THEY WENT TO SEE The Greatest Story Ever Told at the Ramona. Krystal thought it was about Cassius Clay.
Afterward, walking down Gratiot, looking for a cab and not-listening to Krystal talking about her late mother’s efforts to help her find Christ, Quincy stuck his hands in his pockets and breathed the brimstone air of a Detroit evening after a summer storm. The gutters were running and automobile headlights cast elliptical reflections in the puddles on the street. As his brain uncoiled from its long confinement, he considered that John Wayne in the armor and sandals of a Roman centurion still looked like John Wayne.
Gidgy Gidrey’s Excalibur glided up alongside them like the Queen Mary on wire wheels. The drug dealer reached across the front seat and cranked down the window on their side. “Man, you tired of living?”
“What’s happenin’?” Quincy leaned on the sill. Gidgy’s dark glasses and darker face looked smoky in the shade of his Panama.
“You ain’t heard?”
“Man, I been in the Holy Land the last three hours. If it ain’t in stereo I ain’t heard nothing.”
“Somebody gone hit DiJesus this morning. I figured it was you.”
“Dead?”
“All’s I know is they shotgunned his car. You just walking around in the open, asking to get took down. Your clothes clean?”
Quincy sometimes had trouble following the train of Gidgy’s conversation. The refrigerated air inside the car was thick with blue smoke, not tobacco. He said his clothes were clean. Krystal spoke up for her tank top and miniskirt. Her lack of underwear spoke up for itself.
“’Kay, hop in. Wipe your feet first.”
They got into the car, Quincy in front next to Gidgy. The seats were suede leather, soft as butter and the same shade of yellow. Gidgy fired a joint off the dashboard lighter, sucked in a lungful, and passed the joint to Quincy. It was better than the stuff he sold; when Quincy handed it to Krystal over the back of the seat, his lips stuck together from the resin. He pried them apart with his tongue. “Who hit DiJesus?” It came out in a wheeze.
“Don’t look at me, blood. I ain’t the gambler in this crowd.” Gidgy accepted the joint from Krystal and wheeled out into traffic. “When Lafayette said it wasn’t you, I figured Sebastian Bright, but he was with Joe Petite’s old lady all day. Offering his condolences, I expect.”
“Where is everybody?”
“My dump. That’s where we’re headed. We didn’t think it was smart to meet at your place.”
“Who’s we?”
“Besides you and me there’s Sebastian and Lafayette and Beatrice Blackwood and her pet Zulu and them wrasslers. Lafayette called them when he couldn’t get hold of you. You should’ve told him which movie you was going to see. I been to just about every theater in town.”
“What about Mahomet?” Quincy declined another hit. He was getting a contact high from the smoke in the car. It slowed his heartbeat and ordered his thoughts.
Gidgy steered with his wrists while he pinched out the joint and laid it in state in the ashtray. “Out speaking someplace, Lafayette said. Who you think done it if it wasn’t us?”
“What kind of speaking?”
“Ask Lafayette. I ain’t nobody’s answering service. Maybe cops done it.”
“Not with shotguns in broad daylight. See is anything on the radio.”
Gidgy turned it on and ran the dial up and down AM and FM. He got a collage of rock, hillbilly, and classical and a stock market report. He turned it off. “There’s a TV at my dump. We’ll catch the eleven o’clock.”
“Where’d you hear about it?”
“The six o’clock. They didn’t know no more than what I told you.”
Krystal said, in a voice blurred with muggles, “Krystal’s got to pee.”
“Wait till we get to Gidgy’s.”
Gidgy swung into a Shell station and set the brake in front of the rest rooms. “It ain’t your upholstery.”
Krystal came back after a few minutes and they drove the rest of the way to the Morocco Motor Hotel on Euclid, in which Gidgy owned a half interest. The other half belonged to nobody knew who and Gidgy wasn’t saying, although rumor said it was a Detroit policeman whose name was expected to appear sooner or later in one of the little black books still under scrutiny from the Grecian Gardens raid. A white frame two-story building with green shingles and shutters to match, it looked better than its reputation: During one week the previous April, five arrests had been made on the eleven-room premises on charges ranging from prostitution to narcotics violations and the sale of unregistered firearms. The fact that Gidgy had been in Florida that week had seemed to confirm the suspicions about his silent partner’s occupation.
In the garage, the drug dealer paused to cover the ostentatious vehicle with a custom-made tarp with Quincy’s help and the three entered the motel through a covered walkway. Gidgy rapped twice on the door marked manager, paused, and rapped once more. When it opened, Kindu Kinshasha wedged his bulk draped in the inevitable dashiki into the two-foot space. His big broken-knuckled fist was wrapped around a revolver with a large bore.
“Open says me,” Gidgy said.
The ex-fighter identified Quincy and Krystal and opened the door the rest of the way. The office was actually a small living room furnished out of a rummage sale, with a closet-size kitchenette opening off to the right and gauchos poster-painted on black velour on the walls. The room was full of smoke, some of it tobacco, and people.
