Legs (40 page)

"They tell me you're going to Boston."

"I really am."

"Without even saying good-bye?"

"What's another good-bye? We're always saying
that."

"You're not going anyplace. Tomorrow we'll go
down to the mountains, have a drink with old Brady up at Haines
Falls. Weather's still pretty good."

"You say that, but we won't go. "

"Sure. I'll have Frankie pick you up at noon and
meet me at Marcus' office, and we'll go from there."

"What about your darling Alice?"

"I'll send her out shopping."

"Something'll happen and we won't go."

"Yes, we'll go. You can count on it. You got my
word."

Jack, euphoric now, opened Marion's robe, gazed on
her garden of ecstasy. Always a vision. Now better than ever. Jack
had been down. He had hit bottom. But like an astral rubber ball, he
was bouncing back toward the stars. When he held Marion in his arms,
he felt the giddiness. "Top of the goddamn world," he said
into her ear. "I'm on top of the goddamn world."

"That's nice, Jackie."

"I'm a winner again."

"That's really nice."

Jack knew that winners celebrated with biological
food. You found the most beautiful woman on the Eastern Seaboard. You
took your body to where she waited. You turned off her radio, then
gave her body to your body. Your body would thank you for such a
gift. Your body would be a happy body.

Jack laughed out loud, once, in his bed, a resonant
"Haw!"

Moonshine was down to thirty-five cents a pint, and
kids were sipping it with two straws. Iced beer was down to five
dollars a gallon, and you could get it delivered home. College girls
were pledging not to call for drinks costing more than a nickel when
their boyfriends took them out for a good time. Dorothy Dix found
this a step in the right direction, for matrimony was waning in
popularity, a direct result of the high cost of living.

Jack remembered the night he penetrated to the center
of Kiki's treasure at Haines Falls and struck something solid.

"What the hell is that?"

"A cork," she said.

"'
A cork? How'd it get up there?"

"I took it off a gallon of dago red and put it
up there. It's my Italian chastity cork."

"What the hell's the matter with you?"

"I'm not taking it out till you promise to marry
me."

But she got over that, and when he entered her on
this euphoric night in Albany there was no cork, no ultimatum; no
climax either. Jack erected, Marion lubricious, they could've danced
all night. But Jack wearied of the effort, and Marion ran out of her
capacity to groan with pleasure. They rolled away from each other and
let the sweat slowly cool, the breathing return to normal, the
artifacts dry. He pulled off one shoe without opening the laces, let
it drop. He took off the second shoe, noted its scuffiness and
remembered the night he surrendered on the Hotsy charges. He walked
into the Forty-seventh Street station house in his navy-blue
chesterfield with the velvet lapels, white on white silk scarf, the
midnight-blue serge double-breasted, the gray and black dragon tie,
and the shoes so highly polished they could pass for patent leather,
the derby heightening the tone of his special condition. Jack was on
top that night, too, remembering Vinnie Raymond from East Albert
Street, who walked by the Diamond house every night in his derby and
his high-polish shoes and spats, on his way to life. The image of
that man's perfection was still in the mind that controlled the
scuffed shoe, down at the heel. Then he let it too, drop.

Jack heard the horn blowing in the street outside
Marion's Ten Broeck Street apartment. He raised the window.

"It's gettin' late, Jack," Frankie Teller
called up to him. "You said half an hour. It's going on two
hours. You know what Alice told me. You get him back here to this
party, back here to me."

But no partying remained in Jack. He would not return
to any festive scene, festive drunks, festive Alice. He closed the
window and looked at Marion, who had wrapped herself in a beige
floor-length silk robe, gift from Jack six months ago when he had
money for anything. The gown had one large brown flower below the
knee, same color as the stripe around the small lapel. So gorgeous.
Will ever a woman look more gorgeous to Jack than this one?

"You treat women like animals," Marion
said.

"Ah, don't fight me tonight, baby. I'm feelin'
good."

"Like cats. You treat us like damn old cats. Pet
us and pussy us up and scratch our neck."

