The Big Gold Dream Read online

  “Hell with that!” he said. He didn’t have time for all that foolishness.

  From Harlem Hospital he drove furiously to Knickerbocker Hospital, also located in Harlem.

  The doctors there, after listening to his request, told him he had better take the body to the morgue, where he could find an assistant medical examiner on duty who would issue the necessary certificate.

  By the time the police got on the job of tracing his movements, he was heading south, down the East Side Highway at eighty-five miles an hour, making for the morgue on First Avenue at 29th Street.

  Directly after the hearse had left the scene, Sweet Prophet called for his Rolls Royce, and was driven rapidly to his Temple of Wonderful Prayer around the corner on 116th Street. Anticipating all sorts of trouble from the hard-boiled Homicide police, he desired to face them on his home ground.

  The others arrived consecutively:

  First, two fire trucks bringing oxygen tents and inhalators;

  Second, the Assistant Medical Examiner, who had been alerted by the Homicide Bureau;

  And last, a big black sedan from the Homicide Bureau itself, with a uniformed driver, bearing three plain-clothes detectives, a sergeant and two corporals.

  By then the body was gone, the prophet was gone, the witnesses were gone, the bottle which had contained the allegedly poisoned water was gone, and Sugar Stonewall was long gone.

  Now, more than an hour had passed since Alberta Wright had swallowed the first gulps of the water from the bottle Sweet Prophet had blessed, and Sweet Prophet was sitting behind a hand-carved mahogany desk in his sumptuous “Receiving Room” on the third-floor front of his Temple of Wonderful Prayer. Across from him, in the high-backed period chairs usually assigned to the supplicants, sat three detectives. They were enclosed, as it were, by an invisible wall, behind which the room was jammed to the walls by as many of the prophet’s followers as could squeeze inside. Others jammed the outside hallways and staircases, and hundreds stood below on the street.

  The temple was a four-storied apartment building, housing a modern motion picture theater, which Sweet Prophet had converted into his Church of Wonderful Prayer. His living quarters were on the top floor.

  The Homicide sergeant was saying, “Now all I want to do is get the picture straight while the Medical Examiner locates the body and determines the cause of death. There has been some confusion here.”

  “The Lord shall confound the wicked,” Sweet Prophet said.

  “Amen,” said the followers.

  The sergeant, a tall lean hatchet-faced Irishman named Ratigan, blinked. “As to that, we’ll soon find out,” he said. “You were baptizing these people?”

  “They had answered to the call, and the Sweet Prophet was opening the gates to God’s green pastures so that they may graze in faith with God’s chosen flock,” Sweet Prophet said.

  “Amen,” the faithful said.

  “Just stick to the answers, Reverend,” Sergeant Ratigan said.

  “I am a prophet,” Sweet Prophet said. “God called to me at the corner of this very street and Lenox Avenue more than thirty-three years ago. It was a Saturday night and the street was filled with sinners - pimps and prostitutes and thieves. God touched me on the shoulder. I looked around and saw nobody. He said, ‘I am God. I make you my prophet on Earth. I send you forth to save these people from degradation and damnation!’ ”

  “Praise be God and bless Sweet Prophet,” the faithful said.

  “Jesus Christ, do these people have to be here?” Ratigan said, gritting his teeth. “They are interfering with the questioning, obstructing the police and loitering, all of which is against the law.”

  “They are humble, very humble,” Sweet Prophet said. He tossed a handful of bread crumbs onto the floor, touching off a mad scramble. “See how humble we all are,” he stated to the bug-eyed detectives. “We will even eat off the floor for Sweet Prophet.”

  Many of the faithful were lapping the crumbs from the thick purple carpet.

  “All right, all right, stop feeding them crumbs and let’s get back to the killing,” Sergeant Ratigan said harshly.

  “There was no killing,” Sweet Prophet denied. “No killing and no death. There was a departure. A saint departed for heaven.”

  “The question is, did any human dispatch her on her way?” Ratigan said.

  “None! No human hand was raised against her,” Sweet Prophet said.

  “Who poisoned the bottle of water?” Sergeant Ratigan asked.

