Legs (23 page)

"Do you think he's a hero?"

"You asked about the town's feelings. My private
theory is he's a punishment inflicted on us for the sins of the old
patroons. But maybe that's just my Dutch guilt coming out."

"You know Jack personally?"

"I've seen him in some of our best speakeasies
and roadhouses. And like most of the town, I at least once made it a
point to be passing by that little barbershop right across the street
there when he and his chums pulled up at eleven o'clock one morning.
They always came at eleven for their ritual daily shave, hair trim,
shampoo, hot towels, shoe shine, and maybe a treatment by the
manicurist from up the street."

"Every day?"

"Whatever else I say about him, I'll never
accuse him of being ill-groomed. "

"I can't imagine this being the extent of your
knowledge, a political fellow like yourself."

Van gave me a long quiet look that told me the
subject was taboo, if I wanted to talk about a subsidy from Jack—that
he was not in the market and knew no one who was.

"I know all the gossip," he said, finessing
it. "Everybody does. He's the biggest name we've had locally
since Rip Van Winkle woke up. I know his wife, too; I mean, I've seen
her. Alice. Not a bad-looking woman. Saw her awhile back at the
Community Theater, as a matter of fact. They change the movie four
times a week and she sees them all. People seem to like her, but they
don't know why she stays with Diamond. Yet they kind of like him,
too—I suppose in the same way you find him acceptable."

"I accept him as a client."

"Sure, Marcus, And what about that European
jaunt? Your picture even made the Catskill paper, you know."

"Someday when I understand it all better, I'll
tell you about that trip. Right now all I want to know is what this
town thinks."

"What for?"

"Grounding purposes, I suppose. Better my
understanding of the little corner of the world where my candle burns
from time to time."

Van looked at me with his flat Dutch face that seemed
as blond as his hair. He was smiling, a pleasant way of calling me a
liar. Van and I knew each other's facial meanings from days when our
faces were less guarded. We both knew the giveaway smirks, the
twitches, puckers, and sneers.

"Now I get it," he said. "It's him. He
wants to know if the town's changed, how we take to his new
notoriety. Is he worried?"

"What are you talking about?"

"All right, Marcus, so you won't play straight.
Come on, I want to show you something."

We walked awhile, Van singling out certain landmarks
for my education: There stood the garage the Clemente brothers used
before Jack terrorized them out of the beer business. Over that way
is a soft drink distributor's warehouse, which Diamond also took
over. This was news to me. But I suppose when you set out to corner
the thirst market, you corner it all.

Then Van turned in at the Elks' Club and led me to
the bar. I ordered a glass of spring water and Van a beer, and then
he motioned to the bartender, a man who might have been twenty-eight
or forty-five, with a muscular neck; large, furlable ears; and a
cowlick at the crown of his head. His name was Frank DuBois and Van
said he was a straight arrow, a countryman of old Huguenot stock, and
a first-class bartender.

"I was just about to tell Marcus here about your
visit from the Diamond boys," Van said to him, "but I know
you tell it better."

DuBois sniffed a little air, readying his tale for
the four-hundredth telling, and said, "They come in all right,
right through that door. Come right behind the bar here, unhitched
the beer tap and rolled the barrel right out the door. 'Say,' I says
to 'em, 'what'd ya do that for?' And one of them pokes me with a gun
and says it's because we wasn't buying the good Canadian beer and
they'd deliver us some in the mornin'. 'Yeah,' I says, 'that's just
fine, but what about tonight? What do the fellas drink tonight?' 'Not
this,' said one of 'em, and he shoots a couple of holes in the
barrels we got. Not a fella I'd seen around before, and don't want to
see him again either. Then they went out back, two of 'em, and shot
up the barrels out there. Took me and Pete Gressel half a day to get
the place mopped up and dried out. Dangdest mess you ever saw."

"You know the fellow who poked the gun at you?"
I asked.

"'
I knew him all right. Joe Fogarty. Call him
Speed, they do. Nervous fella. Been around this town a long time. I
seen him plenty with the Diamond bunch."

"When was all this?"

"Friday week, 'bout eleven at night. Had to
close up and go home. No beer to serve. No people neither, once they
saw who it was come in."

"Is that the right kind of beer Van's drinking
now?' '

"You betcha, brother. Nobody wants no guns
pokin' at them they can help it. Membership here likes peace and
quiet. Nobody lookin' for trouble with Legs Diamond. He's a member
this here club, you know. In good standin' too. Paid up dues and well
liked till all this happen. Don't know what the others think now."

It was tidy. If Jack let his men point a gun at his
own club, what other club could be safe? DuBois moved up the bar and
Van said quietly, "A lot of people aren't just accepting this
kind of thing, Marcus."

"
I don't know what that means, not accepting."

"I'll let you use your imagination. "

"Vigilantes?"

"
That's not impossible but not likely either,
given the people I'm talking about. At least not at the moment."

"What people are you talking about?"

"I have to exercise a little discretion too,
Marcus. But I don't mean helpless people like Frank here."

"Then all you've got for me is a vague, implied
resistance, but without any form to it. People thinking how to answer
Jack?"

"More than vague. More than thinking about it."

"Van, you're not telling me much. I thought I
could count on your candor. What the hell good are riddles?"

"What the hell good is Jack Diamond?"

Which was the same old question I'd been diddling
with since the start. Van's expression conveyed that he knew the
answer and I never would. He was wrong.
 

JOHN THOMSON'S MAN

When the police went through Jack's house in one of
their fine-combings near the end, somebody turned up a piece of
plaster, one side covered with the old-time mattress ticking
wallpaper. The paper was marked with twenty-five odd squiggles, which
the police presumed were some more code notations of booze
deliveries; and they saved the plaster along with Jack's coded
notebooks and file cards on customers and connections all over the
United States and in half a dozen foreign countries.

