Legs - William Kennedy

by William Kennedy

  I liked him in that context, probably because of the contrast. I no longer think it strange that Jack had both kinds—Fogarty kind, Murray kind—working for him. Jack lived a long time, for Jack, and I credit it to his sense of balance, even in violent matters, even in the choice of killers and drivers, his sense that all ranges of the self must be appeased, and yet only appeased, not indulged. I make no case for Jack as a moderate, only as a man in touch with primal needs. He read them, he answered them, until he stopped functioning in balance. That's when the final trouble began.

  Charlie Northrup drove his car to the Biondo farm at dusk to keep his appointment with Jack. Fogarty said Murray and Oxie were on the porch, rocking in the squeaky, green rockers while Jack waited inside.

  "I don't go inside," Charlie said at the foot of the steps.

  "Then you wait there," Murray said, and he went for Jack, who came out through the screen door and walked down the stairs and put his hand out to shake Charlie's hand. But it wasn't there.

  "Never mind jerking me off," Charlie said. "Get to the point."

  "Don't talk nasty, Charlie," Jack said, "or I'll forget we're brothers. "

  "Brothers. You got some rotten fucking way of being a brother. What you done to me, you're a bum in my book, a bum in spades."

  "Listen, Charlie. I got something to say to you. I ought blow your face off. Anybody talks to the federals has a right to get their face blown off, isn't that so?"

  Fogarty said Charlie shut up at that point, that he obviously didn't think Jack knew.

  "I got some good friends who happen to be federals," Jack said.

  Charlie kept quiet.

  "But the way I look at it, Charlie, I blow your face off and I lose all that money I'd have had if the federals didn't pick up my cargo. And what I figure is, set up a working relationship with Charlie and he'll pay me back what I lost. All we do is cooperate and the problem is solved."

  "Cooperate," said Charlie, "means I give you my shirt and kiss your ass for taking it."

  "Partners, Charlie. That's what I got in mind. Partners in an expanding business. I produce the business, you provide the product. We split seventy-thirty till you pay off the debt, then we reduce it, fifty-fifty, because we're brothers. Business doubles, triples at higher prices and a locked-up market. It's brilliant, Charlie, brilliant."

  "You know I got partners already. They're nobody's patsies."

  "I take the risk about your partners."

  "I don't want no part of you," Charlie said. "I wouldn't hold onto you in an earthquake."

  Charlie stopped walking. They were under the maples, a few feet from the porch, Jack in a tan suit and Charlie in his sweat shirt.

  "I said it before, Jack. Stuff it up your ass. You're not talking to a man without power. Play with me you're not playing with some apple-knocker up here, some dummy saloonkeeper. You know my friends. I'm done talking about it."

  He walked away from Jack, toward his car.

  "You stupid fucking donkey," Jack said, and he looked up at Oxie and Murray, who stood up and pointed their pistols at Charlie. Fogarty remembered only his own rocker squeaking at that point. He kept rocking until Murray gave him the gesture and then he got out of the chair and in behind the wheel of Northrup's car and drove it back into the garage with Oxie and Murray inside it holding their pistols against Charlie's belly. Fogarty remembered Jack climbing the porch steps and watching them all get in the car.

  "Now, Charlie," he said, "you got to get a lesson in manners."

  * * *

  Murray always wore steel-toed shoes and I never knew that either until Fogarty told me this whole story. He used a gun or the long, pointed, three-cornered file he carried (his improvement on the ice pick Flossie remembered) when necessary, but he used his feet when he could. The story is he took lessons from a French killer he met in jail and who used to box savate style. Murray had the rep of being able to kill you with one kick.

  He kicked Charlie in the belly as soon as they got out of the car. Charlie doubled up but charged Murray head down, two hundred and forty pounds of wild bull. Murray sidestepped and kicked Charlie in the leg. Charlie crashed into a wall and bounced off it like a rubber rhino. Murray the shrimp gave a high kick and caught Charlie under the chin, and as Charlie wobbled, Murray kicked him in the kneecap and he went down. Murray kicked him in the groin, creased his face, crunched his nose with the side of his shoe. He danced around Charlie, kicking elbows, ribs, shins, calves, and thighs, kicking ass and back and then kicking Charlie's face lightly, left foot, right foot, lightly but still a kick, drawing blood, rolling the head from side to side like a leaky soccer ball.

