William Kennedy - Roscoe

He finished her off, then left her to sleep away her loathing. He walked out the back door of the main lodge and into the woods, took a circuitous path to the boathouse, and when he looked back at the city of Tristano he could not see any aura of fantasia, nor could he believe there ever was such a thing. Your only fantasia, Roscoe, is your gullibility.

He untethered the outboard motorboat and rode it almost across the lake, where it sputtered and stopped, out of gas. He dropped anchor, dove into the water, swam the last hundred yards to the steamer dock, then walked to the railroad station at North Creek. With damp money he bought a ticket back to Albany, where ecstasy was the impossible love of Veronica, plus two dozen oysters at Keeler’s.

“You were always a malicious bitch,” Veronica was saying to Pamela in the courtroom, “but this is an evil act.”

“I only want what is mine,” Pamela said.

“Gilby is not yours and never was.” Veronica turned to see if the boy was still at the table, and lowered her voice. “Do you even know who his father is?”

“Oh, I do indeed.”

“Your dead Russian never accepted him.”

“What is your point, Veronica? Do you have secret information about his father? By all means, let me in on it.” Pamela was smiling.

“You won’t get this boy.”

“We’ll see, won’t we?”

“Veronica,” said Roscoe, “there’s nothing to be gained by this. She’ll do what she’ll do, and we’ll overthrow it.”

“Still slobbering after her,” Pamela said, “like the fat little Roscoe you always were. And still so insufferably smart. But you know better than anyone what you’ll never have and never be. I love how that must torture you.”

“My torture ends, Pamela,” Roscoe said, “when you leave the room.”

Gilby stood up from his chair and Pamela walked to him.

“We will be together, my darling one,” she said for all to hear, and she embraced him. “I love you and I’ll take care of you forever.”

“I don’t even like you,” Gilby said.

Pamela stood away from him.

“You will,” she said, “you’ll love your mother. Remember that I love you.”

“You’re not my mother,” Gilby said.

“Cut your losses,” Roscoe said to Pamela. “Go home and put a dagger in what’s left of your heart.”

In Pamela’s face Roscoe saw raw malice, malignant need. Elisha was right: she was desperate, would do anything to attain her goal. But despite this lawsuit, her goal wasn’t necessarily Gilby’s custody. She confirmed that when she whispered to Veronica, “It’s a wise child that knows its father.”

Roscoe sat alone in Keeler’s Sadler Room, beneath a W. Dendy Sadler print of twelve happy and fat old monks being served a sumptuous supper by six sullen and thin young monks. When he ate, Roscoe identified with the fat monks. On the room’s walls were dozens of other Sadler prints of eighteenth-century English men, and now and then women, always celebrating or ritualizing, or pensive or bereaved, amid food and drink. Roscoe dipped an oyster cracker into his cocktail sauce, well into his second splendid bottle of Cheval Blanc, and five oysters into his second dozen of bluepoints. Would he go for a third dozen? He would consider it, for this might be his last meal in the civilized world. Now he stopped dwelling on oysters to consider the news just given to him by O.B., who was sitting across the table with Mac, the odor of witch hazel, O.B.’s aftershave lotion, mixing with the aroma of cocktail sauce, not a happy fusion. The news also was not happy: the Dutchman, proper name Vernon Van Epps, a pimp with a nightclub, had been found murdered in his flat upstairs over his Hudson Avenue club, the Double Dutch.

“Two dozen stab wounds, back and chest,” O.B. said.

“I’m cheering,” Mac said.

“Don’t cheer too loud,” O.B. said.

“He was a worthless bag of chicken guts,” Mac said. “They should bury him in pig shit.”

“You didn’t care for him,” Roscoe said.

“He was a no-good fat fuck,” Mac said.

“Keep this up,” O.B. said, “they’ll lock you up for it.”

“What’d he do to you, Mac?”

“He took Mac’s girlfriend off the street and put her to work in his bar,” O.B. said. “Then she wasn’t Mac’s girl anymore.”

“Are you talking about Pina?” Roscoe asked. “Giuseppina?”

“Pina,” Mac said.

“She’s a working girl,” Roscoe said. “She’s been on the street ever since I know her.”

“Right,” Mac said, “but she came home to me.”

“Touching,” said O.B. “The Dutchman was informing for the Governor’s people. He probably told them about the Division Street payoffs. The troopers found him dead.”

“Who said he was informing?”

“A plainclothes trooper, Dory Dixon. He’s an inspector and was making it his investigation. Our beat cop, Eddie Miller, saw trooper cars and called the desk. I went down and they got guards at the Dutchman’s door. ‘Wait a minute,’ I say, ‘this is still Albany. Who the hell are you to set up guards without us?’ Dixon says somebody killed their informant. ‘Maybe so,’ I say, ‘but they killed him in my town, and this is my investigation from this minute on, and my coroner is in charge, and the coroner, as you goddamn well know, can arrest you if he’s in the right mood, so get your troops the fuck out of here and if you’re nice I’ll let you sit in on the autopsy.’ He was boiling, but he pulled off his guards. I called Nolan and he came down and took the body over to Keegan’s.”

“They probably think we did it,” Roscoe said.

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” said O.B.

“We didn’t, did we?”

“Not that I know of,” said O.B.

“You tell Patsy?”

“I couldn’t find him. That’s why I came here.”

“He’s up in Troy for a chicken fight. He and Bindy are going at it.”

“You want me to go up and tell him?”

“I’ll go,” Roscoe said. “I was going to sign myself into the hospital after my oysters.”

“Them goddamn things’d put anybody in the hospital. What do you mean, hospital?”

“The pains from the accident. They don’t go away.”

“You go to the hospital, then. You go, and let me find Patsy.”

“No, I want to see him and Bindy both on this.”

“You got a ride to Troy? You want a car?”

“Bart’s coming here to take me to the hospital.”

“Where’s Manucci?”

“He went to New York to get Alex. You have a clue who did this?”

“Anybody can stab a pimp,” O.B. said.

“Pimps need to be stabbed,” Mac said.

“Whoever it was knew him pretty well. He was in bed, naked.”

“You find the weapon?”

“We found a lot of clean knives,” O.B. said. “No money in his wallet. The whole place ransacked. He must’ve had five thousand dirty pictures.”

“Robbed and stabbed,” Mac said, “and he dies naked, broke, full of holes, and covered with blood. I like it.”

The Game Game

Patsy and Bindy McCall were born into short-heel cockfighting, “short-heel” referring to the modest inch-and-a-quarter length of the needle-pointed spurs, or gaffs, their birds wore to fight. The boys’ grandfather, Butter McCall, had owned the Bull’s Head tavern on the Troy Road, where chickens and bareknucklers battled from mid-century; and their father, Jack McCall, grew up serious about chickens. Then, in 1882, Butter sold the tavern to Bucky O’Brien, who kept on with the ’knucklers but didn’t like chickens. Elisha’s grandfather Lyman also bred birds and fought them at the Bull’s Head, which was where the first interlocking of the McCall and Fitzgibbon families took place, the alliance that would control city politics far into the next century.