Playland (20 page)

It was through such foresight that Morris Lefkowitz inspired loyalty, while at the same time discouraging attempts upon his domain, and one must also add his life. If Philly Wexler were allowed to take over the minute principality of the vending-machine business without Morris Lefkowitz’s benediction, then the whole Lefkowitz empire in all its many parts would be at risk. Morris Lefkowitz would be seen as old, not in charge, and talk of coups would be in the air; it was the predatory law of that world in which he had staked his claim. Morris Lefkowitz, however, had survived in this world for nearly six decades, had become its elder statesman precisely because he was such a student of all the clauses and subsections in the constitution of crime. Age had not dimmed the clarity of his vision, as some had thought, and perhaps even wished, nor his ability to see and play all the angles, which of course was why, as a statement against institutional anarchy, Philly Wexler was marked, had to be marked, for execution, the ultimate penance.

It was a hit that in the normal course of events Jacob King would not have been nominated to perform, prince royal that he was seen to be, at least by himself, in the kingdom of Lefkowitz, but it was Jacob who had argued that if Philly Wexler’s death was intended to be a statement, then the statement, on organizational principles, would best be made by someone in a position of authority rather than by an out-of-town hitter, or worse by an ambitious young shooter who upon its successful conclusion might get ideas above his station. In other words Jacob King himself. There was nothing personal in the decision,
only a belief in order, especially insofar as an assault on that order might compromise Jacob King’s own position in the succession. The fact was that if Jacob King could be said to like anyone, he liked Philly Wexler. They had gone to school together in Red Hook, at least until the fifth grade, which was the extent of the education Jacob King thought he needed in order to persevere in the world. Indeed Philly Wexler’s sister Ruth had been Jacob King’s first piece of ass, under a stoop on Luquer Street, a commercial transaction when he was ten and she thirteen, arranged by Philly, who took half the two dollars and then fucked Ruth himself free of charge.

Hubris came too easily to Jacob King, and it was hubris that almost led to his undoing in the murder of Philly Wexler. What had made him so effective an assassin when he was a boy and on the make was the planning he would put into each hit. He always picked an isolated spot on a meaner street in a lesser borough than Manhattan (never Staten Island, however, because it was an island, and if something went wrong, hard to get off, and who would want to hole up in Staten Island?), an isolated neighborhood where there would be no witnesses and where silence was seen as a virtue and people did not rush to their windows if they heard the sound of gunfire outside. If by chance some poor unfortunate happened upon the wrong place at the wrong time, then that poor unfortunate might well become, if he could not be bribed or intimidated, an ancillary victim himself. There must be, as well, a place to dispose of the body, and the cemetery of choice, vide Pittsburgh Pat Muldoon, was the harbor that made the city the world’s greatest seaport.

It had been some years, however, since Jacob King had killed except in anger, and it was as if he thought, in the prime of life, that his Broadway fame and newspaper glamour exempted him from exercising the cold-blooded care that had come so naturally to him in his youth. He was Jacob King, and if he chose to put two slugs in the base of Philly Wexler’s skull in front of the apartment of Philly’s girlfriend in Washington Heights at eleven
o’clock of a winter’s evening, then that was the way Jacob King would do it. He had not taken the trouble, however, to learn that the apartment on West 180th Street belonged to Ruth Wexler, his first fuck, who Philly at forty was still fucking, his sister the love of his life, and witness number one to his murder. It was also inopportune that Philly Wexler fell in the street under a mailbox onto which the U.S. Postal Service had affixed a card that said,
MAIL EARLY FOR DELIVERY BEFORE CHRISTMAS
. Here was the kind of irony that of course caught the eye of Weegee, that photographer-poet of urban violence, when he arrived on the scene. Weegee took the photograph—it can be seen in
Weegee’s New York
, a book that Blue Tyler showed me in the Hamtramck public library years later, pointing to the picture of Philly Wexler on the sidewalk under the post box, covered by a raincoat, and saying, “Jacob did that guy, I bet you didn’t know that”—and after it appeared in the
Daily News
, another witness, in a momentary and ultimately fatal surge of good citizenship, came forward, a cut man who worked in the corner at Sunnyside Arena in Queens. It was he that minions of Morris Lefkowitz murdered when he was taking a dump during the preliminaries the night Lulu Constantino beat Lefty Lew Mann in the main event (
KING WITNESS KO’D
), as it was to Ruth Wexler that other minions of Morris the Furrier delivered the poinsettia that blew small pieces of her against the walls of her Washington Heights apartment (
CHRISTMAS PACKAGE RIPS KING WITNESS
). With the untimely (or perhaps timely) departures of his two eyewitnesses, the Manhattan district attorney’s case disappeared, and the jury on that sixth day of January, 1947, took only eighty-seven minutes to find Jacob King not guilty of murder in the first degree. The judge told Jacob King he was free to go about his business and congratulated the jury of his peers on a job well and quickly done.