  * * *

  Fogarty left the garage and went inside the house. He poured himself a double whiskey and stood looking at a fly on the front screen door. Jack and Kiki came down the stairs, Jack carrying Kiki's suitcase.

  "Can I see you, Jack?" he said and they went out on the porch, and Fogarty said, "I don't need that stuff going on back there. That cocksucker's not going to leave any face on the man. "

  "All right. The Goose and Oxie can handle it alone."

  "The Goose is a fucking maniac. He oughta be in a cage."

  "The Goose knows what he's doing. He won't hurt him too bad."

  "He's gonna kill him. You said you didn't want to kill him."

  "The Goose won't kill him. He's done this before."

  "He's a sick son of a bitch."

  "Listen, don't get your balls out of joint. Drive us to town. Have a drink in the village while we have dinner. Change your mood."

  So Fogarty drove them in, and Jack checked Kiki in at the Saulpaugh to get her away from the farm. He moved her around like a checker. Fogarty drove Jack back to his own house at midnight and went to sleep himself on the porch sofa where he was awakened at two in the morning by the private buzzer, the one under the second porch step. Jack was at the door almost as soon as Fogarty got himself off the soda. Jack was wide awake, in his red silk pajamas and red silk robe. It was Oxie at the door.

  "Northrup's shot," Oxie said.

  "Who shot him?"

  "Murray."

  "What the hell for?"

  "He had to. He acted up."

  "'Where are they?"

  "In Northrup's car, in the driveway."

  "You half-witted cocksucker, you brought him here?"

  "We didn't want to leave him no place."

  "Get him over to the farm. I'll meet you there in ten minutes."

  Fogarty pulled up behind the Northrup car which Oxie had parked in shadows on the farm's entrance road.

  "He looks dead," Jack said when he looked at Charlie's crumpled frame in the back seat. The seat was full of blood near his head.

  "He ain't peeped," Murray said. "I think he's a cold fishy."

  Jack picked up Charlie's hand, felt it, dropped it.

  "What happened?"

  "I was past Newburgh when he got the rope off," Murray said.

  "Who tied him up?"

  "Me," said Murray.

  "He got free and swung a tire iron and hit me in the neck," Murray said. "Almost broke my neck."

  "I was followin' in our car and I saw him swerve, almost go in a ditch," Oxie said.

  "Where'd he get a tire iron?"

  "It musta been down behind the seat," Murray said. "It wasn't on the floor when we put him in."

  Jack kept nodding, then threw up his hands in a small gesture.

  "You had to shoot him?"

  "It was only one shot, a fluke. What am I supposed to do about a guy with a tire iron?"

  "You're a fucking maniac. You know what this could cost me? Front pages. Not to mention a fucking war." He hit the roof of the car with his fist.

  "What do we do with him?" Oxie asked.

  "Get some weights, we'll put him in the river," said Murray.

  "Goddamn this," Jack said. He kicked Northrup's fender. Then he said, "No, the river he could float up. Take him in the woods and bury him. No, wait, they could st
ill find the son of a bitch. I want no evidence on this. Burn him."

  "Burn him?" Fogarty said.

  "Use the fire out at the still. You can make it as big as you want, nobody pays attention." And then he said to Fogarty, "If he's dead, he's dead, right? A lump of mud."

  "What about Jesse and his kids?"

  "Go see them. Tell them to stay away from the still tonight."

  "You can't burn a man's body in that pit out there," Fogarty said. "It's big but not that big. "

  "I'll take care of that," Murray said. "I'll trim off the edges."

  "Christ Almighty."

  "Try not to burn down the woods," Jack said. "When you're done, let me know. And you won't be done till there's nothing left, even if it takes two days. And then you clean out the pit and sift the ashes and smash the teeth and the bones that don't burn, especially the teeth. And scatter the pieces and the dust someplace else."

  "Gotcha," said Murray. It was his kind of night.

