Roscoe by William Kennedy
Marcus won Jack a change of venue from Catskill to Troy, and Jack then transferred his wife, girlfriend, and select henchmen into a six-room suite on the second floor of the Kenmore. In July, the jury at Jack’s first Troy trial acquitted him of assaulting the trucker, and Jack the celebrity soared socially over Albany rooftops, ubiquitous in the town’s speakeasies, awaiting the second trial—another acquittal? His ultimate plan: go into business upstate, away from the Catskills, new gang, new territory, new connections.
Long story short: Jack, after the Elks Club pinochle game, offered Roscoe a business proposition—cheap beer, no matter what price he had to undercut, cheaper by a dollar a barrel than the Waxey Gordon beer Mush and Bindy were bringing into Albany. Save your money! Buy from Jack! Where was Jack getting his beer now that the troopers had closed his brewery?
“There’s beer everywhere,” said Jack, who had links to breweries in Fort Edward, Troy, Yonkers, Manhattan, Coney Island. But Jack’s beer came with Jack’s baggage. Albany Detective Sergeant Freddie Robin had been slouching on a sofa in the Kenmore lobby, assigned to watch Jack’s pals troop in and out for business and sociality: the Thorpe brothers, homegrown thugs who, a year hence, would bring in Lorenzo Scarpelli to kill Bindy and Mush; also Honey Curry and Hubert Maloy, who would evolve into kidnappers themselves in 1938, holding Bindy’s son, Charlie Boy, for ransom; plus Vincent Coll, Fats McCarthy, and Dutch Schultz, a trio of swaggering notables who had left corpses all over Manhattan in the beer wars. Newsmen had kept score on who was ahead in the corpse count, and Jack won. Did Albany need beer that came in coffins?
“Jack, your proposition sounds tempting,” Roscoe said, “but Waxey’s beer is well liked. I can’t imagine the boys switching.”
“Can you check it out with Patsy and Bindy?” Jack wondered.
“I’ll pass the question along,” said Roscoe.
When he told Patsy about the offer, Patsy said, “That fella’s going to be a serious nuisance if they don’t put him in jail.”
Roscoe at that moment became the outsider in future Jack talk: Patsy trusting him like nobody else, but keeping him apart from certain cosmic decisions. You run the Party, Roscoe, I’ll run the nighttown—as if they could be separated. But Patsy believed in separate realms of power, pitted even his closest allies against one another when it suited him. Like pitting chickens. Competitive truculence. See who survives.
And so monitoring Jack fell to O.B. and Mac. They followed him when he left the Kenmore and moved into the Wellington Hotel, next to the Elks Club. They pressured the Wellington to put him out, and followed him to the Pine Hills where he stayed with the bootlegger Nick Farr. With the Thorpe brothers, Farr was helping set up Jack’s embryonic upstate beer network. Farr’s neighbors hadn’t known what he did for a living, but they recognized Jack from the newspapers and alerted the police. O.B. and Mac told Jack he was upsetting the citizenry and was no longer welcome in Albany. Get lost, Jack.
Jack sent his wife, Alice, to her apartment on 72nd Street in Manhattan, then moved in with his girlfriend, Marion (Kiki) Roberts, upstairs over Sylvester Hausen’s card game on Nineteenth Street in Watervliet. He switched between there and a house in North Troy until the second week of December, when the trial was about to begin. He also called Bindy and said he’d dropped the idea of bringing in beer, but how about permission to go into the insurance business in Albany? Insurance meant collecting premiums that insured the buyer against Jack Diamond’s resentment of people who wouldn’t buy his insurance. Bindy, like Roscoe, passed Jack’s request on to Patsy.
Jack then rented rooms for himself and Alice; his brother Eddie’s widow, Kitty; and her seven-year-old son, Johnny, named for Jack, who were all humanizing presences at Jack’s trials. A fella with a family like that, he’s gotta have some good in him. The rooms were ten dollars a week each in one of Hattie’s houses, 67 Dove Street, rented under the names of Mr. and Mrs. Kelly.
Jack was back in Albany.
