That was it, except for a twice-weekly rendezvous with a hooker named Miss Laura who worked out of a floor-through at Convent and 141st. Once Pepper got Duke’s schedule down, Carney put him on the girl.

“Yeah, but what do you want me to do to the banker?” Pepper asked. He was at a pay phone in the lobby of the Maharaja Theater on 145th and Broadway. Currently on the marquee: Doctor Blood’s Coffin and Creature from the Haunted Sea. It had been a glamorous vaudeville house back in the day. Now its most prominent virtues were the bank of pay phones in the lobby and the dark auditorium beyond. A convenient venue for freelance individuals in which to conduct business.

“Nothing,” Carney said. “Just watch the lady on Convent.”

Lady. “Someone else is taking the banker out?”

“No. I’m getting the lay of the land.”

Pepper hung up, opened the phone-booth door. The light went out. The Maharaja had gotten run-down lately, now that he looked at it. This time of day the lobby was mostly junkies and hookers. Pushers and johns. Anyone in the auditorium was either getting sucked off, sucking off, or tying off, cinematic triumph of Doctor Blood’s Coffin or no Doctor Blood’s Coffin.

Did he have to find another place? Or was everywhere like this now—shabby and sad and dangerous? Last time Pepper was here he observed two gray rats fucking in the popcorn, rutting in that greasy yellow case. Maybe he should have heeded that sign.

The phones still worked and there was never a line. He’d be back.

Pepper adopted a regular table at the Big Apple Diner, a better-than-average uptown hash joint on Convent. Good grub, the waitresses were nice, with a view of 288. He wasn’t surprised when the pimp showed up for the trick money and it turned out to be Cheap Brucie.

Cheap Brucie was the kind of cat who set up his girls in apartments, with regulars. He’d been plying that particular trade a long time, since before Pepper returned from the Pacific theater. The man was ageless; his women put on miles quick. Pepper’d heard more than one story about him dumping bodies in Mount Morris. Six years ago he saw Cheap Brucie cut one of his women across the face, three a.m. at the Hi Tempo Lounge. Unzipped her cheek. One of those long nights that would’ve gone longer if not for that shriek. Sobered you up quick.

Miss Laura had a couple of appointments a day. Her johns brought her things he watched her shove into the garbage cans later: big bouquets of flowers, red boxes of candy from Emilio’s. The ones getting their ashes hauled twice a week, like Duke, tended to be better-dressed. The better they dressed, the emptier the hands.

Sometimes Miss Laura stuck her head out the third-floor window to watch them walk away, wearing an expression of incandescent rage that made Pepper stare into his coffee.

In early July, Pepper dropped by the furniture store. Marie clocked him as he crossed the showroom. He nodded at her and she turned away, startled by his stolid affect.

Carney flipped the blinds in his office. He looked thinner, or off, like he hadn’t had a proper sleep.

“Nice safe,” Pepper said.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Apart from how small it is?”

“Yes.”

“It’s an Ellsworth, and I’m always happy to see an Ellsworth. But you don’t want to own a safe that makes a thief happy.”

That set Carney sulking for the rest of the meeting. “I went by her place on Convent, sat in the diner,” he said. “Duke’s visits, it all checked out.”

“Course it did,” Pepper said. “You think I make shit up?”

He paid Pepper for his work and said there was a new person for him to look at—Biz Dixon. “He’s a friend of my cousin Freddie.”

Pepper shrugged.

“We grew up together,” Carney added.

Pepper was acquainted with Biz Dixon and had a low opinion. He was part of this new breed of Harlem hood: hotheaded, feral, ever-trifling. A couple of years back, Corky Bell hired Pepper for security at the big poker game he ran every January the weekend after New Year’s. Corky Bell liked to have some straights at the table, and you couldn’t get them to come if they’re going to be menaced by lowlifes. It was a three-day game, an effortless gig, everyone behaving, except for the year Biz Dixon showed up.

Corky hired the Saturday-night bartender from the Hotel Theresa. He had a generous pour, as you’d expect in a gambling room. Roast beef on rye with Russian dressing circulated, and come sunup, eggs. One year Corky had Sylvester King come in and do an a cappella version of his hit song “Summer’s Romance.” They were cousins, that’s how he pulled it off. Plus Corky did a little shylocking and a short set covered one week’s vig on the loan for King’s new pool in Long Island. The pool was kidney-shaped, Corky said, with a small box on a timing mechanism that emitted aerosolized jasmine, a known aphrodisiac.

This white accountant down from Connecticut, name of Fletcher, kept taking Dixon’s money. Fletcher didn’t say nothing when Dixon started riding him—Why’d you stay in with a six, Why do you play such shit cards—which riled the peddler to no end. The accountant was a civilian, slumming it uptown like those Park Avenue white girls in Mel’s Place every weekend. Crooks and civilians need to congregate every once in a while to reinforce their life decisions. Corky Bell’s game was one place where that happened.

If Negroes like Biz Dixon didn’t mess things up, that is. To be honest, there was a needling quality to the way Fletcher said “Three kings” that last time and pushed his glasses up on his nose, but nothing out of bounds. Dixon threw his scotch in the man’s face and leapt. Pepper intercepted and dragged him out into the street by the collar. Dixon was steaming. The peddler had a guy with him, but Pepper figured they must have heard about this or that thing he’d done, because they rabbited up and walked away. Fletcher tipped him a hundred bucks when the game broke up, which Pepper used to buy an electric blanket.