Lydell seized one of Quincy’s arms in both hands and coughed. He coughed all the time lately, and in those new surroundings Quincy noticed that he’d lost weight. His gray vest hung in pleats and his wrists rattled in his shirtcuffs. A cigarette smoldered in the jade holder between the first two fingers of his right hand. “Man, I thought you was feeding the alley cats by now. Where you been?” His eyes lacked focus.
“Anything new?” Quincy glanced at the screen of a color console television set, the most expensive thing in the room. Dr. Richard Kimble was running down a long corridor pursued by cops, without a sound.
“News’ll be on in a little. Man, I thought—”
“What’s this about Mahomet speaking?”
“Wilson McCoy axed him to give a talk at his place on Kercheval. Man—”
“That hotheaded son of a bitch? Why’d you let him go?” McCoy, a former Black Panther, was self-appointed head of the Black Afro-American Congress—BLAC, in the papers—headquartered in a private home on Kercheval that had been raided in the past as a blind pig. McCoy’s temper had threatened to escalate the routine arrests into something else.
“I look like his mama? Anyways, that was before we got word. Who done it, you think?”
“Since when’s Mahomet make speeches?”
“Oh, that shit he fed Joe Petite at Congo’s wake got around. Gidgy says he can get us all the guns we need.”
“Handguns with a history, all name brands, hunnert apiece. Three hunnert you don’t want them traced. Automatic weapons a thousand a pop.” Gidgy took off his Panama and hung it up, exposing a head of carroty hair that compromised the solemn dark wood-sculpture of his face; hence the hat. “I got a dude in Chicago’s been after me for months to trade him coke for guns. I tell him, ‘What I want with guns? I get along with everybody.’ ‘You never know,’ he says.”
“White dude?” Sebastian Bright had joined them. Quincy might not have recognized him except for his shiny bald head. The gold-toothed grin that had won him his name was nowhere in evidence. He and Joe Petite had been tight.
Gidgy spread his hands. “Color don’t figure. Man likes to throw snort parties, impress his friends with his big-deal connections. Who cares what color he is if his guns shoot?”
“Means he’s white. Maybe his guns don’t shoot. Maybe they blow up in our face.”
“This ain’t no race war.”
“It ain’t Ethiopians we’re fighting.”
“We ain’t fighting nobody,” Quincy said. “Not yet. We don’t even know for sure what happened. Dude like DiJesus has got more enemies than brains. Maybe one of his own done him.”
“Or maybe it was one of us.”
They turned in a body toward Beatrice Blackwood, perched on the couch with her ankles crossed and a glass of amber liquid in her hand. She was wearing a white blouse with a lace yoke and a full black skirt. She cropped her hair close to the scalp, accentuating the Egyptian cast of her Jamaican features.
“Anybody can buy a shotgun,” she went on. “He wouldn’t even have to tell anyone about it.”
“Not much percentage in a one-man war,” Quincy said.
She sipped her drink. “Maybe he didn’t think it would stay just one man.”
“You saying somebody done it just to start the ball?” Quincy was looking at Sebastian.
After a long moment the gold tooth broke cover. Sebastian shook his head. “I got no stomach for that. Never did.”
“Don’t take no stomach to hire help.” Gidgy had taken a seat next to Beatrice on the couch and poured a quarter-teaspoon of white powder out of an envelope onto the scratched glass top of the coffee table. From an inside breast pocket he produced a straight razor with a mother-of-pearl handle and proceeded to divide and sub-divide the powder into a series of thin lines.
Sebastian said, “It weren’t me.”
“’Course not.” Lydell coughed. “Everybody knows Sebastian never spends his own money on nothing. I heard a lady bought him that tooth.”
“One sweet lady. She went and married a repo man.” The bald man was sanguine.
Beatrice said, “Sebastian wasn’t the one that invited us to the wake.”
“I was to go after DiJesus I’d of done it after he hit my place,” Quincy said. “I only knew Joe to talk to. I sure wouldn’t of killed for him.”
“There’s the news.” Lydell turned up the volume on the set. At that moment James Brown started wailing “I Feel Good” in the room next door. Gidgy hammered on the wall with his fist until someone turned down the music. On the TV screen, a GI in combat fatigues winked as he walked past the camera carrying an M-16 with a flower stuck in the muzzle.
Gidgy used a silver straw to ingest a line of powder into his left nostril. He sat back and let an uncharacteristic grin blossom over the lower half of his face, displaying the yellowest teeth Quincy had ever seen. “Don’t nobody else want a toot?” he asked.
