Dummy wrote on the clean sheet: i seen her fore she got rested she come see my cassie looking for rufus she say i know better she looking for money.
Slick's face didn't show any signs of heightened interest, but his hands tightened on the steering wheel.
'Did she tell your woman she had hid the money in the mattress?' he asked. she didn tell nothin but we knew had to be sumthin sides just her furniter the way she look, Dummy wrote.
'That still don't figure absolutely that he got it,' Slick said. somebody got it and he the only one could of, Dummy wrote.
'Why hasn't he cut out if he's got it?' Slick asked. 'What's he hanging around for?' what he got the civil war money for, Dummy countered.
Slick laughed. 'You're doing the talking,' he said. he trying to con you to thinkin he aint got it, Dummy wrote.
Slick's face got cold and hard. 'That's easier said than done,' he concluded, reached over, tore the sheet from Dummy's pad and put it into his pocket with the other sheet. 'Now just sit here and be still,' he ordered. 'I got work to do.'
They were approaching 125th Street, and Slick became alert to his surroundings. He was the payoff man for the district between 125th Street and 116th Street, bound on the west by Manhattan Avenue and on the east by Lenox Avenue.
'And if you spot any snoopers, point them out,' he added. 'If you're a stool pigeon like they say, you ought to know them all.'
Dummy made as if he were looking somewhere else and didn't get it.
Slick wore a money belt divided into pockets, in which he carried the payoff money, the winning slips and hit-slips. He stopped off at the numbers drops in barber shops, pool rooms, tobacco stores and shoe-shine parlors along the way, and met the roving writers in hallways and parked cars or in their flats. He kept five per cent of the payoff for his end on the small, everyday hits, but on the big hits, which he had to deliver in person to the winner, he kept ten per cent. The writers delivered the small payoffs and kept ten per cent for their end. Only the office staff, the pickup men and the guards were on salaries; the others took their commissions out of the winnings.
It was two-seventeen by the clock in the window of the credit jeweler's on 116th Street when Slick finished his rounds. He pulled up on the opposite side of the street, a half block's distance from Sweet Prophet's Temple of Wonderful Prayer, and parked. He wasn't concerned about the woman they had beat earlier. She would be looking for a man in a black Buick sedan, the car beside which he had been standing when she first saw him. The way he thought about it, if he had to hide from all the squares he had beat, he could never show himself on the street.
Dummy saw the starker when he turned in from Seventh Avenue. He was wearing the same ensemble- beaver hat, tweed jacket, mustard-colored corduroy pants and cowboy boots.
Slick saw him, too, in the rear-view mirror.
The starker crossed the street, jaywalking through the traffic, and rounded the Chrysler to get into the front seat beside Slick. Then he saw Dummy and seemed to freeze.
'Get in the back seat,' Slick said.
He got into the back seat.
'Dummy, this is Susie,' Slick said. 'Susie, this is Dummy.'
Neither moved or made a sound to acknowledge the introduction.
'We're going uptown to my pad and have a little talk about a matter of interest to us all,' Slick said, and put the ignition key in the lock, starting the motor.
Susie took a marijuana butt from behind his ear and lit it.
Dummy sat with his hands on his knees and his head moving continuously from one side to the other.
Slick accelerated the car slowly and slid into the stream of traffic.
19
A woman let them in to the third-floor apartment in Roger Morris. Dummy's hope of catching sight of his deaf porter friend in the vestibule hadn't borne fruit. He would have signaled him a message, if no more than to say 'Watch out.'
He experienced an infinite dread of going unarmed to a strange apartment with Slick and Susie. The woman did nothing to allay it.
Dummy thought that she was a very strange woman. Ordinarily she would have looked like any other sepia- colored well-kept women, of which there were millions. But her hair was dyed bright yellow and pulled so tightly in a severe bun at the nape of her neck that it stretched the skin about her eyes, making the lids slant like an Oriental's. She wore a high-necked, tight-fitting Chinese gown of deep purple silk. She was thin, but she didn't look anemic. Her nostrils had a pale pinched look, and the pupils of her brown eyes were so distended her eyes looked almost black. She carried her head unnaturally high, and she didn't speak. Silently she led them down a close- smelling, almost pitch-dark hall, past several closed doors, to the front sitting room.
It was a big room with three windows overlooking Edgecombe Drive and the rocky clifflike park dropping to the flats bordering Harlem River; in the distance the streets of West Bronx could be seen, rising like a terraced landscape fashioned of bricks.
In the brighter light Dummy saw at a glance that she was a junky; that she sniffed cocaine; that she had been sniffing it for so long she didn't know what life was without it and couldn't live such a life for one full day. That didn't worry him; but her silence did. That and something else about her that he couldn't figure. She never looked directly at anyone.
'Sit down,' Slick ordered the two of them, and sprawled onto a chaise longue flanked by a glass-topped cocktail table. To the woman he said, 'Fix my pipe and bring my rod.'
The woman moved, as though flowing, through another door into another room.
Susie and Dummy found chairs on opposite sides of Slick, as far apart from each other as possible. Dummy sat on the edge of his seat with his feet drawn back and his leg muscles tense, as though prepared to leap in any direction the occasion demanded. But Susie sat sprawled out in his seat-his legs extended, his cowboy boots crossed and the brim of the beaver hat pulled down over his eyes, as though to give the impression he had been there before and was not impressed.
However, it was an impressive room. The furniture didn't match and didn't fit, but every piece was expensive and unusual. Everything, including the curtains and drapes-with the exception of the console radio-record player- television set-had been stolen at one time or another, and Slick had bought it hot.
Dummy's gaze roved from one piece to another. The furniture seemed to be trying to tell him something, but he didn't know what.
No one spoke. The silence oppressed Dummy and put his nerves on a screaming edge. Susie lit a fresh stick of marijuana, took out his knife and began strapping the blade on his boot. Slick didn't seem to be bothered at all.
The woman returned, moving so silently across the carpeted floor that no one saw her until she stood beside the cocktail table flanking Slick's chair. She placed a round, ivory-colored plastic tray on the glass top. The tray held a small nickel-plated alcohol lamp and a water-cooled pipe. The metal bowl rested on the alcohol lamp, and the bit was stuck into a coil of transparent tubing like the head of a sleeping snake. Nestled among the rest was a flat, vicious-looking, blued-steel eleven-shot. 38 caliber Colt automatic pistol.
The gazes of both Susie and Dummy focused on the pistol and didn't leave it.
The woman took the opium pill from her pocket, kneaded it skillfully with slim, delicate fingers and shaped it into a tiny ball. She fitted the ball into the shallow cavity of the metal bowl and lighted the alcohol lamp, and at the first bubbling of the pill she picked up the bit, unfurling the tube, and placed it between Slick's lips.
Four puffs and it was finished.
The woman cleaned up and removed the tray, leaving the pistol on the glass top. She flowed silently from the room without having once looked directly at anyone.
Slick lay back with his eyes half closed and seemed lost to the world. The silence ran on. He didn't give the impression of having any intention of breaking it.
