Legs (21 page)

"I'm ready," she
said to Madge.

* * *

"You better buy a paper," Kiki told Madge
when they came to a newsstand at Broadway and Forty-seventh. And as
Madge did and after Kiki saw her utter a small "Oh" and
throw her face into the paper, Kiki turned to see an old man in a
gray bowler, with a yellowing white walrus mustache and pince-nez
specs, wearing a frock coat with lapel gardenia and a brocaded yellow
vest across which dangled an old watch chain and fob in the design of
a mermaid. Blank cards, an ink bottle, and a quill pen lay in front
of him on a table that folded into a suitcase. Samples of his
script-for-sale, tacked to the table's drop-leaf front, were splendid
with antique swirls, curlicues, and elegant hills, valleys, and
ovals.

"I hope you're in show business, young lady,"
the old gent said to her over his pince-nez.

"As a matter of fact, I am."

"It's the only safe place for talentless beauty,
miss."

"You've got some crust saying I don't have any
talent."

"Anywhere else you'll be destroyed."

"As a matter of fact, I'm quitting show
business."

"A disastrous move. "

"But none of your business."

"Forgive me for speaking so freely, but you look
to me like a bird wounded in the heart, the brain, and between the
legs, and we in the Audubon Society do what we can for the wounded.
My card."

"I'm Jack Diamond's girl. What about that?"

"Ah, then, ah. I had no way of knowing"—and
the old man retrieved his card and handed her another. "Jack
Diamond is an entirely safe place. You have nothing to fear, my dear,
as long as you have a role in Jack Diamond's hilarious tragedy."

She looked at the card and
saw in the obsolete glory of his pen strokes the biography of her
vampy, bondaged, satin-slippered addiction. The card read: "There
is no good and bad in the elfin realm." When she looked up, the
man had packed his table and was halfway down the block.

* * *

Kiki looked over Madge's shoulder at the headline
which read: JACK DIAMOND SHOT FIVE TIMES BY GUNMEN IN 64TH STREET
HOTEL.

"I was there," Kiki told Madge.

"You didn't shoot him, did you'?"

"Oh, Madge, I love him."

"What's that got to do with it? Come on, we've
got to get you off the street."

And so they took a cab to Madge's place and Kiki had
a stiff drink, a very stiff one, and then she started to weep. So
Madge held her hand and Kiki knew that even though Madge was her
friend that she was touching her because she was a special person.
Because Madge never touched her like that before, stroking the back
of her hand, patting it with her fingertips; and Kiki felt good
because somebody was being nice to her and she finally told Madge
then how she heard the shots as she stood in the shower. And she
thought somebody would come in and shoot her. And she would die in
the bathtub, her blood going down the drain.

Maybe Jack would be the one to shoot her. Why did
Kiki think that about J ack?

Then she heard the running in the corridor, and she
said to herself, why, Jack wouldn't run away and leave me, and so she
quickly got into her pink robe and went next door to Jack's own room
and saw the door open and Jack on the floor with his eyes open but
not moving, looking up at her. And she said, "Oh, Jackie, you're
dead," but he said, "No I'm not, help me up," and they
were just the best old words she'd ever heard and she put her arms
under him and lifted him and he put one of his hands over his stomach
and the other over his chest to hold in the blood where they'd shot
him. Blood was coming down his face and all down his blue pajamas so
you couldn't even see the red racehorses anymore.

