“You got me doing legwork for cops?” Pepper said.
Carney was dizzy. Across the street two teenagers stopped dribbling their basketball to gawk. Carney looked up at the crook and tried to sit up. The last time someone socked him like that, it had been his father. For what, what did he do wrong that time, he couldn’t remember.
“If you weren’t Mike Carney’s son I’d choke the shit out of you,” Pepper said.
Then he was gone. The right side of Carney’s face pulsed with heat. He staggered back upstairs. Elizabeth was out with the kids. The area around the eye was livid and discolored. What would he say? All the junkie shit going down these days, he opted to blame it on the drug trade. Some druggie punched him in the face, yelling something, kept going, didn’t even try to take his wallet. Someone should do something about all these pushers. An enactment of how decent people felt these days: things are off-kilter, the world is overtaken by shadow.
His eye closed up the first day. The skin bulged, turned purple and motley-toned. He couldn’t open the eye for twenty-four hours. Carney was a sight; Rusty handled the customers for the Labor Day Weekend Savings Bash. Two days after the sale, they nabbed Cheap Brucie and the clock started ticking on the Duke job, whether he was ready or not.
Before Carney went up to Convent Ave, he paused to take in his sign. carney’s furniture. If he were arrested, would they seize the store? He’d spent so much time trying to keep one half of himself separate from the other half, and now they were set to collide. But then—they already shared an office, didn’t they? He’d been running a con on himself.
Miss Laura met him at the Big Apple Diner. That’s how he knew the caper was almost over: She agreed to meet him at the greasy spoon. Today’s waitress was the third nested Russian doll, with identical features on a diminished scale. The magnitude of disdain for Carney remained the same. When he sat down, the waitress asked Miss Laura, “You know this guy?”
She said, “Not really.” The women chortled.
“The waitresses…” Carney said.
“They’re sisters,” Miss Laura said. “What’s that?” Meaning the black eye.
“I got punched in the face.”
She pursed her lips in disdain. Then rubbed her fingertips in the pay-me gesture. He forked over twenty bucks.
Before they figured out how they were going to play it, Miss Laura had to cuss him out for the time they’d lost. Carney blamed it on Munson and let her vent. Underneath her irritation, she was afraid. Had been for a long time. The man could be out as soon as tomorrow, and needed girls to take out his wrath on. She’d roll over on Duke, but only if Carney took care of Cheap Brucie first—that was her demand that day in July when they did the deal. Get Cheap Brucie out of the picture, and I’ll do it.
Sometimes when Carney jumped into the Hudson when he was a kid, some of that stuff got into his mouth. The Big Apple Diner served it up and called it coffee. “How do we get him here on a Wednesday?” he said. “At night.”
“That’s the problem.”
“Tell him you’re in trouble? You’ll tell his wife?”
She shrugged. “He don’t care if I’m in trouble or need money. And he don’t care about his damn wife.” She tipped her cigarette into the tin ashtray. “You can’t threaten him because it only gets him hot and bothered—trust me.”
He looked up at her apartment. If they pulled it off, that’s where it would go down.
She said, “I’m going to tell him to come because I want him.”
“Just that?”
“Just that.”
There was the problem of Zippo. Carney had to track down Zippo and tell him it was on.
“You know where that nigger’s at?” Miss Laura asked.
It was a good question. The photographer was mercurial.
Carney brought Zippo in on the Duke job last. It was clear that he needed someone to take the photographs. He purchased the Pathfinder because Polaroid advertised it as easy to use. More important, the film didn’t need to be sent out to be developed. One look at the pictures he planned to take and they’d call the vice squad.
Practice runs with the Polaroid proved him useless. “Some people are good at some things and not others,” Elizabeth said. Meant in the nicest way. She and the kids were patient with his various attempts to be one of those capable fathers in TV and magazine ads, capturing the major and minor life moments. He failed before the entrance of the furniture store, with the family name emblazoned above; in Riverside Park, as the serene Hudson whispered past; in front of the old fire watchtower in Mount Morris Park, after guiding his family past the place where he’d dumped Miami Joe’s body in a Moroccan Luxury rug.
