Trick Baby (36 page)

Christmas, I was lounging on my bed listening to the radio. The phone rang. I picked up and said, “Hello.”

Nobody answered. But in the background I heard the sexy voice of a broad torching Cole Porter's Night and Day. “And this torment won't be through until you let me spend my life making love to you, night and day. Day and night deep in the heart of me there's oh, such a hungry yearning burning—”

I thought I heard someone breathing on the other end just before the line closed. I spun my radio dial quickly to find out if the broad I'd heard was on radio. She wasn't.

It was a record. I remembered hearing the same song sung by the same voice when I was waiting the year before to give Blue the
bad news about the Buster Bang Bang play. That call was screwy like this one.

Then I had thought it was the Goddess horsing around. Was it the Goddess who had just called? I reached for the phone. My hand froze on it. I remembered she was one of the poisons I had to leave alone.

I lay there with my heart pounding. I didn't know what I'd do if she called and I heard her contralto voice. I knocked the receiver off the cradle and fell into fitful sleep.

The years galloped by. Our luck held up in the street. Felix the Fixer fixed only two beefs for us. One in the Spring of Nineteen Forty-nine and the other in Nineteen Fifty-four.

Livin' Swell was a big dope wholesaler. Bigger even than his former boss, Butcher Knife Brown. Midge was a destroyed hag with an H habit. A Spanish whore stabbed Precious Jimmy through the heart. Sister Franklin died of old age.

Old man Mule got fifty years in Joliet prison for sodomy against an eight-year-old girl. Dot Murray the cop was naturally still around scaring grifters shitless.

The Vicksburg Kid, who turned Blue out on the grift in Mississippi, came through Chicago in Nineteen Fifty-seven and looked Blue up. He was a tiny, charming old guy with the most alert blue eyes I'd ever seen.

He stayed in Midge's room for several days. He and Blue drank and talked together until the wee hours about the con and the good old days.

We talked about the Kid for days after he left for his con operation in Montreal. I missed his yarns about the humorous marks he had played for.

In Nineteen Fifty-eight, Blue and I went to old man Pocket's funeral. We both cried. He had been a lovable old man. He'd died in a hotel room punching into a young girl from big foot country. He just hadn't been up to the job.

His pump couldn't stand the gaff. But I'm sure he died happy. Too bad he got that old. But then, we were all getting older and wiser, I thought. Blue's hair was completely white in the spring of Nineteen Fifty-nine.

My sorrow about Phala had dulled. But I still got a twinge when I thought about her.

My own yellow hair was generously sprinkled with gray. I was thirty-five years old. Blue was sixty-seven. We were both twenty-five to thirty pounds heavier than we'd been in the mid-Forties.

Aunt Lula had a wild new girl. Her name was Roxie. She was the biggest freak I'd laid since Black Kate. She was a pretty, yellow girl who was glamorous with green eye shadow and glitter dust in her hair. Many times I got home from dates with her and found some of the sparkling dots in my navel. She swore she loved me. Couldn't we shack up? But I remembered the Goddess.

My favorite food was still steak with macaroni and cheese. I had a slight paunch to prove it. All things considered, we were a pair of fairly well-preserved grifters for our ages.

I
n April of Nineteen Fifty-nine, Blue started hanging around Thirty-first Street and Indiana Avenue at night. He was sniffing around the mob of young tramp broads that twisted their butts in and out of Square's Bar on the corner and the Harmonia Hotel at Thirtieth Street and Indiana Avenue.

Everybody down there got to know him. Including Butcher Knife Brown. In the month of April he brought home no less than ten of the half-hungry little urchins.

Next morning the house would be stinking with ripe body odor and dime-store perfume. He had always been weak for young, classy pussy. But now he was digging at the bottom of the barrel.

The first week in May, he brought home a curvy, yellow girl from Thirty-first Street. She was cute all right, with a doll face and long, shiny black hair. She was a striking combination of Filipino and Negro.

She was eighteen, from a broken home. Her name was Cleo and she had found a home. She didn't have to move her clothes. She was wearing them.

She had stayed three days when Blue came into my bedroom early in the morning. His eyes were flashing and he jumped excitedly around the side of the bed.

