Runaway (2 page)

“You never owned one?” the cop asked.

“No, never,” he lied.

“You know a guy called Luis?”

He knew instantly that it was Luis the Spic they were speaking of. He wet his lips. “Lots of guys named Luis,” he said.

“Only one guy called Luis the Spic. You know him?”

“I know him,” he said. “Sure. Everybody knows him.”

“But you particularly, huh?”

“Why me, particularly?”

“Maybe because your name is Johnny Lane.”

“That's my name,” he said. “What's this all about?”

“Maybe because Luis tried to rape your girl say two or three weeks ago. Maybe, let's say, you and Luis had a big tangle outside the Apollo, with Luis pulling homemade brass knucks and trying to rip your face apart with them. Maybe that's why you know him particularly, huh, boy?”

“Luis tried to work over lots of guys. Everybody knows his brass knucks. He made 'em from a garbage-can handle. Besides, he's stayed away from me since that time near the Apollo. Luis don't bother me or my girl any more.”

“You're right there, boy,” the first cop said.

“What do you mean?”

“Luis ain't bothering
anybody
any more. It was Luis who got zip-gunned.”

He wet his lips again. From up on Cathedral Parkway he heard a truck blasting its horn to the sky, high and strident. The blast hung on the silence of the November air, and he could almost taste the gasoline brackishness of the city. He sat still until the horn sound had dissolved, until all he could hear was the sound of muted traffic in the depth of the park, that and his own harsh breathing.

“I didn't shoot him,” he said.

“I know,” the first cop told him. “That's why you ran like a bastard when we came on the scene.”

“Look,” he said, appealing to their common sense now, “I didn't shoot him. I didn't like him, but there was lots of guys didn't like him.” Their faces remained expressionless. “Look, why should I shoot him? I got plenty on my mind besides Luis the Spic.”

“You're a big businessman,” the second cop said wryly. “Lots of big deals on your mind.”

“That ain't it, but … Hey, look, why would I want to shoot the bastard? Hey, come on now, you don't really think …”

He saw the look in the first cop's eyes. That same look was mirrored on the second cop's face. He saw, too, the irrefutable logic there. Luis the Spic had been gunned down. Luis was scum, but he was a citizen of this fair city. Someone had gunned the sonovabitch, and this was like tagging someone for a parking violation. Some big boy upstairs would raise six kinds of hell if this sort of thing went on, people cluttering up the streets with worthless garbage like Luis. First thing you knew, everyone would be leaving all their old gunned bodies around for the cops to clean up, and that would never do. There was only one way to handle a case of this exceptional caliber. Pull in the nearest sucker. Take Johnny, because he was as neat a patsy as the next guy, all made to order with an attempted rape on his girl, and a knock-down-drag-out right on 125th, where Luis had done his best to kill him. Pull in Johnny because all these tenement-crowded slobs were the same anyway, and if one of them fitted the bill, hang it on him.

He read the logic. He knew the logic, even if he didn't know it by name, because he'd read it in the eyes of cops ever since the days he used to swipe penny candies from Jake Soskovich on Lenox Avenue. Only this time it was homicide, and this time there wouldn't be a boot in the tail and a warning. People fried for homicide. Even when the dead man was a bastard like Luis.

You can't fight logic, but he tried to.

“Look,” he said, “I mean it. Me and Luis was all squared away. I had no reason to—”

“Why'd you run?”

“What?”

“Why'd you run?”

“Hell, I didn't want no trouble with the cops. You know—”

“You got it now, boy,” the first cop said.

“What're you wastin' time arguing with a nigger for?” the second cop said, and now the logic was clear and simple, and Johnny understood it perfectly this time. Because coupled with the logic was the warning “Remember 1935,” and 1935 was the year of the race riot, and the cops weren't taking any chances, nossir, not with zip guns in the picture. He read the logic like the writing on the wall, and this time he didn't try to fight it.

