Cheever’s office was on West 111th Street, the edge of Harlem. Monday morning I took the subway uptown.
I got off at 110th Street, the northwest tip of Central Park, and walked north into the ghetto. I wore my raincoat over my suit, bulky enough so Smitty’s gun made no bulge under my belt. It was daytime, so no one looked at me twice.
The building was eight stories tall. A large record store chromed the first floor. The rest of the building, ancient brick and dusty windows, stuck up out of all that chrome and glass and gaiety like a wart.
The door I wanted was off to the left, stuck under the record store’s armpit. I went up narrow-canted stairs for three flights, each time looking up toward a bare twenty-five watt bulb.
William Cheever’s name was fourth of four on the frosted glass panel of the door. It wasn’t a law firm, it was one of those set-ups where a number of unsuccessful professional men get together to share the rent and the receptionist and the futility.
The receptionist was as light as a Negro can be and still have Negroid features. She had relentlessly straightened her hair and then recurled it in neo-Grecian twists. She wore a high-necked and lace-fringed blouse designed for the bustless girls of midtown, and she was far too ample for it. Looking at her dressed in it, the first word that came to mind was “unsanforized.”
She smiled at me and closed a slim volume of Langston Hughes, one finger marking the place. “May I help you?” Her accent was softly British, so she was probably Jamaican.
“William Cheever,” I said. I hoped the attorneys at least had separate offices.
“He isn’t in this morning.”
“Oh.” I frowned as worriedly as I could. “I wanted to get in touch with him. As soon as possible. Would you have any idea when he’d be back?”
“Mister Cheever? Oh, no. He very seldom comes to the office.” She withdrew the finger from the Langston Hughes book. “In fact, to tell you the honest truth, I sometimes wonder why he has an office here at all.”
“Doesn’t he meet his clients here?”
“Not so’s you’d notice it.” She’d been dying to talk about Cheever for days, maybe weeks. “The only clients of Mr. Cheever’s that I’ve ever seen,” she said archly, “are those gamblers and bookmakers and numbers sellers that he sends here for Mr. Partridge to represent.” She leaned confidentially forward, her bosom bracketing Langston Hughes. “Personally, I think Mr. Cheever is using Mr. Partridge, giving him business like that. I think it can do terrible harm to Mr. Partridge’s reputation as a courtroom lawyer if he becomes linked in the public mind with hoodlums and gamblers.”
I smiled at her earnestness and the well-memorized sentence, phrased and rephrased in countless imaginary dialogues. “Once you marry Mr. Partridge,” I told her, “you’ll be able to overcome Mr. Cheever’s influence, I’m sure.”
She blushed. She was light enough to do it beautifully. Her fingers fussed with the papers on her desk.
I was sorry to embarrass her, she was a pleasant girl. But she would sooner answer my question if distracted. I said, “Could you give me Mr. Cheever’s home address? I do have to talk to him today.”
“Yes, of course!” She was overwhelmingly grateful at something else to think about. She scooped up a small notebook and leafed through it. I borrowed pencil and paper and copied down the address. It was only a few blocks away, on 110th Street, a building facing the park on the north side.
It was a sprawling old stone apartment building, dating back to Harlem’s days of eminence, when all four sides of the park were limited to the white well-to-do. It had fallen since. Plaster peeled in the huge foyer. The same drab obscenity was scratched seven times in the elevator walls. The eighth floor corridor was marred by bubbled, cracked, dry and eroded paint crumbling from the walls. I went through a gray door marked service E-H. I was in a small pentagonal gray room. Bags of rubbish leaned against the walls. The concrete floor was a darker gray. The four doors curving around me in Cinemascope each had a letter scrawled on it in white paint, far less professionally than on the front apartment entrances out along the corridor.
The door marked G was locked. I stopped when I realized how relieved that made me.
I had killed one man without meaning to. I had killed another man in the midst of rapid action, without having a chance to think about it. I had no idea whether I could kill a man coldly and intentionally.
What if I couldn’t? To talk of revenge is one thing, but what if I couldn’t do it?
I forced into my mind my last picture of Dad, dying in terror, spewing blood. I thought of Bill, and the wife I hadn’t met. I remembered how I had looked in the full-length mirror at Lake George. I felt the dead seed in my head where a small glass football could not replace an eye. I looked at the jagged hole that had been clawed into my life.
But it did no good. I didn’t hate Cheever. I didn’t hate any of them. I felt a sad lonely pity for myself, and that was all.
Wasted, it was all wasted. I was frail and ineffectual, I’d come all this way for nothing.
I leaned back against the entrance door and slid down it till I was sitting on the floor, knees high before my chest, raincoat bunched around my hips. I crossed my forearms on my knees and rested my brow on my arms. Weak, and wasted, and meaningless. Lost, and broken, and impotent.
