Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(63)
EIGHT
It was like she was waiting for him when he showed up the next day. A small duffel bag and two framed photographs sat at the foot of the staircase. “Mommy—my ride is here,” she said.
Mrs. Wilkes shouted from upstairs and appeared a minute later to say goodbye. She was skinny and spry, not too much older than Pepper. She noticed the photographs and smiled at her daughter. “You think you’re taking those?” she said.
“My place could use a little something new,” Lucinda said.
“Your father’s going to have a fit,” Mrs. Wilkes said. “None of my business, though.” She had appraised her visitor and a dubious expression overtook her face. There was something fishy about him.
“He’s from the movie company,” Lucinda said. On set, her voice was deeper; she sounded childlike now. She wore blue jeans and a black cardigan underneath a red-and-white houndstooth coat. Pepper hadn’t seen her without Nefertiti’s prodigious Afro wig. Her hair was cut in a curly bob; it suited. She told her mother she’d call later that evening. Pepper moved to help her with her things and she brushed him off, covering the photographs so he couldn’t see what they were. He popped the trunk and Lucinda gently laid the pictures inside, facedown. She scurried back to hug her mother in the doorway and Mrs. Wilkes stood there, watching and waving, until they pulled away.
Pepper had borrowed the car from Buford that morning. The Dodge Charger was midnight blue, with a black vinyl top. Buford’s mother lived in Hempstead and the bartender drove out there a few times a week, chain-smoking with the windows up the entire way. Bent cigarette butts jutted from the ashtrays like dismal weeds. Pepper scowled when he got inside and took a whiff. Buford said, “No one’s forcing you to borrow it.”
According to the telephone operator, there were two Wilkeses listed in Maplewood. Pepper headed first to the home of Mr. Lamont Wilkes, as he had never met a white Lamont. The house was a handsome Tudor nestled in oak trees, with cozy window treatments and a lawn of stiff, frozen grass. He rang the doorbell and Lucinda opened the door like she was expecting him.
He drove toward Walton Road. “You grow up there?” Pepper asked.
“My whole life,” she said. “She keeps my room the same.”
It was a charming stretch of Maplewood, the kind of place where white people build snowmen after the first big winter storm and gave them ridiculous names. Pepper had been in Hilton, around Springfield Avenue before, but not this neighborhood. How mixed was it? He wondered how her family had got on when they first moved in. They didn’t speak for a time. “Nice house,” he said.
“Nice neighborhood. They keep the streets clean.” She checked her face in the mirror behind the sun visor. “You’re surprised,” she said. “I had an old boyfriend who said it’d be good for my career if I said I grew up in the ghetto. You know what? They ate it up. I said I was from Harlem in my first interview for Miss Pretty’s Promise and from then on I came from a broken home—my daddy wasn’t around, the whole thing.” She grinned. “You say Harlem and white people get ideas in their heads. I didn’t see the point in correcting them, seeing how much they liked it. Not just white people—I had black folks coming up to me like, ‘I used to see you dance at Shiney’s back in the day,’ mixing me up with other people. My friends I grew up with tease me and congratulate me for getting over.”
Poor girl makes good was a more interesting story than suburban girl makes good, he supposed. Pepper had heard of passing for white before but passing for broke was a new one on him. Getting over. He’d always liked that expression. Crooks make a big score, grab that jackpot, and law-abiding black folks get over, find a way to outwit white people’s rules. Stealing a little security or safety or success from a world that fought hard to keep that from you.
“I was heading back today anyway,” she said. “Zippo freaking out?”
“He was concerned.”
“So they sent you to rescue me? I don’t need saving.”
“Has anyone in your life saved you from anything?”
She looked at him. “No.”
“Ever?”
“No.”
“Then it sounds like you don’t got to worry about it.” He grunted. “But they got a lot of people standing around getting paid for nothing. Had me looking all over. Roscoe Pope. Quincy Black.” He refrained from linking himself to the dead gangster.
“Them,” she said. She sat up straight. “You know about Chink, then. Because Quincy’ll gossip like an old woman.”
He didn’t say anything, which she took as a yes.
“I was a teenager,” she said. “I didn’t know who he was when he waved us over to his table. My cousin Baby, she whispered to me: He’s a bad man. She ran with that street crowd, running uptown to hang out. It was the first time she took me up there. Then I started going with Chink and didn’t need a tour guide anymore.”
“Gangster’s girl is usually chew ’em up and spit ’em out. You look all right.”
“Better than all right.” She cracked the window to cut the cigarette smell. “My parents had a fit when Baby told them about us,” Lucinda said. “I’d told them I was seeing a boy from CCNY—that’s where Daddy went. But they couldn’t do anything about it. Afraid of what he might do more than what the neighbors might say.” Chuckling. “Then it got worse! You should have seen them when I said I was moving to California—‘No one ever comes back from California.’ They’d have preferred I had ten babies with Chink than move out there.”