  “The water was not poisoned,” Sweet Prophet denied. “I blessed it with my own hand.”

  “How is it then that she died after drinking it?” Ratigan asked.

  “If you think she died from drinking that water, bring me a gallon of it and I will drink it all,” Sweet Prophet said.

  “What did she do for a living?” the sergeant asked.

  “She was a cook for a white family in Westchester County,” Sweet Prophet said.

  “What kind of woman was she?” Ratigan asked.

  “An upright, God-fearing, Christian woman,” Sweet Prophet said.

  “Do you have any idea why someone might want to poison her?” Ratigan asked.

  “No one would have ever wanted to poison her,” Sweet Prophet stated emphatically. “She was a great cook and a steady wage-earner. No one on God’s green earth would poison that type of woman.”

  “How about a jealous husband or a disgruntled lover?” the sergeant asked.

  “Only the Almighty Father, who is swayed neither by the color of the skin nor the smartness of the brain, but judges only by the sincerity of the heart, would have called Sister Wright from her life on Earth to offer her a seat in heaven - as useful as she was to everybody,” Sweet Prophet said.

  One of the four gilded telephones on the desk began to ring. Sweet Prophet looked at them without moving, and a sedately dressed middle-aged woman, who had been standing impassively by the wall behind him, stepped forward and miraculously picked up the right one.

  “The blessed Sweet Prophet’s Temple of Wonderful Prayer,” she enunciated in a well-modulated voice.

  The harsh sound of a voice at the other end came into the room, but the words were indistinct.

  “Very well,” the woman replied and, looking up toward the sergeant, said, “It is for you, sir, if you are Sergeant Ratigan.”

  The sergeant got to his feet and reached across the desk for the receiver.

  “Ratigan,” he bellowed. “Shoot!”

  The sound of the harsh voice, metallic and indistinct, poured into the dense, listening silence, punctuated by Ratigan saying, “Yeah … Yeah … Well, that’s that …”

  He hung up the receiver and said to his assistants, “Let’s go.”

  3

  A DILAPIDATED MOVING VAN, minus the name of the owner or any identifying inscription save for a license plate almost obliterated by dirt, drew up in front of a four-storied brick tenement on 118th Street. The block was parallel to the one on 117th Street where the baptism had taken place a short time before.

  Two big overall-clad colored men, one of whom had been driving, and a small, white-haired Jew, wearing a black suit and a brown felt hat, got out.

  “Hey, auntie,” the Jew called to a big black woman leaning from a first-floor window. “What floor does Rufus Wright live on?”

  The woman gave him an evil look. “If you means Alberta Wright, she lives on the top floor.”

  The Jew’s eyebrows shot upward, but he didn’t reply.

  “If Rufus has brought in a woman, we won’t touch it,” he said to his helpers as they climbed the smelly stairs.

  The helpers said nothing.

  On the fourth floor, a slick-looking Negro with straightened hair beckoned from the rear door and said, “Psst.” He was wearing a pink sport shirt, a green silk suit and yellow linen shoes, and he had a wide, confidential grin.

  The Jew and his helpers entered the parlor of a two-room flat.

  The Negro closed th
e door and locked it, then said, “All right, daddy-O, let’s get on.”

  The Jew looked about suspiciously. “You’re alone, ain’t you?” He had been around colored people so long he talked like one.

  “Ain’t I always?” the Negro countered.

  “You know I got to get it straight.”

  “All right, set up your alibis.”

  The Jew frowned. “That’s a bad word,” he said, but the Negro didn’t argue the point. The Jew asked, “Your name is Rufus Wright, ain’t it?”

  “Right,” Rufus said.

  The helpers, standing inside the doorway, sniggered. Every time the Jew bought anything from Rufus, he went through the same act.

  “This is your place, ain’t it?”

  “Right.”

  “You own the furniture, don’t you?”

  “Right.”

  “Who is this woman, Alberta Wright?” the Jew threw in suddenly.

  “Her? She’s my wife,” Rufus said, without batting an eye.

  “Why didn’t you stick to being a bachelor?” the Jew complained. “That was safer.”

