Legs - William Kennedy Read online

  Legs

  William Kennedy

  1975

  This is for Pete McDonald, a first-rate relative

  and for all the archtypes lurking in

  Ruth Tarson's lake house

  People like killers,. And if one feels sympathy

  for the victims it's by way of thanking them

  for letting themselves be killed

  —Eugene Ionesco

  JACK'S ALIVE

  "I really don't think he's dead," I said to my three very old friends.

  "You what?" said Packy Delaney, dropsical now, and with only four teeth left. Elephantiasis had taken over his legs and now one thigh was the size of two. Ah time.

  "He don't mean it," Flossie said, dragging on and then stubbing out another in her chain of smokes, washing the fumes down with muscatel, and never mind trying to list her ailments. ("Roaches in your liver," Flossie's doc had told her. "Go on home and die at your own speed.")

  Tipper Kelley eyed me and knew I was serious.

  "He means it, all right," said Tipper, still the dap newsman, but in a 1948 double-breasted. "But of course he's full of what they call the old bully-bull-bullshit because I was there. You know I was there, Delaney."

  "Don't I know it," said the Pack.

  "Me and Bones McDowell," said the Tip. "Bones sat on his chest."

  "We know the rest," said Packy.

  "It's not respectful to Bones' memory to say he sat on the man's chest of his own accord," Tipper said. "Bones was the finest reporter I ever worked with. No. Bones wouldn't of done that to any man, drunk or sober, him or Jack the corpse, God rest his soul. Both their souls, if Jack had a soul."

  "He had a soul all right," said Flossie. "I saw that and everything else he had too."

  "We'll hear about that another time," said Tipper, "I'm now talking about Bones, who with myself was the first up the stairs before the cops, and Jack's wife there in the hallway, crying the buckets. The door was open, so Bones pushed it the rest of the way open and in he snuck and no light in the room but what was coming in the window. The cops pulled up then and we heard their car door slam and Bones says to me, 'Come inside and we'll get a look before they kick us the hell out,' and he took a step and tripped, the simple bastard, and sprawled backward over the bed, right on top of poor Jack in his underwear, who of course didn't feel a thing. Bones got blood all over the seat of his pants."

  "Tipper," said Packy, "that's a goddamn pack of lies and you know it. You haven't got the truth in you, and neither did Bones McDowell."

  "So in comes big Barney Duffy with his flashlight and shines it on Bones sitting on poor Jack's chest. 'Sweet mother of mine,' says Barney and he grabbed Bones by the collar and elbow and lifted him off poor Jack like a dirty sock. 'Haven't cha no manners atall?' Barney says to him. 'I meant no harm,' says Bones. 'It's a nasty thing you've done,' says Barney, 'sittin' on a dead man's chest.' 'On the grave of me mother I tripped and fell,' says Bones. 'Don't be swearing on your mother at a filthy time like this,' says Barney, 'you ought to be ashamed.' 'Oh I am,' says Bones, 'on the grave of me mother I am.' And then Barney threw us both out, and I said to Bones on the way down the stairs, 'I didn't know your mother was in the grave,' and he says to me, 'Well, she's not, the old fart-in-the-bottle, but she oughta be.' "

  "You never got a good look at the corpse," Packy said to Tip. "and don't tell me you did. But you know damn well that I did. I saw what they did to him when he was over at Keenan the undertaker's for the autopsy. Thirty-nine bullets. They walked in there while he was sleeping and shot him thirty—nine times. I counted the bullet holes. You know what that means? They had seven pistols between the pair of them. "

  "Say what you will." I told them, savoring Packy's senile memory, remembering that autopsy myself, remembering Jack's face intact but the back of his head blown away by not thirty-nine but only three soft-nosed .38-caliber bullets: one through his right jaw, tearing the neck muscle, cutting the spinal cord, and coming out through the neck and falling on the bed; another entering his skull near the right ear and moving upward through his brain, fracturing his skull, and remaining in the fracture; and the third, entering the left temple, taking a straight course across the brain and stopping just above the right ear.

  "I still don't think he's dead."

