Do or Die Page 5

  There was plenty of excitement and I turned and left him standing in it.

  Outside, the Asian couple had moved on and my favorite spot was once again available but my mood had changed. I neither saw nor cared what the moon looked like now. I walked along the port side until the mist bathing my skin cooled me enough to think rationally. Then I went down to the number-two deck to the purser’s office near the midship’s lobby to get Chrissie’s phone number. That girl and I needed to talk, and fast.

  When I dialed, there was no answer. I’d catch up with her eventually, probably at breakfast tomorrow morning.

  I needed to go back to the cabin and shower and get ready for Dad’s show. And also to turn off the scene playing hardball in my head. I slipped the key in the lock and Tad was inside, slouched in the chair, his long legs stretched nearly to the bed and his head resting against the wall.

  I closed the door behind me and leaned against it, waiting, although I didn’t exactly know what I was waiting for.

  Finally, he rose and stepped toward me. “Look, baby, I’m sorry. I—”

  “You have nothing to be sorry about,” I said. “I intend to have a talk with her and that should—”

  “Mali, please. I know your temper. When you get angry …”

  I was against the door and there was nowhere to move. He was crowding me and I needed space. Space to think. But that didn’t happen. His hands were on my shoulders and sliding down to my waist, then up again to the small of my back. And his voice was softer than usual.

  “Mali, baby. Don’t do this. This trip was supposed to be something special for us. Don’t. Don’t. I love you. We’ve been through too much, baby. I love you.”

  I rested my head on his shoulder and we made our way in small steps toward the bed and sat on the edge. “I’m not really angry with you,” I said. “I’m upset with Chrissie. She’s on you like a bee on honey and doesn’t care who knows it. I have to talk to her. I don’t like it and I intend to let her know.”

  “Can’t it wait?”

  “For what?”

  “For this,” he whispered, easing the zipper down the back of my dress and taking it off, then fingering the hooks in my bra. “Can’t it wait, baby?”

  “I don’t know,” I whispered. “Convince me. Try real hard.”

  And that was the real deal. Now I was standing here listening to Miss Viv spin this fantasy.

  She glanced at me, saw my expression, and quickly added, “Of course I know Chrissie can stretch stuff. Ain’t no shame to her game. But she ain’t mentioned the problem she havin’ tryin’ to keep her own man in check.”

  “Really?” I managed to say.

  “That’s right. Travis had a thing for that girl that just got killed. That Starr Hendrix.”

  Now I was really interested. “You don’t say.”

  “Yep. Miss Chrissie never mentioned that, as long as she been comin’ here. Never talked about that and it had been goin’ on for a while. One of my operators told me. So when she came with that tale about your honey, I figured she was either fishin’, wishin’, fantasizin’, or just plain lyin’. Either which way, I thought you ought to know. So you could pay close attention.”

  Close attention. Yes, indeed. With my size-ten sneaker in her butt when I catch up with her. But first, I’d whip her for lying and whip her again for trying.

  Miss Viv looked in my face and read my mind. “Listen, Mali. I’m tellin’ you this ’cause of what you did for me when I went through that bad time. But don’t let this get you. Ain’t no contest when the girl got to take off half a pound of makeup, half her hair, both eyes, and a Wonderbra before she can jump in the sack to do the do. By the time she get ready, the brother probably so tired, he zone out. Now I see you frownin’, Mali, but you straighten out that face. Bottom line is Miss Thing can’t touch your program.”

  Miss Viv talked straighter than Miss Bert and had a knack for adding a word or two of comfort. My jaw slackened and the pressure squeezing the air out of my chest eased up. I was no longer ready for combat but ready for more information. Tad had said Travis Morgan’s prints as well as Short Change’s prints were in Starr’s apartment.

  “Starr was seeing Travis Morgan? I thought she’d been hooked up with Short Change.”

  Miss Viv slowly whirled one of the barber’s chairs around and took a seat. Then she pointed toward the other, motioning me to sit down. “Lemme tell you,” she said. “That Short Change was somethin’ else. He—”

  “What do you mean, was?”

  She leaned back in the chair as if I had pushed her. “You ain’t heard the word?”