"Get the whiskey," Jack told her when she
had him sitting on the bed, and she looked around the room and
couldn't see it, and Jack said, "In the bathroom," and when
she got it, he said, "In my mouth," and she wiped the blood
off his lips and poured in the whiskey. Too much. He choked and
coughed and new blood spurted out of one of the holes in his chest,
and like a little fountain turned on and off by the pumping of his
heart, it flowed down over his fingers. "Get The Count," he
said, "across the hall," and she knocked on The Count's
door until her knuckles hurt and he came to Jack's room and Jack said
to her then: "Get the hell out of here and don't come back and
don't admit you were here or you're all washed up." And Kiki
nodded but didn't understand and said to Madge, "How would I be
washed up, Madge? Did he mean in show business?" And Madge said,
"Go on," so she said The Count called a doctor as she was
leaving and then took Jack to another room in the hotel, down the
hall, because Jack said the killers might come back to see if they
did the job right. And Kiki, still in her pink robe, backed down the
hallway toward her own room, and watched The Count walking and
holding Jack, who was bent like a wishbone, and in they went to
another room, which was when Kiki decided she would go to the theater
and behave like nothing at all had happened. And things went along
perfectly well, didn't they? They went along fine, just fine until
she saw it all again while she was dancing. What she saw was that
little spurt of blood coming out of Jack's chest like a fountain
after she gave him too much whiskey. That was when she decided to
fall down.

Madge read in the paper that two gunmen came running
out of the hotel about the time Jack was shot and got into a car with
its motor running and its door open and drove off with their New
Jersey license plates. Those men, awful men, had shot Jack two places
in the chest and once in the stomach and once in the thigh and once
in the forehead, and the doctor said he was certainly not going to be
able to go on living with all those holes in himself. The paper made
no mention of the pretty little lady who was the first to see it all,
but Kiki knew that her time of attention was going to come.

She caught the faintest smell of mothballs in Madge's
closet, and she thought of marriage because only married people need
mothballs. Kiki would never keep anything long enough to worry about
moths unless she happened to be married. Last year's things? She
stuck them away and bought new ones and let the moths have their fun.
Kiki never thought of herself as married, even though she and Jack
talked about it all the time. She talked about it and Jack tried to
change the subject, is more like it.

"I'll marry you someday, kid," he told her
once, but she didn't believe that and wasn't even sure she wanted to
believe it. Kiki doing the wash. Kiki beating the rugs. Kiki making
fudge. It was certainly a laughing matter.

When the second knock on the door came, just seconds
after Madge told her to hide in the bedroom (and she was in the
closet by then, under the muskrat and smelling the mothballs by
then), she heard Madge say to somebody,

"What the hell are you bothering me for? You
have no right to come in here. " But they didn't go away. Kiki
heard them walking in the rooms and heard them just outside the door,
so she breathed so silently that not even a moth would have known she
was there.

Who are those men is what Kiki wanted to know. Are
they after me? And at that the light flashed into the closet and the
muskrat unwrapped itself from her back and a hand grabbed her and two
great big faces stared down at her.

"Go away," she said. "I don't know you
men." And she pulled one of Madge's dresses over her face. She
could hear Madge saying, "I had no idea she was involved in any
shooting. I certainly wouldn't have brought her into my own home if I
thought she was mixed up in any sort of nasty shooting business. I
don't want this kind of publicity."

But they put Madge's
picture in the papers too. With her legs crossed.

* * *

Jack didn't die. He became more famous than ever.
Both the News and the Mirror ran series on him for weeks. The News
also ran Kiki's memoirs: How I went from bathing beauty to the
Ziegfeld chorus to Jack Diamond's lap. She and Jack were Pyramus and
Thisbe for the world and no breakfast table was without them for at
least a month. Kiki overnight became as famous as most actresses, her
greatest photo (that gorgeous pout at the police station) on every
page one.

Jack recovered at Polyclinic Hospital, and when he
came to and saw where he was, he asked to be moved into the room
where Rothstein had died. The similarities to this and A. R.'s
shooting, both shot in a hotel, both mysterious about their
assailants, money owed being at the center of both cases, and Jack
being A. R.'s man of yore, were carefully noted by the press. You'd
think it was the governor who'd got it, with all the bulletins on
conditions and the endless calls from the public. The hospital
disliked the limelight and worried too about the bill until a
delivery boy brought in an anonymous thirty-five hundred dollars in
crumpled fifties and twenties and a few big ones with a note: "See
Jack Diamond gets the best." This the work of Owney Madden.

