Roscoe (9 page)

Roscoe climbed the stairs to the loft where the weekly
Sentinel
had been founded by Warren Skaggs, a printer, in 1909, and thrived in the era of Republican control of the city. Skaggs did
city printing business for the Republicans and also started printing, then backing, the Albany baseball pool in 1920 as a neighborhood venture with a fifteen-dollar weekly prize. Popularity grew,
prizes swelled to nine hundred dollars, then three thousand, and the pool’s take kept escalating.

Players, for a dollar a play, chose six numbers (from one to sixteen), one for each day of play: Monday to Saturday. As the week began, the pool published a key that matched a number with each
of the sixteen big-league baseball teams. Pool players whose numbers matched the six teams that accumulated the greatest number of runs during the week won the prize. The game appealed not only to
baseball fans but to every sucker who believed in the easy dollar, and Albany was blessed with many.

Patsy paid serious attention to the pool for the first time at Willie Altopeda’s funeral in 1924, when he saw Warren Skaggs, a Republican, driving a four-thousand-dollar Cadillac. “I
knew the bum when he couldn’t afford a wheelbarrow,” Patsy said.

Artie Flinn, a quick-witted gambler from Arbor Hill who’d grown up with Patsy, enlightened him on how profitable Skaggs’s baseball pool was. Patsy then invited Skaggs and his
partners to share pool profits with him fifty-fifty. Skaggs gnashed his teeth and said no. Patsy threatened to have the police close the pool and put Skaggs and company in jail, but said he’d
accept a lesser cut if Artie Flinn became a pool associate.

Patsy, the pool’s new panjandrum, expanded its territory and sales force, and by 1926, when he took it away from Skaggs entirely, pool plays were selling all over New England and New
Jersey, and grossing four million for the year, not enough. The next summer Artie and Patsy implemented a plan to plug the pool—put thousands of dummy plays into competition with the public
play. Artie oversaw the plugging, hiring young women at twenty-five dollars a week to write books full of plug plays, more than a hundred books a week, each book with twenty plays. Artie, his
cohort of pluggers, and twenty accountants manipulated and published thousands of plays and combinations, okaying payoffs for enough legitimate winners to keep word-of-mouth at a frenzied
pitch.

In May 1927, the pool announced its first prize of twenty-two thousand dollars had been won by “Mutt,” second prize of sixteen thousand by “Joan,” and third prize of
eleven thousand shared by “John Doe,” “Beautiful,” and “Marie,” all anonymous, and there were forty ties for the low prize of five thousand dollars. None of
this bothered the public. Callers clogged newspaper switchboards for baseball results. Broadway, across from Union Station at four-thirty on Saturday afternoons, was impassable to traffic as Sport
Schindler posted, in front of his speakeasy, inning-by-inning scores of major-league games crucial to pool prizes. By the end of the 1928 baseball season the pool’s gross for the year was
five million; by 1929, seven million.

Warren Skaggs, a grumpy loser, kept his
Sentinel
running as a pesky hornet trying once a week to sting Democrats. That his paper survived at all was because of its racy cover age of
divorces and scandals. Cautious readers carried it home under their coats. In 1929, it printed two dozen torchy love letters, all forgeries, from a 1908 Love Nest Scandal involving an Albany
playwright and an actress, and when the playwright won a libel settlement against Skaggs, Patsy used this outrage as a reason to pressure advertisers to withdraw their ads. Skaggs had to close the
paper.

In September 1930, a federal prosecutor moved against the pool for violation of the interstate-lottery law, indicting Artie and two dozen others, including Warren Skaggs, who testified with
great relish about Patsy’s takeover and Artie’s plug system, and also brought Elisha’s name into it. Patsy was subpoenaed to appear before Artie’s grand jury but vanished
and lived as a fugitive for three weeks before he figured out what to say. He surrendered to his attorney, Roscoe Conway, and came to federal court to testify.

The judge found him guilty of contempt and sentenced him to six months in a federal jail in Manhattan. No other charges were brought, for only Skaggs’s word linked Patsy to the pool.
Artie, some of whose accountants and young-lady pluggers testified against him to avoid jail, was convicted and sentenced to six years, the start of his enmity toward Patsy over the imbalance of
justice. Warren Skaggs was fined five thousand dollars and given a year’s suspended sentence.

Skaggs felt less than welcome in Albany after his testimony against Artie and Patsy, so he sold his printing plant, plus the rights to his defunct
Sentinel,
for a pittance to the only
buyer who dared be interested, Artie’s son, Roy, who had been a
Sentinel
scandal editor before Patsy took over the pool.

Was Roscoe disturbed by the plugging? It did seem less than sporting. But can one sensibly retreat to the moral high ground when major money is on the table? Roscoe’s cut made him flush
enough to dabble in racehorses with Elisha and Veronica, but his cut was minuscule compared with Patsy’s, which was bundled and banked out of state in Wilkes-Barre under various names, and
held in readiness for the next Democratic crisis. What did Patsy do for himself with his new millions? He left larger tips at Keeler’s and the Elks Club bar, let ward leaders steal more than
last year, bet heavier on chickens, and bought a new Panama hat.

Roy Flinn continued the Skaggs printing business and in 1943 asked Roscoe if the organization would let him resurrect the long-dead
Sentinel
as a patriotic sheet covering local people in
military service, plus local gossip in and out of the courts, but absolutely no political content. Roscoe and Roy had been classmates at Christian Brothers Academy, an Albany military high school,
and because of that connection, and still smarting with guilt over Artie, Roscoe persuaded Patsy to give Roy the okay. Roy ran the paper with two reporters and a photographer, and also wrote the
anonymous “Ghost Rider” himself.

