Sometimes Miss Laura stuck her head out the third-floor window to watch them walk away, wearing an expression of incandescent rage that made Pepper stare into his coffee.
* * *
*
In early July, Pepper dropped by the furniture store. Marie clocked him as he crossed the showroom. He nodded at her and she turned away, startled by his stolid affect.
Carney flipped the blinds in his office. He looked thinner, or off, like he hadn’t had a proper sleep.
“Nice safe,” Pepper said.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Apart from how small it is?”
“Yes.”
“It’s an Ellsworth, and I’m always happy to see an Ellsworth. But you don’t want to own a safe that makes a thief happy.”
That set Carney sulking for the rest of the meeting. “I went by her place on Convent, sat in the diner,” he said. “Duke’s visits, it all checked out.”
“Course it did,” Pepper said. “You think I make shit up?”
He paid Pepper for his work and said there was a new person for him to look at—Biz Dixon. “He’s a friend of my cousin Freddie.”
Pepper shrugged.
“We grew up together,” Carney added.
Pepper was acquainted with Biz Dixon and had a low opinion. He was part of this new breed of Harlem hood: hotheaded, feral, ever-trifling. A couple of years back, Corky Bell hired Pepper for security at the big poker game he ran every January the weekend after New Year’s. Corky Bell liked to have some straights at the table, and you couldn’t get them to come if they’re going to be menaced by lowlifes. It was a three-day game, an effortless gig, everyone behaving, except for the year Biz Dixon showed up.
Corky hired the Saturday-night bartender from the Hotel Theresa. He had a generous pour, as you’d expect in a gambling room. Roast beef on rye with Russian dressing circulated, and come sunup, eggs. One year Corky had Sylvester King come in and do an a cappella version of his hit song “Summer’s Romance.” They were cousins, that’s how he pulled it off. Plus Corky did a little shylocking and a short set covered one week’s vig on the loan for King’s new pool in Long Island. The pool was kidney-shaped, Corky said, with a small box on a timing mechanism that emitted aerosolized jasmine, a known aphrodisiac.
This white accountant down from Connecticut, name of Fletcher, kept taking Dixon’s money. Fletcher didn’t say nothing when Dixon started riding him—Why’d you stay in with a six, Why do you play such shit cards—which riled the peddler to no end. The accountant was a civilian, slumming it uptown like those Park Avenue white girls in Mel’s Place every weekend. Crooks and civilians need to congregate every once in a while to reinforce their life decisions. Corky Bell’s game was one place where that happened.
If Negroes like Biz Dixon didn’t mess things up, that is. To be honest, there was a needling quality to the way Fletcher said “Three kings” that last time and pushed his glasses up on his nose, but nothing out of bounds. Dixon threw his scotch in the man’s face and leapt. Pepper intercepted and dragged him out into the street by the collar. Dixon was steaming. The peddler had a guy with him, but Pepper figured they must have heard about this or that thing he’d done, because they rabbited up and walked away. Fletcher tipped him a hundred bucks when the game broke up, which Pepper used to buy an electric blanket.
“I know Dixon,” Pepper said.
“Does that mean you’re out?”
“Don’t mean I’m out. Means that nigger can’t see me is all.” He sawed his knuckles across the stubble on his jaw. Duke and Miss Laura were connected; Pepper didn’t see where the drug peddler fit in. “What’s he got to do with Duke?”
“I have to take care of one thing before I can do another thing, and I have to do something else before I can do that.”
Pepper wasn’t getting paid enough to work that one through. Moreover: didn’t care. He split, but not before one last look at the Ellsworth. He shook his head.
He borrowed Tommy Lips’s car for the next stint. Dixon would recognize Pepper, despite the years and the enemies accrued in the meantime, so he brought in Tommy Lips. Given the number of players to keep dibs on, he’d need a sideman to spell him. Tommy Lips left a visible brown outline of his body on his reclining chair when he rose to shake Pepper’s hand. He appreciated the work and made it known ad nauseam.
Thus commenced a couple of days of cruising around Harlem tailing the drug peddler. Dixon was a pretty boy, high yellow, fit from sparring in the yard or whatever at Dannemora. Pepper couldn’t comment on the recreational outlets at the prison as he’d never had the pleasure. Dixon kept up the regimen and applied equal diligence to his hair, which shone in loose whorls.