Holiday weekend games—July Fourth, Labor Day—usually petered out Monday afternoon, submitting to the real world and its imperatives. One can inhabit a dream for only so long. This Memorial Day seemed as if it was going to follow suit, but Cameron Purvis needed to keep going, and he made converts. He canceled his flight to Los Angeles—“meeting some idea guys from DuPont”—and informed his secretary of a death in the family. Players crawled home, showered and shaved, returned. Word got out and guys who couldn’t make it Monday appeared Tuesday for another round. Corky Bell arranged for another day of the Aloha Room’s shabby hospitality, rang Blackeye P’s about a platter of roast beef sandwiches, and told his man at the station house that they’d be dropping off another envelope. Perhaps it was this call that drew the detective’s attention to the game.
Lonnie switched off with two other longtime Corky Bell dealers until he punched out Sunday night, weary but content. Corky felt bad calling him up Tuesday morning. Lonnie said the tips alone were a month of shifts at the Whistle Stop, the bar he worked at off 125th. The dealer hosed himself off and was back at the Aloha by dinner.
At 10:35 P.M. on Tuesday, June 1st, they were down to four players. Only Purvis and Nelson Wright remained from the original table four days before. They were making too much money to leave: Purvis was up sixty K, Wright twenty-five. Wright operated a cathouse on Broadway that catered to visiting businessmen. Before the Hotel Theresa was converted into office space, the concierge used to slip guests cards with the name of the place—BILOXI—in neat type. Wright was the only Harlem crook at the table. Times had changed.
The other white man besides Purvis was a self-described talent manager, whom Corky Bell pegged as a degenerate gambler type. Over the course of play it became apparent that no one had heard of his clients or the “big rooms” he claimed to book them in, but he leaked money, a sopping failure, so went unchallenged.
The final player was a soft-spoken Negro architect from Newark. He told them what he did for a living, to uncomprehending stares.
“Black architect?” Wright said. “I didn’t know they let us do that.”
“They don’t let me do shit,” he said. “I take it.” He had designed two hospitals and a nursing school. That was his angle, medical facilities.
Wright nodded, considering. “Solid.”
Four players, plus Corky Bell, and Lonnie, and the security guard at the door, when the gunmen appeared.
In the old days, Corky Bell retained bruisers of the old school, stone-cold killers with specialties: stranglers, mincers, men with strong opinions on quicklime versus sulfuric acid. They barely moved or breathed, fading before the flamboyant antics of the table until suddenly called into action to manhandle a drunk, snap a bodyguard’s femur, headbutt a white kibitzer who’d forgotten where he was.
Men misbehaved at Corky Bell games. No one had dared to rob one. To do so was to disrespect the uptown order and suffer the consequences. Doubtless the robbers were aware of this fact when they targeted the game.
Over the weekend, a two-man team had protected the Aloha Room, one on the door and the other at the bar. Finding replacements for Tuesday took longer than Corky Bell had anticipated. With the game winding down he decided to save a few bucks on the muscle and on the bartender, as he was happy to fix whatever the boys wanted—two lapses in protocol he wouldn’t have permitted himself in the old days.
Tuesday’s guard was Arnie Polk, a third-rater who’d been bounced from Chink Montague’s organization for being “kind of spacey” and having “his head up his ass,” per his performance reviews. Arnie would be the first to admit that violence was not his first passion.
From the brief, Arnie expected a docile crowd. His attention drifted. He made frequent forays to the sandwich platter and had the temerity to complain about the quality of the mayonnaise. When the robber pistol-whipped him, Arnie had been daydreaming about the Newport 30, the snazzy-looking keelboat on the cover of the May issue of Top Boating; he subscribed. Because of his bleak outlook, he’d furnished his daydream with misfortune: After a wrong turn, the sailboat wobbled on the mad heave of the Hudson in the wake of a cruise liner. He assumed the man had come to play—whoever heard of a white man knocking over a card game in Harlem? The robber slugged him and Arnie buckled to the parquet floor, where he played possum for the duration of the robbery. His deception went undetected. Didn’t even flinch when the white robber took his gun, though it tickled.
The white one did the talking. He was sweating and disheveled and he wore a harried expression, but his bark made the players jump. The black robber’s tentative air—“a startled quality” as Purvis put it later—made more than one player think he was on drugs, and thus a dangerous, unpredictable variable. His partner told him to hold up his gun. The black man did as instructed, but his arm slowly sank, capitulating to an invisible burden. This occurred multiple times during the robbery, as if he had a wrestling match inside him. “He was obviously a ruthless killer,” the talent manager told his accountant later, “fighting hard not to murder us all.”
Corky Bell stood. “Detective Munson?” he said, squinting.
The white man said, “Yes, yes.”
“We paid your man at the station,” Corky Bell said. “What the fuck are you doing? Also, you look like shit, motherfucker.”
“I’m working,” Munson said.
“Munson,” Wright said. As the longtime proprietor of a neighborhood whoring concern, Wright made regular contributions to the 28th Precinct’s pad. This man, his division, was in his pocket. But who was that nigger with him? He looked like a spaced-out druggie. Should be knocking over pharmacies for cough syrup, not card games.
“A policeman,” Purvis said, trying to wrap his head around it.
Corky Bell turned to the black intruder. “You a goddamn cop, too?”
The gunman’s hand dropped and he gave a slight but unmistakably guilty shrug, as if caught biting into the last cupcake.
The Aloha Room presented a tableau of tension and confusion, against an absurd tiki backdrop. The violation of a Corky Bell game, the interracial composition of the robbers, the revelation that the white man was a cop—it confounded. Corky Bell was right: None of them would forget this Memorial weekend game.
While the greater robbery unfolded, parties considered private capers. The architect made a quick assessment of the table; if the opportunity presented itself, he’d pocket some chips. At the same time, the talent manager surveyed Purvis’s formidable, many columned empire of red and green chips. An outer settlement appeared undefended.
From the minute changes in their posture, Corky Bell gathered that the architect from Newark and the so-called talent manager were planning to swipe chips when no one was looking. Didn’t matter how many chips these dummies stole if these thieves grabbed the bank.
To wit: Munson asked after the cash. When Corky Bell reiterated that he had paid the precinct and that the detective had no right, Munson shot a round into the ceiling.
The talent agent shrieked.
Corky Bell pointed to the bar. Munson told his partner to cover him and reminded him, with evident impatience, to hold his gun up “properly.” As if scolding a kid over untied shoes. Half a minute later, the black man’s gun pointed at the floor once more.