Black Orchid Blues Read online

  “The police must be on their way. They’ll be looking for us.”

  “This is the last place they’d think to come. You didn’t even expect me to bring you here, and you’re a hell of a lot smarter than those Keystone Cops.” He turned on the faucet. “Rinse out your mouth. I can’t stand sour breath.”

  CHAPTER 42

  He forced me up the stairs to the third floor. There were two bedrooms to the rear, roughly the same size. Queenie entered one that functioned as a walk-in closet. Racks of women’s clothes everywhere. Large women’s clothes—big enough to fit a man. And a closet with shelves of oversized women’s shoes and a drawer full of lacy man-sized undies. On the far wall was a vanity with a mirror and a spread of expensive makeup, hairbrushes, and wigs.

  “This was my little hideaway,” Queenie said, completing the tour. “I’ve got some fine stuff here. Look at this.” He rifled through the racks.

  The outfits appeared to come from the shops of some of the world’s finest designers. Dresses, furs, feather boas. Glittering, sequined, red, silver, and gold.

  He pushed aside a glittering burgundy gown to reveal a smart chestnut tweed traveling suit. His eyes lit up and he smiled. “Perfect!” He glanced at me, at my dirty face, torn costume, and disheveled hair. “Go clean yourself up. Use the bathroom down the hall.” He saw an idea enter my eyes and it made him laugh. “You’re not that stupid, are you? But if you do try to make a break for it, you’ll be dead quicker than you can blink. Got me?”

  I got it. I started down the hall.

  “Hold on.” He went to the adjacent bedroom. He hummed to himself, happily, and returned with a second outfit, a well-cut charcoal wool suit. He held it up for me to see. “This was Sheila’s. Her size looks about right.”

  “You don’t actually expect me to wear that.”

  “Why not? She can’t use it anymore.”

  “No.” I backed away.

  He forced the suit against my chest and pressed the gun to my temple. “You don’t seem to understand. You can’t travel with me the way you’re dressed. People would notice, ask questions. So take the damn dress, or I’ll drop you here and now.”

  I took it. His eyes felt like hot coals on my back as I headed down the hall. I thought of Sam lying in his hospital bed. I thought about getting back to him. About how I wanted that more than anything else in the world.

  I thought about Sheila, about how she’d loved Junior and been so desperate to save him. Then I thought about how the last thing she saw was a gun pressed against her forehead—her husband’s face behind it.

  Hunting Queenie or saving Junior?

  At any given time, which was I doing? Was it possible to do both? At the moment, I was doing neither. I was simply trying to stay alive.

  After I returned wearing Sheila’s clothes, I found that Queenie had also changed outfits. He’d donned a fresh wig and a big, floppy hat that hid most of his face. He looked sharp. He looked ready.

  “You look like shit,” he said. He had me sit at the vanity, then retouched my makeup. As he bent over me, deftly applying eyeliner and mascara, he said, “You really do have beautiful eyes, you know. You should build them up more.”

  I said nothing, just tried to make myself invisible. He hadn’t washed up and stank of sweat, dust, cordite, and a very generous douse of Chanel No. 5.

  Minutes later, he was done. “Open your eyes, girl.”

  He’d heavily applied kohl to my eyes. They appeared larger and darker and more mysterious. My lips were lush and ripe, like cherries. I felt like a stranger.

  “You like it, don’t you?” he said. “This is how you should do your makeup every day.”

  Was I really sitting in a house with a stone-cold killer, wearing his dead wife’s clothes, doing makeup and swapping beauty tips, with the slaughtered remains of his parents one floor below?

  He fussed over my hair and outfit and made me try on various pairs of Sheila’s shoes. All the time I watched him, attempting to understand.

  “Do you see yourself as a real woman?” I asked. My own question surprised me. From the look on Queenie’s face, it surprised him too, but apparently for different reasons. To him, the answer was obvious.

  “Hell yeah! I’ve got the parts, sister.” At the look on my face, he smiled. “Didn’t expect that, did you? But yes, I’ve got it all.”

