Roscoe (32 page)

“Keep out of this, Roscoe. This is my show.”

Discursive Critique, with Gin

Joey found Mac at the Elite Club, a onetime speakeasy on Hudson Avenue, drinking gin with Morty Besch, the ex-bootlegger who was one of the last people to see Jack Diamond
alive. Until the war ended, Morty was bleaching dollar bills to print counterfeit gasoline-ration stamps on the paper, was also the Elite Club’s silent partner with his brother, Herman; for
Morty, a felon, could not legally own a bar. Herman, with a withered leg, was a slave to the place. Morty’s function was to drag in customers and see that they kept drinking. Mac had known
Morty for years, moonlighted with him during Prohibition, riding shotgun on his days off: pistol, rifle, and sawed-off at the ready on the Canadian booze run in Morty’s seven-passenger,
armor-plated Buick. The run was up to the border for the pickup, fill the Buick’s undercarriage full of whiskey out of Montreal, then head back down to Chestertown, where the booze was
offloaded into two other cars to be taken to sanctioned drops in Troy and Albany Mac got off at Chestertown, drove home in his own car, and resumed being an Albany cop noted for collaring
bootleggers operating without sanction.

Joey drove Roscoe to the Elite Club and waited for him in the car. The Elite was two rooms, modest bar, pendulum clock, a calendar with a naked woman bending over the engine of an automobile,
and a wall menu noting the cheese and crackers and oxtail soup you might, on one of his good days, persuade Herman to serve you. When a customer passed on the cheese and crackers and insisted on
the oxtail soup, Morty sold him the unopened can. Mac and Morty were at a table in the back, a bottle of gin between them. Mac never drank gin.

“How’s your teeth?” Roscoe asked. Mac’s jaw was still swollen, two days after the fact. He needed a shave, his shirt collar soiled, two or three days in the same
clothes.

“No good,” Mac said. He barely moved his mouth when he spoke.

“You go to the dentist?”

“The city gets the bill. Jawbone’s broken.”

“He can’t chew,” Morty said, “but he can drink,” and he poured gin into Mac’s glass and topped it with a splash of Vichy water. “Gin, Roscoe?”

“Make it a double. You talk to O.B. today?”

“What do you think?” Mac said.

“I think no.”

“Bong. Give the man a prize.”

Roscoe popped his gin. “You been telling Morty your life story?”

“Morty knows it all.”

“No secrets at this table,” Roscoe said.

“None.”

“I was talking to Gladys.”

“O.B., the bastard, told her about me and Pina,” Mac said. “She says she’s all through with me.”

“That’s not what I hear,” Roscoe said.

“O.B. is also hot for Pina, am I right?” said Morty. “I don’t ask this for any reason. Some things you just hear.”

“No question you could hear that,” Mac said.

“But that’s all done with.”

“Isn’t it,” Mac said.

“If you say it’s all done, it’s all done.”

“If I say it.”

“Why did he hit you?” Roscoe asked.

“His stupid Notchery plan. I told him if he’d only been a little bit smarter he coulda been a first-class moron.”

“I’ll bet he liked that.”

“Bong. And there goes the jaw. The gin helps the pain, if you don’t swallow it. Also if you do.”

“That Gladys,” Morty said. “What’s her name?”

“You should call Gladys,” Roscoe said to Mac. “She wants to talk.”

“Meehan, Gladys Meehan,” Mac said.

“Right. Her boss is whatsisname Fitzgibbon, right?”

“Elisha Fitzgibbon,” Mac said. “He’s dead.”

“He bought my gin,” Morty said, “and Gladys always told me when and where to deliver it. That was Jack Diamond’s gin.”

“Another thing,” Mac said. “He tells the Diamond story and it’s all him.”

“Outside of his cab driver,” Morty said, “I was the last one to see Diamond.”

“You weren’t the last,” Mac said.

“You mean Dove Street. I didn’t see any of that, none,” Morty said. “They shot him right between the head. I heard it was coming.”

“Some people knew,” Mac said. “The newspaper set the headline before it happened.”

“They say he was told to leave town,” Roscoe said.

“I heard that,” Morty said. “Some cockamamie beer deal with the Thorpe brothers. Mush told me. The Thorpes tried to shoot Bindy, bring their beer into Albany over his dead
body. They brought whatsisname in to do the job.”

“Scarpelli,” Roscoe said.

“Scarpelli, a mistake,” Mac said.

“The Thorpes weren’t intelligent,” Morty said.

“They were born short,” Mac said.

“Mush comes in here,” Morty said. “He don’t have money anymore. He ran outa luck. He had it all fixed to get Louie Lepke into the French Foreign Legion and then Lepke
surrendered to the FBI through Winchell and they fried him. Mush woulda made a bundle on that Foreign Legion bit.”

“Diamond died broke,” Mac said.

“He shouldn’ta mixed up with the Thorpes,” Morty said.

“I liked Jack one way,” Mac said.

“He could make you laugh,” Morty said. “He lived upstairs when you people were looking for him. Ate his meals here.”

“Cheese and crackers,” said Roscoe.

“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, walking beside Roscoe, is another of the arrived: quirky Mac, maker of dead meat. He had a calling, knew how it was
done. O.B. didn’t have that assassin’s ease, but he and Mac both knew how to become, and they became; both knew how to be, and they are: final versions of themselves. It was a lesson to
Roscoe.

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.”