The furniture salesman and the photographer waited. It was the first night Carney had skipped the first sleep since June. In the coming days, he tried to determine when the Duke job actually got underway. Did it begin with the arrest of the drug dealer, that endgame maneuver? With the return of dorvay, and Carney’s nocturnal scheming all those summer nights, or the day the banker committed an offense that called for payback? Or had it been summoned from their natures, deep in their makeup? Duke’s corruption. The Carney clan’s worship of grudges. If you believed in the holy circulation of envelopes, everything that went down happened because a man took an envelope and didn’t do his job. An envelope is an envelope. Disrespect the order and the whole system breaks down.
“Let’s go,” Carney said. He shoved Zippo. The man was asleep.
Zippo looked up at her window and the curtains thrown wide. “I had a dream I was sitting in a truck,” he said.
Miss Laura buzzed them in. As he rounded the landing to the second floor, Carney thought: She killed him. Duke’s lying on that four-poster bed with his brains spilling out and now he and Zippo have to help her cover it up. If she hasn’t already called the cops and split out the back and left them holding the bag. It had been her setup all along, not his.
Carney was relieved to see Wilfred Duke on the shiny red sheets, arms spread wide, mouth open and chest quietly rising and falling. He was still dressed in his pinstripe suit with his wing tips on, though his shiny yellow tie was wide, as if his head were being slipped into a noose. He appeared to smile. Miss Laura had her arms crossed, her gaze fixed on the banker. She took a sip from her can of Rheingold.
“Okay,” Zippo said. He rubbed his hands together. “It’s a graveyard scene? That’s not really a burying suit.”
“Enough with the cemetery stuff,” Carney said. “I was clear about that. We have to pose him, though.”
“This fucker,” Miss Laura said. The knockout drops were good for a couple of hours. “I gave him a double dose,” she said. “To be sure.”
“You don’t want to poison him.”
“He’s breathing, ain’t he?”
“You heard of Weegee?” Zippo said. “You’ve seen his stuff even if you don’t know his name. He did crime-scene—”
“Zippo, can you help me with this leg?”
Miss Laura leaned against the fireplace, contemplating Duke and tapping ash on the Heriz rug.
Carney, weeks before, had suggested they confine themselves to a few shots of Duke in bed with his arms around a suggestively dressed Miss Laura. A few scandalous poses would suffice. Enough to shame and disgrace, excommunicate him from a segment of Harlem society. Lose some business. Nothing too distasteful. She agreed. Then she thought upon it.
“That’s not who he is,” she told Carney in their next meeting. “I think we should show him as he really is.”
“What’s that?”
“It should be a bunch of pictures showing different sides of him, like in Screenland when they have Montgomery Clift for pages and pages in different scenes.”
“We’ll be pressed for time,” Carney said.
“Different scenes and props, I think.”
“That’s—”
“That’s how we’re doing it,” Miss Laura said. “After all this thinking you put into it? This is what you want,” and she took charge of the choreography, the way the wheelman attends to the getaway, and the vault is the lock man’s remit.
It was time to get to business. Miss Laura stubbed out her cigarette. “You ready?”
“Can I put a record on?” Zippo asked. She waved her beer can toward the Zenith RecordMaster. He dropped the needle on Mingus Ah Um.
Zippo opened his bag of equipment. Laura went for hers.
The Burlington Hall company out of Worcester, Massachusetts, had been in the furniture business since the mid-eighteenth century and was revered the world over for its peerless craftsmanship and exquisite details. It’s said that Prince Afonso of Portugal had one of their canopy beds hauled five hundred miles through swamps and across ravines, over mountains, to his vacation residence on the Amazon, so that his heir would be conceived on the most luxurious bed in one of the world’s sacred places. His wife was barren it turned out, but the prince and his wife enjoyed the most magnificent slumbers of their short lives. If Francis Burlington, the founder of the company, could see the array of erotic paraphernalia that Miss Laura stored in their 1958 lacquered armoire, with its regal silhouette and masterful cabinetwork, he would’ve been appalled.