“I knew shit was going to blow up,” Munson said, “the second I heard about it on the radio. Kid got shot? Heat wave like that? That ain’t a powder keg—it’s the munitions factory.” Munson was set to go on vacation—down to Rehoboth in Maryland with some buddies who came up with him on the force. One of them had an uncle who owned a bungalow off the beach. Word had it there were some local ladies who liked to have a drink now and then. “He said this one gal likes to dance in the altogether, does a whole show where she wears cha-cha heels and sings Patti Page songs.” Then the kid got shot and nobody was going nowhere.
The first two days, Munson ran a surveillance team that made the rounds of Negro groups—the churches, the NAACP—to get a handle on their response. CORE, of course, loud as they were these days. “Two of my men are college types, look like Jewish civil rights agitators, and the other two are young Negroes who walk around with copies of The Fire Next Time in their back pockets. You hear old-timers grumbling about the number of Negro cops, but who else is going to go inside? Some fat, red-faced Mick who hasn’t done a day’s work in years? Me? My guys take a seat and no one’s looking at them twice.” He paused. “I know you’re not political, that’s why I’m telling you.”
There were known activists and agitators who required a once-over. Downtown wanted to know if they were exploiting the situation, fanning the flames. Munson’s team attended the CORE protest at Wagner Middle School on Friday afternoon and popped up at the funeral home on Saturday afternoon, mixing with the crowd, identifying the players. Nodded their heads at the common sense from Black Muslims holding forth on a corner of 125th. Files were added to. Files were opened. “Had to make sure nobody was getting ideas.” Munson said his wife helped paint the protest signs. She taught art to first graders.
“The ideas, we already got,” Carney said. “Too late for that.”
Munson shrugged. “Harlem, Harlem, Harlem,” he said. He started the car. “Then Saturday night happened.” Once everything blew up on Saturday, Munson was in the trenches with everyone else, putting out flare-ups, rousting the troublemakers. “With one of those dumb helmets on my head so I don’t get my brains turned into scrambled eggs.”
Needless to say, it delayed mail service, the circulation of envelopes. Five days later things were still not back to normal, as Chief Murphy and his lieutenants hustled to prevent another round of protest and vandalism. If it had been a normal week, Munson would have heard about homicide detectives from Washington Heights coming down to the 28th to investigate a body. “Come into my house, you best say hello,” he said. “I would have talked to them first, informed my colleagues that you were a solid citizen. As one can plainly see from your furniture showroom. And I would have given you a heads-up.”
“I had an important meeting—they busted it up.”
“They had a Park Avenue corpse, what do you want? That’s the other part.” This time he parked outside Beautiful Cakes, half a block down 125th. The store was a cherished punch line of Elizabeth’s, as every demo plastic cake and confection in the window was adorned with dust and attended to by dead flies. Look farther into the gloom and the baker’s smoking a cigarette and cutting her nails.
Where’d you get this beautiful birthday cake?
Beautiful Cakes, of course!
Munson darted inside after bowing for a young woman steering a baby carriage. She had a prodigious ass. He let her pass, smiling, and winked at Carney.
Gibbs. Carney hadn’t heard from the man since the aborted meeting. The hotel switchboard took his messages, which went unanswered. Bella Fontaine headquarters in Omaha only offered that he was out of town on business. When Carney got back from Aunt Millie’s apartment, he rang up Wilson at All-American, to see if Gibbs had made it to their sales meeting. Carney had to endure some Condescending White Man humor about uptown mayhem. “Heard you had some weather the last few days…” Once that was out of the way, the midtown salesman offered no insight. “No, he didn’t mention anything. How’d it go? He’s a straight shooter, isn’t he?”
What was Carney going to tell Gibbs, anyway? The dead man was my cousin’s junkie partner, but it was an accidental OD—unless it wasn’t—and as you can see the foot traffic on 125th Street is quite impressive.
