Bump in the Night

By Ed Staskus


Bumpy Williams had a receding off-center chin and green eyes. They were a colorless shade of green. They were always dead set on the prize whenever he was doing a job of work. He rarely missed what he meant to see. When he saw it he tucked it away in the back of his mind. It was a sunny steamy day the last week of summer. He was on a job. The back of his mind was ready.
He was wearing a brown single-breasted jacket with brown pleated trousers, but his shoes were gaudy City Club two-lace two-tones. His face was what made him good at what he did. There was a jagged scar on one side of his chin. Nobody wanted to get caught staring at his crooked chin or the scar and nobody ever looked in the vicinity of his eyes, which when he was working had a one-dimensional look to them. Nobody wanted to ever get into a knife fight in a phone booth with him, where calling for help would always be too late.
There were those who couldn't even say whether he was a white or black man, even though he was a Negro. Some men and women avoided him, hugging the gutter side of the sidewalk. It was Thursday, a week before the end of summer, and he could hear Doris Day singing 'Whatever Will Be Will Be' on a car radio, the car's four windows wide open, easing down the street. White people are always down in the damned dumps, he thought. Little Richard had 'Rip It Up' and 'Ready Teddy' on the Billboard 100 chart. That was his kind of slippin' and slidin' music.
He had a dog-eared copy of All-Negro Comics in his back pocket. He had five dollars and change in his wallet, a 6-ounce stainless steel flask with a picture of a roller-skating chimp on it, and a Vest Pocket Colt .25 in a vest pocket. The small handgun was only good at close range, but it was better than nothing.
He stood still and looked at the four-story building on the other side of the street. Queen Stephanie's man had said the snooper worked on the second floor. A sign on the building said 'Duluc Detective' in green and white neon letters. He was at the right place. The building was one back from the corner of West 48th Street and 10th Avenue.
Bumpy looked into the parking lot behind him. This is going to be easy, he thought. He would put the glad hand on a car nearby, and park it in the lot where he could spy on the front door, keeping track of the comings and goings. A separate door on the side in plain sight led up to the private eye's office. There was a cobbler's shop and a barbershop on the ground floor and apartments on the top two floors.
He could see an oversized gold register and a line of shoeshine chairs with brass pedestals. The repair shop was probably in the basement. The heels of his two-tones needed repairing, but he didn't like the idea of leaving his shoes in Hell's Kitchen. Bumpy took his to Romeo's Shoe Repair in mid-town, in the garment district, off Seventh Avenue, even though there wasn't a Romeo anymore. Romeo was the man who opened the store in 1928 and sold it six years later to another man named Gaetano. He kept the sign, so he became the second Romeo, even though he wasn't a Romeo, and his son Marco became the third one.
There was a barbershop next to the show repair shop. It was the No Embarrassment Barber Shop. A sign said, 'Hair Cut Only 75 Cents.' The barbers were two Italian men. It was the kind of barber shop that didn't offer shaves, singes, shampoos, tonics, or scalp treatments. It only cut hair.
There were Poles, Greeks, and Irishmen in Hell's Kitchen. The cops were all Irish. There were Italians and Puerto Ricans. Everybody talked a foreign language. There were drivers, factory men, and longshoremen. There was stickball and stoopball on the streets. There were too many boys on scooters. There were too many girls in roller skates. There were too many tough kids. They didn't carry weapons though, no guns, no knives. They thought they were tough enough to fight natural, with their hands. He had gotten into a beef with one of them, not even shaving age, with unexpected hands like boxing gloves, fingers as thick as thumbs. He hit the boy in the face, and nothing happened, except the second finger on his own hand got the worse of it. He backed away, smelling trouble. His hurt finger was still bent, a year later.
When Stan Riddman walked past Bumpy, espresso in hand and biscotti in a bag, and went in the side door, Bumpy went looking for a car to steal. By the time Stan and Bettina were sitting opposite one another at Stan's desk, biscotti spread out on the torn open bag, espresso still hot, Stan's notes and Bettina's notebook at hand, Bumpy was back in the parking lot with somebody else's car. He would leave it behind when he left. He always did that. It would be cleaner than when he stole it, too. He didn't like spending all day in a dirty car, so he always tidied it up first thing.
Stan swept crumbs off his desk into the palm of his hand and shook them into the trashcan next to his desk. Sunshine poured in through the windows. Dust motes floated in the light. The cleaning lady was overdue.
