The sickness originated at Mam Lacey’s and tendriled out. The residential block had been inviting and tidy in the old days, stickball street with nice plantings. Now Lacey’s windows were smashed, the two buildings on either side had the same affliction, boarded up and depopulated, and the two buildings next to those looked sketchy. Carney frowned. “Urban blight” was right; it hopped from place to place like bedbugs.
“You come, too,” Pepper said. He waved Carney over as he peered into the dark windows of the basement apartment.
Gun it and split. Get the girls and split.
Pepper’d chase him down even if he was going fifty miles an hour.
Carney removed the key from the ignition.
The front room had smelled rank from cigarette and cigar smoke in the glory days, and from the cheap beer and rotgut soaked into the floorboards, but the stench now was another register of foul. The big fat couch where Carney used to sit with his drink and shake his head over the other patrons’ antics was split open and layered with revolting stains, the dark mirrors set into the walls were smashed, and the top of the oatmeal-crate bar was an altar of junkie worship. Blackened spoons, wadded paper, emptied cylinders. Two skinny men slept on the floor, soiled and raggedy. They didn’t stir when Pepper turned them over to check their faces.
“I used to come here,” Carney said.
“Used to be nice,” Pepper said.
Pepper led the way to the garden, past a small room filled with garbage, and the kitchen, where Mam Lacey had fried chicken all night. Only thing cooking in there these days was misery. Carney put his hands in his pockets so they wouldn’t touch anything. He breathed through his mouth and was glad when they stepped into the back, into the light again. The garden was overgrown and creepy. A tall statue of an angel was broken in half. Its legs stuck up out of a clutch of weeds, white wings pointing this way and that. Along the back wall there was a stone bench. A man slept on it, covered with a wool blanket despite the heat.
Pepper slapped the man awake. “Julius.”
The man stirred, unsurprised at the intrusion. Carney recognized him—Lacey’s son, the teenager who’d bussed the empty glasses and lit ladies’ cigarettes. Joyful and eager in the old days, like the customers’ kid brother who lived back home and oh-goshed over their city stories. In that near-noon light, he looked older than Carney.
“You wake up, Julius,” Pepper said. “I’m looking for your man Miami Joe.”
Julius sat up and patted his pockets after something. He squinted around the garden.
“I’m talking to you,” Pepper said.
Julius pulled the blanket around his shoulders and scowled. “I’m ‘unreliable,’ ” Julius said. The words were sour in his mouth; he ran his tongue over his teeth to rub away the taste. “He don’t let me come along no more.”
“I know that,” Pepper said. “I want to know where that nigger sleep.”
“Miami Joe’s too busy to sleep—” Pepper’s slap echoed in the backyards of 145th between Eighth and Seventh. A window opened a few buildings over, some bystander. Pepper didn’t even look. The window closed.
Carney remembered the boy as he had been not too long ago: gap-toothed and smiling. He said, “Do you have to?”
Pepper gave him a look—cold steel—and returned to Mam Lacey’s ne’er-do-well offspring. “Your mother ran a nice joint,” he said.
“I should have joined the navy,” Julius said.
His mother dies, Carney figured, Julius takes over the place and instead of listening to his customers’ tales of crime, he decides to participate. One thing leads to another. What of the rooms upstairs, the girls who used to work up there? What lived in the rooms now?
“Where’s he sleep?” Pepper said.
Julius said, “I asked him if he had anything cooking, and Joe said he wouldn’t take me along anymore if I was like this. Those were good times…” He trailed off. Then the back side of Pepper’s hand brought him to. “He’s in that flophouse on 136th and Eighth, the one with the old doctor’s sign out front. Third floor…” With that, he bunched one end of the blanket and made it into a pillow. Carney looked back as he and Pepper stepped back into the building. Julius was unconscious again, nestled into his narcotic hideaway.
Out on the street, Carney turned the ignition. “He was a happy kid.”
