Hard Luck And Trouble

by Gammy L. Singer

  I hurried out of my apartment and into my office and headed straight for Montcrieff’s file cabinet. I whipped through the pile of loose pictures and rescued the pictures I wanted. One of Reba, in between Montcrieff and Zeke, arms draped around their shoulders. Another of Montcrieff and Elizabeth in a park, having a picnic. The last picture, all four of them in happier times, dressed in Sunday go-to-meeting clothes, Zeke, Reba, Montcrieff, and Elizabeth. And yes, the picture of Reba and Zeke. I stuffed them in my shirt pocket, grabbed the master keys, and climbed up the stairs to the top floor.

  I banged on Zeke’s door this time, and Wilbur popped his head out of his apartment and told me, “He ain’t there. Ain’t seen him in a couple of days.”

  “The light’s on. It was on last night.” I used the keys and tried to open Zeke’s door. Five minutes into it I realized Zeke must have changed the locks—the key didn’t work. Wilbur, propped against the door, watched me struggle for a couple of minutes, then disappeared into his apartment. He came out with a fingernail file, fiddled with the lock, and it clicked open.

  I rolled my eyes but resisted comment and entered Zeke’s studio apartment. Wilbur peered over my shoulder as I halted just inside the door. A potpourri of odors assaulted my nostrils. Uneaten soup sat in a flowered bowl on top of Zeke’s kitchen table, beside it a shot glass and a bottle of rum that I recognized.

  The tools of Zeke’s mystical trade lay in piles all over the place—pots of crushed herbs and powders, bunches of flowers and weeds, feathers, chicken feet, strings, ropes and ribbons and other strange stuff I couldn’t identify. Dozens upon dozens of small bags lay about, waiting to be filled, with black magick potions. Well, that, I thought, wasn’t going to happen any time soon.

  There lay Zeke, face up in his bed, eyes staring and obviously dead.

  Chapter 41

  I approached Zeke’s body—his form stiff and unmoving. I stared down at him. I couldn’t begin to explain what I felt at that moment. And then I got the shock of my life. Zeke’s eyes blinked. I jumped back. The man looked like a corpse, but he was still breathing, his breath shallow and slow. His skin was clammy when I felt for a pulse, his body rigid. His eyes followed my movements. A sheen of perspiration coated his face.

  “Wilbur, call an ambulance, he’s alive.”

  Wilbur moved with lightning speed to the phone. No questions asked—there wasn’t time and he knew it.

  Zeke’s face looked like a death mask, his eyes yellow. I leaned in to Zeke and said, “Hang on, Zeke, help is coming.” He looked at me with an expression I hoped never to see again.

  “Mine,” he said. Spittle oozed from his lips. Then he said it again, more forcefully. “Mine.”

  “What’s yours, Zeke? What?” I searched his face. “The brownstone, is that what you’re talking about? The brownstone belongs to you?”

  He smiled at me. Can you believe it? The vengeful bastard smiled at me. I knew he was dying, but I couldn’t stay quiet. I whispered close to his ear, “I know about you and my mother.”

  He smiled that horrible smile again, his lips trembled, and with great effort he gripped my shirt and pulled himself nearer. His fingers were icy cold. “Mine. Your father—your father ...”

  “What is it, Zeke? Say it.”

  His eyes glittered, his face contorted. He spat out, “Nigger Landlord.”

  I had nothing to say to him. He fell back on the bed. And then he died. Simple as sin. No angels chorused above. No one wept below. He just died. Zeke was dead—his son by his side.

  Chapter 42

  I called the city morgue, and they called the police, so technically it wasn’t my doing that got Bundt and Caporelli involved again, so I couldn’t understand what Bundt’s harangue was about.

  “Don’t believe in coincidences, Brown. Two victims in two months? How’d you get that tear on your shirt? You’ve got some explaining to do,” Bundt said.

  The police had been in the building over three hours. According to Winnie and some of the neighbors, two carloads of thugs were parked directly down the block and police cars whizzed past them, not noticing a thing.

  And Wilbur buzzed in my ear that the guys that roughed him up were slouched down in a blue sedan at the opposite end of the block. How’s that for coincidence?

