Roscoe (7 page)

Roscoe moved silently into the theater with the crowd, the seats filling quickly. When the curtain rose, ten men and ten women were in two lines on stage, all in white tie and
tails, tap-dancing and singing, with brio, “Somebody Else Is Taking My Place.” As the performers danced, the heads of one man and one woman flew off and sailed across the stage to land
atop the headless torsos of another man, another woman, whose heads were flying to the dancing torsos of yet another man, another woman, and so it went until all twenty singing heads were flying to
and fro across the stage, perfectly synchronized in the labyrinthine choreography of their arcs.

Roscoe, sitting in the balcony, saw Elisha pushed onto the stage from the wings, obviously confused to find himself in the midst of this performance. But as the singing heads crisscrossed in
air, Elisha seemed to realize this was a command performance for him, and he moved his own head from side to side in rhythm with the music and the dancing torsos.

“Yes, I do understand the question that’s being asked,” Elisha said aloud. “It’s the music of the spheres.”

The audience applauded his remark and Roscoe ran down from the balcony to ask Elisha: What question is being asked? Why the spheres? But the theater was now dark, and the audience, dancers, and
Elisha were gone.

When you are three, as in that 1921 photo on the wall of Roscoe’s hotel room, and one of the three is subtracted, the sum is less than you’d expect; for the
mathematics of the spirit are complex. Now, at Elisha’s wake, they were two, Roscoe and Patsy, both feeling like leftovers after the banquet. Patsy, in politics since he was old enough to
deface Republican ballots, was at his first wake since his brother Matt died (Patsy did not like the dead), looking bumptious, the only way he knew how to look, even in his new blue suit. Roscoe
had combed and gracefully parted his beard, draped his corpulence stylishly in a white Palm Beach suit, and stood somberly dapper by the bier with white shoes, black pocket handkerchief, black
tie.

The wake sprawled over the vast, pampered lawn of Tivoli, with its upper and lower mansions, its sculpted gardens, surrounding woods. Servants’ quarters stood behind the upper mansion, and
beyond that the barns, stables, and racetrack that Lyman had built in the 1870s for his trotters, and which Ariel, and later Elisha, modified for their Thoroughbreds. It was a day full of sun and
small breezes, and under a broad white canopy, Roscoe, Patsy, and O.B., a late arrival, stood watch alongside Elisha, the enigma in the open coffin, who looked great dead, in his gray linen suit
and white tie, his head wound cosmetically banished.

“What do you know that I don’t?” Patsy asked when Roscoe arrived at his side.

“Alex is on the way home. He was already a day out on the troopship when he got the news. Bart or Joey will pick him up when he docks.”

“I’m talking about Eli’s autopsy.”

“Mac’s bringing that over.”

“He’s on the way,” O.B. said, looking authoritative in his police chief’s uniform, buttons polished and gleaming in the sunlight. “We did two autopsies, one real,
one fake.”

“But we don’t know why he did it,” said Patsy.

“We will,” Roscoe said. “He can’t just kill himself like this and get away with it.”

“He took a hell of a lot with him,” Patsy said. “We’ll need six guys to take his place.”

“Six is nowhere near enough,” Roscoe said.

Elisha’s coffin lay on a pedestal beneath the canopy, halfway between the gatehouse and Veronica’s swimming pool. Shiny green smilax leaves covered the bottom half of the coffin,
which was ringed with orchids from the Fitzgibbon hothouses. On the lawn’s very long slope perhaps a thousand floral arrangements, far more than anyone could ever recall seeing in one place,
lay as a crescent-shaped blanket of regret that Elisha had gone away.

He had five official mourners: Veronica, and their twelve-year-old adopted son, Gilby, who looked sticklike and bored in black linen suit and black tie, his hair brushed flat, his acne getting
serious; Elisha’s two sisters, Emily and Antonia, and his brother, Gordon, the banker, who were already crowding Veronica for control of the mill. Roscoe, Patsy, and O.B. stood as unofficial
mourners at the head of the coffin, close to Veronica but away from contact with the endless line of wakegoers.

