Trick Baby (37 page)

It wouldn't start. Blue hit the starter every minute or so for ten minutes. Finally, the starter made only a faint growl. Blue turned his sweat-shiny face and looked at me helplessly.

I pushed the door open and said, “Well, Blue, it looks like we'll have to make the trip in the Caddie.”

We went to the shed in the backyard. I backed the Caddie out and headed for the Southside.

I stopped for a stoplight at Thirty-first and Halsted Streets. I was thinking what a sucker play it was to stick our necks out for a tramp like Cleo when Blue said, “Folks, I'll never forget the way you're going along with things. You're a real pal.

“Don't worry. When we get to the Thirty-first Street neighborhood, we'll only have to cruise a couple of streets. It will be a cinch to spot Cleo's purple Thunder-bird parked near one of the after-hours joints. Like I told you, I know them all down there.

“I know it's Butcher Knife Brown's stomping grounds but we're not going to be around long. Besides, I've given out a lot of handouts down there. The broke Niggers I passed out that dough to like me.

“Butcher Knife isn't sucker enough to make a murder play in front of witnesses. He's a sneaky little bastard who grins in your face and tricks you into a dark, lonely place, like an alley or hallway, for his butchering.

“Hell, the cunning sonuvabitch will never get that near us. Say that he or one of his young punk runners spotted us and wired Nino. We'd be back on the Westside before Nino could get down there to knock us off. Go to Thirty-second Street and Prairie Avenue for a starter.”

I drove down almost deserted Thirty-first Street, past Indiana Avenue to the corner of Prairie Avenue and Thirty-second Street. We didn't see Cleo's car.

Blue bit his bottom lip and said, “Folks, try the block on Michigan Avenue between Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth Streets. She's probably at Leona's joint. Most of her old pals hang out there.”

I drove south on Michigan Avenue.

Blue pounded my thigh and shouted, “Folks, I told you! There's the bird!”

I pulled up behind it near the corner of Thirty-fourth Street on Michigan.

Blue opened the door and said, “Keep your motor running. I'll be right back with her.”

I saw a tall, thin, black guy in a white overcoat with hat to match standing on the sidewalk sucking on a reefer. He threw an arm around Blue's shoulder. I watched them go through the dim foyer of a dingy brownstone apartment building.

They turned to the left on the first floor. I heard loud laughter and the blare of gut-bucket blues from the apartment. He came out in less than two minutes without Cleo.

He got in the car and said, “Folks, Cleo left twenty minutes ago with Bootsie in her car. Leona doesn't know where they went. But Jabbo, that chump in the white overcoat that you saw, thinks he knows where Bootsie and Cleo are. He's making a call now.

“Folks, before I married Cleo, Bootsie was Cleo's best friend. I don't want Cleo running around with her. The last time I saw Bootsie, she looked like she was hooked on H.

“Folks, I've got to keep Cleo away from down here. It's a dirty shame the poor little thing had to grow up down here. Folks, why don't you park the Caddie around the corner and we'll wait in Leona's joint for Cleo?”

I thought about it for a long moment.

Then I said, “I've got a better idea. It's four-ten. Dawn is only a couple of hours away. There's no point in both of us waiting for Cleo. Besides, I'm not in the mood for a lot of drunken chumps.

“I'm going to slip out to the house and get some of our clothes and personal things. Then after you take care of your affairs, Monday morning we can all drive directly to New York.”

Blue got out and I pulled away. I parked the Caddie at Sixty-third
and Cottage Grove Avenue and took a cab. I had the cabbie cruise up and down the block past the pink house.

I had to be sure that it wasn't staked out. The cab took me back to my car. Within a half hour I had filled the spacious trunk and rear seat of the car with Cleo's, Blue's and my things. I was feeling pretty good as I drove toward Leona's place. I had seventy-five hundred dollars in my pocket with the twenty-five hundred I got from under the rug in my bedroom.

I pulled up behind the Thunderbird. Twenty minutes passed. I got out and locked the car. I went to the door on the left ground floor. I rang the bell. An eye glistened at a peephole in the door.

A muffled broad's voice said, “Whatta' you want?”

I said, “I'm a friend of Blue Howard. I've been waiting outside for him. Will you have him come to the door?”

The eye said, “Goddamn, you nosey. You a roller? Twenty-ninth and State Street.”

