“Freddie sees this rich kid slumming it, maybe he can make a quick score,” Garrett said. “There were items that were stolen, according to his family. Missing.”
“And this family, they’ve got connections,” Fitzgerald said. “In fact—” He stopped himself. He closed his notebook. “You see that cousin of yours, you tell him to come by the station. And you call us—you don’t want to get mixed up in this.”
“Good riddance,” Rusty said once the policemen departed. He and Marie did their best to cheer Carney up.
Carney told them it was a minor setback. Then he called Mr. Gibbs’s hotel and left a message that he doubted would be returned.
* * *
*
The decor of the Dumas Club hadn’t changed in decades, save for the absence of the full-length portrait of Wilfred Duke which had hung in the library. A brass light had conferred upon Duke a dependable, stately glow. Following the “unfortunate incident,” as the members referred to it, anonymous parties removed the painting one wintry night and burned it in the street with kerosene.
Wilfred Duke—and the money he embezzled—had yet to surface, although Patrick Carson, dentist to Harlem’s elite, swore he caught a glimpse of the disgraced banker at a New Year’s Eve revel in Bridgetown, Barbados. Carson hurried through the crowd but was unable to catch up with the man. A faction recalled Duke mentioning Bajan ancestry at some point, which lent credence to the tale. A private detective was dispatched but nothing came of it.
The membership had changed, however. The bankruptcies, assorted ruinations, and multitiered reversals of fortune caused by Duke’s betrayal had necessitated a campaign for new blood. As the recently installed vice president of the club, Calvin Pierce made sure the prospective members represented the variety of Harlem’s vanguard. Raymond Carney, local entrepreneur, was delighted to receive their invitation. He was accepted without mishap.
Carney’s father-in-law remained on the rolls but had stepped down from club leadership. As one of the old dogs, a Duke crony, Leland was viewed with suspicion by most of his fellow Dumas gentlemen. He didn’t drop by as often as he used to.
The evening of the Bella Fontaine debacle, Carney arranged to meet Pierce for a drink. Carney was the first to arrive. As was his habit now, he fiddled with his Dumas Club ring while waiting on something. He ordered a beer.
At six o’clock, the lounge started to fill up. Carney tipped his beer glass at Ellis Gray, who offered that strange leer of his, as if they were partners on the same swindle. Now that Carney was on the inside, he appreciated the extent of the club’s sovereignty over Harlem. A conversation, a wink, a promise inside these walls expressed itself magnificently, permanently, on the streets beyond in individual lives, in destinies across the years.
Take last week’s protests, for example: They altered the energies in the room. Bloviating across the way was Alexander Oakes, Elizabeth’s childhood neighbor. He continued to work his way up in the prosecutor’s office; his bosses made sure he stood next to Frank Hogan, the Manhattan DA, during press conferences about the boy’s killing. Just a matter of time before Ol’ Alex turned to politics—he was that type. Oakes sat by the fireplace with Lamont Hopkins, who ran the uptown branch of Empire United Insurance. In the coming weeks as Hopkins accepted and rejected claims, he would shape the next version of Harlem. When it came to cleaning up and rebuilding, Sable Construction was still the go-to construction company in Harlem. Its glad-handing owner, Ellis Gray, was a regular fixture at the weekly Dumas scotch tastings and at this moment traded Polish jokes with James Nathan, who was in charge of business loans at Carver Federal and thus decided which entities took over the demolished spaces, which operations received a bailout, separating the drowned from the saved.
Small men with big plans, Carney said to himself. If this room was the seat of black power and influence in New York City, where was its white counterpart? The joint downtown where the same wheeling and dealing happened, but on a bigger stage. With bigger stakes. You don’t get answers to questions like that unless you are on the inside. And you never tell.
Pierce stirred Carney from his reverie with a tap on the shoulder. He sat in the red leather club chair opposite and signaled for his usual drink.
“I saw you on the TV,” Carney said.
“Busy days,” Pierce said. He loosened his tie. Cases like James Powell’s were the specialty of Calvin Pierce, Civil Rights Crusader; you rang him up once you got off the phone with the undertaker.