Trick Baby (24 page)

A week later, a bunco roller from Eleventh Street busted us on G.P. He put us on a show-up, and we caught the elderly white mark's finger. Fixer put us back into the street the next day.

We had to kick back half of the score to the mark. I guess Fixer squared the right people with his half of the seventeen-fifty that was left. That bust cut the score to pieces. But without the fix we'd have been in the State pen playing the con for screw's chow and a soft job. The Fixer sure knew the proper pockets to stuff that fix dough into.

We eased up on the drag for a while. We laid the flue and played the smack. We took off some juicy ones using the Dutchman's bar angle. There were a lot of hate spots like that in Chicago where I could always pull a mark out to Blue for the kill. We never missed a mark with that angle. Squeezing a white mark between a black man and what he thought was a white man was foolproof con.

The last of June I slipped over to Indiana Harbor to Aunt Lula's cathouse. It was a wasted trip. Black Kate was gone. A fast young New York pimp had stolen her from her Chicago pimp.

Aunt Lula didn't have a black broad in the house. And I was in a helluva heat for black and nothing else that night. So, I drove back to Chicago and settled for a jet-black, young twenty-six dice-game broad that I had been banging for a year.

I almost missed her. She had closed down her table and was just getting into a cab when I pulled up in front of the Music Box Bar at Sixty-third Street and South Park Boulevard.

She was a wild lay. But I'd always have a helluva time fending off
her frantic proposals of marriage after the excitement was over. She'd plead that she'd whore for me, do anything for me if I'd marry her. She had it bad and that wasn't good, to paraphrase the Duke Ellington hit record.

On the night of the Fourth of July, I was at a ringside table in the Club Delisa. I had a pretty, young, white school teacher from Philly with me. I had lugged her from the Four Eleven Club on Sixty-third Street across from the Music Box.

The joint was crowded with black hustlers and squares. And there were quite a few whites from Chicago's gold coast soaking up the rich nigger atmosphere.

There was a vacant table right next to ours with a reserved sign on it. If I had known who was going to sit at that table, I'd have run from the joint before she got there.

In fact the rest of Nineteen Forty-five was going to be even worse for me than that horrible year Nineteen Thirty-nine when they took Phala away from me.

It was too bad I didn't get a year in prison for that thirty-five hundred score from the elderly white mark that Felix fixed. I would have had a better break in the joint than I was going to get in the street. And that's the guaranteed truth.

My disaster came to the vacant table during the show's intermission. I had been half turned in my chair for half an hour sweet-talking my sexy school teacher. Then we went to the packed dance floor and stood in one spot and scratched our bellies together to the itchy music of the club's band.

I had my eyes half closed enjoying the warm, racy glow of rum and coke and the hot softness of the school marm. A delicious whiff of Chanel Number Five opened my eyes. I looked down at my side.

A tall white man was holding a Goddess in his arms. His eyes were bleary. And his face had the flaming ruddiness of an alcoholic. Her angelic face had the gleam of rose-tinted porcelain.

She gazed up at me. Emerald stars glinted in her huge, grey eyes. Her hair was a platinum crown that coruscated in the pastel light.

The music outside me stopped. Her pouty scarlet mouth smiled and dimpled the porcelain cheeks. My enslaved eyes were chained to her as she glided away and sat down at the table next to mine.

I was in an enchanted fog when the school teacher and I took our seats. The emcee came on stage and announced the second show. Billy Eckstein and Moms Mabley were the headliners, I think.

I turned my chair to face the stage. The Goddess was just ahead and to the side of me when she turned her chair toward the stage.

Her black-haired escort was on the other side of her table, turned toward the stage away from us. He swayed drunkenly to the music for the first act.

She sipped from a tall, frosty glass. Her exquisite hands moved like beautiful creatures performing a ballet to secret wondrous music. Her face, her limbs, her body could have been created by the composite genius of all the wizard sculptors of the ages.

Her escort turned his head from the stage and hollered something to her. She answered, and her contralto voice was like the caressing lilt of a gypsy violin.