He almost whispered, “Folks, Cleo and I are getting married. I'm having this dingy house freshened up with new carpets and new paint. Say something. I'll bet you're surprised.”

I mumbled, “Congratulations. When is the wedding?”

I heard her syrupy voice calling him, “Blue, babee, I'm lonesome.”

He jumped to his feet, and on the way out he said, over his shoulder, “We're getting married up in Michigan tomorrow. We'll honeymoon at a resort in Idlewilde. Whoopee!”

I listened to a hysterical pillow fight between them for twenty minutes. Then I heard the bed springs creaking. I wondered if Blue would die a glorious death like Pocket. At ten
A.M
. I heard them laughing like grammar-school sweethearts on their way out the front door.

I got up and made coffee. I sat at the kitchen table. I thought, that little tramp has that slick sucker's nose wide open. She's a cinch to bump his head. But who am I to criticize? She can't do him as bad as the Goddess did me.

At one
P.M
. I was eating lunch when they came back. It took Blue six trips to his car to get the bride's trousseau into the house. While Blue was on his last trip, Cleo wiggled into the kitchen and leaned a big tit against my cheek as she plucked a napkin from the holder on the table. She stepped back and blotted her lipstick. She gave me a wicked smile and wiggled away.

They left for Michigan that evening. At nine
P.M
. I got in my Caddie and went to Lula's cat house to bang Roxie. I got back home at two
A.M
.

There was a note stuck in the door. I went to my bedroom and read it. There was a phone number at the bottom.

It said, “Please call this number. L.S.”

I rang the number. Livin' Swell picked up on the first ring.

He blurted, “Folks, is that you?”

I said, “Yes, how are you doing, Livin'?”

His heavy breathing was rasping through the line.

He said, “I ain't doing no good. Ain't you heard?”

I said, “No, what happened?”

He shouted, “It's the dagos! The outfit! Butcher Knife Brown has bullshitted Nino that I'm stooling to a secret grand jury on narcotics. Sure I got a wholesaling beef pending, but I swear, Folks, I'd do fifty years before I'd rat on the syndicate.

“I hid in your backyard until that old white bitch next door to you kept running out to the back peeping at me. I was afraid she'd call the rollers.”

I said, “Where are you?”

He said, “At Barn's poolroom on Sixty-third Street. But it's closing.”

I said, “Drive over here. Maybe I can put an angle together for you. At least you won't be in the street.”

He wailed, “Folks, can't you understand? The dagos are looking for me to kill me. I can't drive my wheels. It's on the street down on Lake Park where I crib.”

I said, “Stay in front of the poolroom. I'll be right down to pick you up.”

He shouted, “I can't stand around in the street. They're after me! I got to keep moving. Let me think.” There was a long silence.

Finally he said, “I used to live at the Pershing Hotel. The fire door to the roof is always open. I'll be there looking out for you. You park across the street on Cottage Grove Avenue so I can't miss you.”

He hung up. In less than five minutes after he hung up, I had driven the several blocks to Sixty-fourth Street and Cottage Grove Avenue.

I got out of the car and looked up toward the roof. I crossed the street and went into the lobby. I went to the elevator and rode to the top floor. I went through a fire door to the roof.

Nobody was up there except two sissies smoking reefer. I thought they'd jump off the roof when they saw me. I went back to the car.

I went up and down Sixty-third and all the streets around. Then I went up and down all the alleys. Livin' was not to be found. It was
dawn before I stopped trying. I went home and stayed awake until noon expecting Livin' to turn up. I fell asleep with my clothes on.

Blue and Cleo got back from their honeymoon on the fifteenth of May. The bride was radiant in a silk shantung suit from Marshall Fields.

On the eighteenth of May a crew of painters and carpet layers freshened up the house. I checked every source I knew to get a line on Livin' Swell. It was like he never was. He had disappeared from the face of the earth.

There was a strong possibility that he was at the bottom of Lake Michigan or the Chicago River. Maybe he was weighted with his belly split open so his corpse wouldn't float to the surface. Many nights I lay in the darkness and thought about him and remembered the old days when we were kids together down on Thirty-ninth street.

