Sneaky People: A Novel (2 page)

As Ralph reached the other side of the street from the lot and waited for a Mack truck to rumble by, Leo came out of the Greek’s, cleaning his teeth with his tongue.

“Hi, Leo,” Ralph said.

“Hi, Ralph,” said Leo, immediately going into his pants pocket. “I figure you’re ready to bite me for four bits. You got the edges nice, right?” He forked over a half dollar so worn you could hardly see the eagle.

Ralph whipped the clippers from his back pocket and snapped them open and shut. “You bet.”

Leo had turned and was looking back. Behind them a stringy-haired girl wearing a slack halter had come out of the Greek’s. She had a faceful of pimples and wore glasses.

She said: “Hi, Ralph.”

“Hi.”

“What are you doing, cutting grass?”

“What’s it look like?” riposted Ralph, and pushed the mower over the curb into the gutter.

“Friend of yours?” asked Leo, glancing back as they crossed the street together.

“I hope not,” said Ralph. “She’s some dope from my class.”

Leo was seated at the desk of his mind, writing as follows:
Dearest, you don’t know who I am, but I know who you are, and I am passionately in love with you, I don’t care about your vision problem or your skin condition, my darling, I want you and need you, a thousand kisses, my dearest precious honey—Your Unknown Admirer
.

He would never actually write this letter. If he had so done, Margie would have swooned, thinking it had come from Ralph, on whom she had a crazy crush and went to sleep every night thinking of, with her toes curled.

Several persons were roaming the lot unattended, Jack no doubt being still inside the office with the buyer of the phaeton and Buddy not having appeared. This annoyed Leo, even though it gave him an opportunity to make up for the theoretical commission he had lost, because in so doing he would be disqualifying himself as a victim of injustice. He was also suffering from heartburn acquired at the Greek’s, where he had seated himself at the far end of the counter so that, pretending to keep an eye on the lot across the street, he could ogle the girl, who sat on the first stool inside the door ravenously devouring a jelly doughnut. At 2:30
P.M.
nobody occupied the intervening seats.

But hardly had Leo’s hamburger been slammed down before him by the Greek, who was always surly after the proper lunch hour had passed, than Leo saw with despair that the girl was mashing the last morsel of doughnut between her lips, soon to be followed by the straw issuing from the bottle of Royal Crown Cola, the last inch of fluid from the bottom of which was sucked up with the appropriate and, to Leo, aphrodisiac sound.

He was forced to gobble his hamburger in two bites and without ketchup or even salt. The patty was grease-hot from the griddle, and Leo’s eyes exuded water. He drained his glass of milk. To make it worse, the girl then only feinted at departure, rising merely to pick her back teeth with a forefinger, then sitting down again to order another doughnut. Her first ferocious bite caused red jelly to squirt onto the countertop, the stingy Greek not providing a plate for small orders.

Thus Leo was compelled to leave before she did. He hoped that Ralph did not make an assumption from the reference to the girl, but he was not really worried. Ralph was a dumb kind of kid, no chip off Buddy’s block, taking rather after Naomi, whom Leo respected as wife and mother but who was no great shakes in the upstairs department.

Ralph ran the lawnmower around back and leaned the handle against the wall. He saw his father talking to Clarence inside the open garage, and entered.

“Hi, Clarence.” He ignored his father. It was locally customary never to greet your parents in public, since you resided with and were completely dependent upon them. The reverse was not true, however, at least not with Buddy, who was given to demonstrations of conspicuous affection and pride—back-slapping, hair-rumpling, etc., which he never did at home. (“C’mere, Ralph, and meet Mr. Plage, vice-president of the Building and Loan. Fred, I’m mighty proud of this boy.”) For some reason, Ralph rarely encountered his mother when out of the house, though she issued forth from time to time, walking to the grocery each day and sometimes taking the streetcar into the city for department-store sales, though generally returning home having purchased little.

