Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(67)

A gang of teenagers tumbled through the auditorium doors, claimed a section, and lit up some reefer. They were rude and boisterous, glorying over some earlier escapade. Even this interruption couldn’t curdle Zippo’s mood—anyway, the credits were rolling. What a crew he had assembled! Pepper—no last name. Zippo wondered if he’d seen the movie. Lola tried to track him down for the premiere, to no avail. The last time Zippo saw the man was when they wrapped and he asked to take his picture for his portfolio of the crew. “What do I need my picture taken for?” Pepper said. “I know what I look like.” Zippo tucked him in the credits under Special Thanks, below the legit investors. The silent partners remained unsung. No one from the Chink Montague organization, or front companies, or estate ever came knocking about the gangster’s profits. Like the toothbrush money, Zippo found a use for it.

Filmed Entirely on Location in Harlem U.S.A.



Zippo exited the Royalton and blinked in the late-afternoon glare. Hard to believe it was still light out. The old biddy in the ticket booth was asleep. Across the street hung a big billboard for Roscoe Pope’s new movie Chimp Cop. A cop with a chimp for a partner. Pope was already deep in mainstream crap by the time Nefertiti opened. It paid, Zippo supposed.

He turned uptown and hummed “Nefertiti Has Come (You Gonna Get It),” the closing theme. There was no talking Page out of the title even though it meant “The Beautiful Woman Has Come Has Come.” Zippo smiled—the one thing AIP hadn’t dared mess with was Gene Page’s magnificent score. Zippo had required an echo of the funky melancholy of Blacula, so he hit up the man himself. Page was amenable. He was currently arranging for Barry White, whom he’d met when they worked on Bob & Earl’s classic 1963 single “Harlem Shuffle.” Doing more and more solo work on movies. Zippo showed him a rough cut in the Grotto when Page came to town for the release of Can’t Get Enough. Page started scribbling notes during the first scene and didn’t stop until the final explosion. “I got you, baby,” he said. He delivered three weeks later. The strings were fucking bananas.

Page didn’t make the premiere but most of the crew and the above-board investors showed up at the New Yorker Theatre. Zippo didn’t like parties per se. He made an exception. He invited folks from the old days—people like his babysitter Pru and Miss Naughton, the social worker who’d helped him out when his life turned weird—and they cheered and hooted at the right moments. They seemed to like it, the movie, that fraction of him on view. If they liked that part, maybe they liked him, too. Everyone got good and loaded at the after party. Carney even showed up with the missus. He said they’d done a good job of making his office look like a real criminal hideout. Zippo was about to point out that they hadn’t changed a thing when Carney added, “I’m proud of you, Zippo. You did good.” Fatherly-like. His wife said it was past their bedtime and steered the furniture salesman to the door. Yes, it was a good night.

There was some kind of protest up ahead on Broadway—Save the Bomb, Ban the Earth, what have you—so Zippo veered west on Forty-sixth. One last errand before his flight. If he remembered correctly Ninth Ave in the Fifties had a bunch of old-school hardware stores and perhaps one of them stocked White Fox Turpentine. Costello Hardware & Paint used to sell it when he lived on 132nd uptown. Cans were hard to find but worth the search. It never failed to bring him back, the heat of a White Fox Turpentine fire on his face, and it was like he was a kid again, just starting to understand the shape of his sadness. Out of step even then, lost among the tall buildings.





THE


   FINISHERS


   1976




“When he walked the streets, he superimposed his own perfect city over the misbegotten one before him, it was a city of ash and cinder heaped hundreds of feet high, emptied of people, wonderfully dead and still.”





ONE


It was a glorious June morning. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the ambulances were screaming, and the daylight falling on last night’s crime scenes made the blood twinkle like dew in a green heaven. Summer in New York that bicentennial year was full of promise and menace in every sign and wonder, no matter how crummy or small. How Ray Carney’s day ended up taking such a turn, he had no idea. To be surrounded by people who ate their pork ribs with a knife and fork.

Yes, the Dumas Club, at a fundraiser for Alexander Oakes, newly declared candidate in next year’s race for Manhattan borough president. Never too early to turn on that money spigot.

Carney popped a deviled egg in his mouth. He plucked his shirt—it was getting warm in there with the windows closed to the street noise. Across 120th a chubby gentleman in a white mesh tank top washed his Cadillac and played salsa at an impertinent volume. So moved that he sang along, soaping. His buddy hunched on an aluminum beach chair on the pavement, slapping his thighs and smoking a cigarillo.

Twenty years ago the block had comported itself differently. Now plywood covered the windows of two burned-out brownstones opposite and a troupe of shabby men rotated through the stoops to sip Ripple from brown bags. What’s the word? Thunderbird! Ambrose Clarke, the current Dumas Club secretary, regularly called the cops about the shooting gallery up the block, to no avail. To be ignored by the police as if he were some ordinary Negro—the humiliation. Elizabeth had hired a jazz combo called the Robert McCoy Trio for today’s event, and their music smothered most of the car washer’s hit parade. Oakes frowned when the car radio harassed them between jazz standards.