Trick Baby

  “Blue was lying on the sidewalk. When I got over here, Jabbo and Cleo and Bootsie were standing around Blue. Jabbo was loud-mouthing about how it was self-defense. Blue had a long open shiv in his hand.

  “Bootsie was cracking that Blue tried to croak Jabbo. Cleo was stooping down relieving Blue of that big rock on his pinky and his wallet. It was a slick cross.

  “Like I said, Jabbo won’t do a day in the joint. How can he? Blue was only a Nigger. And Jabbo is got Blue’s wife and Bootsie as witnesses for him at the coroner’s inquest. Even if he didn’t have witnesses, Brown would spend the scratch to fix it for Jabbo. It would be easy since Blue was found with a shiv in his hand.

  “It’s too bad about Blue. It’s just too bad. Well, Folks, you got a pal to bury. I can’t understand how a stud as slick and classy as Blue could marry a skunky tramp like Cleo and then go for the murder-cross.

  “Give me a jingle at the poolroom and hip me to the funeral day. I always liked Blue. He was real nice people. It’s too bad. It’s just too bad.”

  Somehow my palsied legs took me back to the Caddie. I drove North on State Street toward central police headquarters. I stopped on the street at Twenty-second Street. I sat there in the car for a long time thinking about my next move. Finally, I went into a greasy spoon and called Fixer.

  I blurted, “Blue is dead! Butcher Knife Brown set him up for the cross. But they’re not going to get away with it. I know the whole truth about Nino and Brown’s H hookup. I know that Brown used Jabbo as the executioner to please his boss, Nino, because of the Frascati score.

  “I’m going to Eleventh and State right now to make a statement. Blue never carried a shiv. I’m not a copper-hearted fink. But they croaked the best friend I ever had.

  “I can’t let Jabbo get cut loose at the inquest. My statement will make Jabbo and Brown stand trial. Fixer, I’m going to send those dirty bastards to the big-top for murder-one. Brown will be shocked shitless when he runs to you for the fix and you laugh in his face. Brown isn’t wise that Blue and I for years have been greasing your mitt with thousands and thousands of dollars. Brown won’t be—”

  Felix cut in. He said softly, “Folks, you’ve been rattling off like a sucker. Sure, Blue was all right with me. I knew him since Nineteen Twenty-seven. He was a fine fellow who never welshed on a debt or a loan. But he’s gone now, goddamnit! I’ll miss him.

  “I got a call a few minutes after Blue got shot. The caller asked me to pull strings so that Jabbo and the two chippies could hit the street right away, without bond or anything until the inquest. I couldn’t turn down two grand for an easy service like that. So, I made a call and cut them loose.

  “Folks, I’m a business man. I’m seventy-two years old. I got to look out for old Felix in this cold cruel world. I can’t do business with Blue. He’s dead. I got to do business with the living.

  “It’s a fine angle you’ve got about making a statement to the rollers. There would be a trial, and Brown and Jabbo would have to crawl to me for the fix. I get no less than ten grand to fix even a nigger murder.

  “Don’t lose your nerve. Come to my place as soon as you leave the station. You know Nino has you on the hit list already. After you make the statement you’ll be hotter than ever. Don’t worry, pal. By the time you get out here to me, I’ll have figured a hideout for you until the trial. I’ll split the ten grand right down the middle with you. I’ll lay it in your hand right after—”

  I hung up and went to the Caddie. I wept and drove aimlessly through the lonely dawn. I thought, “Blue was smart after all to make that ten grand pre-need arrangement with the funeral home. Cleo would have given him a C-note funeral, if any at all.

  I was a hundred miles from Cincinnati, Ohio, when I realized the Caddie was reeking with Cleo’s perfume. I looked back at Cleo’s clothes piled on the back seat and floor of the car. I pulled over on the shoulder of the highway. I opened the rear door. I threw all of her stinking clothes into a ditch.

  I checked into a middle class white hotel in downtown Cincinnati. I ordered a fifth of rum as soon as the last piece of clothing was brought to the room. The next day I went to a florist shop and had them wire a double C-note worth of white roses to the funeral home for Blue’s funeral.

  In the following eight months I drank hundreds of fifths of rum. I couldn’t count the whores that I paid to drink with me and keep me company through the long lonely nights.

