dark glasses over her sable eyes to complete the disguise leaving that she'd employed when they'd checked in down in the crowded lobby.
She comes to the bed, leans to kiss his forehead, says 'Promise me you'll go straight home after you drop off your friend and his lady ... I don't want some prowling floozie stealing a smidget of my sugar. Promise?'
He says, with an inanely serious face that overrides flippancy, 'I promise. But c'mon baby, you know I wouldn't give up your sugar to Lena Horne with a tommy gun.'
She laughs. 'I know that precious. And believe me, Clark Gable himself couldn't get into my pants with a blank cashier's check and Spanish Fly, forever lover mine.'
Unwittingly, her remark inflicts a fresh wound of paranoid jealousy and inferiority for he is convinced she's fantasized opening her black thighs to the castrating white king of Hollywood. They lightly kiss to preserve her make up before she leaves the room. He lies catatonically on the bed staring down at the roistering people on the street.
He is flayed by his central problem: How to divorce Zenobia and marry his socialite goddess, Marguerite. He thinks solution will be nearly impossible. Impossible not for his lies of new affluence, Marguerite he believes, will forgive him those. But impossible because Zenobia knows his twenty year secret and can condemn him, return him to a Georgia chain gang for life by dropping a nickel in the phone to the police.
Finally he hears Panther Cox and his girl giggling in the shower. Arthritic pain wobbles his knees as he leaves the bed and goes across the room to the clothes closet. A glance in the dresser mirror at his tortured face stoops him with despair and the full weight of his sixty years.
Several blocks away, Delphine's nightstand phone jangles Joe Junior from his drunken slumber. He stares at it groggily, glances at naked Delphine stirring feebly in deep intoxication. On the fourth ring, he knocks a dead soldier fifth of gin from the nightstand as he picks up.
He mumbles, 'Hello.'
He hears the rasp of the caller's breathing before he hangs up. Joe looks at two a.m. on the face of his watch.
He reaches to call Zenobia, decides he'd better try to slip in and cool her out at breakfast. He showers, feels the rash of Delphine's suck and bite bruises deliciously atingle. He remembers the sweet ferocity of her teeth gnashing, torso whiplashing, fake multiple orgasms under the womb stroking of his weapon. He feels himself, sees himself for the first time, the consummate lover, a sepia Apollo as he towels himself before an enchanted door mirror: Duped by Delphine's lather of flattery and spurious ecstasy, choreographed down to her every rapturous howl.
As he dresses, he gazes at her face, childlike in repose, impulsively tells himself he's in love. He studies the phone dial to memorize her number. He leans across the bed to kiss her lips, is swooned, for an instant, by the raw perfume of their love stew. He gazes at her as he backs from the bedroom. He leaves the apartment, makes sure the door is locked behind him.
He whistles as he goes down the hallway, sees a young guy in shabby sports clothes shred a note, then bang a fist against a door at the end of the hallway before he goes down the stairway. Joe glances at a metal plug sticking from the lock of the punched door. Joe passes the young guy sitting forlornly on the stoop as he leaves the building.
Whispering Slim ducks down in his puce and gold Cadillac parked across the street as Joe goes down the sidewalk toward Central Avenue for a dab. Slim leaves his car, strides across the street, passes Delphine's Continental, to the sidewalk in front of Delphine's building. He stares at the manager sign in a lighted front window. He goes past the young guy on the stoop into the vestibule, retraces back to the stoop.
'Hey Lil Bro, how you doing?' Slim inquires warmly as he leans into the troubled face of the youngster.
'Ain't doing no good ... my landprop plugged
Robert Chazz Chute, Holly Pop