Legs (3 page)

Herman and a waiter moved Jack's table next to the
Reagans, but Jack did not sit down.

"Let me tell you something, Billy," Jack
said, looking down at him. "I think your mouth is too big. I
said it before. Do I make myself clear?"

"I told you to shut your goddamn trap," Tim
told Billy, and when Billy nodded and drank his whiskey, Jack let
everybody sit down and be introduced. Charlie Filetti sat in a quiet
pout. Elaine had swallowed enough whiskey so that it made no
difference where she sat, as long as it was next to Jack. Jack talked
about Philadelphia to Teddy Carson,  but then he saw nobody was
talking to Benny.

"Listen," Jack said, "I want to raise
a toast to Benny here, a man who just won a battle, man headed for
the welterweight crown."

"Benny?" said Billy Reagan. "Benny
who?"

"Benny Shapiro, you lug," Tim Reagan said.
"Right here. The fighter. Jack just introduced you."

"Benny Shapiro," Billy said. He pondered
it. "'That's a yid name." He pondered it further. "What
I think is yids make lousy fighters. "

Everybody looked at Billy, then at Benny.

"The yid runs, is how I see it," Billy
said. "Now take Benny there and the way he runs out on Corrigan.
Wouldn't meet an Irishman."

"Are you gonna shut up, Billy?" Tim Reagan
said.

"
What do you call Murphy?" Benny said to
Billy. "'Last  time I saw him tonight he's got rosin all
over his back. "

"I seen you box, yid. You stink."

"You dumb fucking donkey," Jack said. "Shut
your stupid mouth. "

"You wanna shut my mouth, Jack? Where I come
from, the middle name is fight. That's how you shut the mouth."

Billy pushed his chair away from the table,
straddling it, ready to move. As he did, Jack tossed his drink at
Billy and lunged at his face with the empty glass. But Billy only
blinked and grabbed Jack's hand in flight, held it like a toy. Saul
Baker snatched a gun from his coat at Jack's curse and looked for a
clear shot at Billy. Then Tim Reagan grabbed Saul's arm and wrestled
for the gun. Women shrieked and ran at the sight of pistols, and men
turned over tables to hide. Herman Zuckman yelled for the band to
play louder, and customers scrambled for cover to the insanely loud
strains of the "Jazz Me Blues." Elaine Walsh backed into a
checkroom, Benny Shapiro, Joe Vignola, and four others there ahead of
her. The bartenders ducked below bar level as Billy knocked Jack
backward over chairs.

"Yes, sir," Billy said, "the middle
name is fight."

Tim Reagan twisted the pistol out of Saul Baker's
grip as Teddy Carson fired the first shot. It hit Saul just above the
right eye as he was reaching for his second pistol, on his hip.

The second shot was Charlie Filetti's. It grazed
Billy's skull, knocking him down. Filetti fired again, hitting
Carson, who fell and slithered behind a table.

Jack Diamond, rising slowly with his pistol in his
hand, looked at the only standing enemy, Tim Reagan, who was holding
Saul's pistol. Jack shot Tim in the stomach. As Tim fell, he shot a
hole in the ceiling. Standing then, Jack fired into Tim's forehead.
The head gave a sudden twist and Jack fired two more bullets into it.
He fired his last two shots into Tim's groin, pulling the trigger
three times on empty chambers. Then he stood looking down at Tim
Reagan.

Billy opened his eyes to see his bleeding brother
beside him on the Floor. Billy shook Tim's arm and grunted "Timbo,"
but his brother stayed limp. Jack cracked Billy on the head with the
butt of his empty pistol and Billy went flat.

"Let's go, Jack, let's move," Charlie
Filetti said.

Jack looked up and saw Elaine's terrified face
peering at him from the checkroom. The bartenders' faces were as
white as their aprons. All faces looked at Jack as Filetti grabbed
his arm and pulled. Jack tossed his pistol onto BilIy's chest and it
bounced off onto the floor.
 

