The dice went on to the next shooter.
By midnight Jackson was $180 ahead. He had $376, but he needed $657.95 to cover the $500 he had stolen from Mr. Clay and the $157.95 to pay for his landlady’s stove.
He quit and went back to the Last Word to see if he had hit on the numbers. The last word for that night was 919, dead man’s row.
So Jackson went back to the dice game.
He prayed to the dice; he begged them. “I got pains in my heart as sharp as razor blades, and misery in my mind as deep as the bottom of the ocean and tall as the Rocky Mountains.”
He took off his coat when it came his second turn to shoot. His shirt was wet. His trousers chafed his crotch. He loosened his suspenders when his third turn came and let them hang down his legs.
Jackson threw more natural sevens and elevens than had ever been seen in that game before. But he threw more craps, twos, threes and twelves, than he did natural sevens and elevens. And as all good crapshooters know, crapping is the way you lose.
Day was breaking when the game gave out. They had Jackson. He was stone-cold broke. He borrowed fifty cents from the house and trudged slowly down to the snack bar in the Theresa Hotel. He got a cup of coffee and two doughnuts for thirty cents and stood at the counter.
His eyes were glazed. His black skin had turned putty-gray. He was as tired as though he’d been plowing rocks with a mule team.
“You look beat,” the counterman said.
“I feel low enough to be buried in whalebones, and they’re on the bottom of the sea,” he confessed.
The counterman watched him gobble his doughnuts and gulp his coffee.
“You must have got broke in that crap game.”
“I did,” Jackson confessed.
“Looks like it. They say a rich man can’t sleep, but a broke man can’t get enough to eat.”
Jackson looked up at the clock on the wall and the clock said hurry-hurry. Mr. Clay came down from his living quarters at nine o’clock sharp. Jackson knew he’d have to be there with the money and find some way to slip it back into the safe when Mr. Clay opened it if he expected to get away with it.
Imabelle could raise the money, but he hated to ask her. It meant she’d have to be dishonest. But the kind of trouble they were in now would make a rat eat red pepper.
He went into the hotel lobby next door and telephoned his apartment.
The Theresa lobby was dead at that hour save for a few working-johns who had to make eight o’clock time downtown, and were hurrying into the hotel grill for their morning grits and bacon.
His landlady answered.
“Is Imabelle come home?” he asked.
“Your yallah woman is in jail where you ought to be too,” she answered evilly.
“In jail? How come?”
“Right after you phoned here last night a United States marshal brought her back here under arrest. He was looking for you too, Jackson, and if I’d knowed where you was I’d have told him. He wanted you both on a counterfeiting charge.”
“A United States marshal? He had her under arrest? What’d he look like?”
“He said you knew him.”
“What did he do with Imabelle?”
“He took her to jail, that’s what. And he confiscated her trunk and took that along in case he didn’t find you.”
“Her trunk?” Jackson was so stunned he could barely speak. “He confiscated her trunk? And took it with him?”
“He sure did, lover boy. And when he finds you—”
“Good God! He confiscated her trunk? What did he say his name was?”
“Don’t ask me no more questions, Jackson. I ain’t going to get myself in any trouble helping you to escape.”
“You ain’t got a Christian bone inside of you,” he said, and slowly hung up the receiver.
He stood sagging against the wall of the telephone booth. He felt as though he had stumbled into quicksand. Every time he struggled to get out, he went in deeper.
He couldn’t figure out how the marshal managed to get hold of Imabelle’s trunk. How had he found out what was in it — unless he had scared her enough to make her tell? And that meant she was in trouble.
What made it so bad for Jackson was he didn’t know where to look for the marshal. He had no idea where the marshal had taken Imabelle. He didn’t believe the marshal had taken her to the federal jail because the marshal was out for all he could get. The marshal wouldn’t take her trunk down to the jail if he expected to get a cut for himself. But Jackson had no idea how to go about tracing him. And he didn’t know what he could do to save her trunk if he found the marshal.
He stood on the empty sidewalk in front of the Theresa, trying to think of a way out. His face was knotted from mental effort. Finally he muttered to himself, “There ain’t no help for it.”
He’d have to see his twin brother Goldy. Goldy knew everybody in Harlem.
He didn’t know where Goldy lived, so he’d have to wait until noon when Goldy appeared on the street. He was afraid to loiter on the street himself. He didn’t have the price of a movie, although there was one in the block that opened at eight o’clock in the morning. But there was a professional building around the corner on 125th Street with a number of doctors’ offices.
He went up on the second floor and sat in a doctor’s waiting room. The doctor hadn’t arrived, but there were already four patients waiting. He kept moving back in line, after the doctor had arrived, letting everybody go ahead of him.
The receptionist kept looking at him from time to time. Finally she asked in a hard voice, “Are you sick or aren’t you?”
By then it was almost noon.
“I was, but I feel better now,” he said and put his hat on and left.
4
The plate-glass front of Blumstein’s Department Store, exhibiting eye-catching items of wearing apparel and house furnishings for the residents of Harlem, extended from the back of the Theresa Hotel a half block down 125th Street.
A Sister of Mercy sat on a campstool to one side of the entrance, shaking a round black collection-box at the passersby and smiling sadly.
She was dressed in a long black gown, similar to the vestments of a nun, with a white starched bonnet atop a fringe of gray hair. A large gold cross, attached to a black ribbon, hung at her breast. She had a smooth-skinned, round black cherubic face, and two gold teeth in front which gleamed when she smiled.
No one paid her any special attention. There were many black Sisters of Mercy seen throughout Manhattan. They solicited in the big department-stores downtown, on Fifth Avenue, in the railroad stations, up and down 42nd Street and throughout Times Square. Only a few persons knew the name of the organization they belonged to. Most of the Harlem folk thought they were nuns, just the same as there were black, kinky-headed, frizzly-bearded rabbis seen about the streets.
She glanced up at Jackson and whispered in a prayerful voice, “Give to the Lawd, Brother. Give to the poor.”
Jackson stopped to one side of her stool and examined the nylon stockings on display in the window.
A colored drunk staggering past, turned around and leered at the Sister of Mercy.
“Bless me, Sistah. Bless old Mose,” he mumbled, trying to be funny.
“ ‘Knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked,’ sayeth the Lawd,” the Sister quoted.
The drunk blinked and staggered hurriedly away.
A little black girl with witch-plaited hair ran up to the nun and said in a breathless voice, “Sister Gabriel, Mama wants two tickets to heaven. Uncle Pone’s dyin’.”
She stuck two one-dollar bills into the nun’s hand.
“ ‘Buy of me gold tried in the fire,’ sayeth the Lawd,” the nun whispered, tucking the bucks inside her gown. “What do she want two for, child?”