GERALD W. LILLEY—MAHOMET to his new Twelfth Street friends—walked the five miles from Kercheval to Collingwood. Wilson McCoy had offered him a lift, but he’d said no. It was a nice night after the rain and he wanted the extra time to come down from his high.
Not from drugs. He had given those up in all forms when he read The Autobiography of Malcolm X; impressed with the ethic of the Black Muslims but with no clear idea of how to join formally, he had jettisoned his Christian and family names and adopted a variant spelling of Mohammed. The change was easy because both his parents were dead and his siblings scattered, and he had no friends. The degree from Wayne State University, for which he had washed dishes and bused tables for six years, had cut him off from others of his race. He’d thought of enrolling in divinity school after graduation, but when a distant cousin was lynched in Georgia because he resembled another Negro overheard shouting drunken obscenities at a white woman on the street, he decided that God had abandoned his people. Rising tuition costs and a discouraging academic record in his senior year ended subsequent plans for a career in teaching.
A stint at singing, involving a six-record contract based on an audition at Motown, went the same way when Berry Gordy laid an arm across Mahomet’s shoulders and said, “Man, you can diagram a sentence, but you ain’t got soul.” The records weren’t released.
He let his life slide after that. When jobs he applied for, and for which his education qualified him, went to white men who had barely finished high school, he came to wish that he had never opened the books; they merely promised worlds that were closed to him. About the time he read Malcolm X’s book he learned of Mrs. Rosa Parks, a Negro seamstress who had stood trial in Alabama ten years before for refusing to sit in the back of a bus. Rosa Parks had given up her back seat for one beside Malcolm in Mahomet’s esteem. Although he had lost his faith, he had continued to sing in Baptist choirs as an outlet for his voice and training. But his bitterness at sermons preaching brotherhood and mercy—things plainly denied everyone in the congregation—had begun to boil over in the form of impromptu speeches needled with invective and blasphemy. He was asked to leave. Deprived of that forum, he had carried his anger to restaurants, private clubs, and nightspots where Negroes were tolerated only in the livery of service. Inevitably, he was ejected. Just as inevitably, he had returned, to be beaten and arrested for creating a disturbance. It was a slow, passive form of suicide that would eventually have fulfilled its purpose had not blind luck—he resisted God yet—flung him into a cell opposite Quincy Springfield’s.
When, the day after their brief first acquaintance, a turnkey opened his cell door and told him that Springfield had bailed him out, he’d experienced a lightning revelation of the sort that he had only read of in eighteenth-century British novels: Only your own will look out for you. Nothing he had learned since joining Springfield’s loyal little group had changed that impression. Certainly not Krystal, who had formed the habit early of sharing with Mahomet the cash that Springfield gave her in hopes she might spend some of it in shops that wouldn’t dress her like a Twelfth Street whore.
He had invested some of that money in the suit he was wearing, white linen with a pinched waist and flared trousers, woven so tight it felt like cool silk against his hot skin. Walking along with the jacket flung over his shoulder, he admired his reflection in store windows. The contrast between white vest and pink shirtsleeves and tie made a bold statement that matched the defiance of his verbal message. The fag tailor had tried to sell him a Panama, but he’d refused; hats left ugly ledges in his painstakingly relaxed and brilliantined hair, like laminated porcupine quills. The suit, along with the high-heeled black patent-leather boots he always insisted on regardless of the condition of his finances, added inches to his stature.
The talk had gone well. Wilson McCoy, a firebrand barely out of his teens whom Mahomet distrusted instinctively, had been enthusiastic about the reception and asked him to come back Saturday night when he could promise more than fifteen listeners. Mahomet had said he’d get back to him. Even then he knew he’d accept. He had found his calling.
He scarcely remembered the words he’d used. They were but fuel to get him around from behind the long table that served as a bar after hours while the fifteen in their folding chairs listened at first with skepticism, then swelling anticipation and finally, as he bore down on them, with the rhythmic, junglelike grunts of acquiescence he’d heard so often from congregations in the thrall of the Reverend Otis R. R. Idaho those Sundays when the fever was truly upon him. The words didn’t matter in the end, only the fire and the spirit. He had struck Soul, and the vein was deep, deep. Sex was never as draining nor as satisfying; although he had to admit that most of the sex he had experienced was part of a monetary transaction, and its passion therefore suspect. Women had wanted him, for his looks and his hair and his voice, but that kind of transaction called for a sacrifice after the fact. Once sated, Mahomet’s appetites turned in new directions.
Yes, it was a changing fate that had ushered Quincy Springfield into the life of Gerald W. Lilley, Jr.
A pair of headlights on high beam swung around the corner, blinding him momentarily and shrinking his vitals; the thing with the Sicilians was always a dash of cold water in the face of his good fortune. Despite his fistfights with the Man in all his many incarnations, Mahomet was not physically brave. He felt a warm release when the vehicle, a sport model of some kind on a short wheelbase, sped past. Then its tires shrieked and it reversed directions in a shower of flaming rubber. The door on the driver’s side sprang open. Someone bounded out and seized him by the shoulders.
“Jesus, we been looking for you all over the West Side! You just shufflin’ along, gots all the time in the world.”
The wasted features staring down at him were Lydell Lafayette’s.
“What happened?”
“Quincy got busted is what. Looking for you. The war’s on. We gots to get down to the police department and post bond. How much cash you carrying?”