And here they came, into their third hour: wealthy lawyers, doctors, bankers, and businessmen, the financial peerage with whom Elisha had lunched almost daily at the Fort Orange Club; also the
blue-book women, lady golfers, legislative wives, garden-club matrons whom he courted socially and won politically; several Catholic priests and rabbis, and all the Episcopal clerics in town;
countless steelworkers and secretaries from the Fitzgibbon mill; and all three rings and sideshow of the Democratic circus: pomaded ward leaders, aldermen and committeemen, underpaid undersheriffs,
jailers, lawyers and clerks, bloated contractors, philanthropic slumlords, nervous bookmakers unaccustomed to sunlight.

Happy McGraw, no known occupation, ever, edged out of line to shake hands with the rumpled boss who ran the town: Hello, Patsy, how’s yourself, what a loss, Pat, you and Eli were friends a
long time, he was such a good fellow, keep well, Pat, you’re looking grand, can you spare five? And Patsy: Not here, Hap, button your pants before they fall off and see me Sunday after mass,
not saying which mass or which church, he’ll find me. Ah, God love ya, Pat, Hap said, fading away with a smile.

Ex-Governor Herbert Lehman, who fought Elisha for the gubernatorial nomination in ’32, held Veronica’s hand, and Walter Foley, ex-editor of the
Times-Union,
the first paper to
support Patsy’s run for assessor in 1919, kissed her on the cheek, as did Marcus Gorman. Patsy’s brother was in line, Benjamin (Bindy) McCall, who’d gained a hundred and fifty
pounds in the six years since the Thorpe brothers hired Lorenzo Scarpelli to kill him; and, behind Bindy, Joe Colfels, who, because he went to school with Elisha, was now a Supreme Court judge; and
Moishe (Mush) Trainor, who made seven million running beer with Patsy in Prohibition and blew it gambling; and Deputy Mayor Karl Weingarten, who took over as mayor when Alex joined the army.
They’d all come for a last look at the dead leader who had helped create their politics, their livelihood, their city, came also to prove publicly their personal loyalty to the leaders who
weren’t dead, Roscoe and Patsy.

The harmony of the Episcopal boys’ choir signaled the advent of the ceremonial moment, and the end of personal contact with the mourners, though two hundred were still in
line. Seventy incumbent state senators and assemblymen walked toward the coffin, paying collegial homage to the erstwhile Lieutenant Governor, who had presided over the New York State Senate during
the 1933–34 sessions.

Roscoe moved to Veronica’s side before the legislators reached the canopy. He could not resist the urge to touch her, for she was solemnly but irresistibly seductive in her elegant black
chiffon mourning gown and strand of pearls, a gift from Elisha. Her eyes, without tears, were brilliant with rapt obligation to public grief.

“How are you holding up?” He touched her shoulder.

“I’m a zombie,” she said.

Most beautiful zombie Roscoe ever saw. “How are you doing, Gilby?” Gilby was staring at Elisha in his coffin.

“He didn’t say goodbye, Roscoe.”

“That’s true. He went very suddenly But we’re saying goodbye now.”

“Everybody should say goodbye to him.”

“You’re right. And everybody
is
here.”

“Not everybody,” Gilby said, and he looked at his mother.

“Who’s missing?” Roscoe asked. But Gilby was running across the lawn toward the stables.

“You gave him permission to get the dogs,” Veronica said. “He wanted them here but I said no. We put them in the tack room.”

Roscoe saw Gilby open the stable door as the dean of the Episcopal Cathedral began reading the funeral service, the lesson from St. John: “Jesus saith, let not your heart be
troubled,” which is easy to say. And then followed a hymn of comfort, “The Strife Is O’er; the Battle Done,” a wrong message, for the battle hadn’t even begun. How can
you do battle if you don’t know the point of the war, or who the enemy is?

Roscoe broke away from the hymn singing when he saw Mac crossing the lawn, and went to meet him. They went to the far end of the east portico, where no one could eavesdrop. Mac, full name
Jeremiah McEvoy, wearing a blue-and-white seersucker suit, blue tie, and coconut straw hat with a blue-and-white band, ficey little well-dressed cop, handed Roscoe two autopsy reports, one for
publication on Elisha, dead of coronary occlusion; and one on Abner Sprule, an alias the Party used instead of John Doe when it suited them. Chloral hydrate killed Sprule, enough to put away two
people.

“Is there a body that goes with the Sprule autopsy?” Roscoe asked.

“We got a wino out of the river we can use.”

