“I have a car—what am I going to do? Walk around like some asshole? I don’t understand the question.”
“I’m out.” Carney turned over the newspaper and reached for the door handle.
“Hey—Mr. Furniture.”
“What?”
“This shit is heavy, no joke. I don’t want to be your cousin right now. Don’t want to be you either.”
Carney opened the door. Munson said, “You hear about Sterling Gold?”
Sterling Gold & Gem was a venerable jewelry store on Amsterdam, ten blocks up. The dusty orange bulbs in the sign out front blinked on and off to simulate movement, like a greyhound dashing around a track. Young lovers knew the engagement rings and wedding bands out front, while the drawers of uncut stones and hot merch in the back catered to a more disreputable clientele. Given his insulting rates, the owner, Abe Evans, was a fence and shylock of last resort, but he had a policy where he granted delinquent accounts a one-week grace period before his muscle came over to break a leg or appendage of the client’s choice. No one had heard of such a marketing gimmick before, this à la carte maiming, although one time in Nightbirds Carney overheard a man declare it a hallmark of an offshoot of the Estonian mob. Fancy that.
“Someone broke in and busted up the joint,” Munson said. “No—not looters. Happened last night. Trashed, it’s a big mess, busted-up display cases, alarm goes off, but get this—Abe Evans says nothing was taken.” The detective clocked a portly man with a porkpie hat who walked behind Carney’s shoulder, then returned his attention.
“So what’s the point?” Carney said.
“You tell me,” Munson said. “Maybe the point is to send a message to illegal operations that someone is lifting up the rock to see what scurries out. Someone with money and a lot of reach is saying, I’m looking for what’s mine.”
Carney slammed the car door. The three blocks back to the store was faster on foot.
The front door to the store was unlocked. The lights were out, but the door was unlocked. It wasn’t Rusty or Marie, come back to get something.
The baseball bat was in his office, next to the safe. He crept along the wall to the back of the store. He paused by the Argent recliner and listened. He called out.
Freddie yelled from the office, “Hey, Ray-Ray!”
His cousin sat on the sofa eating an Italian sandwich from Vitale’s, bottle of Coca-Cola resting on the safe. Chink Montague, homicide detectives, and rich people’s hired muscle looking for this motherfucker and he’s eating a goddamn sandwich in his office.
“I have a key,” Freddie said. He chewed. “Remember when May was being born and you had to rush to University Hospital? Before Rusty came on. You asked me to lock up. Gave me the key.”
Carney said, “That was seven years ago.”
“You never asked for it back so I assumed you wanted me to hold on to it. Why are you looking at me like that?” Freddie grinned. “Be glad you never gave me the combination to the safe.”
FIVE
Linus came up with the score in St. Augustine, far as Freddie could tell. “It wasn’t like him to stick to one thing,” Freddie told Carney. “He had ideas—this day that and tomorrow something else.” For an “eraser key” on typewriters, and a special cap on medicine bottles to prevent them from being opened by little kids. A junkie word-of-mouth system tracked which doctors were soft touches for morphine scrips and which drugstores sold needles no questions asked—what if there were a “Yellow Pages for Dopeheads” that listed this week’s shady or clueless docs and pharmacies? The schemes were far-fetched or abundantly flawed, were shared once and never mentioned again. The heist was different. “Linus kept bringing up the setup, turning it over in his head the whole drive back.
“By then we were like brothers,” Freddie said. Carney took it as the insult it was intended to be, and it pleased Freddie to get under his cousin’s skin. When was the last time they’d hung out like this, just the two of them? Like the old days. Now as then, it was Freddie’s job to fend off the silence. Too much silence and you might get to thinking about things. Freddie the storyteller, Carney the straight man, the audience. It worked for a long time.
The front door of Carney’s Furniture was locked. The blinds in the office window overlooking the showroom were shut. Carney’s office was the captain’s cabin in a sub: Run Silent, Run Deep. The world didn’t know what was going on down here in the dark and those below were blind to everything topside.