Bronx Noir

On the red leather sofa Kingston silently flipped stations searching for baseball scores and fiddled with his cigar while Lacey showered. His sky-blue fedora rested on the adjacent pillow, revealing the receding hairline of his freshly cut Caesar specked with gray. He clicked off her TV and leaned over to untie his Stacy Adams, tightening abdominal muscles buried underneath a stout stomach. His growing belly caused him to chuckle at his own jealousy, wondering what sort of younger man her own age a sexy girl like Lacey would attract once he was gone. Lacey would adapt easily, Kingston imagined. She was all of twenty-two. Life adjustments would come harder to Kingston. Comfortably set in his ways, he never vacationed away from his St. Martin time-share, never ate anything outside of the standard ten dishes he either bought from takeout restaurants or Gussy cooked for him, never deviated from his usual Yankees game, jazz concert, or horse race for recreation. Deciding to uproot his life from 1839 Bruner Avenue to the bayou sprang as much from Kingston’s recent unidentified angst as the threats from Héctor and Eddie Hernández. Kingston finally took a lighter to his cigar.

“One of us has too much clothes on,” Lacey said.

She left her cream silk robe untied at the waist, smoking her own tobacco of choice. Tracey Lott bore only fraternaltwin resemblance to her onstage character, always fragrantly oiled, primped, oversexed. Nearly naked again for the second time tonight—clean, shea-butter-exfoliate scrubbed, and nail-polished in her own apartment now—Tracey looked softer, younger.

Kingston called her Tracey at times, Lacey most often, but it didn’t bother her. The last time they saw one another Lacey had dropped X before his unexpected arrival at Golden Lady and rambled all sorts of private personal information afterwards, about her Jehovah’s Witness upbringing, her strict mother (the neighborhood crossing guard), her young cousin’s molestation, her absent dad, and her first fuck at fourteen. Maybe too much for Kingston, she thought.

Lacey flicked cigarette ash into a seashell and sat in Kingston’s lap. The leather sofa farted. As she unbuttoned his shirt both their thoughts clouded with notions of tonight maybe being their last tête-à-tête.

Kingston and Lacey were both more passive than active participants in their own lives, mirrors of each other in that sense. Kingston had inherited the mantle of running numbers from his late father, working under his wing after a brief enlistment in the Gulf War. His life’s work was more due to his own passivity than the passion for the numbers game that his father had held close. Kingston loved Gussy in his way but their union was mainly convenient. She was his Girl Friday on the job. Their relationship saved Kingston the trouble of seeking a woman attracted to his limited social graces who could also be trusted and accepting of his illegal trade. Money only goes so far. Despite over half a million squared away from almost two decades of business, Lacey, an exotic dancer from the projects, was the most ideal mistress he found himself able to draw.

Lacey, too, let her life dictate its own direction, leading from a bust-up with her mother at seventeen to accepting dubious advice from her stalker ex-bf Tré-Sean to sell nude photos to websites and dance at Hunts Point holes like Al’s Mr. Wedge and Golden Lady. The night a zooted pair of homeboys roughly snatched off her thong and dashed out the club with their booty nine months ago, she was comforted by Kingston, a familiar, benevolent customer, and their affair began.

Stripping his shirt, standing and leading him to her bedroom, she felt powerless to trip up the chain of events sweeping Kingston out of her life. Lacey thought sex might solve the problem, her familiar recourse. Their cigarette and cigar sat burning away in an Orchard Beach conch, plumes of smoke dancing an acrobatic tango.

Kingston returned to 1839 Bruner Avenue in the early morning to discover the SUV stolen.

Gussy would find the charred BMW of their steady bettor Wallace parked outside Fordham Hill Apartments on her nighttime jog to the Harlem River, stripped and torched to black cinders save for the pristine license plate: CRM-114.

Like aging hippies cooking organic groceries in a kitchen full of all-Hendrix-all-the-time, Gussy and Kingston were throwback ’70s soul babies. This wasn’t immediately obvious but there were telltale signs: Gussy’s leonine Afro and multitudinous silver bracelets, Kingston’s allegiance to jazz musicians like George Benson and Grover Washington, Jr., who were on the rise when he first started buying vinyl.