While he was speaking, Jackson opened the inner safe door.
“Thought that was the trouble,” Mr. Clay mumbled.
In the money drawer was a stack of twenty-dollar bills, pinned together in bundles of hundreds.
“Ha ha, you’re just joking, Mr. Clay,” Jackson said as he took out five bundles and stuck them into his side pants-pocket.
He rattled the handle of the dust mop while closing the safe’s two doors.
“Lord, you just have to forgive me in this emergency,” he said silently, then spoke in a loud voice, “Got to clean the steps now.”
Mr Clay didn’t answer.
Jackson tiptoed back to the broom closet, put away the cloth and mop, tiptoed silently back toward the front door. Smitty and the woman were still enjoying life.
Jackson let himself out silently and went down the stairs to the marshal’s car. He palmed two of the hundred-dollar bundles and slipped them through the open window to the marshal.
The marshal held them down between his legs while he counted them. Then he nodded and stuck them into his inside coat-pocket.
“Let this be a lesson to you, Jackson,” he said. “Crime doesn’t pay.”
2
As soon as the marshal drove off, Jackson started running. He knew that Mr. Clay would count his money the first thing on awakening. Not because he suspected anybody would steal it. There was always someone on duty. It was just a habit. Mr. Clay counted his money when he went to sleep and when he woke up, when he unlocked his safe and when he locked it. If he wasn’t busy, he counted it fifteen to twenty times a day.
Jackson knew that Mr. Clay would begin questioning the help when he missed the five hundred. He wouldn’t call in the police until he was dead certain who had stolen his money. That was because Mr. Clay believed in ghosts. Mr. Clay knew damn well if ever the ghosts started collecting the money he’d cheated their relatives out of, he’d be headed for the poor house.
Jackson knew that next Mr. Clay would go to his room searching for him.
He was pressed but not panicked. If the Lord would just give him time enough to locate Hank and get him to raise the three hundred into three thousand, he might be able to slip the money back into the safe before Mr. Clay began suspecting him.
But first he had to get the twenty-dollar bills changed into ten-dollar bills. Hank couldn’t raise twenties because there was no such thing as a two-hundred-dollar bill.
He ran down to Seventh Avenue and turned into Small’s bar. Marcus spotted him. He didn’t want Marcus to see him changing the money. He came in by one door and went out by the other; ran up the street to the Red Rooster. They only had sixteen tens in the cash register. Jackson took those and started out. A customer stopped him and changed the rest.
Jackson came out on Seventh Avenue and ran down 142nd Street toward home. It came to him, as he was slipping and sliding on the wet icy sidewalks, that he didn’t know where to look for Hank. Imabelle had met Jodie at her sister’s apartment in the Bronx.
Imabelle’s sister, Margie, had told Imabelle that Jodie knew a man who could make money. Imabelle had brought Jodie to talk to Jackson about it. When Jackson said he’d give it a trial, it had been Jodie who’d gotten in touch with Hank.
Jackson felt certain that Imabelle would know where to find Jodie if not Hank. The only thing was, he didn’t know where Imabelle was.
He stopped across the street and looked up at the kitchen window to see if the light was on. It was dark. He tried to remember if it was himself or the marshal who’d turned off the light. It didn’t make any difference anyway. If the landlady had returned from work she was sure to be in the kitchen raising fifteen million dollars’ worth of hell.
Jackson went around to the front of the apartment house and climbed the four flights of stairs. He listened at the front door of the apartment. He didn’t hear a sound from inside. He unlocked the door, slipped quietly within. He didn’t hear anyone moving about. He tiptoed down to his room and closed himself in. Imabelle hadn’t returned.
He wasn’t worried about her. Imabelle could take care of herself. But time was pressing him.
While trying to decide whether to wait there or go out and look for her, he heard the front door being unlocked. Someone entered the front hall, closed and locked the door. Footsteps approached. The first hall door was opened.
“Claude,” an irritable woman’s voice called.
There was no reply. The footsteps crossed the hall. The opposite door was opened.
“Mr. Canefield.”
The landlady was calling the roll.
“As evil a woman as God ever made,” Jackson muttered. “He must have made her by mistake.”
More footsteps sounded. Jackson crawled quickly underneath the bed, keeping his overcoat and hat on. He heard the door being opened.
“Jackson.”
Jackson could feel her examining the room. He heard her try to open Imabelle’s big steamer-trunk.
“They keeps this trunk locked all the time,” she complained to herself. “Him and that woman. Living in sin. And him calls himself a Christian. If Christ knew what kind of Christians He got here in Harlem He’d climb back up on the cross and start over.”
Jackson heard her walk back toward the kitchen. He rolled from underneath the bed and got to his feet.
“Merciful Lawd!” he heard her exclaim. “Somebody done blowed up my brand-new stove.”
Jackson flung open the door to his room and ran down the hall. He got out of the front door before she saw him. He went upstairs instead of down, taking the stairs two at a time. He had scarcely turned at the landing when he heard the landlady run out into the corridor, chasing him.
“Who you be, you dirty bastard!” she yelled. “It you, Jackson, or Claude? Blew up my stove!”
He came out on the roof and ran to the roof of the adjoining building, past a pigeon cage, and found the door to the stairway unlocked. He went down the stairs like a bouncing ball but stopped at the street doorway to reconnoiter.
The landlady was peering from her doorway in the other building. He drew back his head before she saw him, and watched the sidewalk from an angle.
He saw Mr. Clay’s personal Cadillac sedan turn the corner and pull in at the curb. Smitty, the other chauffeur, was driving. Mr. Clay got out and went inside.
Jackson knew they were looking for him. He turned, running, and went through the hallway and out of the back door. There was a small concrete courtyard filled with garbage cans and trash, closed in by high concrete walls. He put a half-filled garbage can against the wall and climbed over, tearing the middle button from his overcoat. He came out in the back courtyard of the building that faced 142nd Street. He ran through the hallway and turned towards Seventh Avenue.
A cruising taxi came in his direction. He hailed it. He’d have to break one of the ten-dollar bills, and that would cost him a hundred dollars, but there was no help for it now. It was just hurry-hurry.
A black boy was driving. Jackson gave him the address of Imabelle’s sister in the Bronx. The black boy made a U-turn in the icy street as though he liked skating, and took off like a lunatic.
“I’m in a hurry,” Jackson said.
“I’m hurrying, ain’t I?” the black boy called over his shoulder.
“But I ain’t in no hurry to get to heaven.”
“We ain’t going to heaven.”
“That’s what I’m scared of.”
The black boy wasn’t thinking about Jackson. Speed gave him power and made him feel as mighty as Joe Louis. He had his long arms wrapped about the steering wheel and his big foot jammed on the gas, thinking of how he could drive that goddam DeSoto taxicab straight off the mother-raping earth.
Margie lived in a flat on Franklin Avenue. It was a thirty-minute trip by rights, but the black boy made it in eighteen, Jackson biting his nails all the way.