“She’s up with the gold-mine pitch?”
“Must be.”
“What are they using for gold ore?”
“They got a few phony rocks.”
Grave Digger turned to Coffin Ed. “We can take them at Big Kathy’s.”
“I got a better plan,” Goldy said. “I’m goin’ to load Jackson with a phony roll and let Gus Parsons contact him. Gus’ll take him in to their headquarters and you-all can follow them.”
Grave Digger shook his head. “You just said they took Jackson on The Blow.”
“But Gus wasn’t with them. Gus don’t know Jackson. By the time Gus finds out his mistake you’ll have the collar on them all.”
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed exchanged looks. Coffin Ed nodded.
“Okay, Bud, we’ll take them tomorrow night,” Grave Digger said, then added grimly, “I suppose you’re your brother’s beneficiary.”
“I’m just tryin’ to help him, that’s all,” Goldy protested. “He wants his woman back.”
“I’ll bet,” Coffin Ed said.
They let Goldy out of the car and drove off.
“Isn’t there a warrant out for Jackson?” Coffin Ed remarked.
“Yeah, stole five hundred dollars from his boss.”
“We’ll take him too.”
“We’ll take them all.”
The next afternoon when Jackson had finished eating, Goldy gave him a fill-in on the gang’s setup and told him his plan to trap them.
“And here’s the bait.”
He made a huge roll out of stage money, encircled it with two bona fide ten-dollar bills, and bound it with an elastic band. That was the way jokers in Harlem carried their money when they wanted to big-time. He tossed it onto the table.
“Put that in your pocket, Bruzz, and you’re goin’ to be one big fat black piece of cheese. You’re goin’ to look like the biggest piece of cheese them rats ever seen.”
Jackson looked at the phony roll without touching it.
He didn’t like any part of Goldy’s plan. Anything could go wrong. If there was a rumpus the detectives might grab him and let the real criminals go, like that phony marshal had done. Of course, these were real detectives. But they were colored detectives just the same. And from what he’d heard about them they believed in shooting first and questioning the bodies afterward.
“Course if you don’t want your gal back—” Goldy prodded.
Jackson picked up the phony roll and slipped it into his side pants-pocket. Then he crossed himself and knelt beside the table on the floor. Devoutly bowing his head, he whispered a prayer.
“Dear Lord in heaven, if You can’t see fit to help this poor sinner in his hour of need, please don’t help those dirty murderers either.”
“What are you prayin’ for, man?” Goldy said. “Ain’t nothin’ can happen to you. You goin’ to be covered.”
“That’s what I’m worrying about,” Jackson said. “I don’t want to get covered too deep...”
10
The Braddock Bar was on the corner of 126th Street and Eighth Avenue, next door to a Negro-owned loan and insurance company and the Harlem weekly newspaper.
It had an expensive-looking front, small English-type windows with diamond-shaped leaded panes. Once it had claimed respectability, had been patronized by the white and colored businessmen in the neighborhood and their respectable employees. But when the whorehouses, gambling clubs, dope dens had taken over 126th Street to prey on the people from 125th Street, it had gone into bad repute.
“This bar has gone from sugar to shit,” Jackson muttered to himself when he arrived there at seven o’clock.
The cold snowy February night was already getting liquored up.
Jackson squeezed into a place before the long bar, ordered a shot of rye, and looked at his neighbors nervously.
The bar was jammed with the lowest Harlem types, pinched-faced petty hustlers, sneak thieves, pickpockets, muggers, dope pushers, big rough workingmen in overalls and leather jackets. Everyone looked mean or dangerous.
Three hefty bartenders patrolled the sloppy floor behind, silently filling shot glasses and collecting coins.
A jukebox at the front was blaring, a whiskey-voice was shouting, “Rock me, daddy, eight to the beat. Rock me, daddy, from my head to my feet.”
Goldy had instructed Jackson to flash his roll as soon as he’d ordered his first drink, but Jackson didn’t have the nerve. He felt that everyone was watching him. He ordered a second drink. Then he noticed that everyone was watching everyone else, as though each one regarded his neighbor as either a potential victim or a stool pigeon for the police.
“Everybody in here lookin’ for something, ain’t they?” the man next to him said.
Jackson gave a start. “Looking for something?”
“See them whores, they’re looking for a trick. See them muggers ganged around the door, they looking for a drunk to roll. These jokers in here are just waiting for a man to flash his money.”
“Seems like I’ve seen you before,” Jackson said. “Your name ain’t Gus Parsons, is it?”
The man looked at Jackson suspiciously and began moving away. “What you want to know my name for?”
“I just thought I knew you,” Jackson said, fingering the roll in his pocket, trying to get up enough courage to flash it.
He was saved for the moment by a fight.
Two rough-looking men jumped about the floor, knocking over chairs and tables, cutting at one another with switchblade knives. The customers at the bar screwed their heads about to watch, but held on to their places and kept their hands on their drinks. The whores rolled their eyes and looked bored.
One joker slashed the other’s arm. A big-lipped wound opened in the tight leather jacket, but nothing came out but old clothes — two sweaters, three shirts, a pair of winter underwear. The second joker slashed back, opened a wound in the front of his foe’s canvas jacket. But all that came out of the wound was dried printer’s ink from the layers of old newspapers the joker had wrapped about him to keep warm. They kept slashing away at one another like two rag dolls battling in buck-dancing fury, spilling old clothes and last week’s newsprint instead of blood.
The customers laughed.
“How them studs goin’ to get cut?” someone remarked. “Might as well be fightin’ old ragman’s bag.”
“They ain’t doin’ nothin’ but cheatin’ the Salvation Army.”
“They ain’t tryin’ to cut each other, man. Them studs know each other. They just tryin’ to freeze each other to death.”
One of the bartenders went out with a sawed-off baseball bat and knocked one of the fighters on the head. When that one fell the other one leaned down to cut him again and the bartender knocked him on the head also.
Two white cops strolled in lazily, as though they had smelled the fight, and took the battlers away.
Jackson thought it might be safe then to flash his roll. He took out the phony bills, carefully peeled off a ten, threw it onto the bar.
“Take out for two rye whiskeys,” he said.
A dead silence fell. Every eye in the joint looked at the roll in his hand, then looked at him, then at the bartender.
The bartender held the bill up to the light, peered through it, turned it over and snapped it between his hands, then he rang it up in the register and slammed the change onto the bar.
“What you want to do, get your throat cut?” he said angrily.
“What you want me to do, walk off without paying?” Jackson argued.
“I just don’t want no trouble in here,” the bartender said, but it was too late for that.
Underworld characters closed in on Jackson from all sides. But the whores got there first, pressing their wares so hard against Jackson he couldn’t tell whether they were soliciting or trying to dispose of surplus merchandise. The pickpockets were trying to break through. The muggers waited at the door. Everyone else watched him, curious and attentive.