Harlem Shuffle(31)

He’d wandered across from 528 Riverside Drive, his latest prospect. This is what he was working toward. Who wouldn’t want to live on Riverside Drive? Come home from the store, open the front door and the smell of Caw Caw chicken drifts from the kitchen. Radio on, big band, and May hugs one of his legs and the new addition—he was a boy in this reverie—hugs the other. Sunset light from the west, even if you had to look at New Jersey, too. A nice place, like no other he’d lived in his whole life. Street nigger, she’d said.

A tall woman in a green dress ducked out of the front door, high heels clicking on the concrete. She checked her purse for keys or lipstick or cigarettes and kept walking. Carney stood in a spot diagonal to one of the gargoyles on a cornice of 528—their eyes met. No hint of the beast’s stone appraisal. What would his father do? Big Mike Carney. He wouldn’t go to his office, not that he had one, wouldn’t go home, that’s for sure. He would not lay his head down until he hunted down the man who’d double-crossed him. Like Pepper, he’d turn uptown upside down until he shook out his quarry.

Who wouldn’t want to live on Riverside Drive? A few blocks north was the Burbank. Where the finger—Miami Joe’s source inside the Theresa—kept a room. It was a short walk.

    The SRO’s lobby was Saturday-night busy—residents striking out to their drinking spots, running home after work to gussy themselves up for their evening machinations. The disheveled manager perched behind a scratched-up desk, guarding the array of mail slots. A tiny fan blew into his miserable face, two streamers flapping from the grille like tentacles. Carney said he was looking for his friend Betty, couldn’t remember the room number.

“Betty who?”

“I work with her at the Theresa. She forgot her purse.”

The manager looked down at his paper. “She ain’t been around.”

“Maybe I could give it to Joe?”

The manager pushed his glasses up on his nose. He waited for his visitor to notice the hole in his scheme. “Where’s the purse?”

Carney jerked his hand toward the street. “My truck.”

The elevator opened and two ladies with bouffant hairdos levitated into the lobby like queens, gowns shimmering. “I don’t know any Joe,” the manager said.

Carney rounded the corner and stopped to think. Freddie had mentioned Baby’s Best in his account of the robbery. That was on 136th or 137th, off Eighth. He wasn’t going to confront the man—Pepper could handle that. But to help the hunt before calling in the roughneck, it was better than pacing around his living room. Alma rarely stayed past ten o’clock. The apartment would be quiet soon. He chose his route to Baby’s Best.



* * *



*

Miami Joe was not a law-abiding sort and had no love for its earthly muscle: sheriffs and deputies back home, cops and detectives up here. Had they the misfortune to stop him when he had his pistol in his pocket, he’d cut them down. His disdain for those he robbed was of a different variety, akin to that of a child grinding his shoe on a cockroach. They were insignificant, they were helpless, and they passed from his mind after the job was done, whether the task at hand was a rip-off or a rubout. There was, for example, an empty place in his mind formerly occupied by Arthur. Eventually the next job would fill that vacancy. Until he finished that one, too. Miami Joe vaulted down the fire stairwell after Gibbs, the night manager, rang Betty’s room. Clasping his pistol to his leg. If he were quick enough. Miami Joe was surprised to make out the furniture salesman down 140th Street. Pepper would have sensed his approach. Chink would have sent two men. He lucked out. Miami Joe got as close as he could, dropped to his knee, rested the barrel on his forearm to aim, and pulled the trigger.





NINE


His day ended as it started: with men of hard character bracing him under the two-foot-tall letters that spelled out his name.

Like most Harlemites, Carney grew up with broken glass in the playground, the pageant of sidewalk cruelty whenever he stepped outside, and the snap of gunfire. He recognized the sound. Carney crouched and zagged toward the aluminum garbage cans. When he looked back, there was Miami Joe and the zing as his second shot hit the lid of the can next to him. It wasn’t too far to the corner—he sprinted for it.

New York was like that sometimes—you turn a corner and end up in an entirely different city, like magic. 140th Street was dark and silent, and Hamilton was a party. The bar two doors down had a line waiting to get in—one of those bebop spots, from the sound—and next to the bar some Spanish guys drank wine and played dominoes in the light cast from a barbershop. The domino players worked in the barbershop; it paid their rent during the day and provided a refuge from their families at night. Carney bumped through the people standing in line, jostling, and sped down the block. A patrol car cruised on the other side of the street. He looked over his shoulder. No sign of Miami Joe. If Carney saw the cops, so did Miami Joe. He ran once the cops got far enough away.

Carney took an eccentric path south, sawing back and forth down avenues and streets. Before he dropped Pepper off that afternoon, the man told him to leave any messages at Donegal’s. “Don’t matter who’s working—that’s my answering service.” This was definitely more Pepper’s field—gun battles and whatnot. The man was like a swami when it came to putting a hurt on somebody. Carney couldn’t go home and lead Miami Joe to his family. If Miami Joe went there anyway…There were bars full of people; he could hide out in one. Until last call and then what? He headed for the store, that’s where his feet took him at any rate. He’d call Pepper from his office and wait.