“Philly Wexler was my boyhood friend,” Jacob King said that afternoon on the steps of the Criminal Court Building in lower Manhattan, “and Ruthie, while she was a disturbed personality
when she got older, seeing things she didn’t see, Ruthie was one of the world’s beautiful people, and I prefer to remember her like she was when we were all kids together on Luquer Street in Red Hook.” In the tabloid photographs he was wearing his double-breasted camel’s-hair overcoat, and was hatless in the cold. In one arm he held his daughter, Abigail, only three, while his son, Matthew, clung to his other hand, peeking out at the photographers from behind his father’s arm, by now a boy of seven in a blue sailor coat adorned with petty officer’s stripes, and with a cap on his head. Lillian Aronow King held her son’s other hand. She was wearing a seal coat courtesy, I would assume, of Morris Lefkowitz, and in the photographs she had the pinched unhappy face of a woman the years would not treat kindly, broadening her nose, I would have wagered, and further opening the already generous pores of her skin. “I don’t know who it was that did Philly and Ruthie,” Jacob King continued, his use of “did” a reminder that his was a society in which all the tenses of the verb “to do” promised extinction of life, “but I want Lew Valentine”—the chief of police since 1934, a nice touch—“and Frank Hogan”—the Manhattan district attorney, another nice touch—“to know I don’t hold no hard feelings,
any
hard feelings, I mean, they got a job to do, and they should know that anything I can do to help, they got it, and I want to especially thank Mike and Brendan here”—his attorneys, Meyer Feiffer and Brendan Kean, relegated to the background in the photographs, and almost invisible—“for a hell of job, the case never should’ve been brung,
brought
, they proved that, and now thanks, boys, I been in the Tombs four months, I want a bath, a shave, and I want to go home and tell Lillian how much I love her and the kids, thanks again, and no more questions, and Arthur, okay, for you one more picture,” Arthur being Arthur Fellig, the great Weegee himself, in some way Jacob King’s court photographer during his New York period.

I do not know if Jacob King fucked Lillian when he got home to Bay Ridge and shaved and bathed and put Matthew and Abigail to bed, but I do know that he ended up the evening at
the Copacabana, with Lillian and with Morris Lefkowitz and James Francis Riordan, celebrating his acquittal and planning his future.

“Tell me about Jimmy Riordan,” I said to Arthur French.

“He was Morris Lefkowitz’s lawyer.”

“I already know that.”

“A genius.”

“You’re bullshitting me, Arthur.”

“No. He was a man of vision in his way.”

“And Jacob?”

“A sharp dresser with fast moves.”

I try to imagine that night at the Copa as Jacob King and his party took their seats, Joe Romagnola lifting the velvet rope and pocketing the hundred-dollar bill Jimmy Riordan gave him without looking at the denomination, the tip unnecessary because Julie Podel had made it clear to Joe Romagnola that a ringside table would always be available to Jacob King, Jacob King was Morris Lefkowitz’s man, and he, Julie Podel, was not in business to antagonize Morris Lefkowitz, antagonize Morris Lefkowitz and the laundry might not get done or the band might not show up or there might even be an accidental fire in the kitchen. There was a buzz in the packed house, the kind that Shelley Flynn got and Frank got and Jimmy Walker used to get, dying but still a sweet memory, an ex-mayor who liked girls and sticking his dick into them, people craning for a look at the city’s most recently acquitted celebrity murderer, people with money in their pockets now that the war was a year and a half over and already a fading memory, and onstage Helen O’Connell, spotting Jacob, snapped her fingers at her trio, and then as if it were a planned part of her set segued into “I Like the Likes of You,” singing it directly into Jacob King’s ear, a rendition full of innuendo and invitation.

“A very special song for a very special guy, Jacob King, ladies and gentlemen,” Helen O’Connell said to her audience when
she finished. “Glad to see you back on the town, Jake, we missed you.” Back on the town, the words making Jacob King’s acquittal that afternoon seem an absolution, Philly Wexler in the revisionist version having deservedly been condemned to death for the sin of incest, a sin against nature, with Jacob King’s slate wiped clean, his public appearance a proclamation that he considered himself innocent of the crime attributed to him, and he himself a bulwark against perversion who had been ill used by small and ambitious public men. He stood and aimed a kiss toward the stage. “I like the likes of you, too, Helen,” he said, and there was applause at the surrounding tables. A club photographer in mesh stockings and a black skimp snapped his picture, the flashbulb not even making him blink, and then aimed her camera at Morris Lefkowitz, who pretended to blow his nose into a linen napkin so large it covered his entire face. Jimmy Riordan already had a bill in his hand, a twenty, and he stuck it between the twin globes of the photographer’s breasts. “Mr. Lefkowitz says no more pictures, sweetheart,” Jimmy Riordan said, “get rid of the plate.” The photographer said, “Excuse me, of course, Mr. Riordan,” then bent and whispered into his ear, the twenty still sticking out between the tits she rested on his shoulder, and after a moment Jimmy Riordan said, “You tell Winchell he wants to congratulate Jake, all he has to do is walk over here.”

Morris Lefkowitz turned to Jacob King. “You get your face in the newspapers too often.”