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 ravishing, knockout irresistible, Folies Bergere fandancing, headdress wearing, Jo Baker clone. Forget it. I cannot move. And the closest I ever got to ravishing 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 cashier 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?"

"The newspaper, girl. I remember seeing something in the Post a few weeks ago about the b.u.ms and the street musicians getting beat up in the subways. Paper said they gone be using decoys to try to catch whoever's doing it. That's probably what your friend was. One of the decoys. Pretending like he played a fiddle on the street."

"A sax," I corrected, "not a fiddle. And he seemed to know his stuff."

"Whatever. f.u.c.k what he played. If the other cops don't know about the cash, it's yours."

I don't know what Aubrey was reading on my face just then, but suddenly she stopped talking and regarded me with wariness.

"Nan, don't tell me," she finally said. "Don't tell me you gone give it to the police. Not after all the s.h.i.t I been hearing about Paris in the fall and what you wouldn't give to get back there ... Look, take that money and buy your ticket."

"But what about his wife and kids, Aubrey?"

"Do he have a wife and kids?"

"Well, he told me he had a woman-an old lady, he said. He must've meant his wife."

She shook her head in disgust.

"He said his lady had kicked him out," I continued. "I don't know if it was a woman he knew as part of his cover-or whether she was for real in his life. But if she was real, then why should it be me who ... I mean, she should get it."

"Get what?"

"The money, of course."

"We should all get some money, girlfriend."

I walked over to one of her windows and stared out. What a wonderful view! Out across the park and all the way east.

"He said he was desperately in love with me." I waited for her laugh, but I didn't hear it. "You think that's possible, Aubrey? You think he really wanted me to have that money?"

"Go to Paris, Nan."

"Come with me. I'll show it to you."

She waved me off derisively. As if the very idea of Aubrey Davis on foreign soil were preposterous.

I didn't say anything more about the money. Instead I went to the shelf and started rooting around in search of an Etta James ca.s.sette I felt like hearing. While I looked for it, I sang under my breath, mocking Aubrey, but in a friendly way: "When my soul was in the lost and found, you came along to claim it."

We had a grim joke when we were young. Rather than come out and admit she had been off with a man, Aubrey used to say she'd been down at the bus depot all night, waiting at the lost and found for her mother, who was sure to come back one day and inquire about her.

So, as far as Aubrey was concerned, it was simple-I should take the money and run. Not even run-saunter-to Paris. But then, Aubrey was pretty fearless. As for me, I may crave adventure, but things can scare me. And not just Leman Sweet. I was scared that one way or another those big fat rolls of fifty dollar bills were going to end up choking me. Even I am continually surprised at how close to the surface my sense of Christian guilt and terror remains.

No, I wasn't going to buy a ticket to Paris. Not yet. And no, I wasn't going to the police. Not yet. What I had to get started on first was finding little Mrs. Sig and all her poor children.

CHAPTER 4.

Rhythm-a-ning I might have gone a little overboard on the outfit that morning. What I was going for was street waif. But I ended up looking more like a parody of a young civil rights worker in the 1960s-and a male specimen at that. I was wearing my faded James Farmers with one strap safety pinned; my prototype Stokely Carmichael shades; a black cotton turtleneck; and lace up s.h.i.tkickers.

Sig, in his wisdom, had warned me that I'd never make any money in this spot. And sure enough, the breakfast in a bag crowd was once again pa.s.sing me by. Partly my fault, though: they must have thought I was nuts to be blowing Coltrane blues licks that early in the morning. Who the h.e.l.l wants to be moved into that kind of s.p.a.ce before they even get to the job?

But this time I wasn't out there for the money. I was there for Sig and Mrs. Sig-and for my conscience, which I call Ernestine. Because my do-your-liberated-s.h.i.t-but-later-pray-you-ain't-gonna-burn-in-h.e.l.l hypocrisy rates a dorky name like that. Kind of tough to be a wanton when four hundred years of history have been grooming you for that place on the church pew.

