He discarded his sweat-stained rayon jacket and dirty straw hat and went to work. He searched every nook and cranny in the three rooms, going about it methodically. He examined every board in the floor, the baseboards, probed all the rat holes. He even pried loose the tin can tops nailed over the larger rat holes and speared in the openings with a fork. He went through the closet and the cupboards, moving the dishes and the utensils, and the cans, boxes, cartons and stacks of old paper sacks to look underneath them. He emptied the containers of salt and flour, sugar and corn meal, dried peas and hominy grits, and refilled them one by one. He searched the fire-box of the potbellied stove in the sitting room, the oven of the gas stove in the kitchen, inside the electric refrigerator and underneath.
Then he dumped the shoe box containing the policy slips and studied them. They didn't give him any clue.
Two hours later he was convinced the money wasn't there. He was beginning to doubt whether there had been any money. The only thing left to do was to go back and try to find Mabel. It wasn't likely that Rufus had given her any large sum of money to keep for him, but she might know something. The trouble was getting in to see her.
From the kitchen window he could see the people in the various kitchens across the courtyard sitting down to eat. He figured this would be a good time to call on Mabel. But he was so tired and hungry his wits were blunted. He figured he ought to eat first. He had seen food in the refrigerator but had not paid it any attention.
Now he explored it again. He found three pork chops, two eggs, a saucepan hall-filled with cold hominy grits and a serving dish containing dandelion greens and okra that had been boiled with pigs feet. The pigs feet had already been eaten.
He got out the big iron skillet, poured in some half rancid drippings from the lard can on the back of the stove and put the chops on to fry. While they were frying, he pried the hominy grits from the saucepan in one piece, and cut it into slices an inch thick.
When the chops were done he added more drippings, fried the hominy grits a rich brown, stacked them alongside the chops and fried the eggs country style. He put the fried eggs on top of the grits and dumped the greens and okra into the pan, bringing it just to a boil.
He left everything on top of the stove and ate, standing, until it was all gone. By then he was so sleepy he couldn't keep his eyes open.
He went into the bedroom, stretched out on the floor with his head on the pile of Alberta's lingerie and went to sleep.
Twenty minutes later he was snoring loud and steadily. When he exhaled, his snores sounded like a herd of buffalos drinking water; when he inhaled they sounded like a round saw cutting through a fat pine knot. His mouth was open, and a bottle fly was crawling about the crater as though trying to get up nerve to take the plunge. Every now and then Sugar would strike at it limply with his right hand, but he only succeeded in knocking his bottom lip out of shape.
He didn't wake up when the window was slowly raised by someone on the fire escape. He didn't see the man slide cautiously underneath the shade and enter the room.
The man had an open knife in his hand. It had a heavy, brutal-looking blade about seven inches long. The man approached on tiptoe and looked down at his face. He chased the fly with his shoe, but Sugar didn't stir.
The man tiptoed to the door and looked into the kitchen; then he tiptoed to the other door and looked into the sitting room. Then he went back, stood over Sugar and watched him sleeping. He looked as though he were trying to make up his mind about something.
After a while he knelt down beside Sugar and placed the knife on the floor within easy reach. He took his time searching all of Sugar's pockets.
All this didn't even cause a break in Sugar's snoring.
The man did not even smile. Obviously he had no sense of humor.
He picked up the knife and stood up. Still holding the knife open and ready, he scrounged out of the window backwards and went up the fire escape, leaving the window open.
18
A short time after Sugar arrived at the tenement on 118th Street, Dummy arrived back on 116th Street.
The clock in the window of the credit jeweler's said: 11:27.
Dummy kept along that side of the street until he came to the hotel. After looking about in all directions, he entered the hotel like a minister ducking into a house of prostitution. He climbed the smelly stairs to the fourth floor.
It was hot and airless beneath the low, flat, tarred roof, and the heat brought out stinks from the half-rotten floor that had been buried for decades.
A heavy brass padlock hung from the staples screwed to the door frame, but the wood where the hinge of the hasp was screwed to the door looked weakened by previous screw holes. Dummy could have broken through the flimsy door with his shoulder, but it was too risky at that time of the day. He hadn't brought along anything to pry loose the hasp because he had been expecting to find a simple warded lock.
In exasperation he snatched at the big brass lock, and it came open in his hand. His mouth gaped open in a grunting laugh. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred confronted with that lock would have attempted to break open the door, he thought; and hardly anyone would spot that it was a phony. Not a bad idea if you couldn't afford a lock that worked, he thought.
He removed the lock, pushed the door open and walked in. The occupant hadn't taken the trouble to bother with the warded lock.
The room stank with the scent of stale reefer fumes and the rank body odors that collect in stagnant air. A green window shade was drawn over the single tightly closed window, but sunlight filtered through the cracks in it to form an abstract pattern on the dirt-gray sheet that covered the three-quarter bed. A corner was curtained off for a clothes closet by a sleazy curtain, faded with age. In another corner was a wash basin the size of a bird bath; the single tap dripped cold water that left an indedelible rust stain on the white enamel. Dirt encrusted the linoleum floor.
Dummy closed the door and snapped up the shade, flooding the room with hard bright sunlight. The light couldn't hurt it.
Dummy looked beneath the bed. He found the remains of a cotton mattress that had been split down the middle and the padding pulled out and stuffed back in. He began grunting with excitement, making a sound like a hog guzzling swill.
He left the mattress where it was and gave his attention to a warped, scarred pasteboard suitcase lying flat on the floor against the inside wall. The lock didn't work, and the snaps weren't fastened. He lifted the lid and poked about in an accumulation of dirty cotton socks and underwear, holding his nose with his other hand. He didn't bother to close the suitcase. He crossed the room, drew open the sleazy curtain and examined the few soiled garments draped over wire hangers hanging from a sawed-off broomstick. The clothes took more of his time than anything else. But, even so, he was finished in under five minutes.
He was relieved to get out of the room, but his muscles didn't relax until he had quit the hotel and put a block's distance in between.
Around the corner on Lenox Avenue, a smooth-looking curlyhaired young man sat in a two-toned Buick hardtop parked at the curb. Colored men and women approached him at the rate of one every ten seconds and handed him a canvas bag of money and a rubber-bound scratch pad, the size of a playing card, filled with pages of numbers.
He was a pickup man for a numbers house. Two hard-faced, oversized colored men sat in a black Mercury sedan parked directly behind him. They were the bodyguards hired by the house.
Dummy stopped to write in his scratch pad. He tore out the sheet and approached the pickup man. Before he got there, one of the big colored men in the Mercury opened the door and hit the pavement. No sooner had Dummy passed the written sheet to the pickup man than the bodyguard clutched the back of his neck.
'It's just Dummy,' the pickup man said.
