inured. I then considered that maybe the fifty cents was not enough. But would five or fifty dollars have been enough for the girl who once wore a five-hundred-dollar negotiable hymen inside another such garment? No, she was crying because I was witness to both past and present in this actual moment, and she hadn't been prepared to go over it all again on such short notice. She knew I remembered Ziegfeld and all her promise of greater Broadway glory, plus a Hollywood future. But Ziegfeld turned her down after Jack died, and Will Hays wouldn't let her get a foothold in Hollywood: No molls need apply. And finally, as we talked, she brought it out, tears gone, panties there to haunt both of us (I remembered the vision at the miniature golf course, in her Monticello room, and I thought, Pursue it now; nothing bars the way now; no fear, no betrayal intervening between you and that bound-to-be-lovely by-way), and she said: 'It's so shitty, Marcus. It seems once fate puts the finger on you, you're through.'
'You're still in the paper, kiddo; you're in big letters out front, and you look like seven or eight million dollars. Eight. I know a few young ladies with less to point to.'
'You were always nice, Marcus. But you know I still miss Jack. Miss him. After all these years.'
Would the maudlin time never end?
'You're keeping him alive,' I said. 'Look at it that way. He's on the signs out front, too.'
'He wouldn't like his name there.'
'Sure he would, as long as you were tied to it.'
'No, not Jack. He liked it respectable, the two-faced son of a bitch. He left me that night to go home to bed so Alice wouldn't come find him, so he could be there in bed ahead of her. Imagine a man like him thinking like that?'
'Who said he did that?'
'Frankie Teller told me. Jack mumbled it in the cab when they left my place.'
She let the old memories run by in silence, then she said,:But I was the last one to see him,' and she meant, to make love to him. 'He always left Old Lady Prune to come to me. I don't think she had a crotch.' And then Kiki laughed and laughed. as triumphantly as Alice had in the Coney speakeasy.
I bought her a sandwich between shows, then took her back to the theater. I kissed her good-bye on the cheek, but she turned and gave me her mouth as I was leaving, a gift. But she didn't linger over it.
'Thanks for coming,' she said, and I didn't know whether to leave or not. Then she said, 'I could've made it with you, Marcus. I think I could've. But he spoiled me, you know.'
'Sometimes friends should just stay friends.'
'He spoiled me for so many men. I never thought any man could do that to me.'
'You'll never be spoiled for me.'
'Come and see me again, Marcus. Next time you see me on a marquee someplace.'
'You can bank on that,' I said.
But I never did. Her name turned up in the papers when she married a couple of times, never with success. About 1941 a patient treated in Bellevue's alcoholic ward gave the name of Kiki Roberts, but the story that it was the real Kiki was denied in the press the next day. She was hurt in a theater fire in Newark somewhere around that time, and a friend of mine from Albany saw her back in Boston in a small club during the middle years of the war, still known professionally as Jack's sweetheart, not stripping any longer, just singing torch songs, like 'Broken Hearted,' a tune from '27, the year they killed Little Augie and shot Jack full of holes, the year he became famous for the first time for not dying. You can't kill Legs Diamond. I've heard Kiki died in Detroit, Jersey, and Boston, that she went crazy, broke her back and had a metal backbone put in, got fat, grew old beautifully, turned lesbian, and that she still turns up in Troy and Catskill and Albany bars whose owners remember Jack. I don't believe any of it. I don't know what happened to her.
That isn't the end of the story, of course. Didn't I, like everybody else who knew him, end up on a barstool telling Jack's tale again, forty-three years later, telling it my own way? And weren't Tipper and The Pack and Flossie there with me, ready, as always with the ear, ready too to dredge up yet another story of their own? The magazines never stopped retelling Jack's story either, and somebody put it out in book form once, a silly work, and somebody else made a bum movie of it. But nobody ever came anywhere near getting it right, and I mean right, not straight, for accuracy about Jack wasn't possible. His history was as crooked as the line between his brain and his heart. I stand on this: that Packy's dog story was closer to the truth about Jack and his world than any other word ever written or spoken about him.
We were all there in the dingy old Kenmore when Packy told it, old folks together, wearying of talk of any kind by now, all of us deep into the drink, anxious to move along to something else, and yet not quite able to let go. I remember I was winding up, telling what happened to The Goose, who at age sixty-eight homosexually assaulted a young boy in a prison shower and was stabbed in his good eye for his efforts. And Oxie, who did seven long ones and then dropped dead of a heart attack on a Bronx street corner after a month of freedom. And Fogarty, who was let out of jail because of his sickness and wasted away with TB in the isolation ward of the Ann Lee Home in Albany, and who called me at the end to handle his legacy, which consisted of Big Frenchy DeMange's diamond wristwatch. Jack gave it to him as a souvenir after the Big Frenchy snatch, and Fogarty kept it in a safe-deposit box and never sold it, even when he didn't have a dime.
My three old friends didn't know either that Jack never paid me for the second trial, nor had he ever paid Doc Madison a nickel for all the doc's attention to his wounds.
'He stole from us all, to the very end,' I said.
'Yes, Marcus,' said Flossie, the loyal crone, misty-eyed over her wine, profoundly in love with all that was and would never be again, 'but he had a right to. He was magic. He had power. Power over people. Power over animals. He had a tan collie could count to fifty-two and do subtraction.'
'I wrote a story about his dog,' said the Tipper. 'It was a black and white bull terrier named Clancy. I went and fed him when they all left Acra and forgot he was there. Smartest dog I ever saw. Jack taught him how to toe dance.'
'It was a white poodle,' said Packy. 'He brought it with him right here where we're sitting one night in the middle of '31. There was a bunch of us and Jack decides he'll take a walk, and we all say, okay, we'll all take a walk. But Jack says he needs his sweater because the night air gets chilly, and we all say, you're right, Jack, it sure gets chilly.'
'Jack could turn on the electric light sometimes, just by snapping his fingers,' Flossie said.
'So Jack says to the white poodle, 'Listen here, dog, go up and get my black sweater,' and that damn dog got up and went out to the lobby and pushed the elevator button and went up to Jack's suite and barked, and Hubert Maloy let him in.'
'Jack could run right up the wall and halfway across the ceiling when he got a good running start,' Flossie said. 'We all waited, but the poodle didn't come back, and Jack finally says, 'Where the hell is that dog of mine?' And somebody says maybe he went to the show to see the new Rin-Tin-Tin, and Jack says, 'No, he already saw it.' Jack got so fidgety he finally goes upstairs himself and we all follow, and Jack is sayin' when he walks into his room, 'Come on, you son of a bitch, where's my goddamn sweater?' '
'Jack could outrun a rabbit,' Flossie said.
'Well, let me tell you, it took the wind right out of Jack when he saw that damn dog sitting on the sofa with the sweater, sewin' on a button that was missin' off the pocket.'
'Jack could tie both his shoes at once,' Flossie said.
JACKED UP
Jack (Legs) Diamond, aged thirty-four years, five months, seven days, and several hours, sat up in bed in his underwear and stared into the mirror at his new condition: incipiently dead.
'Those simple bastards,' he said, 'they finally did it right.'
He moved without being able to move, thought out of his dead brain, smiled with an immobile mouth, his face intact but the back of his head blown away. Already aware he was moving outside time, he saw the yellow fluid
