by McBain, Ed
“Johnny …”
“You bastard, you’d better fix it,” Johnny said tightly. “I’ll rip your eyes out if you don’t.”
Frankie stared at him levelly. He bit his lower lip, and he wondered what Lefkowitz would do if he were here, and a sudden panic knifed his spine. Suppose Lefkowitz should come back?
“Come on in back,” he said nervously. “Get out of the light, Johnny. For God’s sake, the cops are looking all over for you.”
“They still think I gunned Luis?”
“Didn’t you?”
“You know damn well I didn’t.”
“I only know what I hear, Johnny.”
They walked to the back of the shop, and Frankie led him to where the retorts and measures rested on a long brown table in one darkened corner. Johnny shrugged out of his coat, throwing it over the back of a chair. He rolled up the sleeve of his jacket, and he saw Frankie look sick again. Frankie touched the cut with probing, trembling fingers. The cut was a real bad one. It spread Johnny’s arm in a jagged red streak.
“I … I …” Frankie tried to say something, and then wet his lips. There was a sheen of perspiration on his forehead now, and he blinked his eyes uncontrollably. “Johnny, why’d you have to come here? Did you have to come here?”
“Where else could I go? Could I go to a doctor?”
“No, but …”
“Where else? For Pete’s sake, will you do something to stop the blood?”
“I … I will. I will,” Frankie said, wetting his lips again. He picked up a package of absorbent cotton, breaking the carton open with shaking hands.
“What’re you so nervous about?” Johnny asked. “It’s my goddamned arm.”
“I know, I’m just … I wish you hadn’t come here, Johnny.” He fumbled with the blue paper, unrolled it, and ripped off a piece of cotton.
“Why? I told you I didn’t kill Luis.”
“Everybody says otherwise.”
“Everybody’s wrong, then. Come on, fix my arm and I’ll get the hell out of here.”
“If you killed him, then I’m accessory after the fact by dressing your wound. You shouldn’t have come here. I’m aiding and abetting—”
“Oh, shut the hell up!” Johnny said.
Frankie reached for a large bottle of peroxide and soaked the cotton with it. He put the cotton to the wound, and he saw Johnny’s face tighten in pain.
“Easy, easy,” Johnny said. “You trying to—”
“You’ve got to clean the wound,” Frankie said. He ripped off another piece of cotton, and he was sweating freely now, and his eyes were narrowed. He was thinking of Andrea, the mulatto girl he’d met at a City College dance, and he was thinking of the drugstore he wanted to own one day. He worked on the cut methodically, unaware of Johnny’s clenched fists and Johnny’s tight mouth. He worked on the wound with the blood running red, but he did not think of the wound, he thought only that he was helping someone who was wanted by the police. He thought that, and the sweat rolled from his forehead and over the soggy collar of his shirt and down his back.
“I … I need some bandages,” he said.
“All right, hurry it up,” Johnny answered.
“Out front,” Frankie said. He wet his lips and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I … I keep them out front. I’ll get some and come right back, Johnny.”
“All right, go ahead.”
“I’ll be right back, Johnny,” he said a little louder. “Don’t move. The bleeding may stop if you don’t move.”
He went out front, and Johnny watched him go, and then he looked down at the cut. Damn if that addict hadn’t done a dandy job on him, the sonovabitch. Well, Frankie would fix it. Frankie would bandage it, and at least he’d be able to walk the streets without leaving a trail of blood. He leaned back and looked at the walls of the room, at the bottles of pills and powders stacked on the shelves.
He waited for ten minutes, and finally Frankie came back, out of breath, still sweating.
“What the hell took so long?” Johnny asked.
“I … I had a customer.”
“I didn’t hear no bell,” Johnny said.
“No? That’s funny. It rang.”
“You got the bandage?”
“Yes. Yes, here it is. Johnny, you really shouldn’t have come here. I …”
“Is that the only song you know? Can’t you see my arm is all cut up?”
