Marie was a broad-backed gal with a short torso and skinny legs; the overall effect was a taper, as if she sprouted from the earth like a tree. Given her affable personality, a sturdy tree of dependable shade. She was fast, efficient, and, yes, overlooked the occasional odd creature who came knocking to her boss’s office. She adapted to the Pepper system without comment.
See, not long after the Theresa job, Pepper started using the furniture store as an answering service. One November night near closing, the phone rang.
“It’s Pepper,” he said, although if he’d said nothing Carney would have recognized him. The man harbored a telltale silence.
“Pepper,” Carney said.
“You got a message for me?”
“Sorry?”
“You got a message for me?”
Flummoxed. Carney peered out into 125th to see if he was calling from the phone booth across the street. He stammered and Pepper’s sigh cut him short.
“They call for me,” Pepper said, “you get me the message.” He hung up.
The next day Rusty told him that someone had asked after a Pepper, but it sounded like a drunk up to mischief. After that, Carney kept a yellow legal pad by the phone for Pepper’s inscrutable messages. To flatter them with the word enigmatic would have been dressing a pig in a tuxedo. They were a ragtag code of times, places, and objects shorn of referents, the recognizable world stripped to a series of grunts. Reduced to the Job.
Tell Pepper eleven o’clock. Bring the case.
It’s on at the place. I’ll be there half-past.
Make sure Pepper brings the keys. I’ll be out back under the thing.
Carney told Rusty, then Marie, that the mysterious recipient was an old friend of his father’s, a daffy old coot. No family to speak of, it was sad, really. When Pepper called in a few hours later, he identified himself and repeated the message with his own intonation as if pondering ancient mysteries—“It’s on at the place”—and then hung up. Months might go by until the next contact.
Detective Munson popped the last corner of a pink cookie into his mouth. “Could eat your cookies all day,” he said. If Marie picked up on the innuendo she made no sign.
“Detective,” Carney said.
“The man is all business,” Munson said, to make Marie a conspirator in her boss’s squareness. She shut the door behind them when they entered Carney’s office.
There was a Collins-Hathaway sling-back chair for guests, but Munson sat on Carney’s Ellsworth safe. It was a modest number, dark gray with a levered handle. Carney didn’t have an etiquette book in front of him, but he was sure it was bad manners to sit on a man’s safe.
The detective draped his sports jacket over his arm. Carney shut the blinds.
“I should come here for breakfast every day,” the cop said. “What do you think?”
“They’re for customers.”
“You ain’t trying to sell me on something? What’s up that couldn’t wait until Thursday?”
Thursday was when Munson usually picked up his envelope. After the Theresa heist, Chink Montague had broadcast the names of all the uptown fences to get a line on his girlfriend’s necklace. It had the effect of listing Carney in the crooked yellow pages, and Munson came calling.
In that first meeting, the detective forgave Carney for not paying tribute earlier. “Perhaps you didn’t understand how things work. Now I’m telling you how they work.”
“Sure, some of what I sell has been previously owned,” Carney had said.
“I know how it is. Sometimes shit shows up on your doorstep. Who knows where it comes from or why. But there it is, like a deadbeat relative, and you got to deal with it.”
Carney crossed his arms.
“I’ll come by on Thursdays. You here on Thursdays?”
“Every day, like the sign says.”
“Thursdays then. Regular. Like church.”
Carney didn’t go to church. Blasphemers on one side of the family, skeptics on the other, and both sides liked to sleep in. But he understood paying bills on time, and now there was another outstretched hand every week.
Carney had kept Thursday as the container of their transactions. Until today.
Munson slouched and stretched out his legs. He reminded Carney of the mouthy deputy in a Western, cocksure and cracking jokes, and liable to get offed before the final reel. Munson was too smart for such an ignominious exit; when the outlaws came to town, he’d hide in the stables until the gunfire ceased and then step out and check the lay of the land.