“And how does that go?”
“Back in 1909, Rothstein was one of the best pool players in the city, and he knew it. There were a number of people, gambling types, who never liked him. They brought in a fellow named Jack Conway, the champion of the Philadelphia Athletic Club, and they arranged a match between him and Rothstein. Rothstein and Conway started playing at eight o’clock on a Thursday night, at John McGraw’s pool hall, south of Herald Square. Conway won the first match. Rothstein won the second. They played through Thursday night and Friday morning, straight. They played all of Friday, and they didn’t stop playing until early on Saturday morning. Thirty-two hours after they started. Rothstein won four thousand dollars.”
“But that makes him sound rather admirable,” she said.
“It makes him sound like a good pool player.”
“Certainly a pool player with stamina. And the stories of his bootlegging? Are they true?”
“Who knows? Probably.”
“Mr. Fay began as a bootlegger, I understand,” she said.
“You’ve heard about his trip to Canada in the taxicab?”
“Yes. Could there be some connection between him and Mr. Rothstein?”
“Even if there were, how would that help us?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Robert,” said Mrs. Parker.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Your friend. What’s her name?”
“It’s Leroy, ma’am.”
“Is she very—oh. Oh . . . Ah . . . And the two of you—”
“Yes, ma’am. That’s right.”
“Oh.” Her voice sounded flat and deflated. “I’m sorry.”
Robert turned to her, and I could see the flash of his teeth as he smiled. “Nothing to be sorry about, ma’am.”
Mrs. Norman’s apartment building was on 135th Street, a few blocks west of Lenox. Cars were parked bumper to bumper in front of it, and Robert had to drive two blocks farther to find a space for the big Cadillac.
As he parked it, Miss Lizzie said, “Robert, would you like to come in with us?”
He turned around in his seat. “Excuse me, ma’am?”
“Would it be acceptable, to the people there, if you accompanied us to this party?”
“Acceptable, ma’am? Sure it would. Mr. Liebowitz said it was an open party.”
“It’s up to you, of course. But it does seem rather silly for you to be waiting out here in the car.”
Robert looked at Mr. Liebowitz.
In the soft light drifting in from the streetlamp, Mr. Liebowitz smiled. “You’re supposed to be keeping an eye on Miss Borden and Amanda. You can’t do that if they’re there and you’re here.”
Robert grinned. “No, sir, I guess not.”
“As Miss Borden says, it’s up to you.”
“Would it be all right with you if I change my jacket? There’s another one in the trunk. It’ll only take me a minute.”
“Fine with me.”
We waited on the sidewalk. Robert tossed his chauffeur’s cap into the trunk and stripped off his uniform jacket. Strapped beneath his thick left shoulder was a leather holster that held a large automatic pistol.
“My goodness,” said Mrs. Parker. “Is that loaded?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Robert.
Mrs. Parker looked him up and down, puffed out her cheeks, and then audibly sighed.
Robert laid down the uniform jacket and lifted a suit coat that matched his black pants. He slipped into it and buttoned it shut. Like the chauffeur’s jacket, it had been well tailored. Unless you looked carefully, you could not see the faint swell in the fabric caused by the holster.
“Sorry to make you wait, ma’am,” he said to Miss Lizzie.
“Not at all, Robert. Perhaps you should lead the way.”
We could hear the music even before we reached the building—the tinkling of a piano, the thumping of drums, the earnest wail of a trumpet.
Three black men were sitting on the stoop, two of them side-by-side on the first step, the third sitting two steps up, his forearms on his knees, his right hand holding the neck of a large beer bottle. All the men wore suits, and they all had their coats opened and their ties loosened. They looked up at us without expression, their faces shuttered.
“Evening,” said Robert.
The man with the beer bottle nodded. “Sure is.”
“Excuse us,” said Robert.
No one stood, no one changed expression, but the man sitting farthest to the left moved his knees slightly to the right.
We went up the steps, Robert leading, then Miss Lizzie and her walking stick, then me and Mrs. Parker, and finally Mr. Liebowitz. As we reached the top of the stoop, the man with the beer bottle said something, and the others laughed.
