Legs (32 page)

Jack didn't create the
ambiance that made the Kenmore so appealing, but he enhanced it in
its raffish new age. He danced, he laughed, he wore the best, and
moved with the fastest. But I well knew he had conceived that style
long ago in desperation and was bearing it along cautiously now, like
a fragile golden egg. He was frail, down eighteen pounds again, eyes
abulge again, cheekbones prominent again, left arm all but limp, and
periodically wincing when he felt that double-ought pellet bobbling
about in his liver. But more troubling than this was the diminishing
amount of time left for him to carry out the task at hand: the
balancing of the forces of his life in a way that would give him
ease, let him think well of himself, show him the completion of a
pattern that at least would look something like the one he had
devised as a young man: Young Jack—that desperate fellow he could
barely remember and could not drive out. Empire gone, exchequer
sequestered, future wholly imperfect, it occurred to Jack that the
remaining values of his life inhered chiefly in his women. Naturally,
he decided to collect them, protect them, and install them in the
current safe-deposit box of his life, which at the moment was a
six-room second-floor suite in the Kenmore.

* * *

"Marcus, you won't
believe what I'm saying, but it's a true. I'm in the kitchen one day
and the boss come in and says, Sal, you busy? I say no, not too much.
He says, I gotta friend of mine in such and such a room and his name
is Jack Legs Dime. Have you heard him? Well, I say, in the newspaper,
yes. He says you wanna be his waiter from now on while he stays uppa
here? You go upstays every morning eight thirty breakfast, noon if
he's a call, maybe sandwich now and then, don't worry dinner. Take
care of him and his friends and he pay you. I say, sure, it's all
right with me. So every morning I used to knock on the door with the
same breakfast—little steak and egg overlight for Jack, coffee,
toast, buns, some scramble eggs for everybody, some cornflakes, milk,
plenty potsa coffee, all on the wagon, and Hubert, this rough-lookin'
bast with a puggy nose, he's got a goddama gun in both hands. I say
Hubert, you son um a bitch I won't come up here no more if you don't
put them guns away. I talk to him like that more for joke than
anything else. So I see Jack Dime and I give him the breakfast and
sometime breakfast for two, three extra people they call to tell me
about and Jack call to somebody and says, hey, give Sal twenty-five
dollar. He says to me, will that be enough? I say Yeah, Legs, plenty.
More than what I expect. Just take care a me and my friends and you
down for twenty-five a day, how's that? Beautiful. Jesa Christ, them
days twenty-five dollar, who the hell ever seen twenty-five dollar
like that? Every day was a different five, six new people, I guess
they talking about Jack's trial coming up. And one day Jack call the
next room and say, hey, Coll, you wanna eat some breakfas? I gotta
breakfas here. Hey, Legs, I say, that Vince Coll? He supposed to be
you enemy it says in the pape. Jack says no, he's a good friend a
mine. And I pour Coll a coffee and some toast. Then three, four weeks
later I met another fellow, Schultz. I say, Hey, Legs, you and
Schultz, you supposed to be the worst enemies. And he says no, only
sometimes. Now we get along pretty nice. So I pour Schultz a coffee
and some toast. I say, Hey, Jack, they's a big fight tonight, who you
like, we bet a dollar. Nah, he says, them fighters all crooks. Punks,
no good. Then how about baseball, I says. Yeah, he says, I bet you a
dollar. I take the Yanks. Legs like Babe Ruth and Bill Dickey. Then
one day he says to me, Sal, I want you to meet my wife, Mrs. Jack
Legs Dime. I say it's a pleasure, and then another day I go up and he
says, Sal, I want you to meet my friend, Miss Kiki Roberts. And Kiki
she says hello and I say it's a pleasure. Jesa Christ, I wonder how
the hell Jack Dime got these women together. I see them sit down
together, have breakfast, and then go out together and shop down the
stores on Pearl Street while Jack stay home. I say to Freddie Robin,
the detective sergeant who sits in the lobby looking for punks who
don't look right and who ask funny questions about Legs and I say,
Freddie, son um a bitch, it's magic. He got the both women up there.
Freddie says you think that's something _ you ought to see them
Sunday morn. All in church together. No, I say. Yeah, Freddie say.
All in the same pew, seven o'clock mass Saint Mary's. No, I say.
Don't tell me no, Freddie says, when I get paid to go watch them. So
I says this I got to see for myself and next Sunday seven o'clock
mass son um a bitch they don't all come in, first Kiki, then Alice,
then Jack, and little ways back in another pew, Freddie. Alice goes a
communion and Jack and Kiki sit still. Then later every Friday I see
the monsignor come into the hotel and go upstairs. To hear the
confessions, Freddie says, and he thinks sometimes they go to
communion right in the room. Hey, I says to Freddie, I don't know
nobody gets a communion in this hotel. How they get away with that
when they all living together in the same rooms? I took a peek one
day, the women got a room each, and Legs, he got a room all his own
and the bodyguards got a room and they got other rooms for people in
and out, transaction business. Course when I was up there, everything
was mum. Nobody say anything, and when I go back for the dishes and
the wagon Legs is maybe getting a shave and an haircut, every day,
saying the rosary beads. They got a candle in every room, burn all
day long, and a statue of Saint Anthony and the Blessed Virgin,
which, I figure out, maybe is through Alice, who is on the quiet
side, maybe because she got too damn much on her mind. She don't
smile much at me. Hello, Sal, good morning, Sal, always nice, but not
like Kiki, who says, Sal, how are you this morning, pretty good?
Howsa weather outside? She liked to talk, some girl, Kiki. Wow!
Freddie says to me, Sal, you think they all wind up in bed together?
I laugh like hell. Freddie, I say, how the hell anybody going to do
anything with a woman when another woman alongside you? No, that's
not it. Bad as the guy might be, if I had a swear, put my hands to
God and say would the guy do anything like that, I would say no.
Maybe he got a desire to stay with his wife, then he call his wife
into his room. He gotta desire to stay with his girlfriend, he call
his girlfriend. It's the only thing I can see. Nine time out of ten I
would say his girlfriend. On the other hand, he had to take care of
his wife too. She wasn't so bad-looking, and after all it was a
legitimate wife. You ask me was he an animal, a beast—I say no. He
was a fanat. lf he wasn't a fanat, why the hell he got Saint Anthony
up there? He must've had some kind of good in him, I gotta say it.
Not for the moneywise he gave me. I wouldn't judge him for that. But
I couldn't say nothing bad toward the guy. I never even hear him
curse. Very refine. Pardon me, pardon me. lf he sneeze sometime, it's
pardon me, tank you, see ya tomorra. But, actually speaking, who's a
know what the hell really goes on upstays?"