The white cop dallied longer in the bakery than he had in his previous stops. Carney remembered Pepper taking him on his hunt for Miami Joe, the fronts and hideouts the crook had exposed during their search for the double-crosser. That time, places Carney had never seen before were suddenly rendered visible, like caves uncovered by low tide, branching into dark purpose. They’d never not been there, offering a hidden route to the underworld. This tour with Munson on his rounds took Carney to places he saw every day, establishments on his doorstep, places he’d walked by ever since he was a kid, and exposed them as fronts. The doorways were entrances into different cities—no, different entrances into one vast, secret city. Ever close, adjacent to all you know, just underneath. If you know where to look.
Carney chuckled and shook his head. The way he phrased it, like he wasn’t a part of it. His own stores, if you knew the secret knock, were hip to the password, granted you entrance to that criminal world. You could never know what was going on with other people, but their private selves were never far away. The city was one teeming, miserable tenement and the wall between you and everybody else was thin enough to punch through.
Munson returned, burping and rapping his chest with his fist as if stricken with heartburn.
“Cakes,” Carney said. “Let me guess—it’s a whorehouse?”
Munson said, “You don’t want to know, Carney. Which reminds me of the other reason you’re on your own with Fitzgerald and Garrett.”
“A minute ago you were sorry and now I’m on my own?”
“You read the paper today?”
“What makes you think we read the same papers?”
Munson reached back for the Tribune. He flipped to page 14 and gave it to Carney.
Police are investigating the death of Linus Millicent Percival Van Wyck, of the Van Wyck real estate dynasty. Van Wyck, 28, a cousin of Robert A. Van Wyck, who served as New York City’s first mayor in 1898, was found dead in a Washington Heights hotel Sunday night…
Hotel—that was a kindness. Raised in Manhattan, a graduate of St. Paul’s School and Princeton University, and last employed by the law firm Betty, Lever and Schmitt. Some fancy old-school outfit, Carney gathered, worthy of a monogrammed leather briefcase. How long ago? Before Linus met Freddie. The exact cause of death has yet to be determined, but authorities have characterized it as suspicious in nature. Any information…The picture accompanying the article depicted a teenage Linus with a crew cut and a smug, yacht-club grin.
Millicent Percival—enough to turn even the hardiest among us to narcotics.
“That’s the public version,” Munson said. “What you don’t see is the mayor getting chewed out in his office by the Van Wyck family counsel. Your cousin’s friend—he’s Park Avenue. Was.” He shrugged. “And now they’re applying pressure. Applying pressure like, when I step on a cockroach with my shoe I am applying pressure. Mayor’s office rings up Centre Street to chew them out, and then the commissioner makes his own call, to his own men, all pissed off. Shit rolls downhill. They want Van Wyck’s friend and what he stole.”
Van Wike—Munson pronounced it correctly, as Pierce had. “Stole what?” Carney said.
“You tell me.”
It hit him: Munson had been interrogating him this whole time.
“Why not walk?” Carney said. “Why are we driving one block, parking, going another block. It’s dumb.”
“I have a car—what am I going to do? Walk around like some asshole? I don’t understand the question.”
“I’m out.” Carney turned over the newspaper and reached for the door handle.
“Hey—Mr. Furniture
.”
“What?”
“This shit is heavy, no joke. I don’t want to be your cousin right now. Don’t want to be you either.”
Carney opened the door. Munson said, “You hear about Sterling Gold?”
Sterling Gold & Gem was a venerable jewelry store on Amsterdam, ten blocks up. The dusty orange bulbs in the sign out front blinked on and off to simulate movement, like a greyhound dashing around a track. Young lovers knew the engagement rings and wedding bands out front, while the drawers of uncut stones and hot merch in the back catered to a more disreputable clientele. Given his insulting rates, the owner, Abe Evans, was a fence and shylock of last resort, but he had a policy where he granted delinquent accounts a one-week grace period before his muscle came over to break a leg or appendage of the client’s choice. No one had heard of such a marketing gimmick before, this à la carte maiming, although one time in Nightbirds Carney overheard a man declare it a hallmark of an offshoot of the Estonian mob. Fancy that.
