“Watch it,” the man said, scowling. A mottled canvas bag was slung over his shoulder and his elbows sawed back and forth as he zoomed toward the subway. Carney stepped inside the lobby. A thin, inexplicable layer of grease covered the lobby’s chartreuse walls, as if he were exploring a five-story chicken place. The front desk was empty. Carney heard a toilet flush; he beat it up to the second floor before the clerk returned.
There were six rooms on every floor. On the second floor, one resident watched The Andy Griffith Show at high volume, the next one blasted a Ford commercial, and a third man merely screamed about “them.”
Room 306 was silent. A breeze sucked in the door an inch. Through the crack, the mirror leaning against the wall relinquished few details. “Freddie? Linus?” He pushed in.
They had only been there a few days, but his cousin and his pal had made a nest. The sheets on the twin bed were a grimy bundle, and a makeshift bed on the floor had been gathered from frayed couch cushions. In one corner Freddie and Linus had built a trash pile of soda bottles, beer cans, and grease-soaked wax paper; flies zagged above it in deranged loops. They’d lugged their clothing uptown in pillowcases, which sat half deflated by the window.
“Freddie?” Carney said, loudly, to alert anyone in the bathroom before he tried the door.
But Linus was beyond listening. He was scrunched in the bathtub in an odd position, on his side, as if he had been trying to break through the cast iron with his back. The overdose had turned his lips and fingertips blue. Against the white of the bathtub, dingy as it was, they appeared purplish.
THREE
Elizabeth threw off the sheet and walked to the bathroom. “You’re keeping me up with all the sighing.”
Carney sighed all evening and into the wee hours, often mouthing “Mother of fucking God” as a chaser. He regretted his jokes about Freddie’s friend the last few years, the beatnik putdowns and Bowery bum comments. Linus’s family had locked him up in the nuthouse, doctors had tied him down and sent a million volts through him. He slunk into a drug hole, where he died. Carney’s derision had been a way to let off steam, to express disappointment in and worry over his cousin. Now he thought about the poor man and his last view of earth: the groove of rust worn from the tub’s leaky faucet, like the ooze from a wound.
Did you go quick when you died like that? He hoped it had been quick.
Had Freddie returned from a chicken run, or scoring, and discovered his friend’s corpse, or had he awakened to the scene in the bathroom? He must be scared. And sad. On top of his fears about blowback from whatever job he and Linus had pulled. An unlocked door in a building like the Eagleton, ajar—they would have called the cops by now. Some down-and-outer pops in to see if anything’s lying unattended and gets a big surprise.
No one could identify Carney except the man he bumped into at the Eagleton’s entrance, the crotchety dude with the beard. What does that man do when he returns and sees the cops milling about, or hears about it in a few days—speak up or keep it zipped?
When Elizabeth returned she slipped her arm around his chest and pressed her face to his neck. “You’re going to kill them tomorrow.”
“It’s a lot.” When he tried to focus on the Bella Fontaine meeting, orchestrate the visit, the floor gave way and he tumbled into room 306 again, hand reaching for the bathroom door.
“You’ll be making history.” They chuckled.
“I don’t think First Negro to Become an Authorized Dealer for Bella Fontaine is going to make the papers. It’s not like I’m doing a million things with a peanut.”
“What?”
“George Washington Carver.”
“George Washington Carver. Just because nobody knows doesn’t mean it’s not happening. You worked your butt off.”
“Trying to keep up with my wife,” Carney said. He squeezed her hand. Black Star Travel had opened two satellite offices in the last year. With Dale Baker, the president of the firm, spending half the year in Chicago and Miami, someone had to run the home office—and Elizabeth got the nod. It was more money and fewer hours once they staffed up, which the kids liked, and so did Carney.
Elizabeth brought home enough that from time to time Carney considered dropping the fencing line altogether. They didn’t need the cash, not really; any sober analysis rendered the side untenable. They certainly didn’t need the risk. With Freddie drawing him into crooked complexities once more, walking away made more sense than ever.
“I’ll try to sleep,” he said. And was immediately embroiled again. Let’s say Freddie comes for his briefcase and moves to Timbuktu. Someone’s watching the furniture store, they report to Chink that Freddie came by and Carney didn’t speak up. He suffered the momentary image of a torture chamber, basement of the laundromat: splash a bucket of water on the floor to wash the blood down the drain. Meet Freddie for a handoff somewhere else? What if he’s being tailed? Back in the basement chamber, naked bulb swinging over a table covered by sharp, gleaming tools, cartoon-colored cartons of detergent piled to the ceiling. Carney was in a fix.