William Kennedy - Roscoe

Are you in business in Albany?

A:

I have no business in Albany.

Q:

Are you in business anywhere else?

A:

No, sir.

Q:

How do you make a living?

A:

I am vague on that.

Q:

How did you formerly make a living?

A:

I ran my father’s saloon until the Volstead Act closed it.

Q:

You haven’t worked since 1920? How do you live?

A:

I do a little betting on horses and prizefights.

Q:

On baseball pools?

A:

I refuse to answer because it might degrade or incriminate me.

Q:

You make a living on betting?

A:

That and what I owe.

Q:

How can you make a living on what you owe?

A:

A good many people do that.

Q:

Have you ever heard of the Albany baseball pool?

A:

I am vague on that.

Q:

Do you know a man named Warren Skaggs?

A:

I am vague on that.

Q:

Did you know anyone named Skaggs connected to a baseball pool?

A:

I am vague on that.

The judge found him guilty of contempt and sentenced him to six months in a federal jail in Manhattan. No other charges were brought, for only Skaggs’s word linked Patsy to the pool. Artie, some of whose accountants and young-lady pluggers testified against him to avoid jail, was convicted and sentenced to six years, the start of his enmity toward Patsy over the imbalance of justice. Warren Skaggs was fined five thousand dollars and given a year’s suspended sentence.

Skaggs felt less than welcome in Albany after his testimony against Artie and Patsy, so he sold his printing plant, plus the rights to his defunct Sentinel, for a pittance to the only buyer who dared be interested, Artie’s son, Roy, who had been a Sentinel scandal editor before Patsy took over the pool.

Was Roscoe disturbed by the plugging? It did seem less than sporting. But can one sensibly retreat to the moral high ground when major money is on the table? Roscoe’s cut made him flush enough to dabble in racehorses with Elisha and Veronica, but his cut was minuscule compared with Patsy’s, which was bundled and banked out of state in Wilkes-Barre under various names, and held in readiness for the next Democratic crisis. What did Patsy do for himself with his new millions? He left larger tips at Keeler’s and the Elks Club bar, let ward leaders steal more than last year, bet heavier on chickens, and bought a new Panama hat.

Roy Flinn continued the Skaggs printing business and in 1943 asked Roscoe if the organization would let him resurrect the long-dead Sentinel as a patriotic sheet covering local people in military service, plus local gossip in and out of the courts, but absolutely no political content. Roscoe and Roy had been classmates at Christian Brothers Academy, an Albany military high school, and because of that connection, and still smarting with guilt over Artie, Roscoe persuaded Patsy to give Roy the okay. Roy ran the paper with two reporters and a photographer, and also wrote the anonymous “Ghost Rider” himself.

Roscoe halted at the door to the Sentinel and took six deep breaths, his usual tactical pause to retreat from rage. First find out what Roy knows, for he does tell secrets.

Roy Flinn’s Secret

In their senior year of high school, Roy came to Roscoe’s house to tell him that he had a chancre, a gift from the eighteen-year-old girl he’d been boffing, with modifiers, four times a week, and who told him one night, Roy, gimme it for real, and who turned up at the side door of Roy’s house on Christmas Day with a predictable second gift, asking for help getting rid of it.

Roy came to Roscoe because Roscoe knew people, and Roscoe talked to Patsy, who recommended an Arbor Hill doctor who said, sure, thirty bucks up front, which Roy and the girl did not have. So she got some how-to-do-it advice elsewhere, waited until her parents left town, then went at it in the cellar with assorted implements and a piece of wire, sitting on a spread of newspapers. After a while she strapped herself to keep the blood from staining the world and called in sick at Marie’s Millinery on North Pearl Street, where she sold ladies’ hats.

When she could function she went to Roy’s and brought him home, opened the door of her furnace, and showed him how she had burned the bloody papers but not the baby. “He don’t burn,” she said. Roy took out the fetus, stoked the fire with wood, and heaped on the coal, terrified that the girl’s father might walk in and murder him on the spot. He wrapped the unburned baby in a blanket of newspaper and put it on the flaming coals with a shovel. Soon there was a strong odor in the cellar, said Roy. He kept feeding the fire, and after a few hours there was nothing at all among the coals. Roy still had his chancre, however. And arsenic, mercury, bismuth, and shame were his treatment for years afterward.

He never married, was rejected by the army in the Great War, and turned into a peephole columnist, voyeur at the sex games his trauma had kept him from playing. You are one sad bastard, and it could happen to anybody, Roy, but that’s no excuse. Roscoe whistled his way into the news office at the front of the print shop.

“Roy Flinn, where the hell are you?” Roscoe called out jovially as he entered. He saluted two reporters typing at their desks and saw Roy emerge from the back room with a handful of galleys. Tieless, in shirtsleeves, fingers stained with printer’s ink, Roy Flinn was an angular, bony figure, his hair plastered down with Vaseline, a twisted and bitter freak of fate.

“Roscoe, you rascal,” said Roy, “what brings you here? You have some news for me?”

“News? What would you do with news, Roy? You know less about news than my sister, who thinks Wilson is still President. You find your news scrawled on public-toilet walls. Even your saintly sister, Arlene, is repelled by your sheet. News, Roy? I’m stunned you can even use the word in a sentence.”

“Roscoe, old mushmouth, I’ve heard your song before. Why are you here?”

“Why do geese run funny, Roy? I’m here because your scurrilous scribbles summoned me.”

“The item on the Fitzgibbon custody suit?”

“That suit is public record. I’m talking about your innuendo on Goddard, and that Elisha committed suicide.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Roy, I am fluent in the English language, and you are fluent in the language of pollywogs.”

Roscoe pulled the Sentinel out of his pocket and read from the “Ghost Rider” item: “‘Remember Mayor Goddard dying strangely in Havana in 1928?. Speaking of grave matters, Ghost Rider hears a recent death from natural causes looks like suicide!’ Dying strangely, grave matters, and suicide. I consider that innuendo, Roy.”

“Goddard’s death was never explained and you know it.”

“He died of an infection.”

“After he fell out of a car.”

“He was drunk,” Roscoe said. “Drunks fall out of cars. Drunks fall out of bed.”

“A lot of people thought it was strange.”

“I find it strange that you bring it up in context with Elisha and then add that insidious suicide item.”

“That item has nothing to do with Elisha.”

“Who, then?”

“I can’t reveal that.”

Roscoe grabbed a handful of Roy’s shirtfront, shoved him against a wall. “Are you invoking constitutional privilege here, Roy? Or claiming protection under the sacrosanctity of journalistic ethics? What are you talking about?”