Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(98)
It occurred to Carney that if things went sideways and they didn’t come back, Hickey was in for a rough time. If things went sideways, they all were.
EIGHT
320 West 120th Street, the home of the Dumas Club, was built in 1898 by Mortimer Bacall, a German immigrant who made his fortune in patent medicines. His most popular tonic was advertised under many names, the most well known of which was Dr. Abraham’s Pills, which purported to cure “city ailments” caused by urban living, the “noxious air,” “insalubrious plumbing,” and “excessive proximity of one’s neighbors.” The modern city was a new animal requiring new remedies. Bacall possessed the dexterity to invent both the infirmity and the cure.
Bacall was struck by a Lexington Avenue streetcar in 1911. The townhouse remained empty until it was bought fourteen years later by a trio of distinguished Harlemites: Dr. William T. Frye, physician; Clement Lanford, the famous lawyer and uptown political boss; and Al Gibson, of the Gibson Funeral Home. They had traveled separate paths to a place of prominence, distinction, and influence—time to start a club to mark who was of their rank and who was not. They purchased the property jointly and sold it to the Dumas Corporation a few years later.
The oversized Queen Anne townhouse was forty feet wide and a story taller than the surrounding homes. Against those more modest brownstones, it became a neighborhood landmark. They didn’t make them like that anymore, with gables and green-shingled turrets, the curved windows and broad stoops. The days of such flamboyant design were long past. The days of more relaxed fire codes as well. The tiny basement windows were a nightmare if firefighters needed to ventilate a blaze, and the dumbwaiters, window shafts, and rear servant stairs provided an all-too-convenient thoroughfare for a blaze. An intense fire in the cockloft might destroy the roof supports and cause the top floors to collapse. No, it would never meet code today.
It was nonetheless an impressive building from the outside and a site of local fascination. Kids called it “the Mansion,” on account of its scale and the parade of nattily attired Negro gentlemen strutting in and out of its grand doors. Ray Carney had been one of the neighborhood kids in awe of the place. Who were these men? Their suits were amazing, exquisitely tailored, sober but not without flair, unlike the cheap getups of his father and his crooked circle, garish, redolent of last week’s whiskey and brawls. He needed to know what kind of men they were, and what happened inside. All these years later, after Carney did learn who they were, the texture and grain of their character, and had joined their number, he occasionally took a step back, when the mists of animosity parted temporarily, and appreciated what that generation had accomplished and what it meant to carve out a space for themselves in America. No, they didn’t make them like that anymore.
Pepper parked the Buick on 121st off Manhattan Ave. Quarter past midnight. Last call at the Club on Tuesday nights was ten, the waiters started fussing and straightening up around dawdling guests at ten-forty-five and come eleven-thirty it was lights out and front doors locked. Carney heard the Legend of the Keys soon after he joined, the holy keys to the Dumas Club in the possession of the inner circle. One might bring a woman there after hours, or finalize a scheme to enrich one’s bank accounts or prospects. Oakes’s father had likely been so blessed, and the keys itemized in the man’s will as an heirloom. If the old guard got wind of the late-night confabs between Democratic candidate Alexander Oakes and killer Reece Brown, they would’ve condemned them as a perversion of the club charter, but Carney saw them for what they were: Business as usual.
He asked Pepper where he stashed Oakes’s files.
“That shit’s still in the trunk.”
“You didn’t look at it?”
“What for? I know what it is. Stuff he cares about that pisses him off that he don’t got it. I hadn’t got around to figuring out how to use it.”
“You didn’t look at any of it?”
“These guys, it’s all the same shit.”
Shit: The names of prominent lawyers, judges, prosecutors, the heads of insurance firms, various criminals, firebugs, politicians on the take, big-time developers handing out stacks of cash, community organizers pocketing Albany funds, and whoever else Oakes was entwined with.
He had a point. Shit fit.
Powerful men nonetheless. Carney’s business was in the yellow pages, his house in the white: He was easy to find. “I’ll take it in,” he said. “It’s me they got leverage on.” Pepper didn’t have a wife and kids to threaten. Carney had roped him into his mess. The fire that afternoon, whatever waited in the Dumas—it was Carney’s punishment. Pepper could hop on a Greyhound and set himself up in Maryland—or was it Delaware?—where he knew some people. He didn’t have to go inside.
“No, they got leverage on me,” Pepper said. “They said next time it’ll be your house. Your house? They’re going to fuck with your house? I got a room in there.”
“Okay, Pepper.”
Out on the street, Pepper retrieved the black garbage bag from the trunk and slung it over his shoulder like a crooked Santa Claus. Carney chuckled. Pepper gave him an irritated look.
“Do you have a gun?” Carney asked.
In other words, What was the plan? “I have a .38 they’ll take when we walk in,” Pepper said. “I got it off Hickey so it’s theirs anyway.” Reece and Oakes had to find out what they knew about their business. Who else knows. Did they return everything they stole. “What are we going to do? Got to get in there and have a look-see.”