A Rage in Harlem (20 page)

“Where are they?”

“At Billie’s.”

“All three of them?”

She nodded. “If they haven’t left.”

He got into his seat behind the wheel, looked up the black macadam surface of St. Nicholas rising in a wide black stripe between rows of fashionable apartment buildings on both sides, taking gray shape in the morning light.

Early workers were trudging in from the side streets, hurrying toward the subway. Later the downtown office-porters would pour from the crowded flats in a steady stream, carrying polished leather briefcases stuffed with overalls to look like businessmen, and buy the
Daily News
to read on the subway.

The men he was looking for were not in sight.

“Who has the habit?” he asked.

“Both of ’em. Hank and Jodie, I mean. Hank’s on hop and Jodie on heroin.”

“How about the slim one?”

“He just drinks.”

“What monickers are they using with Billie?”

“Hank calls himself Morgan; Jodie – Walker; Slim – Goldsmith.”

“Then Billie knows about their gold-mine pitch?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Woman, there are a thousand questions you’re going to have to answer,” he said as he shifted into gear and got the car to moving again.

They went past Lucky’s Cabaret, King-of-the-Chicken restaurant, Elite Barbershop, the big stone private mansion known as Harlem’s Castle, made a U-turn at 155th Street between the subway kiosks, came back past The Fat Man’s Bar and Grill, and drew up before the entrance to a large swank six-storied gray-stone apartment-building. Big expensive cars lined the curbs in that area.

From there, going down the steep descent of 155th Street to the bridge, it was less than a five-minute walk to that dark, dismal section along the Harlem River where the shooting fracas had taken place.

When Jackson took off in the big old Cadillac hearse down Park Avenue, he didn’t know where he was going. He was just running. He clung to the wheel with both hands. His bulging eyes were set in a fixed stare on the narrow strip of wet brick pavement as it curled over the hood like an apple-peeling from a knife blade, as
though he were driving underneath it. On one side the iron stanchions of the trestle flew past like close-set fence pickets, on the other the store-fronted sidewalk made one long rushing somber kaleidoscope in the gray light before dawn.

The deep, steady thunder of the supercharger spilled out behind. The open back-doors swung crazily on the bumpy road, battering the head of the corpse as it jolted up and down beneath the bouncing trunk.

He headed into the red traffic-light at 116th Street doing eighty-five miles an hour. He didn’t see it. A sleepy taxi driver saw something black go past in front of him and thought he was seeing automobile ghosts.

The stalls of the Harlem Market underneath the railroad trestle begin at 115th Street and extend down to 101st Street. Delivery trucks filled with meat, vegetables, fruit, fish, canned goods, dried beans, cotton goods, clothing, were jockeying back and forth in the narrow lane between the stanchions and the sidewalk. Laborers, stall-keepers, truck jumpers and drivers were milling about, unloading the provisions, setting up the stalls, getting prepared for the Saturday rush.

Jackson bore down on the congested scene without slackening speed. Behind him were yowling sirens and the red eyes of pursuing patrol cars.

“Look out!” a big colored man yelled.

Panicked people jumped for cover. A truck did the shimmy as the driver frantically steered one way and then the other trying to dodge the hearse.

When Jackson first noticed the congested market area, it was too late to stop. All he could do was try to put the hearse through whatever opening he saw. It was like trying to thread a fine needle with a heavy piece of string.

He bent to the right to avoid the truck, hit a stack of egg crates, saw a molten stream of yellow yolks filled with splinters splash past his far window.

The right wheels of the hearse had gone up over the curb and plowed through crates of vegetables, showering the fleeing men and the store fronts with smashed cabbages, flakes of spinach, squashed potatoes and bananas. Onions peppered the air like cannon shot.

“Runaway hearse! Runaway hearse!” voices screamed.

The hearse ran into crates of iced fish spread out on the sidewalk,
skidded with a heavy lurch, and veered against the side of the refrigerator truck. The back doors were flung wide and the throat-cut corpse came one-third out. The gory head hung down from the cut throat to stare at the scene of devastation from its unblinking white-walled eyes.

Exclamations in seven languages were heard.

Caroming from the refrigerator truck, the hearse wobbled wildly to the other side of the street, climbed over a side of beef a delivery man had dropped to the street to run, and tore, staggering, down the street.

