Legs (38 page)

"You are privileged," he told them. "You
have the chance to rid this nation of one of its worst scourges. You
have the chance to put behind bars this man Diamond, this figure of
unmitigated evil, this conscienceless devil who has been arrested
twenty-five times for every crime from simple assault to foul,
vicious murder, whose association with the worst men of our time has
been widely reported in the press and whose record of having cheated
justice again and again is an appalling blot on our national image.
Shall this nation be ruled by the rod? Shall this ogre of bestial
behavior paralyze every decent man's heart? You twelve can end this
travesty, put him in the penitentiary where he belongs."

Knought breathed fury, thumped the railing of the
jury box with his fist, then walked to his chair and sat down in a
cloud of legitimized wrath.

I rose slowly from my chair alongside Jack, this
thought in my head as I did: O priggish stringbean, thank you for
befouling my client with your excremental denunciation, with the
ordurous funk of your morality, for you now give me the opportunity
to wipe this beshitted countenance clean and show the human face
beneath the fetid desecration. My image before the jury was
calculatedly bumpkinish, my clothes workingman's best, aspiring to
shabby genteel. I tweaked my bow tie and ran my fingers through my
unruly head of hair, which I was told, seemed as gifted with wild
statement as the brain it covered. The head was leonine, the mane
controlled just this side of bushy frazzle. I wore an apple-red vest,
high contrast to my baggy-kneed brown tweed suit. I tucked thumbs in
vest and unleashed the major weapon of the defense—my voice—that
timbre of significance, that resonant spume of the believer, that
majestic chord of a man consecrated to the revelation of boilingly
passionate truths. I said:

"I expect low blows from the prosecution's
lawyers—all seven of them. Are you aware, my friends, that the
state has seven lawyers climbing over one another in a frantic effort
to railroad one frail man into jail? Yes, I expected their low blows,
but never such base name calling as we have just heard—'figure of
unmitigated evil,' 'conscienceless devil,' 'ogre of bestial
behavior.' I would never have dreamed of telling you what I am about
to tell if this champion of self-righteousness had not been so
vitriolic a few moments ago, so full of acid and poison toward my
client. But I will tell you now. I will tell you of the little old
lady—no, I won't disguise her vocation, not now. A little old
Catholic nun, she was, and she came to this courtroom less than an
hour ago to talk with Jack Diamond, only a few steps from where you
are seated. She didn't see him, for he was otherwise occupied. She
saw me, however, and I will see to it that she gets her wish, for she
came here for one reason only—to see the man who was once a boy at
her knee. Jackie Diamond was the name she knew him by, a boy she
described as one of the most devout Catholic children she has ever
known. She sees that boy still in the face of the man you know as
Legs Diamond, that mythical figure of unmitigated evil the prosecutor
has invented. This woman had heard such cruel insults hurled before
at the boy she knew. She had heard them for years. She had read them
in the newspapers. But that little old woman, that creature of God
Almighty's very own army, sat down in that room with me for five
minutes and talked to me about Jackie Diamond's prayers, his prayers
for his mother, a woman who died too early, about the Diamond home
and family in Philadelphia. And when she was through with her
reminiscing she told me precisely what she thought about all those
accusations against the boy whose gaunt, troubled face she hardly
recognized when she saw it across the room. 'They're all lies. Mr.
Gorman,' she said to me, 'fiendish lies! Now that I have seen his
face for myself I know those were lies, Mr. Gorman. I teach
children, Mr. Gorman, and I have boys and girls in my charge who
delight in drowning puppies and stabbing cats and watching them
slowly perish, and I know evil when I see it in the eyes of a human
being. I came here today to see for myself whether my memory had
deceived me, whether I knew good when I saw it, whether I knew evil.
I have now seen the eyes of Jack Diamond in this room and I am as
certain as I am of God's love that whatever on earth that man may
have done, he is not an evil man. I have verified this for myself,
Mr. Gorman. I have verified it.' "

When I finished the rest of my oratory and sat down
at the table, Jack leaned over and whispered: "That nun business
was terrific. Where did you dig her up?"

"She wandered in during the recess," I
said, eyes downcast, scribbling a businesslike doodle on a yellow
pad.

"She's a regular in the courthouse. Collects
nickels for the poor."

