“May’s been asking.”
Larry shook his head. “If I had that in, I’d be going myself.”
Carney’d made the rounds. The Dumas Club was a bust. Inside dope on pending legislation, who to bribe downtown, when influence was the currency and when it was cash—these things the Dumas members excelled in. They were not so savvy when it came to Jackson 5 tickets. Lamar Talbot, whom people called “the Black Clarence Darrow” for no reason Carney could discern, had represented the Garden in a wrongful death suit. Construction worker killed while laying the foundation, Afro American lawyer at the table might smooth it out. No dice. “I save their bacon, and look how they do me.”
He specifically remembered Kermit Wells bragging that Berry Gordy, the father of Motown Records, was his first cousin. He cornered him after a scotch tasting. Wells claimed that Carney had misheard; his wife’s friend was related to Berry Gordy, but she and his wife had had a falling-out. Plus, Kermit added, if he had an in, he’d grab those tickets for himself.
Carney’s father-in-law, Leland Jones, cooked the books for sundry entertainment lawyers and managers who’d kept him in orchestra seats for decades. It shriveled his pride, but Carney hit him up. For May’s sake. Whenever he heard Leland’s voice nowadays, the trembling delivery announced how much the years had diminished the man. Had Carney despised him once? Strong emotions were wasted at this point. He asked after his showbiz contacts.
“I haven’t talked to Albert in quite some time,” Leland said. “And Lance Hollis passed away years ago.”
Lately Carney was afraid to turn on the radio, lest one of their goddamn songs remind him of his failure. Who had he forgotten?
Munson. It had been a while.
Carney usually left a message when he called the 28th Precinct. The man was a rambler. Today someone picked up on the third ring. “Anyone seen Munson? Who’s this?”
Another siren. He said his name.
Munson got on the phone. “Carney,” he repeated, as if trying to place him. The detective’s voice scraped: “Why didn’t I think of it before?”
And like that, in the time WALK turns to DONT WALK, Carney was out of retirement.
TWO
Carney caught the 1 train at 125th Street and grabbed a seat on the east side of the car. The Manhattan viaduct lifted the train tracks one hundred and sixty-eight feet above Broadway and 125th, and if you didn’t have your nose in a book or the daily paper or a tattered ledger of regrets, the view was a pleasant reprieve from the gloomy tunnel. It held no charm for Carney. If he sat on the opposite side he was liable to see his old place, catty-corner to the tracks, which for many years had made him a captive audience to the viaduct’s longest-running show. It was the same performance repeated without variation, the curtain rising multiple times an hour, relentlessly exploring through choreography and noise a single theme of the human condition: You Can’t Afford a Better Apartment.
Rumble rumble. He didn’t take the 1 train as often as he used to, since they’d moved to Strivers’ Row, off Seventh. Enough time had passed that he now associated the line above 125th with that crooked period in his life and its steady complexities. One day it was an elaborate handoff with a thief too afraid to show his face on the street, the next a transaction with a paranoid diamond dealer who drew his rendezvous tactics from spy thrillers. It was a relief to be done with those men, that secret world and its dumb rituals.
He refused the implication that moving to Strivers’ Row had made him quit. That he was so shallow of character that a little respectability made him renounce his ways, made him think he had risen above the unruly elements that had formed him. It would take more than a dignified facade of yellow brick and limestone to hide his premises.
Elizabeth never complained about their first apartment. When a train screeched into the station across the way, she paused and allowed it to pass before she resumed speaking, a portrait of regal poise. “Like Queen Elizabeth waiting for a fart to clear,” Carney teased one time, and from then on she arched an eyebrow for effect, a hint of disdain that made her twice as elegant. Look—the place was a dump. A rat slinked out of the toilet one time, whiskers dripping. Murderous arguments between men and women resounded above and below. The subway vibrations made the building’s nails hop in their holes. She showed miraculous restraint. Now that the apartment was years behind them, Elizabeth allowed that it “definitely had character.”
Celebrity architects had designed Strivers’ Row’s four lines of townhouses in the 1890s. 237 West 138th was part of a Federal Renaissance strip conceived by Bruce Price and Clarence Luce; Carney pretended to have heard of them. He came across the listing in the paper. He never looked at the real estate pages but that day he did. When they saw number 237 that first time, emptied of furniture, dusty halos where pictures and paintings had hung, silent save for the odd insolent floorboard, Elizabeth said “I could get lost in here” with an exquisite mix of longing and belonging. It could be hers and had already been hers: She’d grown up across the alley on the 139th Street line, five houses down in a townhouse with an identical layout. Same floor plan, different arrangement altogether. She’d left this lofty stretch of Harlem to be with him. To return here was—what? A homecoming and also a reward for her love and patience. Of course they were going to buy it. What else was an ongoing criminal enterprise complicated by periodic violence for, but to make your wife happy?
One night soon after they moved in, Carney got home late from a meetup with Church Wiley, a smash-and-grab operator who hunted in Baltimore and came up to New York to off the goods. High-quality stuff that always came with a lot of heat. Baroque arrangements ensued when Carney had to pay him off: knock two times on the door at the end of the fifth-floor hallway of an abandoned tenement on 167th; split out the back room of Blue Eyes on St. Nicholas and 156th, throw a rose into the dented garbage can and count to a hundred, etc.
This time Church was two hours late and Carney had to wait in what he decided was a shooting gallery that had recently been vacated after a raid by the cops or a triple murder. There was no one inside the dilapidated brownstone, but it was well populated with evidence of miserable doings. Cold March night. Wind whistled. He set one buttock on the arm of a 1940s Collins-Hathaway sofa that looked diseased. It had never occurred to him that furniture could be sick, but from that day on he knew it when he saw it, the way human beings infected everything. Church finally arrived. He looked around and said, “This place has really gone downhill.”
When Carney got home that night, Elizabeth had fallen asleep in the parlor in front of The Tonight Show. Roscoe Pope doing a bit about encyclopedia salesmen. Carney turned out the lights, put the house to bed. He checked on May and John on the third floor in their respective bedrooms. The kids were sprawled out in sleep, pinwheels on the sheets. He touched the back of his hand to their foreheads to check their temperature.
Downstairs he tucked a blanket around Elizabeth, rather than wake her. She didn’t care for the latest craze for low sofas—or much of the current offerings in Carney’s showroom, to be honest—so they’d held on to the three-year-old Argent, birch with champagne finish. He turned off the lamp. The shadow of his wife emerged from the darkness as his eyes adjusted. She trusted his excuses for his ridiculous hours. Any sane woman would accuse him of an affair. The real reason for his sneaking around would get him twenty-five years in Sing Sing. What was worse?