He was through the market area so fast a colored laborer exclaimed in a happy voice, “God damn, that was sudden!”

“But did you see what I seen?”

“You reckon he stole it?”

“Must have, man. What else the cops chasing him for?”

“What’s he gonna do with it?”

“Sell it, man, sell it. You can sell anything in Harlem.”

When the hearse came into the open at 100th Street, it was splattered with eggs, stained with vegetables, spotted with blood. Chunks of raw meat, fish scales, fruit skins clung to the dented fenders. The back doors swung open and shut.

It had gained on the patrol cars, which had had to slow down in the market area. Jackson had the feeling of sitting in the middle of a nightmare. He was sealed in panic and he couldn’t get out. He couldn’t think. He didn’t know where he was going, didn’t know what he was doing. Just driving, that’s all. He had forgotten why he was running. Just running. He felt like just sitting there behind the wheel and driving that hearse off the edge of the world.

He went through Puerto Rican Harlem at ninety miles an hour. An old Puerto Rican woman watched the hearse pass, saw the back doors swing open, and fainted dead away.

A patrol car screaming north on Park Avenue spotted the hearse coming south as it approached the intersection of 95th Street. The patrol car made a crying left turn. Jackson saw it and bent the big hearse in a long right turn. The back doors flew open and the corpse slid out slowly, like a body being lowered into the sea, thumped gently onto the pavement and rolled onto its side.

The patrol car swerved, trying to keep from running over it, went out of control and spun like a top on the wet street, bounced over the curb, knocked over a mailbox, and shattered the plate-glass window of a beauty shop.

Jackson went along 95th Street to Fifth Avenue. When he saw the stone wall surrounding Central Park he realized he was out of Harlem. He was down in the white world with no place to go, no place to hide his woman’s gold ore, no place to hide himself. He was going at seventy miles an hour and there was a stone wall ahead.

His mind began to think. Thought rolled back on the lines of a spiritual:

Nothing left now but to pray.

He was going so fast that when he turned sharply north on Fifth Avenue, heading back toward Harlem, the trunk slid back, went off the end of the coffin rack, bounced on the floor of the hearse, somersaulted into the street, landed on the bottom edge and burst wide open.

Jackson was so deep in prayer he didn’t notice it.

He drove straight up Fifth Avenue to 110th Street, turned over to Seventh Avenue, kept north to 139th Street, and drew up in front of his minister’s house.

He passed three patrol cars on the way. The cops gave the battered, dirty, meat-smeared, egg-stained hearse a cursory look and let it pass. No steamer trunks and dead bodies in that wreck. Jackson didn’t even notice the patrol cars.

He parked in front of his minister’s house, got out and went around to the back to lock the doors. When he found the hearse empty, that was the bitter end. Nothing even left to pray for. His girl was gone. Her gold ore was gone. His brother was dead, and gone too. He just wanted to throw himself on the mercy of the Lord. It was all he could do to keep from weeping.

Reverend Gaines was in the middle of a big religious dream when his housekeeper awakened him.

“Brother Jackson is downstairs in the study and says he wants to see you on something very important.”

“Jackson?” Reverend Gaines exclaimed in extreme irritation, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “You mean our brother Jackson?”

“Yes, sir,” that patient colored woman said. “Your Jackson.”

“Lord save us from squares,” Reverend Gaines muttered to
himself as he got up to slip his black silk brocaded robe over his purple silk pyjamas, and descend to the study.

“Brother Jackson, what brings you to the house of the shepherd of the Lord at this ungodly hour, when all the other Lord’s sheep are sleeping peacefully in the meadows?” he asked pointedly.

“I’ve sinned, Reverend Gaines.”

Reverend Gaines stiffened as though someone had uttered blasphemy in his presence.

“Sinned! Good Lord, Brother Jackson, is that sufficient reason to awaken me at this hour of night? Who hasn’t sinned? I was just standing on the banks of the River Jordan, dressed in a flowing white robe, converting sinners by the thousands.”

Jackson stared at him. “Here in the house?”

“In a dream, Brother Jackson, in a dream,” the minister explained, unbending enough to smile.

