Harlem Shuffle

by Colson Whitehead

  That was it, except for a twice-weekly rendezvous with a hooker named Miss Laura who worked out of a floor-through at Convent and 141st. Once Pepper got Duke’s schedule down, Carney put him on the girl.

  “Yeah, but what do you want me to do to the banker?” Pepper asked. He was at a pay phone in the lobby of the Maharaja Theater on 145th and Broadway. Currently on the marquee: Doctor Blood’s Coffin and Creature from the Haunted Sea. It had been a glamorous vaudeville house back in the day. Now its most prominent virtues were the bank of pay phones in the lobby and the dark auditorium beyond. A convenient venue for freelance individuals in which to conduct business.

  “Nothing,” Carney said. “Just watch the lady on Convent.”

  Lady. “Someone else is taking the banker out?”

  “No. I’m getting the lay of the land.”

  Pepper hung up, opened the phone-booth door. The light went out. The Maharaja had gotten run-down lately, now that he looked at it. This time of day the lobby was mostly junkies and hookers. Pushers and johns. Anyone in the auditorium was either getting sucked off, sucking off, or tying off, cinematic triumph of Doctor Blood’s Coffin or no Doctor Blood’s Coffin.

  Did he have to find another place? Or was everywhere like this now—shabby and sad and dangerous? Last time Pepper was here he observed two gray rats fucking in the popcorn, rutting in that greasy yellow case. Maybe he should have heeded that sign.

  The phones still worked and there was never a line. He’d be back.

  Pepper adopted a regular table at the Big Apple Diner, a better-than-average uptown hash joint on Convent. Good grub, the waitresses were nice, with a view of 288. He wasn’t surprised when the pimp showed up for the trick money and it turned out to be Cheap Brucie.

  Cheap Brucie was the kind of cat who set up his girls in apartments, with regulars. He’d been plying that particular trade a long time, since before Pepper returned from the Pacific theater. The man was ageless; his women put on miles quick. Pepper’d heard more than one story about him dumping bodies in Mount Morris. Six years ago he saw Cheap Brucie cut one of his women across the face, three a.m. at the Hi Tempo Lounge. Unzipped her cheek. One of those long nights that would’ve gone longer if not for that shriek. Sobered you up quick.

  Miss Laura had a couple of appointments a day. Her johns brought her things he watched her shove into the garbage cans later: big bouquets of flowers, red boxes of candy from Emilio’s. The ones getting their ashes hauled twice a week, like Duke, tended to be better-dressed. The better they dressed, the emptier the hands.

  Sometimes Miss Laura stuck her head out the third-floor window to watch them walk away, wearing an expression of incandescent rage that made Pepper stare into his coffee.

  * * *

  * * *

  In early July, Pepper dropped by the furniture store. Marie clocked him as he crossed the showroom. He nodded at her and she turned away, startled by his stolid affect.

  Carney flipped the blinds in his office. He looked thinner, or off, like he hadn’t had a proper sleep.

  “Nice safe,” Pepper said.

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Apart from how small it is?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s an Ellsworth, and I’m always happy to see an Ellsworth. But you don’t want to own a safe that makes a thief happy.”

  That set Carney sulking for the rest of the meeting. “I went by her place on Convent, sat in the diner,” he said. “Duke’s visits, it all checked out.”

  “Course it did,” Pepper said. “You think I make shit up?”

  He paid Pepper for his work and said there was a new person for him to look at—Biz Dixon. “He’s a friend of my cousin Freddie.”

  Pepper shrugged.

  “We grew up together,” Carney added.

  Pepper was acquainted with Biz Dixon and had a low opinion. He was part of this new breed of Harlem hood: hotheaded, feral, ever-trifling. A couple of years back, Corky Bell hired Pepper for security at the big poker game he ran every January the weekend after New Year’s. Corky Bell liked to have some straights at the table, and you couldn’t get them to come if they’re going to be menaced by lowlifes. It was a three-day game, an effortless gig, everyone behaving, except for the year Biz Dixon showed up.

