Roscoe (27 page)

Roscoe chose Black Jack McCall’s grill in North Albany as a meeting place because the Governor’s investigators wouldn’t be listening there. After Jack McCall
died in 1937 at age seventy-nine, the grill was locked, and iron grids installed on its windows against intruders. But Roscoe chose it also because it was where the original McCall faction of the
Party had taken root in Black Jack’s day. Patsy perpetuated that tradition by opening it at election time for the annual meeting of ward leaders and candidates—a spread of roast beef, turkey,
salads, and Stanwix—and Roscoe delivering Election Day street money to ward leaders, one by one, in the back room. Then it was locked till next year. O.B. was already inside with Patsy, the two of
them leaning against the empty bar, when Roscoe, Mac, and Bindy arrived with Pina. The place was a cube of dead heat, punishing; but Roscoe closed the door.

“What’s she doing here?” Patsy said. “I don’t want whores in here.”

“Hear me out, Pat,” Roscoe said. And he took three chairs off the tabletop and set them upright, put one in a far corner for Pina and gestured for Mac to keep her company, pushed one
at Patsy, and sat backward on one himself. Then, in the rapidly spoken shorthand he had used all his life with Patsy, he told the story of Pina’s bondage and retaliation and, in a whisper
Pina could not hear, mentioned this was usable, which Patsy heard with reluctant clarity, frustrated that his own Notchery raid had not put his brother in jail. He stared with frigid eyes at Bindy,
who, with O.B., moved closer as Roscoe talked softly of Dory Dixon and Dillenback. And we have to arrest Pina, Roscoe said. He would speak as her attorney.

“She’ll have to go inside,” Patsy said. “She know that?”

“Vaguely.”

“She won’t be very friendly when that happens.”

“We’re the only friends she’s got. We’ll go for justifiable homicide, and the grand jury may not even indict. You know those grand juries.”

“We’ll give it back to those rat bastards,” Patsy said. “We go public now with all we got.”

What Roscoe had heard from Patsy was evidence on an undercover state cop who was a wife beater, but his wife wouldn’t talk against him—a weak case, but something. Also, an aide to the
Governor had gotten drunk and punched a bartender; not much mileage there. But the best bit, and we’d find a way to use it, was the Spanish pimp held by his ankles out a tenth-floor State
Office Building window by undercover state police trying to make him talk about Albany cops on the take. The pimp truly had been ankled out the window, but the anklers were two New York cops on
their day off, doing Patsy a favor by impersonating sadistic state troopers.

“Bindy also has a movie, don’t you, Bin?” Roscoe said.

Bindy shook his head. No deal, Roscoe.

“Whatta you got?” Patsy asked Bindy.

“Nothin’ for you,” Bindy said.

Patsy came up out of his chair, a bear in a wild lunge, and flung a right hand to Bindy’s chin. Bindy rammed him with a high elbow on the side of the head, and both brothers shook off
their blows, Patsy gut-butting Bindy with his head, staggering but failing to topple the fat man, Patsy taking more head blows from Bindy’s fists as the improbably nimble Bin bounced out of
Patsy’s range. O.B. and Roscoe moved between the brothers, brothers on brothers, and stopped the fight.

“Let’s fight the Governor,” Roscoe said.

“Cheatin’ sonofabitch,” Patsy said.

“You’re a bad loser,” Bindy said.

“This isn’t over,” Patsy said.

“You want your money back, welsher?” And Bindy took the cash from his pocket and tossed it at Patsy, who caught it, undid the rubber band, riffled the wad of thousand- and five-hundred-dollar bills.

“You get a rematch anytime you want it,” Bindy said.

Patsy pocketed the money and turned to Roscoe, trying seriously not to smile.

“Better get that little lady’s story in writing,” he said.

Roscoe called Veronica and told her his news so she wouldn’t discover it in the newspapers, the way she discovered the Gilby scandal-mongering.

“They’re going to say I was consorting with whores,” Roscoe said. “But I wasn’t. This was political business, strictly. Do you believe me?”

“Do you ever go with whores?”

“No.”

“But you did.”

“Years ago. Years. I go with you, or I like to think I do. I want only that. You’re the only woman in my life.”

“What makes a woman be a whore?”