Of course Jack never said who shot him. Strangers he
could never possibly identify, he told Devane. Didn't get a good look
at them. But the would-be assassins were neutral underworld figures,
not Jack's enemies and not in Biondo's or Luciano's circle (nor Dutch
Schultz's either, who was generally credited with the work at the
time). Their neutrality was why Jack let them in.

Their function was to retrieve Charlie Lucky's money,
but Jack refused to give it back, claiming finally that Luciano was
lying about his role in the transaction. This was not only Jack's
error, but also his willful need to affront peril. The visitors'
instructions were simple: Get all the money or kill him.

He was sitting on the bed
when they took out their guns. He ran at them, swinging the pillow
off the bed, swinging in rage and terror, and though both men emptied
their pistols, the pillow deflected both their attention and their
aim so that only five of twelve bullets hit him. But five is a lot.
And the men ran, leaving him for dead.

* * *

The Count called me to say that Jack mentioned me
just before he went unconscious from his wounds. "Have Marcus
take care of Alice and see she doesn't get the short end from those
shitkickers up in the country," he told The Count. Then when
Alice called me from the hospital and said Jack wanted to see me, I
went down, and it turned out he wanted to make his will: a
surreptitious ten thousand to Kiki, a token bequest, no more;
everything else to Alice. The arrangement seemed to speak for itself
: Alice, the true love. But Jack wasn't that easy to read even when
he spelled it out himself. Money was only the measure of his guilt
and his sense of duty, a pair of admitted formidables, but not his
answer to his enduring question.

He was in good spirits when I saw him, his bed near
the window so he could hear the city, the roar of the fans spiraling
upward from Madison Square Garden during the fights, all the cars on
Broadway squealing and tooting, the sirens and bells and yells and
shouts of the city wafting Jackward to comfort him, the small comfort
being all he would have for two and a half months, for Jack Diamond
the organism, was playing tag with adhesions, abscesses and lungs
which had the congenital strength of tissue paper. Jack's mail came
in sacks and stacks, hundreds  upon hundreds of letters during
the first weeks, then dwindling to maybe a steady twenty-five a day
for a month. A good many were sob stories, asking for his money when
he shuffled off. Get well wishes ran second, and dead last were the
handful who wanted him dead: filthy dog, dirty scum. Women were
motherly, forgiving, and, on occasion, uninhibited: "Please come
to my home as soon as you are up and around and I will romp you back
to good health. First you can take me on the dining room table, and
then in the bathroom on our new green seat, and the third time (I
know you will be able to dominate me thrice) on my husband's side of
the bed."

"Please when you are feeling better I would like
you to please come and drown our six kittens," another woman
wrote. "My husband lost everything in the crash. We cannot
afford to feed six more mouths, and children come before cats. But I
am much too chickenhearted to kill them myself and know you are
strong enough to oblige."

"I have a foolproof plan for pass-posting the
bookie I bet with," wrote a horseplayer, "but, of course, I
will need protection from his violence, which is where you come in as
my partner."

"Dear Mr. Legs," a woman wrote, "all
my life I work for my boy. Now he gonna go way and leave his momma.
He is no dam good. I hope he die. I hope you shoot him for me. I will
pay what you think up to fifty-five dollars, which is all the extra I
got. But he deserve it for doing such a thing to his momma who gave
him her life. His name is Tommy."

"Dear Sir," wrote a man, "I read in
the papers where you have been a professional killer. I would like to
hire you to remove me from this life. I suppose a man in your
position gets many requests like this from people who find existence
unbearable. I have a special way I would prefer to die. This would be
in lightly cooked lamb fat in my marble bathtub with my posterior
region raised so you may shoot several small-caliber bullets into my
anus at no quicker than thirty-second intervals until I am dead."