  I was stunned. “You have what?”

  “You heard me. When it comes to that, I have more riches than man or woman could dream of.”

  “But how is that possible?”

  “You want me to show you?” He took a step back, made to raise his skirt.

  I shook my head, alarmed. “No—no!”

  “Why not? It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “I just … I’ve heard of it, but I never thought …”

  “Never thought it could be real? Well, it is. I’m one in a million.”

  “Is this why Mrs. Bernard dressed you up as a girl when you were little? Is this why she called you Janie?”

  “Oh, so you heard about that.”

  Things were beginning to make sense now. I had not been able to figure out why Mrs. Bernard dressed her boy up as a girl. But if he were indeed as much a she as a he, then …

  But that still didn’t explain how Junior ended up with two distinct personalities, nor did it explain Queenie’s rabid hatred of the Bernards.

  Obviously, something had gone very wrong.

  “Hey, don’t feel sorry for me,” Queenie said, studying my face. “Cause I have had my fun and then some. Being double-sexed is not the problem.”

  “Then what is?”

  “It’s not the body, it’s who I have to share it with. His body. His parents.” He motioned toward the stairway. “Those sacks of shit downstairs? They weren’t my mama and daddy—they were his parents.”

  Okay, but if he rejected the Bernards as his biological parents, then how did he rationalize his existence? Or did reason count for nothing with him?

  He stopped brushing my hair and beamed down at me. “I’m so proud.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of the fact that you’re interested in my etiology.”

  I gave him a look.

  He laughed. “Did you hear that? I used a college-boy word. Etiology. You know what it means?”

  “Means origins.” To be more specific, it means the origins of a disease or disorder. But I wasn’t about to tell Queenie that.

  “Yeah, of course you’d know the meaning,” he said. “You’re a smart lady, real knowledgeable. Wonder how I knew to use it?”

  “Being stuck in Junior’s head like that, I guess it has certain advantages.”

  “Yeah, it does, don’t it? One of them being that I know what he’s thinking—”

  “But he doesn’t know what you’re thinking.”

  “Exactly.” He started brushing my hair again. “That dumbass thought he could trick me out with this kidnapping scheme. Thought he could pull it off without me. That all he had to do was show some gumption and I’d disappear.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

  “So you took over.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  I didn’t believe him. I knew next to nothing about Queenie’s special brand of sickness, but I did know that he was a liar. I couldn’t trust anything he said, not about himself or his power over Junior, and certainly not about his plans to let me live.

  Queenie set the brush aside and regarded my hairstyle with satisfaction. “Let’s just say I gave Junior’s plan some direction, and now I’m giving you yours.”

  CHAPTER 43

  We slipped back out into the night, carrying food and water in a large carpetbag. It felt as though we’d been in the house for an eternity, but according to my watch, less than fifteen minutes had gone by.

  I had kept hoping that Blackie and his men would arrive. But why should they? He would have expected Queenie to drive straight out of town, or to go underground in some out-of-the-way place. Queenie’s dec
ision to head back to Strivers’ only seemed obvious to me now because that’s where I’d been taken.

  My other hope had been that Mrs. Cardigan would see something suspicious and call the police. But Queenie had made sure we came in through the back way, and it was highly unlikely that Mrs. Cardigan or any other neighbor would’ve been looking out there at that time of night. Even if they had, what would they have seen? There were no lights in the alleyway, and Queenie had made me navigate without headlights. His decision to return to Strivers’ was arrogant and risky, but apparently it was smart too. He now instructed me to head uptown to 145th Street.

  “You know who I’m thinking about?” he asked as I drove.

  “No, who?”

  “Luther Boddy.”

  Well, that explained the hat. Boddy was a twenty-two-year-old boot-black and ex-con. He was a police favorite, of sorts. The coppers used to like to pick him up for “routine questioning.” They’d beat him with a lead pipe covered in a rubber hose. Beat him so bad, he’d have to stay in bed for days to recover.

