Part 2 (1/2)

Sock number two was identical. All together there were twelve rolls.

There was sixty thousand dollars-in cash-in fifties-inside my little sax.

I backed away from the heap and collapsed onto the divan. This was too much. Too crazy ... even for me.

Only one person could have filled my stocking like that: Siggy. Also known as Officer Charlie Conlin.

While I was asleep, he was playing Santa Claus. And they killed him-those evil elves, or whoever. I wondered if he knew all along they were coming for him.

Why me? Why my poor little beaten up sax?

Any way you answered those unanswerables, it meant trouble.

I knew what I had to do. Gather up all that money and run as fast as I could to the local precinct, hand it over to the police ... to Detective Leman Sweet. Whom I wanted to see again like I wanted to be buried up to my neck and left to die in the desert.

Besides, he wouldn't believe a word I said. He'd say I murdered Sig for the money. Never mind that it didn't make sense for me to kill him and then turn around and surrender the loot. Leman Sweet would probably make it his life's work to see me hang for the killing. It was as though he and I were living proof of that popular babble about the enmity between black men and women. Circ.u.mstance ... history ... had made us instant, mortal enemies. There was nothing we could do about it. And it was very pathetic.

But maybe I was letting my imagination run rampant. Even somebody as out of control as Sweet had to do some logical thinking. After all, he was a detective. But, who knew? Who knew what someone like that would think or do? To be black and a cop, you've got to be pretty weird.

I needed help. Advice. A cool head. I had to speak to Aubrey.

Aubrey is my oldest friend. We grew up together, the children in the only two black families on a Spanish-speaking block in East Elmhurst, Queens.

I was smart. In fact, I was so smart that the papers wrote about me. I was one of those obnoxious child prodigies whose exploits are fillers for the Daily News. At seven I could add figures in the time it takes to light a match. I picked up languages in half a day. And I could play Misty in synch with Erroll Garner. The trouble was, all I wanted to do was dance. And I couldn't. And can't. To this day.

Aubrey was ... well, not smart. Dumb was the blunt, casually cruel word the kids used. Strange how she turned out to be so pulled together. While I tend to be in tatters a good once a day. Where did that child prodigy s.h.i.+t get me?

Anyway, the one thing Aubrey could do was dance. Man, could she dance. And she was going to teach me how to move. She was supposed to help me become this ravis.h.i.+ng, knockout irresistible, Folies Bergere fandancing, headdress wearing, Jo Baker clone. Forget it. I cannot move. And the closest I ever got to ravis.h.i.+ng the French was the day I stood on a chair in a cafe on the rue de Savoie and recited Rimbaud from memory. I was very drunk and showing my stuff in the company of this c.o.ke head academic from Toulouse.

Aubrey is still dancing. She is one of the bigger draws at Caesar's Go Go Emporium, which is exactly the kind of place it sounds like, located on a dirty street down where Chinatown meets hyper-hip Tribeca.

She performs topless-and d.a.m.n near bottomless-and usually clears more than a thousand dollars a week, about two hundred of which gets reported. Aubrey is one of the strongest women I know. She is also a beauty. I love her very much. And she ain't dumb.

She works all night and sleeps all afternoon. I felt bad about calling her, waking her, but I did and said I'd be over in forty minutes.

I stuffed the rolls of fifties back into the socks and the socks back into the sax and closed the case on the whole works.

I entered the gla.s.s-walled, opulent lobby of Aubrey's Upper Broadway building. I had been told that Reverend Ike, a you-can-get-yourself-a-million-dollars-if-you-send-me-twenty-bucks kind of sharpie, lived here with a large entourage. Occasionally one of the fatuous doormen, of which there were many, mistook me for one of the reverend's harem. It escaped me why Aubrey, who didn't hook, chose to live in a place where half the neighbors were turning tricks of one kind or another.

Up I went in the supersonic s.p.a.ce capsule. Aubrey was waiting in the doorway. How did a woman who kept such unG.o.dly hours manage to look so unpuffy? Her permed hair was tousled as if someone had arranged it that way for the camera. She turned that slow burning smile of hers up a notch when she saw me step off the elevator. She was wearing a long white silk thing and a pair of frou frou white mules-looking very much the star.

On those few occasions when I'm in the Emporium watching her dance, I see how much of a star she is. There's something so hard-edged about the other dancers. They've got dumb routines-fake s & m c.r.a.p or 1960s hippie fantasies with tie-dyed G-strings-or they just look like tired junkies.

But Aubrey is different. Commanding yet soft. Soft shoulders, soft, insinuating movements. I've heard the way the men take in their breath at the first sight of her toffee colored thighs. She is so quiet when she's up there. It seems to make them hush as well.

We told my mother that Aubrey is a cas.h.i.+er at a posh downtown restaurant. I have no idea whether Mom really bought that, but she behaves as if she has.

”G.o.d, Aubrey,” I began apologizing. ”I woke you up. Sorry, honey.”

”You in trouble?”

”Big trouble,” I said, closing the apartment door.

”The trouble?”

”No. Worse.”

”What's worse than being pregnant?”

”This,” I said, and I opened the sax case and pulled the rolls out of the socks and dumped them on her white leather sofa.

She picked up one of the wads, dazed. ”This is trouble?”

”Yeah.”

”Where'd it come from?”

”A dead guy.”

”He gave it to you?”

”In a way.”

”Before or after he was dead?”

”A little of both. He was a cop.”

”Get outta town, Nan.”

”No, I'm not kidding. He was under cover. He was working right near where I was playing yesterday. He said he was a musician.”

”What do Walter say about it all?”

”Nothing. Walter moved out a few days ago.”

”Good. That silly motherf.u.c.ker needed to move somewhere.” Aubrey walked into the kitchen then and came back with one of those plastic jugs of freshly squeezed orange juice and two gla.s.ses. She drank hers. I followed suit dutifully, hating it, and told her the story.

”So that's why I'm disturbing you, Aubrey. Help me figure out what to do?”

”Nothing to figure, Nan. You got sixty thousand dollars.”

”But what was a cop doing with sixty thousand in rolled up fifties?”

”Musta been working nights.” She laughed at her own joke. Then she said: ”Maybe if you read the paper once in a while ...” Her voice trailed off as she picked delicately through the cigarettes in the gla.s.s box on the coffee table.

”What paper? What are you talking about?”