  * * *

  I had come to see Jack as not merely the dude of all gangsters. the most active brain in the New York underworld, but as one of the truly new American Irishmen of his day; Horatio Alger out of Finn McCool and Jesse James, shaping the dream that you could grow up in America and shoot your way to glory and riches. I've said it again and again to my friends who question the ethics of this somewhat unorthodox memoir: "If you liked Carnegie and Custer, you'll love Diamond." He was almost as famous as Lindbergh while his light burned. "The Most Picturesque Racketeer in the Underworld," the New York American called him; "Most Publicized of Public Enemies," said the Post; "Most Shot-At Man in America," said the Mirror.

  Does anyone think these superlatives were casually earned? Why he was a pioneer, the founder of the first truly modern gang, the dauphin of the town for years. He filled the tabloids—never easy. He advanced the cause of joyful corruption and vice. He put the drop of the creature on the parched tongues of millions. He filled the pipes that pacify the troubled, loaded the needles that puncture anxiety bubbles. He helped the world kick the gong around, Jack did. And was he thanked for this benevolence? Hardly. The final historical image that endures is that corpse clad in underwear, flat-assed out in bed, broke and alone.

  That's what finally caught me, I think: the vision of Jack Diamond alone, rare sight, anomalous event, pungent irony. Consider the slightly deaf sage of Pompeii, his fly open. feet apart. hand at crotch, wetting surreptitiously against the garden wall when the lava hits the house. Why he never even heard the rumbles. Who among the archaeologists could know what glories that man created on earth, what truths he represented, what love and wisdom he propagated before the deluge of lava eternalized him as The Pisser? And so it is with Jack Diamond's last image. It wouldn't matter if he'd sold toilet paper or milk bottles for a living, but he was an original man and he needs an original epitaph, even if it does come four and a half decades late. I say to you, my reader, that here was a singular being in a singular land, a fusion of the individual life flux with the clear and violent light of American reality, with the fundamental Columbian brilliance that illuminates this bloody republic. Jack was a confusion to me. I relished his company, he made me laugh. Yet wasn't I fearful in the presence of this man for whom violence and death were well-oiled tools of the trade? Yes, ah yes. The answer is yes. But fear is a cheap emotion, however full of wisdom. And, emotionally speaking, I've always thought of myself as a man of expensive taste.

  I chose the Kenmore to talk to Packy, Tipper, and Flossie because if Jack's ghost walked anywhere, it was in that bar, that old shut-down Rain-Bo room with its peeling paint and its glory unimaginable now beneath all that emptiness. In the 1920's and 1930's the Kenmore was the Number One nightclub between New York and the Canadian border. Even during the Depression you needed a reservation on weekends to dance in evening clothes to the most popular bands in the country: Rudy Vallee and Ben Bernie and Red Nichols and Russ Morgan and Hal Kemp and the Dorsey Brothers and all the rest who came before and after them. Naturally, limelighter that he was, Jack lived there. And so why wouldn't I choose the place to talk to three old friends, savor their memories and ring them in on my story'?

  I called Flossie first, for we'd had a thing of sorts between us, and I'll get to that. She was pretty back in those days, like a canary, all yellow-haired and soft and with the innocence of a birdsong, even though she was one of the loveliest wh
ores north of Yonkers: The Queen of Stars, she called herself then. Packy's Parody Club had burned years before and he was now tending bar at the Kenmore, and so I said can we meet there and can you get hold of Tipper? And she said Tipper had quit the newspaper business finally but would be on tap, and he was. And so there we were at the Kenmore bar, me looking up at the smoky old pair of David Lithgow murals, showing the hunt, you know. Eight pink-coated huntsmen on horseback were riding out from the mansion in the first mural, at least forty-five hounds at their heels, heading into the woods. They were back indoors in the second painting, toasting and laughing by the fire while one of their number held the dead fox up by the tail. Dead fox.

  "I was sitting where you're sitting," Packy said to me, "and saw a barman work up an order for Jack's table, four rum Cokes. All he poured was one shot of rum, split it over the top of the four and didn't stir them, so the suckers could taste the fruit of his heavy hand. 'I saw that,' I told him after the waiter picked the order up, "and I want you to know Jack Diamond is a friend of mine.' The thieving bastard turned green and I didn't pay for another drink in this joint till Jack died."