His residential slide from Kenmore luxury to a ten-dollar rooming house was strictly financial. Heavy expenses for hotels and high life, hospitals and lawyers, payoffs to politicians, keeping his women happy, were taxing. He had booze of every kind stashed in a dozen drops upstate but, being under surveillance, he couldn’t get to it to peddle it—a prisoner of his own glittering infamy. The stash, much of it originally stolen by Jack, was eventually rounded up by troopers and valued at ten million, its street price. But it wasn’t worth forty cents to Jack at the moment. He was broke.
On the afternoon of December 17, Jack, with Marcus Gorman’s assistance, was acquitted of the Clem Streeter kidnapping. He celebrated with a party at Packy Delaney’s Parody Club in Albany; fifty people—Alice, Marcus, the night crowd of gamblers, pimps, grifters, a few newspapermen, a priest, an ex-railroad cop named Milligan—came to his party. Assorted Albany detectives also came: Freddie Robin, Tuohey and Spivak from the Gambling Squad, taking notes, and O.B. and Mac, who had been at the trial and now, from their car, watched the celebrants enter and leave, all night long. About one o’clock, Jack left them all and went up to Ten Broeck Street to see Kiki in the new apartment he’d rented for her. They drank and whatnotted while his cab driver, Frankie Teller, and his lookout, Morty Besch, waited three hours for him. After four o’clock, Frankie dropped Morty downtown and drove Jack to Dove Street, then helped him climb the stoop and the inside stairs to his room. Alone, Jack undressed and fell into a drunken sleep in his underwear.
At 4:30 a.m., a dark-red Packard sedan that had been idling with its lights out a block to the north, moved up to the curbstone in front of 67 Dove. O.B. and Mac got out and went up the stoop, into the house, past the ported plant in the hall, and up to the second-floor-front room where Jack lay sprawled in sleep. Mac and O.B. shone their flashlights in Jack’s face and pointed their .38s at his head.
Roscoe and Jack
From the Times-Union and Knickerbocker Press, both delivered to his room at the Ten Eyck, Roscoe learned of Jack Diamond’s murder at 4:30 a.m., police not called until 6:55 a.m. The police Teletype was silent all morning: no messages sent to State Police or any other police agency to announce the killing, or to ask for help in finding the killers. The State Police had to confirm Diamond’s death by calling the newspapers, which wrote that it was a gangland slaying, and probably we’ll never know the truth. So many out there who wanted vengeance on the man. Whoever did it, give him a medal, one cop said.
Yet hadn’t Jack neutralized or eliminated those old enmities? He behaved as if he had, running free like a public man, playing pinochle, drinking, dancing, partying with friends, talking of a Florida vacation, spending those late hours with his light o’ love, Kiki—not an unusual way for a liberated man to celebrate. Jack wasn’t living in some psychic cave of fear. He went to his bed ready to wake into a new day of freedom from justice. But he went to his bed alone, in Albany. Mistakes. You usually ride them out, and Jack the nimble, Jack the quick, had ridden many. But now he’s Jack the dead, and a mystery is here. Why did he go it alone?
Roscoe dwelled on that silent police Teletype. Why ask for help in solving a murder when you know who did it? Jack back in Albany: didn’t he believe O.B. about leaving town? Here’s the new message: “Welcome back, Jack. Patsy sends his best.” Roscoe would hear the story more than once from O.B., never from silent Mac. Unsolved murder. Everybody knew the rumor, but who dared say it out loud?
Roscoe saw himself as an accessory in bringing Jack’s life to a close. So many people discover ways to destroy themselves—Elisha, maybe Pina, and Jack—and sometimes we help them along. Roscoe had liked Jack, an excessive fellow, deadly, yet a charmer. But Jack had become careless, a thief all his life, a creature of fraud and deceit, walking around for years with an open wound of the soul (many have it), plus all those body wounds, and then behaving as if he was just another legitimate citizen with nothing to fear, a man who could do what he couldn’t, be what he wasn’t. That’s the way to bet, of course, and who
Prelude to a Whore
Mac pulled the car into the driveway of the Notchery, blocking access to the side door of the old three-story roadhouse that once was the Come On Inn. The place was an antique with a swayback roof, cedar-shingle siding, and the promise of ribald, unsanctioned pleasure. Olive Eyes Wheeler, Mame’s beefy new bouncer, came out immediately and waved Mac away. Mac turned off the motor, and as Roscoe got out of the car he felt chest pain. Another needle in the heart to look forward to? He and Mac went up the stairs from the parking lot, and Roscoe saw Mame inside the doorway. Mac wore his suit coat to cover his pistol.