He needed to bring on another hand.
It’d have to be Zippo.
Zippo—part-time check-kiter and full-time purveyor of boudoir shots and blue movies—knew Freddie from around, but Freddie was scarce. Linus had bailed Carney’s cousin out of jail when he got picked up with Biz Dixon for mouthing off. Freddie didn’t call Carney or his mother for help; he called the white boy. He checked in with Aunt Millie once he got out, to tell her that he was okay, and disappeared underground again.
Elizabeth had been horrified to hear he’d spent a night in the Tombs. The city jail was notorious. “Oh, that’s a terrible place!” Carney hoped it hadn’t been too rough. The last thing Carney wanted when he came up with the setup was to see his cousin hurt. How could he know that Freddie would get entangled in it? It was bad luck is all—though it’d be swell if Freddie took it as a sign to straighten up and fly right. Hardheaded as he was, something good might come out of it.
One of Carney’s regulars—he had a magic well that produced new Sony portable TVs, apparently—was buddies with the photographer and arranged a meet at Nightbirds. How many times had his father met his cronies in this place? To plan a job, or to celebrate one.
Zippo arrived with his limp-dishrag posture, lanky and loose, the sleeves of his blue button-down shirt too short. Carney hadn’t seen him in years. He still rolled with that odd energy of his, defiant and jumpy, like a Bronx pigeon.
“You have a camera these days?” Carney asked. Last he’d heard, a model’s irate boyfriend had put Zippo out of business.
“That was a temporary setback,” Zippo said. “If you call an opportunity to take stock and really think about how you can make your life better a ‘setback.’ ”
Carney had never heard jail described that way. It came back, how Zippo veered every which way, like a drunk driver peeling down the street at three a.m. One person one second, and another the next. Deranged competency is how Carney put it later.
“I’m back to work,” Zippo said. He checked over his shoulder to prove his discretion. “You and the missus want some pictures taken—”
“My wife is not—it’s something else. It’s the stuff you do, boudoir stuff.”
“Right, right.”
“But one person is asleep.”
“Sure, there’s a whole market in that. Ladies pretending to be dead. Men pretending to be graves. Cemetery scenes…”
To curtail further explanation, Carney explained the job in detail. The photographer had no qualms once he named the mark.
“I hate that fucking Carver Federal,” Zippo said. “You know they put my name on a list?” He’d busied himself with ripping a coaster to bits and now made a mound of white shreds.
How old was Zippo—eighteen? Nineteen? Too young for this job?
“It might be in flagrante,” Carney said.
“In flagrante, out flagrante, you’re the boss.” Zippo emphasized his superiority to the assignment. “When I was younger, I was more ‘fine art,’ if you know what I mean.” Certainly not the first Nightbirds customer to wax over the promise of bygone days, and not the last. “I wanted to be one of the great chroniclers,” he said, “like Van Der
Zee. Carl Van Vechten. Harlem life, Harlem people. But my luck has always been rotten. You know that. Any chance I get, I piss it away. Now it’s tits. And people pretending to be dead.”
“I think you’ll like the money,” Carney said.
“It’s not the money,” Zippo said. He scraped the coaster detritus into his hand and asked when it was going down. They did a deal for the photography and the processing.
Now the job had snuck up on them, without warning. Five o’clock. The phone number on the business card he gave Carney was out of service. On the back, Zippo had penciled in an address. He took a taxi.
Photography by Andre was located on 125th and Fifth, above a flower store. The stairwell creaked in such a way that if it collapsed, no one could say there’d been no warning. Carney knocked on the studio’s door and a nervous middle-aged woman rushed past, her face turned so he couldn’t identify her.
The studio was one big room, with a ratty couch and chairs by the door, and then the shooting space with lights on stands, a reflector, an umbrella. Toward the back, assorted props and illustrated backdrops leaned against one another. A beach scene of blue skies and blue water half covered a library backdrop of bookshelves crammed with leather volumes.
