Harlem Shuffle(64)

“I couldn’t have packed a bag if I knew he was out there,” she said, “ready to jump out and cut my throat. He makes you watch what he does to other girls, to advertise what he can do to you.” She lit a cigarette with a brass lighter. “He’ll have too much on his plate to look for me. And I won’t be the only one who runs once they find out he’s locked up.” She wasn’t talking to Carney; it was not clear whom she addressed. She checked her face in the rearview mirror and got out to grab her suitcase. He joined her.

Here it was: the last envelope. He gave her the five hundred bucks and she stuffed it in her bra.

    She said, “I checked you out, you know.” Just them on the street corner, in one of those New York City eddies that clears the stage for a minute. “After that first time we met. I thought, now what does a man like him have against Duke? Then I said to myself, he ripped you off like he does everybody else. That’s why you’re mad.”

“He did.”

“I asked myself, what am I gonna get out of this? What do I want out of it?” She waved her hand at the dirty city heaped up around them in concrete and cold steel. “Can’t stay here and can’t go home. Which leaves everywhere else.” She looked at him. “You go,” she said. So he did.

Miss Laura was right about Cheap Brucie having his hands full. Once the pimp made bail, he fixated on one of his girls to blame for setting him up. Emboldened by his arrest earlier that week, she went to the cops and they picked him up again, this time for battery. This news via Munson. Brucie wasn’t getting out for a while.

Carney hoisted John onto his shoulders. The boy covered Carney’s eyes and he pretended to totter, Oh no! He was grateful to Elizabeth for proposing this outing. He wasn’t getting home for dinner every night, but the four of them still ate together more often than they had before. It was nice. The night of the job he stayed awake through the first sleep, working the job, and when he got home from dropping Miss Laura off he was too energized to sleep. He finally went down near dawn and when he woke he was back on schedule, in sync once more with the straight world. Cast out from the forgotten land of dorvay, as if he’d never been there. What had they meant, those dark hours? Maybe it was a way to keep the two sides of him separate, the midnight him and the daytime him, and he didn’t need it anymore. If he ever had. Maybe he’d invented a separation where none existed, when it was all him and always had been.

    When they passed Nightbirds, he checked if Freddie was sitting there at the bar, wisecracking. He didn’t see him.

As his little boy tugged his ears, Carney added up the cost of the setup. The initial five hundred to Duke, that went into the overhead with the rest of the envelopes. He was out the cash to Pepper, Miss Laura, and Zippo. Tommy Lips and the car. Throw in Rusty’s commissions, the ones he wouldn’t have had to pay the man if he’d been around the office. By Carney’s inner accounting—if not in the actual books—was there any way to write off the money for the job as a business expense?

Even a half-assed audit would reveal his sins. Black eye aside, it had been all pleasure.





COOL IT BABY


   1964




“…maybe don’t play the same number all the time. Play something else, see what happens. Maybe you been playing the wrong thing this whole time.”





ONE


547 Riverside Drive faced the park on a stretch that was quiet more often than not. Until they moved, the Carneys had no inkling of how shallow the elevated train had kept their sleep. As with many things in the city—traffic noise below, quarrelsome neighbors above, a dark walk from the corner to your front door—its effect was unmeasurable until it was gone. The train was like a bad thought or bad memory in that way, a persistent poke and constant whisper. In the spring, the baby pigeons hatched on the roof of 547 and a prodigious cooing woke the household most mornings, but who wouldn’t prefer that to the elevated, prefer new life over the screech of metal.

It was a third-floor apartment opposite the north end of the small hill where they’d stuck Grant’s Tomb. Instead of the Hudson River, their windows overlooked a splash of oak leaves for most of the year, and a scrabbly brown slope the rest.

“You call that a seasonal view,” Alma said. She’d been pouting ever since John had refused “a hug for Grandma.” In general John was compliant when it came to grown-ups’ unearned demands for affection, so Carney took it as a sign of good character.

“In the winter all those green leaves will be gone,” Leland said.

“Yes,” Carney said. “That’s what happens with trees.” He made a quick prayer for Elizabeth’s return from the kitchen with the cookies. He asked his in-laws how they were enjoying Park West Village, the complex off Columbus that they’d moved into.

    “We love it,” Alma said. “There’s a Gristedes opening up.”

It was their third apartment since they’d sold the Strivers’ Row house. They left the first because the block transformed into a drug bazaar once the weather changed. They’d toured it on a snowy afternoon and it had seemed sleepy enough.

The second apartment was in a nice clean building on Amsterdam. Next door to a judge and down the hall from a pastor. Six months into the lease, the Joneses were alarmed by an odd smell. They assumed a mouse had expired in the walls. A reddish-brown liquid dripped from the ceiling and sent them running to the super, who after a quick investigation identified the substance as the upstairs neighbor’s putrefying remains. Such unchecked seepage through the substandard flooring pointed to larger structural issues in the building, on that point everyone agreed. The Joneses stayed at the Hotel Theresa until they landed at Park West Village. As for the upstairs neighbor, he had chased away his friends and family over the decades and the city buried him on Hart Island one unexceptional Sunday afternoon.