  One day in January of ’22, two detectives approached him for questioning. A patrolman had been shot a few days before. The detectives picked Boddy up at a school just a block from the West 135th Street station and across the street from the Chronicle. They started to walk him over and he panicked. Pulled a pistol from his sleeve and shot them both. As he’d later testify, he simply wasn’t going to let himself be beaten again.

  The killings unleashed one of the largest, most sensational manhunts in New York City’s history. Within hours, hundreds of heavily armed cops hit the streets, scouring Harlem. Their orders were to bring him in. Many said they were ready to kill him on sight.

  Boddy moved fast. He got out of Harlem. The next sighting was in Hell’s Kitchen. By the time the cops got word of it, he was gone. He found shelter for a day and a night at his mother’s house in New Jersey. His own brother ratted him out. But by then, Boddy was in the wind. He’d dressed himself in women’s clothes—large, floppy hat included—and set out for Pennsylvania.

  Forty thousand cops were after him. Even so, he made it all the way to Philadelphia. He did it partly on foot and partly by commandeering a taxi cab. He didn’t do it in style, but he did it. Philly, however, was as far as he got.

  “They caught him,” I said.

  “Yes, they did,” Queenie said softly. For a moment, he was still. Then he added, “But they’re not getting me.”

  Despite the renewed determination in his voice, Queenie’s reference to Luther Boddy was telling. Boddy had killed two cops. Queenie had killed at least one, probably more with those grenades. Then there were the club patrons and Olmo and Sheila. If the NYPD had sent hundreds, then thousands, of cops after Boddy, how many would they send after Queenie?

  By the time Boddy had been caught, convicted, and electrocuted, he’d become a folk hero, a martyr to police brutality. Some thirty thousand people came to view his remains at a funeral home in Harlem. Thousands more lined the streets to watch his hearse move slowly down Seventh Avenue.

  Did Queenie think that people would feel the same way about him? It was highly unlikely, but even if for some reason they did, would it matter? Folk hero status didn’t save Boddy. Some might say it even hurt him. The powers that be didn’t want people admiring a cop killer, so they put an end to him, quick.

  Queenie had picked up another handgun in the house. He had me drive to a used-car lot on East 145th. No one seemed to be on duty.

  “No guard?” I asked.

  “Why do you think I chose this one?”

  I was soon back behind the wheel, this time of a Model T Ford. The keys had been waiting in the car.

  “You bribed the guard?”

  “Hell no.” Queenie was insulted. “I bribed the owner.”

  All right. “Where are we headed?”

  “Canada.”

  If he’d said Mars, I wouldn’t have been more surprised.

  He gave me dull smile. “What? You don’t like Canada?”

  “Honestly, I never thought about it.”

  “Well, it’s about time you did, cause that’s where we’re headed. To St. Catherines, in Ontario.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “It’s where Harriet chose to settle down.”

  I thought better of asking who Harriet was.

  I headed west on 145th before turning north on Broadway. He kept the gun in his lap, invisible to the casual eye, but clearly trained on my midsection.

  “I hope you have the safety on,” I said.

  For some reason, he thought that was funny. “Well, I don’t want to lose you, Slim, not before my story’s told. On the other hand, I’d urge you to avoid any bumps in the road, or sudden shifts in direction, if you know what I mean.”

  He sank lower in the seat and we continued in silence, sweeping up Broadway. The lights of stores on both sides flowed past. At 181st Street, I turned left to head over to the Washington Heights Bridge.

  “Whoa! Slow down a minute,” Queenie said. The entrance to the bridge was a scene of flashing red lights. “Cops all over the place,” he muttered with disgust. “Cut the headlights and back up. Do it real slow.”

  I retreated to Broadway, then swung the car around to face north again. The whole time, my heart was in my throat. If the cops saw us and recognized Queenie, one of them might open fire.

  But none of them seemed to have noticed anything. They were too busy searching the cars that were already at the bridge. Furthermore, at this distance, under the cover of night, a black car with no headlights was virtually invisible.