Ralph was astonished now to hear Buddy say harshly, pointing towards the chain-link fence that separated his compound from the vacant lot in back: “Do you mind, Ralph?”

Ralph retired around the corner of the building, not at all hurt but puzzled as to what kind of confidential business his father would have with a colored man. Had Buddy been talking elbow-to-elbow with Leo or Jack, Ralph of course would have hung back for the green light.

Clarence on the other hand had assumed when Buddy approached him privately that his employer wanted a piece of dark meat, i.e., wanted to use him as pimp, and behind the mask of his broken nose and milky eye he secretly smirked, believing that, in the inevitable white way, Buddy was impotent and sought black therapy. Before the bout in which Mulvaney had knocked out half his vision, Clarence had seen, when they were getting into their jockstraps in the common dressing room, that his own tool was twice the size of the Irishman’s, which looked like a little chicken neck. Clarence knew nothing of Buddy’s cocksmanship and would not have believed in it whatever the evidence. Both white women Clarence had himself fucked told him that all men of their race were basically queer, and they should know, being whores.

Jack had brought the Ford phaeton around back for Clarence to Simoniz. This was to impress the purchaser. Actually Clarence would not begin to rub the body until the financing was arranged on Monday with a loan company from which Buddy got a kickback for steering the borrower to its door.

Clarence was rubbing the hood with his forefinger to gauge the depth of the road film when Buddy entered the garage. To do a good job with the Simoniz cleaner would take him an entire day. The buyer would probably show up after his shift let out, Monday afternoon, and expect to drive the car away. Either Clarence would not have finished or the automobile would be imperfectly cleaned and shined. Clarence, who had a sense of craft, constantly had to make decisions of this sort; and whatever the conclusion, he would be blamed, and for the same thing: being colored.

“Hey, Clarence,” Buddy said, a bit too loudly, and then lowered his voice for the subsequent remarks. He was not as cool about arranging a murder as he would have liked to be. He did not hate Naomi; he simply wanted to be rid of her. He would have preferred to press a button, causing her to disappear instantly.

“Hey, Clarence, what am I paying you?”

Clarence recognized this as rhetorical and did not answer. He had his dead eye on Buddy and the other angled to inspect Buddy’s two-toned shoes.

“Fifteen, I think, and I think you’ll admit that’s fair considering I didn’t turn you over to the police that time.” Buddy saw what Clarence was looking at. “These shoes set me back twelve dollars. How you like a pair? Sure you would,” said Buddy. “Be a big jitterbug.” He pressed the end of his nose as if it were a switch. “Tell you what I need. You supply me and you got yourself a pair of these shoes.”

When Clarence was not in his rubber boots he wore a pair of shoes that were cut open in places to ease his two corns and one bunion. He had no vanity about footgear. However he always carried a nice clean handkerchief in his back pocket. If he soiled it—which was seldom, because though his nose was broken it did not exude anything like the amount of snot of the typical white person with the inevitable sinus trouble—he luxuriously threw it away and bought another, encased in cellophane, for five cents at any drugstore, often to the visible amazement of the clerk. He now withdrew the latest and snorted dry into it. He knew how to play a nervous man like a fish.

Buddy said: “I see the idea appeals.” He would have preferred though that Clarence had finger-covered one nostril at a time while blowing the other onto the floor and then smeared the deposit glistening across the cement with the sole of his boot. He found no utility in Negro niceties. “I’ll make this short and sweet, Clarence. I’m looking for some bird with guts, for a little job I got in mind.”

Clarence began to suspect his easy assumption had been in error. Although he was disappointed, he was not a foolishly stubborn man. Thus he had promptly accepted the truth that Irish Mulvaney could outslug him. He extended his lower lip in deliberation and shifted his stance.

“Now I won’t mix you up with the details, which are kind of complicated. What I want is a guy who wouldn’t have to take much of a chance to earn a nice piece of money, a real nice piece in fact.” Buddy lowered his head and leaned towards Clarence’s chest, looking from the tops of his eyes past Clarence’s chin and as it were up into his flattened nostrils, Clarence having instinctively withdrawn his lip at the movement in his direction.

