Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(64)

After Burma, no one had to sell Pepper on leaving New Jersey. He’d never been out West. He saw how it might broaden a person. Then again, Pepper himself had visited ten of these United States—eleven if you count Connecticut—and he couldn’t say they’d made a big impression. A cup of coffee costs the same all over and the person who serves it is miserable in the same way, so maybe when you think you’re moving around you’re marching in place. “I grew up in Newark,” he said.

“Oh, yeah?”

Not too much traffic. The wheels bit into a pothole. It seemed like they just put in this roadway and it’s already falling apart. It used to be on So-and-so Street, before they put the highway in. He knew some boys from Orange who’d had a garage on Essex. A good place to get some wheels, and one of the mechanics knew a coins guy. It had been around here, maybe at this very moment he was driving through where it used to be. The highway had bulldozed on through, splitting Orange in half, erasing the garage, all those nice Victorians, the churches, a playground or two, the whole thing. But it was faster to midtown now, so it was worth it in Pepper’s estimation. Save ten minutes, that adds up over time.

“I saw you in that movie,” Pepper said. “You were good.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“You were that single mom telling off the punks.”

“I’ve done single mom on TV a bunch, but if it was a movie it was Birdie’s Way.”

“They’re playing a transistor radio on the stoop and you come out and yell at them.”

“Birdie’s Way. I moved out there for Miss Pretty and thought I’d made it. Got good notices, too. Did a lot of appearances when the song became a hit. Then a couple of years and all they gave me was stuff like Birdie’s Way.”

“It was all right.”

“They paid on time.”

He realized he was irritated with her. She’d been sitting on the couch with her mother fetching her cocoa while he was running around like a donkey, headbutting trifling fools and getting his bell rung.

The Manhattan skyline emerged for two seconds, misty in the ghost fog, and then another bend in the highway snatched it away again.

“Back into it,” Lucinda said.

“Next time don’t take the job.”

“And do what?”

“You hide out in New Jersey because of Chink?”

“Chink.” She huffed through her nose. “When I left Quincy’s, he was outside. He’d called earlier that night when I was on set and it got me upset. I needed something to mellow me out. I’d been clean since August. It was a hard summer.” She checked his reaction. “Sitting in that big Cadillac. I thought about running. But I’ve seen him do shit to people. Bad shit. Mostly he didn’t do business when I was around, but we’d be out at one of his hangouts and his face’d get mad and I know he spotted someone. He’d have the man brought over for a…” She searched for a euphemism and gave up. “He said, you teach someone a lesson in front of everybody, it stays with them.” She laughed. “Which is a terrible thing to tell an actress! Because my mistakes are out there for everyone to see, and he’s saying no one forgets. I got in the car.”

Chink wanted a cut of her earnings for setting her up when she was starting out, Lucinda said. She owed him. But that was just venting. He still loved her, he told her. He was leaving Harlem to retire someplace nice, an island. “I told him he was already on an island and he said, Somewhere sunny.” Harlem wasn’t the same, he said. It was getting worse. The whole city was, and it wore on him. When the film was over, they could go live somewhere nice, he was making moves to get his stuff in order. She sucked her teeth in disbelief. “Know why I dumped him?”

“Like your cousin said, he’s a bad man.” Present tense.

“That part I was okay with. Back then. Back then I didn’t understand. I had to go because the only way for me to be me was to leave who I was behind. All of it—back East, my family. My man.” Lucinda turned on the radio and jabbed the buttons. She settled on a doo-wop song that wove in and out of static. “I got the part in Miss Pretty’s Promise and they called me out to California and Leanne Wilkes was not getting on that plane. In a way it was Chink’s fault—he’s the one who bought me clothes for auditions and paid for my classes in the Village. He knew people—Hollywood people who liked to slum it uptown. The whole time he was schooling me to leave.”

“I don’t know you,” Pepper said.

“So?”

“You’re telling me all this.”

“I don’t get the impression you have a lot of people to gossip about me with.”

Which was mostly right. He liked to talk to Carney at Donegal’s, drinking beer. Carney wasn’t like those other mopes. There were some other people he didn’t mind spending time with. She was mostly right.

They reached Weehawken and the corkscrew of lanes in advance of the tunnel. The toll booth attendant took his money without looking at him. He had a racist face, as Roscoe Pope put it, but made no indication that he noticed Pepper’s skin. Maybe shit jobs were the true path to equality, so numbing and dull that there was no room left in the brain for bigotry.

“Remember when they got that woman toll collector?” he said. “People were pissed.”