“I’m sorry, Johnny, but I’ve got to think of myself, too. You can understand that, can’t you?”
“All right, bandage my arm.”
“But you can understand that, can’t you? How a man has to think of himself, too? Is that being selfish, Johnny? A man has to think of his future, you know.”
“What are you trying to tell me, Frankie?”
“Nothing.”
“What are you sweating about?”
“What do you mean, sweating? I’m not sweating, Johnny.”
“You’re soaking wet.” Johnny’s eyes narrowed. “What took you so long out there, man?”
“Where, Johnny? Long out where?”
“Out front. Don’t play dumb, Frankie. What took you so goddamn long?”
“I told you. I had a customer.”
“What kind of customer?”
“A woman. A lady. She … she came in just as I went out front.”
“What’d she buy?”
“What?”
Johnny jumped to his feet. “You heard me. What’d she buy?”
“Uh … a bottle of cough medicine.”
“How come you didn’t come back here for the prescription?”
“It’s … Did I say cough medicine? I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Johnny. She bought milk of magnesia. She bought a—”
“Why didn’t the bell over the door ring?”
“The bell? It did ring, Johnny. You just didn’t hear it, that’s all. The bell rang.”
“Did you call the cops, you bastard?”
There was a moment of silence in the small room. The naked light bulb gleamed on the sweat clinging to Frankie’s forehead.
“Did you?” Johnny shouted.
“A man has to think of himself, Johnny.”
“You bastard,” Johnny said. “Oh, you dirty—”
“What am I supposed to do? Throw everything over for you?”
The bell at the front of the store tinkled, and Johnny whirled suddenly. “Is that—”
“Back here!” Frankie screamed. “Back here, officers!”
Johnny froze. He seemed incapable of making a decision for a second, and then his head turned quickly, and he saw the door set in the side wall. He started for the door, remembered his coat, and turned back. He heard the footsteps running for the back of the shop, and again seemed undecided for a fraction of an instant. He left the coat and ran for the door again, opening it and stepping outside. He was running before he hit the pavement.
He did not look back at his friend Frankie, nor did he hear what the cops said to him.
Four
The Grand is on 125th Street, just between Lexington and Third Avenues. It shows the movies the RKO Proctor’s doesn’t run, and it was there that Johnny went, taking a seat near the back, favoring his right arm by leaning over to the left and cradling the gashed wrist and forearm in his lap. He went there for two reasons. First, he went there because it was in Wop Harlem, and he did not think the cops would look for him there. Perhaps he should have gone downtown, to Times Square, maybe, but he didn’t want to be too far away from the neighborhood in case the arm got really bad.
He went there, too, because he wanted time to think. The arm was beginning to hurt badly, and it wasn’t easy to think now. Especially outside in the cold. He cursed Frankie again, and he wondered if he shouldn’t have paused that extra moment, just long enough to pick up his overcoat.
He sat at the back of the theatre, the 3D glasses they had given him lying useless in his lap, alongside his cradled arm. Without the glasses, the scree
n was a distorted hodgepodge of color, but Johnny hadn’t come here to catch up on the latest Hollywood attempt. He’d come to get a breather, come to figure a way out of the mess before it was too late.
The images on the screen did not help his thinking any. Like some nightmare world of demons, they flashed before his eyes, and he heard the sound and watched the kaleidoscopic colors, and lost himself in reliving the encounter with that sonovabitch addict who’d slashed him. He tried to figure, at the same time, just who’d killed Luis the Spic, but he came up with a list as long as his slashed arm. If Luis had anything, it had been a talent for making people dislike him.
The cops, of course, knew this. But they sought the best possible suspect, the one who’d had the best recent reason for killing Luis. If they had bothered to look more than ten inches beyond the tips of their dripping noses, they’d have realized that Luis was, among other things:
A dope pusher.
A bookie.
A pimp, on occasion.
A fence, on occasion.
A would-be rape artist, on occasion.
A bastard, always.
