Harlem Shuffle(26)
“What’s that?”
“Hundred and Forty-Fifth Street,” Carney said.
If they wanted a lead on where Miami Joe hung his hat, they had to talk to some people. Pepper didn’t know Miami Joe well, first met him when he came over to him at Baby’s Best and said he had a job Pepper didn’t want to pass up. “Baby’s—you spent time in that place? Anything that starts there ends up in the pigsty.” Pepper should have known then that it’d go south, he said. He tapped the lunch box.
First up, a pool room on Amsterdam. Carney had walked the block many times and it was impossible that he’d never seen the joint before, but there it was with sooty windows and an ancient sign: Grady Billiards. Older than him. Pepper had him wait in the car. Carney thought he heard a loud crack, but a round of honking—a green sedan stalled out at the light—covered the noise. Pepper emerged, wiping blood on his dark blue dungarees. He got back in the passenger seat and opened his lunch box. Inside were an egg sandwich in wax paper, a faded thermos, and a pistol. He didn’t say anything while he ate half the sandwich and gulped down some coffee. “Three blocks up there’s another guy,” he said, finally.
Next stop was one of those Puerto Rican grocers. Carney nabbed a spot out front with a view inside. Pepper ignored the guy at the cash register and disappeared past the Employees Only door at the back. He came out nodding a minute later. Neither he nor the guy behind the counter acknowledged each other.
After that was a barbershop—Carney couldn’t see from his angle but caught the five customers duck out after Pepper walked in—and another pool room Carney had never noticed before. Places in Pepper’s city that were nowhere on his own map.
“We going to Mam Lacey’s after-hour’s spot,” Pepper said. “You know where that is?”
Carney had been there plenty; it had been a Freddie favorite. One of Carney’s, too, owing to the gregarious owner Lacey, a big, glad lady who kept track of all her customers’ drinks and predilections. Her station was behind the ramshackle bar, which was made out of old oatmeal crates, where she whispered offers too heavy in euphemism for Carney, square that he was, to decipher. Girls in the rooms upstairs, narcotics. He declined with a “No, thank you, ma’am,” and she’d wink: One day, my young man…But the spot had been closed down for years after a shootout. Or a knife fight. There were always new basement joints opening up.
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.”