Miss Laura had lived there for three years and considered one-third of the apartment hers fair and square. The front room was for business, as well as the kitchen. The icebox was a desolate hum but the kitchen had a little bar, if you wanted to wet your whistle before you got to it. The small room in the back overlooking the garden was her domain. No one was allowed past its threshold. She slept there, never easily, and dreamed there, and beneath her bed kept a white leather box for tokens of her life before. Over the decades the street side of the apartment had settled in a slant, but her room was level.
Each time Carney came knocking, he hesitated before he stepped into the front room, as if someone crouched behind the door to spook him—the vice squad, or his wife. By then Miss Laura was accustomed to his skittishness. His intent was bent but he was mostly straight, deep down, she could tell. The man was in sales, so he said. Miss Laura was in sales, too, and knew a mark when she saw one. Let him act this way or that, talk out the side of his mouth, but she knew who he was, what he was worth, the avenues of approach.
* * *
*
She was a hard case. He didn’t know how to read her that first day and hadn’t worked it out since.
The afternoon he approached her, the lunch rush was over but it was before quitting time, the in-between zone. The only other patron at the Big Apple Diner was an old white man in a yellow windbreaker, dozing with his head on the Formica counter. Carney sat at the window again and looked up at 288 Convent. She lived on the third floor. The pink drapes in the front room allowed the July sun in.
The waitress that day was a tinier version of the usual miserable waitress, in eerie proportion and likeness, as if he were served by Russian dolls—take the top half off one and there’s another inside. Carney had one crook who kept coming to his office with tacky shit like those dolls, rhinestone-covered knickknacks, and whatnot. Finally he had to tell the dum-dum to beat it and not come around anymore. It was one thing for his father-in-law to disparage him as a rug peddler, but for a common hood to think he trafficked in such crap was a true insult. The waitress grimaced at him when he asked for milk for his coffee. What factory made such living monstrosities as her and her doubles? Some place in Jersey.
The waitress and the cook started fighting and their epithets for each other were so ugly and precise that Carney had no choice but to finally cross the street.
She buzzed him up and was unsurprised to see him round the stairs to the landing. Had the door wide open, unafraid of a stranger in the stairwell. He said he was a friend of Wilfred Duke. She let him in.
Miss Laura was prettied up that day, in a red-and-white cocktail dress, small hoop earrings dangling beneath her curly bob. In uniform, on the clock. She said, “Hello.” At first glance he took her for a teenager—she was petite and lean—but the impatience in her every syllable sounded ancient enough to predate civilization.
A Burlington Hall four-poster bed with tasseled mauve curtains dominated the living room, centered on a Heriz rug of lush crimson. Whoever had furnished the joint had hit a white store downtown—there wasn’t a Burlington Hall dealer north of Seventy-Second Street. The lacquered armoire, side chairs, and love seat with the chenille upholstery all came from their 1958 catalog—1958 or 1959. In the three portraits on the walls, plump, nude white women reclined on divans while being bathed or adjusted or otherwise attended to by black-skinned servants. “Atmosphere.”
Miss Laura offered him a drink and he accepted a can of Rheingold. She opened one for herself and sat on the love seat. “You want some music?” she asked. Next to the armoire was a 1958 Zenith RecordMaster hi-fi console, with a recess and metal dividers for LPs at the bottom.
He shook his head. Time to make his pitch.
He’d considered various approaches in his midnight stretches of industry, between sleeps, in that new time he’d rediscovered. Bring up the money: “How much would it cost for you to…？” She had a price for her customers; perhaps she had a variety of prices. Or make an appeal to her sense of justice: “You might not know it, but Duke is a bad man.” On the man’s say-so, his bank kicked widows and families out into the street. This one lives and that one dies, like God. Carney had an anecdote in his pocket about a spastic kid who needed an operation, and the poor boy’s eviction in the thick of it. Notorious. Verifiable. The Harlem Gazette ran two pieces about it. Certainly the offense against Carney didn’t rank compared to that, but there was no need to be specific about his own complaint.