  "Speed, you better give 'em a hand," Jack said. "Drive and stand guard. He don't have to touch anything," Jack told Murray.

  "What does he ever touch?" Murray said.

  Fogarty's stomach was burbling as he drove Northrup's car inside the barn. Murray said he needed a lot of newspapers, and so Fogarty went into the house and got some and told Jesse to stay clear of the still until he was told he could go back. Fogarty walked slowly back to the barn, feeling like he might puke. When he saw what Murray had already done to Charlie with the hatchet, it shot out of him like a geyser.

  "Tough guy," Murray said.

  * * *

  "Marcus," Kiki said from the other end of the phone, and it was the first time she called me that, "I'm so damn lonely."

  "Where's your friend?"

  "I thought you might know. "

  "I haven't seen him since the night I took you to dinner."

  "I've seen him twice since then. Twice in seventeen days. He's up in the country with her all the time. Christ, what does he see in that fat old cow? What's the matter with me? I wash my armpits."

  "He's all business these days. He'll turn up."

  "I'm getting bedsores waiting. What he don't know is I'm not waiting anymore. I'm going into a new show. I just couldn't cut it anymore, sitting, waiting. Maybe he sees me dancing again he'll think twice about playing titball with his fat-assed wife. I bet when she takes off her brassiere they bounce off her toes. "

  Kiki was tight, another road to power.

  "What's the show and when does it open? I wouldn't miss that. "

  "Smiles is the name of it, and I do one routine by myself, a tap number. It's swell, Marcus, but I'd rather make love."

  "Sure. Had any more visits from Jimmy Biondo?"

  "Nobody visits me. Why don't you come down to the city and see me? Just to talk, now. Don't let the little lady give you the wrong impression. "

  "Maybe I will," I said, "next time I'm down there on business."

  I had no pressing business in New York, but I made it a point to go, and I presume it was for the same reason I'd helped old Jesse frame a new identity for himself and then got him a job in Boston—because I was now addicted to entering the world of Jack Diamond as fully as possible. I was unable not to stick around and see how it all turned out. And yes, I know, even as a spectator, I was condoning the worst sort of behavior. Absolute worst. I know, I know. I called Jack when I decided to go down, for I had no wish to put myself in the middle of the big romance.

  "Great," he said. "Take her to a movie. I'll be down Friday and we'll all go out."

  "You know I still have some of your belongings."

  "Hang onto them."

  "I'd rather not."

  "Only for a little while more. "

  "A very little while."

  "What's the problem'? They taking up too much room?"

  "Only in my head."

  "Clean out your head. Go see Marion."

  So I did and we went to dinner and talked and talked, and then I took her to see Garbo in Flesh and the Devil in a place that hadn't yet converted to talkies. Kiki was a Garbo fanatic and looked on herself as a femme fatale even though she was nothing of the sort. The main thing she had in common with Garbo was beauty. There is a photo of Garbo at fifteen that has something of Kiki about it, but after that the ladies were not playing the same game. "The spiritually erotic rules over the sensually erotic in her life," an astrologist once said of Garbo, which was a pretty fair critical summary of her movie self at least.

  Kiki was something else: a bread-and-butter sensualist, a let's-put-it-all-on-the-table-folks kind of girl. She actually enjoyed the feeling of being wicked. In the movie Garbo rushes to save her two loves from a duel, repentant that she started it all as a way of simplifying her choice between them. She falls through the ice on the way and it's good-bye Greta. Kiki leaned over to me and whispered, "That's what you get for being a good girl. "

  Kiki started out with the glitter dream, a bathing beauty at fifteen, a Follies' girl at eighteen, a gangster's doll at twenty. She yearned for spangles and got them quickly, then found she didn't really want them except for what they did for her head. They preserved her spangly mood. She was in spangles when she met Jack at the Club Abbey during his fugitive time, and he loved them almost as much as he loved her face.

