Munson the cop perhaps had an inkling. One night the detective, drunk, had come upon Carney at Nightbirds and proposed a toast to Carney’s health. “To the biggest nobody in Harlem.” A compliment on staying out of the fray, or a comment on how much he was making?
“If you say so,” Carney had answered, and sipped his beer.
But this wasn’t Munson putting the snatch on him. The stranger steered Carney to the corner. None of the passersby noticed anything amiss. Would he force Carney back to the office, make a play for the safe? It was Sunday, so Marie wasn’t working. But Rusty was minding the store, and he might start something that got them killed.
“Over here,” the man said. A lime green Cadillac DeVille vibrated at the crosswalk. He opened the back door and ushered Carney inside the sedan, sliding in after.
Delroy was at the wheel, so this was a Chink Montague production. Unless the man was freelancing. Or had gone to work for the competition.
“Say hello to Chet the Vet,” Delroy said. He pulled away, up Broadway.
Chet the Vet flashed gold canines.
“Tell ’em about the war, Chet.”
From his age, Carney gathered he’d been in Korea.
“Fuck a white man’s army,” Chet said.
“They call him Chet the Vet because he went to school to be an animal doctor. For a month.”
“It wasn’t for me,” Chet allowed.
“Delroy,” Carney said, “what’s happening here?”
“Have to ask the boss.”
Carney met his gaze in the rearview mirror. The hood averted his eyes.
* * *
*
It had been five years since Chink Montague sent Delroy and Yea Big around the furniture store to recover his girlfriend’s stolen jewelry. The purpose of the visit had been intimidation; its result was a promotion, once Chink started steering business in Carney’s direction for a cut. Delroy and Yea Big dropped by for the envelope every week, and five years was a long time. At a certain point, an outside observer might characterize them as a species of colleague.
Carney and Delroy, anyway. Some kids throwing a football around one January morning discovered Yea Big in Mount Morris Park, sash-cord wound around his neck. Missing for a week before melted snow gave him up, with the frozen dog shit and cigarette butts. That was last year, at the start of the war between Bumpy Johnson and Chink Montague. Bumpy Johnson got out of Alcatraz in ’63 on mandatory release and had an idea to reclaim the empire he’d lost eleven years before. Jerry Catena, an underboss in the Genovese family, backed his play, while Chink operated under the auspices of the Lombardis, making their conflict a proxy war over Harlem’s rackets. That Chink was Bumpy’s protégé gave the conflict a biblical flair.
“They got us dancing puppets,” Delroy told Carney when he came around for the envelope. He’d been up for days. He ran a finger along the scar in his cheek as if scraping invisible peas out of a pod. “We kill each other and these guinea motherfuckers sit back and laugh.” It made for a hot couple of weeks until they called a truce and carved up the neighborhood like the messy butchers they were.
After Yea Big’s death, Delroy came for the envelope solo. He and Carney were linked now—fellow puppets, crooked confederates, and fellow residents of Harlem, USA, God bless. They shared milestones. Delroy was Carney’s first customer when the furniture store reopened after the expansion; the hood needed another dinette set for his latest girlfriend. Some men commemorated a new romance with the gift of a sparkling necklace or a pair of smart earrings from their preferred jeweler. With Delroy, it was dinette sets. “These gals, they don’t even know how to set a table proper. How you going to feed your man, you ain’t even got a goddamn place to eat?” The logic was sound. For a stretch, Delroy’s romantic life was particularly fruitful and he bought three Riviera! by Collins-Hathaway pedestal tables in one year. Carney cut him a break on the last one.
Did Chink think Carney was shortchanging him? Or had someone set him up?
Delroy parked on 155th and Broadway, across from Sid the Sud King. The mascot on the sign was a Mr. Clean knockoff, a bald-headed Negro flexing in a white T-shirt. His grin broad and psychotic. Chet the Vet tugged Carney out of the car and led him into the laundromat.
driest spin in town. White foam pushed against the washers’ portholes in a lazy slosh. Old ladies parceled coins and old men wearing their last clean drawers shuffled around the grimy coin-op. The place was a misery, a death ward for old Maytags, the machines rocked and bucked so. Is there anything you can do, doctor?…Could be days, could be weeks. It’s in God’s hands now. Every nickel shook the washers closer to the nearest junkyard. Or empty lot, more likely.