The Big Gold Dream

321

As many slips-called hit-slips-were printed as time would allow.

The winning play slips were paid off and assembled in eight collections. The equipment was repacked. The office staff, the man who drew and the eight pickup men left hurriedly. The operator and his two lieutenants remained to wait for the eight payoff men, who took the place of the pickup men. The payoff men arrived, collected the payoffs and left. The operator and his lieutenants came out last with the take.

Dummy watched them come and go. He knew that, in addition to the four bodyguards in the lobby, there were two more in the Mercury sedan outside and probably others stationed out of sight. He didn't make any sudden moves, but he timed his movements so that he was just leaving as Slick came down and started out the door.

He slipped Slick a sheet of paper from his scratch pad on which was written: the punk is doublecrossin you.

Slick glanced at it, looked up quickly at Dummy and said, "Come on," with the quick, sure decision of a man who knew the score. The pale yellow eyes sent a chill down Dummy's spine. He obeyed automatically.

They went down the stairs, and Slick nodded in the direction of 154th Street. He walked a little apart from Dummy, on the right side and a little apart. The two guards in the Mercury sedan never took their eyes from them. Nothing was said.

They walked in silence to the corner, and Dummy glanced at Slick for directions. Slick bent his head in the direction of his car, parked two doors up the street.

They arrived at the Chrysler hardtop, and Slick said in a low, controlled voice, "Stand still a moment."

Dummy had his back turned and was facing the car. He didn't see the motion of Slick's lips, and he had taken it for granted that Slick wanted him to get into the car. He put his hand on the door handle and had started to open the door when suddenly he felt a hand grip his shoulder and his body spun violently around.

Up the street a motor roared, and a car sped down the incline and cut in front of the Chrysler with dragging brakes. A big scar-faced Negro in a red sport shirt and a Panama straw was out of the door and in the street with a snub-barreled. 38 revolver in his hand before the car stopped skidding.

Dummy felt his guts shrink.

"I'll handle it," Slick said coldly to the gunman. "It's a private matter."

"You're new here, son, so I'll tell you," the gunman said in a flat Southern voice. "There ain't no private matter when you're carryin' the house's money."

Slick ignored him. "You're a dummy, eh?" he said to Dummy.

Dummy nodded.

"You can read lips, though."

Again Dummy nodded.

"Put your fingertips on your shoulders and your elbows out," Slick ordered.

Dummy did as he was ordered.

Slick frisked him with quick, sure movements.

"He's clean," he said to the gunman.

"Watch out for him," the gunman said, getting back into the car. "He might be a stoolie."

Slick gave him a thin, cold smile.

Two colored men were passing on the opposite side of the street. They made as though they hadn't seen a thing.

The front car backed up and pulled up by the corner.

Slick went around and got behind the wheel of his Chrysler and turned south on Saint Nicholas Avenue. Far down the incline of the black-topped avenue, stretching toward the east, rooftops in the Valley of Harlem could be seen.

Slick turned toward Dummy as they purred past the basement entrance to Bucky's Cabaret and asked, "What makes you think so?"

Dummy made motions like writing and pointed toward his pocket. He wasn't taking any chances. Slick smiled thinly and nodded. Dummy fished out his stub of pencil and dirty scratch pad.

He wrote: he got the mattress in his room all cutup money was in it, and held it up for Slick to read.

"How do you know that?" Slick asked. i seen it, Dummy wrote.

"No, I mean the money," Slick said. it figgers the money was gone before the jew got there, Dummy wrote.

Slick pulled up for a red light at 145th Street. A real cool black chick in a beige blouse and aqua slacks gave him the eye. But he had business on his mind.

"How do you figure that?" he asked Dummy as he started up again.

Dummy wrote rapidly: nobody aint found it he didn get mattress from the jew must got it afore the jew got there rufus didn get it that for sure.

"It ain't for sure he got it, either," Slick said. "The bitch might have hid it somewhere else. She might still have it-how do you know?"

Dummy began grunting with excitement. no she aint got it she lookin for it.

"How do you know she's looking for it?" Slick asked. "She's in jail. Can you read minds?"

Dummy made sounds like a stopped-up drain. He started to write, but he didn't have space on that sheet and tore it off. Slick reached for it, drew it from his fingers and slipped it into his side coat pocket.

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.