Clarence now spoke for the first time: “Money.”

“It makes the world go round,” Buddy said, reducing some of the intensity without diluting the earnestness. He straightened up.

“You don’t want to say how much,” Clarence stated.

“You know the kind of guy I mean.” Neither was Buddy’s a question.

Clarence scraped his boot. He was now figuring that Buddy wanted to start a fire that would burn up the cars for the insurance. A Jew had done that to his clothes store in Maywood, which was the proper name for the section known to whites as Darktown and to the colored population as the West Side. A number of people had lived in flats overhead as tenants of the Jew, among them a cousin of Clarence’s, and the Jew had got them out of there before setting the fire: which was reckless of him, because when the insurance inspectors came around afterwards and asked the people if they had seen anything unusual, Clarence’s cousin had said vengefully: “Just that Jew, carrying a can of gas at midnight.” The rooms upstairs had been overrun with rats and the corridor toilet was always full of shit owing to a defective flushing mechanism.

At this moment Ralph came around the corner, and Buddy sent him away. Next, Leo poked his head through the office door, saying accusingly: “There you are.” Buddy failed to acknowledge this statement, and Leo retreated.

“The way I’m thinking,” Clarence said suddenly, fixing Buddy with his good eye, “is
how much
leads to
who
.”

Buddy did not relish being eye-pinned by the likes of Clarence, whom in other circumstances he would have stared down. Now, though, it served his needs to be subtle. The less Clarence knew, the better. Once he got hold of the thug, he would conspire to keep Clarence in the dark: surely blood, black blood at that, was not thicker than money. In addition, he and the killer would be linked by murder. Thus he didn’t want a moron who could not understand the equation.

“Somebody tough,” Buddy said. “But somebody smart.” He meant colored-tough, because it would not take much courage to kill a woman; and darky-smart, which was to say capable of an animal shrewdness but not clever enough to match wits with the man who paid him.

“I hears the price going up,” said Clarence, who regarded himself as neither tough nor smart but rather
sensible
. The cousin who informed on the Jew was smart, and his ass was generally out.

Buddy had not intended to name a figure to Clarence, whose own fee after all was a pair of twelve-dollar shoes, but he now decided that the Negro was too stupid for jealousy.

“I wouldn’t mind letting go of a couple hundred for a real good job. One down and the other when it’s finished.”

Two hundred for the black man who burned the place down, and thousands for Buddy when the insurance was paid off: the usual white deal.

Clarence squinted. “A hundred for tough, and a hundred for smart.”

“You could say that.” Buddy was toeing the threshold of impatience now: he had no intention of being analyzed by the likes of Clarence, in whose last statement he detected a hint of mockery.

Clarence let him stew for a while, then said: “When?”

“Don’t you worry about that. You just bring me the individual, get your shoes, and forget about it. Keep your nose clean, Clarence. You don’t need any more trouble.”

This was the second reference of Buddy’s to the unsuccessful attempt to steal the car three years before, and it caused the ex-boxer to reflect that having something on another man was in itself a form of insurance. His cousin was a fool: he should have told the Jew, not the insurance people, about the midnight can of gas, threatening to tell
them
unless the Jew paid off. Yes, Clarence could see that now; but he was no happier for the realization.

“When?” he repeated. “When should I bring the individual?”

Mockery again, quoting Buddy’s very phraseology. However Buddy had let himself in for it by misinterpreting Clarence’s first “when,” which he had taken to mean
When must the deed be done
?

He tightened his nuts and said: “Soon as possible.”

“Tonight?”

He was strengthened by Clarence’s eagerness, having something to deny now. It was not the thought of murder that threatened Buddy: it was rather the need to ask another person for anything.

“No,” he said with satisfaction, then arbitrarily named a time: “Tomorrow, eleven
A.M.
”