We followed the thumping of the drums up the stairs, the sound growing louder as we rose. Between the third and fourth floor, we passed a couple wrapped in a passionate embrace, their hands scrambling at each other’s shoulders. They ignored us. On the fourth floor, where the music was loudest, we stepped out into the hallway.
It was crammed—men and women, black and white, everyone wearing suits and dresses, the dresses of the black women, bright reds and pinks and yellows, wildly more colorful than the dresses of their white counterparts. The people were animated, laughing or smiling as they stood there, leaning toward one another and burbling cheerfully, gesturing with paper cups and cigarettes. A cumulus of smoke hung beneath the ceiling, fogging the light from the overhead fixtures. The air was thick with the sharp smells of perfume and hectic flesh.
There was an energy there, a feeling of excitement, and it occurred to me that it was an excitement very different from the kind I had witnessed at the Cotton Club. It seemed to me then—and it still does—that the people at the club were anticipating, without any real hope of achieving, what these people were actually living. It was exactly this busy jumble of races and genders, this heated erotic bustle, that the customers of the nightclub had been seeking—without, of course, ever actually finding it.
As I wound my way through the crowd with Miss Lizzie beside me, a young black man in a green suit stepped forward and, with a gallant flourish, handed her a paper cup. “Here you go, mama.”
The people around us laughed. Miss Lizzie smiled. “Why, thank you,” she said and took the cup, raised it to her lips, and sipped at it. She smiled. “Delightful,” she announced. The man grinned happily.
We moved on, and I turned to her. “What is it?” I asked her.
She leaned toward me. “Furniture polish.”
We arrived at last at the open door of one apartment. Standing there with a cigar box under his arm was a short, thin black man in a gray suit, a large black beret slumped across his head. He said to Miss Lizzie, “How many, ma’am?”
“There are five of us,” she said.
“Be ten dollahs, please.”
As Miss Lizzie opened her purse, Mr. Liebowitz stepped forward and handed the man a ten-dollar bill.
“Thank you,” said the man. “You go ahead in now.”
And so we did, all of us, into the clash and dash of movement.
Chapter Nineteen
The room was larger than I expected, but it was even more tightly packed than the hallway.
Over in one corner, in white shirts and unknotted black ties, were the musicians: a painfully thin trumpet player, a small but determined drummer, and a jolly young mustachioed fat man who pounded at the keys of an old upright piano while he beamed back over his plump shoulder at the crowd. Perched on the pianist’s head was a tiny porkpie hat that looked as though it were about to go flying off.
In front of them, on a few square feet of bare wood floor, three black couples were ardently dancing, elegant arms and legs flying, managing somehow not to slam an elbow or a knee into the
crowd huddled to either side of them.
To the left was the bar, an improvised table of two-by-eight boards supported by sawhorses. Behind it, ladling out a red liquid from a galvanized metal tub, was a tall black woman in a sleeveless purple dress. More people were clustered along the length of the bar, some of them couples, laughing and grinning and chattering. Some were single men, their glances moving over the crowd, searching through it with a brittle nonchalance.
I looked around.
People were everywhere in the room—standing, sitting, shuffling about. In one overstuffed chair, amid a clutch of attentive young men, sat two young smiling black women in gorgeous matching black gowns. The sofa held three couples, men alternating with women. The last couple was white, and they were chatting merrily with the black couple to their right.
I saw Robert heading off toward another corner, followed by Mrs. Parker.
“Amanda?” said Mr. Liebowitz. “Miss Borden?”
“Yes?” said Miss Lizzie.
“Could the two of you come with me?”
“Certainly.”
Miss Lizzie and I followed him over to the bar, where he edged himself between two men and leaned toward the woman in the purple dress. Using her long metal ladle, she was expertly pouring more red liquid into another paper cup. He said something to her, and she looked at me and then at Miss Lizzie.
Over the music she called out to Miss Lizzie, “You be wantin’ a drink?”