Jack laughed, fell back on the pillow of his own
rooming house bed and laughed and laughed and laughed. She was right.
You look a cat in the eye and demand a love song. It sits there, and
if it likes you at all, it doesn't run away. It wants its goddamn
neck scratched. Wants you to play with its whiskers. Give it what it
wants, it turns on its motor. He laughed and raised his feet off the
floor and saw his socks, still on.

He sat up and took off one sock, dropped it onto one
shoe, missed.

 
. . I toast his defiance, his plan
not to seduce the
world but to terrify it, to
spit in the eye of the public
which says no
Moloch shall pass . . ."

Jack would not begin life again in the same way.
Adirondacks? Vermont? Maybe. But Coll was in jail, his mob busted up
after a shoot-out in Averill Park and a roundup in Manhattan. Jack
would have to recruit from scratch, and the prospect was wearying. So
many dead and gone. Mike Sullivan, Fatty Walsh, Eddie. He reached for
the second sock, remembering all the old boys, friends and enemies.
Brocco. Babe. Frenchy. Shorty. Pretty. Mattie. Hymie. Fogarty. Dead,
gone off, or in jail. And he seemed to himself, for the first time, a
curiously perishable item among many such items, a thing of just so
many seasons. When does the season end? He has survived again and
again to another day, to try yet again to change what he had never
been able to change. Would Jack Diamond ever really change? Or would
he wake tomorrow out of this euphoria and begin to do what he had
done every other day of his senior life? Was there any reason to
doubt that recurring pattern? In the morning he would pay Marcus what
he owed and take Kiki for a ride and hustle Alice and keep her happy
somehow and try to figure out what next. Where was the money coming
from? Something would come up.

He would solve it—he, Jack Diamond, who is what was
designed, what was made this morning, yesterday, and the day before
out of his own private clay.

Ah. What was designed.

This perception arrived as Jack dropped his second
sock to the floor and leaned toward the dresser and saw the rosary in
the top drawer. He thought then of saying it again. But no. No
rosary. No prayer. No remorse. Jack is so happy with his perception
of being what was designed, so released from the struggle to change,
that he begins with a low rumble that rises from the sewers of
madness; and yet he is not mad, only enlightened, or could they be
the same condition? The rumble grows and rises to his throat where it
becomes a cackle, and then into his nose where he begins to snort its
joy, and into his eyes which cry with this pervasive mirth. Now his
whole being—body, mind, and the spirit of nothing that he has at
last recognized in the mirror-is convulsed with an ecstasy of
recognition.

". . . Jack, when you finally decide to
go,when you are only a fading memory along Broadway, a name in the
old police files and yellowing tabloids, then we will not grieve. Yet
we will be empty because our friend Jack, the nonpareil, the
nonesuch, the grand confusion of our lives, has left us. The outer
limit of boldness is what your behavior has been, Jack, and even if
Christ came to town, I'm not sure He'd be seen on the same hill with
you. Nevertheless, I think I speak for all when I say we're rooting
for you. And so here's to your good health, and to ours, and let me
add a safe home, Jacko, a safe home."

Jack heard the cheer go up out in the street in front
of the courthouse. But he knew they were cheering for the wrong man.

"I know that son of a
bitch," Jack said as he entered his final dream. "He was
never any good."

* * *

Mrs. Laura Woods, the landlady at 67 Dove, said she
heard two men climb the carpeted stairs past the potted fern and
enter the front room where the noted guest, who had originally rented
the room as Mr. Kelly, was sleeping. She heard the shots, three into
Jack's head, three into the wall, and then heard one man say, "Let's
make sure. I been waiting a long time for this." And the second
man said, "Oh, hell, that's enough for him."

Mrs. Woods telephoned The Parody Club where she knew
Mrs. Diamond was partying. It was 6:55 A.M. before the family
notified the police and by then Doc Madison had said yes, death
seemed to have at last set in for Jack. When the detectives arrived,
Alice was holding a bloody handkerchief, with which she had wiped the
face of the corpse with the goggle eyes.

