The amount was satisfactory. “Wilmington is where I came from,” she said. He joined her on the love seat. He usually chose one of the Burlington Hall chairs across the room and immediately regretted tonight’s choice. The love seat was a two-seater, made to squeeze a couple close, and here he was a married man in the room of a “working lady,” as his father used to say.
“I got out of there,” Miss Laura continued. “Figured New York was more my size. My aunt Hazel packed her bags and beat it up here when I was little, and whenever she came back, she had the nicest dresses and hats and all these stories of the Big City. It was the first place that popped into my head—New York City.”
Observing his discomfort, she sat up and crossed her legs so the frayed edge of her robe relinquished an inch of thigh.
“It’s good to have family,” Carney said, “when you come to a new place.”
“Good’s a word. She didn’t know me from Adam when I knocked on her door. Still up from last night, to look at her. But she said I could sleep on her couch for a few days until I found a place. I was there six months.” However disheveled Aunt Hazel was in the morning, Miss Laura said, she was the picture of glamour whenever she walked out the door. “You have to have an inside you, she used to say, and an outside you. Ain’t nobody’s business who you are really, so it’s up to you what you gave them.”
“She still living here?” Carney asked. Miss Laura had arranged this meeting and he wondered when she’d get to the reason. It occurred to him that Laura was not her real name.
“She was,” Miss Laura said. “Now she ain’t. She’s the one got me working at Mam Lacey’s—you know it?”
“Of course,” he said.
He squinted, and she said, “I didn’t work downstairs.” In the bar, she meant.
“Right.”
He and Freddie had often joked about going upstairs, but they didn’t mess with hookers. Well, Freddie was up to all sorts of stuff. They knew plenty of guys who used to go upstairs, or who frequented the other whorehouses people knew about. On Carney’s fourteenth birthday, his father had offered to take him to “a place I know,” and Carney said no, and it was years before it clicked what Big Mike had been talking about. Had Freddie joked about this or that woman getting off the bus or walking into the drugstore working for Mam Lacey? Big ass, too much makeup, some kind of look in her eye. Sure. It was in the realm of his humor, and Carney had doubtless laughed. You get older and the old jokes grow less funny.
Miss Laura said, “I used to lie up there and listen to the music. Everybody having a high old time down there. That music…If I got bored, or if I had a rough one, I’d picture me in one of those girl groups. Long dress. Gloves up to here.” She stuck another cigarette into her mouth. “Downstairs was one good time, and upstairs was a different kind of time.”
“Been closed a while,” Carney said.
“Good riddance. Everybody talked so nice about her, it made me so mad.”
The last time he’d been to Mam Lacey’s, it had been closed for some time, a ruin. He and Pepper had been looking for a lead on the loot from the Theresa heist and ended up there. Mam Lacey had died and her junkie son Julius had turned the place into a shooting gallery. There was a broken statue of a white stone angel in the back garden and Julius was lying on a bench in a drug stupor, the legs of the statue sticking up without a body and the torso and wings erupting next to it out of hardy Harlem weeds. Had the statue been in one piece when Miss Laura looked down from that room? And what broke it in two? He didn’t know why he thought of it—him, Julius, and Miss Laura in a triangle at Mam Lacey’s and gazing on the statue, each of them with their own view. Look at it from one way, it was not a place for an angel, look at it from another and maybe it was a place that needed an angel. And another view was that if it were beautiful, it wouldn’t last long there.
He was going to mention the kid, Julius, then nixed the idea.
Miss Laura said, “You come here to tell me what I want to hear?”
“Not yet,” Carney said. There was a holdup.
Last Thursday, the cop Munson had picked up his Thursday envelope. Carney reminded him of his proposal vis-à-vis Biz Dixon. “I said I’d work on it,” the detective told him. “Like I said, these people have friends. That in itself is not insurmountable, but it complicates. Everybody has to get pinched now and then, regardless of what they’re laying out, to keep things democratic. This is America.”