“Thank you, no,” said Miss Lizzie, smiling, and raised her paper cup. “I already have one. Delicious.”
The woman grinned and then looked at me. “Glass of water, chil’?”
“No, thank you,” I said.
In her midforties, she was big-boned and wide-hipped. Her skin was a flawless milk-chocolate brown, and her face, with its broad cheekbones and wide mouth and large solemn eyes, had the simple stoic beauty I would later admire in Olmec statuary. Clinging to the right side of her shiny marcelled hair was the spectacular white sunburst of a dahlia.
“Mr. Liebowitz?” she shouted. “Drink?”
“No. Thanks.”
She called out to a woman standing on this side of the table, to her right, “Florence?” She held up the ladle.
Florence stepped around the table, took the ladle, and the woman in the purple dress edged out from behind the bar. “You all come along with me, okay?” she said to Mr. Liebowitz.
We all followed her through the crowd, down a congested hallway. I caught a whiff of another odor, sweeter than tobacco smoke, a smell that I would learn, some years later, was marijuana. We passed one door and came to another. At this second door, a threesome of guests stood talking: two middle-aged black women and a tall, distinguished-looking older black man. All of them nodded to Mrs. Norman. She nodded back, leaned between them, pounded underhanded at the door with her balled fist, and calmly shouted, “You inside! You finish up that weed and git your ass out here. People be waitin’.”
She turned back to us. “Come along.”
A few feet farther on, at the end of the hallway, we arrived at another door. Mrs. Norman reached into the pocket of her dress, found a key, and unlocked the door. She turned to Mr. Liebowitz. “Got to keep it locked or some of these folks be climbin’ into my bed.”
She pushed open the door, leaned in, flicked a light switch, and then gestured with her long brown arm. “Go ahead.”
Miss Lizzie entered, then I, then Mr. Liebowitz. Mrs. Norman came in behind us, shut the door, slipped the key into the lock, and turned it.
I glanced around me. It was the first time I had been in the bedroom of a black person, and I suppose that I was vaguely disappointed. It seemed utterly, relentlessly normal. The walls were white, and the drawn curtains were brown. On the right was a small mirrored makeup table arrayed with tiny flat tubs of cream and squat glass bottles of perfume. A ladder-back wooden chair stood before it. On its left was a plump padded reading chair and a floor lamp, its yellow shade fringed. Beside these, a dresser and a wardrobe, both painted brown. The bed was large, and it had a lacy yellow coverlet, two oversize pillows, and a kind of headboard that incorporated a bookshelf, the shelf stuffed with books. Above the bed, on the wall, hung a small framed print of a smiling Jesus, his robe opened, the finger of his right hand serenely pointing to his disembodied, glowing, ruby-red heart.
Mr. Liebowitz introduced us, once again referring to Miss Lizzie as Miss Cabot.
Mrs. Norman looked at me. “It’s an awful thing, what happened to your uncle. A cruel, terrible thing.” She turned to Mr. Liebowitz. “What kind of evil person do a thing like that?”
“That,” he said, “is exactly what we’re trying to find out.”
She looked around the room and then back at him. “I apologize,” she said. “Don’t have but the two chairs. I can stand.”
“Of course not,” he said. “I’ll stand.”
After a few moments, we had worked out the disposition. Miss Lizzie sat in the reading chair, I sat on the wooden chair from the makeup table, and Mr. Liebowitz stood, leaning his small body against the table. Mrs. Norman sat on the end of her bed, her back straight, her hands in her lap, her knees together, her shapely, muscular legs crossed at the ankles.
“First of all,” said Mr. Liebowitz, “thank you for taking time away from your party.”
Smiling, Mrs. Norman reached up and gently touched the white dahlia in her hair. “Real nice party, it turned out.”
“Very nice,” said Mr. Liebowitz.
“Fats—the piano player—he had him a birthday couple weeks ago, and he still be celebratin’.”
“He is very good,” said Miss Lizzie.
“He the best. He be big-time one day.”