“Oh, I’m sorry I woke you up, but it’s an emergency.”

“That’s all right, Brother Jackson, sit down.” He sat down himself and poured a glass of liqueur from a cut-glass decanter on his mahogany desk. “Just a little elderberry cordial to awaken my spirit. Will you have a glass?”

“No sir, thank you,” Jackson declined as he sat down facing Reverend Gaines across the desk. “My spirit is already wide awake as it is.”

“You’re in trouble again? Or is it the same trouble? Woman trouble, wasn’t it?”

“No sir, it was about money the last time. I was trying to keep it from looking as if I had stolen some money. But this time it’s worse. It’s about my woman too. I’m in deep trouble this time.”

“Has your woman left you? At last? Because you didn’t steal the money? Or because you did?”

“No sir, it’s nothing like that. She’s gone but she hasn’t left me.”

Reverend Gaines took another sip of cordial. He enjoyed solving domestic mysteries.

“Let us kneel and pray for her safe return.”

Jackson was on his knees before the minister was.

“Yes sir, but I want to confess first.”

“Confess!” Reverend Gaines had started to kneel but he straightened up suddenly like a Jack-in-the-box. “You haven’t killed the woman, Brother Jackson?”

“No sir, it’s nothing like that.”

Reverend Gaines gave a sigh of relief and relaxed.

“But I’ve lost her trunk fullof gold ore.”

“What?” Reverend Gaines’s eyebrows shot upward. “Her trunk full of gold ore? Do you mean to say she had a trunk full of gold ore and never told me, her minister? Brother Jackson, you had better make a full confession.”

“Yes sir, that’s what I want to do.”

At first, as Jackson unfolded the story of being swindled on The Blow and stealing five hundred dollars from Mr. Clay’s to bribe the bogus marshal and trying to get even by gambling, Reverend Gaines was filled with compassion.

“The Lord is merciful, Brother Jackson,” he said consolingly. “And if Mr. Clay is half as merciful, you will be able to work off that account. I will telephone to him about the matter. But what about this trunk full of gold ore?”

But when Jackson described the trunk and related how the gang had kidnapped his woman to get possession of it, Reverend Gaines’s eyes began to widen with curiosity.

“You mean to say that that big green steamer trunk in that little room where you and she lived was filled with gold ore?”

“Yes sir. Pure eighteen-carat gold ore. But it didn’t belong to her. It belonged to her husband and she had to give it back. So I had to get my brother, Goldy, to help me find them.”

Revulsion replaced the curiosity in Reverend Gaines’s eyes as Jackson described Goldy.

“You mean to say that Sister Gabriel was a man? Your twin brother? And he swindled our poor gullible people with tickets to heaven?”

“Yes sir, lots of people believed in them. But the only reason I went to him was because he was a crook and I needed him to help me.”

As Jackson related the events of the night, Reverend Gaines’s eyes got wider and wider, and horror began replacing the expression of revulsion. By the time Jackson got to his escape from the police at the 125th Street Station, Reverend Gaines was sitting forward on the edge of his seat with his mouth hanging open and his eyes bulging. But Jackson had related the story as he had seen it happen, and Reverend Gaines did not understand why he had fled from the police.

“Was it because of your brother?” he asked. “Did they discover he was impersonating a nun?”

“No sir, it wasn’t that. It was because he was dead.”

“Dead!” Reverend Gaines jumped as though a wasp had stung him in the rear. “Great God above!”

“Hank and Jodie had cut his throat when I went upstairs to look for Imabelle.”

“Good God, man, why didn’t you call for help? Didn’t you hear his cries?”

“No sir. I had sat down to rest for a minute and I had fell asleep.”

“Merciful heavens, man! You fell asleep while you were looking for your woman who was in grave danger. While her fortune was sitting unprotected in that street – that street too, the most dangerous street in Harlem – protected only by your brother, a foul sinner who was scarcely better than a murderer himself.” Reverend Gaines’s rich black skin was turning gray at the very thought of what had happened. “And they cut his throat? And put his body in the hearse?”

Jackson mopped the sweat from his eyes and face.

“Yes sir. But I didn’t mean to go to sleep.”

“And what did you do with the hearse? Drive it off into the Harlem River?”

“No sir, it’s parked out front.”