“Need, money, bad luck, stupidity, a fondness for pimps, sometimes too much talent for sin.”

“Do I have that talent?”

“You have a bit of it. I like to think that you have a talent for love.”

“So do you,” she said.

The daily
Times-Union
and
Knickerbocker News
carried subdued front page reports on the raid on the Notchery and six other brothels operating cautiously, but not
cautiously enough, and listed the names of those arrested. Both papers carried photos of Mame and Pina on inside pages, none of Roscoe, Bindy, or Mac. The
Sentinel
, printing its edition two
days before its usual publication day, obviously with inside information, used banner headlines with photos of Roscoe, Bindy, and Mac on page one, and half a page of whore photos inside. The paper
also had, exclusively, the addresses of every whorehouse in town, the number of whores working in each house, and names of madams and owners of each building in which a house operated. Hattie
Wilson was listed as an owner. “Upper-echelon members” of the McCall political machine were said to have masked financial interest in the real estate. Elisha was not mentioned. An
unnamed Governor’s spokesman called this a major crackdown on prostitution controlled by the Albany political machine. The Notchery, he said, was the collection point for money from all the
brothels in the city. The
Sentinel
also carried an editorial calling the raids an overdue move to clean up the city, so sullied by wartime transients who used the city as a sewer. It argued
for throwing out the Democratic scum in the upcoming election.

Patsy reacted by having the city fire commissioner condemn Roy Flinn’s S
entinel
building for multiple transgressions of fire and building ordinances that would keep Roy in court for
years. He also had two dozen rats trapped at the city dump and then let loose into the
Sentinel
’s basement, with witnesses calling the infestation a neighborhood menace to children,
and a photographer on hand to document the rats. Bindy gave Patsy his movie of the Governor’s aide, in hose, bedded with three women, with a transcript of their conversation; and this was
sent anonymously to the Governor, to newspapers, radio stations, and the Albany Catholic Diocese. By day’s end the aide had resigned.

The dailies sought second-day comment from mayoral candidates, and Republican Jay Farley deplored the brothels and cheered their closure. Alex, who had returned to Fort Dix for discharge, issued
a statement in absentia saying he favored a postwar renewal of moral purpose, and would pursue it upon his return. Cutie LaRue said the brothels should stay where they were. “If you take away
the opportunity to sin,” he said, “you also take away the opportunity not to sin, which eliminates the opportunity for virtue. Those places should exist so we don’t have to visit
them.”

Albany County District Attorney Phil Donnelly announced he was empaneling a grand jury to investigate the Governor’s police methods—hanging men out of windows, using degenerate dope fiends
as informants against private citizens. O.B. announced Pina’s arrest for second-degree murder, and her confession to the crime.

People gathered as Roscoe’s mid-morning press conference took shape in front of the Double Dutch bar: merchants from down the block, gamblers from the horse room next
door, stray winos, passing soldiers, teenagers on the prowl, six policemen to monitor the crowd. The bar was padlocked, its shades were drawn, its neon tubes rat-gray in daylight. Roscoe had
invited all local newspapers, radio stations, wire services, and out-of-town correspondents who covered the legislature; and two dozen reporters came to hear how Pina had killed a State Police
informer to escape torture, rape, even death.

“The Dutchman had been after secrets,” said Roscoe, standing on two milk crates to be visible, his shirt so wet it was soaking through his coat, and drops of sweat from his chin
spotting his tie. “The Dutchman thought Pina knew secrets about prostitution and politics, which he planned to pass on to his partners, the state troopers, a cabal of pimps and prosecutors
designed to persecute Albany Democrats. But Pina knew no such secrets. She made her living as a dancer and singer. She had worked in roadhouses like the Notchery ever since her flight from abuse,
first by her father, then her husband, men who violated her beauty until all she could do in her rage was flee her native land for America. She made her way from Italy to Albany, using her beauty
to find work, caught by the Dutchman, who hired her for this abominable place, this Double Dutch bar. It is sad that such places as this exist, but because of the low urges of the human being, they
do. The Dutchman preyed upon these urges, hiring women to ply men with fake whiskey at inflated prices for the right to sit next to them at his bar. And that was Pina’s profession, bar girl,
B-girl, singer of songs for this vile man.”

