Motown, page 10
“Well, we just going to let him walk in and wrap the place up for the wops?”
“You got another idea?”
“I still got my Bulldog. Them blue eyes don’t see backwards.”
“He’s just a screwdriver. Break one, they got more.”
“Dude didn’t say one word that whole time,” Lydell said. “I don’t trust a man don’t talk. That’s the reason I don’t have a mutt. Who knows what they’re thinking, they don’t say it? Rip your face off soon as lick it.”
“That ain’t no way to talk about women.”
Both men turned. Krystal had come in the open door. She had pink ribbons tied in her stack of straw-colored hair and six shades of violet on her eyelids. Her dress, electric purple with flowers exploding all over it, started just above her nipples and ran out of material at her crotch. She was wearing five-inch platform sandals and half a pound of copper bracelets. When she walked she made more noise than a junk-wagon.
“Whooee,” she said, looking around. “Sorry I missed the part-y.”
Neither Quincy nor Lydell paid her any attention. They were looking at the man who had entered behind her, a cinnamon-colored Negro with straight black hair smoothed back like porcupine quills and dark glasses with plain black rims like Little Stevie Wonder wore. He had on a hip-length brown leather jacket with wide lapels, bell-bottoms, and high-heeled brown boots with buckles. Even in the heels he wasn’t medium height. His black shirt was unbuttoned, showing a V of absolutely hairless skin down to his belt buckle. He stopped in the middle of the room and took off the glasses. Both eyes were puffy and ringed with mustard-colored bruises.
“Looks like the cops helped themselves to your likker.” Behind the bar, Krystal took a square bottle of gin off one of the nearly empty shelves, filled a rock glass almost to the rim, and colored the clear liquid with Rose’s Lime Juice from a bottle in the refrigerator. “Law ’n’ order.” She drank.
“Something stuck on your heel.” Lydell was still watching the stranger.
“Oh, that’s Mahomet. You boys got any ice?” She opened the refrigerator again.
Quincy remembered him now. “I bailed you out,” he said. “I didn’t buy you.”
“I owe you, man.”
The rich baritone was always a surprise coming out of that slender little body.
“He come to the apartment looking for you,” Krystal said. “I was on my way here, so I brung him along.”
Lydell said, “The Klan comes looking for him, you bring them along too?”
She laughed into her glass. “He ain’t Klan.”
“I don’t like to see a brother getting beat on,” Quincy said. “I’d of done the same for a alley cat. But I wouldn’t take him home.”
“I thought maybe I could sing in your place till I paid you back.”
A choking fit cut off Lydell’s laughter. Quincy pounded him on the back until he resumed breathing, then took the cigarette from between the fingers of his partner’s good hand and extinguished it in the ashtray on the bar, previously the only butt-free two square inches in the room. He shoved the jade holder into the side pocket of Lydell’s coat. “Don’t need no singers nor acrobats neither,” he said. “Try the Baptists.”
“I don’t owe them.”
“Missing a bargain, bro.” Lydell leaned on the bar, his chest sucking and blowing out like a bellows. “Dress this boy in a white suit like Cab Calloway, hire somebody to come in and play the accordeen. Charge twice’t as much for drinks during the floor show. That’s how the Cotton Club got started.”
“Shut up and breathe.”
Krystal said, “C’mon, sugar, hire him. Krystal likes the way he talks. Just like Sidney Poitier.”
He hated it when she puckered up and talked like Betty Boop.
“Told you my English was too good,” Mahomet said miserably.
Quincy said, “You want to work it off, there’s a broom in back. I got no use for no singers.”
Mahomet brightened. “Can I sing while I’m sweeping?”
“Sure. How about a little ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ while you’re mopping up Congo’s guts?”
Mahomet glanced down at the feasting flies without emotion and started toward the poolroom. As he passed Lydell, the man with his arm in a sling placed his good hand on Mahomet’s arm. “Ain’t you hot in all that leather?”
“It’s okay. I don’t wear underwear.”
Lydell let go quickly.