  “What next?” I asked.

  “Let me think, just keep driving.”

  I headed up Broadway. At this rate, we would soon reach the northern tip of the island. “Manhattan’s not that long,” I said, “and there aren’t too many ways to get off it.”

  “Shut up.”

  “They’re going to have people at every bridge, every tunnel.”

  “Shut up, I said, and let me think.”

  I piped down. One way or another, this whole thing would end soon. Part of me wanted it over; but another part wanted more time with the Black Orchid, quiet time, when I could get his story, when I could maybe even reach Junior, actually meet him. Theoretically, I could do all that once Queenie was captured. Only I didn’t feel that he would ever let himself be caged. Something told me he’d rather die than be taken prisoner, and that one way or another, this would be my last chance to learn his secrets.

  Then my thoughts turned to Sam. Maybe he was awake by now. I hoped with all my heart that he was awake, that he would be okay. I wanted to talk to him, hold him, and be held by him.

  But how? Did I actually believe that the Black Orchid would set me free? He wanted immortality and he thought I could give it to him; it was his reason for keeping me alive. But he was moody and paranoid. He could change his mind at the toss of a dime. Maybe, eventually, he’d fall asleep. That would be my chance. I’d outlast him. He’d fall asleep and I’d be gone.

  Broadway turned into Route 9, and we eventually crossed into the Bronx.

  “This is good,” Queenie said. “Real good.” He frowned and sat up suddenly. “What were you doing taking me over to that bridge, anyway? We didn’t need to go over that bridge. Just drive north and we’ll hit Canada.”

  “But if you want to get to St. Catherines, you head west first.”

  “Really?” He chewed that over, then shook his head. “I don’t think so. You’re trying to screw me, aren’t you, Slim? Everybody knows that Canada’s north. It’s north, damnit! So, you just take this heap up, keep on driving till we get there.”

  A three-quarter moon hung in the sky. As we put more distance behind us, Queenie became festive, humming to himself and sometimes breaking out in song. At one point, he twisted round to watch Manhattan’s receding skyline, then turned back, pumped one fist in the air, and let out a shout. “Look out, Canada! Here I come!”

  I threw him a curious
glance. “Why Canada?”

  He looked at me as though I were a simpleton. “I told you, Canada’s where Harriet went.”

  “Harriet who?”

  “Harriet Tubman! Who else?” He smiled and slapped his thigh. “Yeah, if it’s good enough for Harriet, then it’s good enough for me.”

  Stunned, I remained silent.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “What’s that?”

  “That Harriet and I don’t have a damn thing in common, other than the color of our skin.”

  I cleared my throat. “The thought crossed my mind.”

  “Well, you’re wrong. Harriet and I are very much alike. Harriet, you see, was born into slavery. I was also born under the whip, only my masters were black. And because they could call themselves my parents, no one cared or noticed what they did to me.”

  The tone was petulant, the comparison a stretch, but it was interesting. “Go on.”

  “She too fought for her freedom. She struggled to find that place where she could be herself, with no one to lord it over her. That’s what I’m doing, seeking my own way.”

  How many times had he practiced that little speech?

  “But Queenie,” I cut in, “Harriet Tubman risked her life to save people. She led slaves to freedom. She never killed anyone.”

  “But she threatened to. That bitch was fierce. She told those runaway motherfuckers that if one of them tried to turn back, she’d kill him dead.”

  “That was to guarantee everyone’s safety.”

  “It doesn’t matter why she said it; it just matters that she did. Harriet was a determined woman, just like me. She was ready to do what had to be done. If that meant putting somebody down, then so be it.”

  Nobody ever accused Queenie of being subtle. I took his last words as the threat they were meant to be, and went back to driving. We had a long road ahead of us. The drive to Canada meant passing through Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and beyond. We’d be nowhere near St. Catherines if we got that far north. But with each passing mile, the chances of Queenie being captured decreased. He was sure of that, and so was I.