Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(22)
By ’63, the Cold War proved an impossible headwind. “I’m in shelters, now, buddy,” he explained. Hawking backyard bunkers for the American Fallout Shelter Company. “It pays to be nimble.” He was delighted to see Corky Bell arranging the seats when he arrived at the Aloha Room early Friday evening. Corky Bell was not the only one grateful for a reminder of the good old days; Purvis’s work was not as fulfilling as it used to be. “I got sick of feeling like an errand boy for the RAND Corporation, you know what I mean?” The table stared silently. Currently he consulted for the U.S. military, doing image rehab on tactical-use herbicides like Agent Orange. “The average American hears the word chemical,” he told the table, “and gets all sorts of negative associations. It’s my job to rearrange the brain.” The players nodded.
The first hand was at 8:06 P.M. on Friday, May 28th. Eight players opened up the action and the game sustained a vigorous ebb and flow of new blood, chumps, showboats, and colorful protagonists for the next few days. They rotated through five-card stud, draw, razz, ace-to-five lowball, deuce-to-seven, and hi-lo, with an all-day seven-card stud marathon on Sunday in honor of Purvis’s dad, who served in two world wars and had been an aficionado. Memorial Day—a time to remember those who served. When the energy flagged, Purvis started up a round of “From the Halls of Montezuma” and revived the proceedings.
Diehards napped in the back room and returned after an audit of their botched hands and miscalculations, men skipped Saturday and returned for a forty-eight-hour stretch on Sunday. When Corky Bell needed shut-eye, his nephew George presided. Old-timers reminisced over previous menus, like the Reuben sandwiches from Levi’s and the time Corky Bell ordered trays of fried chicken from Lady Betsy’s and had to pause the game until “motherfuckers learn how to use a goddamn napkin.” Was there enough food? Booze? The table mix of personalities lively and invigorating? A fistfight almost broke out over who fried the better bird, Lady Betsy’s or New Country Kitchen. The scramble made Corky Bell feel ten years younger.
Holiday weekend games—July Fourth, Labor Day—usually petered out Monday afternoon, submitting to the real world and its imperatives. One can inhabit a dream for only so long. This Memorial Day seemed as if it was going to follow suit, but Cameron Purvis needed to keep going, and he made converts. He canceled his flight to Los Angeles—“meeting some idea guys from DuPont”—and informed his secretary of a death in the family. Players crawled home, showered and shaved, returned. Word got out and guys who couldn’t make it Monday appeared Tuesday for another round. Corky Bell arranged for another day of the Aloha Room’s shabby hospitality, rang Blackeye P’s about a platter of roast beef sandwiches, and told his man at the station house that they’d be dropping off another envelope. Perhaps it was this call that drew the detective’s attention to the game.
Lonnie switched off with two other longtime Corky Bell dealers until he punched out Sunday night, weary but content. Corky felt bad calling him up Tuesday morning. Lonnie said the tips alone were a month of shifts at the Whistle Stop, the bar he worked at off 125th. The dealer hosed himself off and was back at the Aloha by dinner.
At 10:35 P.M. on Tuesday, June 1st, they were down to four players. Only Purvis and Nelson Wright remained from the original table four days before. They were making too much money to leave: Purvis was up sixty K, Wright twenty-five. Wright operated a cathouse on Broadway that catered to visiting businessmen. Before the Hotel Theresa was converted into office space, the concierge used to slip guests cards with the name of the place—BILOXI—in neat type. Wright was the only Harlem crook at the table. Times had changed.
The other white man besides Purvis was a self-described talent manager, whom Corky Bell pegged as a degenerate gambler type. Over the course of play it became apparent that no one had heard of his clients or the “big rooms” he claimed to book them in, but he leaked money, a sopping failure, so went unchallenged.
The final player was a soft-spoken Negro architect from Newark. He told them what he did for a living, to uncomprehending stares.
“Black architect?” Wright said. “I didn’t know they let us do that.”
“They don’t let me do shit,” he said. “I take it.” He had designed two hospitals and a nursing school. That was his angle, medical facilities.
Wright nodded, considering. “Solid.”
Four players, plus Corky Bell, and Lonnie, and the security guard at the door, when the gunmen appeared.
In the old days, Corky Bell retained bruisers of the old school, stone-cold killers with specialties: stranglers, mincers, men with strong opinions on quicklime versus sulfuric acid. They barely moved or breathed, fading before the flamboyant antics of the table until suddenly called into action to manhandle a drunk, snap a bodyguard’s femur, headbutt a white kibitzer who’d forgotten where he was.
Men misbehaved at Corky Bell games. No one had dared to rob one. To do so was to disrespect the uptown order and suffer the consequences. Doubtless the robbers were aware of this fact when they targeted the game.
Over the weekend, a two-man team had protected the Aloha Room, one on the door and the other at the bar. Finding replacements for Tuesday took longer than Corky Bell had anticipated. With the game winding down he decided to save a few bucks on the muscle and on the bartender, as he was happy to fix whatever the boys wanted—two lapses in protocol he wouldn’t have permitted himself in the old days.