Beatrice shushed him. The flower-carrying soldier had given way to a tight shot of a jagged hole in the rear window of a parked automobile. The camera prowled the length of the car, lingering on a spray of oval holes in the sheet metal on the driver’s side. “… at the intersection of Cadieux and Mack Avenue,” thundered the voiceover. “The driver, identified as Harold DiJesus, thirty-one, a resident of Nevada, reportedly emerged unscathed and was released from custody after questioning. Police declined to speculate on the motive for the attack, but did not rule out the possibility that drugs were involved. In a related story, Detroit Police Commissioner Ray Girardin today announced the adoption of a plan to protect citizens and private property in the event of a civil disturbance …”
Lydell turned off the set just as Girardin’s basset-hound visage appeared. “If they get the guy they better not count on a confession,” he said. “Ain’t nobody going to admit he missed twice’t at that range with a fucking splattergun.”
Quincy found a bottle of Vernor’s in the kitchenette and poured it into his sour stomach. “Least we know who’s going to be coming at us.” He belched.
“Won’t be DiJesus,” said Sebastian. “Cops’ll be on him like flies on a pig’s asshole. For a while anyways.”
Krystal leaned over Beatrice. “I just love your blouse.”
The telephone rang. Lydell picked it up. “That’s probably Mahomet. I sent them wrestlers to fetch him back here.”
“We still don’t know who did it.” Beatrice ignored Krystal.
“That don’t matter no more.” Gidgy was coming down. “We want them guns or not?”
Lydell hung up the receiver. “Shiiit. That was Mighty Joe Young.” Quincy gave him a stupid look. “The wrestler, you know. The meeting was over when they got there. They missed Mahomet.”
Quincy said, “He’ll head for our place. DiJesus might have somebody there. You bring the Sting Ray?”
“It’s parked out back.” A fit of coughing bent him double.
“Throw me the keys. You can’t even walk.”
“I can shoot.” Wheezing, Lydell handed Quincy the ring. “I got my Bulldog.”
Krystal rose. She had Gidgy’s straw in her hand. “I’ll go too.”
“It only seats two.” Quincy watched as she dropped back down and raised the straw. “Go easy on that shit. I don’t want to scrape you off the ceiling when we get back.”
He drove the Corvette flat-out. The moisture in the air beaded up on the windshield and made crooked tracks toward the frame.
Lydell held his hat and looked back. “You just busted a red.”
Quincy said nothing. He down-shifted for a curve, then banged the stick back up into fourth. The engine harrumphed and whined. Traffic was sparse.
“Man, I hope you drives like this for me when my time comes.”
“Everybody I hang around with needs to be took care of,” Quincy said. “I should start a mission.”
“That’s what you been running right along, brother. You just serves liquor instead of soup and sells numbers instead of Bingo. You the Saint fucking Francis of Twelfth Street.”
Collingwood was quiet at that hour. A light burned behind the window of the Jiffee Coin Laundromat & Custom Laundry to discourage burglars, illuminating starkly the rows of washers and dryers inside, like white marble slabs in a mortuary. Only two cars were parked in the block. One, a stove-in Ford Fairlane with two flat tires and a square of clear plastic taped over a missing window, had been there for three weeks and sported a police tow sticker on the windshield. The other, snugged against the curb across from the laundromat, was a new black Plymouth Fury. Someone was seated behind the wheel.
“Don’t look till we get past.” Quincy kept his eyes on the street ahead.
At the corner, Lydell lit a cigarette. His hand shook. “All’s I know is he’s white.”
“We’ll go around the block, see can we spot Mahomet.”
“Maybe he went up already.”
“Maybe. I don’t see no lights.”
They turned down Twelfth, doubled back on Calvert, and parked on Fourteenth near the corner. From there they could see the Fury. A couple with their arms around each other walked past them swinging white cardboard cartons bound with string, trailing the sweet-sharp aroma of ribs in barbecue sauce.
“Think Mahomet’s up there?”
“One way to find out.” Quincy opened his door. “Give me your piece.”
“What you fixing to do with it?”
“That ain’t up to me.” He held out his hand. Lydell laid the Bulldog in it. It felt cool and heavy. Quincy got out and put it in the side pocket of his linen jacket, leaving his hand on it. He leaned his hip against the door until the latch caught. “If anything moves, blow the horn.”
“Okay if I wets my pants first?” Lydell’s grin flickered and went away.
Quincy tried to walk normally, but the weight of the revolver threw off his rhythm. He turned the corner onto Collingwood opposite the parked car and tried not to look in that direction, tried not to look like he was trying not to look; so of course he looked. From that angle the interior was full of shadows. He kept walking toward the door that led upstairs to the blind pig. His footsteps clapped back at him as if he were walking down an empty corridor. He thought of Dr. Kimble. He turned to grasp the door handle.
The Sting Ray’s horn honked.
He heard the creak of the car door opening, a new set of footsteps shuffling on asphalt. He drew the Bulldog out of his pocket and turned toward the street. A man was standing in the middle with his feet spread and a gun extended in both hands.
“Police!” shouted the man. “Drop it!”