In November of Nineteen Fifty-nine, Blue and I bought new Cadillacs with the exaggerated rear fins. Blue also bought Cleo a new purple Thunderbird. He was hooked and happy. So I never cracked to him that I had seen Cleo riding around with several different young punks in her Thunderbird.

Eight days before Christmas, Blue got a call from a small-time con man on the Westside of Chicago. He drove over there. When he got back he was excited.

He said, “Folks, have I got a sweetheart of a rocks mark. He's even sweeter than Buster Bang Bang. He's an old dago fence with a used-clothing shop front.

“He doesn't know a diamond from a seashell. I've already cut into him and told him the tale. We use the standard rocks play. For this bird we don't need anything fancy.

“You turn your head and cough when we're looking at the stuff so I can palm the rock for the appraisal. I'll switch in my own rock as usual. He and I will be partners. There's no blowoff problem. I'll let him hold the stuff until it cools.

“He'll pay ten grand. We play for him tomorrow afternoon. I've already rented a room at Kedsie Avenue and West Thirty-first Street to play him in. Well, how does it sound?”

I said, “The dough sounds wonderful. But we're sure to get a beef from a hometown mark for a score that big.”

Blue laughed and said, “What the hell you think we got Felix for? He can fix a rocks beef easier than a drag beef. What are you backing up for? You stop liking dough?”

I said, “So we take him off tomorrow.”

He said, “Oh, I almost forgot. We'll go to the Cadillac people tomorrow and drop my car off. The transmission is slipping. I'll take a cab to the mark for the lug back to you.”

Blue and I got out of the house the next morning around eleven-thirty
A.M
. We went to our slum connection on Wabash Avenue in the Loop. We picked up twenty choice zircons mounted in gold plate.

Blue left his Caddie at the dealers for the transmission adjustment. We ate lunch downtown and chatted and killed time over coffee until two
P.M
.

I drove Blue to the corner of Kedsie Avenue and Roosevelt Road. I saw him get in a cab as I drove away to the room.

Blue had been right about Frascati. He was a real cream puff. He didn't give us an anxious moment all during the play. He gave me ten grand. I gave them the glass-filled bag when Blue gave me a boodle that looked like ten grand.

They walked away grinning at the way they had rooked the hot, white hoodlum out of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in rocks for a measly twenty grand.

At five
P.M
., Blue was getting out of a Yellow Cab at Forty-seventh and Halsted Streets as I pulled up to pick him up.

He got in and said, “I feel like a good steak, Folks. How about you?”

I gave him his boodle and five grand of the score. I pulled the Caddie into traffic and said, “It's a great idea. Let's go to the Brass Rail.”

Moments later, I pulled to the curb on Forty-seventh Street in front of the Rail. We got out and went through the door to the front booth. We ordered our steaks and sat there looking out the panoramic front window at the poor chumps buffeted by the violent December winds.

How could we know that Dot Murray, the roller, would bring us the bad news about Nino? And we would begin a run for our lives. . . .

I
had dozed off when Blue shook me awake. For a moment I wasn't sure where I was. Then I heard Reverend Josephus' Bertha Mae's snoring, I realized that we were in Jewtown, and we were waiting for that messenger of death. . . .

Blue said, “I called the house again. Cleo still isn't home. I called the Fixer. He said he saw her Thunderbird parked in front of Square's Bar on Thirty-first at one-thirty this morning. It's after three now. We'd better get out of here. It'll be daylight in a couple of hours.”

I jumped from the bunk and pulled the light string.

I said, “But Blue, the Southside is a big place. We can't find Cleo before daybreak.”

He said sharply, “Folks, she's not just anywhere on the Southside. She's at one of those after-hours joints around Thirty-first Street. I know them all.

“She's down there slumming, flashing her fine clothes and letting her old pals see how she's come up in the world. I'll be able to find her before four
A.M
. You don't have to go. I'm going to get Joe's key to the truck.”

He walked down the hall. I put on my shoes and suit coat. He came back with the key. We put on our overcoats and went to the old truck packed in front of the house. Blue got behind the wheel.