Outside Arthur’s building on 134th, two cop cars had their lights spinning, red and white on the faces of the onlookers. No reason for it—the cops were waiting for the meat wagon—but they liked the show of power. As if white people didn’t remind these people of their place all day. At work, at the white bank, at the grocery store as the clerk explained they’d reached the end of their credit. Pepper jostled to the front of the mob. Scenes like this drew a crowd, killed time, especially on hot, listless nights. One of the cops—this beefy-faced peckerwood—noticed Pepper and gave him the once-over. Pepper stared back and the pig turned his attention to his shiny black shoes.
Pepper got the low-down from the wino swaying next to him. You want to know what’s going on, you ask the block wino. They see everything and then the booze pickles it, keeps it all fresh for later. The wino told him that a man named Arthur—“looks like a schoolteacher”—had been shot in his bed. The landlady saw the open door and phoned the precinct. “His head blown up like a watermelon fell off a cart.” The wino made an evocative splat sound. The landlady was a nice woman, he added, always with a warm hello no matter how shaky he was.
“That’s a shame,” Pepper told the wino. It was too bad, on top of not knowing where his damn money was. He’d liked Arthur, the way the man rubbed his fingertips together when he got to thinking, like he was about to punch out a safe. After the crew went to meet the furniture-store owner last night, he and Arthur went for a drink. The safecracker kept going on about this farm he owned. Out in the country. “I’m going to get a horse, and some chickens.” Come Labor Day, Arthur said, when the heat died down, he wanted to return to Carney’s Furniture and talk to the man about home furnishings. “We won’t say a word about the Theresa job. Won’t even acknowledge that we’ve ever met. Just a salesman and a man in the market. Just: Is it comfortable? Will it last?” He raised his glass to toast the idea.
Gets himself some land, then he kicks the bucket up here. Bought the farm, then bought the farm. More proof for Pepper’s philosophy vis-à-vis making plans. Whoever heard of a crook keeping chickens? Begging for God to smite your uppity ass. Take the road, for instance. Three years to finish, hundreds of men lost, and then the Japanese surrender a month later. It was only good for war and with the war over, the jungle took it back. What was it now? A ribbon of rubble in the mud.
When Pepper woke the next morning the heat was murderous and it was only seven a.m. A nice day for a hunt. Hunting a rat, smoking out a double-crosser—it had been a while. Pepper liked the heat, which flushed out weasels to stoops and shade. Plus today he’d have wheels. He waited outside the furniture store for Carney to show up, and then it was on to the likely hideouts, the fronts and flophouses and fuck pads of this chase.
* * *
*
The heat made Harlem into a forge. Pepper rode shotgun.
Pepper caught up with Carney as he unlocked the front door of the furniture store, greeting him with “Mr. Businessman.” Carney jumped, on alert from Freddie’s visit the night before. The keys in his hand a talisman of the lost, normal world. Everybody knew how to find Carney—one of the drawbacks of having his name in two-foot-tall letters on 125th Street. Chink Montague’s men, this crook. Freddie had all his addresses and in the last three days had popped up with bad news each time. Carney had never thought overmuch about his accessibility before, but now recognized it as a hazard in the criminal trade.
Miami Joe understood this. He was nowhere to be found. “I want to talk to that nigger,” Pepper told Carney after his greeting. “You can drive.”
“I can’t,” Carney said.
“You got that truck, right?”
Carney twisted a thumb at the store.
“That’s what your man is for, right?” Pepper said. “You the boss.”
Yes, Rusty could open up and handle business. Two minutes later Carney and Pepper were in the Ford pickup.
“Uptown,” Pepper said. He put a steel lunch box on the seat next to him. Just another day of work. “Your cousin told you what happened to our friend.” Said as a statement of fact.
“Uptown where?” Carney said. As if not acknowledging Arthur’s murder might make the man alive for a little more.
“It’ll come to me,” Pepper said. “This way for now.” He rolled down the window for a blast of hot air in his face.
Pepper told him about Donegal’s and the scene outside Arthur’s flophouse, which broke up when a soda bottle detonated on a prowl car and sent the onlookers for cover. Kids on the roof across the street, taunting the cops. “Used to call that ‘giving them the Blitz,’？” Pepper said.