JACK,
OUT
Of DOORS

Jack lived the fugitive life after the Hotsy, the
most hunted man in America, and eventually he wound up in the
Catskills. I don't think I'd have ever seen him again if the 1925
meeting in the Kenmore had been our only encounter. But I know my
involvement in the Hotsy case brought me back to his mind, even
though we never met face to face during it. And when the heat was off
in midsummer of 1930, when the Hotsy was merely history, Jack picked
me out of whatever odd pigeonhole he'd put me in, called me up and
asked me to Sunday dinner.

"I'm sorry," he said when he called, "but
I haven't seen you since that night we talked in the Kenmore. That's
been quite a while and I can't remember what you look like. I'll send
a driver to pick you up, but how will he recognize you?"

"I look like St. Thomas Aquinas," I said,
"and I wear a white Panama hat with a black band. Rather beat
up, that hat. You couldn't miss it in a million."

"Come early," he
said. "I got something I'd like to show you."

* * *

Joe (Speed) Fogarty picked me up at the Catskill
railroad station, and when I saw him I said, "Eddie Diamond,
right?"

"No," he said. "Eddie died in January.
Fogarty's the name."

"'
You look like his twin."

"So I'm told."

"You're Mr. Diamond's driver—or is he called
Legs?"

"Nobody who knows him calls him anything but
Jack. And I do what he asks me to do."

"Very loyal of you."

"That's the right word. Jack likes loyalty. He
talks about it."

"What does he say?"

"He says, 'Pal, I'd like you to be loyal. Or
else I'll break your fucking neck.' "

"The direct approach."

We got into Jack's custom, two-tone (green and gray)
Cadillac sedan with whitewalls and bulletproof glass, armor panels,
and the hidden pistol and rifle racks. The latter were features I
didn't know existed until the following year when Jack had the
occasion to open the pistol rack one fateful night. Now what I
noticed were the black leather seats and the wooden dashboard with
more gauges than any car seemed to need.

"How far is it to Jack's house?" I asked.

"We're not going to Jack's house. He's waiting
for you over at the Biondo farm."

"That wouldn't be Jimmy Biondo, would it?"

"You know Jimmy'?"

"I met him once."

"Just once? Lucky you. The bum is a throwback.
Belongs in a tree."

"I'd tend to sympathize with that view. I met
him during the Hotsy Totsy business. We swapped views one day about a
client of mine, Joe Vignola."

"Joe. Poor Joe"—and Fogarty gave a sad
little chuckle.

"Some guys'd be unlucky even if they were born
with rabbits' feet instead of thumbs."

"
Then you knew Joe."

"I used to go to the Hotsy when I was in New
York even before I knew Jack. It was quite a place before the big
blowup. Plenty of action, plenty of gash. I met my wife there, Miss
Miserable of 1929."

'"
So you're married."

"Was. It broke up in four months. That dame
would break up a high mass."

It was Sunday morning, not quite noon, when Fogarty
left the station in Catskill and headed west toward East Durham,
where Jimmy Biondo lived. My head was full of Catskill images, old
Rip Van Winkle who probably would have been hustling applejack
instead of sleeping it off if he'd been alive now, and those old
Dutchmen with their  magical ninepins that lulled you into
oblivion and the headless horseman riding like a spook through Sleepy
Hollow and throwing his head at the trembling Ichabod. The Catskills
were magical for me because of their stories, as well as their
beauty, and I was full of both, despite the little crater of acid in
the pit of my stomach. After all, I was actually going to Sunday
dinner with one of the most notorious men in America. Me. From
Albany.

"You know, two and a half hours ago I was
talking to a whole roomful of cops."

"Cops? I didn't know cops worked in Albany on
Sunday."

"Communion breakfast. I was the speaker and I
told them a few stories and then looked out over their scrubbed faces
and their shiny buttons and explained that they were our most
important weapon in saving the nation from the worst scourge in its
history."

"What scourge?"

"Gangsterism."

Fogarty didn't laugh. It
was one of his rare humor failures.