  Here we go again, I thought. Can’t close your eyes for one second in Harlem without something jumping off. “No, I haven’t heard a thing.”

  “They found ’im early this morning. Somebody opened a third eye in the middle of his forehead. Left him on the sidewalk and the thirty-eight in the gutter.”

  I was glad I was sitting down. My head filled with thoughts of Ozzie and suddenly I felt afraid for him. Where was he? Did he do this? I should’ve kept my mouth shut. Not told Tad a thing. Now every precinct in Harlem would be out to get him. I needed to get home. Talk to Dad.

  “Maybe it was suicide,” I said when I’d gotten my thoughts back on track.

  Miss Viv shook her head emphatically, her braids moving in a multicolored swirl around her face. “No way. Street had it that he was one of them good-doin’ players. No good-doin’ pimp gonna do the suicide thing. Shit like that blow a hole in the code. Short Change had six workin’ girls pullin’ big dollars. He had one for every day of the week but Sunday.”

  “Which one was Starr?”

  “Wednesday. She was supposed to be his Wednesday woman, but she didn’t last but a minute before she quit.”

  “Why’d she quit?”

  Miss Viv shrugged. “Can’t tell what I don’t know. I do know she had started dippin’ and dabbin’ and you know the deal. Ain’t nobody I know can outplay the White Lady. Heroin’ll beat you up, knock you down, and have you crawlin’ sideways like a crippled crab.”

  Miss Viv rose from the chair. “Starr was a cute kid. Too bad that snake got a hold of her.”

  One of the operators from the salon opened the door. “Sorry to interrupt, but your ten o’clock is here.”

  “Be right there,” Viv said and turned to me again. “Maybe we can sit down over dinner sometime at Wells. Their fried chicken is the best thing goin’.”

  “So is the peach cobbler,” I said. “It’s a deal. Just let me know.”

  I stepped from the shop into the still-cool morning and made my way down the hill again. This time I moved quickly, wondering what I was going to tell Dad. I cut through Bradhurst Avenue at 145th Street and back again to Eighth Avenue at 140th Street past the St. Charles townhouses.

  When I reached home my mind was still fixed on Short Change and how he’d died.

  Dad opened the door before I put my key in the lock.

  “Any word from Ozzie?” I asked.

  “Not a note. I’ve called, left messages. I don’t know.”

  I looked at his face and knew he hadn’t heard the latest news. “Dad, we have to find him before the cops do.”

  My father had started toward the kitchen and turned back, his eyes narrowed. “Why? What’s happened?”

  “I just left the Pink Fingernail. Viv’s place. She said Short Change was found dead. Shot.”

  My father leaned against the wall and I saw him hold his hand to his chest as if to keep something from falling out. He blinked rapidly and I barely heard him whisper, “This is my fault. I fell asleep and he slipped out.”

  I led him back to the living room and he sank—collapsed was a better word—into a chair. I hurried to the kitchen and returned with a cup of coffee. “We don’t know if Ozzie did this. Could’ve been anyone,” I said, trying to convince myself as well. “People in that life have a lot of enemies. Have to watch their back twenty-four seven. We don’t know yet who did i
t.”

  “And neither does that so-called street crime unit,” Dad snapped. “They’ll use up a load of dumdum bullets and then all the marches and protests in the world won’t bring him back!”

  I said nothing. I was the one who’d told Tad about Ozzie. I had opened my big mouth and said that Ozzie had gone looking for Short Change. Gone looking with blood in his eye. I had to find him before the cops did.

  8

  I placed the phone on the table near the sofa and persuaded Dad to lie down. Then I went upstairs and changed into linen slacks and a silk jacket. When I came downstairs again, he was staring at the ceiling as if contemplating the designs on the crown molding, but I knew better. He was thinking of Ozzie.

  “I’ll be back in a few hours, Dad. You’re too stressed to do anything else so try to get some sleep. If Tad calls, tell him I went to the movies or something. Better yet, let the machine kick in. Don’t answer unless it’s Ozzie.”

