The Big Gold Dream

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.

"I know it's Dummy," the bodyguard said. "Since when did he get to be one of our writers?"

"He wants to know where we're drawing today," the pickup man said.

Since the police had tightened up on gambling, the lottery was floated to a different place every day.

"Don't tell him nothing," the bodyguard said. "He's a stool pigeon."

A writer squeezed ahead with his bag of money and play slips and the pickup man said, "Woodbine."

The bodyguard gave Dummy a push, and the pickup man didn't look at him again. Dummy gave no sign that it mattered.

Fifteen minutes later he got out of a taxi in front of a hotel way uptown in the Harlem Heights on St. Nicholas Avenue near 154th Street. The sign over the entrance read Hotel Woodbine. Dummy paid the driver and went inside.

Two men came in with heavy luggage and were sent to a suite reserved in advance. Two women followed with modernistic cases that might have been sound recorders and were sent to the same suite. They came in taxis, two at a time, well-dressed men and women, until the entire staff of sixteen had arrived.

Four bodyguards took seats about the lobby, one of them in the chair beside Dummy. He leaned over and whispered through his cupped hand, "Don't dig your grave, stoolie."

Dummy got up and moved to another chair. He knew the setup, and he was not interfering. Upstairs in the two-room suite, the office staff would set up four adding machines and an electric addressograph. There were eight pickup men, who collected the play slips and money from two hundred number writers. The pickup men turned in the books to the women operating the adding machines. The totals were tabulated and checked against the money turned in.

While this was taking place, two men set up the drawing machine. It was a small felt-lined keg with a sliding door, mounted on a winch and turned by a crank. Small black balls made of gutta-percha, lettered in luminous white paint from 0 to 9-three of each number, making thirty figures altogether-were put into the keg, and the door securely closed. The crank was turned over ten times, the door was opened and a blindfolded man put his hand in the keg and drew out one ball. This was repeated three times, and the three numbers thus drawn, in the order in which they were drawn, comprised the winning number for that day.

The blindfolded man who drew the number was not a member of the staff. A different man was picked each day from among the two hundred writers or from the regular players.

When the number was drawn the play slips were rapidly checked and the winning slips put aside for the payoff.

Then the addressograph was set with the name of the house and the winning number: Tia Juana