"Does she really know anything about me?"

I looked at my client, astounded.

"How the hell should
I know?" I retorted.

* * *

The trial proceeded as the first one had in July,
with two parades of witnesses for and against Jack. We used fewer for
the defense, treading lightly after the perjury indictment from the
first trial.

I made two points I remember fondly. The first was a
countercharacterization of Streeter, who had been dubbed "a son
of the soil," by the prosecution. I had not thought to say it in
July, but we rise to our challenges, and I said he might better be
called a son of the apple tree, which once again reduced the
kidnapping to a bootleggers' feud. I also asked a juror, a wretched
little popinjay, whether he thought God loved Legs Diamond. "God
made little green apples," he said to me crisply, "but he
also put worms in 'em." He got a laugh at Jack's expense, but I
liked his theology and kept him. He wore an orange shirt and I knew
my man. He'd have been in line for Jack's autograph if he hadn't been
on the jury. He turned out to be a vigorous partisan for acquittal.
Jack was, of course acquitted, December 17, 1931 , at 8:03 P.M. The
crowd in the street sent up its usual cheer.

I was standing at Keeler's Men's Bar in Albany a week
after the trial, talking to the barman about Jack, and I resurrected
a story he told me about a day in 1927 when he was walking in Central
Park with his brother Eddie and Eddie's baby boy. Jack had the boy in
his arms, and they'd paused on a hill which I can picture even now.
Jack was tossing the boy and catching him when he saw a car coming
with a gun barrel sticking out its window, a vision to which he had
been long sensitized. He tossed the baby feet-first into a bushy blue
spruce, yelling the news to brother Ed, and both dove in the opposite
direction from the baby as the machine gun chopped up the sod where
they'd been standing.

Nobody was hit: the baby bounced off the tree and
rolled to safety under a lilac bush. And after I'd told this tale, a
fellow tippler at the bar asked, "How many people did he kill?"
I said I didn't know, and then, without apparent malice, without
actually responding to my baby story, the fellow said, "Yeah, I
remember a lot of otherwise intelligent people used to think he was a
nice guy."

I told the man he was a horse's ass and walked to the
other end of the bar to finish my drink. Intelligent people? The man
was an insurance salesman. What could he possibly know about
intelligent people?

I am bored by people who keep returning life to a
moral plane, as if we were reducible, now, to some Biblical concept
or its opposite, as if all our history and prehistory had not
conditioned us for what we've become. It's enough to make a moral
nigger out of a man. The niggers are down there, no doubt about it.
But Jack didn't put them there and neither did I. When we get off the
moral gold standard, when the man of enormous wealth is of no more
importance to anybody than the man in rags, then maybe we'll look
back at our own day as a day of justifiable social wrath.

Meantime, the game is rising, not leveling.

Jack taught me that.

Cured me.

(Brother Wolf, are you listening?)

Dove Street runs north and south in Albany through
what for years was the rooming house district on the fringe of
downtown. Number 67 sits on the west side of the street between
Hudson Avenue and Jay Street, a two-story brick building with a
six-step wooden stoop, a building not unlike the house on East Albert
Street in Philadelphia where Jack lived as a child. The basement
shoemaker, the druggist up the block, the grocery and garage at the
corner of Hudson Avenue, the nurses and the masseuse next door and
across the street and all other life-support systems in the
neighborhood were dark at 4:15 A.M. on Friday, December 18, 1931,
when Jack pulled up in front of 67 Dove in his hired cab, Frankie
Teller at the wheel.

Teller parked and ran around to open the passenger
door, took Jack's arm, helped him out. Teller held the arm while Jack
stood up, and together they walked raggedly up the stoop. Jack found
his key, but it remained for Teller to open the door with it. The two
men then walked up the stairs together and into the room at the front
of the house, overlooking the street. Jack took off his hat, and
then, with Teller's help, his coat, and sat on the side of the bed,
which was angled diagonally, foot facing the windows that looked down
on the street.

"Frankie," Jack said. And he smiled at his
driver.

"Yeah, Jack."

"Frankie, I'll duke you tomorrow."

"Sure, Jack, don't worry about it."

"Duke you in the morning."

"Sure, Jack, sure. Anything else I can do for
you? You all right here alone?"