Zippo was unfazed by Carney’s presence. A black cat ran to his feet and he picked it up and held it to his chest. “Just finished,” Zippo said. “Little lady’s husband is in Germany on an air force base and asked her to send some photos to remember her by.”
“Have you been smoking that stuff?”
“She was so uptight, I thought it’d loosen her up,” Zippo said. “And it did! To give oneself to the camera, it’s a complicated dance. Society burdens us with these hang-ups—”
“It’s tonight,” Carney said. “It’s on for tonight.”
Zippo nodded solemnly. “I got to lock up. This place ain’t mine, its Andre’s. That’s why his name is on everything.”
Carney and Zippo walked four blocks to the lot where Carney kept his truck. He got a feeling it was a pickup-truck night, a try-to-outrun-bad-luck night. Might he need the truck bed? Carney didn’t like the notion of dumping bodies in the back of his truck, deceased or not deceased or any which way. Once is bad luck; twice and it looks like you’re getting accustomed.
The photographer lugged a big vinyl bag over his shoulder. It had already been packed when Carney showed up, even though Zippo couldn’t have known it’d go down tonight.
“Oh, I had a feeling,” he explained. “Half my art is trusting my instincts.”
Zippo fiddled with the radio and found a beatnik DJ wandering the lower bands, mumbling desultorily. They parked across the street from Miss Laura’s apartment, where Carney could see her window from the driver’s seat. The open curtains meant she was alone, according to their signal. He told Zippo to stay put and walked over to Amsterdam for a pay phone.
“He says he’s going to try to come over,” Miss Laura told him.
“Try? He is or he isn’t.”
“That’s it. He said he had a meeting.”
He updated Zippo when he got back to the truck.
“Waiting,” Zippo said, “always waiting. I do work sometimes for this white divorce lawyer—Milton O’Neil? He’s on all those matchbooks? The job is to catch them in the act. There’s a lot of waiting.”
“Zippo.”
“Yeah?”
“You still light fires?”
Zippo’s most famous fire was the one that consumed the empty lot on St. Nicholas. Some rags in the garbage caught, it all went up, and the whole neighborhood came out to watch the firemen do their thing. The primitive glow of the fire and the hypnotic fire-truck lights capered across the abandoned buildings and vacant faces and rendered them beautiful. Zippo was fourteen, fifteen. His mother’s uncle lived in Riverdale and had money from a patent, those toothbrush mounts set into everybody’s bathroom tile above the sink. A real immigrant-makes-good story. He paid for Zippo’s treatment.
“I lit fires because I didn’t know back then it was enough to see it in my head,” Zippo said. “I didn’t have to do it. That’s why people dig my boudoir photographs. Seeing it can be the same thing as doing it.”
“That’s what you’ve learned?” His patronizing tone, usually reserved for Freddie, cast Zippo as a lost soul who needed to get wise.
“I wasn’t going to bring it up,” Zippo said, “since it’s none of my business, but since you’re asking me shit that’s none of your business—what happened to your eye? Your eye is all fucked up. You look like shit.”
“I got punched in the face,” Carney said.
“Oh, that happens to me all the time,” Zippo said.
* * *
* * *
At a quarter past eight, Wilfred Duke, wearing a light brown pinstripe suit and whistling happily, rang the buzzer to the third-floor apartment of 288 Convent. Her thin hands drew the curtains shut.
The furniture salesman and the photographer waited. It was the first night Carney had skipped the first sleep since June. In the coming days, he tried to determine when the Duke job actually got underway. Did it begin with the arrest of the drug dealer, that endgame maneuver? With the return of dorvay, and Carney’s nocturnal scheming all those summer nights, or the day the banker committed an offense that called for payback? Or had it been summoned from their natures, deep in their makeup? Duke’s corruption. The Carney clan’s worship of grudges. If you believed in the holy circulation of envelopes, everything that went down happened because a man took an envelope and didn’t do his job. An envelope is an envelope. Disrespect the order and the whole system breaks down.
