Rhode Island Red (3 page)

I looked up searchingly into Billie's cloudy eyes. She knew!

CHAPTER 3

Nutty

The sleep I was getting was more trouble than it was worth. I went and fixed a tray and had my coffee in bed. And eventually I got up and put some Monk on the turntable. Thelonious at his quirkiest—all the old ballads turned on their head. Boy, did that fit in with my life.

It could be worse, I kept telling myself while I located the vacuum cleaner and filled the scrub bucket. It could be worse. Though I couldn't think how. Well, yeah, I could have been the corpse. That would be worse. Or Leman Sweet, instead of calling me the “c” word, could have said I looked like Odetta, as some drunk asshole had done in a restaurant once. Nothing against that venerable lady, but I do not appreciate being taken for a sixty year old folk singer.

On my hands and knees, I scrubbed away at the bloodstain. Then I gathered up the splinters from Sweet's guitar. I wondered what street corner he played on—that street I was never going to walk down as long as I lived.

I also wondered what two detectives were doing posing as funky street musicians.

The building super knocked on the door and wanted to know what had happened here last night … why all the cops and what kind of trouble had I plunged the building into.

“A corpse,” I told him.

“What corpse?”

“A dead man's corpse.”

“But who was the dead corpse?”

“Sig,” I said.

“This is very bad. This is terrible.”

I agreed.

He shook his head, promising me retribution from the landlord.

I finished the washing-up. The place looked a little frazzled around the edges, but it was clean. Now I was hungry. But the cupboard was bare. I didn't have the strength to face the supermarket. Even the easy way out—the corner deli—would mean cooking eggs and toasting bread. Too much.

I decided to take a nap. If I felt just as lazy when I woke up, I'd go ahead and blow five bucks in the coffee shop.

As I slogged over to the divan, I saw my poor sax and its case lying abandoned in the corner. I went over and straightened the instrument in its carrier. Then I pulled it back to the spot it had originally occupied on the floor, before Officer Sweet's temper had sent it flying.

Something was sticking out of the bowl of my sax. I peered in there. For godsakes—it was a dirty sock! At least that's what it looked like—a long, dirty white sock.

I pulled on the tip of the sock. At first it wouldn't budge. But then, slowly, it began to loosen and move. Then it became stuck again. There was something hard and ridged in the toe, something like a sewing spool. I gave it one good yank, and the whole sock popped out. And then another one rolled out after it.

The first one felt heavy in my hand. The way I imagined a sap would heft in one's hand. I had never seen a sap in my life, but it's something they're always talking about in those old black and white detective movies.

I shook out the sock. What I had arrayed before me on the rug were six tightly rolled wads of fifty dollar bills fastened with rubber bands. About 100 fifties to each roll. That came to five thousand dollars a wad.

Sock number two was identical. All together there were twelve rolls.

There was sixty thousand dollars—in cash—in fifties—inside my little sax.

I backed away from the heap and collapsed onto the divan. This was too much. Too crazy … even for me.

Only one person could have filled my stocking like that: Siggy. Also known as Officer Charlie Conlin.

While I was asleep, he was playing Santa Claus. And they killed him—those evil elves, or whoever. I wondered if he knew all along they were coming for him.

Why me? Why my poor little beaten up sax?

Any way you answered those unanswerables, it meant trouble.

I knew what I had to do. Gather up all that money and run as fast as I could to the local precinct, hand it over to the police … to Detective Leman Sweet. Whom I wanted to see again like I wanted to be buried up to my neck and left to die in the desert.

Besides, he wouldn't believe a word I said. He'd say I murdered Sig for the money. Never mind that it didn't make sense for me to kill him and then turn around and surrender the loot. Leman Sweet would probably make it his life's work to see me hang for the killing. It was as though he and I were living proof of that popular babble about the enmity between black men and women. Circumstance … history … had made us instant, mortal enemies. There was nothing we could do about it. And it was very pathetic.

But maybe I was letting my imagination run rampant. Even somebody as out of control as Sweet had to do some logical thinking. After all, he was a detective. But, who knew? Who knew what someone like that would think or do? To be black and a cop, you've got to be pretty weird.

