Carney told him that Dixon hung his hat at a tenement on Fifth Avenue, and from there Pepper shadowed the man to a series of haunts. His mother’s place on 129th, two girlfriends’ pads on Madison and 112th and 116th, respectively, and a succession of mediocre chicken joints and Chinese places. He had a meal with Freddie. Pepper made a note of it.
Then there were Dixon’s work movements. To a man, his crew was drawn from the same clan of young men you encountered uptown these days, spiteful and dumb. Botched somehow. At the Maharaja they showed these juvenile-delinquent and hot-rodder movies featuring angry young white kids. They didn’t make movies about their brown-skinned Harlem versions, but they existed, with their gut hatred for how things worked. If they were good people, they marched and protested and tried to fix what they hated about the system. If they were bad people, they went to work for people like Dixon.
“Look at them,” Tommy Lips said. “I hate them. Tuck in your shirt!”
The young hoods were slovenly, doubtless. Tommy Lips abhorred their comportment and envied their vitality in equal measure. He’d been out of the game ever since a cop billy-clubbed him upside his head. Blackout spells and trembly hands ever since. He was fine for babysitting work, though, if talkative. “It’s downright indecent,” Tommy Lips said.
Pepper followed Dixon’s employees—pushers and half-assed muscle—until he identified the man who was the least incompetent and the most busy. According to the bartender at the Clermont Lounge, the industrious, jug-eared Spanish guy was named Marco. He supervised the lower-level pushers at Dixon’s main spot on Amsterdam and 103rd. Steady white customers, it being a subway block. Bedraggled college kids and working stiffs with a secret habit. City employees with the shakes. Another two days of tailing Marco and they identified the stash house, two blocks up. Also off Amsterdam, in the basement apartment of a beaten-down townhouse.
“These jackals taking over,” Tommy Lips said one afternoon. A pile of garbage next to where they’d parked had black flies bedeviling them. “You been on First Ave lately?”
“Get me a tank, maybe I roll up in there,” Pepper said.
“I been taking these correspondence classes,” Tommy Lips said. “Shoulda done it years ago. I could have been set up somewhere, out of this place.”
“You don’t say.”
Following his two targets back-to-back, the banker and the peddler, Pepper had to say they were in the same business. There were obvious junkies in Harlem, swaying, grooving to some inner refrain, and then there were citizens you’d never know were on junk. Normal people with straight jobs who strolled up to Dixon’s men, copped, then split to their warrens. Then there was Duke. Every day Duke hustled, doing his own handoffs in restaurants and club rooms, pushing that inside dope: influence, information, power. You couldn’t tell who was using what these days, their drug of choice, but half the city was on something if you had your eyes open.
Back in Carney’s office, Pepper read from his tiny pad and delivered his report to the furniture salesman. He mentioned the chicken-spot meetup with Freddie.
“He wasn’t working for him.” Carney said it like a declaration to make it one.
“Not that I saw.”
Carney nodded. “They grew up together.”
Pepper had nothing to add. “Now what?” These ribs were cooked.
“That’s it,” Carney said. “Nothing else.” He paid Pepper what he owed him for Dixon.
Couple of days later an old crony brought Pepper in on a job in Baltimore. That took him south for a few weeks. Crabs on the Delaware shore to treat himself. He didn’t know if Rose still lived there, but it turned out she did. Twenty years is a while. They were both older, fatter, and sadder —“which is the general trajectory”—and that was a nice couple of days.
First night back, he’s in Donegal’s and lookee here, Biz Dixon’s bust is on the TV news, Report to New York. Mayor Wagner and this stiff from the junk squad and a bunch of cops posing before a table stacked with bricks of heroin. In flickering black-and-white. Happy as pigs in shit.
Legwork for cops.
Pepper asked the bartender for the goddamned phone.
That motherfucker had him doing legwork for cops.
SEVEN
In early September two seemingly unrelated items appeared in New York City papers. One small, the other more widely covered and consequential.
The smaller item concerned the arrest of a Harlem pimp named Thomas Andrew Bruce, also known as Cheap Brucie. “No stranger to law enforcement,” Thomas Bruce was arrested in a sting operation at a local nightclub and charged with promoting prostitution in the fourth degree. The story rated three paragraphs in the Amsterdam News, the only paper to mention it.