Roscoe by William Kennedy
“He was afraid of cops,” Mac said.
“He took bad beatings from cops,” Morty said.
“He stood up for his rights, and a few lefts,” Mac said. “He was a rat bastard, but I liked him. Almost nobody knows how to like.”
“You liked him?” Roscoe said.
“I saw him at the Parody Club singing with the piano, pretty good voice, skinny little runt, looked like my brother Joey fightin’ lightweight.”
This made sense to Roscoe, the Mac-and-Jack affinity. They even look alike, now that he thinks about their faces: cheerful, crooked smile that goes away and here comes a deadeyed chilblain of a grin. Two sides of the same coin would be stretching it, but consider that they both weighed, in good health, which Jack seldom was, about a hundred and thirty-five, stood five seven, knew how to dude up, loved women and supported several at a time, thrived on crime, shot people when necessary and sometimes when not, both of them notorious and feared—twinned, you might say, but as if separated at birth, and then found their separate ways to the same time, same place: Jack, the mythic ragamuffin of an evil calling, dead at thirty-four when Mac was twenty-five, and Mac, thirty-nine now, scourge of hoodlums, fearless assassin, a political secret, stable as quicksilver, likes Mozart and Claude Thornhill, now fuming at O.B.’s historical revisionism.
You Can Imagine How Mac Felt
Mac heard it from Jack McQuilty, the ex-sheriff who was talking to Patsy and O.B. at a clambake. When the subject of Legs Diamond came up, Patsy said, “O.B. finished Legs,” and O.B. smiled a big one.
But, hey, what about Mac’s contribution?
Does Patsy really know the crime and punishment that went on in the second-floor front at 67 Dove Street that very early morning in December 1931? Mac never talked to Patsy about it, never told anybody the details. Patsy couldn’t begin to know what Jack looked like with two flashlights in his face, illuminating him and the asters, roses, and swirling tendrils of his wallpaper as he sat up in his double bed, not sure what was happening, then sure, but never figuring it would come to this: alone, no pistol, nobody to help him out; nor could he know how his image related vividly in Mac’s mind to the van Gogh painting on Gladys’s parlor wall, the postman in his hat and long, curly beard (Jack was clean-shaven, his hat on the floor) looking out from a floral design of blossoms and swirling tendrils on a field of green from which five hundred black-oval, white-dotted leaves stare like the eyes of the dangerous night. A floral postman is eccentric, but is he more so than Jack against a wall of roses and asters with tendrils, onto which he casts his large shadow, and into which three bullets are about to be fired?
“We told you not to come back,” Mac said.
“Gimme a break, fellas, I’ll get out.”
“Lotta guys asked you for a break and didn’t get it,” O.B. said.
Mac still remembers O.B. putting his pistol against Jack’s forehead. Deferential to O.B.’s senior pistol, Mac lowered his own.
“Five minutes I’m across the city line,” Jack said, turning his head away from O.B.’s barrel.
Nothing. No bang.
“Just five minutes, boys.”
Still no bang. He’s not going to do it.
Mac shines the light on O.B. and sees those eyes, huge like the postman’s white-dotted black ovals, and blank. Mac wonders if he’s even looking where he’s pointing.
He can’t do it.
“Thanks, fellas,” Jack says and moves a leg to get out of bed.
No bang.
Mac raises his arm and fires three shots from the pearl-handled .38 that O.B. gave him after the Polka Dot Gang shootout, and Jack Diamond ceases to be. The papers will get it wrong at first, but the autopsy will show that all three shots entered the left side of the face (Mac’s side of the bed), one into the left cheek, one in front of the left ear, a third forward of that, but upward, because Jack’s head was falling back. After Mac’s three shots, O.B. fires three, but they all go into the wall over fallen Jack. O.B. shoots to miss.
“You think that’s enough?” O.B. says. “I waited a long time for this.”
“Hell, that’s enough for him,” Mac says.
