The woman who lived in the third-floor apartment of 288 Convent was not on the lease. The tenant of record was one Thomas Andrew Bruce, known in grubby corners and underlit byways of the city as Cheap Brucie. When the landlord found out what he did for a living and made a fuss, Cheap Brucie threw him an extra fifty bucks a month. That shut him up.

Miss Laura had lived there for three years and considered one-third of the apartment hers fair and square. The front room was for business, as well as the kitchen. The icebox was a desolate hum but the kitchen had a little bar, if you wanted to wet your whistle before you got to it. The small room in the back overlooking the garden was her domain. No one was allowed past its threshold. She slept there, never easily, and dreamed there, and beneath her bed kept a white leather box for tokens of her life before. Over the decades the street side of the apartment had settled in a slant, but her room was level.

Each time Carney came knocking, he hesitated before he stepped into the front room, as if someone crouched behind the door to spook him—the vice squad, or his wife. By then Miss Laura was accustomed to his skittishness. His intent was bent but he was mostly straight, deep down, she could tell. The man was in sales, so he said. Miss Laura was in sales, too, and knew a mark when she saw one. Let him act this way or that, talk out the side of his mouth, but she knew who he was, what he was worth, the avenues of approach.

She was a hard case. He didn’t know how to read her that first day and hadn’t worked it out since.

The afternoon he approached her, the lunch rush was over but it was before quitting time, the in-between zone. The only other patron at the Big Apple Diner was an old white man in a yellow windbreaker, dozing with his head on the Formica counter. Carney sat at the window again and looked up at 288 Convent. She lived on the third floor. The pink drapes in the front room allowed the July sun in.

The waitress that day was a tinier version of the usual miserable waitress, in eerie proportion and likeness, as if he were served by Russian dolls—take the top half off one and there’s another inside. Carney had one crook who kept coming to his office with tacky shit like those dolls, rhinestone-covered knickknacks, and whatnot. Finally he had to tell the dum-dum to beat it and not come around anymore. It was one thing for his father-in-law to disparage him as a rug peddler, but for a common hood to think he trafficked in such crap was a true insult. The waitress grimaced at him when he asked for milk for his coffee. What factory made such living monstrosities as her and her doubles? Some place in Jersey.

The waitress and the cook started fighting and their epithets for each other were so ugly and precise that Carney had no choice but to finally cross the street.

She buzzed him up and was unsurprised to see him round the stairs to the landing. Had the door wide open, unafraid of a stranger in the stairwell. He said he was a friend of Wilfred Duke. She let him in.

Miss Laura was prettied up that day, in a red-and-white cocktail dress, small hoop earrings dangling beneath her curly bob. In uniform, on the clock. She said, “Hello.” At first glance he took her for a teenager—she was petite and lean—but the impatience in her every syllable sounded ancient enough to predate civilization.

A Burlington Hall four-poster bed with tasseled mauve curtains dominated the living room, centered on a Heriz rug of lush crimson. Whoever had furnished the joint had hit a white store downtown—there wasn’t a Burlington Hall dealer north of Seventy-Second Street. The lacquered armoire, side chairs, and love seat with the chenille upholstery all came from their 1958 catalog—1958 or 1959. In the three portraits on the walls, plump, nude white women reclined on divans while being bathed or adjusted or otherwise attended to by black-skinned servants. “Atmosphere.”

Miss Laura offered him a drink and he accepted a can of Rheingold. She opened one for herself and sat on the love seat. “You want some music?” she asked. Next to the armoire was a 1958 Zenith RecordMaster hi-fi console, with a recess and metal dividers for LPs at the bottom.

He shook his head. Time to make his pitch.

He’d considered various approaches in his midnight stretches of industry, between sleeps, in that new time he’d rediscovered. Bring up the money: “How much would it cost for you to…?” She had a price for her customers; perhaps she had a variety of prices. Or make an appeal to her sense of justice: “You might not know it, but Duke is a bad man.” On the man’s say-so, his bank kicked widows and families out into the street. This one lives and that one dies, like God. Carney had an anecdote in his pocket about a spastic kid who needed an operation, and the poor boy’s eviction in the thick of it. Notorious. Verifiable. The Harlem Gazette ran two pieces about it. Certainly the offense against Carney didn’t rank compared to that, but there was no need to be specific about his own complaint.

If she said no, she didn’t know Carney’s identity. She could find out, but that would take time, and there were other ways to get at the banker. Carney had a notebook full of stratagems. The first two schemes had not panned out. So this was the next contender.

Sitting in her apartment, searching her narrow brown eyes, he couldn’t read her.