  "I always knew exactly how pretty I was," she told me, "and I knew I could write my own ticket in show business, even though I don't dance or sing so great. I don't kid myself. But whatever you can get out of this business with good looks, I'm going to get. Then when I met Jack it changed. My life started going someplace, someplace weird and good. I wanted to feel that good thing in me, and when I did it with Jack, I knew I didn't care about show business except as a way to stay alive and keep myself out front. I'm Jack's girl, but that's not all I am, and supposing he drops me? But I know he won't do that because what we have is so great. We go out, me and Jack, out to the best places with the best people, rich people, I mean, society people, famous people like politicians and actors and they fall all over us. I know they envy us because of what we've got and what we are. They all want to make sex with us and kiss us and love us. All of them. They look up my dress and down my front and touch me any place they can, stroke my wrist or hair or pat my fanny and say excuse me, or take my hand and say something nice and stupid, but it's all an excuse to touch. And when practically everybody you come across does this to you, women too, then you know you're special, maybe not forever, but for now. Then you go home and he puts it up in you and you wrap around him and you come and he comes, and it mixes up together and it's even greater than what was already great, but it's still the same fantastic thing. You're in love and you're wanted by everybody, and is anything ever better than that? One night, when Jack was in me, I thought, Marion, he's not fucking you, he's fucking himself. Even then I loved him more than I'd ever loved anything on earth. He was stabbing me and I was smothering him. We were killing everything that deserved to die because it wasn't as rich as it could be. We were killing the empty times, and then we'd die with them and wake up and kill them again until there wasn't anything left to kill and we'd be alive in a way that you can never die when you feel like that because you own your life and nothing can ruin you.

  "And then he leaves me here for seventeen days and keeps track of everygoddamnbody I buy a paper off or smile at in the lobby, and so I stay in and practice my dance steps and listen to Rudy Vallee and Kate Smith, and I don't even have a view of the park because Jack doesn't want to be a target from the trees. This is a nice little suite and all, and do I mean little. Because you can lose your mind staying in two rooms, and so I fix my hair and pluck my eyebrows. I know when every hair in my eyebrows first pokes its way out. I watch it grow. I take a hot bath and I rub myself off to forget what I want. One day I did that four times and that's not healthy for a young person like me and I'll tell you straight, I'm to the point where I'm not going to be so damn particular who's inside me when I want to feel that good thing
. But I never cheated on him yet, and I don't want to. I don't want to leave him, and that's the God's truth. I almost said I can't leave him, but I know I can. I can leave if I want. But I don't want to leave. That's why I took the job in Smiles. To show him I can leave him, even when I don't want to."

  * * *

  At 9:30 P.M. on Saturday, October 11, 1930, three men, later identified as members of the Vincent Coll gang, walked into the Pup Club on West Fifty-first Street in Manhattan. One walked up to the short one-eyed man at the bar and said softly to him, "Murray?" The one-eyed man turned on his stool and faced two guns.

  "You're out, Murray," the man who had spoken to him said, and the other two fired six bullets into him. Then they left.

  An hour and a half later, in an eighth-floor room at the Monticello Hotel, across the hall from the room occupied by Marion Roberts, two men stepped off the elevator at the same time that two others were touching the top step of the stairs leading to the eighth floor. The four fanned out into the cul-de-sacs of the hallways and returned to the elevator with an all clear, and Jimmy Biondo stepped out past a blanched elevator man. The five men, Jimmy at the center, walked down the hall to Room 824 and knocked three times, then twice, then once, and the door opened on Jack Diamond in shirtsleeves, a pistol on the arm of the chair he was sitting in. Count Duschene said he stood to Jack's left, and at other points around the room were the men who had confronted Murray earlier in the evening: Vincent Coll, Edward (Fats McCarthy) Popke, and Hubert Maloy.

  "Hey, Jimmy," Jack said. "Glad you could come. How you getting along?"

  Pear-shaped Jimmy, still mistrusting the room, stared at all faces before settling on Jack's and saying, "Whatayou got to offer aside from my money?"

  "Sit down, Jimmy, chair there for you. Let's talk a little."

  "Nothing to talk about. Where's the money?"

  "The money is in good hands. Don't worry about that."

  "Whose good hands?"

  "What's the difference if it's safe'?"

  "Never mind the horseshit, where's the money'?"