Harlem Shuffle(72)
Shuttered for years from the looks of it. “The Theater Where People See Cinema.” Giving the hard sell there. The SRO was right across the street.
He had to get the briefcase out of his safe, whatever it was. Carney had considered jimmying the cheap lock but he was too good at imagining outlandish contents: heroin, gold bullion, strontium 90 in a lead case with Russian lettering. Holding it one night was enough to fulfill his family obligation. Freddie had to get his ass downtown and take it away and not come back until the heat was off.
What kind of loony bird rips off Chink Montague? Or rips off someone with enough juice to mobilize Chink on his behalf? It was Freddie who’d put Carney on the mobster’s map with the Theresa job, and now he had returned him to Chink’s attention by fucking up once more. I didn’t mean to get you in trouble. That was fine when they were kids. Adult trouble was more permanent than Aunt Millie smacking you with a hairbrush or his father taking off his belt. He could still make it downtown to Union Square to check out the Bella Fontaines if he wrapped it up quick.
There had been no reason for Carney to notice the west side of Broadway and 171st, all those times he came to the Imperial. Cafeteria, tobacco store, hair salon, the insignificant front door to 4043 Broadway. It was called the Eagleton—like his childhood home, it was a building that didn’t deserve a name, despite the ambitions of its architects. Fate has a way of striking places with lightning so that you can never see them the same way again. Carney reached for the knob—in raw spots the metal door was gray beneath the red paint—as a short white man with a long, gnarled beard barged out of the SRO, one hand holding his brown trilby fast to his head.
“Watch it,” the man said, scowling. A mottled canvas bag was slung over his shoulder and his elbows sawed back and forth as he zoomed toward the subway. Carney stepped inside the lobby. A thin, inexplicable layer of grease covered the lobby’s chartreuse walls, as if he were exploring a five-story chicken place. The front desk was empty. Carney heard a toilet flush; he beat it up to the second floor before the clerk returned.
There were six rooms on every floor. On the second floor, one resident watched The Andy Griffith Show at high volume, the next one blasted a Ford commercial, and a third man merely screamed about “them.”
Room 306 was silent. A breeze sucked in the door an inch. Through the crack, the mirror leaning against the wall relinquished few details. “Freddie? Linus?” He pushed in.
They had only been there a few days, but his cousin and his pal had made a nest. The sheets on the twin bed were a grimy bundle, and a makeshift bed on the floor had been gathered from frayed couch cushions. In one corner Freddie and Linus had built a trash pile of soda bottles, beer cans, and grease-soaked wax paper; flies zagged above it in deranged loops. They’d lugged their clothing uptown in pillowcases, which sat half deflated by the window.
“Freddie?” Carney said, loudly, to alert anyone in the bathroom before he tried the door.
But Linus was beyond listening. He was scrunched in the bathtub in an odd position, on his side, as if he had been trying to break through the cast iron with his back. The overdose had turned his lips and fingertips blue. Against the white of the bathtub, dingy as it was, they appeared purplish.
THREE
Elizabeth threw off the sheet and walked to the bathroom. “You’re keeping me up with all the sighing.”
Carney sighed all evening and into the wee hours, often mouthing “Mother of fucking God” as a chaser. He regretted his jokes about Freddie’s friend the last few years, the beatnik putdowns and Bowery bum comments. Linus’s family had locked him up in the nuthouse, doctors had tied him down and sent a million volts through him. He slunk into a drug hole, where he died. Carney’s derision had been a way to let off steam, to express disappointment in and worry over his cousin. Now he thought about the poor man and his last view of earth: the groove of rust worn from the tub’s leaky faucet, like the ooze from a wound.
Did you go quick when you died like that? He hoped it had been quick.
Had Freddie returned from a chicken run, or scoring, and discovered his friend’s corpse, or had he awakened to the scene in the bathroom? He must be scared. And sad. On top of his fears about blowback from whatever job he and Linus had pulled. An unlocked door in a building like the Eagleton, ajar—they would have called the cops by now. Some down-and-outer pops in to see if anything’s lying unattended and gets a big surprise.
No one could identify Carney except the man he bumped into at the Eagleton’s entrance, the crotchety dude with the beard. What does that man do when he returns and sees the cops milling about, or hears about it in a few days—speak up or keep it zipped?
When Elizabeth returned she slipped her arm around his chest and pressed her face to his neck. “You’re going to kill them tomorrow.”
“It’s a lot.” When he tried to focus on the Bella Fontaine meeting, orchestrate the visit, the floor gave way and he tumbled into room 306 again, hand reaching for the bathroom door.
“You’ll be making history.” They chuckled.
“I don’t think First Negro to Become an Authorized Dealer for Bella Fontaine is going to make the papers. It’s not like I’m doing a million things with a peanut.”
“What?”
“George Washington Carver.”