“Orcutt?”
“Yeah. He’d of wanted us to report in with color Polaroid shots of all of them. Then he’d of started plotting and figuring what to do next.”
“You miss him, don’t you?” I said.
He nodded again. “Sort of. Don’t you?”
“Sure,” I said and then tried to determine whether I’d lied. I decided I hadn’t.
“He had a head on him,” Necessary said. “You got to give him that.”
“I don’t think it’s hard to figure out what he’d do now,” I said.
Necessary turned to me and I’m sure he was totally unaware of the look of relief that spread across his face. He needed a new Orcutt and he thought he’d found him in me, but he was wrong, of course. I was intuitive where Orcutt had been coldly logical. I made it up as I went along while Orcutt already had the next two paragraphs polished in his mind. Orcutt had been a genius and I was just barely smart enough to knot my own tie. I didn’t want to play Orcutt for Necessary. I wanted to tag along and now and then say, “That’s right, Chief.”
“What do you think old Orcutt would do?” Necessary said.
“Where’s Nick the Nigger?” I said.
“In a private home over in Niggertown.”
I sighed. “I think that Orcutt might remind Schoemeister of that, in case he didn’t already know.”
Necessary stared at me for several moments. He shook his head slowly and then smiled, but there was nothing pleasant in it. “Orcutt never would’ve said that.”
“No?”
“No,” Necessary said. “He was damned cold-blooded, all right, but never that cold-blooded.”
We went calling on Frank (Jimmy Twoshoes) Schoemeister in his four-room suite on the top floor of the Lee-Davis Hotel, which was in a ho-hum race with the Sycamore for the title of “Swankerton’s Finest.” We had to go through three of the suite’s rooms before we were ushered into the one that Schoemeister occupied. He was alone, but the three rooms that we passed through had contained young and middle-aged men in quiet suits. They had looked at us with flat, expressionless stares and then gone back to whatever it was they had been doing, cleaning their Thompsons, I suppose.
Schoemeister smiled at us with his ruin of a mouth and I checked the morning’s shoes. They were made of soft-looking brown mottled leather and when Schoemeister caught my glance he said, “Ostrich,” and I said, “They’re nice.”
He turned then to Necessary and said, “Out early this morning, aren’t you, Chief?”
Necessary nodded as he gratefully accepted a cup of coffee that was brought in and silently served by a slim, fit-looking man in his late twenties. “Not as early as some,” Necessary said, after a sip. “Not as early as Luccarella.”
“A real early riser,” Schoemeister agreed, watching the young man pour my coffee. After serving it, he sat in a chair in the farthest corner of the room. Necessary looked at him and Schoemeister said, “Don’t let Marvin bother you. He’s my nephew. My oldest sister’s kid.”
“What’ve you got in those other three rooms?” Necessary said. “Cousins?”
Schoemeister smiled terribly again. “Just some friends.”
“I counted eleven of them.”
“That’s about right.”
“Did Luccarella count them?”
“I don’t know,” Schomeister said. “He didn’t stay very long.”
“What’d he want?” Necessary said.
“He wanted me to catch a plane.”
“To St. Paul?”
“That’s right. He seemed to get a little upset when I told him that I didn’t know anybody in St. Paul. Not even in Minneapolis.”
“The Onealo brothers do,” I said.
“Is that a fact?” Schoemeister said, trying to make it sound as if he were actually interested, and succeeding fairly well.
“They caught that plane,” I said. “So did Tex Turango and Puranelli.”
Schoemeister nodded at the information. “What about Nick the Nigger?”
“He doesn’t know anybody in Minneapolis either,” Necessary said. “Or St. Paul.”
“Nick’s still here, huh?” Schoemeister asked, trying to make it casual, and again almost bringing it off.
“He’s staying with friends,” Necessary said. “About twelve of them over on Seventeen Thirty-eight Marshall in Niggertown.”
Schoemeister glanced at his nephew who nodded. “I always liked Nick,” he said, “but that Luccarella’s something else. He’s buggy. I wonder if they still call him Joe Lucky?”
“I think the newspapers do,” I said.
Schoemeister locked his hands behind his head and gazed up at the ceiling. “Somehow,” he said softly, “I don’t think they will any more.”
When we were in the Imperial again, Necessary stared at me and I saw that the chill was back in his eyes. “Okay,” he said, “you’re calling it. Now what?”
“We pay another social call.”
“On who?”
“On Nick the Nigger.”
“Yeah,” Necessary said softly and smiled a little. “Orcutt would have done that, too.”
Chapter 41
Sergeant Krone parked the car on 47th Street, around the corner from 1738 Marshall. We were in the heart of the upper middle-class section of what everyone called Niggertown — even its residents — and it looked very much like its white counterpart across the tracks, except that the blacks’ lawns seemed to be a shade better tended, if that were possible. They also used more imagination when it came to trimming their shrubbery. I spotted a dog, a cat, and what must have been a giraffe that were all carved or trimmed out of thick, hedge-like plants.
Krone stayed with the car and the sports page as Necessary and I walked to the house at 1738 Marshall. It was a large gray brick rambler with a graveled roof and a picture window that boasted the inevitable decorator lamp with a scarlet shade and a yellow ceramic base. The house belonged to William Morze, a plump, sixtyish Negro with gray hair, a number of young girlfriends, and a fondness for yellow Cadillacs. He had two of them parked in his garage, a convertible and a sedan.
Morze, sometimes referred to as Saint Billy, ran the black section of Swankerton and had done so since the end of World War II. He distributed what little political patronage there was, operated his own charity, oversaw the flourishing numbers business, conducted a profitable loanshark operation more or less as a sideline, ran a thriving burial, life and auto insurance agency, and contributed steadily, if not heavily, to the Democratic party. It was Morze who opened the door to Necessary’s knock. There was a bell, but I’d never known Necessary to use one when he could pound on a door.
The black man wore a yellow silk dressing gown, maroon pajamas, and fur-lined leather slippers. His brown eyes flicked over Necessary and me and registered dislike, even contempt, before the big white smile split his face and he slipped into his Southern Darkie role. He did it well enough.
“Why, I do b’lieve it’s Chief Necessary and Mr. Dye,” Morze said, mushing it all up. “You gentlemen’s out early this fine mawnin.”
“We’re looking for Nick Jones,” Necessary said.
“Nick Jones,” Morze said thoughtfully, as if he might have known someone by that name a long time ago, but wasn’t quite sure. Then he gave us his brilliant smile again. It was also brilliantly meaningless. “Now I do b’lieve Mistah Jones is up and receivin. Come right on in.”
Nick the Nigger could have passed if he’d wanted to. In fact, he had at one time when, fresh from Jamaica, he had used his English accent and tall, lithe blond good looks to hustle rich widows along Miami Beach. They could be of the grass or sod variety, and they could be thirty or sixty; it didn’t matter to Nick as long as they could pay his stud fee which, some said, ran as high as a thousand a week.