Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(59)
Zippo frowned. “Chink did get weird about the movie, though,” he said. “Kept asking about when we were going to start shooting, where. I thought maybe he wanted a cameo. You ever work for him? As a bodyguard or—”
“I don’t take money from guys like that.” Foot soldier for assholes? He’d already done that in World War II. No. A man has a hierarchy of crime, of what is morally acceptable and what is not, a crook manifesto, and those who subscribe to lesser codes are cockroaches. Are nothing. In Chink Montague’s knife-wielding days, when he did his own enforcing, he’d slashed his bloody path to the top of Harlem’s rackets. For the last twenty years or so he’d preserved his empire of bookmaking, narcotics, protection schemes, and prostitution, enduring like an incurable condition, outlasting aspiring up-and-comers, entering into an accommodation with the Italians, and keeping the right cops, judges, and politicians fed with envelopes. Notch Walker had muscled into Chink’s old territory of Sugar Hill with his grand designs, but Chink had kept the young gangster’s encroachments at bay. Most of them. He’d lost his Lenox Ave numbers operation and a couple of blocks of drug trade, but he hung on.
After the Theresa job, Chink had turned Harlem upside down to find out who’d stolen his girlfriend’s necklace. Didn’t want to lose face, but maybe it meant more to him than just a pretty gift for this month’s girl. Maybe she meant more.
Zippo asked him what he was going to do.
Pepper and Chink Montague had been in the same room before—in the back lounge of Pearly Gates, and once the big man had dropped in to preen at Corky Bell’s poker game when Pepper was working security—but he’d never had the pleasure. One evening Pepper walked down 125th to find the mobster handing out free Easter hams to whoever showed up—throwing a bone to those he preyed upon. His fellow crooks embarrassed themselves when they spoke of Chink with deference to his power or resignation at their powerlessness. The man was vermin. Why shame yourself by flattering a cockroach for being good at finding crumbs. No, they had not met, but that quirk of fate was about to end.
Fuck it. Time to meet the man.
SEVEN
The Daily News reporter covering the Lenox Avenue fire jazzed up his account with tales of the address’s colorful history. For number 347 had seen dirty business. It was built by the French Bros. during the Harlem building boom of the 1880s. Real estate is speculative because you don’t know if customers will show. The vice business isn’t speculative at all; the hungry show up day and night. For many years Lemuel Gold ran the place as a brothel, with discount days for cops and Tammany Hall swells, until they found him floating in the Gowanus Canal with a sash cord wrapped around his neck. The Gowanus Canal—such was the enormity of his killer’s contempt. Once split into apartments, the townhouse became a one-building crime wave, a multistory felony with a moonshine operation in the basement, a small-time numbers bank on the parlor floor, whores on the second, whores on the third, and an occasional opium den on the fourth with a sweet view of the Hotel Theresa. New ownership in 1953 turned it legit and a more law-abiding parade marched through the premises: poets and bricklayers, polio cripples and future aldermen. On November 15, 1973, the tenant on the top-floor apartment was a woman who took in needlework to supplement her waitressing job, monograms and light tailoring. The textiles caught quickly when the cigarette dropped from her sleepy hand.
By the time Pepper arrived, the entire structure was engulfed. Flames geysered from windows—hell had sprung a leak. Policemen shooed the evacuees farther away and the firefighters expanded their perimeter. Four buildings down, the patrons of Earl’s Satin exited the premises for a look. The squares lingering to gawk and the crooked splitting the scene in the face of police presence. The club hadn’t shut its doors yet. He hoped Chink was still inside.
Pepper had called Donegal’s, relayed his request, and called back ten minutes later for the skinny: Chink Montague liked the Thursday action at Earl’s Satin, the club he’d stolen from Smiling Rick many years before, along with the man’s other operations. Not many people remembered Smiling Rick. Pepper did, without fondness. He doubted that Rick’s customers noticed the change in management, whether they played numbers or had a hankering for unlicensed booze or pussy. Ask the runners, waitresses, and working girls and they’d probably acknowledge that of the two bad men, Chink put more effort into being wretched.
The city specialized in accumulated miseries and women in trouble. Women in trouble wasn’t Pepper’s usual line of work, but here he was again, second time in as many years. At least he was getting paid this go-around.
His job for Marie had been a freebie. He’d always respected her, the way she conducted herself at Carney’s Furniture, her kindnesses to the Harlem characters who passed through the door, some of them decent people and some of them rotten. She didn’t ask questions when Pepper used the store as an answering machine; his messages got through and his business proceeded unimpeded. Too smart not to know about her boss’s side action and cool enough to hold her tongue, even if she was a straight arrow.
For a brief time, her husband, Rodney, had pretended to decency. Carney hired a series of sweetly incompetent secretaries when Marie left to have her daughter, Bonnie, and all concerned were relieved when Rodney allowed her to start working again. He was having trouble finding a job, she told Carney. No one believed he tried very hard. She started wearing long sleeves on hot days and big sunglasses—Shiner Specials—to hide her black eyes, but it wasn’t Pepper’s business how she lived her life. Until she asked it to be.