Harlem Shuffle(61)

“Try? He is or he isn’t.”

“That’s it. He said he had a meeting.”

He updated Zippo when he got back to the truck.

“Waiting,” Zippo said, “always waiting. I do work sometimes for this white divorce lawyer—Milton O’Neil? He’s on all those matchbooks? The job is to catch them in the act. There’s a lot of waiting.”

“Zippo.”

“Yeah?”

“You still light fires?”

Zippo’s most famous fire was the one that consumed the empty lot on St. Nicholas. Some rags in the garbage caught, it all went up, and the whole neighborhood came out to watch the firemen do their thing. The primitive glow of the fire and the hypnotic fire-truck lights capered across the abandoned buildings and vacant faces and rendered them beautiful. Zippo was fourteen, fifteen. His mother’s uncle lived in Riverdale and had money from a patent, those toothbrush mounts set into everybody’s bathroom tile above the sink. A real immigrant-makes-good story. He paid for Zippo’s treatment.

“I lit fires because I didn’t know back then it was enough to see it in my head,” Zippo said. “I didn’t have to do it. That’s why people dig my boudoir photographs. Seeing it can be the same thing as doing it.”

“That’s what you’ve learned?” His patronizing tone, usually reserved for Freddie, cast Zippo as a lost soul who needed to get wise.

    “I wasn’t going to bring it up,” Zippo said, “since it’s none of my business, but since you’re asking me shit that’s none of your business—what happened to your eye? Your eye is all fucked up. You look like shit.”

“I got punched in the face,” Carney said.

“Oh, that happens to me all the time,” Zippo said.



* * *



*

At a quarter past eight, Wilfred Duke, wearing a light brown pinstripe suit and whistling happily, rang the buzzer to the third-floor apartment of 288 Convent. Her thin hands drew the curtains shut.

The furniture salesman and the photographer waited. It was the first night Carney had skipped the first sleep since June. In the coming days, he tried to determine when the Duke job actually got underway. Did it begin with the arrest of the drug dealer, that endgame maneuver? With the return of dorvay, and Carney’s nocturnal scheming all those summer nights, or the day the banker committed an offense that called for payback? Or had it been summoned from their natures, deep in their makeup? Duke’s corruption. The Carney clan’s worship of grudges. If you believed in the holy circulation of envelopes, everything that went down happened because a man took an envelope and didn’t do his job. An envelope is an envelope. Disrespect the order and the whole system breaks down.

“Let’s go,” Carney said. He shoved Zippo. The man was asleep.

Zippo looked up at her window and the curtains thrown wide. “I had a dream I was sitting in a truck,” he said.

Miss Laura buzzed them in. As he rounded the landing to the second floor, Carney thought: She killed him. Duke’s lying on that four-poster bed with his brains spilling out and now he and Zippo have to help her cover it up. If she hasn’t already called the cops and split out the back and left them holding the bag. It had been her setup all along, not his.

    Carney was relieved to see Wilfred Duke on the shiny red sheets, arms spread wide, mouth open and chest quietly rising and falling. He was still dressed in his pinstripe suit with his wing tips on, though his shiny yellow tie was wide, as if his head were being slipped into a noose. He appeared to smile. Miss Laura had her arms crossed, her gaze fixed on the banker. She took a sip from her can of Rheingold.

“Okay,” Zippo said. He rubbed his hands together. “It’s a graveyard scene? That’s not really a burying suit.”

“Enough with the cemetery stuff,” Carney said. “I was clear about that. We have to pose him, though.”

“This fucker,” Miss Laura said. The knockout drops were good for a couple of hours. “I gave him a double dose,” she said. “To be sure.”

“You don’t want to poison him.”

“He’s breathing, ain’t he?”

“You heard of Weegee?” Zippo said. “You’ve seen his stuff even if you don’t know his name. He did crime-scene—”

“Zippo, can you help me with this leg?”

Miss Laura leaned against the fireplace, contemplating Duke and tapping ash on the Heriz rug.

Carney, weeks before, had suggested they confine themselves to a few shots of Duke in bed with his arms around a suggestively dressed Miss Laura. A few scandalous poses would suffice. Enough to shame and disgrace, excommunicate him from a segment of Harlem society. Lose some business. Nothing too distasteful. She agreed. Then she thought upon it.

“That’s not who he is,” she told Carney in their next meeting. “I think we should show him as he really is.”

“What’s that?”

    “It should be a bunch of pictures showing different sides of him, like in Screenland when they have Montgomery Clift for pages and pages in different scenes.”

“We’ll be pressed for time,” Carney said.

“Different scenes and props, I think.”