The Big Gold Dream

11

"Let's wake up Sweet Prophet," Grave Digger said.

"He ain't going to like it," Coffin Ed said.

"That's for sure," Grave Digger agreed.

Sweet Prophet received the detectives in the sitting room adjoining his bedroom on the top floor of the building housing his Temple and reception room.

The housekeeper had opened the curtains and raised the windows looking down on the busy shopping area of 116th Street. Motor sounds and loud voices came in with motor exhaust smell and the stink of hot dirty pavement.

The room had a north light and was furnished like a corner of the lobby of the Paramount Theater. Fat, complacent gold and silver cherubs chased coffee-brown angels about the sunrise-pink wall paper, while the appropriately sky-blue ceiling was filled with more golden stars than in the Milky Way, whirling dizzily about a silver moon containing the vague outline of a face with a startling resemblance to that of Sweet Prophet.

"If this ain't heaven, it will have to do until the real heaven comes along," Coffin Ed remarked.

"Shhh," Grave Digger cautioned. "Here's the Prophet."

Sweet Prophet looked both mad and sleepy. His eyes popped from a scowling countenance. His yellow silk pajamas, peeping from beneath a dressing gown with candy stripes of red and white, gave the impression of a carnival on the loose. His big feet were encased in bright red Turkish slippers trimmed in gold; and his long kinky white hair was topped with a Fez of matching red with a golden tassel falling from the crown.

He greeted them in a vexed manner. "Gentlemen, I got the best lawyers east of the Mississippi River."

"Okay, throw us out," Grave Digger said.

"Since you're here, sit down, sit down," he said, plumping himself on a high-backed gilded chair that resembled a throne. "We're all colored folks, ain't we? You don't have to stand on ceremony with me. I am a humble man."

The detectives pulled up chairs that put them two feet lower than the Prophet.

"We hate to trouble you at this hour, Prophet," Grave Digger said, "but it's important."

Sweet Prophet folded his hands across his stomach. He was wearing all of his diamond rings, but his long fingernails were encased in protective hard-rubber fingers of matching colors.

It must be hell when he's got to scratch himself, Coffin Ed thought.

"Important!" Sweet Prophet echoed. "More important than a good night's sleep?"

"It's about one of your recent converts," Grave Digger elaborated.

"My God, don't tell me another one has dropped dead-took off-departed, I mean," Sweet Prophet said, searching for the appropriate expression. "That would be the bitter end."

Grave Digger carefully laid his battered hat on the bright green-carpeted floor. He and Coffin Ed had uncovered their heads in deference to the great man.

"No, it's about Alberta Wright," Grave Digger said. "We want to ask you a few questions about her."

"Gentlemen, let the dead rest in peace, I beg you," he said piously. "That poor woman deserves it, as hard as she has worked all of her life."

"That's the point, Prophet," Grave Digger said. "She's not dead."

"What! Not dead!" Sweet Prophet exclaimed in bug-eyed amazement. "Do you mean that woman is still alive? Or has she risen from the dead?"

"Pull yourself together, Prophet," Grave Digger said drily. "She never was dead."

"Good God, man, I saw her die myself," Sweet Prophet snapped.

"She was just unconscious."

"In a trance, you mean." Sweet Prophet fished his yellow silk handkerchief from his candy-striped dressing gown pocket and wiped his dark, sweating brow. "I never thought of that. You startled me."

"And what we're trying to do," Grave Digger went on calmly, "is get her story."

"That woman's story can be told in two lines," Sweet Prophet said. "Born like a fool, and worked like a mule."

"That might be so," Grave Digger said. "But we want to know what happened at the baptism."

"God only knows, gentlemen. I blessed the bottle of water-I presume it was water-and she drank it and flopped. I thought she was dead, but you say she went into a trance, and that's all right with me. I'll have to remember it."

"All right, a trance," Grave Digger said. "That is as good as any explanation for the present. How long had she been a follower of yours?"

"Bless my soul, gentlemen, she was not strictly a follower of mine, as you put it. Just a new recruit. I never saw the woman before she came to me yesterday morning to confess her sins and request to be baptized."

"You mean you baptize people without knowing anything about them?" Coffin Ed put in finally.

"Gentlemen, you didn't have to see that woman but once to know everything there was to know about her, like I said before," Sweet Prophet declared. "She was a born kitchen mechanic."

"Okay, be that as it may," Grave Digger said. "What prompted her to get religion all of a sudden?"

"Who knows?" Sweet Prophet said, gesturing with his elongated hands. "Women of that type get religion for ten thousand reasons-some have just murdered their husbands, others have had nightmares."

"She must have given some reason," Grave Digger persisted.