“You can’t leave that car in front of the stairs,” Olive Eyes said.
“Yes, I can,” Mac said, and he showed his shield.
“We’re looking for Bindy,” Roscoe said.
“Don’t know anybody by that name,” the bouncer said.
“Very good, Olive. You should look for work in the movies. Tell Mame Roscoe is here to see Mr. McCall.”
Roscoe could hear violin music, classical, maybe Bach? Who could tell in this heat? He walked through the doorway and Mac followed. Mame had vanished. Olive Eyes bolted the door, still fitted with the steel kick-plate that had slowed down several break-ins by dry agents during Prohibition. The old walnut bar was still in place, and bartender Renny Kilmer, who’d had the yearning but not the brass to be a pimp and made a career compromise by working as Mame’s bartender, was sitting behind the bar reading the year’s hot novel Forever Amber.
The inn’s modest dance hall had been expanded to create the main parlor, where a three-piece band entertained Fridays and Saturdays, solo upright piano every night but Sunday, when the Notchery closed to honor the Sabbath. The area bordering the dance floor was covered by a maroon-and-purple Oriental rug that was impractical for spilling beer and throwing up on, but Mame had chosen it for its elite tones. One of her regulars, an architect, had redesigned the place in exchange for several months of free visitations, and had bought artwork for the walls, female nudes by Degas, Goya, Renoir, Botticelli. You could order a whore on the half-shell for an extra five.
The violin music upstairs continued—very fine stuff, Roscoe decided. Why am I listening to fine stuff in a whorehouse? It wasn’t the radio—they don’t allow one—and it wouldn’t be on the jukebox. Another mystery.
Two women in transparent white panties, negligees, and white high-heeled slippers were sitting in the cones of two electric fans near the jukebox. A dozen arm- and armless chairs and two sofas, where the whores waited for, or sat on, customers, were spaced along the walls. One of Mame’s regulars, whom Roscoe knew only as Oke, a retired insurance salesman, was dancing to the violin music (a Bach partita, yes) with the whore Roscoe knew as the Blue Pigeon. The Pigeon could drink a fifth of whiskey in an evening and stay aloft. Her negligee was off both shoulders to ensure contact of her very contactable breasts with the naked chest of Oke, whose blue shirt was open from throat to belt. The two whores in armchairs stood up for the arrival of Roscoe and Mac, and slinked toward them.
“Pina around?” Mac asked.
The whores looked at each other, shrugged, how would we know?
“Upstairs with the fiddle player,” Oke said, breaking his stride with the Pigeon and coming over to visit. The whores zapped Oke with their eyes, couldn’t believe how stupid. Oke didn’t notice. Oke wore dentures, and the joints of his palsied hands were swollen with arthritis. His face had the deep-smiling fissures of a man who didn’t brood.
“What fiddle player is that?” Mac asked.
“Don’t know his name,” said Oke, “but can’t you hear him? Is that great fiddle? Forty years in whorehouses, I never heard anything like it.”
“What is he, a snake charmer?” Mac asked. “Plays for customers who can’t get it up?”
“If he can do that I’ll give him a job for life,” Oke said. “I couldn’t come if you called me.”
“I know how to fiddle if you’re interested,” the whore Trixie said to Roscoe. Trixie was a candidate for the beef trust if she didn’t watch her diet.
“Some other time, sweetheart,” Roscoe said. “You know where Mame went?”
“Are you a cop?” Trixie asked. And Roscoe smiled.
“Mame,” said Oke, “has the most powerful pussy in the North Atlantic states. You couldn’t get into it with a crowbar if she didn’t want you to. Then she says okay and takes you in and you can’t get out. She’s got pussy muscles doctors don’t know about.”
“You’re good friends with Mame,” Roscoe said.
