Carney had been there plenty; it had been a Freddie favorite. One of Carney’s, too, owing to the gregarious owner Lacey, a big, glad lady who kept track of all her customers’ drinks and predilections. Her station was behind the ramshackle bar, which was made out of old oatmeal crates, where she whispered offers too heavy in euphemism for Carney, square that he was, to decipher. Girls in the rooms upstairs, narcotics. He declined with a “No, thank you, ma’am,” and she’d wink: One day, my young man…But the spot had been closed down for years after a shootout. Or a knife fight. There were always new basement joints opening up.
The sickness originated at Mam Lacey’s and tendriled out. The residential block had been inviting and tidy in the old days, stickball street with nice plantings. Now Lacey’s windows were smashed, the two buildings on either side had the same affliction, boarded up and depopulated, and the two buildings next to those looked sketchy. Carney frowned. “Urban blight” was right; it hopped from place to place like bedbugs.
“You come, too,” Pepper said. He waved Carney over as he peered into the dark windows of the basement apartment.
Gun it and split. Get the girls and split.
Pepper’d chase him down even if he was going fifty miles an hour.
Carney removed the key from the ignition.
The front room had smelled rank from cigarette and cigar smoke in the glory days, and from the cheap beer and rotgut soaked into the floorboards, but the stench now was another register of foul. The big fat couch where Carney used to sit with his drink and shake his head over the other patrons’ antics was split open and layered with revolting stains, the dark mirrors set into the walls were smashed, and the top of the oatmeal-crate bar was an altar of junkie worship. Blackened spoons, wadded paper, emptied cylinders. Two skinny men slept on the floor, soiled and raggedy. They didn’t stir when Pepper turned them over to check their faces.
“I used to come here,” Carney said.
“Used to be nice,” Pepper said.
Pepper led the way to the garden, past a small room filled with garbage, and the kitchen, where Mam Lacey had fried chicken all night. Only thing cooking in there these days was misery. Carney put his hands in his pockets so they wouldn’t touch anything. He breathed through his mouth and was glad when they stepped into the back, into the light again. The garden was overgrown and creepy. A tall statue of an angel was broken in half. Its legs stuck up out of a clutch of weeds, white wings pointing this way and that. Along the back wall there was a stone bench. A man slept on it, covered with a wool blanket despite the heat.
Pepper slapped the man awake. “Julius.”
The man stirred, unsurprised at the intrusion. Carney recognized him—Lacey’s son, the teenager who’d bussed the empty glasses and lit ladies’ cigarettes. Joyful and eager in the old days, like the customers’ kid brother who lived back home and oh-goshed over their city stories. In that near-noon light, he looked older than Carney.
“You wake up, Julius,” Pepper said. “I’m looking for your man Miami Joe.”
Julius sat up and patted his pockets after something. He squinted around the garden.
“I’m talking to you,” Pepper said.
Julius pulled the blanket around his shoulders and scowled. “I’m ‘unreliable,’？” Julius said. The words were sour in his mouth; he ran his tongue over his teeth to rub away the taste. “He don’t let me come along no more.”
“I know that,” Pepper said. “I want to know where that nigger sleep.”
“Miami Joe’s too busy to sleep—” Pepper’s slap echoed in the backyards of 145th between Eighth and Seventh. A window opened a few buildings over, some bystander. Pepper didn’t even look. The window closed.
Carney remembered the boy as he had been not too long ago: gap-toothed and smiling. He said, “Do you have to?”
Pepper gave him a look—cold steel—and returned to Mam Lacey’s ne’er-do-well offspring. “Your mother ran a nice joint,” he said.
“I should have joined the navy,” Julius said.
His mother dies, Carney figured, Julius takes over the place and instead of listening to his customers’ tales of crime, he decides to participate. One thing leads to another. What of the rooms upstairs, the girls who used to work up there? What lived in the rooms now?
“Where’s he sleep?” Pepper said.
Julius said, “I asked him if he had anything cooking, and Joe said he wouldn’t take me along anymore if I was like this. Those were good times…” He trailed off. Then the back side of Pepper’s hand brought him to. “He’s in that flophouse on 136th and Eighth, the one with the old doctor’s sign out front. Third floor…” With that, he bunched one end of the blanket and made it into a pillow. Carney looked back as he and Pepper stepped back into the building. Julius was unconscious again, nestled into his narcotic hideaway.