Dark Stain (11 page)

“Was this Negro alone?”

“Yeh.”

“Did you see anything out of the ordinary before he showed up?”

“I don’t get you.”

“Was there any sign that you were going to have trouble before he showed up?”

“No.”

“Have your customers been talking much about Randolph? Or the meeting or about the different leaflets?”

Mr. Carlucci looked up at the ceiling as if to say: That’s all they do talk about. “I’m neutral,” he declared. “I know from nothin’. I mind my own business. When some guy grouches heavy maybe I say it’s too bad the nut got himself bumped, only I don’t say nut to them. They’re awful touchy, the colored. They’re like the Jews. One for all and all for one.” He leaned his head on both elbows and muttered. “I been here, you wouldn’t believe it, eighteen years and I can tell that feelin’.”

“What kind of a feeling?”

“Mister, ever hear of a riot? Get twenty more like that big bastard who come in here and you get yourself a riot. Think he listened when I tell’m I can’t hire a colored man. What’ll I do with the nephew? Five kids and a wife. But that big bastard keeps on hollerin’ until the customers walk out except two guys and one of ‘em tells me to call the Harlem Equalities so I done it.”

“Thanks for the information, Mr. Carlucci.”

“Okay. Have a drink on the house.”

In the next two hours, he spoke to a whole series of proprietors. Only a few wouldn’t talk to him. Mostly, they had a this-is-what-happened attitude. It was after eight o’clock before he took the downtown subway. Hanging on a strap, he asked himself what he had found out? The corpus delicti, he answered himself wearily. The good old corpus delicti, the body of the crime, only there was no body. He had a collection of miscellaneous facts about as valuable as his Kalb-Manders-Congressman Patton-Rodney facts; he was a great detective and he’d be an encyclopedia of useless information before he wound up.

The subway thundered into Seventy-Second Street station, into yellow light and new passengers entering between the rubber-edged doors that slid back into metal like blades into their sheaths. He had accomplished nothing the whole long day. Those bars now? The motive had been to pull Negroes out of the Italian bars. He could have stayed in Clair’s office and been as well off. The time? From one p.m. right into the evening. Number of bars? More than the eleven Clair had known of. Several of the proprietors had mentioned other Italian bars not on Clair’s list. Twenty-five bars, approximately. But this wasn’t another Monday in another week. It was the Monday after mass meeting. Sam’s head felt hot as if he were on the verge of a cold. All the facts, half-facts, prejudices and curses he had heard from bar owners and bartenders tumbled inside his brain. All of them had agreed that the hit-run Negroes were big men. Estimated heights went from five feet ten to over six feet. To Sam, this detail, better than anything else, illustrated white Harlem’s pulse beat. From his experience as a policeman, he knew that people reporting the height of a burglar or a mugger usually exaggerated by five inches; five inches added on by the ruler of intense emotion. That was a fact, important not as court evidence, but as a searchlight playing upon the witnesses themselves. Perhaps, the whole city would react in the same way when the story broke in the morning papers.

One other detail had also barbed itself into his consciousness. After his interview with Mr. Carlucci, he had begun asking the others whether any out-of-the-ordinary acts had been committed by the hit-runners. It was a question derived from his professional knowledge of criminals and what a police interrogation should consist of; often malefactors would eat, drink, smoke or commit other acts at the scene of a crime which might serve as guideposts to their identities. The proprietor of the Four Flags Bar and Grill had shown Sam a crumpled leaflet that had been thrown into his face. It was the leaflet put out by the All-Negro Harlem Committee. Was it a plant? Why hadn’t the other leaflets been thrown? Why just this one? Who, anyway, was behind all these “big Negroes”? And how could they be apprehended? There was no evidence to speak of. There had been no arrests as far as he knew. Sam stared at the pale reflection of himself in the rattling subway glass. Suppose the All-Negro Harlem Committee were secretly behind the anti-Italian agitation? How did he know they weren’t? Maybe, that was why Clair had been so reluctant about having him work for the Harlem Equality League?

Sam pushed through the turnstile at Times Square. He hurried through the electric underground of stores situated near the tracks, the drinking places, shooting galleries, gardenia stands, all a little macabre like a living waxworks in the glaring light. He climbed to the street level. The red and blue neons of Grant’s Bar glowed softly in the twilight, and among other people waiting for sweethearts and husbands, he saw Suzy and Johnny. They weren’t together and Sam realized they had never met; they didn’t know each other. He waved his hand, darted through the crosstown automobiles as if he were playing football again. “Suzy, hello.” He grabbed her hand and half-pulled, half-guided her over to where Johnny was standing. “Hello, Johnny. This is my girl, Suzy.” Hungry people with eyes fascinated by Grant’s hot dogs charged like horses after a day’s work between Sam and Suzy and Johnny. From the doors, a smell of pickles, mustard, weenies and beer rolled out.