  I stuffed my notebook into my shoulder bag, grabbed my straw hat, and left the house. It was going on high noon as I hurried toward Powell Boulevard but a bit too early to pick up the details I needed because most of the night people were still in a coma. The bars were not yet open and if they were, I’d have to be careful. I did not want under any circumstance to run into Tad.

  On Powell Boulevard I turned into 134th Street, where I passed a convoy of old cars, large as boats, that would have been considered classics in more well-to-do neighborhoods. They were docked curbside bumper to bumper with windows down and doors open wide to accommodate drop-ins. Men, older and more damaged than the cars they had sought refuge in, shuttled brown-bagged bottles from the front seat to the rear and back again. They were strangers to life’s promises, only dimly aware of Wall Street with its frenzied optimism and wild profits. “The Street” was foreign territory to which they had no passport. Dow Jones might have been the name of a distant planet. So the brown bags helped to negotiate a tenuous sort of peace with their reality and they took time out to greet me pleasantly as I walked by.

  I waved back, balanced not by memory but by the history of other lives lived large just blocks away. I knew that in the back of memory, at least a few of these men also remembered when Erroll Garner, Buck Clayton, Don Byas, Dizzy Gillespie and his wife, and Billy Eckstine and his wife had, at one time or another, lived in the same apartment building at 2040 Seventh Avenue, just a few blocks away. And they had hung out in Sugar Ray’s, Small’s Paradise, Jock’s Place, the Red Rooster, Connie’s Inn, the Club Baron, Shalimar’s, Basie’s Lounge, and the other bars and clubs long before the avenue was called Powell Boulevard.

  I did not look back at the men in the cars but continued to walk, thankful to Dad for telling me this stuff. It’ll keep me balanced, he’d said.

  I reached Malcolm X Boulevard and some other things began to fall in place. Today was Wednesday and something had to be done fast. I wasn’t concerned about Ozzie missing Dad’s next gig. Dad could always get another piano man. That was no problem. The main thing was to ensure that Ozzie remained alive, even if he never played another note.

  I walked the few blocks to Charleston’s Bar-Be-Que restaurant, although calling his sliver of a place a restaurant was stretching it a bit. It was really a take-out restaurant with the barbecuing done outdoors.

  At curbside in front of the store, the converted oil drums which served as cookers were not yet fired up. The grills as usual had been scrubbed the night before and now Charleston was inside, bleaching the narrow counters and other work surfaces. Jo Jo, clad in a rubber apron that dwarfed his thin frame, had just finished washing the tiled walls with a long-handled brush.

  I knocked on the window and Charleston smiled, glad to see me. Jo Jo smiled also, glad for a break. The shop was so narrow that he prepared to step out to allow me to step in.

  “Don’t go too far,” Charleston warned. “We still got work to do. Got to get those stoves up and running.”

  Jo Jo looked at him from the door, then glanced down at his water-logged outfit and heavy gloves. “Where am I gonna go in this getup?”

  “How should I know? Downtown to the Plaza, maybe.”

  Jo Jo made a face as he leaned the brush against the counter then stepped out to prepare the stoves.

  “He’s a good kid,” Charleston said as he turned from the window. “Boy was in eight foster homes ’til he aged out at eighteen. Can you beat that? That’s how the state spends your tax money. Warehouse ’em. No trainin’. Kids in school doin’ classwork in the damn bathroom, so schools ain’t worth shit. So no education. And next stop naturally is upstate and into the system all over again. This time maybe for ten, twenty years.”

  “The prison industrial complex is big big business,” I said.

  “Prison industrial bullshit,” Charleston snapped, scrubbing the counter harder. “It’s a new name for an old game: slavery. I was in it, remember? So I’m a’ try to see that Jo Jo don’t end up in it.”

  “What happened to his folks?”

  “Who knows? He don’t even know. Anyway, he’s a good kid. Bad breaks just happened, that’s it. He was livin’ in a basement without runnin’ water and hangin’ outside beggin’ for enough coins to keep skin and bone together, to get himself somethin’ to eat. Now he gets a salary and he makes enough just from the tips alone to rent a little kitchenette, buy some decent clothes, and think beyond where his next meal is comin’ from. He’s writin’ rap poetry, thinkin’ about becomin’ a star.”

