He arrived with Arthur. Tonight Miami Joe’s purple suit verged on the zoot, high-waisted with wide lapels. The man was smaller than Carney remembered; Freddie’s accounts had magnified him. His handshake, the rings pincering Carney’s flesh, brought back the night they met, last winter, however briefly: the Clermont Lounge. One of those spots where his cousin ran into hard men of his acquaintance, who stared Carney down when introduced. Cigar smoke twisting like genies below the green glass shades; sharp, cruel laughter from two drunk ladies at the end of the bar; and Carney telling his cousin that May had taken her first steps. A good night.
Arthur’s demeanor, as Freddie had described, was that of a schoolteacher. Chalk dust under the fingernails. Except for the small lump at his ankle where he wore a pistol. When he was little, Carney and his father played a game where he had to guess whether or not his daddy was wearing his revolver under his pants leg. For a long time he thought it was his father’s attempt to get close to him, bleak as it was. Now he was sure his father was merely testing his tailor’s competency. A guy on Orchard handled his work-related alterations.
The architect of the Theresa heist and the able safecracker took the office couch. Pepper showed up last, as he had at the Baby’s Best meeting. A tactic of his, Carney gathered. He was burly and long-limbed, stooping to hide his true size. Something off about him made you look twice, but his dark gaze made you turn before you could figure it out. He shouldn’t be there, but was. A mountain man who’d taken a wrong turn and stayed in the city, or a blown-in weed that’d found purchase in a sidewalk crack: a foreign body that had adapted to its new home.
When Pepper saw there was no place to sit, he picked out the new Headley ottoman from the showroom and set it against the back wall of the office. He hunkered, lips pressed together in an expression equal parts attention and impatience. Faded denim overalls, a dark checkered work shirt, and scuffed horsehide boots. Like the construction truck had just dropped him off on the corner of St. Nicholas after daywork. He could have been any number of Harlem men, outrunning some brand of Southern devil, new to the city and trying to put some grub on the table. Less a disguise than a shared biography.
Nonetheless: something off.
It’d been a long time since Carney had been in the company of such men. Criminal types used to be a regular thing in his life. His father invited cronies to the apartment on 127th; they thumped up the stairs, these mean-eyed rogues with flashy style and smiles as counterfeit as the twenties in their hip pockets. Sent to his room, Carney’d kneel at the bedroom door, puzzling over their shop talk: pinch, vig. Juggler? Why did they need a juggler? Not juggler, a jugger—a safecracker. Reminded of their own lost children, the men sometimes gave him toys of unfamiliar make, trinkets with sharp points and hungry edges that broke within minutes.
“Place looks halfway legit,” Miami Joe said. He squinted at Carney’s college diploma on the wall.
“It is legit,” Carney said.
“Some nice stuff,” Arthur said. “Good front for an offman. TVs.”
Freddie cleared his throat. Pepper looked bemused, reminding Carney of a photo from National Geographic—a crocodile raising his lids above the waterline, gliding toward unsuspecting prey.
“Why Juneteenth?” Carney asked.
Miami Joe shrugged. “I didn’t know that’s what day it was.”
“It’s some country shit,” Pepper said. “They have a party.”
According to the Tribune’s account, the Brown family, late from Houston, Texas, held a Juneteenth party every year. The Skyline Ballroom soiree the night of the robbery was their twentieth celebration. Honoring the day that the final enslaved men and women received word of emancipation was a tradition worth bringing North, they thought. The bandleader played with Duke Ellington, it was jumping. They had hoped to make the party an annual affair; no more. “This sort of thing doesn’t happen back home,” Mrs. Brown told the reporter. “Waking up to such a scene!”
“If it pissed people off,” Miami Joe said, “good.” If it made it look like there was a racial aspect to throw everybody off, so much the better.
“Why don’t you tell them why we’re here,” Pepper said.
They had a Chink Montague problem, Miami Joe said. Everyone north of 110th Street knew the mobster from the papers, from a gossip-page roundup of a big charity ball at the Theresa, or a police blotter item about a shootout in a basement gambling room: The victim was taken to Harlem Hospital where he was pronounced dead. If not the news, then from daily routine, if you were the sort to play numbers, and there were many of that sort, or handed over an envelope of protection money to his men once a week, and of these there were many, or needed a loan now and again, and who didn’t need a little help now and again.