"Just get outa here and let me sleep."

"Right away. Just want you settled in all
right."

"I'm in."

"Tomorrow, then."

"Tomorrow," Jack said.

Frankie Teller went downstairs and got into his car
and drove south on Dove Street, back to Packy's to carry the news
that Jack was tucked in. A block to the north on the west side of the
street a dark red sedan idled with its lights out.

During the eight hours and fifteen minutes that
elapsed between his acquittal and the moment when he sat on the bed
and looked into the mirror of the scratched and flaking oak dresser
in his Dove Street room, Jack had been seeking an antidote to false
elation. The jury foreman's saying not guilty created an instant
giddiness in him that he recognized. He'd felt it when he saw
Streeter's truck in front of him on the road, and he felt it on the
ship when he decided not to give Biondo back his money. He could
drown in reasons for not yielding the cash and for giving Streeter
the heat. But none explained why a man would keep anything that
brought on that much trouble, or why a man would jeopardize his
entire setup in life for a truckload of cider. And so he feared the
giddiness, knew it was to be resisted.

When he'd tossed his forty-dollar brown velour hat
onto the bed, it had hit the threadbare spread and rolled off. He
folded his brown chinchilla coat (two grand, legitimately acquired)
over the footboard, and it too slipped to the floor. When he left the
courthouse and saw the newsmen backing away from him in the corridor,
saw them on the steps and in the streets with their cameras, he had
the impulse to reach into his coat pocket and find the rotten eggs to
throw at the bastards. And this was the Jack Diamond who once hired a
press agent to get his name around.

He sat on the bed, unable to see the condition of his
eyes, which were heavy-lidded with whiskey—too little light in the
room and in his brain. He squinted at the mirror, but saw only his
squint returned. He felt an irritation of the penis from his
lovemaking and adjusted his shorts where they rubbed. He remembered
Alice's kiss before he left the party, a wet one. She opened her
mouth slightly, as she always did when she had a few whiskeys in. He
reached into his pocket, felt a card, and looked at it. Packy's
speakeasy card. The Parody Association, members only. Jack had seen
it on the bar during the party, never owned one, never needed one,
but picked it up and pocketed it out of habit. There was a time when
he could enter any speakeasy on his name alone, but now people
imitated him, even made collections in his name. I'm Legs Diamond. Oh
sure, and I'm Herbert Hoover. He used the cards now because he no
longer even looked like his own pictures. Fifty people were in The
Parody when Marcus gave his victory toast, the words floating now
somewhere behind Jack's squint.

"To Jack Diamond's ability to escape from the
clutches of righteous official indignation, which would so dearly
love to murder him in his bed .... "

Fifty people with glasses in the air. Would've been
more, but Jack said keep it small, it ain't the circus. But it was,
in its own way, what with Packy and Marcus and Sal from the Kenmore,
and Hubert and Hooker Ryan the old fighter, and Tipper Kelly the
newsie, and Flossie, who came with the place.

Jack told me to bring Frances, my secretary, who
still thought Jack was the devil, even though he'd been acquitted
twice. "Show her the devil face to face," Jack said, but
when he saw her he mistrusted her face. Lovely Irish face. Reminded
Jack of his first wife, Katherine, he married in '17. Army bride.
Prettiest Irish kid you ever saw, and she left him because he used
coke. Crazy young Jack. Crazy Jack owes Marcus. Five grand. Coming in
the morning from Madden. Where would Jack Diamond be without Uncle
Owney? Pay you in the morning, Marcus. Meet you at your office at
eleven. Cash on the barrelhead. Jack would be a semifree man, walking
Albany's streets, a little less intimidated by the weight of his own
future. Maybe his head would clear now that he'd won a second
acquittal. They could go on trying him on gun charges, but Marcus
said the state boys were whipped, would never try him again with
Streeter the adversary witness. The federals were the problem, with
four years facing him and no end of other charges pending. No end,
even if he reversed the conviction with an appeal. But Jack would
worry about the federals when he got well. The immediate future lay
in South Carolina. A beachfront spot where he'd holed up when
Rothstein and Schultz were both gunning for him in '27. Beautiful old
house on a sand dune back from the ocean. Sea air good for the lungs.