“Those the ones you have to look out for,” Pepper said. “They got a lot to catch up on if they start late.”
The old truck bucked as it always did, then they were in the street. Julius had inherited a building and an illicit bar, Carney this Ford truck. He didn’t see his father much once he got out of Queens College. Mike Carney had taken up with Gladys in Bed-Stuy and made Brooklyn his hunting ground. Carney was working in Blumstein’s furniture department and saving up his money in a sock in a boot under his bed. Saving up for what, he didn’t know.
Then the afternoon when Gladys came to the department store to tell him that his father had been killed by the cops. “There’s someone here to see you.” His father had broken into a pharmacy to steal a box of cough syrup, the strong stuff druggies were into.
“You still work here,” Gladys said.
“I’m working my way up,” Carney said. Last winter they gave him a shift in the Santa suit, a mark of Blumstein approval. The long-running Santa had taken to the bottle and they were teaching him a lesson. Can’t have people breathing rotgut on our customers’ kids.
“ ‘Working your way up’—that’s what he said.” Gladys was a full-figured Jamaican gal with a thick, honeyed accent. His father had always liked West Indian women. “Manhattan is an island, too, I figure, so we got a lot in common. Even if I don’t understand half of what they say.”
Carney couldn’t bring himself to ask Gladys for details. Cut down by police—it was how he suspected his father would exit this planet. By police or another crook. The day he picked up his father’s truck was the last time he saw Gladys. She threw herself wailing over the hood as if it were his coffin. Two guys from down the street had to pry her off.
Carney had the truck a whole year before he ran over a nail on Lenox Avenue. He went to get the spare in back. That’s how he found the money. Thirty thousand in cash. Spare-tire bank. If he’d sold the truck, he wouldn’t have found it. That was just like his father, to make him earn his down payment. Three months later Carney signed the lease for 125th Street.
* * *
* * *
Carney’s companion had his face zipped up in contentment, twisting to check the derrieres of neighborhood beauties and narrating their travels down the avenues. “That’s a good chicken spot,” Pepper said. “You ever eat there?” The blood on his jeans had dried to a dark smudge, oil or grime from a distance. Pepper rode shotgun, but he was in the driver’s seat.
Pepper said he wanted to stop for lunch at Jolly Chan’s for chop suey. The owner knew Pepper and gave them a table in the corner, by the window. There was a fish tank with greenish water over by the kitchen door. Something moved inside it. Red-and-orange dragons writhed on the wallpaper, roiling like clouds.
They didn’t speak much and Carney’s stomach was too sour to accept food. Pepper was preoccupied as well and only ate half his plate. He sat so he could watch the street.
“What made you want to sell couches?” Pepper said, poking at his food.
“I’m an entrepreneur.”
“Entrepreneur?” Pepper said the last part like manure. “That’s just a hustler who pays taxes.”
Carney explained that he got a tip about a furniture store that was going out of business. The previous tenant had lit out in the middle of the night. The rent was cheap. It was a steal. Carney was nervous, and babbling prevented contemplation of Pepper’s stony face. What was in the man’s head? Might as well talk to a sidewalk. Carney shared tidbits from his business-school classes about the logis
tics of taking over a failing venture. Maintaining or severing existing relationships with suppliers, how to avoid the assumption liabilities. The couch in the basement, for example. It was there, this inherited problem, and he’d had to figure out how to deal with it.
Pepper said, “Didn’t matter how it got there. What you care about it is how to take care of it. An ax is good. Fire and a match, too.”
Carney took a sip of water.
“Though I’ve been told I am too quick to reach for the gas can sometimes.” Pepper gestured for the check and poured ketchup over what he didn’t eat. “So Chan can’t serve it to the next guy.”
Pepper had a different kind of brain.
“Where are you from, man?” Carney asked.
“New Jersey,” Pepper said, as if it were the dumbest question he’d ever heard.
The cookies were stale and the fortunes discouraging.
