In response to Pepper’s question, he added that she left around midnight. “Hooked her up with some Valium. In and out, didn’t want to stay and chat.”
“Valium.”
“Practically raining Valium out there these days. Corporate pharmaceutical profit strategy is the same as ghetto strategy: Flood the streets, get them hooked.”
Quincy began to expound on how the Nazis basically invented the modern-day tranquilizer industry by forcing the drug company Roche to relocate their Jewish scientists to the United States, but Pepper raised his hand: Stop. He turned to Pickles. “What’s he leaving out?”
“That’s it,” Pickles said. He rubbed his sore foot in gentle circles. “You know, sometimes people want to get to their goodies lickety-split.”
“Too true,” Pope said, wistfully.
“Chink Montague looking for my ass, I’d be scarce, too.” Quincy laughed.
Pepper’s headache piped up: Still here. He told him to spill it.
“She was running out the door and I asked her if it was good to be home,” Quincy said. “She grew up around here, uptown. Said it was good to be back, except for all the familiar faces.”
“Like Chink?”
“I didn’t bring him up—she did.” He flopped his shoulders. “He used to go with her when she was starting out. Bought her clothes, helped her ‘get discovered.’ She said she was mostly laying low downtown, but that night she was shooting in some shoe store uptown, the phone rings and it’s him on the phone.”
Pepper pictured the movie setup at Carney’s place. Lola had taken over Marie’s office. “What’d he say?”
“I don’t know man, ask Columbo.” Pepper stiffened and Quincy eliminated the sarcasm from his tone. “Didn’t say. But she came here so he must have got her riled up.”
Pepper withdrew four steps. He checked on the defeated Pickles, whose slouch and pout signaled that he was unlikely to coldcock him on the way out.
Pope said, “We done?”
Pepper nodded.
“Mind if I stay and catch up with my man Quincy?”
Pepper gave him a look. “Macrobiotic.”
The comedian chuckled and rubbed his palms together. “It’s hard out here in the Big Apple—man needs every boost he can get.”
Pope had brought a violent man into the drug peddler’s house and made him rat out a customer, but from Quincy’s expression he bore no grudge. Another reason Pepper had never worked retail: It required a forgiving nature.
Pickles sat up. He said, “Hey, man.”
Pepper stopped in the doorway.
“Why didn’t you take off your damn shoes?”
“Hole,” he said. “In my sock.”
SIX
They were tearing up the street outside the Martinez Funeral Home again, exposing the layers beneath the black asphalt. The jackhammers did not stop, the racket went on for hours, and it was as if the noise from out of the hole was that of the machine of the city and you could now hear the true operation of the metropolis. The noisy industry of valves and pistons, the great gears grinding against each other, the clack and snap and bang. Maybe after midnight in the hours of crime and sleeplessness you may hear it, too, if you listen closely: a distant whir or rumble.
When he woke it was dark and quiet. After his visit to 107th Street, Pepper had returned to the McAlpin to check out Lucinda Cole’s room. It had been trashed; he wanted to see what he could find in the mess. The hotel hadn’t cleaned up—probably waiting on the insurance company. Get the film company to pay, then your insurance: double-dip. What Pepper saw was not the aftermath of a party, as described. A vase had detonated against the full-length mirror on the door, shattering them both. The floor lamp had been ripped from the wall and bent in half—the shaft was too thick to snap completely. This was rage.
By the time Pepper got back uptown, his headache had evolved into an insistent, malevolent throb. Ideally a headbutt demolished the victim’s soft tissue—the nose was the most popular target—but he’d caught the plane of Pope’s forehead and knocked something loose inside his own thick noggin. He swallowed a bunch of aspirin, staggered into bed, and when he opened his eyes the street work was done and it was night.
He cut across 143rd and down Amsterdam to meet Zippo. His time on Secret Agent: Nefertiti made him think the massive lights on the south side of 140th Street were part of a film. A different sort of production was underway. The red, white, and blue banner strung from the eaves of the five-story buildings read HOMES 4 HARLEM. Ribbon-cutting ceremony on a new city housing development that wasn’t supposed to look like public housing, as if using orange brick instead of red would confuse people.
David Dinkins jabbered at the podium. He was one of Charlie Rangel’s and Percy Sutton’s cronies, probably bucking for a city hall job now that Beame was in charge. Pepper’s distaste for Dinkins owed to the man’s na?ve opinions on “the crime problem.” Crime isn’t a scourge, people are. Crime is just how folks talk to each other sometimes.
The sidewalk civilians were good, law-abiding types, churchy-looking men and women in their fifties and sixties. A few young moms thrown in. He assumed they were mothers—what else could motivate them to stand in the cold but the possibility that their loved ones might get it better than they had it?
Dinkins wrapped it up and gave the mic to a man he introduced as former district attorney Alexander Oakes. Pretty boy. Pepper had seen him on the news a few times, applauding the white man beside him at appropriate moments. He’d ditched his dark pinstripe suit in favor of a man-of-the-people work coat with the H4H logo stitched into the breast.
“And I’d like to thank Jake’s and the Amsterdam Gardens for providing the food tonight,” Oakes said. “I asked good Mr. King if he’d made enough cobbler for all the people we expect and he said, ‘You’ll see.’ There are going to be a lot of disappointed faces, that’s all I’m going to say, brother. You know black people can eat some cobbler.” Oakes smiled and the crowd chuckled.
The prim line of buildings had gone up in a blink. Pepper remembered the row of abandoned tenements, half of them sootened and hollowed by fires, the burned-out buildings like black gaps in a rickety smile. Then the empty lot, with its indecent glimpse of the city’s innards. Now this five-story housing, nothing fancy, but respectable and—if they hadn’t cut corners and had kept the construction grift within a reasonable range—a decent place for people to live.
“Before we head into the community room for the first time and you see what a wonderful job they did, I want to get serious for a moment.” Oakes waited for the ambulance and its siren to pass. “Some people say Harlem’s on its way out. The whole city is going down the tubes. Can’t get a decent wage, landlords got us in a vise grip, and city hall’s an empty suit.” The crowd murmured, surveying their private complaints. “Drugs on every corner, kids growing up with the wrong kind of role models. It doesn’t have to be this way,” Oakes said, “unless we let it. It starts here. On these streets, in places like this. You used to walk past this block all the time, past the buildings that used to stand here, and be reminded about how bad they let things get. These houses, and the others like them, will finally provide a safe place for working New Yorkers to raise a family.” Hokey enough for multiple amens even if they were only in it for the cobbler.