A Rage in Harlem Read Online Free PDF Page A

putty-gray. He was as tired as though he’d been plowing rocks with a mule team.
    “You look beat,” the counterman said.
    “I feel low enough to be buried in whalebones, and they’re on the bottom of the sea,” he confessed.
    The counterman watched him gobble his doughnuts and gulp his coffee.
    “You must have got broke in that crap game.”
    “I did,” Jackson confessed.
    “Looks like it. They say a rich man can’t sleep, but a broke man can’t get enough to eat.”
    Jackson looked up at the clock on the wall and the clock said hurry-hurry. Mr. Clay came down from his living quarters at nine o’clock sharp. Jackson knew he’d have to be there with the moneyand find some way to slip it back into the safe when Mr. Clay opened it if he expected to get away with it.
    Imabelle could raise the money, but he hated to ask her. It meant she’d have to be dishonest. But the kind of trouble they were in now would make a rat eat red pepper.
    He went into the hotel lobby next door and telephoned his apartment.
    The Theresa lobby was dead at that hour save for a few working-johns who had to make eight o’clock time downtown, and were hurrying into the hotel grill for their morning grits and bacon.
    His landlady answered.
    “Is Imabelle come home?” he asked.
    “Your yallah woman is in jail where you ought to be too,” she answered evilly.
    “In jail? How come?”
    “Right after you phoned here last night a United States marshal brought her back here under arrest. He was looking for you too, Jackson, and if I’d knowed where you was I’d have told him. He wanted you both on a counterfeiting charge.”
    “A United States marshal? He had her under arrest? What’d he look like?”
    “He said you knew him.”
    “What did he do with Imabelle?”
    “He took her to jail, that’s what. And he confiscated her trunk and took that along in case he didn’t find you.”
    “Her trunk?” Jackson was so stunned he could barely speak. “He confiscated her trunk? And took it with him?”
    “He sure did, lover boy. And when he finds you –”
    “Good God! He confiscated her trunk? What did he say his name was?”
    “Don’t ask me no more questions, Jackson. I ain’t going to get myself in any trouble helping you to escape.”
    “You ain’t got a Christian bone inside of you,” he said, and slowly hung up the receiver.
    He stood sagging against the wall of the telephone booth. He felt as though he had stumbled into quicksand. Every time he struggled to get out, he went in deeper.
    He couldn’t figure out how the marshal managed to get hold of Imabelle’s trunk. How had he found out what was in it – unless hehad scared her enough to make her tell? And that meant she was in trouble.
    What made it so bad for Jackson was he didn’t know where to look for the marshal. He had no idea where the marshal had taken Imabelle. He didn’t believe the marshal had taken her to the federal jail because the marshal was out for all he could get. The marshal wouldn’t take her trunk down to the jail if he expected to get a cut for himself. But Jackson had no idea how to go about tracing him. And he didn’t know what he could do to save her trunk if he found the marshal.
    He stood on the empty sidewalk in front of the Theresa, trying to think of a way out. His face was knotted from mental effort. Finally he muttered to himself, “There ain’t no help for it.”
    He’d have to see his twin brother Goldy. Goldy knew everybody in Harlem.
    He didn’t know where Goldy lived, so he’d have to wait until noon when Goldy appeared on the street. He was afraid to loiter on the street himself. He didn’t have the price of a movie, although there was one in the block that opened at eight o’clock in the morning. But there was a professional building around the corner on 125th Street with a number of doctors’ offices.
    He went up on the second floor and sat in a doctor’s waiting room. The doctor hadn’t arrived, but there were