When he emerged from the back room carrying a broom and dustpan, the newcomer had removed his leather jacket. The cuffs of his black sleeves were fastened with four mother-of-pearl buttons apiece. He hummed as he swept, low and melodic.
Lydell caught Quincy’s eye and went into the poolroom. Quincy pointed at Krystal, freshening her glass from the square bottle. “Don’t drink up the inventory.”
“Yes, boss.”
The poolroom was in better condition than the bar. Quincy blew ashes off the green felt on the table and transferred a Dixie cup two-thirds full of cold coffee from a corner pocket to the wastebasket. Lydell was seated on his favorite stool next to the cues. He had been sitting there when he broke one of them over the head of the disappointed gambler who had threatened Quincy with a Saturday Night Special. He had Mahomet’s leather jacket across his lap and was going through the pockets.
“Anything?” Quincy selected a cue and set up a combination shot.
“Tap City. Beats me how a man can wear threads like these here and not have nothing in his pockets but lint.” He leaned over and hung it on the peg. “What kind of a name is Mahomet anyways?”
“Black Muslim. Malcolm X, remember? They blowed him down last year.”
“No, that’d be Muhammad.”
“Maybe he just likes it, then. Maybe it’s his name.” Quincy made the shot.
“Think he’s a spy?”
“Can’t figure what he’d find out that Patsy don’t already know. Or won’t when he hears from Gallante and DiJesus.”
“I mean the cops.”
“Too small. Five-nine’s the minimum.” He set up another shot and missed.
“Well, I don’t like him hanging around. He talks funny.”
“He went to school.”
“You and me went to school.”
“He finished.” He sank it on the second try.
“Plus I don’t like a man dresses better’n me.”
“Forget him.”
“Okay, let’s talk about the guineas. We going to let Mr. Bigass Deal Gallante and Harry Blue Eyes squeeze our balls till they pop or what?”
“Shit. Scratched.” Quincy returned the stick to the rack. “You pick up Congo’s body at the morgue like I told you?”
“Oh, yeah, he’s out watching the Sting Ray. What am I supposed to do with him when I gots him, take him out dancing?”
“Most stiffs get funerals.”
“Who’d come?”
“We’ll invite Joe Petite and Sebastian Bright. They’ll bring their people and we’ll bring ours.”
“They didn’t even know Congo. They got their own games to run.”
“And Gidgy.”
“All that pusher knows is horse.”
“We all got something in common. We’re colored and we deal with Patsy Orr or we don’t deal at all. And together we got more guns and blades than the fucking National Guard.”
Lydell’s grin was a long time coming. He fished the holder out of his pocket and lit up, forgetting and taking his bandaged arm from its sling. “Think they’ll go for it?”
“They come from the streets just like us. They’ll take any excuse to dress up and show off their cars and their fine ladies. We’ll bust the bank on flowers and a coffin for Congo. We’ll make it so big they don’t dare stay home. What’s the name of that reverend at Second Baptist, Otis something?”
“Otis R. R. Idaho. They built the place around him.”
“Whips up the hellfire, does he?”
“Whips it up and makes it do the Watusi, they say. I missed a sermon or two myself.”
“We’ll do it out of his church and the burying in Mount Elliott Cemetery. Make for a nice long funeral route.”
“Too bad we can’t take it right past the Penobscot,” Lydell said, “rub Patsy the Crip’s nose in it.”
“He’ll get a whiff anyways. We’ll use a white hearse. If we can’t find one we’ll buy one and paint it. This is one planting they’ll be talking about when they elect Sammy Davis Junior President.”
“Congo’d be proud.”
“We’ll hold the wake here afterwards. The best booze, the best food. The griddle in every rib joint on Twelfth Street’ll be sizzling just for us. When we got everyone together, all the bad brothers in town, we’ll have us a pow-wow.”
“They shake our hands and thanks us for the eats and be on their way.”
“Maybe. Or maybe they see when one of us is in hot shit, the rest better grab towels.”
Lydell coughed, hacked, and spat into a cuspidor the size of a loving cup. He dragged his charcoal sleeve across his lips. “Suppose Patsy don’t like it and sends DiJesus and his boys to pay their respects?”
