say in Harlem, which meant they were in trouble. Care was taken that no stool pigeon ever got to know another stool pigeon.

When they showed in their battered black sedan, idling slowly along the street, the stool pigeon at his post would give the signal. The signal was for him to cut whatever he was doing and duck into the nearest doorway, as though he were ducking the cops. After which the detectives would turn into the first dark street and park unobtrusively in the shadows with the lights cut. Then wait. Sometimes the stool pigeon could make it in a few minutes. Sometimes it took more than a half hour. The stool pigeon had to be given time to shake his companions and make a clean getaway. There was no sense in having a stool pigeon who was known to be a stool pigeon.

After returning from the Bronx with Alberta Wright, the detectives got on their route. They needed information about Rufus and the Jew. The Medical Examiner's report, photographs, fingerprints, the findings of the criminal laboratory and all the results of modern police techniques-including police theories-were generally useless in solving murders in Harlem. Interrogations helped but little because the criminal and lowerclass elements of Harlem were for the most part natural-born and highly talented liars. Third-degree methods were useful, but they couldn't beat the truth out of everybody. If there were no eyewitness accounts, the detectives had to depend on stool pigeons.