The doctor’s sign outside the flophouse was gone; the two metal chains dangled on the metal brace. Carney joined Pepper without being asked. The front door was unlocked. The landlord, a white-haired gnome, swept up the front hallway. He looked away when he got a load of Pepper. By now Carney was accustomed to the effect the man had on people.
“Three,” Pepper said. The floors creaked all the way up. Like a giant had given the building a good shake and then set it down again, well-squeezed.
No one answered Pepper’s knock the first two times. “Yes?”
“It’s Pepper. And Carney.”
“Don’t know any Pepper. No salt, neither. You get on.”
It wasn’t Miami Joe’s voice. This guy sounded like he’d read a book once.
Pepper ran his finger along the doorframe, testing, then kicked it in.
Residents rented the room furnished, Carney supposed, from the hodgepodge of styles represented. The old Morgan couch from the 1930s, before the company went under for taking the fill from dirty old mattresses; the scuffed-up pine bureau; and the plywood coffee table that looked like it’d topple over if you put an ashtray on it. Flop here for weeks or months and then slide down to the next bleak escapade. Meanwhile the stained furniture circulated from room to room, that’ll be an extra two dollars a week for a bed if you need one, and if you want another lamp we can work that out, too.
The man in the room fit the profile, skinny-armed and potbellied, with thick black eyeglasses, at a loss before these strangers in his yellowed undershirt and drawers. “What’d you do that for?” he asked, pointing at the busted door.
“Looking for Miami Joe,” Pepper said.
“You got eyes—he ain’t here.” The man said his name was Jones and that he knew Miami Joe from Florida. He was here on a sales trip and Miami Joe said he could bunk on the floor. He wasn’t going to be around much, or so he told Jones.
“Selling what?” Pepper asked.
“If you’d let me show you—” Jones started for the suitcase at the foot of the bed. The bedsheet held the fuzzy, grimed silhouette of the human form.
Pepper had his pistol out. “He can do it.”
Carney popped the snaps on the battered blue suitcase. Jones’s merchandise was set in cushioned pockets, vials of dark-colored fluids. Carney held one up to the window, dust drifting in the sunlight: virile waters.
“Nice, right?” Jones said. He leaned against the beat-up bedside table, the surface of which was covered with brown cigarette burns that looked like a swarm of cockroaches. “I’m a purveyor of certified masculine tonics,” Jones continued, “whether your needs lie in the realm of marital duties or growing a beard.”
“Shoot, I got my own roots,” Pepper said.
Jones turned to Carney. “How about you, sir? I’m sure your wife would appreciate the new spring in your step. You heard of bedroom eyes? These will give you bedroom binoculars.”
Before Carney could answer, Jones reached for the top drawer of the bedside table. He reached inside and Pepper kicked it shut on his hand. Carney dropped Virile Waters and the vial bounced on the parquet floor but did not shatter. Only thing that broke were bones in Jones’s hand, from the sound of it. He lurched to the floor and howled.
Pepper pressed his boot on the salesman’s neck. He told Carney to check the drawer. There was a rusty hunting knife inside and some cards for a gentleman’s club in the Bronx.
“I don’t know who you niggers are,” Jones said. Without his glasses he looked like a mole. “Miami Joe hangs with some crazies.”
“When’s he coming back?” Carney asked.
“He ain’t—he moved out yesterday,” Jones said. “The room is paid up until the end of the month.”
“Where to?” Pepper said.
“He said he was homesick.”
“He went back to Miami?” Carney said.
“They don’t call that nigger Chicago Joe, nigger,” Jones said.
“What do you think?” Carney asked Pepper when they were back in the truck. There was a lump in his pocket. He’d swiped one of Jones’s potions at some point.
“Miami Joe’s up to something shady, no doubt,” Pepper said. “But did he take out Arthur, or did Chink do Arthur and then Miami Joe? All we know, he’s lying in Mount Morris Park.”