* * *

The night I went to dinner with Jack, Alice, and Kiki
at the Kenmore, the
ménage
seemed to be functioning the way Jack wanted it to function. He'd
called me to come down and see him, talk about the trial, and, more
important, he wanted to pay me. I'd already told him I was fond of
him as a friend, even though I disagreed with some of his behavior,
and I enjoyed his company. However, I said, all that has nothing to
do with business. If I work for you, I expect to get paid, and now
that you've got your bank accounts under government lock and key,
what are you going to do about my fee, which, I explained, would be
ten thousand dollars payable in advance? I knew two aspiring criminal
lawyers who waited until after trial for their pay and are waiting
yet.

"Jack, let's face it," I said, "you're
a crook."

He laughed and said, "Marcus, you're twice the
crook I'll ever be," which pleased me because it implied prowess
in a world alien to me, even if it wasn't true. What he was really
doing was admiring my willingness to structure an alibi for his
trial, give it a reasonableness that smacked lovingly of truth. I had
fifteen witnesses lined up three weeks before we went to trial, and
all were ready to testify, in authenticatingly eccentric and
voluminous detail, that Jack had been in Albany the night Streeter
and the kid were abducted. Waiters saw him, a manicurist, a desk
clerk, a physiotherapist, a car salesman, a bootblack, a barber, a
garment executive from the Bronx, and more.

