William Kennedy - Legs

"I remember," he said softly to her. "I could never forget that coat. "

Kiki watched their intimacy, then leaned toward Jack and whispered, "I've got my legs open, Jackie."

"Have you, kid?"

"Yes. And now I'm opening my nether lips."

"You are?"

"Yes. And now I'm closing them. And now I'm opening them again."

"You know, kid, you're all right. Yes, sir, you're all right."

He stood up then and said, "I'm going to dance."

Alice looked at Kiki, Kiki at Alice, the ultimate decision blooming at long last. They both looked to Jack for his choice, but he made none. He got up from his chair at last and, with his left arm swinging limply, his right shoulder curled in a way to give his movement the quality of a young man in full swagger, he headed for the dance floor where a half dozen couples were twirling about to a waltz. When Jack put a foot on the dance floor, some, then all couples stopped and the band trailed off. But Jack turned to the bandstand, motioned for the music to continue. Then he looked at Kiki and Alice, who stood just off the edge of the floor.

"My arm, Marion," he said. "Take my arm."

And while Alice's eyes instantly filled with tears at the choice, Kiki gripped Jack's all but useless left hand with her own and raised it. As she moved toward him for the dancer's embrace, he said, "My right arm, Alice," and Alice's face broke into a roseate smile of tears as she raised Jack's right hand outward.

The women needed no further instruction. They joined their own hands and stepped onto the dance floor with their man. Then, as the orchestra broke into the waltz of now and forever, the waltz that all America, all Europe, was dancing to-'"Two Hearts in Three-Quarter Time," its arithmetic obviously calculated in heaven-Alice, Marion, and Jack stepped forward into the music, into the dance of their lives.

"One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three," Jack counted. And they twirled on their own axis and spun around the room to the waltz like a perfect circle as the slowly growing applause of the entire room carried them up, up, and up into the ethereal sphere where people truly know how to be happy.

I'll spare you the details of the summer's two trials, which produced few surprises beyond my own splendid rhetoric and, in the Troy trial, a perjury indictment for one of our witnesses whose vigorous support of Jack's alibi was, alas, provably untrue. I presume the July verdict must be counted a surprise, being for acquittal of Jack on a charge of assaulting Streeter. The courtroom burst into applause and shouts when the verdict was read. Alice ran down the aisle in her lovely pink frock with the poppy print and her floppy picture hat, leaned over the rail and gave Jack a wet one with gush. "Oh, my darling boy!" And three hundred people standing outside the Rensselaer County courthouse in Troy, because there were no seats left in the courtroom, sent up a cheer heard 'round the world.

Moralists cited that cheer as proof of America's utter decadence and depravity, rooting for a dog-rat like Diamond. How little they understood Jack's appeal to those everyday folk on the sidewalk.

I must admit that the attorney general lined up an impressive supply of witnesses to prove conclusively to any logician that Jack was in Sweeney's speakeasy in Catskill the night Streeter was lifted. But once I identified Streeter as a bootlegger, the issue became a gangster argument about a load of booze, not the torture of innocence. And Jack was home free.

It wasn't so easy to confuse the issue at the federal trial in Manhattan. All that the federal lawyers (young Tom Dewey among them) had to do was connect Jack with the still, which wasn't much of a problem, and they were home free. The Catskill burghers, including my friend Warren Van Deusen, spouted for the prosecution, and so did some of Jack's former drivers; but most damning was Fogarty, who called Jack a double-crossing rat who wouldn't put up money for a lawyer, who let this poor, defenseless, tubercular henchman, who had trusted him, take the rap alone and penniless. Alice was in court again, with Eddie's seven-year-old son, a marvelously sympathetic prop, and Jack broke into genuine tears when a newsman asked him in the hallway if the boy really was his nephew. But those feds nailed our boy. My rhetoric had no resonance in that alien courtroom: too many indignant businessmen, too much faceless justice, too far from home, too much Fogarty. In an earlier trial at Catskill, the state had managed to convict Fogarty on the same Streeter charge Jack was acquitted of, which was poetic justice for the turncoat as I see it. Jack drew four years, the maximum, and not really a whole lot, but enough of a prospect to spoil the summer.

Jack had been making plans to merge with Vincent Coll and Fats McCarthy, substitute their mob for his own, refurbish the Catskill scene, and maybe put a toe in the door of the Adirondacks. But Johnny Broderick and a squad of New York dicks followed Coll's crowd up from Manhattan and raided them in Coxsackie, hauling in about a dozen. They missed Coll and McCarthy, who along with a few stragglers holed up in an artist's home in Averill Park, a crossroads summer town east of Troy, where Jack and Coll occasionally met and tried to cook up a future for themselves.

It was a depressing time for Jack. Kiki had to take an apartment away from the Kenmore when the state police began to breathe heavily around the lobby, and Alice was delighted to get rid of the competition. But Jack took Kiki out regularly and brought her back to the hotel for visits after the first trial, and Alice finally said good-bye forever, folks, and went to live in her Manhattan apartment on Seventy-second Street.

The acquittal in Troy came in early July, the federal conviction in early August, and the state announced it would try Jack on a second Streeter charge, kidnapping, in December. It was a very long, very hot summer for all of us, but especially Jack, like the predator wolf pushed ever farther from civilization by angry men, who was learning the hard way how to die.

Jack's federal conviction drove a spike of gloom into everybody. Jack insisted on trying to buy a retrial, his hangover from the days when Rothstein had money in everybody's mouth, all the way up to the Presidential cabinet. That money had bought Jack a delay on a federal charge of smuggling heroin for Rothstein, the noted bowling pin case, and Jack died without ever having to face up to the evidence against him.

"The fuckers are all the same, all the way to the top," he said to me one night. "They'll do you any favor you can pay for."

But times had changed to a certain unpredictable degree in Manhattan, especially for people like Jack. The new federal crowd was young, imbued with Seaburyism, and still unbuyable. Even if we had found somebody to buy, there was the case of the diminishing bankroll. The first thing Jack did after he got out of the Catskill jail on bail was to take the one hundred and eighty thousand dollars I'd held for him in safe deposit. That still seemed like a lot of money to me, but it wasn't for Jack. He owed everybody: me, the hospital, the doc, his barber, his waiter, the hotel, his driver, Hubert the bodyguard, infinite numbers of bartenders who would now and in the future provide him with service. He was keeping apartments in Troy, Watervliet, Albany, East Greenbush, a house in Petersburg, and probably six or eight other cities I don't know about. He was keeping Kiki. He was subsidizing Alice in Manhattan. And, and most costly of all, he was paying off politicians everywhere to keep his freedom, keeping them from infecting him with further trouble. The one hundred and eighty thousand dollars went in a few months, or so Jack said, though I think he must have kept a secret nest egg somewhere, and if he did, of course, he kept it utterly to himself. He didn't leave the egg with me. I also know Vincent Coll offered him a loan of ten thousand dollars after a nifty Coll snatch of a Saratoga gambler, and a handsome ransom of sixty-five thousand dollars; and Jack took it.