A Welcome Haunting - Part Nineteen
TUESDAY NIGHT
The thing about Jackie the Rat-Faced Boy is that he never permitted his criminal record to limit his options. Having a criminal record is supposed to be important because of the fact of it. It’s there, official, checkable. It’s supposed to matter. It’s weighty and always needs explaining. And for the overwhelming majority it does regardless of their attitude towards it. But Jackie managed to create a space for himself where the crimes of his young adulthood - aggravated assaults, B&Es, robberies and a suspected murder or two - didn’t impact his ability to make, now, a seemingly honest living and be out in the public world with friends in places high, low and in-between.
Jackie, at least seventy years old and probably closer to eighty, is a friend of mine. We were introduced through my uncle with the guns.
“I had come home from school, had to be this was in eighth grade, looking forward to wearing a new coat the next day, which was supposed to be much colder,” my uncle explained to me the day before I was introduced to Jackie when I was twelve years old.
“I was sure I had hung the coat up on the inside of my bedroom door but it wasn’t there. I figured my mother had put it away in the closet. Houses in those days were built with only one closet to fit jackets and one funeral or wedding suit and one or two nice dresses. Not there. Turned out my father, who you know had a junk store in Coney Island, gave my new coat to a kid whose family worked a freak show there but hadn’t left for the winter southern circuit on account of a new baby that wasn’t doing well. Jackie the Rat-Faced Boy. I had plenty of coats, my father said, and Jackie needed something nice and new and warm.”
“It was more like he had a pinched face, but with some makeup and the right clothes, in dim light and with the audience predisposed to seeing a rat-boy, yeah I can see how that worked,” my uncle opined.
“So the baby died, that was Jackie’s brother, and his family did go south but Jackie and my coat stayed in Brooklyn. I was never sure where he lived but I heard he slept on the couch of a drunk who lived in a clapboard house near the rides. He had to live somewhere, I suppose, since he went to school for a while. But whatever the arrangement was, Jackie was always around from then on in.”
With connections to traditional crime figures, though never actually a made man, and a reputation as an honest broker with the trades and their immigrant clubs, Jackie made a lot of money working for builders. He started with condos and small developments and ended his sixteen-hours-a-day career working for the families who had their names at the top of ballots and on hospitals and college buildings.
“All of them needed someone between them and what needed doing,” the Judge later explained to me. “For a long time in this city you couldn’t put a shovel in the ground or corral important endorsements without being involved. The construction companies left alone couldn’t be trusted not to triple costs so there needed to be someone close enough to that world who could also breakfast with the big names. They all had someone like Jackie and more than a few of them had Jackie himself, usually as a consultant attached to their lawyers’ offices.”
Jackie left the development business in the late 1990s after making himself very rich but stayed with the politics, directing support to candidates for various offices throughout the city. I first thought the politics mostly as a hobby and a way for a vital guy to stay busy but came to appreciate that he was in it more for maintaining the connections that kept him protected. Some of his crimes, done or instigated, were ongoing and some had no statute of limitations, so the need to stay a power broker was also about self-preservation.
Jackie was in a booth on the side of the diner that runs along Emmons Avenue, set back three away from any with people. When I slid in across from him he gave no mention of how long he’d been there waiting and the table itself offered up no indication whether he had eaten. A cup of coffee rested in front of him. Sections from the previous Sunday’s New York Times were neatly stacked within easy reach. Jackie was dressed in black pants and a trim dark gray turtleneck sweater, and he was sporting what looked like new glasses with black frames. He was, as always, incredibly clean shaven and his shock of white hair was combed straight back. Compared to him I always looked shabby. Having driven in from Albany after an eventful morning and day of meetings, I looked and felt wrinkled.
“You know you could have called me directly. Through two people isn’t very discreet,” he stated without any real affect.
“I‟m not feeling very discreet these days,” I said testily. “Everything around me is playing itself out in public, so please spare me the cloak and dagger routine.”
Jackie didn’t respond to things beneath him and my little outburst garnered only him sipping his coffee and looking out at the narrow wooden bridge over Sheepshead Bay.
“I killed the Rabbi,” I said.
“Yes, you did,” he responded flatly, now with his eyes back on me.
“But I didn’t do it.”
“Nope. You didn’t. Those who believe you did don’t actually think you did it yourself. They think you had it done.”
“Not much of a difference in my world.”
“That’s a big difference in mine. And you’re wrong. It makes a difference in what you do too. In what I do it’s a negative. In what you’re doing it’s a positive.”
“I get blamed either way,” I said plaintively.
“Maybe you should think of it as getting credit, not blame,” Jackie suggested.
“That’s not how the District Attorney is seeing this.”
“Our vaguely racist and anti-Semitic county prosecutor is like a referee in this matter. He’s keeping things moving along and will call fouls in pursuit of a speedy resolution.”
“You know who killed the Rabbi.”
“I do,” Jackie said, gathering his coat and papers, clearly preferring to answer on the move.
“So? Who did it?”
“You did. You killed the Rabbi. Everyone knows that. I figured you were up to this part already.”
He was standing in front of our booth.
“What part?”
“You called me too early. That story you put in the tabloid on the Rabbi’s double dealing was cute but we’re way past cute. Salad days are over.”
He walked away. I saw in the mirrored walls that Jackie rested his papers by the cash register up front and gave the Russian girl behind the counter some bills and then shrugged on his black leather jacket. He started to pick up the pile and instead motioned for the girl to watch his stuff. Walking back to me he was shaking his head slowly back and forth with a small smile filling up the bottom half of his face.
“We want to see you succeed, you know. In this and in other things. Think this through and call me when you have something real to say. You look awful. Order a meal with a vegetable. I left fifty bucks with the girl up front.”
With that he left the diner to walk around to the row of parked cars just below where we were sitting. He got into a black BMW 760 and pulled out into traffic away, I supposed, into Brighton Beach.
Great, I thought as I ordered dinner. Who’s the “we” in “we want to see you succeed?”