In the front room of the first-floor flat directly below Jack’s room, the landlady, Laura Woods, and the owner of the house, Hattie, who had come by on her predawn rounds of tending the furnaces in her rooming houses, sat in darkness listening to the voices, to the gunshots that sounded like cannons, and to the rapidly descending footsteps. By the light of the street lamp Hattie saw Mac and O.B. get into their red Packard. Mac drove.
Two .38-caliber pistols were found on nearby streets the next day, one with a wooden handle, neither of them Mac’s or O.B.’s, which went into the river. Much was made of the pistols by police and press, and within a few days a Manhattan ballistics expert consulted by Albany Police Chief Dan Spurling would say unequivocally that the woodenhandled pistol was the death weapon. The chief believed the finding would lead to Jack’s gangland assassins. Within six months, Mac would be promoted to detective sergeant, O.B. to captain. O.B. bought Mac a new pearl-handled .38, and they went back out into the night that they ruled, a legendary pair now, more feared than ever as the tale ran in whispers through the streets: Yeah, those two pulled off the killing of the century in this town, one bad bastard gone.
Hitch your .38 to a star. Mac didn’t expect stardom, but began to think he just might live forever on the basis of being the man who put Legs away, solo. But Mac couldn’t say that out loud. So he wrote it in the kid’s composition book where he kept a record of his deeds. Only when the Governor began investigating Albany in 1943 did Mac burn the book, but until then, for twelve years, he and Jack were there on the page, to reconfirm the things that had happened, and that he had not hallucinated them after a binge: “Followed Diamond two days. Execution at Dove Street. Solo. Dead meat.” Mac called it an execution, not a murder, for he had served the highest order of his society, the assignment awesome by itself, nothing like it in his life as a cop. Proud Mac basked in the enormity of the growing legend, until he learned his role in it had been stolen, that he’d been eliminated from a most significant moment in American history: he, the man without whom there wouldn’t even be a moment, eliminated. You can imagine how Mac felt.
The Call
Herman Besch came to the table where Roscoe sat with Morty and Mac to say O.B. was on the line for Mac, the second time he’d called today.
“Tell him I went to Troy to get my laundry,” Mac said.
“He said he’s got people in cars outside and he wants you to go to his office the easy way.”
“Tell him I went up on the roof for a suntan.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Roscoe said. And he did. When he came back to the table he told Mac, “I said I’d try to persuade you to come in.”
“Not going.”
“He said he’s only kidding about turning in your badge.”
“Always a joker.”
“I think I calmed him down,” Roscoe said. “And I’ll fix it with Patsy. When O.B. sees he can’t win, he won’t fight it. I’ve seen this in him all his life.”
“I don’t turn in the badge, I don’t turn in the gun.”
“He wants to talk. I’ll go in with you.”
Roscoe called Patsy from Herman’s phone booth, and Patsy said O.B. was making too much of it and he’d cool him down. Roscoe told this to Mac. Joey Manucci drove Roscoe and Mac to police headquarters at Eagle and Beaver Streets, and Roscoe led the way into the chief’s inner office, where, Roscoe decided, O.B. had truly arrived. This was the place O.B. had moved toward as soon as he knew it existed, a true believer in authority. Half their lives the Conway brothers worked the same territory, O.B. after the dominance, Roscoe not interested. O.B. called himself the Doctor: “You had a problem? Why didn’t you call the Doctor?” On his desk he kept a small sign: “The Doctor is in.” The Doctor possesses the arcane knowledge that eludes you. The Doctor sees what ails you and can prescribe a cure. And Mac, walk
O.B. was at his desk, sleeves rolled, red-and-ocher tie on a white shirt open at the collar, wearing his bifocals to read a complaint sheet. Roscoe and Mac stood in front of the desk. O.B. took off his glasses.
“So we’re here,” Roscoe said.
“You goddamn ingrate,” O.B. said to Mac, “after all I did for you.”
“Ingrate? You broke my jaw,” Mac said.
“Put your pistol on the desk,” O.B. said, his middle right knuckle a scab.
“Wait a minute,” Roscoe said.