With his face cut off, Carney added. He didn’t care where the money and stones were. He wanted to know how well he was going to sleep that night.
Pepper decided. “No, it’s Miami Joe. He killed Arthur and took the money.”
“I have to get back,” Carney said.
“Sure.”
They drove two blocks in silence, then Pepper said, “You still got that thinking look.”
“What?”
“We met, way back,” Pepper said. “With your father at that old place you guys had on 127th. ‘The Montgomery’ carved out there on the front of the building. Sounded so fancy. Back then.”
They were at a stoplight behind a gasoline truck. “It wasn’t fancy,” Carney said.
“I said it sounded.”
“You knew him?”
“Big Mike Carney? You pulled jobs in Harlem, you knew Mike Carney. We pulled a lot of shit. He was good.”
“Good?”
“You kept the truck.”
“He left it.”
Pepper slapped the dashboard. “Still runs.”
Perhaps he’d ask about his father another time. This day he tried to imagine a young Pepper at the old apartment and wondered if he was one of the men who brought him toys, and if the cheap thing broke in his hands after five minutes, or ten.
EIGHT
Rusty was a law-abiding sort but had no love for its mortal representatives: sheriffs and deputies back home, cops and detectives up here. When the Klan burned down his father’s grocery store—the store drew a mixed clientele, and thus white business from Myrtle’s on Main Street—the sheriff said they might want to think twice about reopening. The sheriff spat tobacco juice into the ashes and looked bored. Probably his hand that splashed the gasoline. Rusty’s parents and sister relocated to Decatur, and Rusty picked up stakes to New York City. His mother had nicknamed him “Big Time” when he was a baby and when he stepped on the northbound Greyhound bus she said, “See, I told you.” The police ’round here were the same breed, but Harlem was so big and hectic Rusty figured they didn’t have time to hassle folks as much as they liked. Had to spread their hassle around, which suited Rusty fine. The detective who stopped in the furniture store that afternoon didn’t even have time for a proper bullying. He beat it for the door when Rusty informed him Carney was out.
* * *
* * *
“What did he want?” Carney asked. He’d returned to the office after dropping Pepper off and his mood was curdled.
Rusty gave Carney the detective’s card. Detective William Munson, 28th Precinct. Arthur had warned Carney that someone on Chink’s payroll would pay him a
visit. To probe about the Theresa, but this also could have concerned certain merchandise for sale. He had pushed his luck and now luck’s opposite pushed back.
“Did Freddie call?”
“No.”
Rusty added that he’d made a big sale that afternoon, but Carney didn’t hear. Carney closed the door to the office and brooded over his afternoon with Pepper, and other troubles, until closing time.
The apartment door caught on the chain—only Alma latched it when he was out—and he had to knock to be let into his own home. A crook in the morning and this lady at night. He waited. The strange couple next door had left a bag of something foul outside their door and the marks and grime in the hallways stood out more than usual. Sometimes the train rumble moved through steel struts and concrete and into the building and he felt it in his feet, like now. How had he subjected his wife and child to this place for all this time?
Alma regarded him through the crack for longer than he thought necessary, and that was the first thing.
“May fell asleep in your bed,” Alma said. Elizabeth bided her time until it was safe to sneak out, or else she’d fallen asleep, too. “I was just cleaning up.”
Carney tried to shake off his mood. He joined her in the kitchen and pitched in. Pot roast and peas for dinner. Carney and his mother-in-law stuck to their quadrants in the small kitchen, squeezing past each other and apologizing too much when they got too close. From her silence, Alma had something on her mind and was being uncharacteristically reticent about making it known. That was the second thing. Carney said, “It’s cooled off.”
“It’s so hot,” Alma said. She rubbed the big white serving dish with the red-and-white-checkered cloth. The dish was one of her wedding gifts to them. It was notched and chipped now, with black splinter lines.
Harlem Shuffle Page 9