I was thundering inside with a new mad excitement that I had never known before. The strange thing about it was, it raged in my chest and thrashed inside my head. It was all above the crotch line, if you get what I mean.

I sat there and played a mirror game with her through the first half of the show. A half-dozen times she gazed at me through the mirror of her jeweled compact. Each time I'd gaze adoringly into the grey depths of the emerald-flecked magnets.

The school teacher went to the john and gave me the break I needed. When I stood up for her leaving, I pulled my chair closer to the Goddess.

A sly smile dimpled her cheek when I sat down. I wrote a note on
a paper napkin. I put my phone number at the bottom of it. I folded it and flicked it into her lap.

It said, “Seeing you for the first time makes me so sad and blue. Oh! How Johnny O'Brien regrets those worthless, empty years before we met.

“I sit here adoring you and despising the memories of the dull mortal women I have known. But then how could I have known that a Goddess would bless my path?

“May I know the Goddess's name? Is it naive to believe that a Goddess has a telephone number? Or must I climb to a mountaintop and beg the stars to bring her forth for love? Shouldn't we ditch our chains and flee together into the passionate midnight?”

The large vein at the side of her long white throat was pulsing wildly as she read it. She palmed the note and stood up facing me.

I glanced across her table at her escort. His head was turned toward the stage. I looked up at her. For a long moment she stood there sweeping her smoky gray eyes across my face. When she went by me toward the powder room, I noticed the lime silk of her skintight dress fluttering over her heart.

The school marm came back with a new coat of paint and a bedroom smile. She was cute, like a carrot-topped pixie.

I was getting lots of hot, heavy action all right. I heard the swish of silk behind me. A tiny paper square fell into my lap as the Goddess floated to her chair. Her escort hadn't known she had gone and come.

I took the note to the john and read it.

It said, “Johnny O'Brien, you beautiful, dear, mischievous boy. Shame on you for exciting an old married woman with that pretty blarney.

“Apollo should not be required to climb a dusty old mountain to bring forth Camille Costain and her telephone number. Unfortunately my tipsy chain is my husband. If it were otherwise, I should be delighted to flee with you into your passionate midnight. Call me soon, any time, day or night.”

Her phone number was at the bottom of the note. A P.S. was below it.

It said, “Don't be alarmed when you undress and retire tonight, if you should hear the wild anxious wings of my curiosity beating desperately against your windowpane.”

Her note was thrilling. But how could she be old enough to call me a boy? She was beautiful and tender looking. I thought maybe I had been blinded to the creeping signs of age in the first explosion of her platinum and rose dazzle.

I stared at her elbow and the back of her neck. Her skin was smooth and taut like on a young girl. After the second show the Goddess and her looped husband got up from their table to leave. She narrowed her eyes and wickedly parted her lips as she passed me.

Shortly after they left, I took the school marm to a Creole gumbo joint on Sixty-first Street. I was crazy about the rich stew of lobster, shrimp, chicken and okra, when I had drunk heavily.

I liked it almost as much as roast beef or macaroni and cheese. But I liked nothing better than a filet steak with a crisp tossed salad and heavily buttered crescent rolls.

It was four
A.M
. when I led the school marm down the hall to my bedroom. I heard Blue's bedsprings creaking rhythmically. I wondered if he were riding a penitentiary filly that would need a Felix fix down the stretch.

The school teacher, whose name was Denise, I think, gave me the usual bewhiskered con that this was her first time to lay a guy on such short notice.

She had the agility of an arthritic elephant and a dull dogma for routine position and movement. To rescue the situation I tried to imagine that she was the Goddess. But it was no use. I had squandered an evening on a pretty dud.

I fell asleep on her ample bosom as she was expounding her theory of education for the exceptional child.

I woke up with a scorching sun searing my leaden eyeballs. Denise was spanking my cheek like she'd caught me in her classroom with a slimy finger.

It was eight
A.M
. and she had a date with a train going back to Philly at ten. I struggled up and went to the bathroom. I toothbrushed the stale rum stink from my mouth and stared at myself in the cabinet mirror.

