Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(18)
FIVE
535 Edgecombe Ave. An address from the invoice pile on his desk, one of his customers. Puerto Rican lady, two kids, curly red hair tucked under a green-and-white gingham wrap. New convertible sofa and his apologies for not carrying bunk beds. Her name escaped but the musicality of her delivery had imprinted itself. Five three five: a delicate filament; a fragment of a TV jingle; the voice of an ambitious starlet stealing the scene, flirty and determined.
In better times. The place had been torched. Plywood sealed the first-floor windows and those above were dark and haloed in soot. Carney hoped they made it out okay.
“Insurance play,” Munson said. “Landlord buys it for cheap, it’s got a big mortgage and tax liens. Load up on insurance and boom—burn that sucker down.” He stepped out of the car to piss. “Up here, Brooklyn and the Bronx. I’d like to get in on that, boy.”
A racket predating Carney’s birth, he didn’t need the lesson. His father came home reeking of kerosene on occasion. Some of Carney’s fencing clientele dabbled. “You light some rags and get out of there,” Skip Lauderdale told him once. They were waiting for his coin guy to call back. “You hear people arguing down the hallway, kids laughing it up, and hope the guy who’s supposed to call the fire department will do his job. Usually the fire’s out before anyone gets hurt.” Usually meant sometimes it went another way.
The arson game was more brazen nowadays. State inspector’s in your pocket, who’s going to flag suspicious payouts? Another sign of the city’s advancing deterioration. Driving on the expressway, Carney’d look over to find a plain of rubble instead of a neighborhood, a scatter of bricks that used to be tenements containing the hopes and miseries of tens of thousands of newcomers, strivers, and the humbly plodding on. A man lights a match and a building goes up in smoke. A landlord stops paying taxes and surrenders the building to junkies, who move in and drive out the families, and then the city razes it all. Crater by crater. An organized shamelessness that verged on conspiracy. Simpler than conspiracy was Carney’s take: In general, people were terrible.
In April, the papers covered a delegation of mayors who came to town for a conference, with a field trip to Brownsville. Elizabeth read out quotes, using her Caucasian voice for the outraged visitors:
Kevin White of Boston said the twenty-block area “may be the first tangible sign of the collapse of our civilization.”
“God, it looks like Dresden,” said Wesley C. Uhlman of Seattle.
…and most of them said it reminded them of home.
Ha ha. That last quote became a punch line when she and Carney were out for a stroll and encountered tokens of neighborhood decrepitude. A pervert squatting on a park bench, ladling goo out of an iron bucket; an alley cat with its head smashed flat; a baby’s grimy doll missing half a face: It reminds me of home!
The east side of Edgecombe was Coogan’s Bluff, and the top of the stairs to the old Polo Grounds. Bums camped in the park beyond the stone wall, in shanties nestled against the rocks. Sheet-metal walls held up by pipe. One of the residents had taken a pet: a mutt with matted fur, tethered to a concrete block by a long, curly telephone cord. A few blocks over from Munson’s hideout and he’d crossed the border into a different city.
Munson whistled at the dog and received an indifferent response. He got back in the car.
“This is a stakeout?” Carney said.
“In that we’re waiting. Not similar in that there’s no mystery.”
No mystery because they waited for his partner. Munson had reached out to Webb from a pay phone three blocks down from the 157th Street apartment. When he turned to dial, Carney weighed the pros and cons of running. Elizabeth was safe out of town, scoop up the kids and split before this night got worse. Because it was getting worse minute by minute, like he was a nail being pounded deeper and snugger and stuck. Two white cops being pursued by the Justice Department, black radicals with submachine guns, Notch Walker. This was unsustainable. His assessment: It was Tuesday night, a warm pleasant night in Washington Heights with people around, witnesses, and Munson couldn’t stop him if he ran.
“Carney.” Munson cupped his hand over the transmitter. “Don’t even think about it.”
He got off the phone and informed Carney they were headed to Highbridge Park to square things with Buck. “Maybe even get him to apologize for belting you. What’d he, hit you in the kidney?”
“I don’t know what you call it.”
Munson shrugged and told him his car was around the corner.
Carney drove the Cadillac over to 158th and Edgecombe, one block south of the meet. Fifty-fourth and Lex, 157th. “How many hideouts you have?” he asked.
“They’re like women—you got to have a few spares.”
Carney only had the one. He’d been deliberating, but now there was no question he was taking tomorrow off to meet Elizabeth. The kids wouldn’t be home until after four. He’d have to explain the knot on his head and the bruises blooming on his stomach. Last time he got a black eye on extralegal business, he told Elizabeth that a druggie had socked him and run off. “It’s crazy out there!” This time around, he was going with mugged, given the state of the city these days. If Alma were still alive, he’d have picked a mugging location to irritate her—in front of her church, broad daylight, or outside Broken Wing, that orphan charity she was on the board of. For the first time, he felt her loss.