“What!” Reverend Gaines started as though Jackson had uttered blasphemy. “Give yourself up to the Lord? Jesus Christ, man, what do you take the Lord for? You have to go and give yourself up to the police. The Lord won’t get you out of that kind of mess.”
23
The rays of the rising sun over the Harlem River shone blood-red on the top floor of the building where Billie ran her after-hours joint.
“Can’t I just wait in the car?” Imabelle asked. She was having trouble with her breathing.
“Get out,” Grave Digger said flatly.
“What do you need me for? They’re up there, I tell you. You know I can’t run anywhere with these handcuffs on.”
He saw that she was scared. She was trembling all over.
“Well, Little Sister, if it’s your grave, just remember that you dug it,” he said without mercy. “If Ed was here to see you I’d let you stay.”
She got out, stumbling as her legs buckled. Grave Digger came around from the other side, took her by the arm, steered her up a flight of concrete stairs, through the glass double-doors, into a small immaculate foyer furnished with a long table, polished chairs and parchment-shaded lights flanking wall mirrors.
Not a sound could be heard.
“These slick hustlers live high on the hog,” he muttered. “But at least they’re quiet.”
They rode in a push-button elevator to the sixth floor, and turned toward the jade-green door at the left of a square hall.
“I beg you,” Imabelle pleaded, trembling.
“Go ahead and buzz her,” Grave Digger ordered, flattening himself against the wall beside the door and drawing his long-barreled nickel-plated pistol.
She pushed the button. After a time the Judas window clicked open.
“Oh, it’s you, honey,” said a deep feminine voice, strangely pleasant.
The door was unlocked.
Grave Digger held his .38 in his right hand, put his left hand on the doorknob, and rode it in.
A vague shape in the almost pitch-dark hall moved slowly to one side to let him enter, and the deep voice said to Imabelle, not so pleasantly, “Well, come on inside and shut the door.”
Imabelle pushed in behind Grave Digger, and the front of the dark hall was crowded. The faint sound of her teeth chattering could be heard in the silence.
The woman closed the door and locked it without speaking.
“You got some friends I want, Billie,” Grave Digger said.
“Come into my office a moment, Digger.”
She unlocked the first door to the left with a Yale key attached to a chain about her neck. A copper-shaded lamp spilled a soft glow on a blond-oak writing desk. When she switched on the bright overhead light, a luxurious bedroom suite, planted in the deep pile of a vermilion rug, sprang into view. She quickly closed the door behind them.
Grave Digger searched the room with one quick glance, looked an instant longer at the knobs of the doors to the closet and bathroom, then moved out into the room so that Billie was a target against the hall door.
“Talk fast,” he said. “It’s getting late.”
She was a brown-skinned woman in her middle forties, with a compact husky body filling a red gabardine dress. With a man’s haircut and a smooth, thick, silky mustache, her face resembled that of a handsome man. But her body was a cross. The top two buttons of the dress were open, and between her two immense uplifted breasts was a thick growth of satiny black hair. When she talked a diamond flashed between her two front teeth.
She flicked a glance at Imabelle’s swollen, purple-tinted cheek, across Imabelle’s scared-sick eyes, and then gave her whole attention to Grave Digger.
“Don’t take them in the house, Digger. I’ll send them out.”
“Are they all together?”
“All? There’s only two here now. Hank and Jodie.”
“Slim ought to be here too,” Imabelle said in a breathless voice. Both Grave Digger and Billie turned to stare at her.
“Maybe he’s out looking for me.”
Billie looked away from her first. Grave Digger stared an instant longer. Then both turned back toward each other.
“I’ll take those two,” Grave Digger said.
“Not in the house, Digger. They’re hopped to the gills and kill-happy. I’ve got two of my best girls with them.”
“That’s the chance you take running this kind of joint.”
“I don’t run it for free, you know. I pay like hell. And the captain promised me there wouldn’t be any rumbles in here.”
“Where are they?”
“The captain won’t like it, Digger.”
Grave Digger looked at her thoughtfully.
“Billie, they threw acid in Ed’s eyes.”
Billie shuddered.
“Listen, Digger, I’ll set them up. I’ll take them down to the foyer myself and hand them over to you with their hands full of air.”
“You know goddamn well they don’t intend to leave that way. They’re planning on going over the roof and coming out of the house next door.”
“All right. Listen. I’ll trade you. I’ll give you three purse-snatchers, a prowler you’ve been wanting for a long time—”
“It’s getting late, Billie.”
“—and the Wilson murderer. The one who killed the liquor-store man during that stickup last month.”
“I’m going to come back for them. But I’ll take these two now.”
She turned quickly and pulled open a top bureau-drawer.
Grave Digger drew a bead on the middle of her spine.
She pulled the drawer clear out, threw it on the bed. It was filled evenly with stacks of brand-new twenty-dollar bills.
“There’s five grand. It’s yours.”
He didn’t look at the money.
“Where are they, Billie? There isn’t much time.”
“They’re in the pad. But they’ve got themselves locked in and they won’t open even for me.”
“They’ll open for her,” Grave Digger said, nodding toward Imabelle.
Billie turned to stare at Imabelle.
Imabelle had turned a sour-cream yellow with blue-black half-moons beneath her dog-sick eyes. She was trembling like a leaf.
“Don’t make me do it. Please don’t make me do it.”
Tears streamed down her face. She knelt on the floor, clutched Grave Digger about the legs.
“I’ll do anything. I’ll be your woman, or a circus girl—”
“Get up,” Grave Digger said without mercy. “Get up, or I’ll blast open the door, holding you in front of me as a shield.”
She got to her feet like an old woman.
Billie looked at her without pity.
“You know Hank when you see him?” Imabelle asked Grave Digger, talking in gasps. “The one who threw the acid?”
“I’d know that bastard in hell.”
“He’s the one who’s got the gun.”
“Digger, for God’s sake be careful,” Billie pleaded. “They got two of my best young girls in there. Jeanie’s only sixteen and she’s with Jodie—”
“You’re talking yourself out of business.”
“—and Jodie’s on a kill-crazy edge with that knife. And Carol’s only nineteen herself.”
“Let’s just hope neither of their numbers comes up,” Grave Digger said.
He turned to Imabelle. “Go down and knock on the door.”
When they came out of the room, a white man came from the bathroom next door, buttoning his fly, gave them a drunken look, and staggered quietly back to the sitting room.
Imabelle went down the hall as to her death.
There were six rooms and a bath in the flat, the four bedrooms facing across the long center-hall, the bath between Billie’s office and the small bedroom called the pad. The hall ran into a big front combination dining-sitting room with shaded windows overlooking both 155th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue; a small electrically equipped kitchen was to the right.