“Someone broke in and busted up the joint,” Munson said. “No—not looters. Happened last night. Trashed, it’s a big mess, busted-up display cases, alarm goes off, but get this—Abe Evans says nothing was taken.” The detective clocked a portly man with a porkpie hat who walked behind Carney’s shoulder, then returned his attention.
“So what’s the point?” Carney said.
“You tell me,” Munson said. “Maybe the point is to send a message to illegal operations that someone is lifting up the rock to see what scurries out. Someone with money and a lot of reach is saying, I’m looking for what’s mine.”
Carney slammed the car door. The three blocks back to the store was faster on foot.
The front door to the store was unlocked. The lights were out, but the door was unlocked. It wasn’t Rusty or Marie, come back to get something.
The baseball bat was in his office, next to the safe. He crept along the wall to the back of the store. He paused by the Argent recliner and listened. He called out.
Freddie yelled from the office, “Hey, Ray-Ray!”
His cousin sat on the sofa eating an Italian sandwich from Vitale’s, bottle of Coca-Cola resting on the safe. Chink Montague, homicide detectives, and rich people’s hired muscle looking for this motherfucker and he’s eating a goddamn sandwich in his office.
“I have a key,” Freddie said. He chewed. “Remember when May was being born and you had to rush to University Hospital? Before Rusty came on. You asked me to lock up. Gave me the key.”
Carney said, “That was seven years ago.”
“You never asked for it back so I assumed you wanted me to hold on to it. Why are you looking at me like that?” Freddie grinned. “Be glad you never gave me the combination to the safe.”
FIVE
Linus came up with the score in St. Augustine, far as Freddie could tell. “It wasn’t like him to stick to one thing,” Freddie told Carney. “He had ideas—this day that and tomorrow something else.” For an “eraser key” on typewriters, and a special cap on medicine bottles to prevent them from being opened by little kids. A junkie word-of-mouth system tracked which doctors were soft touches for morphine scrips and which drugstores sold needles no questions asked—what if there were a “Yellow Pages for Dopeheads” that listed this week’s shady or clueless docs and pharmacies? The schemes were far-fetched or abundantly flawed, were shared once and never mentioned again. The heist was different. “Linus kept bringing up the setup, turning it over in his head the whole drive back.
“By then we were like brothers,” Freddie said. Carney took it as the insult it was intended to be, and it pleased Freddie to get under his cousin’s skin. When was the last time they’d hung out like this, just the two of them? Like the old days. Now as then, it was Freddie’s job to fend off the silence. Too much silence and you might get to thinking about things. Freddie the storyteller, Carney the straight man, the audience. It worked for a long time.
The front door of Carney’s Furniture was locked. The blinds in the office window overlooking the showroom were shut. Carney’s office was the captain’s cabin in a sub: Run Silent, Run Deep. The world didn’t know what was going on down here in the dark and those below were blind to everything topside.
This wasn’t Freddie’s first trip underwater. The submarine was his pet analogy for periods of exile from decent society, ever since his trip to the Tombs three years ago. The steel bunks bracketed into the gray cell walls reminded him of the crew quarters in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, albeit less vermin-filled and overcrowded. Four cots for six men. Freddie curled on the cement floor, with its soaked-in piss. Forty-eight hours in jail nearly wrecked him. Nightmares seized him still, alive with grim, half-forgotten details: roaches scrabbling into his ear like it was some insect Cotton Club; a maggot swimming in the foul, mess-hall oatmeal, twisting on his tongue.
All his life he’d heard about the Manhattan House of Detention from guys dumb enough to get caught. Freddie never understood fools who bragged about doing time—why advertise your stupidity? Then he got busted. The storytellers had undersold the wretchedness. His first trip to the chow line a guard bashed him upside the head with a blackjack. Freddie buckled and dropped to the grimy floor. Years later he woke with a ringing sometimes. Why? Freddie hadn’t heard the officer call his name. He staggered with his tray and sat down to a dinner of stiff baloney on moldy bread. Two tables over, one slob bit off this other guy’s earlobe for hogging ketchup. Bad meals all around.
Later, in his submarine cell, he stopped swatting the rats—rats boiled forth at night—when one of his cellmates warned him that “hittin’ ’em puts them in a biting mood.”
