cameras. She looked like the favourite in a sultan's harem.
Through the crack she saw a woman who looked too black to be real, dressed like a housemaid on her afternoon off. She blinked. 'You've got the wrong door,' she said.
'It's me,' Iris said.
Billie's eyes widened ' Me who? You sound like somebody I know but you sure don't look like anybody I'd ever know.'
'Me, Iris.'
Billie scrutinized her for a moment, then broke into hysterical laughter. 'My God, you look like the last of the Topsys. Whatever happened to you?'
'Unchain the door and let me in,' Iris snapped. 'I know how I look.'
Billie unchained the door, still laughing hysterically, and locked and chained it behind her. Then suddenly, watching Iris hurry towards the bath, she called, 'Hey, I read you were in jail,' running after her.
Iris was already at the mirror, smearing cleansing cream over her face, when Billie came in. 'I'm out now, as you can see.'
'Well, how 'bout you,' Billie said, sitting on the edge of the bathtub. 'Who sprung you? The paper said you lowered the boom on Deke and now he's escaped.'
Iris snatched a clean towel and began frantically rubbing her face to see if the black would come off. Yellow skin appeared. Reassured, she became less frantic. 'The monsters,' she said. 'They want me to help 'em find Deke.'
Billie looked shocked. 'You wouldn't!' she exclaimed.
Iris was slipping out of the cheap red dress. 'The hell I wouldn't,' she said.
Billie jumped to her feet. 'I certainly won't help you,' she said. 'I always liked Deke.'
'You can have him, sugar,' Iris said sweetly, peeling off the lisle stockings. 'I'll swap him for a dress.'
Billie left the room, looking indignant, while Iris shed to the skin and began removing the black in earnest. After a while Billie returned and threw clothes across the side of the tub. She looked at Iris's nude body critically.
'You sure got beat up, baby. You look like you've been raped by three cannibals.'
'That'd be a kick,' Iris mumbled, smearing her face more thoroughly with the cleansing cream.
'Here, use Ponds,' Billie said, handing her a different jar. 'That's Chanel's you're wasting on that blackening and this is just as good for that.'
Iris exchanged the jar without comment and went on smearing her face, neck, arms and legs.
'Did you really kill her?' Billie asked as though casually. Iris stopped applying the cream and turned around and looked at her. 'Don't ask me that question. There never was a man I'd kill for.' There was a warning in her voice that frightened Billie.
But she had to know. 'Were you and her — '
'Shut up,' Iris snapped. 'I didn't know the bitch.'
'You can't stay here,' Billie said bitchily, showing her disbelief. 'They'd lock me up too if they found me.'
'Don't be so fucking jealous,' Iris said and began kneading in the cleansing cream again. 'Nobody knows I'm here and not even Deke knows about us.'
Billie smiled with secret pleasure. Mollified, she asked, 'How do you expect to get to Deke after you've ratted on him?'
Iris laughed as at a good joke. 'I'm going to cook up a good story about where to find the money he's lost and see what he'll pay me for it. Deke will forgive anything for money.'
'The Back-to-Africa money? Honey, that money has gone with the wind.'
'Don't think I don't know it. I just want to get something out of that two-timing mother-raper any kind of way.'
Billie had her secret smile again. 'Baby, how you talk,' she said, adding: 'You can wipe it off now,' referring to the cream. 'I'll make you up in tan so you'll look brand-new.'
'You're a darling,' Iris said absently, but in the back of her mind she was thinking furiously why Deke would want a bale of cotton.
Billie was looking at her nude body lustfully. 'Don't tempt me,' she said.
19
The Monday edition of the Harlem Sentinel came out around noon. Coffin Ed picked up a copy at the newsstand by the Lexington Avenue Subway Kiosk at one-thirty for them to read with their lunch. There had been no word from Abigail, and Paul had just ridden past giving the high sign that Iris was still put.
They wanted to eat some place where it was unlikely they'd be spotted, and where they wouldn't look out of place in their black weedhead sunglasses. They decided to go to a joint on East 116th Street called Spotty's, run by a big black man with white skin spots and his albino wife.
After years of bemoaning the fact that he looked like an overgrown Dalmatian, Spotty had made a peace with life and opened a restaurant specializing in ham hocks, red beans and rice. It sat between a store-front church and a box factory and had no side windows, and the front was so heavily curtained the light of day never entered. Spotty's prices were too moderate and his helpings too big to afford bright electric lights all day. Therefore it attracted customers such as people in hiding, finicky people who couldn't bear the sight of flies in their food, poor people who wanted as much as they could get for their money, weedheads avoiding bright lights, and blind people who didn't know the difference.
They took a table in the rear across from two laborers. Spotty brought them plates of red beans, rice and ham hocks, and a stack of sliced bread. There wasn't any choice.
Coffin Ed wolfed a mouthful hungrily and gasped for breath. 'This stuff will set your teeth on fire,' he said.
'Take some of this hot sauce and cool it off,' one of the laborers said with a straight face.
'It cools you off these hot days,' the other laborer said. 'Draws all the heat to the belly and leaves the rest of you cool.'
'What about the belly?' Grave Digger asked.
'Hell, man, what kind of old lady you got?' the laborer said.
Grave Digger shouted for two beers. Coffin Ed took out the paper and divided it in two. He could barely see the large print through his smoked glasses. 'What you want, the inside or the outside?'
'You expect to read in here?' Grave Digger said.
'Ask Spotty to give you a candle,' the laborer said with a straight face.
'Never mind,' Grave Digger said. 'I'll read one word and guess two.'
He took the inside of the paper and folded it on the table. The classified ads were up. His gaze was drawn to an ad in a box: Bale of cotton wanted immediately. Telephone Tompkins 2 — before seven p.m. He passed the paper to Coffin Ed. Neither of them said anything. The laborers looked curious but Grave Digger turned over the page before they could see anything.
'Looking for a job?' the talkative laborer asked.
'Yeah,' Grave Digger said.
'That ain't the paper for it,' the laborer said.
No one replied. Finally the two laborers got tired of trying to find out their business and got up and left. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed finished eating in silence.
Spotty came to their table. 'Dessert?' he asked.
'What is it?'
'Blackberry pie.'
'Hell, it's too dark in here to eat blackberry pie,' Grave Digger said and paid him and they got up and left.
Coffin Ed called his home from a street booth, but there was still no word from Abigail. Then he called the