This was an impressive list when chalked up to a cat who was no more than twenty-eight years old, a most impressive list. And there were enough junkies, bettors, prostitutes and takers; petty jewel thieves and car-tire hijackers, outraged virgins and plain ordinary citizens who would have loved nothing better than to hold Luis’ throat between their fingers while his eyes popped out of his goddamned skull and his tongue turned purple. Enough to fill the Grand on a Saturday—a rainy Saturday, at that. So the cops had reached into their bag and come up with Johnny Lane.
They had undoubtedly picked up his trail from Old Man Lefkowitz’s. If he had another half hour here, he was good. And in a half hour, he had to figure it all out, and then start looking for the guy with the zip gun, because the only way the cops would ease off would be if he had the guy in tow.
Except, of course, that the gun was probably at the bottom of the Harlem River by this time.
And the guy was probably in Alaska or points west.
“You ain’t even watching the picture,” the girl said.
He turned abruptly, startled, ready to run. He thought at first that the girl was white, and he relaxed a little when he saw she was colored. She couldn’t have been more than twenty. She wore a white sweater that was filled to capacity. He could see that even in the dark. She was pretty, he supposed, in a hard brassy way, with high cheekbones and full lips, blurred now by the darkness of the theatre. There was a vivid slash of lipstick across her mouth, and the whites of her eyes glowed in the reflection from the screen.
“No, I ain’t,” he said. He hadn’t even noticed the girl sitting on his left, and he wondered now when she’d come in. She reeked of cheap perfume, but there was something exciting about the perfume and her nearness, and he tried to remember why the perfume stimulated him, but at the same time he told himself he had other things to think about besides some pickup in the movies.
“These three-D things are good,” she said, taking the glasses from his lap, her hand brushing against his thigh. “Suppose to put these Hollywood women right in your arms. Don’t you go for Hollywood women right in your arms?”
“I … Look, I’m busy,” he said.
“Too busy to watch the picture?”
He felt an instant panic. Had she heard about him? Did she know he was the one the cops wanted? What the hell was she doing in Wop Harlem, anyway?
“Yes,” he said slowly, “too busy.”
“Too busy for … other things, too?”
He caught the pitch then, and he remembered the perfume, the same cheap heady stuff he’d sniffed that time on the Market. An idea began kicking around in the back of his mind.
“Things like what?” he asked.
The girl sucked in a deep breath, and the sweater expanded in the darkness, high and full, straining. “Things like a way to kill the night. Better than doing eye-muscle tricks in a movie.”
“How?” he asked.
“A room on Lex. Not the Waldorf, but clean sheets. A bottle, if you can afford it. Or a pipe. You choose your poison. Not to mention a price that’s right.”
“Like?” His mind was racing ahead now. A room on Lex, away from the eyes of the cops, away from Nigger Harlem, more time to think, more time to work it all out.
“Like five for a roll,” she said, “and seven-fifty for all night. Plus the bottle. You got seven-fifty?”
“I’ve got seven-fifty,” he whispered.
“Don’t let the price throw you, man. It’s quality merchandise. I’m generous.”
“You’re on,” he said, making up his mind.
He saw her grin in the darkness. “I knew you was an intellectual,” she said. “Come on.”
They moved out of the row into the aisle, and she started for the rear of the theatre.
“This way,” he said. “We’ll use the exit down front.”
“You ashamed or something?” she asked, her hands on her hips.
He decided to give it to her straight. “I got slashed in a fight. My arm is bleeding. I don’t want to attract attention.”
She stared at him for a few moments, and then said, “Long as only your arm is cut, that don’t affect my business at all. Not at all.”
They left the theatre, and he gave her the money for a jug, and then waited in the darkness of a hallway while she bought it in a brilliantly lighted liquor store. When she came back, she walked on the side of his wounded arm, blocking it effectively from inquisitive eyes.
“What are you doing so far east?” he asked her.
“How do you mean?”
“With the wops,” he said.
