William Kennedy - Roscoe

Then Roscoe’s fading tension flared anew when Gladys came to visit. He sat with her in the garden room with all the wicker and heard her say, with a tremolo in her voice, that O.B. had put Mac on departmental leave and told him to turn in his badge and pistol; and when Mac refused, O.B. punched him, breaking his partial denture and splintering his jaw. O.B. was still furious that Mac had gone to Roscoe and thwarted his Notchery raid, never mind Roscoe’s quick-witted salvation of the harebrained disaster that didn’t quite happen, that’s irrelevant. The grave issue before us is O.B.’s authority affronted. Gladys also said O.B. asked her to go to New York with him for a weekend. When she refused him he retaliated, telling her the infamous Pina had been Mac’s personal whore “all the years he’s been sleeping with you.”

“I beg your pardon,” Gladys said. “I haven’t been sleeping with him.”

“Having chocolates and port wine, listening to Claude Thornhill and Mozart,” O.B. said. “Mac told me all about it. He said he slept with you twice a week.”

“Then he’s not an honorable man,” Gladys said.

She telephoned and screamed at Mac, who went silent, then left the receiver off the hook. “And it’s still off,” Gladys told Roscoe. She had already gone twice to Mac’s house on Walter Street, afternoon and evening, but no one answered his bell, the place was dark, and Mac’s sister downstairs didn’t know where he was.

“What do you want me to do?” Roscoe asked her.

“Find him and tell him I don’t care what he said to O.B. or did with that woman.”

“That morning Elisha died, O.B. took you home from the mill.”

“Yes.”

“You were seeing them both.”

“I only visited with O.B.,” she said. “He never stayed over.”

“Mac suspected.”

“Yes.”

“You’re a femme fatale, Gladys. Two cops on the hook.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“It was something like that.”

“I never betrayed Mac. I was always true to him.”

“In your fashion.”

“What do you know about it? Did you listen to O.B.’s lies?”

“I’m just reading between your hesitations.”

“I never let O.B. touch me.”

“But he kept trying for a breakthrough.”

“I’m sorry I asked you anything,” Gladys said, and she stood up.

“I’ll try to find him,” Roscoe said.

He sent Joey Manucci to all the bars and lunchrooms Mac frequented, checked Hattie to see if he’d sought sanctuary with her, no, then called O.B., feeling the rage he’d felt in childhood when O.B. tattled on him to Felix. O.B. knew intimately the power of the stool pigeon, indispensable ally in delivering justice to the miscreant. And justice for miscreant Mac was precisely what O.B. wanted.

“I hear you’ve gone crazy,” Roscoe said to him on the phone, “persecuting the best cop you’ve got.”

“I’d expect you to stand up for him.”

“Your ego is ridiculous, O.B. You look like a self-serving sap.”

“Patsy doesn’t think so. He likes people to obey his orders.”

“Patsy won’t back you when he hears what you told Gladys.”

“She been talking to you?”

“You run down Mac to her, you think she’ll say, Thanks a lot, honey, let’s go to bed? She loves the man, O.B.”

“She oughta know the kind of guy she’s screwing.”

“Thank you, Monsignor. Your moral stance is exemplary.”

“Keep out of this, Roscoe. This is my show.”

Discursive Critique, with Gin

Joey found Mac at the Elite Club, a onetime speakeasy on Hudson Avenue, drinking gin with Morty Besch, the ex-bootlegger who was one of the last people to see Jack Diamond alive. Until the war ended, Morty was bleaching dollar bills to print counterfeit gasoline-ration stamps on the paper, was also the Elite Club’s silent partner with his brother, Herman; for Morty, a felon, could not legally own a bar. Herman, with a withered leg, was a slave to the place. Morty’s function was to drag in customers and see that they kept drinking. Mac had known Morty for years, moonlighted with him during Prohibition, riding shotgun on his days off: pistol, rifle, and sawed-off at the ready on the Canadian booze run in Morty’s seven-passenger, armor-plated Buick. The run was up to the border for the pickup, fill the Buick’s undercarriage full of whiskey out of Montreal, then head back down to Chestertown, where the booze was offloaded into two other cars to be taken to sanctioned drops in Troy and Albany Mac got off at Chestertown, drove home in his own car, and resumed being an Albany cop noted for collaring bootleggers operating without sanction.

Joey drove Roscoe to the Elite Club and waited for him in the car. The Elite was two rooms, modest bar, pendulum clock, a calendar with a naked woman bending over the engine of an automobile, and a wall menu noting the cheese and crackers and oxtail soup you might, on one of his good days, persuade Herman to serve you. When a customer passed on the cheese and crackers and insisted on the oxtail soup, Morty sold him the unopened can. Mac and Morty were at a table in the back, a bottle of gin between them. Mac never drank gin.

“How’s your teeth?” Roscoe asked. Mac’s jaw was still swollen, two days after the fact. He needed a shave, his shirt collar soiled, two or three days in the same clothes.

“No good,” Mac said. He barely moved his mouth when he spoke.

“You go to the dentist?”

“The city gets the bill. Jawbone’s broken.”

“He can’t chew,” Morty said, “but he can drink,” and he poured gin into Mac’s glass and topped it with a splash of Vichy water. “Gin, Roscoe?”

“Make it a double. You talk to O.B. today?”

“What do you think?” Mac said.

“I think no.”

“Bong. Give the man a prize.”

Roscoe popped his gin. “You been telling Morty your life story?”

“Morty knows it all.”

“No secrets at this table,” Roscoe said.

“None.”

“I was talking to Gladys.”

“O.B., the bastard, told her about me and Pina,” Mac said. “She says she’s all through with me.”

“That’s not what I hear,” Roscoe said.

“O.B. is also hot for Pina, am I right?” said Morty. “I don’t ask this for any reason. Some things you just hear.”

“No question you could hear that,” Mac said.

“But that’s all done with.”

“Isn’t it,” Mac said.

“If you say it’s all done, it’s all done.”

“If I say it.”

“Why did he hit you?” Roscoe asked.

“His stupid Notchery plan. I told him if he’d only been a little bit smarter he coulda been a first-class moron.”

“I’ll bet he liked that.”

“Bong. And there goes the jaw. The gin helps the pain, if you don’t swallow it. Also if you do.”

“That Gladys,” Morty said. “What’s her name?”

“You should call Gladys,” Roscoe said to Mac. “She wants to talk.”

“Meehan, Gladys Meehan,” Mac said.

“Right. Her boss is whatsisname Fitzgibbon, right?”

“Elisha Fitzgibbon,” Mac said. “He’s dead.”

“He bought my gin,” Morty said, “and Gladys always told me when and where to deliver it. That was Jack Diamond’s gin.”

“Another thing,” Mac said. “He tells the Diamond story and it’s all him.”

“Outside of his cab driver,” Morty said, “I was the last one to see Diamond.”

“You weren’t the last,” Mac said.

“You mean Dove Street. I didn’t see any of that, none,” Morty said. “They shot him right between the head. I heard it was coming.”

“Some people knew,” Mac said. “The newspaper set the headline before it happened.”

“They say he was told to leave town,” Roscoe said.