“How often,” Miss Lizzie asked her, “do you have these parties?”
“’Bout once a month. I do any more, the neighbors git riled. But what I do, I invite ’em in, let ’em all come in for free.” She smiled. “Couple glasses of punch, they git happy as clams at high tide.”
“It’s a lovely punch,” said Miss Lizzie.
Mrs. Norman laughed. “You pullin’ my leg now. It ain’t poison, but it ain’t no nectar of the gods. It git the job done, though. People these days, they need a little somethin’ take they minds off they troubles.”
“People in any days,” said Miss Lizzie.
Mrs. Norman nodded. “That the truth.”
“Mrs. Norman,” said Mr. Liebowitz, “how well did you know John Burton?”
“Not hardly at all. I work for him. Three years now. But I don’t know him, exactly.”
She turned to me. “He nice, though. I know that. A real nice gentleman. He real excited you coming to town.”
“Excited?” I said.
She smiled. “Like a little boy. Two weeks ago, he there, at the apartment. I knock on his bedroom door. I want to go in and give it a cleanup, and he come to the door. He wearin’ one of them spiffy black coats. Dress-up coats.”
“A dinner jacket,” I said.
She nodded. “Dinner jacket. He say, ‘What you think, Mrs. Norman?’ He always real polite. He say, ‘My niece I tol’ you about, Amanda, she comin’ in next week. You think she like this?’”
“He really asked you that?” I said.
“Sure he did. I say, ‘You be looking real suave, Mr. Burton. Your niece, she be deep down impressed, for sure.’”
I thought of John trying out his dinner jacket like a high school senior, eagerly asking Mrs. Norman her opinion, and I felt a sadness sift slowly through me. When I first met him at Grand Central Station, he had said that my upcoming visit had been a big deal, but I had discounted that. I would never have imagined that he, so debonair, so self-assured, would actually be nervous about meeting a sixteen-year-old girl.
“I say to him,” Mrs. Norman continued, “‘You know what you do, Mr. Burton?’ I
say, ‘You buy that young girl a great big ole flower. You buy her a corsage, a real nice one, for when the both of you go out together.’”
She smiled at me. “He do that, chil’? He buy you a flower?”
“Yes,” I said, and my throat clamped shut. Until this moment, I had completely forgotten about the orchid John had given me on Friday evening. As far as I knew, it was still in the icebox at his apartment, where I carefully tucked it away when we returned that night. I imagined it lying there in its tiny cardboard coffin, limp and withered, and I lowered my head, abruptly guilty, abruptly forlorn. I felt a tear trickle down my cheek.
“Aw, honey,” said Mrs. Norman softly. “Hey now. I’m sorry. I got me a big fat mouth. Don’t half know what I’m sayin’ sometimes.”
I looked up, swallowing. “No,” I said. I lowered my head again, rubbed at my eyes with my finger and thumb, and then looked back up at her. “Thank you so much for telling me.”
“He a good man,” she told me. She nodded and reached out and touched my arm. “He a real gentleman.”
Mr. Liebowitz asked Mrs. Norman, “Did he have any enemies that you know of, Mrs. Norman?”
She turned to him. “No one I ever knew about.”
“Have you met Sybil Cartwright?”
She thought a moment then shook her handsome head. “Don’t recollect the name.”
“What about Daphne Dale?”
She frowned. “She the writer lady?”
“Yes.”
“Her, yes.” Her handsome black face was serious now.
“You didn’t like her,” said Miss Lizzie.
Mrs. Norman shook her head. “Not my place to have feelings about Mr. Burton’s friends.”
“Mrs. Norman,” said Miss Lizzie, “we’re all very much in the dark here, Amanda and I and Mr. Liebowitz. None of us really knew John. Anything you can tell us about him, anything at all, will be helpful. Why is it that you disliked Miss Dale?”
“Didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t need to.”
“More like she be dislikin’ me.”
“Why?”
“She don’t need no reason. She from the South. In her mind, black people still be slaves.”
New York Nocturne Page 17
