Hard Luck And Trouble

by Gammy L. Singer

  “Your mother’s face left a perfect impression in the cement. Some items of jewelry were also identified by your aunt. A locket she wore. Sorry to break it to you, Mr. Brown, but it’s your mother all right.”

  You know, I really liked the way he called me mister. I replaced the cup on the stoop and reached for the photograph. Without warning, something deep inside me cracked and split into ragged blocks of ice. An ice floe rafted through my veins and chilled me. I pressed my hands against my stomach to still the shaking. Through a roar in my head Caporelli talked, but the sound came at me muffled and distant.

  “... waited seven years to file a report ... strangled. . . neck broken. A pity your old man’s deceased. Might have wanted to have a conversation with him.”

  At the mention of my father, I raised my head. Caporelli lacked subtlety. I caught his drift, and a muscle in my jaw twitched.

  “Murder this old ... it ain’t going to be easy to put the pieces together. You have information—anything about your mother that might help us?”

  I stared back at the ground. I could offer no help.

  “No, I can’t help you,” I said.

  “Anything,” Caporelli continued. “Something you’ve heard, from your father, other relatives?”

  “No, I can’t help you,” I repeated. Caporelli cast a sideways glance at me.

  Bundt said, “Mr. Brown, we’re going to try, but to be honest, it’s unlikely we’ll ever find her killer. If you can think of anything useful to our investigation, let us know.” He handed me his card.

  I didn’t trust my voice, so I nodded at him. He nodded back and the cops left in their car.

  A squirrel clambered up and onto the branches of the oak tree. Minutes passed. The coffee grew cold. I stared across the street at the brownstone where my mother was murdered. Aunt Reba had lied to me.

  I was seven years old and wore long gray pants. I was in Mrs. Schwartz’s class at school, and my aunt Reba came to school. Why did I think of that? Gloria stood. She must have thought I was staring at her. She made a move like she was coming over.

  The phone rang inside my building, coming from my office. I left Gloria standing—scooped up the paper, the cup, and my emotions, and disappeared inside.

  Chapter 18

  The next day, me and the sun got up at the same time. Dawn fingered its way into my bedroom. I sat on the edge of my bed thumbing through the Brooklyn phone book, looking for Aunt Reba’s number. No luck. Maybe she’d gotten married. Disgusted, I tossed the thick book on the floor; it landed with a thud.

  Satchels hung beneath my eyes. I replayed the scene on the front stoop for the millionth time. The questions I wanted to ask Reba looped around my brain like a hula hoop.

  Dew glistened on the open window and I looked at it, then back at my alarm clock. Five-thirty in the morning. A two-hundred-pound bird with bronchial pneumonia chirped nearby. I slammed the window shut, lay back on the bed, and held my head. A mammer-jammer of a headache throbbed behind my eyes.

  It was all God’s fault. God must be a woman, ’cause she was always fucking with me. That’s what women did—they fucked with you. Gloria came to mind. I rambled out loud—lack of sleep and pain in my head does that to me. Catherine’s image floated past, her eyes huge and accusing. My eyes popped open and I peered around the room. Nothing there to “smite” me. I smiled grimly. The Arranger must not be paying attention.

  Thoughts of what happened to my Mother replaced thoughts of Catherine. What did it matter if my mother died in childbirth, or some fucker offed her? Dead was dead. And that was that. But there was more to it. I couldn’t leave it at that—not until I knew for sure who had killed her.

  Montcrieff? Was it Montcrieff? My father? Frustration and anger made me ram a fist into my bedroom wall. That was stupid. The only thing that did was make a hole. Today, I needed to take action. I needed to talk to Reba. Get Bundt to give me her address. He seemed to be an okay guy—maybe he’d do it.

  I turned on my side, pulled a pillow over my head, and tried to shut out morning noises and that stupid bird. Somewhere outside a garbage truck belched. I rolled on my other side. I couldn’t quash the turmoil roiling inside, so for hours I watched daybreak turn to morning, and around eight o’clock I pushed myself up and got out of bed.

  Both body and mind fatigued, I stood in the shower and let the water pour vigor and purpose into me. For twenty minutes I stood.