He brought his knee up into the groin of the first cop, and then clobbered him on the back of the head with both hands squeezed together like the head of a mallet. The cop fell to the pavement, and his buddy unsnapped the Police Special hanging in the holster near his right buttock. The shot rang out crisp and sharp, but Johnny was already behind the squad car, ducking around the grille, heading for the door near the driver's seat. He knew it was crazy, and he knew you didn't go around driving cops' cars, but taking the rap for Luis' kill was just as nuts, and he had nothing to lose now, not after the logic he had read.

He heard the second shot, and the third one, but he was already behind the wheel, his head ducked low, his hand releasing the emergency brake, his foot on the accelerator. The car leaped ahead, and then the shots came like bursts from a Tommy gun, fast and crackling, pinging against the sides of the car.

He heard the first cop banging his night stick against the pavement, and the pounding was as loud and as frightening as the bark of the other cop's gun. The last bullet found one of the rear tires, and the car lurched crazily, but he held onto the wheel and kept his foot pressed to the floor, and the rubber flapped and beat the asphalt as he headed crosstown. The cop had stopped to reload, and by the time the next shots came, he couldn't have hit the car if he'd been using a bazooka. He drove all the way down to Pleasant Avenue, wondering whether or not he should turn on the siren, a little excited about all of it now, a little reckless-feeling.

He ditched the car, and then ran like a thief up to First Avenue, cutting back uptown. He reached 116th Street, wondered where he should go then. Back home? That was the first place they'd look. Cindy's? No, they'd look there, too.

He stood on the corner for a moment, looking up toward the Third Avenue El, wondering. When he saw a squad car pull around Second Avenue, he made up his mind, and he made it up fast.

He didn't run this time. He walked casually, his head turned toward the shop windows that lined the street. He passed the big church, and then he passed the movie theatre west of Third Avenue, and he kept walking, unsure of himself because he was surrounded by whites, making sure he didn't look at any of the white women. He turned right on Lex, walking up toward 125th Street. On the corner of Lex and 125th, he looked back toward Third Avenue briefly, and then turned left, walking past the RKO Proctor's, past Park Avenue, past Madison Avenue and Mount Morris Park, past Fifth, penetrating deeper into Harlem.

He turned right again on Lenox Avenue, and now he was on his toes, watching for cops, because this was home ground and this was where they'd be looking. He walked cautiously. He tried to appear nonchalant, but his eyes raked each side street he passed, looking for the telltale white top of a squad car. There was a crowd in front of the synagogue on 128th, but there wasn't a cops' car in sight, so he figured it for a meeting or something. He kept walking uptown, looking west on 134th to the Y.M.C.A. and then to the Public Library on 135th.

He was in The Valley now, and he still didn't know where he should go because he didn't know where they would not look. He passed Harlem Hospital, and he wondered if this was where they'd taken Luis, and then he wondered if they took dead men to the hospital.

And abruptly he realized that Luis
was
dead, and that the cops thought he'd done it, and that he was a runaway.

He turned up 137th Street and headed for Seventh Avenue.

Two

The Corset Shop was on Seventh Avenue, between 137th and 138th. The plate-glass window carried the fancy legend “Foundation Garments,” but everybody knew this was the Corset Shop, and everybody knew it was run by Gussie the Corset Lady.

He walked into the shop quickly. The front room was stacked with dummies wearing brassieres and girdles and corsets and contraptions he couldn't name. He'd worked for Gussie a long time ago, when he was fourteen, delivering the garments to fat women who should have, ordered tents with zippers instead. He heard the hum of the sewing machine in the back room, and he looked out at the street once and then parted the flowered curtains and stepped out of sight.

Gussie looked up from the machine. She was a tall woman in her early fifties, with large brown eyes and full, sensuous lips. She was a warm tan color, and the Harlem rumble had it that she was from a rich family in the West Indies, but Gussie never called herself anything but “a nigger—and proud of it.” She wore her own foundation garments, and she was wearing one now that bunched her full breasts up into the low yoke of her neckline, like the heroine on the jacket of a historical novel.

“Well!” she said. “Who's after
you?
”

“The cops,” Johnny said quickly.

She'd been smiling, but the smile dropped from her face now, as if her little joke had paid off in unforeseen dividends. Her foot stopped on the treadle of the machine. “What d'you mean, the cops? What for?”

