The Conjure-Man Dies: A Harlem Mystery. Rudolph Fisher
out pop-eyed and beckoned to me. I went back with him—and there was Frimbo, jes’ like you found him. We didn’t even know he was over the river.’
‘Did he fall against anything and strike his head?’
‘No, suh, doc.’ Jinx became articulate. ‘He didn’t do nothin’ the whole time I was in there. Nothin’ but talk. He tol’ me who I was and what I wanted befo’ I could open my mouth. Well, I said that I knowed that much already and that I come to find out sump’m I didn’t know. Then he went on talkin’, tellin’ me plenty. He knowed his stuff all right. But all of a sudden he stopped talkin’ and mumbled sump’m ’bout not bein’ able to see. Seem like he got scared, and he say, “Frimbo, why don’t you see?” Then he didn’t say no more. He sound’ so funny I got scared myself and jumped up and grabbed that light and turned it on him—and there he was.’
‘M-m.’
Dr Archer, pursuing his examination, now indulged in what appeared to be a characteristic habit: he began to talk as he worked, to talk rather absently and wordily on a matter which at first seemed inapropos.
‘I,’ said he, ‘am an exceedingly curious fellow.’ Deftly, delicately, with half-closed eyes, he was manipulating his probe. ‘Questions are forever popping into my head. For example, which of you two gentlemen, if either, stands responsible for the expenses of medical attention in this unfortunate instance?’
‘Mean who go’n’ pay you?’
‘That,’ smiled the doctor, ‘makes it rather a bald question.’
Bubber grinned understandingly.
‘Well here’s one with hair on it, doc,’ he said. ‘Who got the medical attention?’
‘M-m,’ murmured the doctor. ‘I was afraid of that. Not,’ he added, ‘that I am moved by mercenary motives. Oh, not at all. But if I am not to be paid in the usual way, in coin of the realm, then of course I must derive my compensation in some other form of satisfaction. Which, after all, is the end of all our getting and spending, is it not?’
‘Oh, sho’,’ agreed Bubber.
‘Now this case’—the doctor dropped the gauze dressing into his bag—‘even robbed of its material promise, still bids well to feed my native curiosity—if not my cellular protoplasm. You follow me, of course?’
‘With my tongue hangin’ out,’ said Bubber.
But that part of his mind which was directing this discourse did not give rise to the puzzled expression on the physician’s lean, light-skinned countenance as he absently moistened another dressing with alcohol, wiped off his fingers and his probe, and stood up again.
‘We’d better notify the police,’ he said. ‘You men’—he looked at them again—‘you men call up the precinct.’
They promptly started for the door.
‘No—you don’t have to go out. The cops, you see’—he was almost confidential—‘the cops will want to question all of us. Mr Crouch has a phone back there. Use that.’
They exchanged glances but obeyed.
‘I’ll be thinking over my findings.’
Through the next room they scuffled and into the back of the long first-floor suite. There they abruptly came to a halt and again looked at each other, but now for an entirely different reason. Along one side of this room, hidden from view until their entrance, stretched a long narrow table draped with a white sheet that covered an unmistakably human form. There was not much light. The two young men stood quite still.
‘Seem like it’s—occupied,’ murmured Bubber.
‘Another one,’ mumbled Jinx.
‘Where’s the phone?’
‘Don’t ask me. I got both eyes full.’
‘There ’tis—on that desk. Go on—use it.’
‘Use it yo’ own black self,’ suggested Jinx. ‘I’m goin’ back.’
‘No you ain’t. Come on. We use it together.’
‘All right. But if that whosis says “Howdy” tell it I said “Goo’by.”’
‘And where the hell you think I’ll be if it says “Howdy”?’
‘What a place to have a telephone!’
‘Step on it, slow motion.’
‘Hello!—Hello!’ Bubber rattled the hook. ‘Hey operator! Operator!’
‘My Gawd,’ said Jinx, ‘is the phone dead too?’
‘Operator—gimme the station—quick … Pennsylvania? No ma’am—New York—Harlem—listen, lady, not railroad. Police. Please, ma’am … Hello—hey—send a flock o’ cops around here—Frimbo’s—the fortune teller’s—yea—Thirteen West 130th—yea—somebody done put that thing on him! … Yea—O.K.’
Hurriedly they returned to the front room where Dr Archer was pacing back and forth, his hands thrust into his pockets, his brow pleated into troubled furrows.
‘They say hold everything, doc. Be right over.’
‘Good.’ The doctor went on pacing.
Jinx and Bubber surveyed the recumbent form. Said Bubber, ‘If he could keep folks from dyin’, how come he didn’t keep hisself from it?’
‘Reckon he didn’t have time to put no spell on hisself,’ Jinx surmised.
‘No,’ returned Bubber grimly. ‘But somebody else had time to put one on him. I knowed sump’m was comin’. I told you. First time I seen death on the moon since I been grown. And they’s two mo’ yet.’
‘How you reckon it happened?’
‘You askin’ me?’ Bubber said. ‘You was closer to him than I was.’
‘It was plumb dark all around. Somebody could’a’ snook up behind him and crowned him while he was talkin’ to me. But I didn’t hear a sound. Say—I better catch air. This thing’s puttin’ me on the well-known spot, ain’t it?’
‘All right, dumbo. Run away and prove you done it. Wouldn’t that be a bright move?’
Dr Archer said, ‘The wisest thing for you men to do is stay here and help solve this puzzle. You’d be called in anyway—you found the body, you see. Running away looks as if you were—well—running away.’
‘What’d I tell you?’ said Bubber.
‘All right,’ growled Jinx. ‘But I can’t see how they could blame anybody for runnin’ away from this place. Graveyard’s a playground side o’ this.’
OF the ten Negro members of Harlem’s police force to be promoted from the rank of patrolman to that of detective, Perry Dart was one of the first. As if the city administration had wished to leave no doubt in the public mind as to its intention in the matter, they had chosen, in him, a man who could not have been under any circumstances mistaken for aught but a Negro; or perhaps, as Dart’s intimates insisted, they had chosen him because his generously pigmented skin rendered him invisible in the dark, a conceivably great advantage to a detective who did most of his work at night. In any case, the somber hue of his integument in no wise reflected the complexion of his brain, which was bright, alert, and practical within such territory as it embraced. He was a Manhattanite by birth, had come up through the public schools, distinguished himself in athletics at the high school he attended, and, having himself grown up with the black colony, knew Harlem from lowest dive to loftiest temple.