“I hope to Christ he does,” Quincy said. “It’ll save us a ton of words.”
“Cool it.” Lydell was looking past him.
Quincy turned. Mahomet was standing in the doorway, holding his broom like one half of American Gothic. “We got a scrub brush? For cleaning up guts.”
“Try the toilet.”
Mahomet started to withdraw.
“Second.”
He stopped. Quincy looked at him a moment. “Ever sing at a funeral?”
Chapter 15
THE FARM WAS A farm.
No different from the others they’d passed, a flat forty acres surrounded by barbed wire with a small white farmhouse and two large barns built of corrugated steel in the shape of airplane hangars. A gate fashioned from an iron pipe hinged to a fence post barred the gravel driveway. Wendell Porter got out of the car, opened the padlock with a key attached to his ring, and swung the pipe out of the way. After he drove through he went back and closed and locked it.
He parked in front of the house and got out. Rick unbuckled himself and followed. They mounted a wooden porch containing a big orange cat curled up in a dilapidated wicker chair and went through the screen door without knocking. The smell of the interior, old damp wood and meals cooked and consumed and forgotten, reminded Rick of Mrs. Herder’s kitchen.
The room was in fact a large kitchen, with brown mottled linoleum on the floor and an old-fashioned pump-up gas stove and electric refrigerator with a cylinder on top and a sink whose white enamel was flaking away from the black cast iron beneath. A black steel desk that belonged in a service station stood incongruously just inside the entrance, behind which a gray-haired man sat with one foot up on the typewriter leaf watching Tom and Jerry on a set with rabbit ears. The man wore a short-sleeved white shirt with a blue necktie and dark work pants, but his footwear, a white sock and high black lace-up shoe, was a dead giveaway. He was a security guard.
“Think he’s ever going to catch that mouse, Fred?”
“I keep hoping, but he ain’t in thirty years. ’Morning, Mr. Porter.” Fred put his foot on the floor and handed Porter a clipboard with a ballpoint pen tied to it.
Porter signed the attached sheet. “This is Rick Amery. The Porter Group just increased by one.”
Fred regarded Rick from behind square-rimmed glasses, then reached into a bowl on the desk and held out a blank white button the size of a nickel. “Pin this on. Don’t take it off while you’re on the grounds. And sign in.”
Rick obeyed and was surprised to see Porter select a button for himself and pin it to his lapel. Porter smiled at his reaction.
“White on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Blue the rest of the week. The guards have orders to eject anyone not wearing the right button, me included. GM might send in a double.”
“You believe that?”
“What I believe makes no difference. Fred was with security at the Ford Willow Run plant for twenty-seven years. We all dance to his tune.”
“Henry the First used to try to sneak past me there; he liked his jokes. I caught him every time and didn’t it piss him off.” Fred got up and turned off the TV in the middle of a commercial for something called a Frisbee. A square Colt Army rode in his belt holster with its barrel in his right hip pocket. “Henry Deuce gave me a watch last year and showed me the door. That was the first and last time I ever seen him.”
“Is he a volunteer?” Rick followed Porter down a narrow hallway behind the kitchen and out a side door.
“No. Everyone at the Farm is on salary.”
They took a path worn down to bare earth to the nearer of the two hangarlike structures. As they drew close, Rick saw that the building was at least twice the size of a normal barn. It could have sheltered a 747.
“I have Caroline to thank for the house and property,” Porter said. “One of her clients, a developer, got in a financial crunch and couldn’t meet her fee. He’d been planning to build a shopping center. We paid up the taxes and here we are.”
“Where are we?”
“On the boundary between theory and proof.” The consumer advocate opened a door next to the big closed bay and held it. Rick went inside.
He wasn’t prepared for the assault on his senses that followed.
The interior was the size of a football field, bounded on four sides by cork paneling and the complex girdered structure of the roof forty feet overhead, where a series of suspended fans turned under louvered vents shaped like gables. The floor was asphalt over cement. Sandbags stacked in a solid lace pattern like tires encircled the center, creating an oval one hundred yards long by sixty yards wide. There a driver in a silver firesuit and red crash helmet was threading a brick-colored Chevrolet Impala convertible through an obstacle course of yellow hazard cones. The roar of the big 409 engine in the enclosed area was horrendous.