“I know Dixon,” Pepper said.

“Does that mean you’re out?”

“Don’t mean I’m out. Means that nigger can’t see me is all.” He sawed his knuckles across the stubble on his jaw. Duke and Miss Laura were connected; Pepper didn’t see where the drug peddler fit in. “What’s he got to do with Duke?”

“I have to take care of one thing before I can do another thing, and I have to do something else before I can do that.”

Pepper wasn’t getting paid enough to work that one through. Moreover: didn’t care. He split, but not before one last look at the Ellsworth. He shook his head.

He borrowed Tommy Lips’s car for the next stint. Dixon would recognize Pepper, despite the years and the enemies accrued in the meantime, so he brought in Tommy Lips. Given the number of players to keep dibs on, he’d need a sideman to spell him. Tommy Lips left a visible brown outline of his body on his reclining chair when he rose to shake Pepper’s hand. He appreciated the work and made it known ad nauseam.

Thus commenced a couple of days of cruising around Harlem tailing the drug peddler. Dixon was a pretty boy, high yellow, fit from sparring in the yard or whatever at Dannemora. Pepper couldn’t comment on the recreational outlets at the prison as he’d never had the pleasure. Dixon kept up the regimen and applied equal diligence to his hair, which shone in loose whorls.

Carney told him that Dixon hung his hat at a tenement on Fifth Avenue, and from there Pepper shadowed the man to a series of haunts. His mother’s place on 129th, two girlfriends’ pads on Madison and 112th and 116th, respectively, and a succession of mediocre chicken joints and Chinese places. He had a meal with Freddie. Pepper made a note of it.

Then there were Dixon’s work movements. To a man, his crew was drawn from the same clan of young men you encountered uptown these days, spiteful and dumb. Botched somehow. At the Maharaja they showed these juvenile-delinquent and hot-rodder movies featuring angry young white kids. They didn’t make movies about their brown-skinned Harlem versions, but they existed, with their gut hatred for how things worked. If they were good people, they marched and protested and tried to fix what they hated about the system. If they were bad people, they went to work for people like Dixon.

“Look at them,” Tommy Lips said. “I hate them. Tuck in your shirt!”

The young hoods were slovenly, doubtless. Tommy Lips abhorred their comportment and envied their vitality in equal measure. He’d been out of the game ever since a cop billy-clubbed him upside his head. Blackout spells and trembly hands ever since. He was fine for babysitting work, though, if talkative. “It’s downright indecent,” Tommy Lips said.

Pepper followed Dixon’s employees—pushers and half-assed muscle—until he identified the man who was the least incompetent and the most busy. According to the bartender at the Clermont Lounge, the industrious, jug-eared Spanish guy was named Marco. He supervised the lower-level pushers at Dixon’s main spot on Amsterdam and 103rd. Steady white customers, it being a subway block. Bedraggled college kids and working stiffs with a secret habit. City employees with the shakes. Another two days of tailing Marco and they identified the stash house, two blocks up. Also off Amsterdam, in the basement apartment of a beaten-down townhouse.

“These jackals taking over,” Tommy Lips said one afternoon. A pile of garbage next to where they’d parked had black flies bedeviling them. “You been on First Ave lately?”

“Get me a tank, maybe I roll up in there,” Pepper said.

“I been taking these correspondence classes,” Tommy Lips said. “Shoulda done it years ago. I could have been set up somewhere, out of this place.”

“You don’t say.”

Following his two targets back-to-back, the banker and the peddler, Pepper had to say they were in the same business. There were obvious junkies in Harlem, swaying, grooving to some inner refrain, and then there were citizens you’d never know were on junk. Normal people with straight jobs who strolled up to Dixon’s men, copped, then split to their warrens. Then there was Duke. Every day Duke hustled, doing his own handoffs in restaurants and club rooms, pushing that inside dope: influence, information, power. You couldn’t tell who was using what these days, their drug of choice, but half the city was on something if you had your eyes open.

Back in Carney’s office, Pepper read from his tiny pad and delivered his report to the furniture salesman. He mentioned the chicken-spot meetup with Freddie.

“He wasn’t working for him.” Carney said it like a declaration to make it one.

“Not that I saw.”

Carney nodded. “They grew up together.”

Pepper had nothing to add. “Now what?” These ribs were cooked.

“That’s it,” Carney said. “Nothing else.” He paid Pepper what he owed him for Dixon.

Couple of days later an old crony brought Pepper in on a job in Baltimore. That took him south for a few weeks. Crabs on the Delaware shore to treat himself. He didn’t know if Rose still lived there, but it turned out she did. Twenty years is a while. They were both older, fatter, and sadder —“which is the general trajectory”—and that was a nice couple of days.

First night back, he’s in Donegal’s and lookee here, Biz Dixon’s bust is on the TV news, Report to New York. Mayor Wagner and this stiff from the junk squad and a bunch of cops posing before a table stacked with bricks of heroin. In flickering black-and-white. Happy as pigs in shit.

Legwork for cops.

Pepper asked the bartender for the goddamned phone.

That motherfucker had him doing legwork for cops.