He pried himself free and picked his jacket up off the sidewalk. He found six dollars in a side pocket. Lydell coughed disgustedly.
“I got about a hunnert. We’ll go up to the place and get what’s in the box. Shake it, brother! That nightside’s hell on niggers.” He was climbing under the wheel.
Mahomet got into the passenger’s side carefully. He’d wet himself when Lydell grabbed him.
The name on the watch desk at 1300 was O’Pronteagh, but the sergeant’s accent was flat Midwestern and he had the patrician features of a Roman senator, all high cheekbones and eagle’s beak and a shock of salt-and-pepper hair on a tall tan forehead. Despite the airlessness of the big room with a single fan humming in a distant corner, his collar was buttoned and his necktie snugged up under an Adam’s apple as big as an eightball.
“Your boy’s being booked downstairs,” he said. “Carrying a concealed weapon. You can visit him in the morning at County.”
Lydell said, “We’re here to post bond.”
“Sorry.”
Lydell took the roll from his pocket and thumped it down on the counter. “They’s a thousand here. That ought to cover it three times and change.”
“Son, are you trying to bribe a police officer?”
“I ain’t your son.”
Mahomet laid a hand on Lydell’s arm. They had begun to attract the attention of the other officers in the room. “Excuse me, Sergeant, but regulations say we can post bond on a misdemeanor.”
O’Pronteagh took in the white suit. “If you’re selling Ajax, where’s your horse and lance?”
One of the uniforms snorted. Mahomet said, “How much is bond?”
“I’m a peace officer, son. It’s not my job to let you people run around with firearms.”
“What you mean, ‘you people’?” Lydell gripped the counter.
The sergeant made an infinitesimal movement of his head. One of the uniforms standing nearby stepped in, grabbed Lydell’s wrist, and jerked it behind his back. His other arm went across Lydell’s throat. The prisoner stopped struggling.
O’Pronteagh handed the roll of bills to another officer behind the counter. “Count it and tag it as evidence. Attempted bribery and resisting arrest.”
“Call Gidgy,” Lydell croaked. “The Morocco Motor Hotel.” His eyes were starting from his head.
Mahomet went to a booth near the door. He was reaching for the receiver when someone pulled him out of the booth. A fist plowed into his stomach. His knees lost tension. Someone caught him before he hit the floor.
“Another resisting.” The sergeant’s voice, far away. “Book them both and make it stick.”
“Jesus fucking Christ. Jesus fucking goddamn Christ.”
The other plainclothesmen in the seventh floor squad room stood around in silence. They had never heard the neat quiet inspector raise his voice before. Now he was standing over a goggle-eyed Sergeant Esther, both hands clenching the sides of the sergeant’s desk to avoid seizing the sergeant’s fat throat.
“It wasn’t me, Inspector. I just found out about it myself.”
“O’Pronteagh and the others just got bored, decided to kill some time with a little nigger-baiting?”
“Not exactly, no.”
“What, exactly?”
Esther took a deep breath and exhaled. Canada smelled stale coffee. “Wasylyk busted Springfield at the stakeout in front of the place on Collingwood; Springfield had a piece. When he came in I told O’Pronteagh to hold him no matter what. I knew you’d want to talk to him. But I never said to rough anybody around.”
“Where are they now?”
“Holding.”
“Kick ’em.”
“Inspector—”
Canada shoved a finger in the sergeant’s face. “Kick them. Give back the money and the gun; it isn’t as if they couldn’t score another one thirty feet from the door. Tell O’Pronteagh if I even see erasures where their names were on the blotter I’ll have him up on charges so fast his shorts will ride up. The whole fucking thing never happened.”
“That might not be so easy, Inspector. There was a reporter downstairs when it happened.”
“News or Free Press?”
“News. It was Conger.”
“That’s a break. They don’t go to press till afternoon. Cut a deal.”
“What kind of deal?”
“Use your imagination. Offer him first look at the final I. A.D. report on Grecian Gardens. That ought to hold him for a couple of months.”
“These aren’t exactly leaders of the Negro community, Inspector. Springfield’s and Lafayette’s priors would fill a drawer and this Mahomet character’s a born troublemaker. I bet he’s the one started it.”
“I don’t give a fuck if he started the New York blackout. Any rookie knows you don’t muss up coloreds on the ground floor of Thirteen Hundred in a hot month like July. Especially not when the Orrs and the Springfields are stalking each other all over town. You want Joe Weaver and a Channel Two camera up here on seven?”
Esther lifted his receiver. “Give me the desk.” He made eye contact with the knot of the inspector’s necktie. “Coopersmith heard back from the FBI.”
“What?” Canada was disoriented.
“Just a second,” Esther said into the mouthpiece. “On that partial thumb the print boys found in that stolen Caddy. DiJesus, you know? I started to tell you when you came in, but—”
“What’d they say?”
“Belongs to somebody named Curtis Dupree, Negro, did a nickel in Jackson for opening up some poor schnook’s skull over a fender-bender on the Lodge. Works at McLouth. He’s a Steelhauler. A.P.B.?”
“Let me.” He went into his office.
After he got off the telephone to Dispatch, Canada took the photograph he had gotten from Susan Niles out of his wallet and stuck it to the center of the bulletin board covered with mug shots. He resisted the temptation to drive the thumbtack grinning between Albert Brock’s eyes.