Read Online Trick Baby by Iceberg Slim - Free Book Online Page B

He’s probably at a poker game.
    â€œIt’s after midnight. I called the Sutherland Hotel Lounge. Ray Charles is there, I think. She’d go a hundred miles to hear him. I got her paged. No dice.
    â€œThere’s a big dance in Robbins. She could be there. Anyway, I’m going to make one more call at three. I’m going to that Southside if she’s not home then. I have to know what’s wrong. Like I told you, I can’t leave without her.”
    I started to point out the obvious danger for him. But then I thought about the flaming passion I had felt for the Goddess.
    Perhaps if I were in Blue’s spot, and it were the Goddess over there, I’d be chump enough to risk my own life. I decided to soothe him. The odds were long against it, but maybe I could still get an angle later to persuade him to leave town and send for her.
    I said, “There’s nothing to worry about. I’m sure she’ll be there at three. If she’s not, you could slip to the Southside in Reverend’s truck. Or you could let Fixer find her for you. Wait until three like you said. No point in getting upset about the unknown. Only suckers do that.”
    He said, “I’m not the worrying kind. I just want to get her off the Southside before daybreak. I want to keep my promise to you, that we leave Chicago on schedule.”
    We lay there, two slick grifters at bay. We had a load of spending money. But it couldn’t buy us a clean bed.

6
TEARS FOR A LOST DRUM
    B ertha had stopped snoring. The tomb silence was broken by the rapid throbbing of a car engine. I could hear tires gnashing their rubber teeth against the gritty alley floor. The car screeched to a halt. The engine idled.
    Then I heard the faint thumping of a jazz drummer from the car’s radio playing counterpoint to the presto racing of my heartbeat. Was it Nino out there in the alley? Had he found some way to trace us?
    I sat up. I had started to swing my leg over the bunk rim. I was going to the window to look out on the alley. Then I sank back to the bunk in relief. The car throbbed away down the alley.
    For some strange reason, I couldn’t forget the sound of that drum. I wondered why. I tried to turn my mind from it. It was no use. Then I closed my eyes and let my mind grope back through the past. Perhaps it could make some kind of connection there.
    Then the painful reason why the sound of that drum was so insistent came in a blinding burst of chrome. The connection lay, not in a sound, but in pictures! On the screen behind my closed eyes, I saw once again that glittery, elusive drum. . . .
    I saw the featureless image of the blond giant striding through the hazy doorway. I felt again the transient, joyful fear in the pit of mystomach when the shadow hurled me into the air. He’d catch me and squeeze his cheek against mine.
    At his feet would be the drum. I heard Phala’s cries of happiness as she rushed into the visitor’s arms.
    I heard her soft sobbing moans behind her bedroom door. I saw me so lonely, amusing myself making faces in the gleaming trim of the drum.
    I felt an aching boulder of tension roll and tumble inside my chest when I saw me waking up the next morning. I rushed frantically through the apartment.
    I couldn’t find it anywhere! The drum! That mute, shiny drum was gone again.
    Phala tried to blink back her tears. I got in her lap and we bawled together, because the drum was gone. One day the drum did come and never came again.
    The pictures were becoming more vivid. Spinning on the reel of memory, back to Kansas City, Missouri. It was perhaps like the total recall that a dying man might experience.
    Shortly after the drum left for the last time, Phala’s loneliness and heartbreak became real to me.
    There were blond white men, many of them, in drunken succession. But no drum. They brought bottles, and far into the night I’d be awake listening to Phala’s wild sad laughter.
    I