Until I got mad, at myself. I raised my head and glowered at the white-painted G and whispered stupid insults at myself in idiotic fury. And then after a while that dulled too, and I just sat there, legs stretched out now, and looked at the bags of rubbish, and let my head do whatever it wanted.
I sat there about two hours. When I got up my back was stiff, but I had my role straightened out. I had jerrybuilt a justification for my existence. I was a weak and unworthy vessel, but I would take the life from William Cheever and the other one. If I had been strong and capable, I could kill them out of a cold fury, a dispassionate rage. Instead, I would kill them cheaply, I would kill them only because that was what I was supposed to do.
Back doors get cheap locks. A nail file between door and jamb worked as well as a key in the lock. I pushed the door open silently, and entered the kitchen. Some rooms ahead, I could hear the murmur of talking.
I went left through an empty bedroom. The door was closed, but didn’t set snug. Through the crack, I saw him in the living room, talking on the phone. I could only see a narrow strip of the room, so I couldn’t tell if he were alone.
He was abusing the receptionist for having given away the secret of his address. His face was naked and jagged and gray. I was glad he was afraid of me.
It hurt him that he couldn’t let the girl know just how strongly he was upset. He was having trouble restraining himself, keeping his voice down. He was making do as best he could with heavy sarcasm and cruel caricature of her accent. At last he said, “No, he hasn’t come here. How long ago was he there?—It’s over two hours. You should have called me, sweetheart, and not wait around till I called you.—Honey, none of my clients are ofay, you know that. When was the last time you saw a white man in that office? Oh, the hell, why waste time talking to you? Besides, it’s time for you and Benny Partridge to have lunch together on his sofa, isn’t it?—What do you suppose I mean, dumplin’?”
He listened a few seconds more, then slammed the receiver down and glared desperately around the room. The way his eyes moved, I could tell he was alone. I reached in under the raincoat and jacket and dragged out Smitty’s gun.
Cheever reached for the phone again. He dialed jerkily. I counted ten numbers, so he was calling someone out of town. He told the operator his number, and then he waited, fumbling a Viceroy out of the pack one-handed. All at once he dropped the pack and said quickly into the phone, “Let me talk to Ed. Willy Cheever.—Yeah, sure, I’ll hold on.”
He managed to get the cigarette out and lit before he had to talk again. Then he said, “Ed? Willy Cheever. Somebody came around to my office this morning, asking for me.—Well, the thing is, the stupid girl at the office gave him my address.—I’m home now. I want to come up, Ed. If I could stay at the farm just a couple days—Just a couple days, Ed, until—Ed, for God’s sake, she told him where I live!—There isn’t anyplace else.—Ed, I’ve never asked you for any special favor before. I—Ed! Ed!”
He jiggled the receiver and I stepped into the living room and said, “He hung up on you, Willy.”
His head swiveled around and he stared at me. He didn’t move. I had Smitty’s gun in my right hand. I went over and took the phone out of his hand and cradled it. Then I backed off from him and said, “You better pick up your cigarette. It’s burning the rug.”
He picked it up, moving like a robot, and put it in the ashtray beside the phone. It smoldered there, and he stared at the gun.
I said, “Ganolese threw you away. He’s got too much to worry about, and you’re just a cheap Harlem shyster. He can replace you with a nod of his head.”
“No.” The word jolted out of him. His hands started to twitch together in his lap. “Ed listens to me. Ed respects my advice.”
“He threw you away.”
“Oh, God!” His hands snapped up and covered his face.
I crossed the room and sat down opposite him and waited for him to finish. When he finally took his hands down, his eyes were red and puffed, his flat cheeks gleamed wet. The little mustache was only silly, like a little girl wearing her mother’s shoes. He said, “He called me boy. Like the kid who shines his shoes.”
“Eddie Kapp is taking over,” I said. “Ganolese doesn’t have time for shoe-shine boys. Not even if they went to college.”
“He’s a son of a bitch. Goddamn him, I treated him right.”
“Drive me up there. I’ll put in a good word for you with Eddie Kapp.”
He stared at me a second, than shook his head. “Not a chance. Not a chance.”
“Ganolese is losing. If he was winning, he’d have the time to kid you along like always.”
“Oh, damn!” His eyes squeezed shut and he pounded the chair arms with clenched fists. “I never tommed!” he cried. “I never sucked! He treated me like a white man, he never made me play the color!”
“That was when he needed you.” I got to my feet. “Take me up there.”
He was calming again. He brooded at the wall. “He shouldn’t have hung up on me,” he whispered. “He shouldn’t have called me boy. He’s a slick wop, he’s nothing but.”
“Come along,” I said.
He looked at me, and started to calculate. “You’ll put in a good word for me with Kapp?”
It was easy to lie to him. “I will,” I said. “You’ve got no reason not to trust me.”
“All right,” he said. And bought himself an hour or two more of life.