I arrived at Jack's Kenmore suite half an hour ahead
of schedule and was let in by Hubert Maloy, the plump Irish kid from
Troy whom Jack had hired away from Vincent Coll as his inside guard.
Hubert knew me and let me sit in the parlor. I immediately caught the
odor of exotic incense and saw a wisp of smoke curling upward from an
open door to one of the bedrooms. I glimpsed Alice on her hands and
knees with a brushbroom, pushing a lemon back and forth on the rug in
front of the incense, which burned in a tin dish. The scene was so
weird it embarrassed me. It was like intruding on someone's
humiliating dream. Alice was in her slip and stocking feet, a long
run in the stocking most visible to me. Her hair was uncombed and she
was without the protection of makeup. I quietly got up from the chair
and moved to another one, where I wouldn't be able to see her room.

Jack arrived with Kiki about ten minutes later, and
Alice emerged from the incense room like a new woman, hair combed,
lipstick in place, lovely wildflower housecoat covering slip and run.
She kissed Jack on the check, kissed me too, and said to Kiki: "Your
black dress came from the cleaners, Marion. It's in the closet."

"Oh terrific, thanks," said a smiling,
amiable, grateful Kiki.

Such was the nature of the interchanges I observed,
and I won't bore you further with the banality of their civility.
Jack took me aside, and when we'd finished updating the state of the
trial, and of our witnesses (our foreboding reserved not for this but
for the federal trial), Jack handed me a white envelope with twenty
five-hundred-dollar bills.

"That suit you'?"

"Seems to be in order. I'll accept it only if
you tell me
where it came from."

"It's not hot, if that's your worry."

"That's my worry."

"It's fresh from Madden. All legitimate. My fee
for transferring some cash."

The cash, I would perceive before the week was out,
was the ransom paid for Big Frenchy DeMange, Owney Madden's partner
in the country's biggest brewery. Vincent Coll, Fats McCarthy, and
another fellow whose name I never caught, whisked Big Frenchy off a
corner in midtown Manhattan and returned him intact several hours
later after the delivery of thirty-five thousand dollars to Jack,
who, despite being on bail, left the state and drove to Jersey to
pick it up. Madden knew Coll and McCarthy were basically cretins and
that Jack was more than the innocent intermediary in such a neat
snatch, and so Madden-Diamond relations were sorely, but not
permanently, ruptured. I had little interest in any of that. I merely
assured Jack he would now have the best defense money could buy.

Kiki had flopped into the chair from which I'd
witnessed Alice's lemon brushing, and she said to Jack when he and I
broke from conference: "I wanna go eat, Jackie." I saw
Alice wince at the "Jackie." Jack looked at me and said,
"Join us for dinner?" and I said why not and he said, "All
right, ladies, get yourself spiffy," and twenty minutes and two
old-fashioneds later we were all in the elevator, descending to the
Rain-Bo room, my own pot of gold tucked away in a breast pocket,
Jack's twin receptacles on either side of him, exuding love, need,
perfume, promise, and lightly controlled confusion; also present:
Hubert, the troll protecting all treasures.

For purposes of polite camouflage, Kiki clutched my
arm as we moved toward Jack's corner table in the large room.

"You know," she said to me softly, "Jack
gave me a gift just before we came down."

"No, I didn't know."

"Five hundred dollars."

"That's a lovely gift."

"In a single bill."

"A single bill. Well, you don't see many of
them."

"I never saw one before."

"I hope you put it in a safe place."

"Oh, I did, I'm wearing it."

"Wearing it?"

"In my panties."

Two days later Kiki would take the bill—well
stained by then not only with her most private secretions, but also
with Jack's—to Madame Amalia, a Spanish gypsy crone who ran a
tearoom on Hudson Avenue, and paid the going fee of twenty-five
dollars for the hex of a lover's erstwhile possession, hex that would
drive the wedge between man and wife. Knowing whose wife was being
hexed and wedged, Madame Amalia was careful not to make the
five-hundred-dollar bill disappear.

"Did you see the new picture of me and Jack?"
Alice asked me across the table.

"No, not yet."

"We had it taken this week. We never had a good
picture of us together, just the ones the newspapermen snap."

"You have it there, do you?"

"Sure do." And she handed it over.

"It's a good picture all right."

"We never even had one taken on our honeymoon."

"You're both smiling here."