Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(80)
Leon rubbed his tongue over his bloodstained teeth, spat a red glob on the sidewalk. He squinted. “Come to my place of work asking about some fire somebody did?”
“No one told you to raise a fist.”
“I lose my job, there will be hell to pay, I promise you that,” Leon said.
He asked Pepper to repeat the particulars. Leon told Pepper that he was in the Tombs last Thursday night. Picked up for a scuffle in Happy’s. “Not that it’s any of your damn business.”
Pepper believed him—a call to Happy’s later that afternoon confirmed matters—and once again he doubted his fit for this assignment. Sometimes Pepper beat the wrong man, and the man happened to wear a hairpiece. If this man was black, he picked up the man’s knocked-off hairpiece and returned it in a form of reluctant apology. He was cold, but not without feeling. He had developed a little ceremony at this point, like when the military presents the American flag to the family of a dead soldier: thusly. Pepper felt a quiver in his back as he bent to retrieve the hairnet from the pavement and put it in Leon’s greasy hands.
* * *
***
Somebody named Joe left a message at the bar. They gave a time and an address. Buford would have demanded more information, but Toomey was filling in, and when it came to saloon answering services these days you got what you paid for. Pepper moseyed over.
He’d been wrong about Mose, that they’d never worked anything big together. On his way to the meet he remembered the alarm-company deal back in ’52. People still talked about it, like Don Larsen in Game 5 or seeing Jackie Robinson on TV for the first time. Old-timers, anyway.
The brains behind the Bulldog Security Co. job was a young man named Uncle Rich. Uncle Rich’s brief career in Harlem crime had been outlandish, flashy, and memorable. If Donegal’s had a Hall of Fame that consisted of more than initials scratched into the wall above the urinal, surely Uncle Rich’s portrait would have been up there next to greats like Grady Cooper, Vic Thurman, and the Count. In his youth he got sent up the river for stealing a bundle of New York Timeses from a midtown newsstand. Ten-year bid. On the inside he commenced his studies—analyzing the big scores and botched break-ins, the spectacular heists and life-ruining debacles, interviewing madmen and broken masterminds alike—and emerged into the free world as the architect of visionary capers.
It couldn’t last and it didn’t, but before he got taken out Uncle Rich brought Big Mike and Pepper in on schemes. That first job had its origins in the postwar alarm-company boom. Everybody was getting their establishments good and wired—doors, windows, vaults. Any serious business maintained a dedicated line to one of the big security companies. “We’re in an arms race,” Uncle Rich told Pepper and Big Mike. They were in the basement of Saint Andrew AME Church over on 147th. The church rented out space, and the crook was interviewing prospective crews in fifteen-minute slots.
“Johnny Law comes up with an advancement,” Uncle Rich said, “we figure out the countermeasure, and the game continues.” He removed his specs and rubbed them with a handkerchief. Everything about him was precise: his movements, his diction, how long he maintained eye contact. As if he had timed it out and rehearsed it all before you knew you were going to meet. “I got to thinking,” Uncle Rich said, “what if instead of deactivating the alarm system, you deactivated the alarm company?”
Bulldog’s representatives wore down shoe leather poaching clients from the Big Three: Argo, Top Lad, Valiant. Bulldog was out of Chicago, where they’d sewn up an exclusive contract with Ma Bell; like mobsters expanding their territory, they were moving in on established players. The sign-up deals for switching were pretty generous, and they gave you a nice sticker to put in the window to identify you as a client. And a target. “That’s how I got the idea—it says, they all use the same key for the front door.” Gideon Gem & Diamond on Broadway defected, and Fabrizio, and a few other uptown jewelry outlets that maintained a substantial overnight inventory.
Bulldog’s New York headquarters was on Ninety-fifth and First Ave. Uncle Rich had a finger, a phone-company lineman who’d helped set up their main switchboard. The company’s web extended uptown and down through the telephone cables. Trip one of those wires, Bulldog dispatched a team and rang you up. Next call after that was the cops if you didn’t have the code word for the account. If the switchboard itself—and the men who manned it—was removed from play, what treasure awaited an enterprising burglar before the heat came down?
Uncle Rich knew, and felt no need to elaborate on that or how he was going to engineer such a feat. Bulldog HQ was his end. Pepper and Big Mike’s concern was the target he’d chosen for them: Fabrizio’s on 125th. Once Uncle Rich neutralized the security company’s magic box, they’d get the signal and take it down. In and out. “Can you handle that?”
Big Mike said, “Shit.” Pepper shrugged.
At nine P.M. on the first Monday in August, Pepper and Big Mike entered 24 East 125th and walked up to the second floor, the home of Liberia Insurance. From afar, their worn gray uniforms and black cases identified them as workmen; up close one made out the Rogers Plumbing patches on their backs. They bypassed the insurance firm and accessed the roof at the top of the stairwell. They traversed three rooftops, and set up on the black tar beach over 18 East 125th. The doorknob to 18’s stairwell had been punched out two days prior. They waited for the signal.