In the end, he didn’t have to go into a big pitch at all. What you want in his trade, that most perfect thing, is a product that sells itself, an item of such craft and novelty that it renders the salesman superfluous. He had barely begun his spiel when it was clear that Fucking Over Duke, it turned out, sold itself.

“Lay it out like that, all cool,” she’d said. “Like you’re selling me a couch.”

“You in the market for a couch?”

“What’s my end?”

“Five hundred dollars.”

The number impressed. “Who are you?” she asked.

He didn’t say.

“Right. Men come up here,” Miss Laura said, “I’ll take any name they want to give. Take their money, too.” She sipped her beer. “But this is real business, and I need to know the name of my partner. Like how a bank needs to know.”

It was like Freddie and the Theresa job—there’s being outside in the car, and being in the thick of it. “Raymond Carney. I own that furniture store on 125th—Carney’s Furniture?”

“Never heard of it.”

In many negotiations, a pause opens up, a silent interval in which both parties consider the next move and its implications. Like the pause before a kiss or before a hand reaches into a wallet.

She said, “I knew you wasn’t no friend of Willie’s. Know how?”

“How?”

“Willie doesn’t like to share.”

She smiled at him for the first and last time, to say she saw through him and delighted in her superiority. Her lips curved then, her eyes containing a mean brand of delight, and they did a deal for the Duke job.

The first sleep was a subway train that dropped him off in different neighborhoods of crooked behavior and the second sleep returned him to normal life with a rumble. The Dorvay Express? That was too fancy, galloping and gleaming in the moonlight. Here was a local: rattling, grimy, and it didn’t take you anywhere you hadn’t been before.

Carney woke to the first summer night that was more fall than summer, with a breeze that sent you to shut the windows and snap open a musty blanket. Elizabeth didn’t stir when he dressed. The children were spread-eagled, with their faces nestled into the crooks of their arms. All the Carneys slept like that, as if still shrinking from some primeval ugliness.

He didn’t know Convent at night so he took Amsterdam, in and out of stretches of liveliness and desolation—men drinking beer on aluminum folding chairs, clacking dominoes, and then blocks of cratered emptiness, rowdy night spots next to tenements torched for insurance money—until he got to 141st.

His first encounter with Miss Laura took place in July, and they had met a few times since then. Now it was almost a month later, and she had summoned him. He had an inkling why, and it was nothing good. She buzzed him in quickly. Carney had suggested the diner more than once but she wouldn’t meet him during the day. It was near midnight.

Her irritated nod served as a welcome. Miss Laura wore a thin blue robe and her hair was tucked with bobby pins. She was slender, and the robe made her look slighter still, exposing the line of her collarbone and a splash of freckles below her throat.

Out of the Zenith hi-fi shook crazy saxophone stuff from the Village. Freddie could have identified who was playing, and on what basement bebop nights he’d seen them, but whenever Carney heard those sounds he felt trapped in a room of lunatics. Down the hall, the bathtub was running and his host told him to hold on. She disappeared into the back.

Carney’s nose wrinkled at the unctuous aroma that underlay the cigarette smoke. He determined that it came from the purple flowers in the vase on the fireplace. Miss Laura returned and caught him taking a whiff. “My mother kept a garden full of them,” Miss Laura said. “Back in Wilmington. The flower place on Amsterdam has them this time of year.”

“That’s where you’re from?”

She rubbed her fingertips together.

After that first meeting, she made him pay for their conversations, even though it was just talk. Business. Sometimes ten bucks, sometimes thirty, he never knew. Carney asked her to explain the variance and she told him that not everything costs the same. Tonight he handed her a twenty, guessing.

The amount was satisfactory. “Wilmington is where I came from,” she said. He joined her on the love seat. He usually chose one of the Burlington Hall chairs across the room and immediately regretted tonight’s choice. The love seat was a two-seater, made to squeeze a couple close, and here he was a married man in the room of a “working lady,” as his father used to say.

“I got out of there,” Miss Laura continued. “Figured New York was more my size. My aunt Hazel packed her bags and beat it up here when I was little, and whenever she came back, she had the nicest dresses and hats and all these stories of the Big City. It was the first place that popped into my head—New York City.”

Observing his discomfort, she sat up and crossed her legs so the frayed edge of her robe relinquished an inch of thigh.

“It’s good to have family,” Carney said, “when you come to a new place.”

“Good’s a word. She didn’t know me from Adam when I knocked on her door. Still up from last night, to look at her. But she said I could sleep on her couch for a few days until I found a place. I was there six months.” However disheveled Aunt Hazel was in the morning, Miss Laura said, she was the picture of glamour whenever she walked out the door. “You have to have an inside you, she used to say, and an outside you. Ain’t nobody’s business who you are really, so it’s up to you what you gave them.”