  "His name had power," Tipper said.

  "It still does," I said. "Didn't he bring us together here?"

  And I told them I was writing about him then, and they told me some of their truths, and secret lies, just as Jack had, and his wife Alice and his lovely light o' love, Kiki, had years ago. I liked all their lies best, for I think they are the brightest part of anybody's history.

  I began by recalling that my life changed on a summer day in 1930 when I was sitting in the second-floor library of the Knights of Columbus, overlooking Clinton Square and two blocks up from the Kenmore bar. I was killing time until the pinochle crowd turned up, or a pool partner, and I was reading Rabelais, my gift to the library. It was the only book on The Index in the library and the only one I ever looked at.

  That empty afternoon, and that book, gave me the insight that my life was a stupendous bore, and that it could use a little Gargantuan dimension. And so I said yes, I would take Jack Diamond up on his telephone invitation of that morning to come down to his place for Sunday dinner, three days hence. It was the Sunday I was to speak at the police communion breakfast, for I was one of Albany's noted communion breakfast intellectuals in those days. I would speak, all right, and then I would walk down to Union Station and take the west shore train to Catskill to listen to whatever that strange and vicious charmer had to say to an Albany barrister.

  JACK SAUCE

  I met Jack in l925 when he and his brother Eddie were personally running booze down from Canada. Jack stopped at the Kenmore even then, and he and Eddie and some more of their crew were at the table next to me, talking about Al Jolson. From what he said, Jack was clearly a Jolson fan, and so was I, and I listened to him express amazement that anybody could be as good at anything as Jolson was, but that he was also the most conceited son of a bitch in shoe leather. I broke into the conversation and said something windy, like: "'He sings, whistles, dances, gives out the jokes and patter and it's all emotion, all a revelation of who he is. I don't care how much he's rehearsed, it's still rare because it's pure. He's so at home in himself he can't make a false gesture. Everything he does is more of that self that's made a million, ten, twenty million, whatever it is. People find this very special and they'll pay to see it. Even his trouble is important because it gives him diversity, pathos, and those qualities turn up in his voice. Everything he does funnels in and out of him through his talent. Sure he's conceited, but that's only a cover-up for his fear that he'll be exposed as the desolated, impoverished, scrawny, fearful hyena that he probably thinks is his true image, but that he can't admit to anybody without destroying his soul."

  It all stunned Jack, who was a sucker for slick talk, and he bought me drinks for an hour. The next day he called to say he was sending me six quarts of Scotch and could I get him a pistol permit from Albany County? I liked the Scotch so I got him the permit.

  I didn't have anything to do with him after that until l929 when I represented Joe Vignola in the Hotsy Totsy case. And a story, which I pieced together very painfully from Joe, Jack, and half a dozen others, goes with that. It begins the night Benny Shapiro knocked out Kid Murphy in eight rounds at the Garden in '29. Jack, a serious fan of Benny's, won two grand that night taking the short end of seven to five.

  "Stop by the club later," Benny remembered Jack telling him in the dressing room after the light. "We'll have a little celebration."

  "I got to meet a guy, Jack," Benny said.

  "Bring her along."

  "I'll try to make it, but I might be late."

  "We'll wait," said Jack.

  * * *

  Herman Zuckman came hustling toward the bar as Jack walked into the Hotsy Totsy Club with Elaine Walsh, a singer and his special friend of the moment, on his arm. Fat Herman had been sole owner of the Hotsy until Jack Diamond decided to join him as a fifty-fifty partner. The club was on Broadway, near Fifty-fourth, top of the second-floor stairs, music by a six-piece jazz band, and tonight Joe Vignola, the singing waiter, doubling on violin.

  All thirty tables in the bar area were full, despite Mayor Walker's nightlife curfew to keep decent people away from racketeers, bad beer, and worse liquor. Wood alcohol. Rubbing alcohol. The finest. Imported by Jack from the cellars of Newark and Brooklyn. Drink me. The bartenders were working hard, but there was too much work for the pair, Walter Rudolph, old rum-runner with a bad liver, and Lukas, a new man. Jack took off his coat, a Palm Beach, and his hat, a white sailor straw, and rolled up his sleeves to help the barmen. Elaine Walsh sat at the end of the bar and listened to the music. "I'm just a vagabond lover," Joe Vignola was singing. Joe Vignola, a merger of John Gilbert and Oliver Hardy, fiddled a chorus, then went back to delivering drinks.

