Roscoe

by William Kennedy

  Players, for a dollar a play, chose six numbers (from one to sixteen), one for each day of play: Monday to Saturday. As the week began, the pool published a key that matched a number with each of the sixteen big-league baseball teams. Pool players whose numbers matched the six teams that accumulated the greatest number of runs during the week won the prize. The game appealed not only to baseball fans but to every sucker who believed in the easy dollar, and Albany was blessed with many.

  Patsy paid serious attention to the pool for the first time at Willie Altopeda’s funeral in 1924, when he saw Warren Skaggs, a Republican, driving a four-thousand-dollar Cadillac. “I knew the bum when he couldn’t afford a wheelbarrow,” Patsy said.

  Artie Flinn, a quick-witted gambler from Arbor Hill who’d grown up with Patsy, enlightened him on how profitable Skaggs’s baseball pool was. Patsy then invited Skaggs and his partners to share pool profits with him fifty-fifty. Skaggs gnashed his teeth and said no. Patsy threatened to have the police close the pool and put Skaggs and company in jail, but said he’d accept a lesser cut if Artie Flinn became a pool associate.

  Patsy, the pool’s new panjandrum, expanded its territory and sales force, and by 1926, when he took it away from Skaggs entirely, pool plays were selling all over New England and New Jersey, and grossing four million for the year, not enough. The next summer Artie and Patsy implemented a plan to plug the pool—put thousands of dummy plays into competition with the public play. Artie oversaw the plugging, hiring young women at twenty-five dollars a week to write books full of plug plays, more than a hundred books a week, each book with twenty plays. Artie, his cohort of pluggers, and twenty accountants manipulated and published thousands of plays and combinations, okaying payoffs for enough legitimate winners to keep word-of-mouth at a frenzied pitch.

  In May 1927, the pool announced its first prize of twenty-two thousand dollars had been won by “Mutt,” second prize of sixteen thousand by “Joan,” and third prize of eleven thousand shared by “John Doe,” “Beautiful,” and “Marie,” all anonymous, and there were forty ties for the low prize of five thousand dollars. None of this bothered the public. Callers clogged newspaper switchboards for baseball results. Broadway, across from Union Station at four-thirty on Saturday afternoons, was impassable to traffic as Sport Schindler posted, in front of his speakeasy, inning-by-inning scores of major-league games crucial to pool prizes. By the end of the 1928 baseball season the pool’s gross for the year was five million; by 1929, seven million.

  Warren Skaggs, a grumpy loser, kept his Sentinel running as a pesky hornet trying once a week to sting Democrats. That his paper survived at all was because of its racy cover age of divorces and scandals. Cautious readers carried it home under their coats. In 1929, it printed two dozen torchy love letters, all forgeries, from a 1908 Love Nest Scandal involving an Albany playwright and an actress, and when the playwright won a libel settlement against Skaggs, Patsy used this outrage as a reason to pressure advertisers to withdraw their ads. Skaggs had to close the paper.

  In September 1930, a federal prosecutor moved against the pool for violation of the interstate-lottery law, indicting Artie and two dozen others, including Warren Skaggs, who testified with great relish about Patsy’s takeover and Artie’s plug system, and also brought Elisha’s name into it. Patsy was subpoenaed to appear before Artie’s grand jury but vanished and lived as a fugitive for three weeks before he figured out what to say. He surrendered to his attorney, Roscoe Conway, and came to federal court to testify.

  Q:

  Are you in business in Albany?

  A:

  I have no business in Albany.

  Q:

  Are you in business anywhere else?

  A:

  No, sir.

  Q:

  How do you make a living?

  A:

  I am vague on that.

  Q:

  How did you formerly make a living?

  A:

  I ran my father’s saloon until the Volstead Act closed it.

  Q:

  You haven’t worked since 1920? How do you live?

  A:

  I do a little betting on horses and prizefights.

  Q:

  On baseball pools?

  A:

  I refuse to answer because it might degrade or incriminate me.

  Q:

  You make a living on betting?

  A:

  That and what I owe.

  Q:

  How can you make a living on what you owe?

