Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(58)

“So a lot?”

“You think he took her?”

“It’s not a druggie thing. Her dealer says she hit him up for sleeping pills. That doesn’t fit with the mess in her hotel room.” When Pepper visited her hotel room, he’d expected the aftermath of a party—wine stains on the couch, cigarettes put out in the plants, some broken glass. But the damage wasn’t from a good time. It was from a bad time.

“He wouldn’t do that,” Zippo said. “Kidnap her.”

“Why? It’s not ZIPPO?” Pepper didn’t know if he was more disgusted by his employer’s stupidity or his na?veté. Chink had run most of Harlem at one point. He’d ordered kidnappings, done worse, and he knows he gets away with it. “What’d you, pimp her out? Tell him if he comes on board you’ll offer her up?”

Their food arrived. Pepper dug in. Zippo crossed his arms and pursed his lips, as if he spied a big curly hair sitting atop his slaw. “That’s not me.”

“You didn’t know?”

“I knew they’d stepped out together, I didn’t know he’d do something like this.”

They were making a movie about dirty Harlem and then the real thing came up and bit them in the ass. “More than step out,” Pepper said. “He set her up, bought her fancy clothes.” Gave her a ruby necklace that got two men killed, one of them by Pepper’s hand. Gave her a present made Pepper realize: Today was his birthday. “Something went down in that hotel room,” Pepper said. “A few hours after the shoot at Carney’s Furniture.”

Zippo made sure no one eavesdropped. “Lola’s in the office, says there’s someone on the phone who wants to speak to me. I figure it’s an overdue invoice. It’s Chink. He wants to talk to Lucinda. What am I supposed to do? I wasn’t pimping—it was an investor on the phone wants to say hi to what he’s investing in. A simple hello.” The conversation was brief, Zippo told him. “Five minutes later we were rolling. If she was upset, you’d never know.”

“I was there,” Pepper said. Nefertiti did not show weakness. But what about the actress, away from the cameras.

“One time,” Zippo said, “I had a client who asked me to take some pictures of this big-shot businessman.” His voice had ditched the manic, bubbly quality. “Naughty pictures, you know, to get the man in trouble. And I’m good at what I do—I see things. Most guys, blackmail pics, you’re lucky the thumb’s not over the lens half the time. But I see things, I capture them, and on that job I captured who that man was, and it ruined him. I didn’t like the way it felt. You cross to that side of the street, you take one step and another and then you never come back.”

He paused to make sure Pepper followed his point. His companion’s face remained blank. He pressed on. “I use the camera differently now. I love Lucinda—she’s a beautiful soul. When this movie comes out people will discover a part of her they’ve never seen before. I don’t even know if she knows it’s there. I’d never serve her up like that.” He nudged his food with the fork and finally took a bite.

The cashier shouted, “Family meal, four Cokes!”

It was stupid to hit up a monster like Chink Montague, period, but extra stupid when there was a woman in the mix. But people as a whole were pretty dim upstairs, and if you started dwelling on this or that person’s dimness, ranking it and measuring just how dim this or that motherfucker was, before you realize it half the day is gone. In Pepper’s experience.

They ate without speaking for a few minutes. Going to 107th Street had reminded him of when he tailed that drug dealer Biz Dixon, but it had been part of another job, surveillance of Wilfred Duke, the big Harlem banker. Former banker—that nigger was on the run with everybody’s money. Never did find him. But Pepper had helped set him up. He didn’t know who Zippo had taken blackmail pictures of, but some people, they’ve earned it. Guilt was a mug’s game, with chump stakes. Best to lay off that action.

Zippo waved to an old lady picking up her takeout order. She clutched the bag of chicken like it was her purse and she was walking down a dark alley. “We used to live in the same building,” Zippo said. “When I was little.” He wiped his mouth. “It’s weird when people know you for one thing, but that person ain’t around anymore, you know?”

Pepper shook his head.

“Like, I’m from around here and they still remember me for the fire thing, when I’m all about cinema now.”

“The fire thing.”

“That’s why they call me Zippo. I used to light fires.”

“For insurance money.”

“No, for myself.”

“You torch shit for no reason?”

“No, because I had to.”

“Had to.”

“To express myself. To put what’s inside me out there with everyone else.”

Pepper decided he didn’t understand the artistic temperament. “Next time, get in on an insurance play, make some money at the same time.”

What did Pepper have inside? Years ago he’d gone with a woman who informed him that he was, in fact, empty. “It’s like there’s nobody home.” Janet, with that apartment on Morningside and the fucking parakeet. Another ill-advised excursion to the land of the straight and narrow. Empty: At the time he had been insulted. He cut her off. The assessment stayed with him and in time its rightness sat more comfortably. Back in the war, busting his ass on the Ledo Road and ducking typhoons and typhus, he’d had plenty of time to listen to the Burmese workers expound on life. How to detach a leech from your balls, how their wives curried their chicken, their mumblings about down-home Buddha shit. He hadn’t seen a leech since, but that down-home Buddha shit continued to pop up, lit up in red neon like the facts of life. Take that bottle of Coke that Zippo was drinking. You pay a deposit on the bottle for the glass, like it’s worth something. But it’s the empty space inside, not the glass, that makes the bottle useful. Call him empty: He had put it to work.