  Cops tramped up the stairs to the third floor and back down again. I watched the parade through the open door of my office and saw when Zeke’s body bag bounced down the stairs on a stretcher. It could have been a sack of potatoes the way they handled the body.

  No activity on the street, except for the police cars coming and going. Kids were locked up in their homes tighter than presents at Christmas—the street quiet. And these cops standing next to me, asking me a hundred questions, had no clue.

  I brought my attention back to Bundt’s questions and inspected the rip in my shirt. “What would you like me to explain? This? I tore it on a nail sticking out of a fence.” The truth was easy.

  The two detectives eyeballed me with poker faces.

  “Oh, come on,” I added. “You don’t seriously think I had anything to do with the old man’s death? He was alive when me and Wilbur found him. What? I went up there, said boo to him, he had a heart attack?”

  Caporelli put his two cents in. “Wasn’t his heart, wiseass. It was murder, plain and simple. Poisons all over the place. Did you know rhododendrons are poisonous?”

  I stared at him.

  Caporelli shrugged. “A Jeopardy question—the category was poisonous flowers.”

  “Caporelli, button it,” Bundt said.

  “Maybe it was suicide,” I said.

  “Maybe not. Can you think of any reason he might have killed himself? Definitely a suspicious death.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “No.”

  Bundt stepped toward me and rumbled in my ear, “Listen, Brown, you got something you ain’t telling me?”

  I looked him square in his face. “I got a lot I ain’t telling you, ’cause if I remember rightly, you don’t want to know. Maybe Zeke’s death is drug-related. You want to try that on for size?”

  That brought Bundt up short and he shot a glance at his partner.

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “Tried to give you heads-up on that, but you didn’t listen. DEA. And news flash—some person or persons in your precious Twenty-eighth Precinct, Narc Unit, is probably involved.”

  The muscles bunched in Bundt’s jaw and he told Caporelli to shut the office door.

  “What the fuck’s he talking about, Hal?” Caporelli said softly.

  “I ain’t got a clue. What the hell are you talking about, Brown?”

  And then I laid it out, like a corpse at his feet.

  I wasn’t crazy, stupid neither. Those cats were in bed with somebody out of that precinct, I’d bet my watch. From what I had pieced together I figured Short and Tall worked with somebody dirty at the Twenty-eighth, and who knows? Maybe other precincts as well. The feds had a leaky storage tank too. The kilos I had been given had evidentiary tags, so it was “misplaced” heroin coming from evidence storage and somebody on the inside on the take.

  Since Tall had so generously promised to provide heroin on a continuous basis, he was receiving it on a continuous basis, had to be, and that told me he had to have some stashed somewhere, waiting to move it.

  If drug dealers like Harry could be believed, and I, for one, believed him on this, the alphabet agencies were involved up to their eyeballs. Complicit, I think the word is. Drugs poured into this country like rain, and wasted whole populations of black people in big cities everywhere. Like Patty. Made me sick to my stomach to think about it. Well, somebody had to stand up to this carnage.

  “Cherchez the drugs, man, and check your own house. This could be a promotion for you. Bet somebody in your department would like to see this drain plugged. Aren’t there any honest cops around?”

  Bundt turned a rosy red and asked me, “Where’d you get your information?”

&
nbsp; “I live in Harlem, man. I don’t have to look for nothing; it comes to me. Two white men knocked on my door yesterday.” I quickly described Short and Tall and identified them as the same pair I had run into at the Twenty-eighth Precinct.

  And then I said, “The old man upstairs, he worked for Harry Algonquin Bridges—heard of him? You put two and two together and you’re bound to come up with four.” Or six or five or eight, but I wasn’t telling them that. Disinformation, I think that’s the term. And what’s a little misdirection between friends? And a little heat on Harry couldn’t be a bad thing.

  I pulled tags from my pocket and threw them down one by one on the desk. DEA, four. NYPD, six. NYPD was ahead by two.

  “Where’d you get these?” Caporelli said and he reached for them. I looked across at Bundt.

  Bundt snatched the tags out of Caporelli’s hands and inspected them. Let Caporelli play catch-up—it wasn’t my concern.

  “Ain’t you at least angry, man?” I pointed upstairs. “I mean, the DEA’s making more work for you. A homicide—that’s your job, ain’t it? Investigating homicides?” Bundt caught my drift.

