Carney bought his newspapers elsewhere; Grant’s run-down facade discouraged outsiders, as intended. A whole gambling operation back there—Freddie probably knew about it. The cop’s car had made Carney into a country bumpkin, like his own street didn’t belong to him.
Munson drove another block and stopped short of Lenox. The detective darted into Top Cat Dry Cleaning. The place had been there as long as Carney could remember. He’d never patronized this place, either; Mr. Sherman’s up the street was more welcoming. Perhaps he’d known Top Cat wasn’t legit in some way, in his bones, and he’d avoided it because of his solid-citizen side. To disavow the crooked inclinations of his nature.
Munson got back in the car and said, “He takes numbers for Bumpy Johnson.”
“You take your piece from Bumpy and leave him high and dry, too?” Carney said.
A man lurched toward Munson’s car as he exited a Checker cab. The detective honked. “I was waiting for you to say something like that,” Munson said. “Look, I fucking apologize. Take a gander at my Fucking Apology Face—it’s like Medusa, you only ever see it once.”
With that, the detective gave Carney his account of the riot days, as a prelude for why he failed to run interference with the homicide detectives.
“I knew shit was going to blow up,” Munson said, “the second I heard about it on the radio. Kid got shot? Heat wave like that? That ain’t a powder keg—it’s the munitions factory.” Munson was set to go on vacation—down to Rehoboth in Maryland with some buddies who came up with him on the force. One of them had an uncle who owned a bungalow off the beach. Word had it there were some local ladies who liked to have a drink now and then. “He said this one gal likes to dance in the altogether, does a whole show where she wears cha-cha heels and sings Patti Page songs.” Then the kid got shot and nobody was going nowhere.
The first two days, Munson ran a surveillance team that made the rounds of Negro groups—the churches, the NAACP—to get a handle on their response. CORE, of course, loud as they were these days. “Two of my men are college types, look like Jewish civil rights agitators, and the other two are young Negroes who walk around with copies of The Fire Next Time in their back pockets. You hear old-timers grumbling about the number of Negro cops, but who else is going to go inside? Some fat, red-faced Mick who hasn’t done a day’s work in years? Me? My guys take a seat and no one’s looking at them twice.” He paused. “I know you’re not political, that’s why I’m telling you.”
There were known activists and agitators who required a once-over. Downtown wanted to know if they were exploiting the situation, fanning the flames. Munson’s team attended the CORE protest at Wagner Middle School on Friday afternoon and popped up at the funeral home on Saturday afternoon, mixing with the crowd, identifying the players. Nodded their heads at the common sense from Black Muslims holding forth on a corner of 125th. Files were added to. Files were opened. “Had to make sure nobody was getting ideas.” Munson said his wife helped paint the protest signs. She taught art to first graders.
“The ideas, we already got,” Carney said. “Too late for that.”
Munson shrugged. “Harlem, Harlem, Harlem,” he said. He started the car. “Then Saturday night happened.” Once everything blew up on Saturday, Munson was in the trenches with everyone else, putting out flare-ups, rousting the troublemakers. “With one of those dumb helmets on my head so I don’t get my brains turned into scrambled eggs.”
Needless to say, it delayed mail service, the circulation of envelopes. Five days later things were still not back to normal, as Chief Murphy and his lieutenants hustled to prevent another round of protest and vandalism. If it had been a normal week, Munson would have heard about homicide detectives from Washington Heights coming down to the 28th to investigate a body. “Come into my house, you best say hello,” he said. “I would have talked to them first, informed my colleagues that you were a solid citizen. As one can plainly see from your furniture showroom. And I would have given you a heads-up.”
“I had an important meeting—they busted it up.”
“They had a Park Avenue corpse, what do you want? That’s the other part.” This time he parked outside Beautiful Cakes, half a block down 125th. The store was a cherished punch line of Elizabeth’s, as every demo plastic cake and confection in the window was adorned with dust and attended to by dead flies. Look farther into the gloom and the baker’s smoking a cigarette and cutting her nails.