Roscoe halted at the door to the
Sentinel
and took six deep breaths, his usual tactical pause to retreat from rage. First find out what Roy knows, for he does tell secrets.

Roy Flinn’s Secret

In their senior year of high school, Roy came to Roscoe’s house to tell him that he had a chancre, a gift from the eighteen-year-old girl he’d been boffing, with
modifiers, four times a week, and who told him one night, Roy, gimme it for real, and who turned up at the side door of Roy’s house on Christmas Day with a predictable second gift, asking for
help getting rid of it.

Roy came to Roscoe because Roscoe knew people, and Roscoe talked to Patsy, who recommended an Arbor Hill doctor who said, sure, thirty bucks up front, which Roy and the girl did not have. So she
got some how-to-do-it advice elsewhere, waited until her parents left town, then went at it in the cellar with assorted implements and a piece of wire, sitting on a spread of newspapers. After a
while she strapped herself to keep the blood from staining the world and called in sick at Marie’s Millinery on North Pearl Street, where she sold ladies’ hats.

When she could function she went to Roy’s and brought him home, opened the door of her furnace, and showed him how she had burned the bloody papers but not the baby. “He don’t
burn,” she said. Roy took out the fetus, stoked the fire with wood, and heaped on the coal, terrified that the girl’s father might walk in and murder him on the spot. He wrapped the
unburned baby in a blanket of newspaper and put it on the flaming coals with a shovel. Soon there was a strong odor in the cellar, said Roy. He kept feeding the fire, and after a few hours there
was nothing at all among the coals. Roy still had his chancre, however. And arsenic, mercury, bismuth, and shame were his treatment for years afterward.

He never married, was rejected by the army in the Great War, and turned into a peephole columnist, voyeur at the sex games his trauma had kept him from playing. You are one sad bastard, and it
could happen to anybody, Roy, but that’s no excuse. Roscoe whistled his way into the news office at the front of the print shop.

“Roy Flinn, where the hell are you?” Roscoe called out jovially as he entered. He saluted two reporters typing at their desks and saw Roy emerge from the back room
with a handful of galleys. Tieless, in shirtsleeves, fingers stained with printer’s ink, Roy Flinn was an angular, bony figure, his hair plastered down with Vaseline, a twisted and bitter
freak of fate.

“Roscoe, you rascal,” said Roy, “what brings you here? You have some news for me?”

“News? What would you do with news, Roy? You know less about news than my sister, who thinks Wilson is still President. You find your news scrawled on public-toilet walls. Even your
saintly sister, Arlene, is repelled by your sheet. News, Roy? I’m stunned you can even use the word in a sentence.”

“Roscoe, old mushmouth, I’ve heard your song before. Why are you here?”

“Why do geese run funny, Roy? I’m here because your scurrilous scribbles summoned me.”

“The item on the Fitzgibbon custody suit?”

“That suit is public record. I’m talking about your innuendo on Goddard, and that Elisha committed suicide.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Roy, I am fluent in the English language, and you are fluent in the language of pollywogs.”

Roscoe pulled the
Sentinel
out of his pocket and read from the “Ghost Rider” item: “‘Remember Mayor Goddard dying strangely in Havana in 1928? . . . Speaking of
grave matters, Ghost Rider hears a recent death from natural causes looks like suicide!’ Dying strangely, grave matters, and suicide. I consider that innuendo, Roy.”

“Goddard’s death was never explained and you know it.”

“He died of an infection.”

“After he fell out of a car.”

“He was drunk,” Roscoe said. “Drunks fall out of cars. Drunks fall out of bed.”

“A lot of people thought it was strange.”

“I find it strange that you bring it up in context with Elisha and then add that insidious suicide item.”

“That item has nothing to do with Elisha.”

“Who, then?”

“I can’t reveal that.”

Roscoe grabbed a handful of Roy’s shirtfront, shoved him against a wall. “Are you invoking constitutional privilege here, Roy? Or claiming protection under the sacrosanctity of
journalistic ethics? What are you talking about?”

“I can’t say.”

Roscoe slid Roy up the wall with one hand and held him there, the move pulling out Roy’s shirttail and tightening his collar into a noose.

“You’re a lying stringbean traitor. You were told no politics.”

“Let go of me, Roscoe,” Roy said, a windpipe croak.

“Why did you print that, Roy? Tell me why.”

“You people are in trouble,” Roy said.

Roscoe slid Roy down the wall and released his shirt. “Trouble?”

“You’ll probably beat it like you always do,” Roy said, righting his collar, “but you’re in for a dogfight.”

“With what dogs?”

“The Governor’s people know Elisha owned a block of whorehouses. That’s just the beginning.”

Roscoe’s right elbow suddenly bent upward, and his fist, from a position of rest, whomped Roy’s face with three rapid snaps of the full forearm, Roy’s head hitting the wall and
rebounding into each new whomp.

“There, Roy,” Roscoe said as Roy stumbled sideways to lean on a desk, “there you have your headlines. Lawyer punches out editor for maligning his friend. Genuine
news.”

As he left, Roscoe saluted the two reporters, who were out of their chairs, trying to decide how to rescue Roy. “See you later, fellas,” he said, reveling in the vision of
Roy’s blood and licking his own bleeding Purple Heart, his big knuckle stabbed by Roy’s hostile fangs. He remembered his father’s commandment on justice—Never let an enemy
go unpunished—and he thought, I did all right, Pa, didn’t I?