A kick from old Ernestine made me suddenly think of my mother. I think maybe she's a little put out that I haven't been calling her so often lately. But she doesn't get too mad, because at least her terminally quirky child is busy with honorable work. Teaching French lit at NYU. Or so Mom thinks, sitting out there in Queens. d.a.m.n, I've told a lot of lies to that woman in my lifetime ... little lies, big lies ... sometimes for next to no reason. And I've no f.u.c.king idea why I do it.

How did I come to be this compulsive liar? It must have started with that imagination of mine-the one Mom thought was so wonderful when I was little. The one that got me out of Elmhurst and took me to Paris. That always seems to land me in some new pot of soup no matter how sensibly I'm trying to comport myself.

Anyway, if the morning crowd thought I was nuts, they weren't far wrong. I was running the streets of Manhattan with sixty grand zippered into my overalls.

I circled like a Comanche that day. From Nineteenth Street on the south to Sixty-first Street on the north. From Park on the east side to Ninth Avenue on the west. Then back in the other direction. I was looking for street players. Looking for leads to Sig's lady friend.

And I found street players, in all their infinite variety. Jazz is hardly the only idiom of street music. I figured, however, that the kind of music they played was a lot less important than how they played it-outside, for tips. I thought there would be an automatic brotherhood among the various genres. So I talked to them all. Sax players. Violinists. Steel drummers. Flutists. Guitarists. Truth is, I had heard some pretty good stuff by the time I decided to knock off for a while. But I hadn't found a single musician who knew Sig or the Mrs.

After lunch, which was a sodden piece of microwaved spinach quiche I had at a coffee bar in midtown, I headed for Grand Central Station.

I made my way leisurely through the cavernous rotunda. It had been longer than I realized since I'd been in there. G.o.d, how the place had changed! The homeless and the all-purpose psychos, who had for a time transformed the terminal into a haven for lost souls, like something out of nineteenth century London, had disappeared. The station had been face-lifted within an inch of its life: murals restored, ceilings repainted, bra.s.s burnished and shining like new shoes. This was the deco era Grand Central of a high budget movie.

And then, as if to underscore the illusion, the music began.

A saxophone-and a very accomplished one indeed-was treating the crowds to Out of Nowhere. I followed the melody, the music growing louder as I neared its source. As soon as this guy finished playing, whoever he might turn out to be, I would start my rote interrogation-Hey, man, you play pretty. Know a white musician who calls himself Sig?

But that's where the screenplay took an unexpected turn. When I was a few feet away from the soloist, I saw that he wasn't alone. Nor was he your average street player. He was part of a combo of middle-aged men in uber conservative Brooks Brothers suits. On a folding table nearby they had set, not a hat for donations, but a briefcase, lid open, containing a couple of dozen copies of their latest CD. I looked at the sign next to the case, which listed each of their names and announced that this free lunchtime concert was being sponsored by the City Arts Council as a courtesy to the patrons at Grand Central Station-your basic quality of life innovation. The trio was well known to the so-called jazz cognoscenti. They played all the smart clubs uptown and were unerringly tasteful. No way would any of them know a scruffy guy like Sig.

I kept walking, past the tasteful strains of the next number, but threw a dented quarter into the briefcase, just to put a little s.h.i.t in the game. I headed down one of the long corridors toward the revolving door that let out onto Vanderbilt Avenue.

Two young black men sporting matted Rasta braids had set up a card table against the window of an empty store in the corridor. One was loudly touting the myriad wares spread out on the table top, at the same time keeping a wary eye out for the cops who might come along at any moment and roust them.

I made a hurried survey of the merchandise-the usual c.r.a.p: scarves, incense, factory second gym socks, ear m.u.f.fs, headbands, Afro picks, and so on.

"A m.u.f.flah for ya, Sweetart?" the cuter one of them pitched me. "Genuine mohair, sistah, keep you warm when I'm not than to do the job."

"How much?" I asked.

"Five."

"Genuine mohair, huh?"

"I look like a liar, mon?"

I chuckled, flirting a little. "No need to get into personalities."

He looked prepared to press his case, but I had stopped listening by then. A particular group of items displayed on a plaster replica of a human arm had suddenly captured all my attention.

"What are those?" I asked, pointing.

"For you lovely wrist, lady. Two fa each. Three fa five."