Legs (2 page)

I didn't have anything to do with him after that
until l929 when I represented Joe Vignola in the Hotsy Totsy case.
And a story, which I pieced together very painfully from Joe, Jack,
and half a dozen others, goes with that. It begins the night Benny
Shapiro knocked out Kid Murphy in eight rounds at the Garden in '29.
Jack, a serious fan of Benny's, won two grand that night taking the
short end of seven to five.

"Stop by the club later," Benny remembered
Jack telling him in the dressing room after the light. "We'll
have a little celebration."

"I got to meet a guy, Jack," Benny said.

"Bring her along."

"I'll try to make it, but I might be late."

"We'll wait,"
said Jack.

* * *

Herman Zuckman came hustling toward the bar as Jack
walked into the Hotsy Totsy Club with Elaine Walsh, a singer and his
special friend of the moment, on his arm. Fat Herman had been sole
owner of the Hotsy until Jack Diamond decided to join him as a
fifty-fifty partner. The club was on Broadway, near Fifty-fourth, top
of the second-floor stairs, music by a six-piece jazz band, and
tonight Joe Vignola, the singing waiter, doubling on violin.

All thirty tables in the bar area were full, despite
Mayor Walker's nightlife curfew to keep decent people away from
racketeers, bad beer, and worse liquor. Wood alcohol. Rubbing
alcohol. The finest. Imported by Jack from the cellars of Newark and
Brooklyn. Drink me. The bartenders were working hard, but there was
too much work for the pair, Walter Rudolph, old rum-runner with a bad
liver, and Lukas, a new man. Jack took off his coat, a Palm Beach,
and his hat, a white sailor straw, and rolled up his sleeves to help
the barmen. Elaine Walsh sat at the end of the bar and listened to
the music. "I'm just a vagabond lover," Joe Vignola was
singing. Joe Vignola, a merger of John Gilbert and Oliver Hardy,
fiddled a chorus, then went back to delivering drinks.

Saul Baker, silent doorman, sat by the door with two
pistols in his pockets, one on his hip, another inside his coat, and
smiled at arriving customers. Just out of Sing Sing, a holdup man in
need, pudgy Saul had found a survival point in the spiritual soup
kitchen of Jack Diamond. Let no hungry thief pass my door. Don't try
to tell Saul Baker Jack Diamond is a heartless man. Charlie Filetti
sat at the end of the bar. Filetti, it would soon be disclosed, had
recently banked twenty-five thousand dollars in one day, a fragment
of profit from his partnership with Jack Diamond in the shakedown of
bucket-shop proprietors, shady dealers in the stock market.

"Who won the fight, Jack?" Filetti asked.

"Benny. KO in eight. He ruined the bum."

"I lose three hundred."

"You bet against Benny?" Jack stopped
working.

"You got more confidence in him than I got. A
lot of people don't like him ducking Corrigan."

'"
Ducking? Did you say ducking?"

"I'm saying what's being said. I like Benny good
enough."

"Benny ducks nobody. "

"Okay, Jack, but I'm telling you what talk's
around town. They say you can make Benny lose, but you can't make him
win."

"It was on the level tonight. You think I'd back
a mug who runs? You should've seen him take Murphy apart. Murphy's a
lunk. Hits like half a pound of sausage. Benny ate him up."

"I like Benny," Filetti said. "Don't
get me wrong. I just like what Murphy did in his last fight. Murphy
looked good that night I saw him."

"You don't know, Charlie. You shouldn't bet on
fights. You just don't know. Ain't that right, Walter? He don't
know?"

"I don't follow the fights, Jack," Walter
Rudolph said. "I got out of the habit in stir. Last fight I saw
was in '23. Benny Leonard whippin' a guy I don't even remember. "

"How about you, pal?" Jack asked Lukas, the
new bar-man. "You follow the fights? You know Benny Shapiro?"

"I see his name in the papers, that's all. To
tell you the truth, Mr. Diamond, I watch baseball."

