William Kennedy - Roscoe

At 4:30 a.m., a dark-red Packard sedan that had been idling with its lights out a block to the north, moved up to the curbstone in front of 67 Dove. O.B. and Mac got out and went up the stoop, into the house, past the ported plant in the hall, and up to the second-floor-front room where Jack lay sprawled in sleep. Mac and O.B. shone their flashlights in Jack’s face and pointed their.38s at his head.

Roscoe and Jack

From the Times-Union and Knickerbocker Press, both delivered to his room at the Ten Eyck, Roscoe learned of Jack Diamond’s murder at 4:30 a.m., police not called until 6:55 a.m. The police Teletype was silent all morning: no messages sent to State Police or any other police agency to announce the killing, or to ask for help in finding the killers. The State Police had to confirm Diamond’s death by calling the newspapers, which wrote that it was a gangland slaying, and probably we’ll never know the truth. So many out there who wanted vengeance on the man. Whoever did it, give him a medal, one cop said.

Yet hadn’t Jack neutralized or eliminated those old enmities? He behaved as if he had, running free like a public man, playing pinochle, drinking, dancing, partying with friends, talking of a Florida vacation, spending those late hours with his light o’ love, Kiki — not an unusual way for a liberated man to celebrate. Jack wasn’t living in some psychic cave of fear. He went to his bed ready to wake into a new day of freedom from justice. But he went to his bed alone, in Albany. Mistakes. You usually ride them out, and Jack the nimble, Jack the quick, had ridden many. But now he’s Jack the dead, and a mystery is here. Why did he go it alone?

Roscoe dwelled on that silent police Teletype. Why ask for help in solving a murder when you know who did it? Jack back in Albany: didn’t he believe O.B. about leaving town? Here’s the new message: “Welcome back, Jack. Patsy sends his best.” Roscoe would hear the story more than once from O.B., never from silent Mac. Unsolved murder. Everybody knew the rumor, but who dared say it out loud?

Roscoe saw himself as an accessory in bringing Jack’s life to a close. So many people discover ways to destroy themselves — Elisha, maybe Pina, and Jack — and sometimes we help them along. Roscoe had liked Jack, an excessive fellow, deadly, yet a charmer. But Jack had become careless, a thief all his life, a creature of fraud and deceit, walking around for years with an open wound of the soul (many have it), plus all those body wounds, and then behaving as if he was just another legitimate citizen with nothing to fear, a man who could do what he couldn’t, be what he wasn’t. That’s the way to bet, of course, and who knows better than Roscoe? Go for the impossible. But now Jack knows: sometimes the impossible is impossible.

Prelude to a Whore

Mac pulled the car into the driveway of the Notchery, blocking access to the side door of the old three-story roadhouse that once was the Come On Inn. The place was an antique with a swayback roof, cedar-shingle siding, and the promise of ribald, unsanctioned pleasure. Olive Eyes Wheeler, Mame’s beefy new bouncer, came out immediately and waved Mac away. Mac turned off the motor, and as Roscoe got out of the car he felt chest pain. Another needle in the heart to look forward to? He and Mac went up the stairs from the parking lot, and Roscoe saw Mame inside the doorway. Mac wore his suit coat to cover his pistol.

“You can’t leave that car in front of the stairs,” Olive Eyes said.

“Yes, I can,” Mac said, and he showed his shield.

“We’re looking for Bindy,” Roscoe said.

“Don’t know anybody by that name,” the bouncer said.

“Very good, Olive. You should look for work in the movies. Tell Mame Roscoe is here to see Mr. McCall.”

Roscoe could hear violin music, classical, maybe Bach? Who could tell in this heat? He walked through the doorway and Mac followed. Mame had vanished. Olive Eyes bolted the door, still fitted with the steel kick-plate that had slowed down several break-ins by dry agents during Prohibition. The old walnut bar was still in place, and bartender Renny Kilmer, who’d had the yearning but not the brass to be a pimp and made a career compromise by working as Mame’s bartender, was sitting behind the bar reading the year’s hot novel Forever Amber.

The inn’s modest dance hall had been expanded to create the main parlor, where a three-piece band entertained Fridays and Saturdays, solo upright piano every night but Sunday, when the Notchery closed to honor the Sabbath. The area bordering the dance floor was covered by a maroon-and-purple Oriental rug that was impractical for spilling beer and throwing up on, but Mame had chosen it for its elite tones. One of her regulars, an architect, had redesigned the place in exchange for several months of free visitations, and had bought artwork for the walls, female nudes by Degas, Goya, Renoir, Botticelli. You could order a whore on the half-shell for an extra five.

The violin music upstairs continued — very fine stuff, Roscoe decided. Why am I listening to fine stuff in a whorehouse? It wasn’t the radio — they don’t allow one — and it wouldn’t be on the jukebox. Another mystery.

Two women in transparent white panties, negligees, and white high-heeled slippers were sitting in the cones of two electric fans near the jukebox. A dozen arm- and armless chairs and two sofas, where the whores waited for, or sat on, customers, were spaced along the walls. One of Mame’s regulars, whom Roscoe knew only as Oke, a retired insurance salesman, was dancing to the violin music (a Bach partita, yes) with the whore Roscoe knew as the Blue Pigeon. The Pigeon could drink a fifth of whiskey in an evening and stay aloft. Her negligee was off both shoulders to ensure contact of her very contactable breasts with the naked chest of Oke, whose blue shirt was open from throat to belt. The two whores in armchairs stood up for the arrival of Roscoe and Mac, and slinked toward them.

“Pina around?” Mac asked.

The whores looked at each other, shrugged, how would we know?

“Upstairs with the fiddle player,” Oke said, breaking his stride with the Pigeon and coming over to visit. The whores zapped Oke with their eyes, couldn’t believe how stupid. Oke didn’t notice. Oke wore dentures, and the joints of his palsied hands were swollen with arthritis. His face had the deep-smiling fissures of a man who didn’t brood.

“What fiddle player is that?” Mac asked.

“Don’t know his name,” said Oke, “but can’t you hear him? Is that great fiddle? Forty years in whorehouses, I never heard anything like it.”

“What is he, a snake charmer?” Mac asked. “Plays for customers who can’t get it up?”

“If he can do that I’ll give him a job for life,” Oke said. “I couldn’t come if you called me.”

“I know how to fiddle if you’re interested,” the whore Trixie said to Roscoe. Trixie was a candidate for the beef trust if she didn’t watch her diet.

“Some other time, sweetheart,” Roscoe said. “You know where Mame went?”

“Are you a cop?” Trixie asked. And Roscoe smiled.

“Mame,” said Oke, “has the most powerful pussy in the North Atlantic states. You couldn’t get into it with a crowbar if she didn’t want you to. Then she says okay and takes you in and you can’t get out. She’s got pussy muscles doctors don’t know about.”

“You’re good friends with Mame,” Roscoe said.

“I been coming here for years, here and Lily Clark’s joint. Tell the family I’m going fishing, then stash the fishing rods in a locker at the train station and come here for the weekend. One whore, Rosie, the way she liked me you’d think I was the greatest screw in town. ‘Marry me, Oke,’ she says. ‘We’ll have fun and then you can divorce me.’ She was a hot one.”