“She still living here?” Carney asked. Miss Laura had arranged this meeting and he wondered when she’d get to the reason. It occurred to him that Laura was not her real name.

“She was,” Miss Laura said. “Now she ain’t. She’s the one got me working at Mam Lacey’s—you know it?”

“Of course,” he said.

He squinted, and she said, “I didn’t work downstairs.” In the bar, she meant.

“Right.”

He and Freddie had often joked about going upstairs, but they didn’t mess with hookers. Well, Freddie was up to all sorts of stuff. They knew plenty of guys who used to go upstairs, or who frequented the other whorehouses people knew about. On Carney’s fourteenth birthday, his father had offered to take him to “a place I know,” and Carney said no, and it was years before it clicked what Big Mike had been talking about. Had Freddie joked about this or that woman getting off the bus or walking into the drugstore working for Mam Lacey? Big ass, too much makeup, some kind of look in her eye. Sure. It was in the realm of his humor, and Carney had doubtless laughed. You get older and the old jokes grow less funny.

Miss Laura said, “I used to lie up there and listen to the music. Everybody having a high old time down there. That music…If I got bored, or if I had a rough one, I’d picture me in one of those girl groups. Long dress. Gloves up to here.” She stuck another cigarette into her mouth. “Downstairs was one good time, and upstairs was a different kind of time.”

“Been closed a while,” Carney said.

“Good riddance. Everybody talked so nice about her, it made me so mad.”

The last time he’d been to Mam Lacey’s, it had been closed for some time, a ruin. He and Pepper had been looking for a lead on the loot from the Theresa heist and ended up there. Mam Lacey had died and her junkie son Julius had turned the place into a shooting gallery. There was a broken statue of a white stone angel in the back garden and Julius was lying on a bench in a drug stupor, the legs of the statue sticking up without a body and the torso and wings erupting next to it out of hardy Harlem weeds. Had the statue been in one piece when Miss Laura looked down from that room? And what broke it in two? He didn’t know why he thought of it—him, Julius, and Miss Laura in a triangle at Mam Lacey’s and gazing on the statue, each of them with their own view. Look at it from one way, it was not a place for an angel, look at it from another and maybe it was a place that needed an angel. And another view was that if it were beautiful, it wouldn’t last long there.

He was going to mention the kid, Julius, then nixed the idea.

Miss Laura said, “You come here to tell me what I want to hear?”

“Not yet,” Carney said. There was a holdup.

Last Thursday, the cop Munson had picked up his Thursday envelope. Carney reminded him of his proposal vis-à-vis Biz Dixon. “I said I’d work on it,” the detective told him. “Like I said, these people have friends. That in itself is not insurmountable, but it complicates. Everybody has to get pinched now and then, regardless of what they’re laying out, to keep things democratic. This is America.”

Carney had considered giving Munson something more to sweeten the deal, but what did he have? Second-story men. Half-assed crooks. What would his father have thought, him feeding shit to the cops? Working on being a full-time rat.

Even if he could explain the delay to Miss Laura, she was not the sympathetic sort. “A ‘hold up’?” she said. She mashed her cigarette into an L in the ashtray beside her. Lit another. “Then what good are you?”

Bottom line, they had a deal and Carney hadn’t delivered. If the windows had been open, the smell of the flowers and her cigarettes would have been less cloying. It’s a telegram, he said to himself. A saying of his mother’s, about nights like this. She only got telegrams when it was bad news, and so his mother called that chilly night at the end of August a telegram, to warn you summer was over. Rip it up and throw it in the trash but you got the message.

Miss Laura pulled her robe tight around her neck.

“You asked me if my aunt is still in town?” she said. “She left our place one day, two months behind on the rent. Didn’t say a word. I didn’t have two nickels to rub together. She didn’t take me to Mam Lacey herself, but she made it so I had no choice but to go to Mam Lacey. That was the start of it. Now we’re here.”

She was working up to an ultimatum. Making moves in this midnight time of the watch, like Carney. He imagined that she’d had her first sleep, too, and was getting her accounts done before she lay down for her second. All over the city there were people like them, a whole mean army of schemers and nocturnal masterminds working their rackets. Thousands and thousands toiling and plotting in their apartments and SROs and twenty-four-hour greasy spoons, waiting for the day when they will bring their plans into the daylight.

Miss Laura rose to show him out. “Time goes by,” she said, “and a girl’s got to wonder if a man like Willie’d like to know that someone’s dogging him. He’s a fucking miser, but surely that’d be worth something. Right? To know that someone is out to get you.”

She called down to him when he put his hand on the door to the street.

“Get it done, Carney. You get it done.”