“They say I killed Luis the Spic.”

“He dead?” Gussie asked. When he nodded she said, “Good. He deserved it.”

“Yeah, but I didn't do it.”

“I din't say you did. No matter who, he deserved it.”

Johnny glanced through the curtains and out at the street again. “I run away from them,” he said. “They was planning a run-through, and I don't like working on a railroad.”

“You shouldn't have run, man,” Gussie said. “That was stupid.”

“All right, it was stupid. You didn't see their eyes.”

Gussie stared at him contemplatively for a few moments. “Why'd you come to me?” she asked.

“Just to get off the streets. You don't have to worry. I'm leaving.” He said it more bitterly than he'd intended to.

“I don't want no trouble with the bulls,” she said lamely.

“Nobody does.”

“Nor me especially.”

Johnny forced a smile. “Hell, you pay the cops off regular, anyhow.”

“That ain't got nothin' to do with it. I ain't askin' for trouble.”

“You want me to go right this minute?”

“I din't say that.”

“Then stop bellyaching.”

Gussie's face was worried now. She was thinking hard, Johnny could see, and there was a phone on the wall not three feet from them. Maybe he shouldn't have come here after all. Maybe …

“What're y'gonna do?” she asked.

“I don't know. How do I know? Just stay away from them for now, that's all.”

“And then what?”

“
Some
body killed Luis,” he said. “That's for sure.”

“They'll catch you,” she said. “They'll catch you, an' you'll wisht you was back in Georgia, boy.”

“I ain't from Georgia,” Johnny said.

“You'll still wisht you was back there. Man, you shun'ta run from them. That's the worst thing you could've done.”

“I also slugged a cop and stole a pussy wagon. I got nothing to lose now.”

“You're fixed up real fine, ain't you?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said dully.

They heard the front door open, and Johnny tensed.

“Who …”

“Shut up,” she hissed. “Stay back here. I'll take care of it.”

He hugged the wall, and she parted the curtains and went out front.

“Afternoon, Gussie,” he heard a woman's voice say.

“Afternoon, Mrs. Welles,” Gussie answered. “Cold enough out there for you?”

“
Mm
-mmmmuh,” Mrs. Welles said. “I come by to see if the corset was ready.”

“It sure is, Mrs. Welles. Finished it this morning. Just a moment, now, an' I'll get it for you.”

She parted the curtains again and came into the back of the shop. Johnny watched her as she checked the rows of cardboard boxes stacked on the long table. She selected one from the rest, turned, winked at him, and then went out front again.

“Here we are,” she said heartily.

“Uh-huh,” Mrs. Welles said, and Johnny could picture her nodding her head as she opened the box. “It looks very nice, Gussie, very nice. You mind if I try it on?”

“Well …” Gussie hesitated. “It's kind of chilly in the back. I don't want you catchin' pneumonia. You try it on home, and if there's anything to be changed, why, you just bring it right back. How's that?”

“Well, all right,” Mrs. Welles said. She paused and then added, “If it's all right with you, Gussie, I'll pay you
after
I tries it on.”

“Any time you're passing by,” Gussie said agreeably.

“Don't know when that'll be,” Mrs. Welles said. “Gettin' so a body's scared to walk the streets. You hear about Luis Ortega?”

“No,” Gussie lied.

“Shot to death about an hour ago.”

“No!” Gussie said.

“He was,” Mrs. Welles said. “Serves him right, I say.”

“Who shot him?” Gussie asked.

“Johnny Lane. You know Johnny Lane?”

“Well …”

“That's right, he used to work for you, didn't he? Well, him. He's the one. He shot Luis.”

“Imagine that,” Gussie said.

“Serves Luis right. I don't hold with no spics in Harlem, Gussie. Let 'em stay where they belong, I say.”

“Well …”

“Besides, I give him enough of my money, that one. 'Tween us, Gussie, I think he was runnin' a crooked numbers game. Oh, I know they's folks say they hit from Luis, but I don't know of any personally, do you? I say it's good he got it.”