The cookies were stale and the fortunes discouraging.
The doctor’s sign outside the flophouse was gone; the two metal chains dangled on the metal brace. Carney joined Pepper without being asked. The front door was unlocked. The landlord, a white-haired gnome, swept up the front hallway. He looked away when he got a load of Pepper. By now Carney was accustomed to the effect the man had on people.
“Three,” Pepper said. The floors creaked all the way up. Like a giant had given the building a good shake and then set it down again, well-squeezed.
No one answered Pepper’s knock the first two times. “Yes?”
“It’s Pepper. And Carney.”
“Don’t know any Pepper. No salt, neither. You get on.”
It wasn’t Miami Joe’s voice. This guy sounded like he’d read a book once.
Pepper ran his finger along the doorframe, testing, then kicked it in.
Residents rented the room furnished, Carney supposed, from the hodgepodge of styles represented. The old Morgan couch from the 1930s, before the company went under for taking the fill from dirty old mattresses; the scuffed-up pine bureau; and the plywood coffee table that looked like it’d topple over if you put an ashtray on it. Flop here for weeks or months and then slide down to the next bleak escapade. Meanwhile the stained furniture circulated from room to room, that’ll be an extra two dollars a week for a bed if you need one, and if you want another lamp we can work that out, too.
The man in the room fit the profile, skinny-armed and potbellied, with thick black eyeglasses, at a loss before these strangers in his yellowed undershirt and drawers. “What’d you do that for?” he asked, pointing at the busted door.
“Looking for Miami Joe,” Pepper said.
“You got eyes—he ain’t here.” The man said his name was Jones and that he knew Miami Joe from Florida. He was here on a sales trip and Miami Joe said he could bunk on the floor. He wasn’t going to be around much, or so he told Jones.
“Selling what?” Pepper asked.
“If you’d let me show you—” Jones started for the suitcase at the foot of the bed. The bedsheet held the fuzzy, grimed silhouette of the human form.
Pepper had his pistol out. “He can do it.”
Carney popped the snaps on the battered blue suitcase. Jones’s merchandise was set in cushioned pockets, vials of dark-colored fluids. Carney held one up to the window, dust drifting in the sunlight: virile waters.
“Nice, right?” Jones said. He leaned against the beat-up bedside table, the surface of which was covered with brown cigarette burns that looked like a swarm of cockroaches. “I’m a purveyor of certified masculine tonics,” Jones continued, “whether your needs lie in the realm of marital duties or growing a beard.”
“Shoot, I got my own roots,” Pepper said.
Jones turned to Carney. “How about you, sir? I’m sure your wife would appreciate the new spring in your step. You heard of bedroom eyes? These will give you bedroom binoculars.”
Before Carney could answer, Jones reached for the top drawer of the bedside table. He reached inside and Pepper kicked it shut on his hand. Carney dropped Virile Waters and the vial bounced on the parquet floor but did not shatter. Only thing that broke were bones in Jones’s hand, from the sound of it. He lurched to the floor and howled.
Pepper pressed his boot on the salesman’s neck. He told Carney to check the drawer. There was a rusty hunting knife inside and some cards for a gentleman’s club in the Bronx.
“I don’t know who you niggers are,” Jones said. Without his glasses he looked like a mole. “Miami Joe hangs with some crazies.”
“When’s he coming back?” Carney asked.
“He ain’t—he moved out yesterday,” Jones said. “The room is paid up until the end of the month.”
“Where to?” Pepper said.
“He said he was homesick.”
“He went back to Miami?” Carney said.
“They don’t call that nigger Chicago Joe, nigger,” Jones said.
“What do you think?” Carney asked Pepper when they were back in the truck. There was a lump in his pocket. He’d swiped one of Jones’s potions at some point.
“Miami Joe’s up to something shady, no doubt,” Pepper said. “But did he take out Arthur, or did Chink do Arthur and then Miami Joe? All we know, he’s lying in Mount Morris Park.”
With his face cut off, Carney added. He didn’t care where the money and stones were. He wanted to know how well he was going to sleep that night.