"'He looked like an old dead tree lying in the brush,' was what one of Pollack's neighbors said," Stan said. "The man helped the police search the woods with a flashlight. 'There was a little blood run down from the forehead, no other damage except for the neck swollen like a balloon,'" he read from his notes. "I talked to the undertaker up there who handled Pollack and the dead girl. He said Pollack died of a compound fracture of the skull and the girl died of a broken neck."
"What do our friends the police think?" Bettina asked.
"They think he was a hell of an unhappy man, they think he had a hell of a lot to drink, and they think it was a hell of an accident. I talked to an Earl Finch up there. He was the patrolman on the scene."
"I knew he was dead from the look of him," Patrolman Finch said. "It was so dark up there I don't think I even covered him up."
"Oh, hell!" Dr. William Abel said when he was led to the body of Jackson Pollack and looked at his broken head. He didn't bother searching for a pulse. He put his Gladstone bag down and reached for a notepad.
The East Hampton police report noted that Patrolman Finch radioed back to the station at 10:30 PM. It was less than twenty minutes after the accident. "Two dead at scene of accident," was what he radioed. One girl was crushed by the upside down Oldsmobile, the other girl fractured her pelvis, and Jackson Pollack died of a head injury, was how the rest of the report put it.
Jackson Pollack was wearing "a black velvet shirt, gray pants, a brown belt, blue shorts, brown socks, no shoes, no jewelry, and no ID." Officer Finch knew who it was without having to look at the mangled face. He didn't have to sniff out footsteps. He knew the Oldsmobile as well as anybody, having ticketed it a half-dozen times.
"Who called in the accident?"
"Three or four people. One of the neighbors said he heard the car barreling down the road and told his wife, 'That fool isn't going to make the curve.' The other ones heard the car horn after the accident happened."
"After, not before?"
"Yeah, I guess the horn got stuck and started blowing and wouldn't stop."
"What bothered us was that horn blowing," said one of the neighbors. "We jumped in the car." They drove to the crash. "There wasn't anyone around, just this girl with her head toward that piled-in car and blood coming out of her scalp. We had to holler at her with the horn blaring."
"It sounds like a small town. What is Springs like?" Bettina asked.
"It's a small town," Stan said. "It's sort of a thumb of land stuck out into a bay, so there's water on three sides. There's a lot of land and scattered houses in the middle of nothing there. The locals call themselves Bonackers."
"I'm going to be a Bonacker same as you some day," Jackson Pollack declared to George Sid Miller one day, reaching for a beer at the Joe Loris bar in the East Hampton Hotel. "You live long enough you'll get 'er done," George Sid Miller said. "You only got to wait a hundred years and three or four generations." It was something he had been telling other barflies since he started drinking at Joe Loris. He never got tired of talking about it.
"Everybody says he drank phenomenal amounts of beer," Stan said. "They say it had been going on for about four years. Before that he'd been good, although he seems to have always drunk plenty. One of his neighbors said if he hadn't killed himself in that car, he would have killed himself with drink, sooner rather than later."
"How about the car? Did anybody check to see if it had been tampered with?"
"No, it was turned over, busted, and a wrecker hauled it away first thing. It wasn't the first car he had driven into a tree, either, He had a Caddy, did it about five years earlier. I talked to a Jim Brooks, one of his friends. He said, 'I expected him to kill himself in an automobile, and I knew he wanted not to do it alone.'''
"So, he was suicidal?"
"Not that anyone said so, but some of them said he was self-destructive. They seemed to think there was a difference. One guy at Jungle Pete's said Pollack was too much of a coward to kill himself."
"What is Jungle Pete's?" Bettina asked.
"A tavern, restaurant, and social club, all wrapped up in one dump. It's rough around the edges."
"He came to my restaurant every day for eggs and home fries, toast and coffee," said Nina Federico at Jungle Pete's. "He bought a second-hand bike and would come over evenings on the bike for beers. He didn't always get home on the bike, though."
"There's a married couple who live right there behind Jungle Pete's," Stan said. "Whenever Nina gave them the high sign they would take him home. The beer is a nickel. I spent some of my nickels there. The locals bring their kids in their pajamas, the kids fall asleep on the floor, and their parents dance and party all night."
"It sounds like a house party," Bettina said. "What was their house like there in Springs?"
"There was a lot of paint in a studio, a converted barn, it looked like to me, but you wouldn't know he was a famous artist by his house, even though I found out he was famous enough that the New York Times ran the story of his death on the front page."
"Did he have any problems in the neighborhood?"