I looked like a slender Santa Claus with my red nose and the pink splotches on my cheek bones. My face was puffy like Phala's used to be. I felt lousy. I'd have to stop drinking so much.

I went to the phone and called a cab for Denise. I just wasn't up to the trip to her Loop hotel for her bags and then to the train station.

I gave her a double sawbuck when her cab came. She gave me her address and phone number in Philly. She made me promise I'd keep in touch. I walked her to the front door and kissed her goodbye on the forehead.

I got the Sunday Tribune off the porch and went to the bathroom and sat on the stool. I read half the paper.

I was washing my hands when I remembered the slip of paper in my pajama pocket with Denise's address and phone number on it. I threw it into the toilet bowl and watched it swirl into the sewer.

I decided I wouldn't call the Goddess right away like an overeager sucker. It was a long wait for Monday to come.

The Goddess's phone number had a River Forest exchange. I wondered if she'd ever seen Phala going to her domestic job out there.

At eleven o'clock I went to a Sixty-first Street dentist and got my cavity filled. I got home about noon. It was one
P.M
. when I put the call through to Camille. Her throaty voice answered, “Hello.” I said, “Mrs. Costain, this is Johnny O'Brien. Can you talk?”

She laughed and said, “Johnny, I can always talk. I have a private phone in my private bedroom. And please Johnny, don't call me Mrs. Costain. I don't want to be reminded more than is necessary.
I'm sure you can find something more romantic to call me. Has stark daylight robbed you of your sweet touch?”

I said, “Camille, angel, I wish I was in that bedroom with you. I'd shower your pretty ears with sweet-talk and then devour you.”

She moaned, “Oh! You precious boy. Cannibals have always made me delirious with joy. Beautiful young white cannibals, that is.”

I said, “Camille, I'm not a boy, I'm a man. Can't you look at me and tell? There isn't a lot of difference in our ages. But you talk like you've been around a thousand years. I'll make a deal with you. Don't call me a boy, and I won't call you Mrs. Costain.”

She said, “Agreed, Johnny. Now tell me something about yourself. Where do you live? What do you do for a living?”

I said, “I live in the Sixties on the Southside of Chicago. I'm a skip tracer for a discount firm that buys delinquent accounts from commercial businesses.

“I'm a twenty-two-year-old orphan with no wife, no family. Does my address and background disqualify me, Darling? Now tell me about yourself.”

She said, “Of course not. My family lived in Cicero before Daddy founded a bearing manufacturing firm in Chicago and moved Mother and me to River Forest.

“My husband and I share this house with Daddy who is still active as president of his company. Mother died shortly after we moved from Cicero. My husband is an executive in the firm.

“Johnny, it must be terribly dismal to live in your neighborhood. I understand that almost all of the respectable whites have moved out. And all of those once fine neighborhoods have given way to coon rot.

“Oh, Johnny, if we're going to be friends, why not get a small apartment elsewhere? Say near the Northside of Chicago. I just get cold chills thinking about you living in the midst of those savage niggers.

“Johnny, you don't go about that Southside making love to those
disease-ridden coon girls do you? I couldn't stand for you to touch me if I thought you did.”

I loosened my tie and mopped my brow.

I said, “Camille, I'm afraid those things you said about black people are not true. I know for a fact that most of the rundown houses on the Southside were like that when the whites moved out.

“The black girls don't have a monopoly on disease. There are people all over Chicago with disease. All blacks aren't bad. Just like all whites aren't good. My best friend is black. I didn't know you hated black people. I could be black, then you'd hate me. Maybe it was a mistake to call you.”

There was a long pause.

Then she bubbled, “Oh you emotional Irish bunny. I don't hate coo—I mean black people. I don't really hate anybody. But in my circle it's always been so unfashionable to accept them as associates. They seem so stupid and unsanitary looking. I guess it's not that I hate them. Perhaps I'm terrified at the prospect of loving them. So, forgive me, and I promise not to malign your precious blacks again.

“Oh, my heavens! It's almost two. I'm going to be late for my appointment with the hairdresser. You were wonderful to call me. You can't know how much I need you. But let me miss you until I'm bursting inside. I'll try very hard not to call you.