William Kennedy - Legs

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."

"I told Jack I wanted us to be happy together for always, even if it was only in a picture."

Despite such healthy overtness, the good Alice had pushed the lemon back and forth in front of the incense for three months, a ritual learned from her maid Cordelia, a child of Puerto Rico, where the occult is still as common as the sand and the sea. The lemon embodied Alice's bitter wish that Jack see Kiki as the witch Alice knew her to be, witch of caprice and beauty beyond Alice's understanding; for beauty to Alice was makeshift-nice clothing, properly colored hair, not being fat. And Kiki's beauty, ineffable as the Holy Ghost, was a hateful riddle.

When Jack's lucky blue suit came back from the hotel cleaners, a silver rosary came with it in the key pocket. I always suspected Alice's fine Irish Catholic hand at work in that pocket. The night of our Rain-Bo dinner Jack pulled out a handful of change when he sent Hubert for the Daily News, and when I saw the rosary I said, "New prayer implement there?" which embarrassed him. He nodded and dropped it back into his pocket.

He had examined it carefully when it turned up in that pocket, looked at its cross, which had what seemed to be hieroglyphics on it, and at the tiny sliver of wood inside the cross (which opened like a locket), wood that might well, the monsignor suggested, have been a piece of the true cross. The hieroglyphics and the sliver had no more meaning for Jack than the Hail Marys, the Our Fathers, and the Glory Bes he recited as his fingers breezed along the beads. His scrutiny of the cross was a search for a coded message from his mother, whose rosary, he was beginning to believe, had been providentially returned to him. For he remembered clearly the silver rosary on her dresser and, again, twined in her hands when she lay in her coffin. He studied it until its hieroglyphics yielded their true meaning: scratches. The sliver of wood, he decided, was too new to have been at Calvary. Piece of a toothpick from Lindy's more like it. Yet he fondled those silver beads, recited those holy rote phrases as if he, too, were rolling a lemon or hexing money, and he offered up the cheapjack stuff of his ragged optimism to the only mystical being he truly understood.