  “Let’s go,” he said and pushed a bewildered Caporelli out of the room. At the door he turned. “I’ll see what I can do. Can’t promise anything. Only what I’m able to do, understand? You still ain’t out of the woodpile. Make no mistake, Brown, we’ll be back.”

  Nigger in the woodpile, huh? I watched them leave. In fact, I watched as their car zoomed right by the blue sedan at the end of the block.

  Make no mistake, the man said. I heard him. Good advice.

  The tenants packed into my office—all of them. Except for Patty. She was nowhere to be found. Wilbur had Josephine hanging off his hip. The new tenant, Oscar, looked like he was about to wet his pants. Winnie sat on a folding chair, the only one in the room crying over Zeke’s demise. They asked a million questions. You could tell they were scared.

  Everybody knew something was about to go down. Not a soul stirred on the street outside. The mugginess was intense, the sky dark and threatening. The neighbors were anxious and my phone rang off the hook. Even the pastor down the street called, wanted to know what to tell his flock. I told him to get the flock out of there.

  I reassured everybody as much as I could and pledged to do something. After all, this was my doing. I didn’t let the other neighbors in on it, but I had to come clean with my tenants, and it was hard. I took the receiver off the hook and laid it on the desk.

  “It’s about drugs.”

  Still weeping, Winnie said, “Everything in Harlem is about drugs, everything, and I’m sick to death of it.” The others murmured their agreement.

  “Frieda-down-the-block’s two children done gone to drugs. Charlotte Ferguson’s son is dead, and Patty—Lord help her, what’s happened to her?”

  “That ain’t the half of it, Winnie. What about the ones in jail—in hospitals?” said Wilbur.

  “I know, I know. I see what’s going on same as you. I don’t want to see it neither. Hard times and funny money. But what’s happening today, I got to let you know, it’s my fault.”

  “How’s it your fault, Mr. B.? You the only somebody around here trying to do something about the drugs,” Wilbur said.

  Straight up I said, “Yeah, well, I did something I ain’t proud of, and it’s biting my ass.” Nobody spoke—I could guess what they thought. “You have my word, I’m getting the drug dealers off the block.”

  “But, Mr. B., you only one man. How you going to—”

  “Nobody on this block gets hurt. These people are after me. I’m going to take my car and lead Harry’s men and the blue sedan out of this neighborhood. Unfortunately, it’d ruin my plans if I got shot before I got to my car, so I’m going to need help with a disguise.”

  Oscar and Winnie looked blank. Wilbur was the first to speak. “Anything, Mr. B. You got it. We’re behind you.”

  So what if Wilbur was light in the loafers? The man was righteous. I looked at him and swore to myself I’d never think another bad thought about him. That promise didn’t last. I had another bad thought. But what happened was, it triggered an idea and I turned to Winnie. “Winnie, lend me your dress.”

  Both Wilbur and Oscar looked surprised, but I was beyond caring. Winnie caught on quick and bustled into action. She pounded upstairs, and a few minutes later her dress sailed over the railing. “You need shoes? A purse?” she shouted.

  “Your shoes won’t fit me, Winnie.”

  “Sandals, Mr. B., that’ll work,” said Wilbur. He was getting excited.

  In ten minutes, I was dressed and ready to go. I would have made any transvestite proud. Wilbur beamed. He wanted to put makeup on me, but I resisted and told him not to get carried away. A breeze whizzed past my crotch, so I put my pants back on and rolled the cuffs up so they wouldn’t show beneath the dress. Wilbur said it destroyed the “line,” but I ignored him. Then I asked Winnie to empty her purse and give it to me. I put the three guns and some rounds in it. Everyone got hysterical, but I assured them I’d only use it to protect myself.

  I asked Oscar to take care of everybody while I was gone. Wilbur got huffy and said, “Oh, puh-lease,” as if his manhood was insulted. Think I could figure that one out? Everybody wished me luck.

  I looked neither to the right nor to the left as I clumped down the brownstone steps, crossed the street, and headed to where Stepchild was parked, only about twenty yards from the blue sedan. Mine was the only movement on the block. As I walked, a dark cloud passed overhead. Superstitious? Not me.

  The sky crackled a warning, then rumbled, low and ominous. Who should appear but Big Butt, drunk as a skunk, weaving down the block and fucking waving to me.

