Harlem Shuffle(56)
Did he have to find another place? Or was everywhere like this now—shabby and sad and dangerous? Last time Pepper was here he observed two gray rats fucking in the popcorn, rutting in that greasy yellow case. Maybe he should have heeded that sign.
The phones still worked and there was never a line. He’d be back.
Pepper adopted a regular table at the Big Apple Diner, a better-than-average uptown hash joint on Convent. Good grub, the waitresses were nice, with a view of 288. He wasn’t surprised when the pimp showed up for the trick money and it turned out to be Cheap Brucie.
Cheap Brucie was the kind of cat who set up his girls in apartments, with regulars. He’d been plying that particular trade a long time, since before Pepper returned from the Pacific theater. The man was ageless; his women put on miles quick. Pepper’d heard more than one story about him dumping bodies in Mount Morris. Six years ago he saw Cheap Brucie cut one of his women across the face, three a.m. at the Hi Tempo Lounge. Unzipped her cheek. One of those long nights that would’ve gone longer if not for that shriek. Sobered you up quick.
Miss Laura had a couple of appointments a day. Her johns brought her things he watched her shove into the garbage cans later: big bouquets of flowers, red boxes of candy from Emilio’s. The ones getting their ashes hauled twice a week, like Duke, tended to be better-dressed. The better they dressed, the emptier the hands.
Sometimes Miss Laura stuck her head out the third-floor window to watch them walk away, wearing an expression of incandescent rage that made Pepper stare into his coffee.
* * *
*
In early July, Pepper dropped by the furniture store. Marie clocked him as he crossed the showroom. He nodded at her and she turned away, startled by his stolid affect.
Carney flipped the blinds in his office. He looked thinner, or off, like he hadn’t had a proper sleep.
“Nice safe,” Pepper said.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Apart from how small it is?”
“Yes.”
“It’s an Ellsworth, and I’m always happy to see an Ellsworth. But you don’t want to own a safe that makes a thief happy.”
That set Carney sulking for the rest of the meeting. “I went by her place on Convent, sat in the diner,” he said. “Duke’s visits, it all checked out.”
“Course it did,” Pepper said. “You think I make shit up?”
He paid Pepper for his work and said there was a new person for him to look at—Biz Dixon. “He’s a friend of my cousin Freddie.”
Pepper shrugged.
“We grew up together,” Carney added.
Pepper was acquainted with Biz Dixon and had a low opinion. He was part of this new breed of Harlem hood: hotheaded, feral, ever-trifling. A couple of years back, Corky Bell hired Pepper for security at the big poker game he ran every January the weekend after New Year’s. Corky Bell liked to have some straights at the table, and you couldn’t get them to come if they’re going to be menaced by lowlifes. It was a three-day game, an effortless gig, everyone behaving, except for the year Biz Dixon showed up.
Corky hired the Saturday-night bartender from the Hotel Theresa. He had a generous pour, as you’d expect in a gambling room. Roast beef on rye with Russian dressing circulated, and come sunup, eggs. One year Corky had Sylvester King come in and do an a cappella version of his hit song “Summer’s Romance.” They were cousins, that’s how he pulled it off. Plus Corky did a little shylocking and a short set covered one week’s vig on the loan for King’s new pool in Long Island. The pool was kidney-shaped, Corky said, with a small box on a timing mechanism that emitted aerosolized jasmine, a known aphrodisiac.
This white accountant down from Connecticut, name of Fletcher, kept taking Dixon’s money. Fletcher didn’t say nothing when Dixon started riding him—Why’d you stay in with a six, Why do you play such shit cards—which riled the peddler to no end. The accountant was a civilian, slumming it uptown like those Park Avenue white girls in Mel’s Place every weekend. Crooks and civilians need to congregate every once in a while to reinforce their life decisions. Corky Bell’s game was one place where that happened.
If Negroes like Biz Dixon didn’t mess things up, that is. To be honest, there was a needling quality to the way Fletcher said “Three kings” that last time and pushed his glasses up on his nose, but nothing out of bounds. Dixon threw his scotch in the man’s face and leapt. Pepper intercepted and dragged him out into the street by the collar. Dixon was steaming. The peddler had a guy with him, but Pepper figured they must have heard about this or that thing he’d done, because they rabbited up and walked away. Fletcher tipped him a hundred bucks when the game broke up, which Pepper used to buy an electric blanket.
“I know Dixon,” Pepper said.
“Does that mean you’re out?”
“Don’t mean I’m out. Means that nigger can’t see me is all.” He sawed his knuckles across the stubble on his jaw. Duke and Miss Laura were connected; Pepper didn’t see where the drug peddler fit in. “What’s he got to do with Duke?”
“I have to take care of one thing before I can do another thing, and I have to do something else before I can do that.”
Pepper wasn’t getting paid enough to work that one through. Moreover: didn’t care. He split, but not before one last look at the Ellsworth. He shook his head.