“Slip these on,” shouted Porter, handing him a pair of noise-suppressing earphones from a table full of them. He put on another pair.
“Ventilation’s our biggest problem,” he went on at the top of his lungs. “The fans don’t quite do it, and we can’t open the doors without bringing in the whole neighborhood to investigate the noise. Fifteen minutes out of every hour is as long as I dare expose anyone to the fumes, and the shifts are rotated so that nobody’s here two days in a row.”
Rick nodded. The screech of the Impala’s brakes as the driver negotiated the turns came unadulterated through the suppressors. He had knocked over about a third of the cones.
They weren’t the only witnesses to the exercise. A man in shirtsleeves and earphones stood with his back to them taking notes on a clipboard, and a motion picture camera attached to a steel tripod recorded everything under arc lights as bright as the sun. A big man in slacks and a loose blue zip-front Windbreaker spotted the newcomers and came their way. He was wearing earphones and Rick was certain the jacket concealed a handgun. Just then the man with the clipboard raised his hand to signal the driver, who cut the ignition and coasted to a stop six feet short of him.
Silence rang.
The earphones came off. Porter introduced Rick to the guard, whose name was Arthur. He was in his late thirties with black hair thinning on top and shallow gray eyes. He nodded at Rick and stepped past him to shoot back the heavy bolt that secured the bay doors. The air sweetened noticeably when he pushed them open.
Porter and Rick went over to where the man with the clipboard was talking with the driver, who had removed his helmet to reveal a shock of curly blond hair on a Nordic head.
“Hal Bledsoe, Günter Damm, Rick Amery,” Porter said. “I hired Hal away from Production and Design at AMC.”
Rick shook the round-faced Bledsoe’s pudgy hand and grasped the bronze one offered by the driver. “I thought I recognized you,” Rick said. “You ran in the Vegas Grand Prix a couple of years back.”
“You were there?” Damm spoke with a soft German accent.
“No, I caught it on the tube.”
“Günter doubled for Elvis in Viva, Las Vegas,” Porter said. “He doesn’t like to talk about it.”
Damm’s aristocratic face became animated. “He signed my driving gloves. He said I could have a speaking part in his next picture, but I broke my leg at Monte Carlo and missed the shooting. Roustabout. He sent me an autographed poster.”
“But he doesn’t like to talk about it.” Bledsoe was grinning.
“How’d we do?” Porter asked.
Bledsoe handed him the clipboard. “We’re running out of cones.”
Porter skimmed the top sheet and the one underneath. “Nothing we didn’t expect. That’s just too much car for those nine-and-a-half-inch drums. How’d we do for stopping distance?”
“That’s next.”
He gave back the clipboard and pointed at Damm’s helmet. “May I borrow it?”
The German hesitated, then held it out. “You paid for it.”
Porter handed Bledsoe his earphones and put on the helmet. When he’d adjusted the chinstrap, he looked like an investment broker for the Detroit Lions. He smiled at Rick. “Feeling adventurous?”
“Always do on Saturday.”
“There’s another helmet on the table.”
It was silver-colored fiberglass and a snug fit. Rick emptied his pockets onto the table and took off the white button. When he rejoined the others, Porter was climbing into the driver’s seat of the Impala. Arthur the security guard was clearing the yellow cones from the track.
“Wendell, is this smart?” Bledsoe asked.
“If I were smart I’d be defending corporate vice presidents from charges of income tax evasion. Mount up, Tonto.”
The car had no radio or heater. The dash was upholstered with molded foam rubber three inches thick.
“The industry can’t claim my tests aren’t fair. I’m not prepared to sacrifice my drivers just to prove a point.” Porter cinched Rick’s seat belt tight enough to cut off his circulation and buckled his own. “The whole country’s on a speed binge. The auto companies cut back on safety so they have more money to spend on horsepower. When this model was introduced, it had eleven-inch brake drums. Now it’s one and one-half inches less safe than it was last year.”