But Mac took his pearl-handled pistol out of his back-pocket holster and, standing to the right of the desk as he had at Jack’s bed, told O.B., “I’m gonna break your jaw.”
When O.B. saw the way the pistol was rising in Mac’s hand, he moved his head away from it, and so Mac’s bullet did not enter the front of his jaw as Mac had intended, but his left temple, which sent O.B. to a new place. Mac then handed his pistol to Roscoe.
“Lunatic. You goddamn lunatic,” Roscoe said. “You’re as dead as he is.” He stared at O.B.’s head on the desk. “He’s my brother.”
“He was the best friend I ever had,” Mac said.
The walls of O.B.’s office were the same pale blue as Elisha’s final face.
When Elisha stepped off the train and stood alone on the platform, Roscoe called to him through the train window. But Elisha only tapped his right foot as the train pulled away. Now Roscoe entered the barn where the Communion of Saints was sponsoring its perennial flea market. Crowds moved from stall to stall, buying St. Teresa’s eyelashes, chips off St. Peter’s shinbone, St. Sebastian’s arrowheads, and, new this year, the curly toenails of St. Anthony’s demon temptress. Roscoe asked to see Elisha.
“We have no one by that name,” the Registrar said.
“He got off the train here.”
“Has he performed any posthumous miracles?”
“He’s working on that.”
“Many are called, sir, but even the holiest of men rarely qualify, because of the severe demands of the moral law.”
“Elisha wasn’t up on the moral law. He wasn’t even a Catholic.”
“Ignorance of the moral law is no excuse.”
“No, but it’s a living.”
Roscoe wanted to tell this fellow that not morality but fraudulence is the necessary modality for human existence. Nothing is, or ever was, what it seems. Thou shalt not commit honesty. Elisha died a martyr to this creed.
“Those thoughts,” the Registrar said, “are unacceptable here.”
“I’m glad we agree on something,” Roscoe said.
There was Roscoe all over page one again: lofty pol, whorehouse lawyer, now intermediary for the killer-cop who killed his brother. What he must be going through. See Roscoe in mourning with his sister Cress, see widow Hattie in her weeds, see the police honor guard standing at the hero’s grave.
“I never thought he’d die in bed,” said Hattie. “But to have my little Mac do him. And I put them together.”
O.B.’s death put her in tears at first, weep, stop, weep again. Then she was over it. O.B. was an erratic, mediocre husband, not such a bad lover, a pal who made her feel like an insider, told her everything that wasn’t an official secret, brought her fresh bread and cake from the Jewish bakeries, roasts and chops from the Armenian butcher, never came by empty-handed before or after they were married. And why did they ever marry? Well, he made her feel safe, and he chased her, as he chased so many, but probably he married her for more reasons than her enduring nubility: one, because it would—oh, sibling treachery—one-up Roscoe, whom, two, Hattie loved in her way-premarital blockade. But Hattie also had her reasons: one, Ros wasn’t available to her, the way Veronica wasn’t available to Ros, who therefore married Pamela, as Hattie therefore married O.B.; and, two, Hattie, invincibly lonely, always has to marry somebody.
Mac immediately pleaded guilty when charged with first-degree murder. I did it, he said, give me the chair. Sorry, Mac, you can’t plead to the capital crime. You need a lawyer, and don’t ask Roscoe for any more favors. Mac stopped eating in jail, wanted to die; so many maniacs in this suicide roundelay: Jack and Elisha, and then O.B. deciding that stealing Mac’s women and ending his career as a cop were mere amusements, and Mac assuming a jaw-shot would be judged as tit-for-tat, all of them lying to themselves as they designed their own finales. From his car on the curving road to O.B.’s new grave in St. Agnes Cemetery, Roscoe saw where Hattie’s fourth husband, Benny (the) Behr, another one, was buried: Benny, who blew a hole in his head with a shotgun when he couldn’t stand the pain in his spine. No hallowed ground for you, Ben, your place is with the suicidal trees. But Hattie wouldn’t hear of that, and confessed to the chancellor of the Albany Catholic Diocese that she was the one who blew that hole in Benny’s pain. Bless me, Father, I did murder. Punish me, not him, such a good man, how could I sit there and watch him suffer and do nothing to help him? The chancellor believed Hattie, and so Benny joined the hallowable dead in the St. Agnes underworld. The chancellor also said Hattie should tell the police what she did, but she told only Roscoe, and nobody prosecuted St. Hat—after all, she didn’t do it. The chancellor kept Hattie’s confession to himself, as did Roscoe, and it remained secret even to Benny.
