The story of that Saturday night made Freddie shake his head and sigh. He had a hungry look. Then he asked, “In a rug?”
It ended up being a good month once the heat broke. Customers returned and he and Rusty closed some nice sales. Some of them were repeat. Sell quality goods, and people come back. The two Silvertones found takers one Thursday afternoon, one after the other. More where that came from, Aronowitz told him.
Elizabeth didn’t have any more fainting spells, and if her mother told her about the argument that night, there was no sign. That bill would come due in time.
About a month later Carney received a package. He got an odd feeling and closed his office door and drew the blinds to the showroom. Inside the box, wrapped in newspaper like a fish, was Miss Lucinda Cole’s necklace. The ruby glared at him, a mean lizard eye. Pepper’s handwriting was childish. The note said, “You can split this with your cousin.” He didn’t. He sat on it for a year to let the heat die down. Buxbaum paid him and Carney put the money away for the apartment. “I may be broke sometimes, but I ain’t crooked,” he said to himself. Although, he had to admit, perhaps he was.
DORVAY
1961
“An envelope is an envelope. Disrespect the order and the whole system breaks down.”
ONE
Five hundred dollars, onetime payment. As far as bribes and payoffs went, the onetime nature argued in its favor. Detective Munson came knocking for his weekly envelope, every Friday Delroy and Yea Big came to the store to pick up Chink Montague’s—Carney didn’t have the heart to calculate how much he’d paid out to those crooks the last two years. Operating expenses. The price of doing business, like rent and insurance and Ma Bell. Squint at it, the five hundred to Duke was an investment.
“It’ll pay off down the road.” That’s how Pierce had pitched membership to Carney, when the lawyer caught his reaction to the words Dumas Club. Carney’s expression: a braid of disdain and revulsion. “I’m not the right color,” Carney said.
“It’s not that bad anymore,” Pierce said. He grinned. “Look at me.”
It was true that Pierce was a blacker variety of berry than the average Dumas member. Certainly the lawyer wasn’t as stuffy or stuck-up as, say, Leland Jones.
“That’s your father-in-law?”
“Yes,” Carney said.
“Sorry, brother.”
They first met at the inaugural meeting of the Harlem Small Business Association. Basement of the St. Nicholas AME Zion Church. Terrance Pierce was on hand to lend his legal expertise, pro bono. “We’re not going to rise unless we all rise, right?”
Carney sat in the front row, as he had as a student. Pierce arrived five minutes late and took the only seat left, next to him. Instead of clapping for the speakers, Pierce tapped a Chesterfield on a monogrammed silver cigarette case. He was a tall man, with wavy black hair that focused his features into something eagle-like. His suit was expensive, gray with silvery pinstripes; Carney had been mulling a wardrobe upgrade and later inquired about his tailor.
They got to talking between the plans and appeals of uptown merchants, restaurant owners, and local pols. Hank Diggs, the president of the Diggs Pomade Company and originator of the slogan “Dig This Shine!,” took the podium. “With all the brain power we got in this room,” he said, “we could light up Times Square!” He spoke in a slow, rumbling voice that evoked his own low wattage and undercut his point. His hair looked great, though. Carney took the cynic’s view when it came to groups, specifically groups and results, but Elizabeth had pushed him to show up. It wouldn’t hurt to increase his profile, she told him. Even if nothing came of it, it was good to put a face to the name on the sign. The letters on the new sign he’d just paid for tilted upward like a jet taking to the sky.
Adam Clayton Powell Jr. even popped in toward the end to cheer on the crowd. Regal and dapper. Carney admired the man’s hustle; one of these days they were going to name a street after him, you watch. “It’s a new day in Harlem,” the congressman said. “We have President Kennedy down in D.C., promising a New Frontier—why can’t we have our own New Frontier in our own backyards, on the streets of Harlem, one the world has never seen before?” He’d used the same analogy last week, at the opening of a supermarket on Ninth. Carney’d read about it in the Harlem Gazette. An assistant materialized, whispered in Powell’s ear, and he left the merchants to foment economic revolution.