Carney didn’t make the same mistake he made last time. He gave Pepper the rundown, from Freddie’s friendship with Linus and his rich family, to the interrupted robbery and everything that happened after it. The crook knew about the Theresa, the Duke job—no one else had as much dope on Carney’s other life. No reason not to come clean.
Carney finished. Pepper scratched his neck, looked at the ceiling thoughtfully. He said, “Like the expressway.”
“A lot of people think it’s Wick.”
Pepper shrugged. A gun battle broke out on the afternoon movie, a Lee Marvin picture, and everyone in the bar stopped talking to check out the TV. For tips? To critique? The getaway car sped off and Donegal’s patrons returned to their affairs. “Using the riots,” Pepper said. “If I had something cooking, I would have done the same thing. Everybody running around like chickens with their heads cut off, you can pull a job.”
“People weren’t acting crazy over nothing. They had good reason,” Carney said.
“Since when do white people care about reason? They gonna put that cop in jail?”
The bartender looked up from his racing form. “Put a white cop in jail for killing a black boy? Believe in the fucking tooth fairy.”
“Buford knows what’s up,” Pepper said.
“Newspapers talking about ‘looting,’？” Buford continued. “Should ask the Indians about looting. This whole country’s founded on taking other people’s shit.”
“How’d they fill their museums? Tutankhamun.”
“Right? I’m glad they stood up,” Buford said. “I’m saying a week later it’s like it never happened.” He decamped to the other end of the bar again and relit his cigar.
Like it never happened? This struck Carney as pure cynicism. For instance, after the riot of ’43, the pants his father had looted from Nelson’s had lasted two years before the knees gave out. That was something.
They saw things differently, him and Pepper, but Carney had come to Donegal’s—risking a punch in the face—because the man had another angle on how the world worked. Which is what Carney required at the moment. Five years after the Theresa, another necklace had brought them together, one that made Lucinda Cole’s look like it rolled out of a gumball machine. “I’d like to hire you for security,” Carney said. “In case anyone else comes knocking.”
“Sounds like someone might, one or another,” Pepper said. “Look, you don’t want my advice. You’re not an advice-taker and I don’t give a shit. But—cut him loose. He’s a loser. It’s already done.”
“It’s not done. He’s splitting.”
“Trouble’ll find him again. Your father would say, fuck him. Even if he is family. Even if it was you.”
“That’s why,” Carney said.
Pepper grimaced and gestured for another beer. “What are you going to do with the loot? The shit from the safe—who are you going to lay it off on?”
“I have a guy who can handle it.”
“Deals with that heavy shit.” Pepper sipped his Rheingold. “If he deals with that heavy shit, he covers his ass. What if covering his ass means hanging niggers out to dry?”
“He’s solid.”
“Nothing solid in the city but the bedrock.”
He took the questions to mean that Pepper was in. Pepper did not disabuse him of that assumption.
Carney mentioned a figure. Pepper said he had a mind for something from the store.
“Whatever you need. What’s your current home situation?”
“Situation?”
“With regards to furniture—eat-in kitchen? Do you have a separate place for dining?” Carney knew not to say, How often do you entertain?
“Do I look like I want people knowing what my house is like?”
“A couch, then.”
“That flips back when you put your feet up, with a lever.”
“A recliner.”
“That’s it—a recliner.” They did a deal for the security and miscellaneous manhandling.
Carney laid down some bucks on the bar for Pepper’s beer and stood to go.
Pepper said, “He used to say that you were going to be a doctor, you were so smart, but that you were smart enough to know you make more money being crooked.”
“Who’d want to be a doctor?” Carney said.
* * *
*
The shade outside their apartment, down the hill from Grant’s Tomb, provided a cool retreat from the day’s heat. Traffic was light on Riverside. When Carney tried to relax in his living room after a long day at the store, the squeal of the kids in the park below usually set him on edge, but today they were a token of normalcy. Gangsters strong-arming him into sedans, white cops disrupting his business, riots and real estate barons and what have you—it was nice to pretend his world remembered the old, stable orbit.