Elisha had obviously gambled that Roscoe, Patsy, and O.B. would find a way to cover up his death. They’d done it for others. Yet it was sloppy; and Roscoe concluded Elisha ran out of time
for punctiliousness, sudden death his only pressing issue.

“A whole lot of chloral hydrate,” Roscoe said.

“You’re gonna do it, do it so it gets done,” Mac said.

“You know that, all right.” And Roscoe remembered when Mac, tipped by an informer, went to Union Station to meet a gunman coming to town on a train to either collect a gambling debt
from Roscoe or shoot him in the knee. Mac disarmed the visitor, put him in the back of his detective car and shoved a pistol under his rump, explaining that Albany was a city of law and order, shot
him through both buttocks, and drove him to see Dr. Johnny (The Butcher) Merola, the designated abortionist for and inspector general of Albany’s prostitutes, to have his wounds treated.
Johnny doped up the visitor, and Mac and his partner put him in a Pullman compartment on the train back to Buffalo so he could suffer in private when he woke up. Roscoe, knees still intact, thanks
you, Mac.

Roscoe read in the Sprule medical report that Elisha’s heart was twice its normal size. He could’ve dropped dead anytime. Both autopsies were done by Neil Deasey, coroner’s
physician, who found whatever Patsy told him to find in any given corpse. So now Veronica and the Party would not be publicly embarrassed, and Elisha’s insurance not jeopardized. As to the
real cause of death, that was the Party’s business. Was Elisha’s enlarged heart a true fact or a Neil Deasey fact? Could Elisha have known this about his heart? He could. Blighted
kamikaze. Roscoe put the autopsies in his inside coat pocket.

“Mac,” Roscoe said, “you know when every pimp and felon sneezes in this town. You ever hear any threat to Elisha?”

“I hear the troopers are ready to move against the organization, but no word on what or who. Maybe close down our gambling, don’t know. You wanna shut down the city before they
do?”

“That’d be a first,” Roscoe said. “Maybe close the horse rooms.”

“Is that a yes? I’ll start making the rounds.”

“Let me talk to Patsy.”

“Right. You take Gladys home the other night?”

“Why do you ask?”

“She said you did.”

“Don’t you believe her?”

“I like to make sure she gets home safe,” Mac said.

Roscoe saw O.B. coming at quick time across the lawn to the portico.

“Patsy wants the autopsies,” O.B. said to Mac.

“I’ve got them,” Roscoe said. “I’ll see he gets them.”

“This thing is almost over,” O.B. said. “I’m not going to the cemetery. I’ll ride back with you, Mac.”

“Mac says word’s around about a crackdown, maybe on gambling. You hear that?” Roscoe asked O.B.

“Twice a week, every week.”

“We should take it seriously. Patsy’ll probably want to close the horse rooms. Let ’em do phone business.”

“You don’t think the troopers’ll tap the phones?”

“The bookies take that risk, not us.”

“They’re gonna scream,” O.B. said.

“You ever know a bookie didn’t scream?” Roscoe asked.

O.B. and Mac went down the steps and toward Mac’s car, and Roscoe crossed the lawn to hear the boys’ choir singing “Nearer My God to Thee.” He saw Gladys sitting at the
end of a row with, guess who, Trish, also Minnie Hausen, who handled legislative patronage for Patsy, and Hattie Wilson, dear old Hat. Roscoe stood in Gladys’s sight line until she eyed him,
then he went to her, took her aside.

“Did you tell Mac I took you home from the mill?”

“No.”

“Why would he say you did?”

“I said you offered to. He keeps tabs on me.”

“Not on my account.”

“It’s everybody.”

Roscoe stood with Patsy for the rest of the hymn singing, wondering whether Gladys or Mac was lying, and why. At hymn’s end the Episcopal dean opened his prayer book, and Roscoe heard the
snort of a horse. He turned to see Gilby riding out from the stable, a collie and a German shepherd at the heels of Jazz Baby, the eleven-year-old Thoroughbred gelding that had held such promise
for Elisha as a racehorse until he turned into a bleeder, going too fast too young, and Elisha brought him back, but as a riding horse, and gave him to Gilby for his tenth birthday. Gilby, his
black coat and tie both gone, his sleeves rolled, at home in the saddle, rode Jazz Baby slowly toward the wake and stopped at the outer edge of the crowd.