Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(88)
Pepper and Carney didn’t have much to say to each other until the float came up the avenue. They heard the music first, a jumble of horns and drums. Reluctantly, they looked back to see. A small green rig tugged the parade float, which was decked out in red, white, and blue—the colors of the American flag, and also the Exxon oil company, sponsor of this roving display. The Exxon tiger mascot gyrated and strummed air guitar as two ladies in hot pants and rhinestone tank tops cavorted and waved to the passersby. A honeycomb of amplifiers perched on the tail of the float, inflicting a funk version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Nobody paid it much mind on those Harlem streets. There was too much to do.
“Fucking Doodle Dandy,” Pepper said.
“What are they going to do once Fourth of July comes?” Carney said. “They have to stop at some point.”
“In the war—”
“You were in a war? Who won?”
Pepper looked at him.
“Pepper’s feeling better,” Carney said. He folded the newspaper and nodded at the cigar store. “You going to recognize him?”
No, Pepper did not remember the faces of everyone whom he had beaten and who had beaten him—he had trouble retaining the faces of the dead—but his encounter on 104th was recent, and they hadn’t scrambled his brains that much. He was stiff, but more than up to the task of retribution.
His recovery was a matter of will and its modern assistant, pharmaceuticals. Dr. Rostropovich’s pills had kicked in Saturday afternoon and smoothed out Pepper’s wrinkles and kinks like a hot iron. Pepper shuffled to the rocking chair, to-ing and fro-ing, listening to the transistor radio. Iraqi soldiers on the Syrian border, Jimmy Carter nabbing endorsements. He “closed his eyes” a few times. A crochet throw materialized on his lap. It was soft. When Carney came up for the lowdown on how Pepper ended up on his doorstep, Pepper said, “You.”
Pepper had enemies, but none that resourceful or in any position to act on their hatred on account of physical limitations (maimed) or mental weakness (scaredy). He’d been off the circuit, laid up with his bad back, so it wasn’t a loose end on a job. He had, however, been rattling cages all over Harlem, knocking heads, knocking the heads of employees, which meant employers, and some of them might have manpower.
It took a minute for Carney to accept that the ambush was his fault. “I told Elizabeth what I assumed had happened—you were slapping someone around for looking at you funny, and ten of his buddies showed up.” He apologized.
“You think you’re Superman, Carney,” Pepper said. “The Red Conk. You come up with a setup, and it has to work, because it’s yours.” His father was like that, Pepper said. The money drawer in the bank pops open like magic, the watchman sticks to his schedule because you need him to. “You wriggle out of shit enough times, you start to believe you’re bulletproof. When you’re not. It comes around. It catches up.”
Pepper had taken some lumps for Carney. He’d be up on his feet soon. And when that happened, the least Carney could do was drive.
In the upstairs room, Pepper gathered what he knew about Reece Brown. Pepper worked security at Corky Bell’s poker games plenty in the old days. Low hassle, good money. Hoods and crooks showed up to play with the locals and slumming white folks, but they respected the game. When Pepper had to manhandle someone, it was an angry player on tilt after a bunch of bad beats, not a stickup man. The muscle work for Corky dried up. Then one of his games got robbed—by a white cop no less. He renewed his interest in proper security, and reinstituted his New Year’s games to send a message he wasn’t running scared. Pepper was there, eating tongue sandwiches and glowering, at those final ’73 and ’74 games.
Reece attended both. His nose, chin, and ears came to a ratlike taper, with a hungry malevolence glinting in his eyes. He’d stolen the Black Panthers’ style—black leather coat, turtleneck, and occasional beret—but his sneering mouth, full of gold, hipped you that he did not devote the majority of his energies to social activism. Reece wasn’t a bad poker player in Pepper’s estimation. An ungracious winner. Intimidating in the showdown, from the other players’ expressions when they went heads-up. Corky had tipped Pepper as to who he was: Notch Walker’s right-hand man. On call to remind those who trespass how power preserves itself: swiftly, bloodily. “If he acts funky, take it outside quick, is all I’m asking.” Reece didn’t cause any trouble and they’d had no interaction.
As he rocked in the rocking chair, in the hot room on Strivers’ Row, Pepper remembered the weasel Reece brought with him. Confronted with a big bet, Reece leaned back in his chair and gossiped with his flunky, both smirking, to get in his opponent’s head. He was medium height, compactly built, with big, red-brown curls on his head and jug ears. Both his profession and cologne were criminal. Dan Hickey was his name; Pepper inquired when the pair returned for the ’74 game. The next time Pepper saw Hickey, he was hitting him with a baseball bat, the less powerful of the two sluggers in a post-beating assessment. A fact that suggested Hickey was the one they should brace first. Church Wiley and his job would have to wait.
In this era of Notch Walker’s empire, its structure and routines were well documented. After the death of Chink Montague, Notch seized his nemesis’s territory, consolidating the south Harlem rackets with his own Sugar Hill operation. A realignment of that size causes ripples: this night spot is taken over, that bar changes from a Montague hangout to one controlled by Walker goons, back-room business changes addresses. Those whose livelihoods and survival were determined by the new geography of power—criminals—maintained maps of where it was safe to go and where it was not safe to go, where this Walker operative spent his nights and where another had acquired a controlling interest. Best keep track.