  Saul Baker, silent doorman, sat by the door with two pistols in his pockets, one on his hip, another inside his coat, and smiled at arriving customers. Just out of Sing Sing, a holdup man in need, pudgy Saul had found a survival point in the spiritual soup kitchen of Jack Diamond. Let no hungry thief pass my door. Don't try to tell Saul Baker Jack Diamond is a heartless man. Charlie Filetti sat at the end of the bar. Filetti, it would soon be disclosed, had recently banked twenty-five thousand dollars in one day, a fragment of profit from his partnership with Jack Diamond in the shakedown of bucket-shop proprietors, shady dealers in the stock market.

  "Who won the fight, Jack?" Filetti asked.

  "Benny. KO in eight. He ruined the bum."

  "I lose three hundred."

  "You bet against Benny?" Jack stopped working.

  "You got more confidence in him than I got. A lot of people don't like him ducking Corrigan."

  '"Ducking? Did you say ducking?"

  "I'm saying what's being said. I like Benny good enough."

  "Benny ducks nobody. "

  "Okay, Jack, but I'm telling you what talk's around town. They say you can make Benny lose, but you can't make him win."

  "It was on the level tonight. You think I'd back a mug who runs? You should've seen him take Murphy apart. Murphy's a lunk. Hits like half a pound of sausage. Benny ate him up."

  "I like Benny," Filetti said. "Don't get me wrong. I just like what Murphy did in his last fight. Murphy looked good that night I saw him."

  "You don't know, Charlie. You shouldn't bet on fights. You just don't know. Ain't that right, Walter? He don't know?"

  "I don't follow the fights, Jack," Walter Rudolph said. "I got out of the habit in stir. Last fight I saw was in '23. Benny Leonard whippin' a guy I don't even remember. "

  "How about you, pal?" Jack asked Lukas, the new bar-man. "You follow the fights? You know Benny Shapiro?"

  "I see his name in the papers, that's all. To tell you the truth, Mr. Diamond, I watch baseball."

  "Nobody knows," Jack said. He looked at Elaine. "But Elaine knows, don't you, baby? Tell them what you said tonight at the light."

  "I don't want t
o say, Jack." She smiled.

  "Go ahead."

  "It makes me blush."

  "Never mind that, just tell them what you said."

  "All right. I said Benny fights as good as Jack Diamond makes love."

  Everybody at the bar laughed, after Jack laughed.

  "That means he's a cinch to be champ," Jack said.

  * * *

  The mood of the club was on the rise and midnight seemed only a beginning. But forty minutes behind the bar was enough for Jack. Jack, though he had tended bar in his time, was not required to do manual labor. He was a club owner. But it's a kick to do what you don't have to do, right? Jack put on his coat and sat alongside Elaine. He put his hand under her loose blond hair, held her neck, kissed her once as everyone looked in other directions. Nobody looked when Jack kissed his ladies in public.

  "Jack is back," he said.

  "I'm glad to see him," Elaine said.

  Benny Shapiro walked through the door and Jack leaped off his chair and hugged him with one arm, walked him to a bar stool.

  "I'm a little late," Benny said.

  "Where's the girl?"

  "No girl, Jack. I told you it was a man. I owed some insurance."

  "Insurance? You win a fight, break a man's nose, and then go out and pay your insurance?"

  "For my father. I already stalled the guy two weeks. He was waiting. Woulda canceled the old man out in the morning. I figure, pay the bill before I blow the dough."

  "Why don't you tell somebody these things? Who is this prick insurance man?"

  "It's okay, Jack, it's all over."

  "Imagine a guy like this'?" Jack said to everybody.

  "I told you I always liked Benny," Filetti said.

  "Get us a table, Herman," Jack said. "Benny's here."

  Herman Zuckman, counting money behind the bar, turned to Jack with an amazed look.

  "I'm busy here, Jack."

  "Just get us a table, Herman. "

  "The tables are all full, Jack. You can see that. We already turned away three dozen people. Maybe more."