I said, “Is Cleo inside?”

The eye said, “Goddamn you nosey. You a roller?”

I said, “I'm a friend of theirs. I told you, I've been waiting for Blue. I drove him here.”

The eye blew a gust of rot-gut whiskey through the hole and said, “Jabbo took Blue down there where Cleo is at.”

I said, “Where at Twenty-ninth and State? Can't you give me an address?”

The peephole banged shut. I U-turned the Caddie and went down Michigan Avenue toward Twenty-ninth Street.

At Thirty-first Street, I heard the distant wail of a police meat wagon. I turned left on Thirty-first Street and drove toward State.

I got a strange, tense feeling driving down State Street. That wail was loud as hell straight ahead. I saw a crowd on the sidewalk a couple of hundred yards from the corner of Twenty-ninth Street.

A police ambulance was sitting in the street at the same distance.
My hands were trembling on the steering wheel. I double-parked fifty feet behind the meat wagon. I leaped from the car and trotted toward the crowd. I saw two uniformed coppers lifting a stretcher into the back of the wagon. Somebody tugged at my arm. I looked down. It was an old pool hustler pal of Pocket's from Forty-seventh Street.

He shook his head and said, “Folks, it's too bad. It's too bad.”

I leaned weakly against the side of a car and blurted, “What happened? Who was that?”

He lowered his eyes and said softly, “Folks, that was your pal Blue. He got crossed out of his life. A thirty-eight slug blasted through his right eye.”

I grabbed his coat front and shouted, “Who did it? Did they catch the sonuvabitch?”

My chest was a boiling cauldron of grief and shock. My hoarse sobby voice was a stranger's, far away.

He jerked his thumb. I looked. The wagon was pulling away down the street. Two plainclothes white rollers were putting Cleo and a black, scrawny broad into a car. Then in the light that flashed on inside the car, I saw the thin guy with the white overcoat and hat sitting on the back seat. The police car pulled away.

I said, “That's Cleo! Who is the guy with the white coat? Who is that other broad? Did the guy in the white coat kill Blue? Are you sure that he's dead?”

He said, “The stud in the white coat is Jabbo. He's the killer, but he won't go to the joint. He's Butcher Knife Brown's ace runner and hatchet man since Brown has got elderly and half-blind. Poor Blue musta' wasn't hip to that. Jabbo is been fucking Cleo off and on since she was twelve years old. That skinny broad is Bootsie, a hype. She deals H for Brown. I'm cribbing across the street. I rushed out here when I heard the shot.

“Blue was lying on the sidewalk. When I got over here, Jabbo and Cleo and Bootsie were standing around Blue. Jabbo was
loud-mouthing about how it was self-defense. Blue had a long open shiv in his hand.

“Bootsie was cracking that Blue tried to croak Jabbo. Cleo was stooping down relieving Blue of that big rock on his pinky and his wallet. It was a slick cross.

“Like I said, Jabbo won't do a day in the joint. How can he? Blue was only a Nigger. And Jabbo is got Blue's wife and Bootsie as witnesses for him at the coroner's inquest. Even if he didn't have witnesses, Brown would spend the scratch to fix it for Jabbo. It would be easy since Blue was found with a shiv in his hand.

“It's too bad about Blue. It's just too bad. Well, Folks, you got a pal to bury. I can't understand how a stud as slick and classy as Blue could marry a skunky tramp like Cleo and then go for the murder-cross.

“Give me a jingle at the poolroom and hip me to the funeral day. I always liked Blue. He was real nice people. It's too bad. It's just too bad.”

Somehow my palsied legs took me back to the Caddie. I drove North on State Street toward central police headquarters. I stopped on the street at Twenty-second Street. I sat there in the car for a long time thinking about my next move. Finally, I went into a greasy spoon and called Fixer.

I blurted, “Blue is dead! Butcher Knife Brown set him up for the cross. But they're not going to get away with it. I know the whole truth about Nino and Brown's H hookup. I know that Brown used Jabbo as the executioner to please his boss, Nino, because of the Frascati score.

“I'm going to Eleventh and State right now to make a statement. Blue never carried a shiv. I'm not a copper-hearted fink. But they croaked the best friend I ever had.