  But after the shower all my movements seemed weighted and stuck in molasses. I toweled off, wrapping the towel around my waist, and shuffled into the kitchen. I brewed a pot of coffee, extra strong, and waited for it to perk. I looked up at the kitchen clock. Nine. Time to call Bundt.

  I went to the bedroom, picked up my billfold on the nightstand with Bundt’s card tucked inside, and dialed the Twenty-eighth Precinct. I was surprised when Bundt himself answered the phone.

  “Detective Bundt here.”

  “Bundt? This is Amos Brown. Skeleton-in-the-wall Brown?”

  “You don’t need the description. I know who you are.”

  “Right. I need a favor. I want to find my aunt Reba. I’d like to talk to her about, you know ...”

  “You don’t have her address?”

  “Nuh-uh. We ... we lost touch.” There was a slight pause before Bundt answered.

  “Really not supposed to do this but ... tell you what, I’ll give you the phone number. Let her decide if she wants to see you.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  “Hold on.”

  I heard the clunk of the phone as it hit the desk. I waited a minute, then he came back on the line.

  “It’s 5520 Nostrand Avenue.” He immediately moaned and said, “Aw, shit, I wasn’t supposed to do that. I was supposed to give you the phone number ...”

  “It’s forgotten already, Bundt. What did you say the phone number was?” He gave it to me, and I wrote the phone number down next to the address.

  “Thanks, Bundt. I owe you.”

  He grumbled something unintelligible and broke the connection. I threw on some clothes and was out the door on my way to Brooklyn.

  Chapter 19

  Pots of roses, rhododendrons, and marigolds filled every cranny on the front porch of the small, trim Brooklyn house. Flowers nudged their blossoms against my pants and let me know I was an unwelcome intruder. I took in the place. Didn’t add up—flowers and Reba?

  I navigated my size-twelves through the minefield of pots and checked the number of the door against the address I held in my hand. Same number all right.

  An old woman with runny-maple-syrup skin and bird eyes stuck her head through the curtains of the window on my left and stared out at me. I returned her stare and jammed the door buzzer hard.

  Her head disappeared from the window. Seconds later I heard the click-click-click of locks being released and the door swung open.

  “Stop ringing that bell, don’t you see me coming? Amos? Is that you? Lord today. Amos Brown. Figured it wouldn’t be too long before you’d come calling. Police already been here. Wipe your feet and come on in.”

  Out of habit, I did as I was told and entered the cramped vestibule. The woman who stood before me wasn’t the Reba I remembered. This Reba had lost inches, and the years hadn’t been kind. Wrinkles, like tributaries of some ancient river, crisscrossed the map of her face. The rod I had imagined as a kid to be soldered to her spine and inserted up her butt-hole had disappeared, leaving this new Reba bent over and frail looking.

  I asked her straight out, “Why did you lie to me about my mother?”

  She bristled and sparks shot from her eyes. “You come in here and accuse me, you might as well turn around and carry your black butt on out of here. I ain’t taking your sass.”

  I clenched my jaw and said, “Listen, old woman, this ain’t about you. I’m here to find out the truth about my mother.”

  “The truth?” she repeated. She turned and shuffled to the living room in her run-over slippers, and unfolded herself into
a waiting easy chair. I assumed I was supposed to follow her, so I did. She pressed her hands together on her lap, her eyes riveted to mine with her birdlike stare. I took a seat opposite her on a stiff plastic-covered settee. The plastic snapped, crackled, and grabbed at my behind, and didn’t want to let go.

  Reba sniffed as if she smelled dog shit, then wrapped arms around herself and waited for me to speak.

  “Well?” I said.

  No response. And then I gave it to her. Words spewed from me like projectile vomit; I couldn’t have stopped myself if I tried. “All those years ago—you lied to me. Did you know I grew up, old woman, thinking my mother’s death was somehow my fault?”

  Reba blinked and snorted. “Hmph. What you thought ain’t had nothing to do with me.”

  My jaw dropped. Belligerent, she thrust hers forward. “Listen, boy, before you get on your high horse, you better remember who took you in when nobody else would. Who sacrificed precious years for your little hoodlum ass. What did I get for it, huh? Tell me that.”