  I stood near the soapy counter as Charleston continued to clean it. Watching him with his huge bulk and scowling face, you’d think he was the meanest man in the world, then he’d smile and you’d know better.

  “So what’s up with you, Mali? Guess you heard the word on Short Change.”

  “Yep. Fast track slowed him down.”

  Charleston nodded. “Wonder what his ladies gonna do?”

  I looked out of the window, feeling the two inches of hair on my head rise in irritation. I wanted to say or at least theorize that the ladies might possibly think about going out on their own. Booker T. and Garvey and Elijah had all preached “doing for self” even if they didn’t have these particular occupations in mind. But so what? Why shouldn’t these women do for themselves? Why turn over their hard-earned—and they were hard-earned—dollars to a pimp?

  If I opened this line of conversation, I’d probably be here all day arguing and Charleston had work to do. He needed to be ready when the folks started lining up outside and I needed any lead that would keep me one step ahead of the cops. So I said, “Were Short Change’s women from around the neighborhood?”

  “Yep.”

  “You delivered?”

  “All the time. Folks like my secret sauce and they was no exception.”

  “Same address?”

  “Naw. S.C. had ’em spread out. That way they don’t get in no cat fights over him. He make his rounds, pick up the dollars, and drop a little something to keep ’em all happy.”

  I nodded, easing farther into the tight space to rest my elbows on the bit of counter that was dry.

  “Charleston, you know what I need?”

  He paused to look at me. “Damn, Mali. Why?”

  “No. No. I don’t need the lock picks. I’m not planning to sneak into anybody’s apartment.”

  “I hope not. Last time, you was just plain lucky. Now you dealin’ with a different crew. If one of these sisters catch you, they jack you up so high, your feet won’t touch the ground for a week.”

  I wondered how the sisters in question could be so self-reliant in some ways and so dependent in others. “All I want,” I said, “are some addresses. I intend to ring the bells and walk in like a normal human being. If they let me.”

  “Why you need to see them?”

  “Because I need some answers. Because Ozzie is Dad’s friend and Dad’s seriously affected by this. Now Ozzie’s disappeared and there’s talk that he might’ve gotten to S.C. because he thinks the pimp killed his da
ughter.”

  “Ozzie? Why would he think that?”

  “Starr testified against S.C., remember?”

  “Oh yeah.” Charleston rubbed his face and left a thin streak of soap suds on his chin. “Well, I hope you tag ’im before that street unit git to him. They way outta hand now. Remember when they shot up that rapper, ODB, in Brooklyn on a hummer? Now they kill that African brother? This is some way-out shit. Was those cops cokin’, smokin’, or just plain went crazy at the sight of an unarmed black man? Forty-one shots.

  “And then they turn around and announce they gonna use dumdum bullets. Dummies usin’ dumdums is damn dangerous. Why they nab ODB on the coast for sportin’ a vest? Shit, the way things is jumpin’ off, I’m thinkin’ about gettin’ measured for one myself. Along with a matchin’ bulletproof hat, socks, and ear muffs. And that’s just for summer gear. When the death squad come callin’, I’m a be ready for they funky ass.”

  He slapped a sponge on the counter and I waited patiently for him to cool down, as much as it was possible to do so under the circumstances.

  I remembered how Tad had talked about the murder, and how furious the black officers at the precinct house felt. They were angry enough about Amadou Diallo and about the torture of Abner Louima to join the public in a demand for justice.

  Several minutes slid by and I listened in silence to the hard opening and closing of the fridge and to Charleston’s choice adjectives.

  After a while, I reminded him why I’d dropped in.

  “Mali. I oughta start chargin’ you. In fact, if it was anybody else, I’d tell ’em to go to hell, but you—”

  Then he remembered the holdup incident a few years ago that I’d walked in on, which had probably saved his life and his cash, and he said no more. He wiped his hands on the plaid towel hanging from his back pocket and pulled a large accordion file from under the counter. It was filled with receipts and a spiral notebook containing addresses, phone numbers, and proper names and nicknames of his customers.