* * *

Fogarty was the only man I ever met through Jack who
wasn't afraid to tell me what was really on his mind. There was an
innocence about him that survived all the horror, all the fear, all
the crooked action, and it survived because Jack allowed it to
survive. Until he didn't allow it anymore. Fogarty told me he was
eleven when he understood his own weak spot. It was his nose. When
tapped on the nose in a fight, he bled, and the sight and feel of the
blood made him vomit. While he vomited, the other guy punched him
senseless. Fogarty avoided fistfights, but when they were unavoidable
he packed his nose with the cotton he always carried. He usually lost
his fights, but after he understood his nose, he never again bled to
the vomit point.

He was thirty-five when I got to know him, pretty
well recovered from a case of TB he'd picked up during his last year
of college. He had a Fordham stringency that had gone sour on
religion, but he still read books, liked O'Neill, and could talk a
little
Hamlet
, because
he'd played Laertes once in school. Jack used him as a driver but
also trusted him with money and let him keep the books on beer
distribution. But his main role was as Jack's sidekick. He looked
like Eddie. And Eddie had died of TB.

Fogarty was working as a bartender for Charlie
Northrup when he first met Jack. He talked flatteringly about Jack's
history when they sat across from each other at Northrup's roadhouse
bar. Jack was new in the mountains and he quizzed Fogarty on the
scene. What about the sheriff and the judges? Were they womanizers?
Gamblers? Queers? Drunks? Merely greedy? Who ran beer in the
mountains besides Northrup and the Clemente brothers?

Fogarty gave Jack the answers, and Jack hired him
away from Northrup and gave him the pearl-handled .32 Eddie Diamond
once owned. Fogarty carried it without loading it, giving it the
equivalent menace of a one-pound rock. "You boys don't know it,
but I've got you all covered with a one-pound rock. "

"I don't want to get into any heavy stuff"
is what he explained to Jack when he took the pistol.

And Jack told him: "I know you better than that,
Speed. I don't ask my tailor to fix my teeth."

This arrangement suited
Fogarty down to his socks. He could move among the big fellows, the
tough fellows, without danger to himself. If he did not fight, he
would not bleed.

* * *

Fogarty turned onto a winding narrow dirt road that
climbed a few minor hills and then flattened out on a plateau
surrounded by trees. Jimmy Biondo's place was an old white farmhouse
with green shutters and green shingled roof. It sat at the end of the
drive, and behind it stood a large unpainted barn as dilapidated as
the house was elegant. Three moving shapes sat on the long front
porch, rocking in green wicker rockers, their faces hidden from me by
the newspapers they were all reading. The faces opened themselves to
us when Fogarty stopped on the grass beside the house, and Jack, the
first to stand, threw down the paper and bounded down the stairs to
greet me. The woman, Alice, held the paper in her lap and looked at
me with a smile. The second man was Jimmy Biondo, who owned the place
but no longer used it, and rented it to Jack. He detached himself
from Andy Gump to give me a look. "Welcome to God's country,
Marcus," Jack said. He was in white ducks, brown and white wing
tips, and a yellow silk sport shirt. A tan blazer hung on the back of
his rocker.

"God's country?" I said. "Fogarty told
me Jimmy Biondo owned this place."

Jack laughed and Jimmy actually smiled. A smile from
Jimmy lit up the world like a three-watt bulb.

"Look at this guy," Jack said to his wife
and Jimmy, "a lawyer with a sense of humor. Didn't I tell you he
was beautiful?"

"I only let my mother call me beautiful," I
said.

What can I say? Jack laughed again. He liked my
lines. Maybe it was my delivery or my funny old hat. Fogarty
recognized me from the hat as soon as he saw me. It was all
discolored at the front from where I touched it, crown and brim; the
brim was split on the side and the black band raveling a little. It
happened to be my favorite hat. People don't understand that some men
need tradition as much as others need innovation. I doffed the hat
when Alice came down the steps and characteristically asked me after
our handshake, "Are you hungry? Have you had breakfast?"

"Catholic eggs and Irish bacon. That's extra
greasy. About three hours ago at a communion breakfast."