  I just stayed in the room and tried to chink my sorrow and memories away. In September of Nineteen Sixty, I bought the Chicago Tribune from an out-of-town newspaper stand.

  Nino Parelli had gotten too big for his britches. The story in the paper said that his corpse had been found stuffed into the trunk of his car. He had been tortured and stabbed many times with an ice pick.

  It was good news. The seventy-five hundred dollars I had brought to Cincinnati with me was gone. I had pawned all of my clothes and Blue’s too. I couldn’t afford rum anymore. I drank cheap wine by the gallons.

  I had no partner to play the con with. So, the day after I read about Nino, I hit the highway for Chicago. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.

  It was midnight when I got back to Chicago. I had a fifth of sherry wine and a lousy deuce in my pocket. I couldn’t blow it on a flophouse bed for the night. I’d need to buy a piece of cheap slum to hustle.

  I parked the Caddie on a Westside street, and tossed on the back seat until daybreak. Later that morning, I went downtown to State Street, and bought a bridal set of slum mounted in sterling for a buck and a half.

  I got a double sawbuck for it two hours later from a sucker standing at a jewelry shop window looking at bridal sets.

  I got a hotel room on the far Westside. I never went on Southside Chicago. In the middle of October, Nineteen Sixty, I stepped into the mouth of an alley next to a new Sixty Cadillac to take a leak.

  I was leaning against it as I sprayed the wall of a building in front of me. The crazy little bastard owner of the Cadillac rushed off the sidewalk. He cursed me and shoved me away from his car.

  I pushed him. He slugged me on the side of the jaw. I knocked him down. He had lots of heart. He got up and tore into me. We were slugging it out when the rollers came. They locked me up in Maxwell Street Station.

  He was a big shot who owned a string of bars on the Westside. He showed up in court the next morning with a black eye. He pressed an assault and battery complaint against me.

  I was dizzy and sick as hell when the judge said, “. . . or ten days in the House of Correction.”

  I didn’t hear how much the fine was. It wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. I was dead broke with only a piece of slum in my pocket.

  At noon I was crammed into a big police van loaded with drunks and petty thieves on the way to the House of Correction.

  The van stopped at a red light. I looked down through the wire grill at a platinum blonde in a Jaguar halted beside the van. I thought about the Goddess and wondered why the hell a bum like me hadn’t swallowed a handful of those red devils at the Majestic Hotel in Cleveland, Ohio, long ago.

  EPILOGUE

  I lay in darkness on the bottom bunk in the cell and listened to White Folks thrashing and groaning through a nightmare on the bunk above me. He had done nine days of his short bit, and the next morning he would be released.

  I wasn’t known as Iceberg Slim because I was wildly emotional. But after White Folks had told me his life story, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. I felt like kicking my own ass for pimping all my life instead of conning.

  At daybreak he jumped to the floor and sat on the john.

  I said, “Well, White Folks, you’ll be hitting those streets in a few hours. I’m going to miss you. What are your plans?”

  He tented his long fingers beneath his chin. He smiled and said, “Iceberg, the first thing I’m going to do is sell the Cadillac. With that dough, I’m going to buy some nice clothes and a small used car. I’m going to gas it up and go to Mon
treal, Canada, to the Vicksburg Kid.

  “I’m going to learn all the angles of the big white con. I’m going to lose myself in the white world. I’m going to break every classy white broad’s heart that gives me a second gander. I’m going to eat and sleep and fuck with nothing but white people for the rest of my life.

  “I’ll never hear the goddamn tag, Trick Baby, again. Iceberg, I’m going to be the happiest white Nigger sonuvabitch there ever was. And that’s the guaranteed truth.”

  THE END

  GLOSSARY

  BELLY STICK, shill for a flat joint

  BIG FOOT COUNTRY, in the deep South United States

  BIG-TOP, state prison

  BLOWOFF, to get rid of a mark after he’s been fleeced.

  BOODLE, fake bankroll used by con men to impress a sucker

  BOOT, Negro

  BOOST, brace of shills for a flat joint

  BREAD, money

  BURNED, cheated of one’s share

  CAP, back up con to the catch

  CANNON, pickpocket

  CATCH, to lure a victim into the first stage of a con game

  COP A HEEL, to flee

  CRIB, room, apartment, house, etc.