  Corky hired the Saturday-night bartender from the Hotel Theresa. He had a generous pour, as you’d expect in a gambling room. Roast beef on rye with Russian dressing circulated, and come sunup, eggs. One year Corky had Sylvester King come in and do an a cappella version of his hit song “Summer’s Romance.” They were cousins, that’s how he pulled it off. Plus Corky did a little shylocking and a short set covered one week’s vig on the loan for King’s new pool in Long Island. The pool was kidney-shaped, Corky said, with a small box on a timing mechanism that emitted aerosolized jasmine, a known aphrodisiac.

  This white accountant down from Connecticut, name of Fletcher, kept taking Dixon’s money. Fletcher didn’t say nothing when Dixon started riding him—Why’d you stay in with a six, Why do you play such shit cards—which riled the peddler to no end. The accountant was a civilian, slumming it uptown like those Park Avenue white girls in Mel’s Place every weekend. Crooks and civilians need to congregate every once in a while to reinforce their life decisions. Corky Bell’s game was one place where that happened.

  If Negroes like Biz Dixon didn’t mess things up, that is. To be honest, there was a needling quality to the way Fletcher said “Three kings” that last time and pushed his glasses up on his nose, but nothing out of bounds. Dixon threw his scotch in the man’s face and leapt. Pepper intercepted and dragged him out into the street by the collar. Dixon was steaming. The peddler had a guy with him, but Pepper figured they must have heard about this or that thing he’d done, because they rabbited up and walked away. Fletcher tipped him a hundred bucks when the game broke up, which Pepper used to buy an electric blanket.

  “I know Dixon,” Pepper said.

  “Does that mean you’re out?”

  “Don’t mean I’m out. Means that nigger can’t see me is all.” He sawed his knuckles across the stubble on his jaw. Duke and Miss Laura were connected; Pepper didn’t see where the drug peddler fit in. “What’s he got to do with Duke?”

  “I have to take care of one thing before I can do another thing, and I have to do something else before I can do that.”

  Pepper wasn’t getting paid enough to work that one through. Moreover: didn’t care. He split, but not before one last look at the Ellsworth. He shook his head.

  He borrowed Tommy Lips’s car for the next stint. Dixon would recognize Pepper, despite the years and the enemies accrued in the meantime, so he brought in Tommy Lips. Given the number of players to keep dibs on, he’d need a sideman to spell him. Tommy Lips left a visible brown outline of his body on his reclining chair when he rose to shake Pepper’s hand. He appreciated the work and made it known ad nauseam.

  Thus commenced a couple of days of cruising around Harlem tailing the drug peddler. Dixon was a pretty boy, high yellow, fit from sparring in the yard or whatever at Dannemora. Pepper couldn’t comment on the recreational outlets at the prison as he’d never had the pleasure. Dixon kept up the regimen and applied equal diligence to his hair, which shone in loose whorls.

  Carney told him that Dixon hung his hat at a tenement on Fifth Avenue, and from there Pepper shadowed the man to a series of haunts. His mother’s place on 129th, two girlfriends’ pads on Madison and 112th and 116th, respectively, and a succession of mediocre chicken joints and Chinese places. He had a meal with Freddie. Pepper made a note of it.

  Then there were Dixon’s work movements. To a man, his crew was drawn from the same clan of young men you encountered uptown these days, spiteful and dumb. Botched somehow. At the Maharaja they showed these juvenile-delinquent and hot-rodder movies featuring angry young white kids. They didn’
t make movies about their brown-skinned Harlem versions, but they existed, with their gut hatred for how things worked. If they were good people, they marched and protested and tried to fix what they hated about the system. If they were bad people, they went to work for people like Dixon.

  “Look at them,” Tommy Lips said. “I hate them. Tuck in your shirt!”

  The young hoods were slovenly, doubtless. Tommy Lips abhorred their comportment and envied their vitality in equal measure. He’d been out of the game ever since a cop billy-clubbed him upside his head. Blackout spells and trembly hands ever since. He was fine for babysitting work, though, if talkative. “It’s downright indecent,” Tommy Lips said.