"Nobody knows," Jack said. He looked at
Elaine. "But Elaine knows, don't you, baby? Tell them what you
said tonight at the light."

"I don't want to say, Jack." She smiled.

"Go ahead."

"It makes me blush."

"Never mind that, just tell them what you said."

"All right. I said Benny fights as good as Jack
Diamond makes love."

Everybody at the bar laughed, after Jack laughed.

"That means he's a
cinch to be champ," Jack said.

* * *

The mood of the club was on the rise and midnight
seemed only a beginning. But forty minutes behind the bar was enough
for Jack. Jack, though he had tended bar in his time, was not
required to do manual labor. He was a club owner. But it's a kick to
do what you don't have to do, right? Jack put on his coat and sat
alongside Elaine. He put his hand under her loose blond hair, held
her neck, kissed her once as everyone looked in other directions.
Nobody looked when Jack kissed his ladies in public.

"Jack is back," he said.

"I'm glad to see him," Elaine said.

Benny Shapiro walked through the door and Jack leaped
off his chair and hugged him with one arm, walked him to a bar stool.

"I'm a little late," Benny said.

"Where's the girl?"

"No girl, Jack. I told you it was a man. I owed
some insurance."

"Insurance? You win a fight, break a man's nose,
and then go out and pay your insurance?"

"For my father. I already stalled the guy two
weeks. He was waiting. Woulda canceled the old man out in the
morning. I figure, pay the bill before I blow the dough."

"Why don't you tell somebody these things? Who
is this prick insurance man?"

"It's okay, Jack, it's all over."

"Imagine a guy like this'?" Jack said to
everybody.

"I told you I always liked Benny," Filetti
said.

"Get us a table, Herman," Jack said.
"Benny's here."

Herman Zuckman, counting money behind the bar, turned
to Jack with an amazed look.

"I'm busy here, Jack."

"Just get us a table, Herman. "

"The tables are all full, Jack. You can see
that. We already turned away three dozen people. Maybe more."

"Herman, here beside me is the next welterweight
champion of the world who's come to see us, and all you're doing is
standing there making the wrong kind of noise."

Herman put the money in a strongbox under the bar,
then moved two couples away from a table. He gave them seats at the
bar and bought them a bottle of champagne.

"You feeling all right?" Jack asked Benny
when they all sat down. "No damage?"

"No damage, just a little headache."

"Too much worrying about insurance. Don't worry
anymore about shit like that. "

"Maybe he's got a headache because he got hit in
the head," Charlie Filetti said.

"He didn't get hit in the head," Jack said.
"Murphy couldn't find Benny's head. Murphy couldn't find his own
ass with a compass. But Benny found Murphy's head. And his nose."

"How does it feel to break a man's nose?"
Elaine asked.

"That's a funny question," Benny said. "But
to tell the truth you don't even know you're doing it. It's just
another punch. Maybe it feels solid, maybe it don't."

"You don't feel the crunch, what the hell good
is it?" Jack said.

Filetti laughed. "Jack likes to feel it happen
when the noses break, right Jack?"

Jack mock-backhanded Filetti, who told him: "Don't
get your nose out of joint, partner"—and he laughed some more.
"I remember the night that big Texas oil bozo gave Jack lip.
He's about six eight and Jack breaks a bottle across his face at the
table, and then you couldn't stop laughing, Jack. The son of a bitch
didn't know what hit him. Just sat there moppin' up his blood. Next
day I go around to tell him what it costs to give lip to Jack and he
says he wants to apologize. Gives me a grand to make Jack feel good.
Remember that, Jack'?"

Jack grinned.

