“An’ if you cain’t make that then melt me some ice, okay?”
Hannah liked my jokes.
THE HOUSE WAS DIVIDED into areas of interest. On the first floor was music and dancing, drinking and sweet talk. The next floor was a series of gambling rooms. Poker, blackjack, craps, and roulette. The one pool table had no line waiting because every ball cost five dollars.
Only the best played at the Black Chantilly.
The third floor was women. At the bottom of the stairs sat a man who looked like Rupert’s midget brother. He took two twenties and gave you a key ring with the number of the room attached.
I peered up the stairs, past the brawny midget, but I couldn’t think of an excuse to part with forty dollars.
“Nice up there?” I asked.
“If you got the green,” the little man answered.
“Easy?” Her voice came from behind me.
I turned around and said, “Hey, Gracie. What you doin’ here?” I asked the question but really it seemed perfect that I’d see Grace Phillips at the Black Chantilly.
She almost smiled. The faraway look in her eye was way past alcohol.
“I’as jus’ talkin’ ’bout you t’Bertie,” she said. Her mouth gave up on each word before it was finished. “You know he likes you. ’Spects you.”
“He around here?” I asked, looking over her head down the stairs. There was a man coming up behind her but it wasn’t my boss. It was a cream-colored Negro in loose brown pants, cinched tight, and a coral shirt. Between his first two fingers was a burning cigarette; between the second and third finger was a fold of green, forty dollars I’d bet.
He popped his eyes and said, “Hi, Gracie,” as he went by. She turned away and looked uncomfortably at me, pretending to smile, until the fish-eyed man passed.
“Hey, Li’l Joe,” the customer said to the guardian. “How’s it goin’?”
Li’l Joe took the fold of green. He grimaced at the two twenties but smiled when he saw the extra two-dollar bill.
“Fine, fine, Greenwood.” He handed a key over and Greenwood sauntered and whistled his way up the stairs.
“I thought you straightened out, Gracie. Don’t you have a baby now?” I asked.
Grace smiled, accepting some imagined compliment. “They beautiful, huh, Easy? Babies the most beautiful thing in the worl’.”
Grace had on a darkish beige dress that made it down to about three inches above her bare knees. She was the kind of woman you could look at without embarrassment.
“A couple could go up there for just twenty,” she said.
“They can?”
“Uh-huh. The house only take twenty. The other twenty is for the girl.” She looked down at her chest and I did too.
Grace was a good-looking woman, and I could tell, by the way she nearly smiled, that time with her would be as far from death as a workingman could get. It would be as good as or better than Idabell’s soft embraces.
It was the thought of Mrs. Turner killed my ardor.
“I don’t think that Bert would look on it too kindly if I was to go up those steps wit’ you, Gracie,” I said.
“No,” she agreed. She smiled too.
“Why’ont we go downstairs,” I suggested.
“Could I borrah twenty dollars, Easy?” She didn’t trip on a syllable of that sentence.
“We’ll see.”
HANNAH DIDN’T APPROVE of Grace. She wouldn’t even look at me when I ordered the soda and scotch and soda for me and my friend.
“Grace, you should go home to your baby,” I said after she’d gagged on a gulp of scotch.
“I know,” she said. “I know. If you gimme twenty dollars I promise I will…. Bertie’d pay you back.”
“What’s Bert gonna do when he finds that you been out here in the streets?” I asked.
Her sneer would have dissuaded the bubonic plague.
“What he know?” she said. “Lea’me all by myself all that time. Sallie an’ all’a his friends wou’n’t say boo t’me an’ I had t’make it on my own. On my own.”
“You should go home, Grace.”
Just that fast she put me out of her mind. Her gaze swung left and then right, looking for anybody with twenty dollars in his pocket.
“You ever hear of Roman or Holland Gasteau?” I asked the back of her head.
“No.”
“If I could find out about either one of them it’d be worth twenty dollars.” I wasn’t really hurting Bert. I figured that she could do a lot worse for that twenty dollars than just talk.
“They come around,” she said, swinging back toward me. “But I heard sumpin’ happened with them. I’ont know
