Harlem Shuffle(52)

“It’s good to have family,” Carney said, “when you come to a new place.”

    “Good’s a word. She didn’t know me from Adam when I knocked on her door. Still up from last night, to look at her. But she said I could sleep on her couch for a few days until I found a place. I was there six months.” However disheveled Aunt Hazel was in the morning, Miss Laura said, she was the picture of glamour whenever she walked out the door. “You have to have an inside you, she used to say, and an outside you. Ain’t nobody’s business who you are really, so it’s up to you what you gave them.”

“She still living here?” Carney asked. Miss Laura had arranged this meeting and he wondered when she’d get to the reason. It occurred to him that Laura was not her real name.

“She was,” Miss Laura said. “Now she ain’t. She’s the one got me working at Mam Lacey’s—you know it?”

“Of course,” he said.

He squinted, and she said, “I didn’t work downstairs.” In the bar, she meant.

“Right.”

He and Freddie had often joked about going upstairs, but they didn’t mess with hookers. Well, Freddie was up to all sorts of stuff. They knew plenty of guys who used to go upstairs, or who frequented the other whorehouses people knew about. On Carney’s fourteenth birthday, his father had offered to take him to “a place I know,” and Carney said no, and it was years before it clicked what Big Mike had been talking about. Had Freddie joked about this or that woman getting off the bus or walking into the drugstore working for Mam Lacey? Big ass, too much makeup, some kind of look in her eye. Sure. It was in the realm of his humor, and Carney had doubtless laughed. You get older and the old jokes grow less funny.

Miss Laura said, “I used to lie up there and listen to the music. Everybody having a high old time down there. That music…If I got bored, or if I had a rough one, I’d picture me in one of those girl groups. Long dress. Gloves up to here.” She stuck another cigarette into her mouth. “Downstairs was one good time, and upstairs was a different kind of time.”

    “Been closed a while,” Carney said.

“Good riddance. Everybody talked so nice about her, it made me so mad.”

The last time he’d been to Mam Lacey’s, it had been closed for some time, a ruin. He and Pepper had been looking for a lead on the loot from the Theresa heist and ended up there. Mam Lacey had died and her junkie son Julius had turned the place into a shooting gallery. There was a broken statue of a white stone angel in the back garden and Julius was lying on a bench in a drug stupor, the legs of the statue sticking up without a body and the torso and wings erupting next to it out of hardy Harlem weeds. Had the statue been in one piece when Miss Laura looked down from that room? And what broke it in two? He didn’t know why he thought of it—him, Julius, and Miss Laura in a triangle at Mam Lacey’s and gazing on the statue, each of them with their own view. Look at it from one way, it was not a place for an angel, look at it from another and maybe it was a place that needed an angel. And another view was that if it were beautiful, it wouldn’t last long there.

He was going to mention the kid, Julius, then nixed the idea.

Miss Laura said, “You come here to tell me what I want to hear?”

“Not yet,” Carney said. There was a holdup.

Last Thursday, the cop Munson had picked up his Thursday envelope. Carney reminded him of his proposal vis-à-vis Biz Dixon. “I said I’d work on it,” the detective told him. “Like I said, these people have friends. That in itself is not insurmountable, but it complicates. Everybody has to get pinched now and then, regardless of what they’re laying out, to keep things democratic. This is America.”

Carney had considered giving Munson something more to sweeten the deal, but what did he have? Second-story men. Half-assed crooks. What would his father have thought, him feeding shit to the cops? Working on being a full-time rat.

    Even if he could explain the delay to Miss Laura, she was not the sympathetic sort. “A ‘hold up’?” she said. She mashed her cigarette into an L in the ashtray beside her. Lit another. “Then what good are you?”

Bottom line, they had a deal and Carney hadn’t delivered. If the windows had been open, the smell of the flowers and her cigarettes would have been less cloying. It’s a telegram, he said to himself. A saying of his mother’s, about nights like this. She only got telegrams when it was bad news, and so his mother called that chilly night at the end of August a telegram, to warn you summer was over. Rip it up and throw it in the trash but you got the message.

Miss Laura pulled her robe tight around her neck.

“You asked me if my aunt is still in town?” she said. “She left our place one day, two months behind on the rent. Didn’t say a word. I didn’t have two nickels to rub together. She didn’t take me to Mam Lacey herself, but she made it so I had no choice but to go to Mam Lacey. That was the start of it. Now we’re here.”

She was working up to an ultimatum. Making moves in this midnight time of the watch, like Carney. He imagined that she’d had her first sleep, too, and was getting her accounts done before she lay down for her second. All over the city there were people like them, a whole mean army of schemers and nocturnal masterminds working their rackets. Thousands and thousands toiling and plotting in their apartments and SROs and twenty-four-hour greasy spoons, waiting for the day when they will bring their plans into the daylight.