I needed help. Advice. A cool head. I had to speak to Aubrey.

Aubrey is my oldest friend. We grew up together, the children in the only two black families on a Spanish-speaking block in East Elmhurst, Queens.

I was smart. In fact, I was so smart that the papers wrote about me. I was one of those obnoxious child prodigies whose exploits are fillers for the
Daily News
. At seven I could add figures in the time it takes to light a match. I picked up languages in half a day. And I could play
Misty
in synch with Erroll Garner. The trouble was, all I wanted to do was dance. And I couldn't. And can't. To this day.

Aubrey was … well, not smart. Dumb was the blunt, casually cruel word the kids used. Strange how she turned out to be so pulled together. While I tend to be in tatters a good once a day. Where did that child prodigy shit get me?

Anyway, the one thing Aubrey could do was dance. Man, could she dance. And she was going to teach me how to move. She was supposed to help me become this ravishing, knockout irresistible, Folies Bergère fandancing, headdress wearing, Jo Baker clone. Forget it. I cannot move. And the closest I ever got to ravishing the French was the day I stood on a chair in a cafe on the rue de Savoie and recited Rimbaud from memory. I was very drunk and showing my stuff in the company of this coke head academic from Toulouse.

Aubrey is still dancing. She is one of the bigger draws at Caesar's Go Go Emporium, which is exactly the kind of place it sounds like, located on a dirty street down where Chinatown meets hyper-hip Tribeca.

She performs topless—and damn near bottomless—and usually clears more than a thousand dollars a week, about two hundred of which gets reported. Aubrey is one of the strongest women I know. She is also a beauty. I love her very much. And she ain't dumb.

She works all night and sleeps all afternoon. I felt bad about calling her, waking her, but I did and said I'd be over in forty minutes.

I stuffed the rolls of fifties back into the socks and the socks back into the sax and closed the case on the whole works.

I entered the glass-walled, opulent lobby of Aubrey's Upper Broadway building. I had been told that Reverend Ike, a you-can-get-yourself-a-million-dollars-if-you-send-me-twenty-bucks kind of sharpie, lived here with a large entourage. Occasionally one of the fatuous doormen, of which there were many, mistook me for one of the reverend's harem. It escaped me why Aubrey, who didn't hook, chose to live in a place where half the neighbors were turning tricks of one kind or another.

Up I went in the supersonic space capsule. Aubrey was waiting in the doorway. How did a woman who kept such ungodly hours manage to look so unpuffy? Her permed hair was tousled as if someone had arranged it that way for the camera. She turned that slow burning smile of hers up a notch when she saw me step off the elevator. She was wearing a long white silk thing and a pair of frou frou white mules—looking very much the star.

On those few occasions when I'm in the Emporium watching her dance, I see how much of a star she is. There's something so hard-edged about the other dancers. They've got dumb routines—fake s & m crap or 1960s hippie fantasies with tie-dyed G-strings—or they just look like tired junkies.

But Aubrey is different. Commanding yet soft. Soft shoulders, soft, insinuating movements. I've heard the way the men take in their breath at the first sight of her toffee colored thighs. She is so quiet when she's up there. It seems to make them hush as well.

We told my mother that Aubrey is a cashier at a posh downtown restaurant. I have no idea whether Mom really bought that, but she behaves as if she has.

“God, Aubrey,” I began apologizing. “I woke you up. Sorry, honey.”

“You in trouble?”

“Big trouble,” I said, closing the apartment door.

“
The
trouble?”

“No. Worse.”

“What's worse than being pregnant?”

“This,” I said, and I opened the sax case and pulled the rolls out of the socks and dumped them on her white leather sofa.

She picked up one of the wads, dazed. “This is trouble?”

“Yeah.”

“Where'd it come from?”

“A dead guy.”

“He gave it to you?”

“In a way.”

“Before or after he was dead?”

“A little of both. He was a cop.”

“Get outta town, Nan.”

“No, I'm not kidding. He was under cover. He was working right near where I was playing yesterday. He said he was a musician.”

“What do Walter say about it all?”