  CRUMB CRUSHER, infant

  DEEMER, a dime

  EARIE, intense listening

  END, share

  FINAL, blowoff for a con game

  FLASH, cheap flashy merchandise used to attract suckers to a flat joint; also fake jewelry

  FLAT-JOINT, gambling concession in a carnival

  FLIMFLAM, colloquial form of verb “con”

  FLUFF, attractive female

  FRENCH TICKLER, a thin rubber casing studded with various sized rubber nodules slipped over the penis to tickle and titillate the vaginal track during sexual intercourse

  GAFF, a foot device to control a numbered carnival wheel GANDER, to look

  GIRL, cocaine

  JINKY, prone to be a jinx

  JISM, seminal fluid; climatic discharge material of the male during sexual intercourse

  MURDER-ONE, first degree murder

  PADDY, white person

  PECKERWOOD, contemptuous term referring to white men

  PULL COAT, to inform or to alert

  PUTZ, penis

  QUILL, real, authentic

  RAISE, pocket

  SCRATCH, money

  SHED, railroad or bus station

  SHILL, confederate of a con man

  SLUM, fake jewelry

  SMACK, short con played with coins

  SPANISH FLY, powdered insect used medicinally to increase urine flow—sometimes used as an aphrodisiac to seduce a woman

  SPOOK, Negro

  SQUEAL, victim’s complaint to police

  TRAIN, mass rape

  TURNOUT, to teach and train for the con

  TRICK BAG, any disadvantageous situation or condition

  WASTE, kill, murder

  WHITE STONES, crudely simulated diamonds

  A preview of

  LONG WHITE CON

  1

  HAPPY . . . ALMOST

  The southwestern sky was sugary with rock candy stars. The four of them were happy, happy. Life was delicious! White Folks felt the sleek new ’62 Eldorado under his hands cruise smoothly as a spaceship through a galaxy of neon. The four of them were Wade “Speedy” Jackson, ex-crack detective and ex-Harlem grifter whiz, his main squeeze, pixie Janie, and Folks’ beauteous black Pearl seated beside him. You’ve made it Johnny O’Brien, he told himself. You’ve made it to become a big white con roper. Me, a closet nigger expatriate from the black southside of the Big Windy has made it!

  A toothy attendant, in a red velvet monkey suit, scrambled to open the doors of the Eldorado. He drove it away to park. They caught a reflection of themselves, resplendent in dinner attire, mirrored in the glass doors as they stepped into the elegant maw of the supper club.

  The room’s diners played muted music with the Rogers’ silver as the lyrics of their animated chitchat sotto voced politely across the Damask snow of the tablecloths. A strolling violinist teased haunting classics from his fiddle.

  Writhing flamelets from candelabras sanctified the diners’ faces, ignited their jewels that showered a confetti of congealed fire in the posh haze. A maitre d’ from Naples, with a charming appreciation for half C-notes, seated them grandly at a table reserved for V.I.P.’s.

  They had just finished the fourth course of Speedy’s birthday supper when she and her entourage walked in. The diners stared at Christina Buckmeister, the coal mines, banking, real estate heiress. Folks thought, she carries herself like the finishing schools and long bread had turned her out, arrogantly, prima ballerina gracefully. A lush petticoat snare to the bone.

  She paused for a mini instant in passing to her table. He had met her once, casually. Her dog-in-the-manger brother, Trevor, was the Vicksburg Kid’s source for the police and bank fixes for Kid’s con mob operation.

  Christina gave Folks a gray, deliberate blast of she-wolf eyes as she nodded and moved past. Pearl barraged eye-gouging vibes when he smiled stingily and nodded back.

  He was irritated with himself as he fought to keep his eyes off her even after she had seated herself facing him several tables away. In the cathedral ambience, her flawless patrician features and rosebud mouth shot a lance, half of thrill, half of hatred, through his head. She had a painful resemblance to Camille Costain. He’d never forget that racist assassin of his heart.

  He smiled grimly, remembering how his precious white Chicago socialite Goddess had been fatally in love with him before he had confessed he was a nigger that night on Chicago’s outer drive at the edge of Lake Michigan. The heartless bitch had cut him loose, crucified his foolish young soul, nearly drowned him, mad and dead, in an ocean of booze to stop the pain that took months to fade away.