“I can't let Jabbo get cut loose at the inquest. My statement will make Jabbo and Brown stand trial. Fixer, I'm going to send those dirty bastards to the big-top for murder-one. Brown will be shocked
shitless when he runs to you for the fix and you laugh in his face. Brown isn't wise that Blue and I for years have been greasing your mitt with thousands and thousands of dollars. Brown won't be—”

Felix cut in. He said softly, “Folks, you've been rattling off like a sucker. Sure, Blue was all right with me. I knew him since Nineteen Twenty-seven. He was a fine fellow who never welshed on a debt or a loan. But he's gone now, goddamnit! I'll miss him.

“I got a call a few minutes after Blue got shot. The caller asked me to pull strings so that Jabbo and the two chippies could hit the street right away, without bond or anything until the inquest. I couldn't turn down two grand for an easy service like that. So, I made a call and cut them loose.

“Folks, I'm a business man. I'm seventy-two years old. I got to look out for old Felix in this cold cruel world. I can't do business with Blue. He's dead. I got to do business with the living.

“It's a fine angle you've got about making a statement to the rollers. There would be a trial, and Brown and Jabbo would have to crawl to me for the fix. I get no less than ten grand to fix even a nigger murder.

“Don't lose your nerve. Come to my place as soon as you leave the station. You know Nino has you on the hit list already. After you make the statement you'll be hotter than ever. Don't worry, pal. By the time you get out here to me, I'll have figured a hideout for you until the trial. I'll split the ten grand right down the middle with you. I'll lay it in your hand right after—”

I hung up and went to the Caddie. I wept and drove aimlessly through the lonely dawn. I thought, “Blue was smart after all to make that ten grand pre-need arrangement with the funeral home. Cleo would have given him a C-note funeral, if any at all.

I was a hundred miles from Cincinnati, Ohio, when I realized the Caddie was reeking with Cleo's perfume. I looked back at Cleo's clothes piled on the back seat and floor of the car. I pulled over on the shoulder of the highway. I opened the rear door. I threw all of her stinking clothes into a ditch.

I checked into a middle class white hotel in downtown Cincinnati. I ordered a fifth of rum as soon as the last piece of clothing was brought to the room. The next day I went to a florist shop and had them wire a double C-note worth of white roses to the funeral home for Blue's funeral.

In the following eight months I drank hundreds of fifths of rum. I couldn't count the whores that I paid to drink with me and keep me company through the long lonely nights.

I just stayed in the room and tried to chink my sorrow and memories away. In September of Nineteen Sixty, I bought the Chicago Tribune from an out-of-town newspaper stand.

Nino Parelli had gotten too big for his britches. The story in the paper said that his corpse had been found stuffed into the trunk of his car. He had been tortured and stabbed many times with an ice pick.

It was good news. The seventy-five hundred dollars I had brought to Cincinnati with me was gone. I had pawned all of my clothes and Blue's too. I couldn't afford rum anymore. I drank cheap wine by the gallons.

I had no partner to play the con with. So, the day after I read about Nino, I hit the highway for Chicago. I couldn't think of anywhere else to go.

It was midnight when I got back to Chicago. I had a fifth of sherry wine and a lousy deuce in my pocket. I couldn't blow it on a flophouse bed for the night. I'd need to buy a piece of cheap slum to hustle.

I parked the Caddie on a Westside street, and tossed on the back seat until daybreak. Later that morning, I went downtown to State Street, and bought a bridal set of slum mounted in sterling for a buck and a half.

I got a double sawbuck for it two hours later from a sucker standing at a jewelry shop window looking at bridal sets.

I got a hotel room on the far Westside. I never went on Southside Chicago. In the middle of October, Nineteen Sixty, I stepped into the mouth of an alley next to a new Sixty Cadillac to take a leak.

I was leaning against it as I sprayed the wall of a building in front of me. The crazy little bastard owner of the Cadillac rushed off the sidewalk. He cursed me and shoved me away from his car.

I pushed him. He slugged me on the side of the jaw. I knocked him down. He had lots of heart. He got up and tore into me. We were slugging it out when the rollers came. They locked me up in Maxwell Street Station.

He was a big shot who owned a string of bars on the Westside. He showed up in court the next morning with a black eye. He pressed an assault and battery complaint against me.

I was dizzy and sick as hell when the judge said, “. . . or ten days in the House of Correction.”