  A:

  A good many people do that.

  Q:

  Have you ever heard of the Albany baseball pool?

  A:

  I am vague on that.

  Q:

  Do you know a man named Warren Skaggs?

  A:

  I am vague on that.

  Q:

  Did you know anyone named Skaggs connected to a baseball pool?

  A:

  I am vague on that.

  The judge found him guilty of contempt and sentenced him to six months in a federal jail in Manhattan. No other charges were brought, for only Skaggs’s word linked Patsy to the pool. Artie, some of whose accountants and young-lady pluggers testified against him to avoid jail, was convicted and sentenced to six years, the start of his enmity toward Patsy over the imbalance of justice. Warren Skaggs was fined five thousand dollars and given a year’s suspended sentence.

  Skaggs felt less than welcome in Albany after his testimony against Artie and Patsy, so he sold his printing plant, plus the rights to his defunct Sentinel, for a pittance to the only buyer who dared be interested, Artie’s son, Roy, who had been a Sentinel scandal editor before Patsy took over the pool.

  Was Roscoe disturbed by the plugging? It did seem less than sporting. But can one sensibly retreat to the moral high ground when major money is on the table? Roscoe’s cut made him flush enough to dabble in racehorses with Elisha and Veronica, but his cut was minuscule compared with Patsy’s, which was bundled and banked out of state in Wilkes-Barre under various names, and held in readiness for the next Democratic crisis. What did Patsy do for himself with his new millions? He left larger tips at Keeler’s and the Elks Club bar, let ward leaders steal more than last year, bet heavier on chickens, and bought a new Panama hat.

  Roy Flinn continued the Skaggs printing business and in 1943 asked Roscoe if the organization would let him resurrect the long-dead Sentinel as a patriotic sheet covering local people in military service, plus local gossip in and out of the courts, but absolutely no political content. Roscoe and Roy had been classmates at Christian Brothers Academy, an Albany military high school, and because of that connection, and still smarting with guilt over Artie, Roscoe persuaded Patsy to give Roy the okay. Roy ran the paper with two reporters and a photographer, and also wrote the anonymous “Ghost Rider” himself.

  Roscoe halted at the door to the Sentinel and took six deep breaths, his usual tactical pause to retreat from rage. First find out what Roy knows, for he does tell secrets.

  Roy Flinn’s Secret

  In their senior year of high school, Roy came to Roscoe’s house to tell him that he had a chancre, a gift from the eighteen-year-old girl he’d been boffing, with modifiers, four times a week, and who told him one night, Roy, gimme it for real, and who turned up at the side door of Roy’s house on Christmas Day with a predictable second gift, asking for help getting rid of it.

  Roy came to Roscoe because Roscoe knew people, and Roscoe talked to Patsy, who recommended an Arbor Hill doctor who said, sure, thirty bucks up front, which Roy and the girl did not have. So she got some how-to-do-it advice elsewhere, waited until her parents left town, then went at it in the cellar with assorted implements and a piece of wire, sitting on a spread of newspapers. After a while she strapped herself to keep the blood from staining the world and called in sick at Marie’s Millinery on North Pearl Street, where she sold ladies’ hats.

  When she could function she went to Roy’s
and brought him home, opened the door of her furnace, and showed him how she had burned the bloody papers but not the baby. “He don’t burn,” she said. Roy took out the fetus, stoked the fire with wood, and heaped on the coal, terrified that the girl’s father might walk in and murder him on the spot. He wrapped the unburned baby in a blanket of newspaper and put it on the flaming coals with a shovel. Soon there was a strong odor in the cellar, said Roy. He kept feeding the fire, and after a few hours there was nothing at all among the coals. Roy still had his chancre, however. And arsenic, mercury, bismuth, and shame were his treatment for years afterward.

  He never married, was rejected by the army in the Great War, and turned into a peephole columnist, voyeur at the sex games his trauma had kept him from playing. You are one sad bastard, and it could happen to anybody, Roy, but that’s no excuse. Roscoe whistled his way into the news office at the front of the print shop.