"No real trouble, not that way. He seems to have had a soft spot for kids and dogs. Somebody said he had a pet crow for a while. One lady said he was an innocent, childlike person, except when he was in a car. Everybody had seen him falling down drunk, more than once. I talked to a doctor neighbor of his who said Pollack would put away two, three cases of beer when he was on a bender."
"He must have worn out a path to the toilet," Bettina said.
"Found Jackson Pollack outside on the sidewalk lying down," reported the East Hampton police blotter more than once. They propped him up on his bicycle and sent him home more than once. If he didn't get home they looked for him in the morning in ditches along the road.
"He could be mean, got into fights, broke his ankle just a few years ago fighting with some other artist, but I didn't talk to anybody who disliked him, although not everybody liked him. There were more people than not who felt sorry for him. I almost felt sorry for him by the time I left."
"Did anything look funny about the crash?" Bettina asked.
"Not to anybody up there," Stan said. "Not to me, either. They seemed surprised it happened but not surprised at the same time. It was like they had been making book on it happening."
Getting comfortable in his stolen car Bumpy Williams cracked open an All-Negro Comics and balanced it on the steering wheel. Ace Harlem was the private detective of the cover story and the bad guys were zoot-suited back alley muggers. He was planning on re-reading "Sugarfoot," which was about the traveling musicians Sugarfoot and Snake Oil on the prowl for a farmer's daughter.
He had brought a double-decker sandwich and a thermos of coffee with him. He peeled back the parchment paper the sandwich was wrapped in and spread it out on his lap. He poured a cup of coffee and put the cup on top of the dashboard. It was after two o'clock when he finished eating and flicking crumbs out of the car. "Remember - Crime Doesn't Pay, Kids!" Ace Harlem admonished on the back cover of the comic book. Bumpy folded it and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket.
"While you were re-discovering that Pollack drank like a fish and finding out what he was wearing when he died, I talked to the death-car girl," Bettina said. "Maybe everybody up in Springs expected or didn't expect something like that accident to happen, but she says it wasn't an accident. She says Jackson Pollack deliberately swerved off the road and accelerated into the oak tree he smashed into."
"She thinks he was committing suicide?"
"No," Bettina said. "She calls it his death-day."
"What's the difference?"
"At the moment he died I believe his soul came into my body," Ruth Kligman explained to Bettina. "When I was convalescing in the hospital, his spirit came and visited me. I'm like Cleopatra and he was like Marc Anthony. He was a very deep soul mate. The minute I met him I felt I had known him for years." The minute Ruth met Jackson they were off to the races. Only Ruth believed there would be a winner. Jackson Pollack knew there was poison in the gravy.
"He visited her?"
"His ghost."
"You don't believe any of that any more than I do, do you Betty?"
"No," she said. "But she was right there, and she believes he deliberately drove off the road."
"There were no skid marks, on or off the road, according to the police report," Stan said. "The police sergeant I talked to estimates he was going at least seventy when he hit the tree." The Oldsmobile fishtailed off the road almost two hundred feet through underbrush before colliding with the guts of the forest, pivoting, going end over, a hubcap rolling away, empty cans of Rheingold flying into the dark. Three of the cans landed upright in a staggered row, like three blind mice.
"If we take it for granted it wasn't an accident, and we take it for granted he wasn't trying to commit suicide, what do we have?" Stan asked.
"We have him driving into the tree on purpose, but not for any suicidal reason," Betty said.
"If that's what we have, that's crazy. Why would he do that?"
"We've got to go with whatever we have is what we have. Maybe somebody brainwashed him into doing it."
Stan gave it some thought. "If that's what we've got, then who would have done the brainwashing? Who had the means and opportunity to lead Jackson Pollack down that path? I can't see that getting done out there in Springs."
"Barney Newman told us he had been in and out of therapy for a long time," Bettina said. "We could start with his doctor. We know Pollack came into the city often, did business with his dealers, went drinking with his pals at the Cedar Tavern, and ran around with his girlfriend. I would expect his doctor to be here in the city if he's anywhere."
"All right, let's find out who he was, try to get a line on him."
"Does that mean me?"
"That's why you make the big bucks," Stan said.
"When did that happen?" Bettina asked.
At the end of the day, outside Stan's apartment, Bumpy found a phone booth and called in his day of watching the detective. "He didn't do nothing all day. He's got some girl, probably his office girl, and a Jew man came and went. Other than that, he was in the office all day and then went home. I didn't see a wife, but he's got a little girl. That's it, ain't no more. I'm gonna head to the barbershop, get a wig chop, maybe stop up at Joe Wells' for some fried chicken and waffles."