  Unbelievable.

  “She died giving birth to me—that’s what you told me.” I looked at her. It was useless. She’d never understand what she did to me. I shook my head. “Let’s close the book on that, Reba,” I said. “The deal is, somebody killed my mother. I want to know—did my father do it?”

  “You not the only one hurting. My sister never deserved to be buried in no basement. She was too good for that.”

  “Well, that’s what someone did. Did my father do it?”

  Reba touched her throat where her next words caught. “How am I supposed to know?”

  “Didn’t I always hear you say how your sister was your best friend?”

  “She was.”

  “Well? How were things between Montcrieff and Elizabeth? You had to know.”

  Like an inner tube deflating, Reba turned and blew a sigh into the room. “Why you want to know about Montcrieff? He’s dead and this won’t bring her back. Nothing on God’s earth can bring her back.” Tears started down her face.

  “I’ve lived with that. But if Montcrieff didn’t do it, I want to find the son of a bitch who did. Was Montcrieff violent?” I waited.

  “Are you?” she countered. And then Reba fixed her eyes on a spot above my head—her next words difficult to hear. “I heard, the week before she left ... before she disappeared ... they took Montcrieff off to jail—the police released him two days later.”

  The fucking bastard. My hands turned February cold and it was June. I asked, “Why did you wait so long to report her missing?”

  Reba hesitated. “I never thought ... Not my duty. She had a husband ... But when years went by, and no one heard from her, that’s when I went to the police.”

  “And?”

  “Said they’d look into it. Well, they didn’t look too hard. Wasn’t good relations between black folk and the police. I couldn’t get in my head why Elizabeth would of run off and not tell a living soul. Where would she go? Our parents had died. We’d lived in Harlem all our lives. Where could a young girl go?”

  I could tell it was a question Reba had asked herself before. I couldn’t fill in any blanks. “Was there another man?”

  Reba shrugged. “Maybe Montcrieff thought so.” She snuck a glance. “You’re tall, like your father.”

  I shifted in my seat. The plastic crackled. “Yeah, so I’ve been told.” I leaned to the side, pulled plastic out of my behind, and got up, ready to leave. Something I had to do first. Tough to ask this witch for anything, but I did it anyway. I asked her if she had a picture she could part with.

  She was surprised. “Of you?”

  “No. My mother.”

  Her eyes bored into mine. I understood when she made the decision. She unfurled herself from her chair and crossed to an antique sideboard, its wood polished and rich. She opened sideboard doors and pulled out an inlaid wooden box, tucked away on a shelf. I moved to help her lift it. Together we placed it on top of the sideboard.

  She tilted the lid back and carefully selected two pictures. One was a picture of two Harlem girls, Reba and Elizabeth, elementary school age, with hair plaited and dressed in pinafores, posed on the front stoop of a brownstone, the house on 131st—I recognized it as the one I also grew up in. The other was a sepia-toned wedding picture of a bride dressed in white lace.

  Reba pushed the wedding picture at me. “Here, take this one,” she said. She ran her fingers across the picture of the two sisters and returned it to the box. Pain crossed her face, and she grasped the box tightly. When I asked if she was all right she swatted me away. Then I asked a tougher question. I asked her if there were any pictures of me. She looked startled for a second, and then she shook her head. “No,” she said.

  The simple “no” told me what I wanted to know. I picked up my hat and headed for the door. “Thanks. I’ll let myself out.”

  As the door closed behind me I heard, “Amos, next time call first, and I’ll have some food ready for you.”

  I froze on the porch in disbelief, my hand still on the doorknob. She called me Amos. Reba had never called me Amos in all the years I’d been with her. Little Nigger, she’d always called me—and for the first five years of my life I thought that was my name.

  A breeze eddied around my legs and whispered secrets to the flowers pressed against me. Did the blossoms look up and wink? Son of a bitch.

  Chapter 20

  Wet hung in the air. I flicked the sweat off my forehead that threatened to trickle into my eyes. I was hungrier than a big dog. Back in Harlem, I stopped to pick up a fried fish sandwich at Pan-Pan’s on Lenox Avenue and wolfed it down in the car, hot sauce dripping onto my shirt, and then I cruised the hood, the streets thick with people. I nodded to some of the number runners working the streets, who returned a high sign as I passed.