  “Nigger Landlord,” she shouted and started humping toward me. So much for disguises.

  I beat it to my car. Big Butt was closing ground. At the other end of the block a car engine started. “Get away, get away before you get hurt,” I screamed.

  Lightning split the sky. Big Butt hesitated and looked up, confused. I jumped into the car and Stepchild leaped into action. I gunned her motor, pulled off Winnie’s wig, and tossed it to Short and Tall as I sped past them.

  They hooked a U and came after me. No sooner had they spun around than I jammed on the brakes, shifted into reverse, streaked backward past them, then jerked the wheel and did a hard U of my own. I heard the screeching of brakes and the sedan whipped around again.

  Waiting at the other corner were the Clots. I tore past them as well. Relief poured through me. Both cars were on my tail. At least I got them out of this hood and off the block.

  Traffic was heavy. The bicentennial, July 4, was tomorrow and celebrants were already in the streets. I weaved in and out of pedestrians and cars and headed to the Bronx, a strange caravan behind me.

  The heavens had opened, and rain beat against my windshield. Still people streamed in the downpour over to the Hudson River to watch the festivities and see thousands of tall ships and other small boats sail up and down. Audiences crowded along the shoreline to hear the bands and see the entertainment. I made slow progress, but my trackers were still behind me.

  The highway was closed to traffic, so I kept to city streets. Something happening at Yankee Stadium too. I traveled past the stadium and headed for what I remembered was an isolated area and open spaces beyond the warehouses off the Hudson, the cars still trailing. My heart was thumping. A good place for a showdown.

  Chapter 43

  As soon as we hit wide-open spaces, Short and Tall wised up to the Clots on their tail and tried some evasive moves. Behind me I heard shots—the blue sedan peeled suddenly off to the left. The Clots followed. The sedan sped toward the bank of warehouses, and the chase began for real.

  I swung Stepchild’s wheel in their direction, ground the accelerator into the floor until Stepchild’s frame shook in protest, the speedometer’s needle shivering at a hundred miles an hour. Ahead, the sedan turned left and I watched as it burned rubber and r
aced down a cobbled alley, the Clots’ cars not far behind.

  I sped past the alley’s entrance and rushed ahead to the next one. The burp of a machine gun repeated in the distance. Jesus. I geared Stepchild down, hung a left, and shocks catching hell, bounced down a cobbled alley to cut off the blue sedan.

  Menlo’s Meatpacking Warehouse loomed into view at the far end of the alley in a cul-de-sac. Just as I figured, the blue sedan appeared and skidded around the cul of the sac and headed straight for me.

  I stomped on my brakes, and Stepchild fishtailed to the right and came to rest across the width of the alley. I yanked on the hand brake, grabbed Winnie’s purse, and hauled ass out of the car. Shit, the dress I wore wrapped itself around my pant legs, and I stumbled to the ground. The sedan’s brakes howled. I scrambled up, but the sedan kept coming.

  Perfume misted in vapors from the dress as the odor mingled with the heat of my body. I jumped out of the sedan’s path just in time and pressed myself against a brick wall of the nearest building and hung on for dear life as the car plowed sideways into Stepchild. Wham. Damn. Thank you, ma’am. Stepchild skidded like an eight ball spinning toward a corner pocket. Sound filled the narrow alley. More brakes screamed bloody murder. Before the Clots’ cars hit, doors flew open and a dozen bodies hurtled through the air.

  Have you evah seen an elephant fly-y-y?

  It was surreal. Visions of Meat Mouth, a young punk, back from the Vietnam War, Eighty-second Airborne, gone all nutty two months before. Nigger jumped off the top of a tenement building, arms spread like an eagle, singing that song from that Disney Dumbo flick, his body plunging to the pavement. It was just like that.

  The sound from the crunching metal roared in my ears. Hell, I wasn’t no fool—I stayed plastered to the wall and hung by my fingernails.

  The next chain of events left me stupid. Harry’s ghetto army leaped into action, professionals at work. Harry always bragged about his “army” and here was a bona fide demonstration, a paramilitary maneuver happening before my eyes—Harry’s homeboys, armed and dangerous. They fell on Short and Tall like maggots on meat.