I asked Alice about the plaster before she was
killed, for it turned up in the belongings they returned to her,
through my intervention, after Jack died. When she saw it she laughed
a soft little laugh and told me the squiggle marks were hers; that
she'd made them the first weekend she and Jack were married; that
they stayed in an Atlantic City hotel and hardly went out except to
eat and that they'd made it together twenty-five times. After number
five, she said, she knew they'd only just started and she kept the
score on the wall next to the bed. And when they checked out, Jack
got the tire iron from the car and hacked out the plaster with all
the squiggles on it. They kept it in their dresser drawer until the
police took it away. Alice made Jack give the hotel clerk twenty-live
dollars for the broken wall. A dollar a squiggle. Half the price of
professional action.

I thought of Warren Van Deusen telling me people
didn't understand why Alice stayed with Jack. She had her reasons.
Her memories were like those squiggles. She was profoundly in love
with the man, gave him her life at the outset and never wanted anyone
else. She was in love with loving him too, and knew it, liked the way
it looked. She won a bundle of psychic points sitting at his bedside
after the Monticello, cooing into his ear while the reporters
listened at the door and the nurses and orderlies carried messages to
tabloid snoops. Alice heroine. Sweet Alice. Alice Blue. When the
crash comes they always go back to their wives. Faithful spouse.
Betrayed, yet staunch.

Adversity no match for Alice. The greatest of the
underworld women. Paragon of wifely virtue. Never did a wrong thing
in her life. The better half of that bum, all right, all right.

Texas Guinan let her have a limousine, with
chauffeur, all the time she was in New York, so she wouldn't have to
worry about hawking taxis to and from Jack's bedside. The press gave
Kiki the play at first, but then they caught up with Alice at the
police station (that's where Kiki and Alice first met; they glowered
at each other, didn't speak). The press boys tried to make her the
second act of the drama, but Alice wouldn't play.

"Did you know the Roberts girl?"

"No."

"Did you know any of his friends?"

"He had many friends, but I'm not sure I knew
them."

"Did you know his enemies?"

"He didn't have any enemies."

Alice was no sap, had no need for publicity. Not
then. It was all happening in her ball park anyway, whether she
talked or not.

"You know," she
said to me after the shooting, "I hardly even brought up the
subject of Marion with him. Only enough to let him know I wasn't
going to die over it, that I was bigger than that. I was just as
sweet as I could be. Gave him the biggest old smile I could and told
him I remembered the squiggles and let him lay there and fry."

* * *

She said she was thinking about her Mormon dream and
how it didn't make any sense when she had it, even after she told
John about it and they talked about him having another wife. It was
in the time of the roses, after he was shot the first time, on Fifth
Avenue, when he was afraid he would die before he had done what he
set out to do. He saw girls at his Theatrical Club. She knew that.
But that was a trivial thing in the life of Alice Diamond because she
had John as a husband, and that superseded any girl. Alice Diamond
was bona fide. The real thing. A wife. And don't you forget it, John
Diamond. A wife. For life.

She sat on the arm of his chair one night in the
living room and told him she dreamed he'd brought home a second wife.
He stood alongside the woman in the dream and said to Alice, "Well,
we'll all be together from now on." And Alice said, "Not on
your Philadelphia tintype."

But even as she said no to him she knew it was not
no. Never a total no to anything John wanted. Then the other wife
came in and started taking over little things Alice used to do for
John. But after Alice told him the dream, he said, "Alice, I
love you, nobody else." And Alice said to him, "No, you've
got another wife." And they both laughed when he said to her,
"Alice, we'll be together as long as we live."

Alice did not think her dream would ever come true.
Maybe he'd see a woman now and then. But to move into a hotel, to
keep a woman permanently, to see her just hours after he'd seen
Alice, and maybe even after he'd been with Alice, was terrible. It
was not incomprehensible. How, after all, could anything be
incomprehensible to a person like Alice, who knew what everybody
along Broadway thinks, wants, does, and won't do? Alice was as smart
about life as anybody she ever came up against. She knew the worst
often happened, worse than the worst you can imagine, and so you made
provisions. Her prayer book helped her make provision for the worst:
for the sick, the dying, for a happy death, for the departed, for the
faithful departed, for the souls in Purgatory, for the end of man,
for release from Purgatorial fire. Even a special one for John. She
knew she was deceived by John's capacity for passion, and so she sat
by his bed and read the Prayer to Overcome Passions and to Acquire
Perfection: "Through the infinite merits of Thy painful
sufferings, give John strength and courage to destroy every evil
passion which sways his heart, supremely to hate all sin, and thus to
become a saint."

Saint John of the Bullets.

"Alice, there you are, Alice," Jack said
when he woke up and saw her. The beginning and the end of his first
coherent sentence.

She smiled at him, picked up the wax rose she'd
brought him, the one rose, the secret nobody else knew, and said,
"It's wax, John. Do you remember?" The corners of his mouth
eased upward and he said, "Sure," so softly she could
barely hear it. Then she ran her fingers ever so softly through his
hair. Bittykittymins. Sweet baby. Son of a bitch. Bittykittymins. And
when he was really awake for the first time, when he'd even had a
little bouillon and she'd combed his hair and they put a new hospital
gown on him, she said to him in her silent heart: I wish you had
died.

"How are you, kid'?" she said out loud, the
first time in a long, long while she called him kid, the code word.

"I might make it."

"I think you might. "

"They got me good this time."