“This is Johnny, Suzy,” Sam was saying. “I forgot you two were strangers. Boy, I’ve got lapses of memory these days. I’ll make some detective.”

Suzy smiled. “Glad to meet you, Johnny.”

“Same here.” Johnny had a folded evening newspaper under his arm.

Suzy took Sam’s hand. “What a lug you are. I don’t know about your friend but I’ve been here since eight. Eight sharp!”

“Did you eat?” Sam asked her.

“Not too much. My appetite’s weak when I eat without you, dear.”

“How about it, Johnny?” Sam said. “I’m starved.” Johnny nodded and the three of them swung inside. Sam stared at the huge counter with its rows and rows of sizzling hot dogs. “Just look at ‘em.”

“Why were you so late?” Suzy said.

“There’s a time and a place,” Sam said, trying to catch the eye of the girl in charge of the counter. Suzy poked her elbow into his ribs and he twisted his head sideways, smiling down at her tilted chin. “Why, it’s you.”

The neon light polished her light brown hair so that she almost seemed blond. A round black hat like an inflated beret was on her head and she was wearing a black dress with a red block S stitched under her right shoulder. She placed one finger on the S. “A new dress and with your initial.”

He laughed as the girl behind the counter took his order and slapped three hot dogs on a plate. He paid the girl fifteen cents and said to Suzy, “My initial’s M.”

“M as in mutt,” Suzy said. The girl behind the counter stared at Suzy dispassionately; at Grant’s Bar you heard all kinds popping off all day long. Sam noticed that stare as the three of them squeezed over to the mustard pot. He was glad they had come to Grant’s, to this subway rush of gulping eaters. The interior stretched before him busy as Grand Central Station. There were hot meat stands on both ends, chefs in white hats perched high above the clamoring customers. Everywhere men were standing about, nickel beers in their hands, sucking up clams at the seafood bar, leaning on the brass rail. Near Sam, a woman with an elegant marcel was chewing away on a red pepper. High school kids, clerks, soldiers, sailors were gobbling up french fries, hamburgers, roast beef sandwiches. A continuous flow of eaters surrounded the tables set like islands in the middle of the floor. “Know why I picked this place?” he asked Suzy.

“Why?”

“I can’t hear your wisecracks above the noise.”

“Did you resign?”

“No. But I’m working with Clair.”

Johnny wiped a mustard stain from his lips with his handkerchief, his eyes meeting Sam’s. “I’m glad to hear that. How about another hot dog?”

“Not for me,” Suzy said. “Got to watch my complexion. My boss is particular.” As Johnny left them to get the franks, Sam pinched her cheek.

“Well, old spitfire, I’m glad to see you.”

“Without the hands, caveman, especially when you’ve got them covered with mustard.”

“I have not.”

“Anyway, don’t be so glad to see me.”

“Why not?”

“I haven’t heard what you’ve been up to.”

“The Deputy Inspector!”

“Does Johnny always look so sad and quiet?”

“I didn’t notice — ”

“Sh. Here he comes.”

With the second round of hot dogs they each had a beer, and then Sam and Johnny had a second beer while Suzy puffed on a cigarette and read off the whiskey specials listed behind the bar. When they pushed out to Forty-Second Street and over to Broadway, the avenue once as vivid as fireworks, was dimmed out; the huge Wrigley swimming fish neon and the liquor signs dead for the duration. It depressed Sam a little, this living darkness of dancehall girls, side-street Broadwayites walking off their dinners, movie fans, New Jerseyites, stenos, out of towners, tourists from the outlying boroughs of the Bronx and Brooklyn. Boys in khaki, Australian pilots, Canadian soldiers. De Gaullists, Russian merchant marine men would loom up as if washed onto the beach of the dark avenue from all the oceans and continents. He peered at the fighting men and wondered if any of those soldiers and sailors had noticed Suzy with her arm through Johnny’s as well as through his own. He was disgusted with his own self-consciousness. Those men in uniforms had come from all the lands; they had fought in the Coral Seas, in the Solomon Islands, in the Libyan desert, in the mountains of the Caucausus, in the Norwegian fjords and in the vast fjord of air over all the cities. They were something and he was definitely a lug, as Suzy called him. He thought that maybe he would be better off in the armed forces. Maybe if he met the enemy head on with bayonet and bullet that would strip him of his stupid ideas? He felt that he had spent the whole day in a cave blacker than any dim-out, searching for a light that wasn’t there.

