Harlem Shuffle(55)
“Blackmail is when you try to get something from somebody,” Carney answered. “I want to burn his house down.”
“But not really torch it. You want to fuck him up.”
“Yes, not an actual torching, but a real burning down.”
“Didn’t know you did it like that.”
Carney shrugged.
Like father, like son. They did a deal for the stakeout and the general surveillance.
Pepper had never heard of this Duke character. “Guess we run in different circles,” he said to himself. Leaning against the greasy spoon opposite the Mill Building on 125th, he had a clear shot of the banker’s office window and the entrance to the building.
His grandpa Alfred had kept a steel-drum smoker out back in Newark, on Clinton Ave. He’d do ribs, brisket, make his own sausage. Grandpa Alfred’s father had been a butcher and cook on an indigo plantation in South Carolina and passed down the mysteries. “You throw chops on some coals,” Pepper’s grandfather said, “that’s one way to cook a piece of meat. Few minutes later, you got that black on it, you’re done. But barbecue is slow. Put it in that smoke, you got to be ready to wait. That heat and smoke is going to do its work, boy, but you got to wait.”
One was fast and one was slow, and it was the same for stickups and stakeouts. Stickups were chops—they cook fast and hot, you’re in and out. A stakeout was ribs—fire down low, slow, taking your time.
Pepper was a gourmand in that he liked chops and he liked ribs. He hadn’t planned a job in years, with the legwork that entailed: casing the place; clocking passenger and vehicle traffic, and how often the prowl car made the rounds; the schedule of the staff, managers, and security guards. Figuring out when to take a piss. He’d enjoyed that side of things once—conception, pulling it all together, choosing a crew. Nowadays he let the ebb and flow of jobs take him. He wasn’t as sharp or as hungry as he used to be. Stuff fell into his lap, or didn’t. Some cat got out of Dannemora and wanted back in, or another dude was cooking up a big score. Maybe Pepper wasn’t as sharp these days, but the quality of hood they turned out now? He was sharp enough. No, he hadn’t made ribs in a while but it came back quick.
Waiting and watching on Carney’s dime. He found his old stash of tiny notebooks he used for planning jobs. The good weather helped. Those weeks in June were hot but it barely rained at all. The first two days Pepper borrowed Tommy Lips’s Ford Crestliner, but lucky for him it turned out Duke was a walker, one of those short guys who had a complex about size and had to rooster-strut everywhere. Little head poking up over a car’s steering wheel probably made those bully taunts come back. Lucky because Pepper hated Tommy Lips’s Crestline, it was a fucking lemon.
The days passed. A new version of this corner of 125th had sprung into being when he wasn’t looking, with a lot of old hangouts erased and sleek cafeterias and electronics stores and record stores popping up. Not the most sentimental of men, Pepper nonetheless allowed himself a reminiscence of his last visit to the Mill Building. Or he tried to reminisce. Pepper had definitely dangled the mope out the window by his ankles (black wing tips and black socks held up by garters) and threatened to drop him on Madison Avenue (the window had an eastern exposure), that much he was sure of. He recalled the man’s name, Alvin Pitt, and that he was an osteopath by profession, but for the life of him Pepper couldn’t get a handle on why he was bracing the guy. He was at a loss. Perhaps when this job was over, he’d pay Alvin Pitt a visit, ask the man himself what the fuss had been about.
Weekdays at noon Duke departed to dine with muckety-mucks of equal rank. Pepper recognized some of them from the papers: judges, lawyers, politicians. They ate at famous Harlem places Pepper had never set foot in, chowing down on lobster thermidor at the Palm and beef Wellington at the Royale, and drinking brandy at the Orchid Room in the Hotel Theresa. Then it was back to the Mill Building. The banker belonged to the Dumas Club on 120th Street, which observation proved to be a variety of shitheel factory. Duke’s rooster-strut wobbled after a Dumas Club visit, so Pepper assumed there was a rich man’s happy hour going on. Then it was back home to Riverside Drive, one of those monument buildings with a sleepy doorman and service entrance with a broken lock. Once Duke returned home, he was in for the night.
That was it, except for a twice-weekly rendezvous with a hooker named Miss Laura who worked out of a floor-through at Convent and 141st. Once Pepper got Duke’s schedule down, Carney put him on the girl.
“Yeah, but what do you want me to do to the banker?” Pepper asked. He was at a pay phone in the lobby of the Maharaja Theater on 145th and Broadway. Currently on the marquee: Doctor Blood’s Coffin and Creature from the Haunted Sea. It had been a glamorous vaudeville house back in the day. Now its most prominent virtues were the bank of pay phones in the lobby and the dark auditorium beyond. A convenient venue for freelance individuals in which to conduct business.
“Nothing,” Carney said. “Just watch the lady on Convent.”
Lady. “Someone else is taking the banker out?”
“No. I’m getting the lay of the land.”
Pepper hung up, opened the phone-booth door. The light went out. The Maharaja had gotten run-down lately, now that he looked at it. This time of day the lobby was mostly junkies and hookers. Pushers and johns. Anyone in the auditorium was either getting sucked off, sucking off, or tying off, cinematic triumph of Doctor Blood’s Coffin or no Doctor Blood’s Coffin.