Freddie looked away from Carney to shove the feeling down—Linus in the tub, Linus cold and still. Carney sat back in his chair and gave him his time.
“We didn’t, you know, sit outside with a stopwatch and track all the comings and goings,” Freddie said, “but we were thorough. I didn’t see any holes in it. Turns out it’s a lot easier when you’re breaking into your own house.”
They sketched out the setup but put it off. Excuses: Some theater types Linus knew from college were having a rent party; they were too hungover; it looked like it might rain. “Then the kid got shot. By the cop. There were police all over, but they were worried about shit popping off uptown.” The radio said they dispatched a hundred cops to the CORE demonstration at the dead boy’s school and were deploying teams all over Harlem to put down any disturbance. Park Avenue and Eighty-Eighth Street was as open as it was ever going to be.
“Let’s do it tonight,” Linus said. It was Friday afternoon. His mother and father had a fundraiser for polio survivors and would be out until eleven p.m., easy. “They keep the liquor flowing to loosen the checkbooks.” The Van Wycks’ old housekeeper, Gretchen, used to live in the apartment—when Linus was little he’d slip into her gassy bed on bad-dream nights—but she passed three years prior. The new girl lived in the Bronx and left at seven p.m. The plan called for Linus to ride up with the elevator man at eight-thirty, hop down the fire stairs, prop open the alley door, and leave the service gate open a whisper.
At 8:41 p.m. on Friday, July 17, Freddie started his trip uptown. Freddie stuck out on Park Avenue for obvious reasons, so killing time leaning against a phone booth was out of the question. He sat at the counter at Soup Burg on Seventy-Third and Madison, contemplating the small orange bubbles of fat on the surface of chicken noodle soup until his watch said it was time. The Action Watch for Active People. On the way up he pondered the big imponderable of the day: Was Linus capable of not fucking this up? Freddie had seen the man sloppy, nodding out, observed him puke himself and shit the bed. Last summer he found Linus twitching and blue and overdosing and had to drop him off in front of Harlem Hospital—a cop stopping him at the wheel of a white man’s car would have meant his ruin. Did Linus have the heart and balls to pull off a job like this? His family will know he ripped them off—was he ready to cash out? If the service gate didn’t budge…
He took the long way up Lexington, rounded the corner, and didn’t break his stride when he pushed the service gate. It was unlocked, ajar half an inch, and he was in. It was 9:01 p.m.
The Van Wyck residence was a duplex on the fourteenth and fifteenth floors. The walk up the fire stairs was a miserable hump but Linus waited at the back door. His gleeful expression reminded Freddie of other capers: when his family accidentally sent his check twice and they went out for steaks and shrimp; that time they walked by the Cha Cha Club during a delivery and snatched a box of schnapps. Tonight’s take was bigger. So was Linus’s smile.
The back door opened onto the kitchen. Freddie had been in these big six-room, seven-room spreads before. Above Ninety-Sixth they were cut up into three apartments, and below Ninety-Sixth they were dark warrens, dusty and rife with cat hair and books, the apartments of the parents of college chicks he picked up downtown. The Van Wyck residence was so complicated it needed two floors to tell itself and twice as many rooms. Twelve feet floor to ceiling, paneled walls, parquet floors in Masonic arrangements. Here was a floating mansion.
Noticing Freddie’s reaction, Linus said, “Check this out.” He pulled back a heavy, mustard-colored curtain in the dining room. “On nights like this…” The humidity transformed Park Avenue, the moisture in the air bestowing warm halos to the lights on the street and in the rows of apartment windows. It made the street less stuck-up. Inexplicably kind, like a white cop who cuts you slack for no reason you can figure. Park Avenue creeped Freddie out: The buildings had an attitude, a comfort in and assurance of their own power. They were judges, decreeing that all that you called your own, what you fought for and dreamed of, was merely a cheap imitation of what they possessed. Tonight the street looked kind. From that angle, anyway.
“I was thinking about how you used to talk about Riverside Drive,” Freddie told Carney, “how much you love it. The edge of the island, looking out across the water, like putting it all in perspective. There’s us, there’s water, and then there’s more land, we’re all a part of the same thing. But Park Avenue, with those big old buildings facing one another, full of old white people, there’s none of that feeling, right? It’s a canyon. And the two sides don’t give a shit about you. If they wanted, if they so decided, they could squeeze together and crush you. That’s how little you are.” That night, he conceded, it was gorgeous.