Wells' Restaurant, sometimes an eatery, sometimes a nightclub, was on Seventh Avenue between 132ndand 133rd. Bumpy Williams was from South Carolina but had grown up and still lived on 132nd Street. He lived on the top floor of a brownstone. Benta's Funeral Home was on both the first and parlor floors of the building.
"We like your looks," they said when they rented the rooms to him after the war. "The crow's nest is yours." He had lived there ever since, ever since 1946. He kept his rooms as neat as he kept stolen cars.
Benta's buried famous, infamous, and nobody Negro's. If you had plenty of dead presidents, you could order a gold, green, or red hearse, with a colored coffin to match. If you were short on folding money, George Benta made all the arrangements. Nobody was ever turned away. Everybody got to meet their maker with a modicum of dignity.
It wasn't that the funeral director was over generous. Going up the stairs one day Bumpy heard George behind him. "Don't forget to turn that hall light off when you turn in. My name is George Benta, not Thomas Edison." George wasn't a stingy man. He was a frugal man. Bumpy had no problem with that.
"Stop by the shop and we'll pay you for the day," the soft voice on the other end of the line said. "The Queen says it best we pay you by the day. She says there's something queer going on, so we'll keep it close. We maybe will need you again the next couple of days."
Queenie Johnson ran the numbers in Harlem. She was the uptown arm of Umberto "Albert" Anastasia's Italian Hand. Bumpy knew if he was doing work for her, he was doing work for them. That's where the money came from. "The Mad Hatter says there's no such thing as good money or bad money," Queenie said one day when they were smoking on a stoop after Bumpy had come back from making a delivery to her runners and controllers. "There's just money, is what Albert says."
Benta's had buried Alain Locke, a big-time Negro, two years ago. W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Johnson, and Paul Robeson's widow all came and paid their respects. Nobody could find a place to park. Nobody stayed over long. There wasn't enough standing room to stand. The stale air in the grieving chapel started to run out. Bumpy was standing at the front door with George after it was all over, and the casket coach was pulling away. George was in his work clothes, a long coat, pinstripes, and gray gloves. His wife, Pearl, was accompanying the funeral procession.
"Do you know that Alain Locke kept sperm samples from all his man lovers in a small box? One of them tried to slip it into the coffin. I slapped his hand away. I wouldn't touch that box, though, not on your life."
Bumpy looked down the street at the departing train of black cars, imagining them to be a line of wiggling sperm.
"You pay me what you said, I'll lean on a light pole every day of the week," he said to Queenie's man before hanging up. "I'll check with you in the morning. King Cole is supposed to be in town for that new TV show he's doing, and word is he might be singing it up at the supper club tonight."
Bumpy replaced the receiver, stuck two fingers into his mouth, and whistled up a cab.
"Harlem," he said, getting in beside the driver. He knew sitting up front was like going to an afternoon matinee and sitting next to the only other person at the movies, but he liked riding shotgun. He was looking forward to seeing a show tonight. His favorite summer show was the Bums at Ebbets Field. He and a friend liked sitting in the lower section along the third base line, except Bumpy's favorite place to park his behind was the concrete stairs between the seats. As soon as he could he sat there. The view was the best. There were never any fat heads or funny hats in front of him. Hardly anybody except the ushers complained. When they did he gave them a hard look with his indifferent green eyes.
"Big night tonight. Nat King Cole is in town."
"Never heard of him, pal," the cabbie said.
"When I perform it's like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories," Nat King Cole said before a show in Birmingham, Alabama.
It was five months since he had been attacked in Birmingham, during a show, when half-a-dozen white men jumped over the footlights and rushed him, grabbing his legs, wrenching his back, taking him down to the floor of the stage before the police were able to break up the melee and the baritone with perfect pitch was able to go back to telling fairy stories.
"Alabama is no place for immoral nigger rock and roll music," Willie Hinson said the next morning standing in front of the storefront office of the White Citizen's Council. He had a slight sunburn lighting up his freckles and was wearing a tie. Bumpy had heard it all before. He had already killed one white man. It had not been an accident. He thought he might have to kill another one someday, if not for any particular reason, then on principle alone.
Excerpted from "Cross Walk" at http://www.stanriddman.com.
Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com.

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"Cross Walk" by Ed Staskus

A Cold War Thriller

"Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC." Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction
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Late summer and early autumn, New York City, 1956. Stickball in the streets and the Mob on the make. President Eisenhower on his way to Ebbets Field for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. A Hell's Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

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