William Kennedy - Legs

I called Van Deusen, who was involved in Republican county politics, as a way of beginning my assignment for Jack. In the early days of our law practice, his in Catskill, mine in Albany, I recommended him to a client who turned into very decent money for Van, and he'd been trying for years to repay the favor. I decided to give him the chance and told him to take me to lunch, which he did. We dined among men with heavy watch chains and heavier bellies. Warren, still a young man, had acquired a roll of well-to-do burgher girth himself since I'd last seen him, and when we strolled together up Main Street, I felt I was at the very center of America's well-fed, Depression complacency. It was an Indian summer day, which lightened the weight of my heavy question to Warren, that being: "What does this town think of Jack Diamond'?"

"A hero, if you can believe it," Van said. "But a hero they fear, a hero they wished lived someplace else."

"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.

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.