Harlem Shuffle(95)

Carney read out sections to Pepper, summarizing. The thing was out of Elizabeth’s dime novels, the ones with a white lady in a flowing dress running from a cliff-side castle, candelabra in hand. Young Miss Mather expounded upon the night with Linus on the patio, the bonfire at the beach. “Counting down the days until we can see each other again on Heart’s Meadow.” Heart’s Meadow—it reeked of gazebo confessions in splintered moonlight. Romantic letter aside, Linus and the young lady didn’t end up together, he knew that.

A woman in shiny red hot pants strolled by on the sidewalk and distracted Pepper, which Carney took as an indication to stop reading. He was returning the letter to the yellowed envelope when he noticed the folded piece of paper. It was new and didn’t belong with the old letter. The heavy white office bond contained five rows of numbers, typewritten. Carney held it up to Pepper.

    Pepper grunted.

“What is it?”

“From the number of digits, numbered bank accounts,” Pepper said.

Carney looked them over again. “How do you know?”

“Where do you think I keep my shit?” Pepper said.

Carney couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. Money stashed abroad. Laundered? Tax evasion? Is this why they were chasing Freddie down? The last item in the briefcase was the 1941 Double Play baseball card featuring Joe DiMaggio and Charley Keller. But it’d be ludicrous to go through all this for a baseball card.

Pepper and Carney killed time in the Chinese joint. Instead of offering prophecies or lucky numbers, the white slips inside the fortune cookies advertised United Life Insurance. Pepper left an inordinate tip.

They walked over to Carney’s truck. Carney had gotten a new paint job for the Ford but the sounds it produced when he turned the key betrayed its age. He had stopped selling gently used furniture years ago and mostly used the truck to make the rounds of the swap meets, to off-load old coins or watches on specialists. Given the way his business was going, and Elizabeth’s, they could afford a new car, a sporty but practical number, but he liked the truck because it felt like a disguise. The kids could still squeeze in the front seat and it made him happy to have the four of them in a line, chopping his hand to restrain them at a sudden stop.

Pepper said, “Still runs.” He closed the door.

“It’s a good old truck.” He decided: Get a proper car for the family at the end of the summer, before May and John got too big. And concentrate on the job at hand.

    When he and Pepper left the furniture store that afternoon, Pepper had put a steel lunch box by his feet. Now he opened it up and took out the two Colt Cobras inside. “They dropped these,” he said. He checked them.

Carney pulled out his own gun. “From Miami Joe,” he said. He’d found it under the sofa a few months after Pepper killed the man in his office. It had remained untouched in the bottom drawer of his desk, beneath a copy of Ebony with Lena Horne on the cover, until today.

Pepper was unsurprised. “Know how to use it?”

There had been one time in high school when his father was out and these rats had been squealing for hours behind his building. That anyone could hear it and not go crazy was inconceivable. He knew where his father kept his gun. On the closet shelf where his mother had kept her hat boxes, Big Mike had a shoebox with bullets and knives and what Carney later figured out was a makeshift garrote. And this month’s gun. The day of the rats it had been a .38 snub nose that sat like a big black frog on Carney’s thirteen-year-old palm. It was loud. He didn’t know if he hit any of the critters, but they scattered and Carney lived in fear for weeks that his father would find out he’d been in his stuff. When he opened the shoebox months later, there was a different pistol inside.

He told Pepper he knew how to use it.

Pepper grunted. He put one of the Colt Cobras into a pocket inside his nylon windbreaker.

Now that they had arrived at the Park Avenue meet, Miami Joe’s gun seemed silly. For the last five years, Carney had told himself that if anything bad went down, there was the gun from under the couch for protection. Secret security, like get-out-of-town money you keep in a shoe just in case. But they were on Park Avenue. One of the most expensive streets in the world. The building Van Wyck had chosen for the handoff was worth tens of millions of dollars; it was a token of the man’s concentrated power, the capital and influence that scaffolded his greed. As for Carney, he had a dead man’s gun and a worn-out crook who was too cheap to buy new pants.

    “Ready?” Carney said.

“I was checking out the Egon one.”

Carney looked at him.

“The Egon recliner with the EZ-Smooth Lever Action. In your office, the catalog. And a standing lamp.”

“Of course,” Carney said. “It’s usually four to six weeks.”

A tiny latch secured the plywood doors in front of 319 Park, next to a sign that read van wyck realty: building the future. Pepper and Carney moved beyond the fence and the sounds of the city magically hushed. The bronze plate was already up: VWR. White tape crisscrossed the newly installed glass of the lobby entrance. Dusty cardboard covered the floors and gray clouds of plaster mottled the walls.

A white security guard sat on a folding chair by the bank of elevators. He removed his reading glasses—he had been scratching at a book of word jumbles—and regarded Carney and his partner with irritation. His hand dropped to his waist, in the vicinity of his holster. He pointed to the glass case containing the building directory, where white letters floated on an expanse of black felt: suite 1500. The lone occupant.