“Nothing. Walter moved out a few days ago.”

“Good. That silly motherfucker needed to move somewhere.” Aubrey walked into the kitchen then and came back with one of those plastic jugs of freshly squeezed orange juice and two glasses. She drank hers. I followed suit dutifully, hating it, and told her the story.

“So that's why I'm disturbing you, Aubrey. Help me figure out what to do?”

“Nothing to figure, Nan. You got sixty thousand dollars.”

“But what was a cop doing with sixty thousand in rolled up fifties?”

“Musta been working nights.” She laughed at her own joke. Then she said: “Maybe if you read the paper once in a while …” Her voice trailed off as she picked delicately through the cigarettes in the glass box on the coffee table.

“What paper? What are you talking about?”

“The newspaper, girl. I remember seeing something in the
Post
a few weeks ago about the bums and the street musicians getting beat up in the subways. Paper said they gone be using decoys to try to catch whoever's doing it. That's probably what your friend was. One of the decoys. Pretending like he played a fiddle on the street.”

“A sax,” I corrected, “not a fiddle. And he seemed to know his stuff.”

“Whatever. Fuck what he played. If the other cops don't know about the cash, it's yours.”

I don't know what Aubrey was reading on my face just then, but suddenly she stopped talking and regarded me with wariness.

“Nan, don't tell me,” she finally said. “Don't tell me you gone give it to the police. Not after all the shit I been hearing about Paris in the fall and what you wouldn't give to get back there … Look, take that money and buy your ticket.”

“But what about his wife and kids, Aubrey?”

“Do he have a wife and kids?”

“Well, he told me he had a woman—an old lady, he said. He must've meant his wife.”

She shook her head in disgust.

“He said his lady had kicked him out,” I continued. “I don't know if it was a woman he knew as part of his cover—or whether she was for real in his life. But if she was real, then why should it be me who … I mean, she should get it.”

“Get what?”

“The money, of course.”

“We should all get some money, girlfriend.”

I walked over to one of her windows and stared out. What a wonderful view! Out across the park and all the way east.

“He said he was desperately in love with me.” I waited for her laugh, but I didn't hear it. “You think that's possible, Aubrey? You think he really wanted me to have that money?”

“Go to Paris, Nan.”

“Come with me. I'll show it to you.”

She waved me off derisively. As if the very idea of Aubrey Davis on foreign soil were preposterous.

I didn't say anything more about the money. Instead I went to the shelf and started rooting around in search of an Etta James cassette I felt like hearing. While I looked for it, I sang under my breath, mocking Aubrey, but in a friendly way: “When my soul was in the lost and found, you came along to claim it.”

We had a grim joke when we were young. Rather than come out and admit she had been off with a man, Aubrey used to say she'd been down at the bus depot all night, waiting at the lost and found for her mother, who was sure to come back one day and inquire about her.

So, as far as Aubrey was concerned, it was simple—I should take the money and run. Not even run—saunter—to Paris. But then, Aubrey was pretty fearless. As for me, I may crave adventure, but things can scare me. And not just Leman Sweet. I was scared that one way or another those big fat rolls of fifty dollar bills were going to end up choking me. Even I am continually surprised at how close to the surface my sense of Christian guilt and terror remains.

No, I wasn't going to buy a ticket to Paris. Not yet. And no, I wasn't going to the police. Not yet. What I had to get started on first was finding little Mrs. Sig and all her poor children.

CHAPTER 4

Rhythm-a-ning

I might have gone a little overboard on the outfit that morning. What I was going for was street waif. But I ended up looking more like a parody of a young civil rights worker in the 1960s—and a male specimen at that. I was wearing my faded James Farmers with one strap safety pinned; my prototype Stokely Carmichael shades; a black cotton turtleneck; and lace up shitkickers.

Sig, in his wisdom, had warned me that I'd never make any money in this spot. And sure enough, the breakfast in a bag crowd was once again passing me by. Partly my fault, though: they must have thought I was nuts to be blowing Coltrane blues licks that early in the morning. Who the hell wants to be moved into that kind of space before they even
get
to the job?