Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(51)
Pope said, “Talked to Hal Ashby last week at a party. He’s doing a movie about the circus. Writing a part for me—the ringmaster. Black ringmaster of a white circus—ain’t that a gas? And I’m in New York City doing this crummy picture.”
Pepper nodded. Fiftieth Street. He’d been chased into this station once and lost them when he jumped into the tunnel. They only follow half the time if you beat it for the tracks, he’d learned.
“This guy Zippo? I don’t think he’s all there. I think that nigger’s got a screw loose, you hear me?”
“I agree.”
Pope’s expression turned overcast. “This thing with Lucy. You think she’s okay?”
“How would I know?”
“She never missed a day of work, even when she was snorting one day into the next. I thought I was bad, shit—I used to call her the Hoover, the way she vacuumed that shit up! But she always showed up to the set. ‘We don’t get second chances,’ she used to tell me when I was fucking around, sleeping in. You need people like that in your life—tell you to get your ass out of bed, right?”
Pepper thought of Hazel naturally, but was not going to signal inclusion in Pope’s fraternity. But he did miss her. He didn’t mind it when she told him his business, didn’t mind a lot of things about her.
Pope sighed. “Quincy is cool, but he has these guys who handle his business sometimes, I heard some bad things. You think one of them did something to her? She goes up there late at night and—”
“I don’t know.”
“We should have taken a taxi if the movie is paying for it. I’m famous, bitch.” He delivered famous with a quiver, as if unable to hold on to the notion. He met Lucinda Cole three years ago, he said, at the house of a Los Angeles player. Pepper had never heard of the guy, but Pope kept repeating his name, the way low-level hoods invoke neighborhood gangsters and bosses, like everyone is supposed to know who they are and regard them with the same fear and reverence: Don Cornelius, Don Cornelius. Don—was he in the mob? Pepper gathered the man was in the music industry. He’d ask John or May who he was, next time he saw them.
Don Cornelius held a July Fourth cookout and Roscoe Pope saw Lucinda enter the patio from the walkway along the side of the house. “You know how it is, you recognize someone from the movies and then you see them in person and it knocks you out? It was like that but times ten.”
Pepper had seen Martin Balsam coming out of Trader Vic’s once, back in the old Savoy Hilton, so he understood.
“Everybody had a thing for Lucy from Miss Pretty’s Promise—she was fine. Finer in person—but you know, you’re working on this movie. A Black Athena.”
“Nefertiti.”
“Black Athena. I don’t know how I got it up to rap to her. I was all”—he mouthed gibberish—“but that was the start. She’d heard of me—not seen my act but heard stories of my partying, that Vegas stuff. She listened to me. You let me talk, I’m going to get you.”
Pepper tuned him out. The ghost station caught his attention, as it always did, that fleeting apparition beyond the windows. Look at a subway map and downtown all the stops are close together: Rector, Wall, Cortlandt. Only a few blocks apart. White people were lazy back then—lazier—and didn’t want to walk too far. Then they got smart—too many stops slow things down. Back in ’59, they closed the Ninety-first Street station, so the 1 went from Eighty-sixth to Ninety-sixth. It made sense. Pepper didn’t remember activists marching up Broadway with Save Our Ninety-First Street Station! signs and handing out pamphlets like they do these days over every little thing.
But it had been one of his stations. Dolly had lived on Eighty-ninth when they were together, so he’d split from her pad, snag a coffee at Metro Donut, and hop on the 1 at Ninety-first. Ninety-first was a door into Dolly’s law-abiding world—and how he got back into his own crooked one. He liked getting on at Ninety-first because it meant he was returning to where he belonged. Sometimes when he hung out with Carney and Elizabeth and the kids, Pepper thought about how he had chosen to live, and where. He thought about all his passed-over stations.
When they buried Ninety-first it was like they buried those days too, the good parts and otherwise. No going back. The platform remained even if the street entrance was covered by concrete. Walking on the sidewalk above, he forgot it existed. In the tunnel he sped through it and some rides—not every time—he stared into that harbor carved into the rock. What’s been happening in there, among the advertisements for discontinued products and posters of forgotten motion pictures and Broadway flops? Punks sneak in to paint graffiti over what other guys threw up last week, layer over layer, like the buildings above—put it up, knock it down, another takes its place. But what’s been happening that can’t be captured in the five seconds when his train shudders through? As a crook he knew that everybody gets up to something when nobody’s looking.
The ghost station remained. They passed it. One day when he had time he’d walk down the tunnel from Ninety-sixth and visit. Up close, see it for real, what it’s been up to lately.
“I told her to fire her manager,” Pope said. “She was doing this TV shit, Dragnet and Adam-12, glamorizing the pigs. Man, she was Sister Josephine from Miss Pretty’s Promise—you don’t put her up for chump shit like that! It’s a modern-day plantation out there. I got these white directors sucking my dick right now because I’m hot. Got to make a splash while I can. But when they stop giving a shit, I still have my jokes. What does Lucy have, except what they decide to give her? Ten years after Miss Pretty and they got her playing nurses.” He stopped to glower at a white man in a tan overcoat who disapproved of his colorful language. “When we were together, she still thought that big role was just around the corner. You come from the ghetto like she did, you have to believe that. The way out. That’s why I felt bad when I saw her at the hotel. She didn’t have that fire anymore. She looked beaten.”