“No, it was true,” Munson said, “we played for days on end.” He lit a cigarette. “They should have called it cops and robbers. Collaring the other team, or running around trying to stay out of jail: cops and robbers.”
Carney said, “We called it jail because it was a place you didn’t want to go.” If his father heard him say he was playing cops and robbers, he would have taken off his belt. Shit, take Carney’s belt, too, and whup him double.
“You were a cop and then a robber and a cop again. It didn’t matter how you saw yourself, you were both at the same time,” Munson said. “We’d run all over Hell’s Kitchen. All over the city. All day. Take a break and buy a soda and then one of the guys snatched you and went, Ringolevio! I was, Wait—we’re still playing? Of course you were playing, the game never ended.” He grunted. “Next day, start all over.”
Buck Webb floated past in a dark green DeVille. Webb and Munson shared a nod that Carney took as silent cop signal. Webb pulled over up the block.
The partners drove the same make. Munson’s was red. “You buy them together?” Carney said.
“I know a guy.” Munson picked up the vinyl bag at his feet. He flexed his injured arm. “Going to apologize to the man, explain, and give him his half.” He tapped the vinyl bag. “Then we’ll do that errand I mentioned.”
“I thought this was the errand.”
“This? This is just Buck.” Munson exited and walked up to the DeVille. He bent to speak through the window and got inside.
Carney had ridden with Munson once before, years back. While the cop hit his envelope route, he performed a slow-burn interrogation of Carney over his cousin Freddie. Took Carney a few blocks to catch on. He patted the upholstery. This wasn’t the same car but he was sure it had seen its share of trouble. Racked up the violence like miles. You kept track of miles because it’s important—beatdowns of black men, they didn’t bother with those records.
He wondered if any of the guys he grew up with had been worked over in the backseat. Brad Wiley! Bradford Wiley, most definitely, after he knocked over a luncheonette or snatched an old lady’s welfare check. He was “always bad,” as Aunt Millie put it. Lie in your face, plain as day, like when they played ringolevio and he’d deny going out of bounds when he couldn’t have snuck around without a transporter.
Carney and his buddies didn’t hold all-day ringolevio tournaments like the ones Munson went on about, but they’d spend hours hiding and chasing, lurking in vestibules, screaming down the street like one mad, pell-mell creature. You nabbed someone and were nabbed in turn. Delivered the incantation before the enemy squirmed away.
Hoarse at the end of the day from all the screeching. He and Freddie were always on the same team, good luck trying to separate them. Carney was living with him and Aunt Millie then, Pedro when he was around. Freddie was the recruiter. He kept tabs on everyone who was down to play, the kids from upstairs, up and down the block, the next block. The Jones twins, Jesus, Roger Roger, Timmy the Crip. Vouching for some runny-nosed chump you’d never seen before: “Oh that’s Sammy from Jamaica, he’s cool.” You never saw them around, they only existed on this earthly plane when Freddie called a game.
There had been historic ones over the years. The drizzly afternoon Roger Roger knocked over Mr. Conner’s fruit cart and had to work it off all summer. That time Carney and Freddie hid out on the roof and saw the naked lady across the street do a little dance with her garters. Freddie almost fell over the side trying to get a view. And that final game, whose grisly majesty outlived childhood mythology and remained a clutch anecdote.
It was the spring of 1942. Freddie and Carney were on the hiding team and laying low in Morningside Park. The park was out of bounds that game, but his cousin had proposed that they sneak out, kick back for a while, then return to free their incarcerated brethren. “It’s not the same if you don’t cheat a little,” Freddie used to say. Carney was a slow learner. It didn’t take much to enlist him in one of Freddie’s schemes. Playing hooky to catch a double matinee or blowing up trash cans with a bunch of Chinatown cherry bombs, Carney was in.
Ten minutes into their Morningside vacation, they were bored by the transgression. Freddie leapt from bench to bench, pretending the cracked Parks Department concrete was lava. Carney kicked cans off the walkway into the grass, cleaning up after someone’s party.
“Hey, look,” Freddie said.
Carney came over. A man in a dark brown suit was lying on the grass, turned away from them. Legs entwined, arms outstretched—the posture was too tortured for him to be sleeping one off.
There was no one else around. Carney shrugged. Freddie nudged the body with his shoe. Nothing. No rising and falling to signal breathing. They crept around to see his face. Half of it was gone, a gory mess. What had appeared to be mud on the small of his back and on the seat of his trousers were bullet wounds.
“They shot him in the butt!” Freddie yelped. They tore out of there.
When Carney got home he told his father what they’d found. He was back living with him at the 127th Street apartment at that point.
His father said, “He a high yellow nigger with a mustache? That was probably Clive.” He cackled.
Carney asked if they should tell the police.
“Who do you think dumped his ass there?”
Would he have laughed more or less if he knew that one day the cops would cut him down, too? More.
The usual New York City childhood: stickball, ringolevio, and bullet-ridden corpses. When John and his pals played ringolevio—the kids still played the old game, the chants echoing in the alley behind the townhouses—Carney ordered them to maintain a Strivers’ Row boundary. The Row wasn’t what it used to be, but it ran low on surprises.
The muzzle flash lit up the inside of the Cadillac DeVille for an instant, silhouetting the front seat, the back of Buck’s head, Munson in profile. Munson shot his partner twice—another flash—and walked back to his car. The gunfire roused no movement in shanties in the park or buildings opposite. The mutt gnawed at its hindquarters.
Munson got in and placed the vinyl bag and Carney’s briefcase at his feet. “That didn’t go as well as I hoped.”
Carney pulled on the door handle and Munson grabbed him with one hand, jabbed a pistol in his gut with the other. The detective gritted his teeth at his injury but held Carney fast. “You should drive,” he said.
Carney couldn’t stop himself from looking over at Buck Webb’s ruined face as they drove past. His stomach flopped. When he turned west, people reappeared on the sidewalks, there were lights in the windows. The Cadillac had punched through, back into the world again.
“Where are we going?” Carney said. He was vibrating.
“It’s more than one stop, I got to confess.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Munson said. “You’re my partner now, Carney.”
SIX
They called him Corky because his older brother tried to drown him in the creek when he was five, but he “kept floating up.” His longevity in hazardous trades reaffirmed the nickname. He made his money as a bookmaker in the ’50s, covering the big fights, back when the dagos had it all fixed, from the boxers to the ringside judges to the sanitation trucks that hauled away the trash from the floor of the Garden the next day. When Bumpy Johnson muscled him out, loan-sharking covered the bills. Black dentists and black undertakers catered to a steady client pool; black shylocks more so.