Harlem Shuffle(54)

    Shamed, he said, “Freddie?” To divert attention to the one who hadn’t shown up at all.

“He doesn’t call me back,” Aunt Millie said. “I’ll run into someone, they’ve seen him at this place, they’ve seen him at some other place. He doesn’t call me back.”

“He looked okay when I saw him.”

She exhaled. Once they got Freddie out of the way, Carney and his aunt did what relatives and friends do sometimes—pretended that time and circumstance had not sent them down different paths, and that they were as close as they had ever been. The performance was easy for Carney; he was scheming so much these days. For his aunt, it was likely a welcome refuge. She told him that a Puerto Rican had taken over Mickey’s Grocery and filled it with these Spanish foods and drinks; Miss Isabel from upstairs had moved into the new public housing complex on 131st, where Maybelle’s Beauty used to be; and don’t eat at that new place across from the Apollo, Jimmy Ellis had a bad meatloaf there and had to get his stomach pumped.

Things she would’ve told her husband, her son, her dear little sister, if they were around. But there was just Carney.

To sell his enthusiasm for the annual get-together, he asked to see the photo album. Aunt Millie rummaged but couldn’t place it. When she called later that night, he thought it was to tell him she’d found it. Instead she said Freddie had been picked up. The police came for Bismarck Dixon, and he’d been there and mouthed off, you know how he does. So they took Freddie, too.



* * *



*

Pepper was the first person Carney brought in on the Duke job. Early June, three days after the furniture salesman’s unsuccessful attempt to retrieve his five hundred dollars. Pepper occasionally used the store as an answering machine. This time he got a job out of it.

    What happened was, Pepper called Carney’s Furniture to get rendezvous instructions for his last job, a warehouse rip-off. The job had gone off without a hitch. A rug wholesaler on Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn, Royal Oriental, received a shipment from a particular overseas supplier twice a year. Ship comes into port, sits at customs, they off-load the rugs and carpets and what have you, and Royal Oriental forks over the dough. The night before they pay for all that inventory the warehouse safe is full of cash, foreign rugs being a notorious way to wash money.

Some jobs, it was like Burma again. People whose faces you never saw, who you never talked to, plan the setup and you have to hope they have their shit together. When you know they don’t. He never met the bankroller of the Brooklyn robbery, or the finger, the man inside with the info on the wholesaler’s cash flow. Pepper’s partner was Roper, a lock man he’d worked with a couple of times. Roper had his head screwed on straight; that it went south that one time had been no fault of his. The brains behind the setup brought Roper in, Roper brought Pepper in, and if Pepper didn’t get the other names on this job it was fine as long as he got his share.

The moon was full. A breeze huffed out humid air to Jersey. It was a beautiful night to be out in the city and up to no good. Pepper subdued the night man and got him out of the way. Roper punched out the safe. There was a guard dog at some point. The main thing being that nothing went sideways, they were back in the Chevy Bel Air and on the bridge like that and two days later when it was time for Pepper to pick up his cut, he used Carney as an answering machine. Pepper only used the furniture store when things were in the clear. As in the clear as things could be, given his line of work. He didn’t want to mess things up for Carney if he could help it. If he couldn’t, fuck it, point was he wasn’t going out of his way to bring down heat on the man.

    Roper had left the address for Pepper’s money. Carney delivered the instructions. He cleared his throat. “I’d like to bring you in on a job.”

“What, you need to move a couch?”

“No, it’s a job.”

Pepper said he’d head over. After he picked up the money.

He checked in on the store occasionally. If he was going to go-between Carney from time to time, it behooved him. Plus, it was Big Mike’s son.

The expansion looked smart—the furniture side was doing well for Junior. Rusty, the employee, had got himself a gal who looked like she’d snuck out in the back of a potato wagon. Pure country. The new secretary carried a wounded look on the street but put on a smile when she opened the door to the store. Pepper would have done the sign different, though. Make the letters blockier, so you can see it, put some red in there. He read an article that said red was a color favored by nature to make animals take notice, and you had to be part animal to live in New York City. Made sense to use red in signs, Pepper thought. But no one was asking him.

The door Carney put onto Morningside Avenue was handy, providing another exit. He refrained from commenting on the safe.

“That other rug had to go?” Pepper said. Carney most likely rolled up Miami Joe in it and dumped him in Mount Morris. That’s what he would have done.

“Yes, it’s a new rug,” Carney said.

The furniture salesman explained the job. At first, it didn’t sound like Carney. But then, Big Mike had tended his crop of grudges like a farmer, inspecting the rows, taking care they got enough water and fertilizer so that they grew big and healthy.

“You want dirt to blackmail him,” Pepper said.