  Pepper followed Dixon’s employees—pushers and half-assed muscle—until he identified the man who was the least incompetent and the most busy. According to the bartender at the Clermont Lounge, the industrious, jug-eared Spanish guy was named Marco. He supervised the lower-level pushers at Dixon’s main spot on Amsterdam and 103rd. Steady white customers, it being a subway block. Bedraggled college kids and working stiffs with a secret habit. City employees with the shakes. Another two days of tailing Marco and they identified the stash house, two blocks up. Also off Amsterdam, in the basement apartment of a beaten-down townhouse.

  “These jackals taking over,” Tommy Lips said one afternoon. A pile of garbage next to where they’d parked had black flies bedeviling them. “You been on First Ave lately?”

  “Get me a tank, maybe I roll up in there,” Pepper said.

  “I been taking these correspondence classes,” Tommy Lips said. “Shoulda done it years ago. I could have been set up somewhere, out of this place.”

  “You don’t say.”

  Following his two targets back-to-back, the banker and the peddler, Pepper had to say they were in the same business. There were obvious junkies in Harlem, swaying, grooving to some inner refrain, and then there were citizens you’d never know were on junk. Normal people with straight jobs who strolled up to Dixon’s men, copped, then split to their warrens. Then there was Duke. Every day Duke hustled, doing his own handoffs in restaurants and club rooms, pushing that inside dope: influence, information, power. You couldn’t tell who was using what these days, their drug of choice, but half the city was on something if you had your eyes open.

  Back in Carney’s office, Pepper read from his tiny pad and delivered his report to the furniture salesman. He mentioned the chicken-spot meetup with Freddie.

  “He wasn’t working for him.” Carney said it like a declaration to make it one.

  “Not that I saw.”

  Carney nodded. “They grew up together.”

  Pepper had nothing to add. “Now what?” These ribs were cooked.

  “That’s it,” Carney said. “Nothing else.” He paid Pepper what he owed him for Dixon.

  Couple of days later an old crony brought Pepper in on a job in Baltimore. That took him south for a few weeks. Crabs on the Delaware shore to treat himself. He didn’t know if Rose still lived there, but it turned out she did. Twenty years is a while. They were both older, fatter, and sadder —“which is the general trajectory”—and that was a nice couple of days.

  First night back, he’s in Donegal’s and lookee here, Biz Dixon’s bust is on the TV news, Report to New York. Mayor Wagner and this stiff from the junk squad and a bunch of cops posing before a table stacked with bricks of heroin. In flickering black-and-white. Happy as pigs in shit.

  Legwork for cops.

  Pepper asked the bartender for the goddamned phone.

  That motherfucker had him doing legwork for cops.

  SEVEN

  In early September two seemingly unrelated items appeared in New York City papers. One small, the other more widely covered and consequential.

  The smaller item concerned the arrest of a Harlem pimp named Thomas Andrew Bruce, also known as Cheap Brucie. “No stranger to law enforcement,” Thomas Bruce was arrested in a sting operation at a local nightclub and charged with promoting prostitution in the fourth degree. The story rated three paragraphs in the Amsterdam News, the only paper to mention it.

  The bigger item, days later, concerned the disappearance of prominent banker Wilfred Duke, late of Carver Federal Savings. “There’s been no word,” Mrs. Myrna Duke, the missing person’s wife, told one reporter. “Not a one.” Mr. Duke was a well-known Negro businessman, and his disappearance made the white papers downtown.

  Few people understood the link between those two stories. Three of them—Ray Carney, Miss Laura, and Zippo—were inside or near 288 Convent Avenue on Wednesday, September 6, at nine-thirty p.m. The meeting had been hastily arranged.

  Detective Munson had told Carney that he’d give him a heads-up when they were going to pinch Cheap Brucie. The deal that Carney had proposed in his office weeks before—the drug dealer for the pimp—neared closure.

  But Munson didn’t call him in advance. The pimp was arrested late Tuesday night, and Munson called Carney shortly after three p.m. the next day. “I’ve been busy, what can I tell you?”