  All ages, colors, sizes, and shapes clustered on street corners, outside barber shops, beauty salons, grocery stores—catching up on gossip, telling lies, or signifying. American born or immigrant, didn’t matter—all melded into the pastiche that was Harlem.

  Reba hadn’t given up much information, but what she said convinced me I didn’t have to do much looking for the man that murdered my mother. He was as close as my skin. His ghost moved with me—was with me now. Seeing Reba revived a past I had shunted away.

  Without much thought I made a spontaneous left turn at the next corner and found myself on 131st Street—the old neighborhood. I inched down the street until I came to a boarded-up and empty house—the house where Reba raised me. Signs of the Jolly Stompers, a Harlem gang, were evident. Spray paint had been graffitied across the front of the crumbling edifice.

  Memories returned. I heard the shouts of long-forgotten friends urging me to come out to play. Jo-Jo, dead at fourteen, Rocky killed when I was in the joint. Bubba ...

  On the stoop, a couple of teenagers loafed and smoked reefer. I eased into an empty spot and parked the car. The teenagers paid me no mind. I looked at the building for a minute, and then noticed the stain on my shirt—the color of blood. Shit. I couldn’t leave it. What was the matter with me? That spot, like the windowpanes in my office, disturbed me. All out of proportion to what it was, I know, but I couldn’t leave it. I knocked about in the glove compartment and retrieved a paper napkin. I used spit to lift the spot, but it only made it worse. Damn.

  A thump on my window and I shot clean up and off the seat, and hit my crazy bone on the door handle. Jesus. Ham Hocks stood there outside my car, grinning like a fool and waving at me. I rolled down the window, ready to cuss her ass out.

  Instead she blasted, “Hey, Nigger Landlord, what you be doing over here?”

  Like we were old friends or something. I ignored the disrespect and said, “You know this neighborhood?”

  “Man, what you want to know? I knows everything.”

  “Is that right? If you know so much, how come you can’t remember my name?”

  “I knows your name all right. I just be funning with you, that�
�s all. You Amos Brown. Your daddy Montcrieff Brown. Your mama dead.”

  I stared at her. Who was this woman? How did she know my daddy? I looked her up and down. She was one of those people you couldn’t tell their age by their looks, who looked the same at thirty as they did at sixty.

  I looked her over again. Jesus. A thunderbolt had hit her head—her hair stuck straight out all over. Her dress was grimy. She had few teeth left in her head. Whether they had been knocked out or had fallen out, who knew?

  “How you know about my mama?” I said.

  “Aw, man, everybody know about your mama. Leastways, now they do. But I knew your mama when.”

  The gossip machine—it roared through Harlem like one of them combines and mangled truth in its teeth like so much straw. I chewed on what she told me, and raised my eyebrow. “Is that a fact?”

  She lifted her brow back at me and cocked her head to one side. The question and its inevitable answer hung in the air between us.

  I pulled a five out of my pocket. Hocks grabbed at it, but I pulled it out of reach. She laid her roly-poly palm across my open window and told me, “Your mama be friends with my sister Doris.”

  That sounded like a lie as fat as she was. “Your sister Doris, huh? Where can I find your sister Doris?” I regretted the question as soon as it rolled off my lips.

  Let sleeping dogs sleep. The past was the past.

  Hocks pointed in the direction of two converted brownstones that stood side by side a few doors down the street, with the signs above the doors, THE CHURCH OF THE EVERLASTING ARMS and THE MOUNT ZION TEMPLE OF GOD.

  “Axe for Sister Cawley at the Temple of God. She a deaconess.” I hesitated for a second, then handed over the five. She stuffed the money between her big bazookas, then rolled off in the direction of Sixth Avenue.

  I sat another moment. Hocks was probably running a number on me, but I hoisted my body out of the car anyway and turned my feet toward the Mount Zion Temple of God. Okay. So what if she was? Nothing to lose but time, and a five-dollar bill.