  “Well, you see, daddy-O, this time it’s different,” Rufus said. “This time it’s on her account that I got to sell my furniture.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Nothing wrong with her. She’s dead is all. That’s why I got to raise some money on a Sunday. I got to pay the undertaker some money in advance so he’ll go down to the morgue and get the body.”

  The Jew grinned at his helpers to show he appreciated the story. “Well, that’s all right,” he conceded, relaxing. “Now we got everything straight.” He turned again to his helpers and called them to witness. “You boys heard what Mr. Wright said.”

  They nodded.

  “All right, Rufus boy, let’s get down to business. Is that the set you want to sell?” he asked, pointing toward a huge blond-oak television set on a gate-legged table.

  “I’ve decided to sell all my furniture,” Rufus said. “This funeral is going to be expensive, and I got to make a down payment of five hundred dollars.”

  “For that much, you had ought to got the whole Blumstein’s department store,” the Jew said drily.

  “There’s a lot of good stuff here,” Rufus contended.

  The Jew looked over the room, and his expression went sour. The room was jammed with a motley collection of worn-out furnishings arranged about a potbellied stove like molting chickens about a mother hen: threadbare rugs; moth-eaten over-stuffed chairs and a sofa, broken-legged tables; clocks without works; ceramic statuettes that had been through the Inquisition; a stuffed pheasant with a bald patch on its back; a set of scarred antlers mounted on the wall, flanked by faded lithographs of English hunting scenes; cutout photos of Negro blues singers hanging beside reproductions of the Virgin Mother and Child, The Last Supper and The Crucifixion cut from calendars given out by undertaker H. Exodus Clay.

  “Do you call this furniture?” the Jew asked.

  “These are mostly antiques in this room,” Rufus said. “But there’s a brand new set of furniture in the bedroom.”

  “Your wife couldn’t say no to her white folks, could she?” the Jew cracked. “She must have brought everything home that they left for the trash man.”

  “She couldn’t throw nothing away either,” Rufus added.

  Grinning, the Jew took a notebook and stylo from his inside coat pocket and went to work. Rapidly and with scarcely a look, he itemized the furnishings, allowing $50 for the television set and $19 for everything else.

  “I can’t use the stove,” he said. “Sixty-nine bucks for the lot. Okay.”

  “You mean that’s all you want to pay for everything in this room?” Rufus asked incredulously.

  “That’s more than it’s worth,” the Jew said, adding with a grin, “I wouldn’t pay for it if it wasn’t for your wife needing a decent funeral.”

  With an abrupt motion, Rufus opened his mouth and stuck it in front of the Jew’s face. “Here, take my teeth too and have it done with,” he blubbered.

  The Jew looked into his mouth with interest. “Holy Mackerel, you got a red tongue, blue gums and white teeth,” he observed. “If anybody calls you a Communist, you just open your’ mouth and show them the national colors.”

  Rufus closed his mouth and looked sheepish. “All right, sixty-nine bucks; if I got to, I got to.”

  The helpers started to move the furniture but the Jew stopped them. “Wait till I get it down legal,” he cautioned.

  In the bedroom the bureau drawers and the dressing table still contained Alberta’s personal effects, lingerie and toilette articles as she had left them that morning, and the bed was made up and covered with a pink rayon spread.

  “Get these drawers cleaned out,” the Jew said.

  Rufus began piling the contents helter-skelter in a corner of the room. The Jew went about his business of assessing the furniture without paying him the slightest attention.

  When he had thrown off the bed linen to examine the mattress, the Jew said sharply, “This has been damaged.”

  The seams of the mattress on all four sides, both top and bottom, tad been opened with a knife wide enough to permit a hand.

  “I had to open it to put in some bug powder,” Rufus said. “We been bothered with the bugs. But all it needs is sewing up a little and it’ll look like new.”

  The Jew wasn’t listening. He was sticking his arm through the openings and probing the padding with his fingers. With an enraged gesture, he wheeled it over to the floor and probed the other side. His face was a study of frustration.