Roscoe showed photos of the Dutchman’s ropes, the chair he tied Pina to, the pipe he tied the chair to, the bed strewn with obscene photographs, the dildo he raped her with,
“. . .and I do not expect you to photograph this or even mention the substance of these photos to your readers or listeners. I show them to reveal the obscene life of this
man—and lower than he the lowlife of this city does not get—the opium and the dope he smoked, the books of pornography that agitated his warped mind, his sadistic quest for beautiful
young women to enslave and torture. But Pina broke away from him and found the best friend she ever made in this city, Mary Catherine Ray, who gave Pina a job in her nightclub. There is no shame in
expressing your God-given talent for song or dance in this world, and Pina had these talents. She sings like an angel, dances the way the clouds move. She had been at the Notchery singing with a
violinist, a friend who recognized her ability. But suddenly she was arrested by State Police and put through ignominy and absurd rituals. This happened just as an Albany detective and myself were
about to accept her surrender. For Pina’s remorse over the death of the Dutchman had brought such an ache to her heart, and such disquiet to her soul, that she gave her confidence to Mary
Catherine. And Mary, on hearing her story, sought advice from her friend Benjamin McCall, a figure of known stature in this community Ben McCall then asked me to protect the rights of this young
beauty when she surrendered, and I went to the Notchery to meet him and Pina, bringing with me one of the most respected detectives on the Albany police force, a man I trusted to move Pina through
the legal process without prejudice. And as her surrender was about to take place, this detective and I were both arrested by the troopers and charged with a low misdemeanor.

“Why? Why did state troopers, working for the Governor’s special investigators, do this? Publicity was their goal. Publicity to use against the popularly elected Albany Democratic
organization they so irrationally hate and seek to destroy.

“And why do they want this publicity so badly that they stoop to such tactics as arresting a detective who is making a major arrest? I’ll tell you why. I direct your attention to the
great building at the top of State Street, the Capitol of New York State, where some of you work, but which is now the captive office of a gnarled and mustachioed little gnome who wants to be
President of our nation—I refer to the power-maddened Governor, who will do anything to get elected. That’s why we’re here today, my friends, because of the lunacy of presidential
ambition. May God deliver our city from it, and from that man so possessed by it.”

The
Knickerbocker News,
in its midday final, reported Roscoe’s speech on page one, with his photo in front of the Double Dutch. The paper also carried an editorial
wondering why a State Police inspector would make a politically motivated misdemeanor arrest of a detective lieutenant who was arresting a surrendering murderess. “Have the State Police lost
their brains?” the newspaper wondered.

In a sidebar, Cutie LaRue suggested that the Democrats nominate Roscoe as their next candidate for governor. When Roscoe read the paper, he sent a one-word telegram to Inspector Dory Dixon.
“Moo,” it said.

The heat was fierce after the press conference, and the pain was niggling at Roscoe’s heart. He had never felt more vital or necessary, yet he knew he was not well. He
should go home to Tivoli, let Veronica take care of him. But he could not go directly from the Double Dutch to Veronica’s presence. He went to Hattie’s, to comfort her in her time of
public embarrassment.

“Gin and food is what I need,” Roscoe told Hattie, and she brought out her Canadian gin and phoned in an order to Joe’s Delicatessen for pastrami sandwiches on rye (two for
Roscoe) with coleslaw and dill pickles, which Joe sent down in a taxi. They ate in front of Hattie’s parlor fans, and Roscoe apologized for not foreseeing the publication of her name in the
paper. Roscoe opened his shirt to beat the heat and he thought of poor old Oke. Hattie waved the skirt of her housedress to air her thighs.

“They made a whore out of me, Rosky,” she said.

“They made me a consort of whores,” Roscoe said.

“I could’ve been a good whore.”

“Well, yes, but no. You’ve got too much heart.”

“Whores have heart.”

“Maybe at the beginning. Whoring eats your heart.”

“Everything eats your heart,” Hattie said.

“Nothing ate your heart, Hat. You’re still the love queen of Lancaster Street. How can I make this thing up to you?”

“You could love me like a husband.”

“And you’d kill me like a husband. My heart couldn’t handle it today.”

“You have to do something about that heart, Rosky, if it gets in the way of love.”