O.B.’s fresh grave lay alongside Felix’s obelisk, which rested on a pedestal into which the name Conway was engraved; and the pedestal was losing ground to the encroaching sod.
“You see that?” he said to Cress.
“Of course I see it,” she said. “Mama’s and Papa’s graves.”
“I mean the sod. Look at the sod.”
“Yes, the sod. They’re under it.”
“I mean we should come back up and cut away that sod. It’s overgrowing the stone.”
“If you cut away the sod the grass dies, and then it comes back as clover and dandelions.”
Forget it. Roscoe would come alone. Cress had been a lovable sister, but grew into a dotty spinster with selectively skewed memories: all the celebratory minutiae of Felix’s history as mayor, but not a whit of recollection of his removal from office, and no acknowledgment that he had lived half his later life in hotel exile from the family. It was not seemly to have such memories.
Mayor Alex, the fire chief, half the city government, police chiefs from other cities, and a hundred friends circled the grave for O.B.’s ceremonial descent to the eighth floor, no more worry about Albany’s evildoers. No evil down there, either; only pain. Get ready for the boiling pitch, brother barrator, and I may be along presently. Look among the trees for Elisha when you get down there and tell him I’m on the verge of decoding his scheme. But he’s probably elsewhere, you don’t know where in hell to look for that man. And tell him I’ve decided the windshield head-bump injured his prefrontal cortex, which brought on all that anxiety and chloral hydrate, my fault. I hit the brakes, another oblique homicide. Send my regrets.
Monsignor Tooher from St. Joseph’s gave O.B. a full Jesus sendoff, and Roscoe came close to weeping when he remembered the adolescent O.B., for, since Felix was usually on family leave, Roscoe half-raised his brother in those years, Rozzie and Ozzie inseparable: trapping yellow birds with George Quinn, running on top of freight cars; O.B., learning the hard way, fell and broke his arm. Roscoe taught him about Patsy’s chickens and Eli’s horses, took him to the burlesque at the Gayety to see Millie DeLeon shake herself and throw her garters to the audience; also introduced him to a community of reluctant virgins who tested their own limits with Roscoe and then with O.B., who became an apt student of their restraint. To civilize him, Roscoe took him regularly to Harmanus Bleecker Hall to see Chauncey Olcott, Lew Docksteader’s minstrels, Lillian Russell, the Barrymores, e
“We should talk,” Alex said to him as they walked away from the grave. Roscoe saw Veronica in the moving crowd and returned her nod.
“Now?” he said to Alex.
“As soon as possible, privately.”
Roscoe gestured toward a slope with more illustrious obelisks and statues of angels. “No eavesdroppers up there,” he said.
“Fine.” Alex gestured for Roscoe to lead the way up the grassy incline.
Roscoe and Alex (2)
“I worry about you,” Alex said, a marble cherub hovering behind him. He stood tall, sharp in his black tie on gray collar, getting his old weight back. “This is almost too much to bear. Witnessing it, arranging it yourself. God, Roscoe, I’m so sorry. I wanted to say this at the wake.”
Weary Roscoe sat on the marble sarcophagus of Ebel Campion, the North End undertaker, a good fellow. Ebel would not consider the sitting an imposition. Probably glad for the visit. And Roscoe said to Alex, “It’s good of you, my boy. I’m in a bad place. O.B. was a decent brother, a foolish man. I’m trying to understand him.”