“Yassum,” he replied obediently. “But he took me in and called me his son.”
“Ain’t I told you time and again that you is my heir?” she insisted. “Ain’t I told you that you is going to inherit all that I got when I die?”
“Yassum, but you ain’t helping me now.”
“You ain’t got no right to hold out on me like this. God won’t like it,” she said.
“I ain’t holding out,’ he whined, looking trapped. “It’s just that I promised not to tell.”
She leaned forward and held his eyes in a hypnotic stare. “Is it in a trunk?”
Her eyes were like two balls of colored fire bearing down on him.
“Not when I seen it.”
“Is it in a sack?”
He felt his power to defy her slipping away.
“Twarn’t in no sack when I seen it.”
“Were it hidden in the house?”
He shook his head.
“In the closet?… Beneath the floor?… Behind the wall?”
He felt himself growing dizzy in a holocaust of lights.
“That ain’t how it were hidden,” he admitted.
“He got it on him,” she said triumphantly.
He was too worn out by her eyes to resist further.
“Yassum. In a money belt.”
Intense thought wrinkled her face like a prune.
“It’s jewelry,” she concluded. “He’s stolen some jewelry. Is it diamonds?”
His willpower gave way. He slumped forward and sighed. “It’s a treasure map,” he confessed. “It tells how to find a whole mess of buried treasure in Africa.”
Her eyes popped open as though the lids had broken.
“Treasure map!” she screamed. “Lost treasure! You still believe in lost treasure, as old as you is?”
“I know how it sound, but that’s what it is all right,” he maintained stubbornly.
She stared at him speculatively until he felt himself withering.
“Did you see it?” she asked finally.
“Yassum. It shows a river and the sea and just where the treasure is buried on the bank.”
“A river!” Her eyes glittered as her brain worked lightning fast. “Where did he get it?”
“He’s had it.”
Her eyes narrowed. “When he show it to you?”
He hesitated before answering. “Last night.”
“Don’t nobody but you know he got it?”
“His wife and the African know. He’s going to give it to the expressmen who come for his trunk this morning. They’re going to send it on to his farm in Ghana so can’t nobody rob him of it before he gets there. But I knows that woman and the African plan to kill him and take it before the expressmen get there — if they ain’t already done it.”
“Why didn’t you stay with him and protect him?”
“He wouldn’t let me; he said he had something to do. He went off and I didn’t know where he was at. That’s why I rung the fire alarm.”
“What time are the expressmen due?”
“Six o’clock.”
She drew from inside her gown an old-fashioned locket-watch attached to a thin gold chain. It read 5:27.
She jumped out of bed and began to dress. First she snatched off the black wig and substituted a gray one.
“You’ll find some green stuff in a bottle in the drawer,” she said. “Give yourself a shot. It’ll calm you. You’re too jumpy with all that C.”
While he was loading the spike and banging himself, she dressed rapidly. She paid him no attention.
She put on a flowing black gown over numerous petticoats, low-heeled black shoes and black silk gloves, elbow length. She pinned a small black straw hat to her gray wig with a long steel hatpin.
“Go start the car,” she said.
She listened until he had gone out of the back door. Then she picked up a large black-beaded handbag, got a black-and-white striped parasol from the closet, and went into the kitchen.
Uncle Saint had already dressed. He now wore a black chauffeur’s uniform and cap, several sizes too large for him, and of a fashion popular during the 1920s.
“Did you get it?” she asked tersely.
“I heered him,” he replied straight from his mouth. “If Gus’s cut is big enough to buy a farm, it can’t be chicken feed — whatever it is.”
“I have an idea what it is,” she said. “If we ain’t too late.”
“Let’s go then.”
She went outside. He picked up his shotgun from beside the doorway and followed her, closing and locking the door behind him. He was high as a kite.
Although objects were already visible in the gray dawn light, they did not see Pinky. But they heard him. He was on his knees on the hard-packed dirt floor of the garage, gripping the doorposts with his hands, trying to get to his feet, breathing in loud hard gasps. The muscles of his neck, arms and torso were corded; his blood vessels stood out like ropes.
“He’s got the constitution of an ox,” Uncle Saint said.
“Shhh,” Sister Heavenly cautioned. “He can still hear.”
His sense of hearing was unbearably heightened, and he heard every word they said as distinctly as though they had shouted. His mind was lucid. She gave me a knockout drop, he was thinking. But he could feel consciousness leaving him like a wrecked ship sinking slowly into the sea. Finally his muscles collapsed and he went down onto his face between the doorposts. He didn’t hear Sister Heavenly and Uncle Saint when they approached.
Uncle Saint reached inside the garage and turned on the light. A 1937 black Lincoln Continental sprang into view.
They stepped over Pinky without comment and left him lying there. Sister Heavenly got into the back. Uncle Saint placed the shotgun within easy reach on the floor of the front seat, then went forward to open the double doors.
He followed a dirt road across an abandoned field, pushing up to fifty, bouncing over rocks and ruts, leaving a cloud of dust. A gardener in his undershirt, wearing a straw hat, was milking a goat tethered to a tree. He paid no attention to the black limousine; it was a common sight. But when Uncle Saint got onto the macadam streets and pushed up to seventy and seventy-five, early-morning workers, milkmen and garbage collectors, turned to stare.
6
Uncle Saint sat in the Lincoln and watched the entrance to the apartment. It was parked in the same place Grave Digger and Coffin Ed had vacated less than an hour earlier.
Sister Heavenly had gone inside to look for Gus. But Uncle Saint didn’t take any stock in Pinky’s story about a map. The way he figured, Gus was a connection for racketeers smuggling diamonds or maybe gold. He was picking it up somewhere and passing it on.
Sister Heavenly reckoned that Gus was carrying the boodle on him. But Uncle Saint didn’t figure it that way. Whatever it was would be in the trunk, he decided. You had to figure that racketeers who would use an old square like Gus for a connection knew what they were doing. And a trunk was still the best means of smuggling anything hot — because it was so obvious. All the smart federal men and slick city dicks would figure racketeers too smart to use an old worn-out gimmick like a trunk. And that was where the racketeers could outsmart them. Just plain human nature. Like the best mark is the one who has been clipped before; he figures then that he knows everything.
As he sat there and turned it over in his mind, Uncle Saint resolved to get that trunk for himself.
For more than twenty-five years he had flunkied for Sister Heavenly, serving her as guard, cook, nurse and toady — doing her dirty work. Before that he had been her lover. But when she had thrown him over, he had hung around like a homeless dog through a long succession of subsequent lovers. Now all he had for her was hate, but he couldn’t leave her because he didn’t have anywhere else to go, and she knew it.
So he decided to cross her, get the boodle and cut out. Leave her taking the rap. See how she’d handle a mob of racketeers.
He saw a green panel truck pull up before the apartment house entrance. It looked similar to a Railway Express Company truck except for the name in white letters on its sides: ACME EXPRESS CO.