  “The deal’s off,” he choked in a furious voice. His sallow skin had turned the dull purple of a ripe fig.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you!” Rufus shouted, his eyes bugging in matching fury. “You think I’m going to sell you a mattress if there was any money hidden in it?”

  “It’s risky, too risky,” the Jew said, halfcowed by Rufus’s threatening attitude. “If money has been stolen, I won’t touch it.”

  “What risk is you taking?” Rufus kept raving. “You don’t never take no risk. It’s me takes all the risks. The way you cover yourself up with all kinds of legal tetches, all of Congress couldn’t get nothing on you.”

  The Jew gave in. “All right, all right. We don’t have to fight. I just like to do my own looking, whether I find anything or not.”

  “Hell, you think you’re going to find a bale of money in every mattress you buy,” Rufus said scornfully.

  It was rumored in Harlem that twenty years ago the Jew had found thirty-five thousand dollars in cash hidden in a mattress he had bought for 75c from a flea-bag hotel room in which an old white beggar had died.

  Rufus kept on needling. “Us colored folks ain’t got no money to hide. You Jews got it all.”

  The Jew was finished with it. “All right, drop it, boy. Twenty-seven fifty for what’s in here, okay?”

  “That’s just what I mean,” Rufus said. “My old lady paid two hundred seventy-five for this set less than a month ago.”

  “All right, stop breaking my heart - thirty-five, okay?” the Jew said.

  Rufus wiped his smooth black cold-creamed face with a white silk handkerchief. “Okay, man, okay,” he said harshly. “Let’s get finished; I ain’t got all day.”

  The Jew hid a vindictive smile and went into the kitchen. He took one look at the enamel-topped table and tubular stainless steel chairs with foam-rubber plastic-covered seats and said, “I can see that your wife was a cook.”

  He sat at the table and added up the total, allowing $13 for the kitchen’s contents, exclusive of the table service and utensils. It came to $117. He then wrote a receipt on a form taken from a pad that looked like a check book:

  Received from A. Finkelstein $117.00 for total furnishings of apartment No. 44, 118th Street, Manhattan, New York City.

  Leaving It undated, he asked Rufus to sign it.

  “Man, don’t you never talk to me no more
about taking risks,” Rufus grumbled as he signed.

  “You got to bury your wife,” the Jew needled slyly. “I ain’t got no wife.”

  The helpers exchanged looks and grinned.

  “No cracks,” the Jew warned. “You just sign here as witnesses.”

  Laboriously, they spelled out their signatures below.

  “Okay, now you can take this junk and load it,” the Jew said, tucking the receipt carefully into a stuffed wallet and extracting a thin sheaf of banknotes.

  Stolidly the helpers shuffled into the sitting room and began slamming the furniture about. The colored lady had retired from her grandstand seat in the front window when they appeared on the street with the first load, but other windows up and down the street on both sides were occupied with the customary Sunday afternoon sightseers. No significance was attached to the moving. In a number of windows only the grayish bottoms of big bare black feet resting on the sills were visible from below; and they remained stationary. A patrol car idled past, but the cops didn’t give the movers a second look. Moving on Sunday was a perfectly legitimate undertaking; many people figured that was the best time to do it.

  The helpers loaded the bureau and the dressing table in the van alongside the sitting room suite, then, after knocking the bed apart, brought it down in sections. One of them brought down the mattress, and the other brought down the springs. They packed the springs but left the mattress on the tailgate to be used as a buffer for the stuff from the kitchen. Before going back up, they went forward to the driver’s compartment and drank heartily from a bottle of California muscatel wine.

  A young man standing in the doorway of the adjoining tenement sucked on a marijuana cigarette and watched them with an expression of infantile concentration. He had a big, flat body, whose wide square shoulders gave the impression of abnormal strength. He had a small head with a round babyish face and smooth brown hairless skin. His big eyes with their drug-widened pupils looked completely senseless. Despite the heat he wore a heavy tweed jacket with thick shoulder pads, a wide-brimmed beaver hat pulled low over his forehead and skintight mustard-colored corduroy pants tucked into black and white cowboy boots. On first sight he looked like a harmless moron.