“I been coming here for years, here and Lily Clark’s joint. Tell the family I’m going fishing, then stash the fishing rods in a locker at the train station and come here for the weekend. One whore, Rosie, the way she liked me you’d think I was the greatest screw in town. ‘Marry me, Oke,’ she says. ‘We’ll have fun and then you can divorce me.’ She was a hot one.”
“You see Pina down here today?” Mac asked Oke.
“Pina,” said Oke. “Now, there’s a broad. I’d give my left ball for one night with her, a lotta good it’d do me. I couldn’t come if you called me.”
“You’re here just to dance, is that it?” Roscoe asked
“If that’s all there is it ain’t bad,” Oke said.
“How much a dance?”
“Twelve bucks for all afternoon, with anybody who’s free, once a week.”
“Like paying dues at the Elks Club,” Roscoe said.
Oke lifted the Pigeon’s negligee to her shoulders. “You don’t get these at the Elks Club,” he said.
“Anybody want a drink?” Renny Kilmer asked.
“Ginger ale, lots of ice,” said Roscoe.
“Two,” said Mac, and the slender whore whose name Roscoe didn’t know brought their drinks.
“How long has that fiddle been going?” Mac asked.
“About an hour,” said Oke. “He stops playing and gets a little action.”
Mame came down the back staircase and across the parlor to Roscoe, Madam of the Afternoon, red hair in a businesslike upsweep, professional body camouflaged by a floral tent-like frock. Her whores went back to their chairs and Oke followed them.
“We can go up,” Mame said to Roscoe. “But only you.” She gestured at Mac. “Why is he here?”
“He’s my driver for the day.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“That’s smart. I don’t believe anything I say either. But that’s my story, Mame, and you’re stuck with it.”
Roscoe quaffed his ginger ale and went over to Mac. “I’ll be right back. Wait here.”
“I don’t wanna wait,” Mac said.
“Don’t get excited till I tell you.”
“I’ll go up and get Pina.”
“Not yet, for chrissake. Not yet.”
Mac sulked and sipped his ginger ale. The violin music stopped, and Mac stared bullets through the ceiling. Mac never liked the violin, although hillbilly fiddlers weren’t bad. Last week he saw a report on a stolen violin worth a lot of money. Mac liked the piano. Trixie pushed a button on the jukebox and “Paper Doll” played: the Mills Brothers lamenting about playing the doll game. Mac has played that game.
Bindy was naked to the waist, three electric fans blowing directly on him, two pitchers on an end table beside his chair, one with iced tea, one with ice cubes, plus a pile of small towels next to the pitchers. He was toweling his chest, his arms, and his high forehead, a sweating Buddha in the love shrine. Behind him sat his large safe, covered by a velvet tapestry, which was Mame’s way of preventing it from offending the plush décor established by her decorators: George III armchairs, pink linen drapes on the windows, marble horse figurines on the marble coffee table, a baby-grand piano given to Mame by an ardent customer, a portrait of Mame as a young beauty—in sum, the escalation of Mame’s sense of herself as mistress of a world different in kind from her h
Bindy gave Roscoe a serious handshake with the old Bindy smile, always so likable; but does today’s smile mean he thinks he’s a winner?
“What’s on your mind, Roscoe? You got trouble I can help you with?”
“We all got trouble, Bin. I’m trying to solve it.”
Roscoe, awash in the sweat of his own brow, sat facing his host, who turned a fan in his direction. The last time Roscoe saw him, Bindy offered candy; now air currents. In thrall to generosity.
“Iced tea?” Bindy asked. He poured the tea into a tall glass and added ice.
“That bet you won up at Fogarty’s,” Roscoe said, taking the tea, “Patsy wants to get even.”
“He should get better chickens.”
“He’s not happy about the switch.”
“Wasn’t any switch.”
“Haven’t you heard, Bin? Fogarty found the Swiggler was twins, and the wrong twin won. The way out is give Patsy back his forty thousand.”
“Is that all?”
“No. Pay him another forty. The wrong bird’s a foul, which doesn’t cost anything if they don’t catch you. But they caught you. Pay the man, Bin, the trouble’ll fade.”