Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(7)
Celebrity architects had designed Strivers’ Row’s four lines of townhouses in the 1890s. 237 West 138th was part of a Federal Renaissance strip conceived by Bruce Price and Clarence Luce; Carney pretended to have heard of them. He came across the listing in the paper. He never looked at the real estate pages but that day he did. When they saw number 237 that first time, emptied of furniture, dusty halos where pictures and paintings had hung, silent save for the odd insolent floorboard, Elizabeth said “I could get lost in here” with an exquisite mix of longing and belonging. It could be hers and had already been hers: She’d grown up across the alley on the 139th Street line, five houses down in a townhouse with an identical layout. Same floor plan, different arrangement altogether. She’d left this lofty stretch of Harlem to be with him. To return here was—what? A homecoming and also a reward for her love and patience. Of course they were going to buy it. What else was an ongoing criminal enterprise complicated by periodic violence for, but to make your wife happy?
One night soon after they moved in, Carney got home late from a meetup with Church Wiley, a smash-and-grab operator who hunted in Baltimore and came up to New York to off the goods. High-quality stuff that always came with a lot of heat. Baroque arrangements ensued when Carney had to pay him off: knock two times on the door at the end of the fifth-floor hallway of an abandoned tenement on 167th; split out the back room of Blue Eyes on St. Nicholas and 156th, throw a rose into the dented garbage can and count to a hundred, etc.
This time Church was two hours late and Carney had to wait in what he decided was a shooting gallery that had recently been vacated after a raid by the cops or a triple murder. There was no one inside the dilapidated brownstone, but it was well populated with evidence of miserable doings. Cold March night. Wind whistled. He set one buttock on the arm of a 1940s Collins-Hathaway sofa that looked diseased. It had never occurred to him that furniture could be sick, but from that day on he knew it when he saw it, the way human beings infected everything. Church finally arrived. He looked around and said, “This place has really gone downhill.”
When Carney got home that night, Elizabeth had fallen asleep in the parlor in front of The Tonight Show. Roscoe Pope doing a bit about encyclopedia salesmen. Carney turned out the lights, put the house to bed. He checked on May and John on the third floor in their respective bedrooms. The kids were sprawled out in sleep, pinwheels on the sheets. He touched the back of his hand to their foreheads to check their temperature.
Downstairs he tucked a blanket around Elizabeth, rather than wake her. She didn’t care for the latest craze for low sofas—or much of the current offerings in Carney’s showroom, to be honest—so they’d held on to the three-year-old Argent, birch with champagne finish. He turned off the lamp. The shadow of his wife emerged from the darkness as his eyes adjusted. She trusted his excuses for his ridiculous hours. Any sane woman would accuse him of an affair. The real reason for his sneaking around would get him twenty-five years in Sing Sing. What was worse?
The streetlight penetrated the parlor window in a sheer purifying beam. The silence and calm put him in a renouncing frame of mind. He was done.
Dropping the thieves and heisters was no problem. Chink Montague and Munson were another matter. Carney rendered unto Chink an envelope every week for permission to operate. Mobsters by and large did not respect conventions like two weeks’ notice. Carney informed Delroy, Chink’s bagman, that he no longer dealt in previously owned merchandise but would continue his weekly contribution to express gratitude for all their good work together. The envelope was recategorized as protection, like Carney was just another schlubby shopkeeper getting leaned on. Which, to be sure, he was and ever had been.
Carney invited the detective to Nightbirds and Munson toasted his retirement: “To the most famous nobody in Harlem.” He came by for his handout the next week, and the one after that, but trailed off. After a time Munson only showed up at Carney’s office at Easter and Christmas to collect for the “Widows and Orphans Fund.” He hadn’t visited in three years.
Apart from tending to his extensive shakedown network, cultivating criminal alliances, and occasional forays into police work, Detective Munson was an accomplished fixer. Sometimes that meant ushering a state senator out the back fire stairs of a Lexington Avenue whorehouse during a bust, or handing some mope’s blabbermouth mistress a one-way ticket to Miami on the Silver Meteor. Doubtless he had dumped a body or two in Mount Morris Park when it was all the rage.
Sometimes a fix entailed snagging that week’s hot ticket for someone—the Frazier–Ellis fight at the Garden, or whatever big act was in town. Carney remembered Munson gloating over taking his wife to see Sinatra, taking his ex-partner’s ex-wife backstage to meet Vic Damone, and taking one of his young girlfriends to see the Dave Clark Five at Carnegie Hall. Carney had no idea what the detective was into these days, the nature of his schemes and scams, but if Munson had half as much juice as in the old days, there were Jackson 5 tickets coming his way.
At what price, he didn’t know.
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***
As instructed, Carney waited by the phone booth across from the 157th Street subway station, northwest exit. The tiny triangular park contained six decrepit pigeons and three benches. Comidas, Farmacia. From the signs and stores, this stretch of Broadway had grown more Puerto Rican and Dominican since his last visit. On 125th, it was Jews and Italians out, blacks in, and up here the Spanish replaced the Germans and Irish when they split. Churn, baby, churn.