  “Roy Flinn, where the hell are you?” Roscoe called out jovially as he entered. He saluted two reporters typing at their desks and saw Roy emerge from the back room with a handful of galleys. Tieless, in shirtsleeves, fingers stained with printer’s ink, Roy Flinn was an angular, bony figure, his hair plastered down with Vaseline, a twisted and bitter freak of fate.

  “Roscoe, you rascal,” said Roy, “what brings you here? You have some news for me?”

  “News? What would you do with news, Roy? You know less about news than my sister, who thinks Wilson is still President. You find your news scrawled on public-toilet walls. Even your saintly sister, Arlene, is repelled by your sheet. News, Roy? I’m stunned you can even use the word in a sentence.”

  “Roscoe, old mushmouth, I’ve heard your song before. Why are you here?”

  “Why do geese run funny, Roy? I’m here because your scurrilous scribbles summoned me.”

  “The item on the Fitzgibbon custody suit?”

  “That suit is public record. I’m talking about your innuendo on Goddard, and that Elisha committed suicide.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Roy, I am fluent in the English language, and you are fluent in the language of pollywogs.”

  Roscoe pulled the Sentinel out of his pocket and read from the “Ghost Rider” item: “‘Remember Mayor Goddard dying strangely in Havana in 1928? . . . Speaking of grave matters, Ghost Rider hears a recent death from natural causes looks like suicide!’ Dying strangely, grave matters, and suicide. I consider that innuendo, Roy.”

  “Goddard’s death was never explained and you know it.”

  “He died of an infection.”

  “After he fell out of a car.”

  “He was drunk,” Roscoe said. “Drunks fall out of cars. Drunks fall out of bed.”

  “A lot of people thought it was strange.”

  “I find it strange that you bring it up in context with Elisha and then add that insidious suicide item.”

  “That item has nothing to do with Elisha.”

  “Who, then?”

  “I can’t reveal that.”

  Roscoe grabbed a handful of Roy’s shirtfront, shoved him against a wall. “Are you invoking constitutional privilege here, Roy? Or claiming protection under the sacrosanctity of journalistic ethics? What are you talking about?”

  “I can’t say.”

  Roscoe slid Roy up the wall with one hand and held him there, the move pulling out Roy’s shirttail and tightening his collar into a noose.

  “You’re a lying stringbean traitor. You were told no politics.”

  “Let go of me, Roscoe,” Roy said, a windpipe croak.

  “Why did you print that, Roy? Tell me why.”

  “You people are in trouble,” Roy said.

  Roscoe slid Roy down the wall and released his shirt. “Trouble?”

  “You’ll probably beat it like you always do,” Roy said, righting his collar, “but you’re in for a dogfight.”

  “With what dogs?”

  “The Governor’s people know Elisha owned a block of whorehouses. That’s just the beginning.”

  Roscoe’s right elbow suddenly bent upward, and his fist, from a position of rest, whomped Roy’s face with three rapid snaps of the full forearm, Roy’s head hitting the wall and rebounding into each new whomp.

  “There, Roy,” Roscoe said as Roy stumbled sideways to lean on a desk, “there you have your headlines. Lawyer punches out editor for maligning his friend. Genuine news.”

  As he left, Roscoe saluted the two reporters, who were out of their chairs, trying to decide how to rescue Roy. “See you later, fellas,” he said, reveling in the vision of Roy’s blood and licking his own bleeding Purple Heart, his big knuckle stabbed by Roy’s hostile fangs. He remembered his father’s commandment on justice—Never let an enemy go unpunished—and he thought, I did all right, Pa, didn’t I?

  Roscoe drove twenty-five minutes to Patsy’s summer place to give him the news. It was situated on a Helderberg mountainside that gave a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree vista of Patsy’s Garden of Eden, the city and county of Albany. Patsy’s father had built a cedar-shingled summer bungalow on the land when he was sheriff. When the old man died, Patsy winterized the place, added a second story, built outbuildings to breed fighting chickens and a pit where they could fight. In the years after the Party took City Hall, the house became the summer hub of political action. Principal Albany Democrats made regular pilgrimages here to listen to Patsy the oracle tell them what they should think tomorrow.

