Yet Pepper did not remove his shoes.
It was not Pepper’s intention to be difficult. It was a matter of personal principle: socks were holy. To straights and squares, the criminal world was defined by chaotic forces: the violent and the unruly, the reprehensible and the forbidden. But Pepper governed his own little corner through iron rules and logic, and if asked to explain his system （don’t work with dopeheads, never knock over a bank on a Tuesday）， he could do so （though no one ever asked）。 His disproportionate affection for socks, however, was idiosyncratic and belonged to the realm of the unsayable, like the formulae of love or the final name of God.
His appreciation took root in the freezing Newark mornings of his childhood. Cotton swaddled around his feet, no matter how threadbare, allowed him to face the mirthless cold. In the Pacific theater during the war he came to respect and revere fresh, dry pairs as a ward against trench foot, parasites, and myriad fungal depredations. The first thing he did when he got back to the Green Valley Motor Lodge after the botched McCarran job was to peel off his blood-soaked footwear; he didn’t feel human again until he put on a new pair of cotton-poly socks. People were often disappointing; a fine pair of socks, seldom so. They were not to be displayed casually, at a stranger’s demand. He slept in them, only took them off to bathe or to make love, although on two occasions they had been cut off by emergency room personnel while he lay unconscious. At this moment he was not making love, and the highlight of his day so far had been a long hot shower. No, he could not stoop or bend in the front hallway of Quincy Black’s townhouse. It was impossible.
Quincy put his hands on his hips. “Ros, what’s up with your friend?”
Pope frowned and wilted.
Quincy sucked his teeth. “I got white carpet.” He addressed the man with the butcher knife. “Pickles—welcome this nigger to the house.”
Roscoe Pope in his time working dingy clubs and jukes in the great Midwest had witnessed all manner of impromptu and messy violence—rotgut-fueled knife fights, cruel psychopaths terrorizing prey, bloody back-alley retribution. He was hard to impress. After the fight in the parlor hall of 316 West 107th Street, he resolved never to sass Pepper again. Foreboding imagery aside, Pickles probably just wanted to make some intimidating noises—scare the man a little—and get back to whatever he was doing in the kitchen. He liked to bake, Pope knew. He started to warn the bodyguard to chill out, but the event was over too quickly.
Pickles ripped off the apron and tossed it to the parquet floor. He advanced, holding the butcher knife before him as a knight charged with his lance. Pepper moved swiftly, like a mean gust between skyscrapers, nabbing the man’s wrist and checking him against the stairwell. Three family pictures jumped off their nails and fell down the stairs at the impact. Pickles heaved himself free and rammed Pepper into the opposite wall of the hallway. Pepper stayed the knife with his left hand, and smashed the bodyguard’s Adam’s apple with his right. He lifted his foot—here time slowed down for the eyewitnesses to apprehend what was about to transpire—and pulverized Pickles’s naked, defenseless foot with his big, black shoe. The knife fell silently onto the tight fibers of the runner.
Pickles’s screams withered to a croak. Dispatched with the nonchalance of a man crumpling up sandwich paper and tossing it in the trash. Pepper kicked the butcher knife down the hall and hoisted Pickles to his feet. He marched him into the adjacent parlor and shoved the limping man to the curved, coffee-colored leather sofa. The gigantic sofa dwarfed the bodyguard and reminded Pepper of the ventriloquist’s puppet the previous night. Tiny man, dangling legs. The two armchairs were mammoth and sumptuous, and the paintings on the walls covered by expensive scribbles. Pepper was rarely in rooms like this when their owners were home.
A rug of perfect white covered the majority of the floor. One imagined it stained easily.
Pepper nodded to Quincy, to indicate that his host join his employee on the couch. Without being told, Pope leaned against the fireplace where Pepper could keep an eye on him. From the painting above the mantel, an old black man in plantation master clothes scowled at the proceedings.
Pepper grabbed Pickles’s lapels and pulled him forward. He asked Quincy how many people were in the house, slapping Pickles for emphasis without taking his eyes off Quincy’s face.
“Just us,” Quincy said.
Pickles croaked again.
Pepper told him to spit it out.
“The Armand bank-truck job.”
Pepper shook his head. In ignorance. In reproach that a man would refer to a job—any job—in mixed company.
“Shaved head? White sunglasses?” Pickles said. “That was my thing.”
The Armand Armored Truck Company—sure. Pepper recalled their earlier meeting. He’d been invited to join the crew but declined the rip-off for many reasons. They had met in Put Put Lewis’s house out in Corona to go over the setup. Put Put had converted his basement into a rec room, with a mirrored wet bar, leopard-skin stools, and two black-velvet paintings of naked women on horseback. Kept offering cocktails to justify summoning them there but no one was in the mood for anything more complicated than Canadian Club rocks. Reasons for passing: The wheelman talked too slow, like he was from the South or missing gears upstairs. Pepper liked a fast-talking wheelman, for consistency, the complete package. Then there was Put Put. Put Put was a known type, a man who appeared at your elbow and waited to weasel into your conversation with tales of jobs gone wrong, shit-eating grin like it was the highlight of his day. To be so lacking in self-respect as to advertise one’s bad luck and incompetence.
Finally, Pickles. Pepper caught him picking his nose, under the harsh interrogation-room track lighting of the rec room. Hard to put faith in a man’s subtlety and discretion when he can’t pick his nose right. In retrospect maybe that’s why they called him Pickles.
“Remember me?” Pickles asked. His eyes watered.
Pepper said, yeah.
Quincy huffed in disgust. “Pickles. Pepper. Pope—what is this, some kind of fucked-up convention?”
Pope said, “Man, you don’t want to mess with this dude.”
“Bring some motherfucker in to rob my ass and tell me to calm down.”
Pepper exhaled loudly. “I’m here about Lucinda Cole. She was here two nights ago.”
“So what?” Quincy said. “She forgot her purse?”
Pepper scratched his jaw. His host got two free wisecracks in return for him not taking off his shoes, but the next one meant a pop in the mouth. “Tell me about it,” Pepper said.
He hadn’t seen the actress in two years, Quincy told him. “She tried to clean her ass up, and we’re always the first to get dropped. Until they get a hankering again.” He was a fan of her work, and of her as a person. She was always polite and comported herself well, “not like a lot of the heads who come through here.” The actress was lucky he was home when she called; he and Pickles were supposed to see that killer snake movie Sssssss at the Maharaja Theater on 145th, but the times in the newspaper were wrong “as motherfucking usual.”
Now assured that he was not being robbed, and merely had to violate customer privacy, Quincy adopted a relaxed tone. “She looked good, but she always does,” he said, crook to crook. “She never showed her habit, you know? Didn’t want any powder, just something to help her sleep. Complained the movie was running her ragged. People go on about how tired and run ragged they are, then ask for something to turn the volume down more.”