Harlem Shuffle(70)

Carney and Delroy, anyway. Some kids throwing a football around one January morning discovered Yea Big in Mount Morris Park, sash-cord wound around his neck. Missing for a week before melted snow gave him up, with the frozen dog shit and cigarette butts. That was last year, at the start of the war between Bumpy Johnson and Chink Montague. Bumpy Johnson got out of Alcatraz in ’63 on mandatory release and had an idea to reclaim the empire he’d lost eleven years before. Jerry Catena, an underboss in the Genovese family, backed his play, while Chink operated under the auspices of the Lombardis, making their conflict a proxy war over Harlem’s rackets. That Chink was Bumpy’s protégé gave the conflict a biblical flair.

“They got us dancing puppets,” Delroy told Carney when he came around for the envelope. He’d been up for days. He ran a finger along the scar in his cheek as if scraping invisible peas out of a pod. “We kill each other and these guinea motherfuckers sit back and laugh.” It made for a hot couple of weeks until they called a truce and carved up the neighborhood like the messy butchers they were.

After Yea Big’s death, Delroy came for the envelope solo. He and Carney were linked now—fellow puppets, crooked confederates, and fellow residents of Harlem, USA, God bless. They shared milestones. Delroy was Carney’s first customer when the furniture store reopened after the expansion; the hood needed another dinette set for his latest girlfriend. Some men commemorated a new romance with the gift of a sparkling necklace or a pair of smart earrings from their preferred jeweler. With Delroy, it was dinette sets. “These gals, they don’t even know how to set a table proper. How you going to feed your man, you ain’t even got a goddamn place to eat?” The logic was sound. For a stretch, Delroy’s romantic life was particularly fruitful and he bought three Riviera! by Collins-Hathaway pedestal tables in one year. Carney cut him a break on the last one.

    Did Chink think Carney was shortchanging him? Or had someone set him up?

Delroy parked on 155th and Broadway, across from Sid the Sud King. The mascot on the sign was a Mr. Clean knockoff, a bald-headed Negro flexing in a white T-shirt. His grin broad and psychotic. Chet the Vet tugged Carney out of the car and led him into the laundromat.

driest spin in town. White foam pushed against the washers’ portholes in a lazy slosh. Old ladies parceled coins and old men wearing their last clean drawers shuffled around the grimy coin-op. The place was a misery, a death ward for old Maytags, the machines rocked and bucked so. Is there anything you can do, doctor?…Could be days, could be weeks. It’s in God’s hands now. Every nickel shook the washers closer to the nearest junkyard. Or empty lot, more likely.

The July swelter plus the heat from the mammoth dryers made the room unbearable. You couldn’t hear a word above the machines and the fans that shoved the hot air around. Which was probably the point.

last wash 7 p.m. Today it sounded like a warning.

Chet the Vet steered Carney into the office, past the vending machine that dispensed boxes of Salvo, Biz, and Instant Fels. The back room was dim and most of the light came from the door to the alley. Chink Montague sat in a wheeled, green leather executive chair, one leg crossed over the other, his hands interlaced. Gigantic diamond rings bulged on his fingers like warts.

    Chink Montague had made his fearsome reputation with a knife, but no longer conjured the image of a fleet, balletic slasher. People still remembered the audacious sadism of his first campaign, after Bumpy Johnson got sent to Alcatraz. That initial bloody exercise in ambition had served him well over the years, but he’d learned other means of control. Take the publicity trick with the hams. Bumpy had started the Christmas goodwill giveaway, handing out turkeys to the Harlem needy from the back of a truck. Chink followed suit, tossing out free hams the day before Easter, sometimes to people who were unaware that he’d killed their husband or son. Or were too hungry to care. These days he was more likely to hold court than to press steel to some mope’s throat, presiding over his minions at the Hotel Theresa bar or buying a round for everyone at one of his clubs, the 99 Spot or the Too True.

And this place, behind one of the city’s innumerable fronts, where the operators of power worked their levers and pedals. Sometimes business wasn’t business unless rubes and squares walked outside, oblivious to how they were getting fucked over inside.

The manager of the laundromat was a scrawny man in a saggy undershirt painted with sweat stains. Launderer, heal thyself. He leaned against the bathroom door and scratched his neck. Chink Montague snapped his fingers and the man scurried away.

The mobster explained that he was getting the floors refinished at his office upstairs at the 99 Spot. “Contractors,” he said. “They promise and promise it’s going to take not so long, and then you have to double it. It’s hot in here today, but I like the sound of the thumping machines. Like someone’s getting worked over in the next room.”

    A customer hollered through the door to complain that a machine stole his money. Chet the Vet stuck his head out. Whatever his expression was, it ended the dispute.

“First time we met,” Chink told Carney, “I was telling you to find something. People told me there was a new fence uptown, keeping his head down.”

“I try to stay out of things,” Carney said.

“And I was helping out a young starlet—Miss Lucinda Cole. She’s in Hollywood now. You seen any of her movies?”