The girl shrugged. “The ofay likes it black now and then.” In Harlem, ofay was simple pig Latin for “foe.”
“And do you like it white?” he asked suspiciously.
“Business is business,” she said.
“You ever operate in Harlem? Our Harlem?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I got my reasons. Listen, who’re you, the D.A.? Do you want this, or don’t you?”
“I want it,” he said, thinking, I only want the room, baby. You can stuff the rest.
They walked in silence to a brownstone set next to a delicatessen. She led him up the steps and opened the wooden door to her room. It was a small room, with a bare bulb hanging overhead and a dresser in one corner. A bed occupied most of the room, and there was a table with an enamel washbasin on a stand alongside the bed.
“Like I said,” she told him, “it ain’t the Waldorf.”
She was not as big as he’d thought she was in the movies. She was, in fact, almost small except for the breasts that crowded the woolen sweater. He unconsciously compared her to Cindy in his mind, and his eyes roamed her body candidly. She saw his eyes on her and said, “Look O.K.?”
“Looks fine,” he answered. He could not manage a smile.
“Which shall we treat first? The arm or the gullet or whatever?”
“Have a drink, if you want,” he said. “I can wait.”
“Yeah, but you’re bleeding on my imported Persian rug.” She grinned and went to the dresser, taking out a bottle of peroxide and a roll of gauze.
“I already had the peroxide treatment,” he said bitterly.
“Little more won’t hurt.” She led him to the basin, took off his jacket, and then rolled up the sleeve of his shirt. “Besides,” she said, “don’t kick about the service. You’d never get this on the Market.”
“Don’t I know it,” he said.
She studied the cut more closely. “You run into a buzz saw?”
“No, a hophead.”
“Same thing,” she said, pouring the peroxide onto the wound. He winced, holding back the scream that bubbled onto his lips.
“You got glass in there.”
“Pull it out, if you can.”
She looked at him curiously. “Sure,” she said. She
wrapped absorbent cotton around a toothpick, and then began fishing for the glass splinters. Each time she got one, he clamped his teeth down hard, and finally it was all over. She drenched the arm in peroxide again, and then wrapped the gauze around it, so tight that he could feel the veins throbbing against the thin material.
“That rates a swallow,” she said. She broke the seal on the fifth, poured whisky for them both into water glasses, and handed him one. “Here’s to the hophead,” she said.
“May he drop dead,” Johnny answered, tossing off the drink. It burned a hole clear down to his stomach, and he remembered abruptly that he hadn’t eaten for a good long while.
The girl took another drink, and then put the glass and the bottle on the dresser top again. “Well, now,” she said. “Let’s try to forget that arm, shall we?”
She moved closer to him, and he thought of Cindy and of his real reasons for coming up here. “Look …” he started.
The sweater moved in on him, warm and high, soft, beating with the soft muted beat of her heart beneath the wool and the flesh. He tried to move away, but she took the back of his head and pressed his face tight against the wool. He sat on the edge of the bed, and she stood in front of him, and he thought, Cindy, Cindy, and then he thought, I’m tired, I’m goddamn tired, and then he thought, The hell with Cindy, the hell with the cops, the hell with Luis, the hell with everyone. His hands dropped behind her, seizing the thin silk of her skirt, tightening there fiercely.
“Say, easy now, man,” she said, chiding, smiling. “Easy now. Slow and easy.”
She stepped back from him, dipped her head, and reached her arms up suddenly. The white sweater slid up over smooth brown skin. She pulled it over her head, and then threw her shoulders back, proud of what she’d uncovered, watching his face and watching him wet his lips and suck in a deep breath, and smiling all the while because this was her trade and she knew she was good at her trade.
She took a step closer to him, a sad, wise, happy, unhappy smile on her face. “Now, don’t break me, man,” she said. “Nice and easy now, you promise?”
She took the back of his head again, and her fingers toyed with his hair. She kissed his nose, and his mouth, and his ears, and when his hands tightened on her again, she caught his wrists and held them away from her.