He hadn’t told Carney about those two days and never would. Freddie called Linus to bail him out because he was too diminished to abide a lecture. Linus wouldn’t scold him that it was his fault for eating chicken with Biz Dixon (as if Biz were the only crooked man they knew). Linus wouldn’t tell him that it was Freddie’s fault for mouthing off to the junk squad when they arrested Biz (as if a man could rebel against his nature and not sass a cop).
Linus bailed him out and they celebrated the remainder of Labor Day weekend by smoking reefer and drinking rum, and that worked out so well they carried the performance over another week, and another. The men had been close before the Tombs, but the arrest confirmed that they were fellow sailors on the same freakish tour of duty. Dive! Dive! Into that silty narcotic gloom. Stationed on the next submarine, Linus’s apartment on Madison: the USS Bender.
“I’m sorry you got picked up,” Carney told him. He separated two slats in the blinds and checked out 125th Street. All clear.
“Wasn’t your fault,” Freddie said.
The rest of that fall and winter was a mumble. Linus retained a lawyer who got the case dropped. Freddie crashed on Linus’s living-room couch most days, until his lease ran out and he moved in full time. They woke, grazed around Greenwich Village and Times Square, got high, made fun of TV soap operas, put their feet up in movie houses and occasionally snorted a little something, and come nightfall ricocheted through various coffee shops and cocktail bars and basement oases, propelled by debauched momentum. Pissing against tenement walls, sleeping until noon. If Freddie got somewhere with a girl, a college girl or typist three drinks in, Linus disappeared at the right time. The next day Freddie either magically manifested on the couch when Linus padded out in his weird, archduke pajamas, or he popped up later in the afternoon, returning from his mission with a sack of doughnuts. They got along fine.
Sometimes Linus drove them out to Jersey in his Chevy Two-Ten to bet on the horses at the Garden. Linus was part owner of a thoroughbred named Hot Cup, a birthday gift from his great-uncle James, who was a scion of derby culture and thought you weren’t a man unless you had a piece of a racehorse. Hot Cup’s lofty pedigree notwithstanding—his father, General Tip, was a legend in championship jism circles—on the track he
was an oddly distracted specimen, listless and morose. Much like his part owner, Hot Cup was well-bred, well-raised, and utterly incapable.
These ventures and others were underwritten by the Van Wyck family, who mailed checks on the second Friday of the month if Linus upheld the meager duties of his office: show up groomed and presentable for family functions and society benefits; visit the law offices of Newman, Shears & Whipple to sign where they told him to sign. Good to see you, Mr. Van Wyck. “The work is for the birds,” Linus said, “but you can’t beat the hours.” He kept his nice clothes at his parents’ apartment, got into his uniform for work, and slipped back into beatnik attire when he punched out.
One day Linus split for his grandma’s ninety-sixth birthday and didn’t come back. He rang three days later from the Bubbling Brook Sanatorium in Connecticut; his family had hijacked him when he stepped off the elevator and dispatched him for another round of psychological treatment. Zap! Periodically the Van Wycks scooped up their wayward son and carted him off to a succession of licensed facilities, an archipelago of mental recalibration centers dotting the tri-state area. Linus’s first long stint was during his Princeton days. The dorm proctor caught him sucking some townie’s dick or vice versa, Freddie couldn’t remember which. Zap! Zap!
Freddie didn’t care about Linus’s proclivities. Linus knew he didn’t swing that way and never tried anything. “Far as I remember,” Freddie said. He shrugged. “We were loaded most of the time.”
The Madison Avenue apartment was small and quiet without Linus. No one to shove the trash into the hallway chute, to laugh at his jokes when he made fun of white people on TV. Hanging with Linus reminded Freddie of the old days, when it was him and Carney running wild. Aunt Nancy had passed, Uncle Mike was who knows where, his own mother doing a double at the hospital, Pedro in Florida: That left the two boys and whole days to cram full of feverish schemes. Then Big Mike came back and took Carney home and it was over.
Harlem Shuffle Page 25