He circled his arm around Suzy’s waist, sighing. “Just to keep you from being knocked away.”

“What about Clair?” she said.

“I saw him. I saw Deputy Inspector Coombs — ” And as they inched north past the Paramount Building, the Concord Book Shop with its 49
¢
fiction specials, the Astor with its women on all the stone stairs, he told them briefly whom he had seen, Hal Clair, Deputy Inspector Coombs, the secretaries of the anti-fascist groups who had shown him their collections of fascist literature, the Italian bar owners. “None of it much,” he concluded. “As for Clair,” he said challengingly, “He’s a great newspaper clipper. He ought to be teaching and not be the head of the Harlem Equality League.”

“You’ve only met him once,” Suzy reminded him.

“I’ve got a hunch on my first impressions — ”

“Miller, the clairvoyant,” she said.

“Clair looks like a white man but I don’t feel that he’s a colored man,” Sam said. “And that secretary of his, Marian Burrow! She’s got the looks of a chorine. Johnny, do you know anything about her?”

“No, Sam.”

“That set-up’s cockeyed somewheres. Now you two know how I feel anyway. No use keeping it to myself. I thought Clair’d be glad to have me but is he suspicious!”

“You’re still a cop to him,” Johnny said. “A cop on a leave of absence. But Sam, you know — Every time a man starts something new, he don’t feel right. He isn’t used to it. He’s worried — ”

“I’m worried, too,” Suzy said suddenly. “I’m worried about you, Sam.”

“Nothing to worry about.”

“There’s plenty to worry about,” Johnny said. “You’re a marked man. No use pussyfooting. Even Butch said I ought to tell you to be careful — ”

Sam gritted his jaws. That was all Suzy needed to make his life miserable, this dumb broadcast. “Get an earful, Suzy.”

“Some of your ideas about women,” Suzy retorted, “go back to I don’t know when. I’ve got a right to know everything. And you’ve got to be careful.”

“Maybe one of those guys in the Italian bars is following me right now,” he teased her. “He could stab me and get lost in the crowd. The perfect murder.”

“Funny man. Sam, you’re going to be in Harlem for the next week or so?”

“What if I am?”

“Listen to his nasty tone,” Suzy said. “But you can’t scare me off, Sam.”

“That leaflet Sunday,” Johnny said, “just about begs somebody to wipe you out. And when the Negro papers come out this Thursday — ”

Suzy said determinedly. “Sam, you need me to keep an eye on you.”

Sam howled. “If you haven’t a sweet opinion of yourself.”

“I need a leave of absence myself,” Suzy said. “That’s just what I need. Tomorrow, I’m going to tell Mr. Hunter that I have to go away and take care of my grandma.”

He gaped at her. “You’re not serious?”

“Sure I’m serious.”

“And then what?” he demanded.

Innocently she repeated. “Then what? Why nothing, dear. I’ll see Mr. Clair and volunteer to help in the office while you’re there.”

“What!”

“Don’t bellow, Sammy. We can all hear you.”

“What do you intend to do?” he said.

“I’ve told you. I could type your notes or Clair’s notes and keep in touch — ”

“Who do you think you are, my watchdog, Suzy?”

“Don’t become insulting, Sammy.”

“Suzy, you’re balmy. That office isn’t keen on me! And you — ”

She patted him on the cheek. “If you’re going to be in Harlem so am I.”

“You can’t. I won’t have it.”

“No?”

“Johnny!” Sam exclaimed. “Maybe you can convince her she isn’t sensible.”

Johnny smiled, shaking his head as if to say: It’s between you two; then he said. “What’s sensible, anyway, Sam? You need all the help and all the friends you got. Isn’t that sensible?”

Sam glared at Suzy. He tightened his arm around her waist, lifted her off her feet.

“Let me down,” she buzzed at him. “Let me down. What’s that? An outlet for your emotions? Let me down.”

“I’ll let you down but do me a favor and not speak for awhile.”

Johnny laughed. “You sound like married folks. Sam, this Thursday, the day the Negro papers come out, Butch and me make our report to the union. We was wondering if you would like to speak to the boys?”