“I get off duty here at six o’clock,” he said.
She understood at once, and forced a smile for his benefit. “I imagine I’ll be back by then.”
He nodded. “When you go outside,” he said, “walk down the hill to Green Street. Turn right.”
She waited for more directions, but there were no more forthcoming, so she said, “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said.
The elevator reached the main floor, and she walked through the empty lobby to the street, and started down the State Street hill.
Six blocks south and one block west of the Conning Towers, Joshua Crawford sat in a chair beside the CID man’s desk and said, “I just don’t remember a thing. It’s all a blank.”
“Lawyer Crawford,” said the CID man, with heavy emphasis on the first word, “I hope you aren’t going to try for a temporary insanity plea. You had the gun on you. We can prove premeditation with no trouble at all.”
Crawford rubbed a damp palm across his face. “I must have been crazy,” he whispered, meaning it sincerely. “I must have been crazy.” He looked pleadingly at the CID man. “My wife,” he said. “This is going to be hell for my wife.”
The CID man waited.
“In many ways,” said Crawford seriously, “my wife is an excellent woman.” His hand came up to his face again.
The CID man waited. He was bored. He had nothing to do but wait now. They always cried before confessing.
The first two blocks of Green Street were dark and narrow and lifeless, except for an occasional derelict asleep beside an empty bottle in a doorway. The third block was just as narrow, but brightly lit from a double row of bars, and people were constantly on the move. Cars were parked on both sides of the street, leaving only one narrow lane open in the middle for the one-way traffic, of which there was practically none. The derelicts who were still shakily on their feet were all over this block, mingling with short, slender, bright-eyed homosexuals, hard-looking hustlers, strange-uniformed sailors — since Albany is also a port city, shipping grain and manufactured goods to the European markets — and clusters of skinny, black-jacketed teenagers. It didn’t look good to Honour Mercy; it was lower and harder and more primitive than anything she’d ever run into before, and so she kept on walking.
The fourth block was half-bright and half-dark. Bars were scattered here and there on both sides of the street, but crammed in with them were dark, empty-windowed tenements. And in the doorways and ground-floor windows of the tenements were women, watching the street. This was closer to the world Honour Mercy knew, and so she stopped at the first dark doorway on her side of the street and looked at the Negro woman standing there, “I just got to town,” she said.
“Come in here off the street!” hissed the woman.
Honour Mercy, surprised, did as she was told, and the woman said, “What you want?”
“I just got here,” repeated Honour Mercy. “I don’t know what things are like.”
“They ain’t good,” said the woman. “The goddam police is on the rampage.” She laughed harshly at Honour Mercy’s blank look. “No, they ain’t honest,” she said. “They just greedy. They want all the bread they can get. The only way to make a dime in this town is hustle on your own and take your chances on being picked up.” She looked out at the street and ducked back, clutching Honour Mercy’s arm. “Get back in here!”
Honour Mercy, not understanding what was going on, cowered with the woman in the darkest corner of the entranceway. Outside, a three-year-old Buick drove slowly by, two men in the front seat. The car was painted black, with small gray letters on the front door reading, “POLICE,” and a red light, now off, attached to the top of the right fender.
The car slid by, slow and silent, and the hand gripping Honour Mercy’s arm slowly relaxed. Honour Mercy, impressed by it all, whispered, “Who was that?”
“The King,” said the woman, and the way she said it, it wasn’t as funny as it should have been. “He runs this section. He’s the only cop in the city dares walk down this street alone. He goes into a bar — crowded, jumpin’ — and he picks out the man he’s after, and he says, ‘You come with me.’ And he walks out, with the guy at his heels, and nobody stops him. Any other cop in this town try that, he’d get his badge shoved down his throat.”
“How can he do it?”
The woman shrugged. “He breaks heads,” she said. “And he’s straight. He don’t take a penny, and he don’t make a phony rap. Get rid of him, you get somebody bad down here to take his place.”
When Honour Mercy left the hotel, it had seemed simple enough. She would go to work. Now, it didn’t seem so simple any more. This city had a set-up unlike anything she’d ever seen before.
“You got a pad?” the woman asked suddenly.
Honour Mercy shook her head.
“No good,” said the woman. “You stuck to guys with cars. That means you got to stay on the sidewalk, where they can see you. And where the law can see you. You ought to wait till you get a pad.”
“I need money tonight,” said Honour Mercy. It wasn’t strictly true. The hotel wouldn’t start asking for money for a day or two at least. What Honour Mercy needed tonight was to work, to be doing something that would take her mind off the defection of Richie Parsons.
The woman shrugged again. “Then you got to hit the pavement. Look out for one-tone cars, specially Buicks and Oldsmobiles. That’s the law, whether it says so on the car or not.”
“Thanks a lot,” said Honour Mercy. “I appreciate it.”
“We all in the same racket,” said the woman.
“What — what are the prices around here?”
The woman looked her over. “You’re white,” she said. “And you’re young. You could get away with charging ten.”
Ten. That was low pay indeed, low, low pay after New York. Honour Mercy decided right there to get enough money together to get back to New York as quickly as possible. Back to New York, where the organization was so much smoother, the prices so much higher, the clientele so much better. Back to New York, and, come to think of it, back to Joshua Crawford.
Joshua was going to ask her to be his mistress. She knew that, but she’d avoided acknowledging it before this, because it would have brought up the problem of Richie. But now that Richie had left her, there was no problem. She would get the money quickly, get back to New York, and she would become Joshua Crawford’s mistress. It would be a good life.
“Thanks again,” she said to the woman, and left the darkness of the doorway.
She walked for twenty minutes before she got a customer. Single-color Buicks and Oldsmobiles had driven by, slowly, the drivers watching the sidewalks, but she hadn’t even glanced at them as they passed her. She had walked purposefully, as though to a set destination, when cars like that passed her, and she hadn’t been stopped.
The customer — or customers — arrived in a late-forties Ford, amateurishly painted gold and black. There were four teenagers in the car, and the driver slowed to a crawl, matching Honour Mercy’s speed, and they went half a block that way before he murmured. “Hey. You lookin’ for somebody?”
She turned and gave him the big smile. “Nobody in particular,” she said.
He stopped the car completely. “Come on over here.”
She went, studying the driver’s face. He was about seventeen, sharp-nosed and dissatisfied-looking, with a crewcut. The other three were all in the shadows within the car, but she knew they would look very much like the driver.
When she got to the car, the driver said, “How much?”
“I charge ten dollars—” she noticed the change of expression in time “—but with a group like this, of course, it’s cheaper.”