* * *

The Reagans, Billy and Tim, came into the club and
everybody knew it. They were brawny boys from the Lower West Side,
dockworkers as soon as they knew they were men, that God had put
muscles in their backs to alert them to that fact. Behind his back
people called Billy The Omadhaun, a name he'd earned at seventeen
when in a drunken rage he threw repeated football blocks at the
crumbling brick tenement he lived in. Apart from the bleeding scrapes
and gouges all over his body, an examination disclosed he had also
broken both shoulders. His brother Tim, a man of somewhat larger wit,
discovered upon his return from the Army in 1919 that beer-loading
was no more strenuous than ship-loading, and far more lucrative.
Proprietorship of a small speakeasy followed, as Tim pursued a
prevailing dictum that to establish a speakeasy what you needed was
one room, one bottle of whiskey, and one customer.

"That's a noisy bunch," Elaine said when
they came in.

"It's the Reagans," said Filetti. "Bad
news."

"They're tough monkeys," Jack said, "but
they're pretty good boys."

"The big one's got a fist like a watermelon,"
Benny said.

"That's Billy," Jack said. "He's tough
as he is thick."

Jack waved to the Reagans, and Tim Reagan waved and
said, "Hello, Jack, howsa boy?"

"How's the gin in this joint?" Billy asked
Joe Vignola in a voice that carried around the room. Herman Zuckman
looked up. Customers eyed the Reagans.

"The best English gin is all we serve,"
Vignola told him.

"Right off the boat for fancy drinkers like
yourselves."

"Right out of Jack's dirty bathtub," Billy
said.

"No homemade merchandise here," Vignola
said. "Our customers get only the real stuff. "

"If he didn't make it then he stole it,"
Billy said. He looked over at Jack Diamond. "Ain't that so,
Jack?"

"If you say so, Billy," Jack said.

"Hey, he can get in trouble with that kind of
talk," Filetti said.

"Forget it," Jack said. "Who listens
to a drunk donkey Irishman?"

"Three of the good gins," Billy told
Vignola. "Right away."

"Comin' up," said Vignola, and he rolled
his eyes, dropped the serving tray he carried under his arm, but
caught it just before it hit the floor, then lofted it and caught it
again, well over his head, and spun it on the index finger of his
left hand: a juggler's routine. Others laughed. The Reagans did not.

"Get the goddamn gin and never mind the clown
act," Billy Reagan said. "You hear me, you waiter baloney?
Get the gin."

Jack immediately went to the Reagan table and stood
over big-fisted Billy. He poked Billy's shoulder with one finger.
"You got no patience. Make noise in your own joint, but have a
little patience when you're in somebody else's."

"I keep telling him he's ignorant," Tim
Reagan said. "Sit down, Jack, don't mind him. Have a drink. Meet
Teddy Carson from Philly. We been tellin' him about you, how you come
a long way from Philadelphia."

"How you makin' out, Jack?" Teddy Carson
said, another big fist. He shook Jack's hand, cracking knuckles.
"Some boys I know in Philly talk about you a lot. Duke Gleason,
Wiggles Mason. Wiggles said he knew you as a kid."

"He knocked a tooth out on me. I never got
even."

"That's what he told me."

"You tell him I said hello."

"He'll be glad to hear that."

"Pull up a chair. Jack," Tim said.

"I got a party over there."

"Bring 'em over. Make the party bigger."

Saul Baker left his post by the door when Jack went
back to his own table. "That's a bunch of shitheads, Jack. You
want 'em thrown out'?"

"It's all right, Saul." Pudgy little Saul
Baker, chastising three elephants.

"I hate a big mouth. "

"Don't get excited."

Jack said he wanted to have a drink with the Reagans.
"We'll all go over," he said to Filetti, Elaine, and Benny.

"What the hell for?" said Filetti,

"It'll keep 'em quiet. They're noisy, but I like
them. And there's a guy from Philly knows friends of mine."

Jack signaled Herman to move the table as Joe Vignola
finally brought drinks to the Reagans.

"You call this gin'?" Billy said to
Vignola, holding up a glass of whiskey. "Are you tryna be a
funny guy? Are you lookin' for a fight?"

"Gin's gone," Vignola said.

"I think you're lookin' for a fight," Billy
said.

"No, I was looking for the gin," Vignola
said, laughing, moving away.

"This is some dump you got here, Jack,"
Billy called out.