The last hour, Carney had been working on how to get out of this mess. He said, “I sell furniture. People come in off the street, look around, decide to buy somewhere else, that’s business. If you want to go to someone else, I don’t take it personally.”
Miami raised an eyebrow.
Arthur said, “Huh.”
Pepper looked Carney over. He leaned forward on the ottoman, alert and stiff. As if perched on a crate of moonshine in a backwoods shack, revenue agents barreling up the driveway, and not on a new Headley with sumptuous, space-age fill. He didn’t let Carney off the hook. “He knows, he’s in.”
Freddie said, “He’s solid. I told you.”
Carney had sounded too indifferent. Folks mistook that for confidence sometimes. In the store, his job was to nudge people into doing what they didn’t know they wanted to do—lay down a couple hundred on a new dinette, say. That was a different matter than convincing them to do the opposite. The crew had come here to reassure themselves of their decisions. He made a note to correct his pitch; it would come in handy the next time Elizabeth tut-tutted one of his ideas or May demanded an extra scoop of ice cream. He’d have to satisfy himself with making it through the meeting in one piece.
The safecracker dismissed the class. “We keep our mouths shut,” Arthur said, “see how it shakes out. Then divvy it up like we planned.” Miami Joe never closed a job unless he was satisfied they were free and clear. Putting off the split was sometimes a problem with the crew, but Arthur was known as a good thief, steady all around, and they trusted him to hold the loot until Monday. Give Chink Montague some time to get distracted with other business, the cops time to move on to another case to botch.
Four days, unless Chink Montague rooted one of them out and they put Carney’s name out there.
Four days for Carney to come up with an angle.
SIX
“See how quiet it is?” Leland said. “The dealer says it has one of those new compressors.”
The Westinghouse was bolted into the parlor window. Carney had never seen an air conditioner in someone’s house before; according to Leland Jones, theirs was the first on the block, though his father-in-law was a shameless exaggerator. They crowded around the unit’s plastic grille, Elizabeth up front flapping her face with her hands. She’d almost fainted that morning and a treatment was in order. May sneezed as the sweat on her body cooled. Carney had to admit it felt good.
The AC was one part of the treatment, Elizabeth’s old house another. She’d grown up in the Strivers’ Row townhouse, and a visit never failed to fortify her. Her room was as she’d left it, on the second floor overlooking the alley. W. C. Handy used to live across the way and Elizabeth liked to tell the story of watching the Father of the Blues in his study, his hands like doves fluttering in the air to the songs on his Victrola. The artist surveying a kingdom that only he could see. As far as views went, it beat the elevated and its discordant symphony of metal on metal. Her favorite blanket on the bed, the annual marks on the doorframe that tracked her height. Carney held no such nostalgia for the apartment he’d grown up in.
Leland turned the AC’s dial to demonstrate. “You should look into one of these,” he said, aware that Carney’s budget forbade the expense.
“One day,” Carney said.
“They have payment plans,” Leland said.
Elizabeth grabbed Carney’s waist. He put his hand on May’s shoulder. He didn’t know what she made of today’s round of jousting between her father and grandfather, but she sure understood that cool air. She exposed her belly to the contraption and looked off into a dream.
Despite the company, he liked coming up to his in-laws’ place on Strivers’ Row. As a kid he’d admired the neat yellow brick and white limestone houses, plopped down in the middle of Harlem. Looking over from Eighth Avenue, the sidewalks were always swept, the gutters unclotted, the alleyways between the houses strange domains. What kind of block had its own name? What would they call his old stretch of 127th? Crooked Way. Striver versus crook. Strivers grasped for something better—maybe it existed, maybe it didn’t—and crooks schemed about how to manipulate the present system. The world as it might be versus the world as it was. But perhaps Carney was being too stark. Plenty of crooks were strivers, and plenty of strivers bent the law.
His father-in-law, for example. Leland Jones was one of black Harlem’s premier accountants, squaring the books of the best doctors, lawyers, and politicians, all the big Negro-owned 125th Street businesses. He’d get you off the hook. He bragged about his collection of loopholes and dodges, the fat-envelope bribes passed over in the drawing room of the Dumas Club. Brandy and a cigar: I got you. Let’s keep this between us, but he didn’t care who spoke of it because it was cheap advertising. “I eat audits like cornflakes,” Leland liked to say, grinning. “With milk and a spoon.” He was a tall man, with a wide, moon face and thick white mustache and muttonchops. His grandfather had been a preacher, and a taste for the lecture had been passed down, the righteous address from the front of the room.