Harlem Shuffle(59)
“You got me doing legwork for cops?” Pepper said.
Carney was dizzy. Across the street two teenagers stopped dribbling their basketball to gawk. Carney looked up at the crook and tried to sit up. The last time someone socked him like that, it had been his father. For what, what did he do wrong that time, he couldn’t remember.
“If you weren’t Mike Carney’s son I’d choke the shit out of you,” Pepper said.
Then he was gone. The right side of Carney’s face pulsed with heat. He staggered back upstairs. Elizabeth was out with the kids. The area around the eye was livid and discolored. What would he say? All the junkie shit going down these days, he opted to blame it on the drug trade. Some druggie punched him in the face, yelling something, kept going, didn’t even try to take his wallet. Someone should do something about all these pushers. An enactment of how decent people felt these days: things are off-kilter, the world is overtaken by shadow.
His eye closed up the first day. The skin bulged, turned purple and motley-toned. He couldn’t open the eye for twenty-four hours. Carney was a sight; Rusty handled the customers for the Labor Day Weekend Savings Bash. Two days after the sale, they nabbed Cheap Brucie and the clock started ticking on the Duke job, whether he was ready or not.
Before Carney went up to Convent Ave, he paused to take in his sign. carney’s furniture. If he were arrested, would they seize the store? He’d spent so much time trying to keep one half of himself separate from the other half, and now they were set to collide. But then—they already shared an office, didn’t they? He’d been running a con on himself.
Miss Laura met him at the Big Apple Diner. That’s how he knew the caper was almost over: She agreed to meet him at the greasy spoon. Today’s waitress was the third nested Russian doll, with identical features on a diminished scale. The magnitude of disdain for Carney remained the same. When he sat down, the waitress asked Miss Laura, “You know this guy?”
She said, “Not really.” The women chortled.
“The waitresses…” Carney said.
“They’re sisters,” Miss Laura said. “What’s that?” Meaning the black eye.
“I got punched in the face.”
She pursed her lips in disdain. Then rubbed her fingertips in the pay-me gesture. He forked over twenty bucks.
Before they figured out how they were going to play it, Miss Laura had to cuss him out for the time they’d lost. Carney blamed it on Munson and let her vent. Underneath her irritation, she was afraid. Had been for a long time. The man could be out as soon as tomorrow, and needed girls to take out his wrath on. She’d roll over on Duke, but only if Carney took care of Cheap Brucie first—that was her demand that day in July when they did the deal. Get Cheap Brucie out of the picture, and I’ll do it.
Sometimes when Carney jumped into the Hudson when he was a kid, some of that stuff got into his mouth. The Big Apple Diner served it up and called it coffee. “How do we get him here on a Wednesday?” he said. “At night.”
“That’s the problem.”
“Tell him you’re in trouble? You’ll tell his wife?”
She shrugged. “He don’t care if I’m in trouble or need money. And he don’t care about his damn wife.” She tipped her cigarette into the tin ashtray. “You can’t threaten him because it only gets him hot and bothered—trust me.”
He looked up at her apartment. If they pulled it off, that’s where it would go down.
She said, “I’m going to tell him to come because I want him.”
“Just that?”
“Just that.”
There was the problem of Zippo. Carney had to track down Zippo and tell him it was on.
“You know where that nigger’s at?” Miss Laura asked.
It was a good question. The photographer was mercurial.
Carney brought Zippo in on the Duke job last. It was clear that he needed someone to take the photographs. He purchased the Pathfinder because Polaroid advertised it as easy to use. More important, the film didn’t need to be sent out to be developed. One look at the pictures he planned to take and they’d call the vice squad.
Practice runs with the Polaroid proved him useless. “Some people are good at some things and not others,” Elizabeth said. Meant in the nicest way. She and the kids were patient with his various attempts to be one of those capable fathers in TV and magazine ads, capturing the major and minor life moments. He failed before the entrance of the furniture store, with the family name emblazoned above; in Riverside Park, as the serene Hudson whispered past; in front of the old fire watchtower in Mount Morris Park, after guiding his family past the place where he’d dumped Miami Joe’s body in a Moroccan Luxury rug.
He needed to bring on another hand.
It’d have to be Zippo.
Zippo—part-time check-kiter and full-time purveyor of boudoir shots and blue movies—knew Freddie from around, but Freddie was scarce. Linus had bailed Carney’s cousin out of jail when he got picked up with Biz Dixon for mouthing off. Freddie didn’t call Carney or his mother for help; he called the white boy. He checked in with Aunt Millie once he got out, to tell her that he was okay, and disappeared underground again.
Elizabeth had been horrified to hear he’d spent a night in the Tombs. The city jail was notorious. “Oh, that’s a terrible place!” Carney hoped it hadn’t been too rough. The last thing Carney wanted when he came up with the setup was to see his cousin hurt. How could he know that Freddie would get entangled in it? It was bad luck is all—though it’d be swell if Freddie took it as a sign to straighten up and fly right. Hardheaded as he was, something good might come out of it.