  Carney rubbed his temple and paced his office. Now he had to scramble. “When does he get out?”

  “Tomorrow earliest, he gets bond. I don’t know.”

  Beyond the office window, Marie circulated in the showroom, recording the serial numbers of the Argent display models. She waved. Carney waved back.

  The detective exhaled loudly into the receiver. “You don’t sound appreciative. You did me a solid, I got you back.”

  From Carney’s vantage, Munson was not the only one who’d benefited mightily from the raid on Biz Dixon’s places of business.

  A few weeks prior, the detective told Carney that no one in the 28th Precinct was inclined to touch Dixon, the kind of ice he was spreading around. Given the quality of his product, Dixon was fronting for an Italian gentleman who was circumventing his clan’s narcotics prohibition and didn’t want his name out there. But a Dixon bust might play better elsewhere, Munson opined, with other parties. At Centre Street, under pressure from Wagner to produce results for Governor Rockefeller’s antidrug initiative. With the Narcotics Bureau itself, where they were keen to arrest a crook who wasn’t paying tribute, or enough tribute, or had a rival who’d pay to have them kneecapped. Even the mayor, put to the test by his primary challenge next month. To punish Wagner for splitting from the machine, the Tammany bosses were pulling out the stops for their man Arthur Levitt. The mayor could use a friendly headline.

  On August 31, a week before the primary, the junk agents raided Biz Dixon. Twenty-two arrests for possessing narcotics with intent to sell, selling to policemen, and other narcotics misdemeanors. Fourteen thousand dollars in cash confiscated, with who knows how much more pocketed by the cops on the scene. So what if in the end the product seized was no record-breaker, and the dope on the table had to be supplemented with contraband from other busts so it looked good for the cameras? It made the papers and the nightly news. The pictures turned out swell. They’d look nice in a frame and hung on the wall against the industrial sick-green paint of a municipal office.

  What did Munson get out of it? Carney could only speculate what made the deal attractive to the detective in the end. Burnish his reputation as a player. Appease Dixon’s competitors who gave him envelopes. At any rate, he retailed the Dixon info to Narcotics, they followed up with undercover buys and their own surveillance, and everything was copacetic.

  “They want to know who my informant is,” Munson told him. “Let ’em speculate. This week they love me. Next week? But this week they love me.” He said he’d honor the arrangement and get Cheap Brucie picked up.

  “You want to know why,” Munson said.

  Carney said he was curious, yes.

  “He cuts women. I’d never take money from a fucking pimp, or cover for one,” Munson told Carney, “and I got no respect for guys who do.” Which sou
nded too pat. It wouldn’t be the first time that self-righteousness covered for a self-serving impulse. A few years later—when the game had changed, and the stakes, and a long-term relationship with a fellow you understood was an invaluable asset—Munson admitted to Carney that Cheap Brucie had a guy in the precinct looking out for him, and Munson hated this guy for stealing his lunch out of the icebox one time. Egg salad sandwich he’d been looking forward to all day. “Motherfucker has the nerve to call himself a cop.”

  Maybe it wasn’t envelopes the city ran on, but grudges and payback.

  Carney got off the phone with the detective. It was three-thirty p.m. If Cheap Brucie got sprung tomorrow, they had one night to pull it off. It was Wednesday, not Tuesday or Thursday, the days Duke typically had his appointment at 288 Convent Avenue.

  Miss Laura was determined, Carney knew. She’d pull it off if she had to drag it on her back, up Broadway all the way from the Battery to the Cloisters.

  * * *

  * * *

  Carney informed Rusty and Marie he’d be out the rest of the day.

  “Okay, boss,” Rusty said. “It’s looking better today.”

  “Yeah, it does,” Marie seconded.

  He touched the lump under his right eye. The day had been so hectic he’d forgotten about his black eye.

  Last Friday, the furniture salesman had stepped out of his apartment building’s vestibule and was immediately felled. He crashed against the front door and slid down. Pepper had socked him magnificently. He was not enthused with the purpose to which Carney had directed his labor.