  The fiddler paused for a moment at his side to break memory’s spell with his melodic Clair de Lune.

  He stared at Christina and wondered if she’d ever visited one of her nightmare coal pits. Wondered if she’d ever heard the pitiful bellow of a black lunger’s cough. How he despised that blonde bitch Camille Costain look-alike across the way. He remembered the horror stories he’d read about the coal pit victims of the imperialist, heartless class she symbolized. He fantasized a mob of street bums gang raping her, punching her blue blood guts to ribbons.

  But even as he despised her, he felt himself drawn to her. He wanted to garrote her with ropes of come. He was palpitating to despoil her, hurt her, violate her with a hate fuck.

  Pearl sneaked a hand beneath the table and pinched his swipe to jolt him from his trance. Pearl said, “Who is that? I’d be thrilled to meet her. Introduce me, Sugar?”

  He said, “She’s the sister of a business acquaintance . . . there’s a rumor she’s not thrilled to mix with the common folk.”

  Pearl persisted, “Well, since you obviously are an exception, couldn’t you try for this little Harlem Belle?”

  Ebonic Janie piped up, “Yeah Johnny, include this li’l old Central Avenue Fox in, too.”

  Speedy glared at her and said, “Janie, use your mouth to put some curves on that skinny ass.”

  Pearl leaned close, begging, “Please, Daddy Sweetback, introduce me . . . who did you say she was?”

  He said, “She’s Christina Buckmeister. I’ll introduce you when we all make the Blue Book and Who’s Who.”

  Janie exclaimed, “Wow! Spee, don’t you work for them?”

  Speedy said, “Yeah, finish that creamed corn.”

  The wire thin Vicksburg Kid, and his fluff, junoesque Rita, finally showed to break up the cat game. Since he was late, Folks wondered if the Kid was lugging bad news. They sat down and greeted all around. Kid’s tender, brown eyes were placid, so Folks knew the fix and the play for C.P. Stilwell II, the restauranteur mark, were set in smooth concrete for the next day.

  Their waiter was just serving the chocolate mousse. He gave Kid and Rita menus. Buxom Rita started rattling off a st
ring of calorie loaded items. Kid gently relieved her of the menu and ordered just a salad for them.

  Kid said patiently, “Rita, you’re on a diet. You’ve been gobbling booze and junk all day. Trust Pappy to save what’s left of what you had that hooked me.”

  Rita batted her rhinestoned eyelashes seductively like the Vegas chorus pony she once, recently, was. “Please, darlingkins! Let me have a full supper. I promise I won’t eat even a bite all day tomorrow to make up.”

  Kid patted the slight protuberance of her alabaster belly gleaming through her see-through tunic. He resolutely crooned, “Sorry, Big Stuff. Your mouth is a dangerous weapon. I can’t let you harm yourself further.”

  Janie and Pearl, on giggle road, excused themselves for a trek to the powder room.

  Before they were out of view, Kid said, “Dove, your nose is reflecting the candelabra. Go fix it.”

  She snatched a jeweled compact from the sable handbag that matched her wrap and studied her elfin face.

  She said, “You need an ophthalmologist, Pappy Dear.”

  Kid said, “Then cop a heel and pee.”

  She muttered an inaudible expletive as she gave him a filthy look and stomped away. Her steepled coiffure glittered like a cache of platinum in the wash of the candelabra glow.

  Kid leaned his silver fox head in close to Speedy and Folks. He stage whispered, “Now laddies, there’s no cause for undue alarm, but I received some additional research info on that customer we’re playing for tomorrow. Stilwell drowned a chum about a fluff when he was sixteen. He’s been in the psycho ward of two asylums in the past twenty years. The gent is violence prone! I’ve alerted the High Ass Marvel, Kate and the shills, so Johnny, we’ll have to give him an eggshell play.

  “Oh, by the way, Speedy, wire up Victoria Buckmeister’s limo, phone and bedroom. Since Trevor has advised me that his mother is cancerous and rapidly losing her mental powers, I want to be privy to any radical business decisions she might make. Especially since Trevor believes the old girl has plans to dump him as Buckmeister Major Domo and place his witch of a sister in charge. I want tapes of every word she utters.”