"Oh, my beloved boy,"
she was saying over and over, "I didn't do it, I didn't do it."

* * *

". . . Months ago,"
Winchell wrote, "we called him 'On His Last Legs' Diamond .... "

* * *

Jack wore his tuxedo and signet ring and held his
rosary at the wake, which was given at the home of Alice's relatives
in Maspeth, Long Island., The family sent four floral tributes, and I
paid for one-third of the fifth, a pillow of red roses, the other
two-thirds kicked in by Packy and Flossie, and signed, "Your
pals." An eight-foot bleeding heart was dedicated to "Uncle
John," and Alice sent a five-and-a-half-foot-high floral chair
of yellow tea roses and lilies of the valley. On a gauze streamer in
two-inch gold letters across the chairback she had inscribed: VACANT
CHAIR, TO MY OWN, AFTER ALL, YOUR LOVING WIFE.

Owney Madden paid for the coffin, a dark mahogany box
worth eight hundred dollars. Jack had seven hundred dollars' worth of
industrial insurance once, but the company canceled it. The plan was
to bury Jack in Calvary Cemetery alongside Eddie, but the church
wouldn't let him be put in consecrated ground. Wouldn't allow a mass
either. And the permission for the final prayer by a priest at the
wake house, which I negotiated with Cardinal Hayes, was withdrawn at
the last minute, putting the women in tears. A thirteen-year-old
cousin of Jack's said the rosary in place of the priest, as a
thousand people stood outside the house in the rain.

It rained yellow mud into the grave. A couple of
hundred of Jack's fans went to the cemetery with the family and the
press. Somebody from the undertakers picked up a shovel and tried to
drive the photographers away from the graveside, but none of them
gave an inch, and when the man screamed at them, the photographers
chased him up a tree. Jack belonged to them.

It was all over quickly.
Alice, heavily veiled, said, "Good-bye, boy, good-bye,"
when they began to fill the grave, and then she walked away with a
single red rose in her hand. Ten minutes later most of the flowers on
the grave were gone. Souvenirs.

* * *

When Kiki began her five-a-day stint at the Academy
of Music on Fourteenth Street ("See Kiki, the Gangster's Gal"),
fifteen hundred people were in line before the theater opened at
eleven in the morning, and the manager sold two hundred and fifty SRO
tickets. "She is better box office than Peaches Browning,"
the manager said, "and Peaches was the best I ever had here."
Sidney Skolsky reported Alice was in the balcony at the opening to
see the wicked child (she was just twenty-two) tippy-tap-toe to the
tune of twin banjos, then take four bows and never mention Jack. But
Sidney was wrong. Alice didn't see the show. I called her to offer a
bit of consolation after I'd read about Kiki's success.

"Only eighteen days, Marcus," Alice said.
"He's dead only eighteen days and she's out there with banjos,
dancing on his grave. She could at least have waited a month."

My advice was to stop competing with Kiki for a dead
man, but it was an absurd suggestion to a gladiator, and the first
time I made the mistake of thinking Jack was totally dead. Alice had
already hired a writer and was putting together a skit that would be
staged, thirty-five days after Jack's murder, on the boards of the
Central Theater in the Bronx. The theme was crime doesn't pay. In one
moment of the drama Alice interrupted a holdup, disarmed the gunman,
and guarded him with his own gun until the police arrived. Then she
said to the audience, "You can't make a dime with any of them.
The straight and narrow is the only way," which brought to mind
the era when she banked eighteen thousand dollars in about six months
at Acra. Ambivalence, you're beautiful.

Kiki and Alice both took their acts on the road, in
vaudeville and on the Minsky burlesque circuit, outraging any number
of actors, the Marx Brothers among them. "A damn shame and a
disgrace," said Groucho of Kiki's sixteen-week contract,
"especially when so many actors are out of work. For what she is
getting they could have hired five good acts, people who know their
business. She's nothing but a gangster's moll."