  Wally Mitchell, an ex-heavyweight who knocked down Jim Jeffries and was now Patsy’s driver and bodyguard, unlocked the chain across the driveway and waved Roscoe in. Such security had been the norm since a homegrown gang of bootleggers tried to shoot Bindy and later kidnapped his son, Charlie Boy McCall. Roscoe saw Bindy’s custom-made, bulletproof black Packard, and he parked alongside it. He stepped out into the sunshine of a clear August afternoon and could see everything, from the beginning of the patchwork fruited plain at the base of the mountains, all the way in to the tower of Albany’s splendid City Hall and the Al Smith State Office Building, Albany’s modest skyscraper. He saw the shadow of a cloud moving fast across the plain below, but in the clear, blue-white sky he could find no cloud. He saw Patsy and Bindy near the chicken coops and went to them.

  “How fare the chickens of this world?” Roscoe asked.

  “Chickens is chickens,” Patsy said. “Fight ’em and eat ’em.”

  “The received wisdom of history,” Roscoe said. “Don’t you fellows have a main coming up?”

  “Tomorrow night, up in Fogarty’s,” Bindy said.

  “Been weedin’ out my sick ones,” Patsy said, a chicken under his arm. “One of my tough guys’s got the megrims, feedin’ it too much. And this guy got the chicken pox fightin’ his friends. His head’s pecked all to hell.”

  The McCall brothers had raised chickens since early adolescence in North Albany. Later, when they moved to Arbor Hill, Patsy kept his coops in a stable next to his house on Colonie Street, but as the chickens grew in number he was deemed a neighborhood nuisance and told to get rid of them. A politically connected neighbor let him put his coops on the Albany County Courthouse roof, the beginning of Patsy’s life above the law.

  Patsy put his poxy chicken back on the walk and led the way to the kitchen. Wally Mitchell was lifting a blue roasting pan out of the oven, two cooked chickens in it. He put forks under the chickens and moved them onto a white stoneware platter. The house smelled like Sunday.

  “Cook those yourself, Wally?” Roscoe asked. Wally’s left ear, from heavy use by others, looked like a partly eaten chicken wing.

  “I don’t cook,” Wally said. “I do the heavy liftin’.”

  Rose Carbone, Patsy’s full-time housekeeper ever since Patsy’s wife, Flora, died, stood at the sink washing a pot.

  “Did you make the gravy?” Patsy asked Rose.

  “I did not and I would not and you know it,” she said.

  “Good,” said Patsy.

  Rose went out of the
kitchen and Patsy said, “She’s all right but she can’t make gravy.” He took a tin of flour from the pantry and put the roasting pan with its drippings on the gas stove and lit the burner. He mixed the flour with some water, poured it into the pan as the drippings began to boil, added salt, pepper, a splash of Kitchen Bouquet, and water from a kettle, then stirred the mix with a wooden spoon. Roscoe knew better than to try for Patsy’s attention when he was cooking, so he sat at the kitchen table to watch a ritual that dated to their adolescent fishing trips, when Patsy cooked in self-defense against Roscoe’s and Elisha’s life-threatening concoctions; and again in the army in 1918, when shrapnel knocked Patsy off his horse; and after his leg healed they made him a cook’s helper. Patsy poured the thickened brown gravy into a bowl and set it beside the chickens.

  Bindy came out of the bathroom into the kitchen. “You see that stuff in the Sentinel?” he asked Roscoe.

  “I have some serious news on that,” Roscoe said.

  Patsy nodded and put down his spoon and the three men walked through Patsy’s workout room toward the parlor. Patsy punched the hanging bag and bent it in half. He sat in his parlor rocker, feet crossed on the floor, a book, Hard Times, open on his reading table, and under it the Sentinel. His brown fedora sat on a straight chair by the door under the holy-water font, which was a Christmas gift from Father Tooher, pastor of St. Joseph’s.

  Roscoe sat in an armchair facing Patsy and Bindy, who weighed three pounds less than a horse and made Roscoe feel thin. Bindy sat on half the sofa, eating peanuts from a silver dish.