“Let’s go,” Carney said. He shoved Zippo. The man was asleep.
Zippo looked up at her window and the curtains thrown wide. “I had a dream I was sitting in a truck,” he said.
Miss Laura buzzed them in. As he rounded the landing to the second floor, Carney thought: She killed him. Duke’s lying on that four-poster bed with his brains spilling out and now he and Zippo have to help her cover it up. If she hasn’t already called the cops and split out the back and left them holding the bag. It had been her setup all along, not his.
Carney was relieved to see Wilfred Duke on the shiny red sheets, arms spread wide, mouth open and chest quietly rising and falling. He was still dressed in his pinstripe suit with his wing tips on, though his shiny yellow tie was wide, as if his head were being slipped into a noose. He appeared to smile. Miss Laura had her arms crossed, her gaze fixed on the banker. She took a sip from her can of Rheingold.
“Okay,” Zippo said. He rubbed his hands together. “It’s a graveyard scene? That’s not really a burying suit.”
“Enough with the cemetery stuff,” Carney said. “I was clear about that. We have to pose him, though.”
“This fucker,” Miss Laura said. The knockout drops were good for a couple of hours. “I gave him a double dose,” she said. “To be sure.”
“You don’t want to poison him.”
“He’s breathing, ain’t he?”
“You heard of Weegee?” Zippo said. “You’ve seen his stuff even if you don’t know his name. He did crime-scene—”
“Zippo, can you help me with this leg?”
Miss Laura leaned against the fireplace, contemplating Duke and tapping ash on the Heriz rug.
Carney, weeks before, had suggested they confine themselves to a few shots of Duke in bed with his arms around a suggestively dressed Miss Laura. A few scandalous poses would suffice. Enough to shame and disgrace, excommunicate him from a segment of Harlem society. Lose some business. Nothing too distasteful. She agreed. Then she thought upon it.
“That’s not who he is,” she told Carney in their next meeting. “I think we should show him as he really is.”
“What’s that?”
“It should be a bunch of pictures showing
different sides of him, like in Screenland when they have Montgomery Clift for pages and pages in different scenes.”
“We’ll be pressed for time,” Carney said.
“Different scenes and props, I think.”
“That’s—”
“That’s how we’re doing it,” Miss Laura said. “After all this thinking you put into it? This is what you want,” and she took charge of the choreography, the way the wheelman attends to the getaway, and the vault is the lock man’s remit.
It was time to get to business. Miss Laura stubbed out her cigarette. “You ready?”
“Can I put a record on?” Zippo asked. She waved her beer can toward the Zenith RecordMaster. He dropped the needle on Mingus Ah Um.
Zippo opened his bag of equipment. Laura went for hers.
The Burlington Hall company out of Worcester, Massachusetts, had been in the furniture business since the mid-eighteenth century and was revered the world over for its peerless craftsmanship and exquisite details. It’s said that Prince Afonso of Portugal had one of their canopy beds hauled five hundred miles through swamps and across ravines, over mountains, to his vacation residence on the Amazon, so that his heir would be conceived on the most luxurious bed in one of the world’s sacred places. His wife was barren it turned out, but the prince and his wife enjoyed the most magnificent slumbers of their short lives. If Francis Burlington, the founder of the company, could see the array of erotic paraphernalia that Miss Laura stored in their 1958 lacquered armoire, with its regal silhouette and masterful cabinetwork, he would’ve been appalled.
Or pleasantly delighted. As a salesman, Carney knew better than to make assumptions about a stranger’s tastes. He tried not to speculate what the objects were used for, or where. They hinted at a domain beyond the missionary, off his map. He removed Duke’s shoes as Zippo worried over his lenses and camera, and Laura plotted the order of events.
“Where’s that from?” Zippo asked. “I saw something like it in Crispus Catalog.”
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