"If she did, I didn't listen," Sweet Prophet said. "Women always lie about the reason they get religion. If I harkened to them, I couldn't last."

"Okay, let's skip it," Grave Digger said. "Just tell me what she might have owned that someone would go to the trouble of stealing."

Sweet Prophet's eyebrows went up an inch, and his eyeballs extended precariously. "You mean to say someone stole something from her?" he asked in an incredulous voice. "Gentlemen, that would be the miracle."

"Her furniture was stolen while she was unconscious, and two people have been killed about it," Grave Digger informed him.

His eyeballs came out so far they seemed on the verge of rolling down his cheeks. "She killed them," he stated more than asked.

"We don't think so," Grave Digger said.

"Look, brothers," Sweet Prophet began, wiping his face with the big yellow handkerchief. "We are more or less in the same business, collaring the sinners. Let us level with each other. Nobody has been killed about that sister's furniture, unless she killed them. I looked on that sister's face and listened to her confession. She has never owned anything in her life that the white folks didn't give her. And they haven't given that sister anything that anybody else would want. She was that kind of woman-is, rather."

"Would you be breaking any kind of vows or such if you told us what sins she confessed to?" Grave Digger asked.

"Nothing worth repeating," Sweet Prophet assured him. "She was just a poor woman living in adultery and working like a dog to pay for it-like any other thousands of poor simpleminded colored women in Harlem. Nothing to make the Lord skin back His ears."

"She had something," Coffin Ed stated.

Sweet Prophet looked at him from his popping eyes. "The only thing that sister had was faith," he said. "And between you and me, gentlemen, her faith were not worth stealing."

"Well, let's try to get some facts," Grave Digger said. "What happened to her after she seemed to drop dead?"

"I never found out," Sweet Prophet confessed. "Until you told me better, I thought the sister at rest with her Maker. Brother Clay's hearse came and took her away, and afterwards the downtown policemen asked me some questions. But one of them got a phone call, and they dropped it without any explanations."

"You didn't make any effort to find out what had happened to her?" Grave Digger asked.

"No, with death the work of Sweet Prophet ends and the Lord takes charge," Sweet Prophet said. "You might ask undertaker Clay."

"We will," Grave Digger said.

He and Coffin Ed stood up.

"Thank you for you cooperation, Prophet," he added. "We hope we haven't disturbed you too much."

"I am always glad to be of service to our colored police," Sweet Prophet declared. "As long as you don't come to arrest me."

"I may as well tell you that Alberta Wright wants to see you, if you haven't already got the message," Coffin Ed said before leaving.

"Don't they all," Sweet Prophet said.

Mr. H. Exodus Clay had just come down from his living quarters on the top floor of the old brownstone mansion on 134th Street, where he had his undertaking parlor. He looked more than ever like a body dressed for burial, with his parchment-colored skin still half dead from sleep and his long white dried-out kinky hair freshly combed and brushed.

He received them in his office, the front room that had the light in the window that never went out.

They went straight to the point.

"We're trying to find out what happened to the woman one of your drivers picked up for dead at Sweet Prophet's baptism yesterday," Grave Digger said.

Mr. Clay adjusted his pince-nez. "You mean the body that came to life," he said in his dry, impersonal voice. "Just a minute-I will send for the driver."

"It was like this, Mr. Clay," the young man who drove the hearse explained. "They-all sent me to the morgue to get the death certificate. But when I got there the man said I had to bring the body inside so he could look at it before he could give me the certificate, but I couldn't handle it alone and he helped me. We carried it into a big white room and laid it on a long white table, then the man began messing around with a lot of instruments and things and kept on talking about what a fine specimen it was. I asked him if it was dead, and he asked me where I got it from. I told him, and he said it would take him about an hour to finish his examination and for me to go outside and come back in an hour. Then I asked him if it was going to take a whole hour just to find out if it was dead, and he said it wasn't dead but it would take him that much time to find out what was wrong with it. So I figured there wasn't any need of me waiting a whole hour for it if it wasn't dead. So I just came on back here and put the hearse away and wiped it good and clean."

Mr. Clay turned to the detectives and asked, without batting an eye, "Does that answer your question?"

Grave Digger put on his hat, and Coffin Ed did likewise.

"It does indeed," he said.

They went next to the morgue.

The morgue attendant who was on duty Sundays was off on Mondays, and the one on duty didn't know anything about the case.

"You think we ought to rouse him at his house?" Coffin Ed asked.

Grave Digger looked at his watch. "Not this morning. It's already nine o'clock, and my wife has probably begun to worry."

"Mine, too," Coffin Ed said. "So let's call it a day."

"Right," Grave Digger said. "As long as we keep the woman locked up, nothing is going to happen."