Jack 1939 Read Online Free PDF Page B

others who hinted his dad’s luck was too good to be true. But they never said it twice. Jack was a scrappy fighter. He didn’t care if he nursed a shiner for a week; there were still such things in the world as honor. He had a pretty good idea how Dad had made his millions. But that was between Joe Kennedy and the Law—and the Law had caved.
    He was realizing, however, that there were limits to his father’s canniness, and they began and ended with Wall Street. How was it possible, Jack wondered, for Joe Kennedy—the Bronxville Shark, the Croesus of Hyannis Port—to believe all those reporters inflating his ego in Palm Beach? Did he seriously think he had a shot at the presidency? He dined with the King of England now, and his wife bought her clothes in Paris—but the rest of the world would never forget he was the son of a mick who’d owned a saloon. Nobody would be voting for Joe Kennedy, Jack thought—because FDR was running for president again, and apparently not even Joe Kennedy knew it.
    He fingered his private knowledge like a smooth and shining pebble, hefting its weight. He was the Bearer of Secrets. He knew things his father did not know.
    “Everything go okay out at Mayo?”
    Mayo.
    Jack’s stomach turned over, the acid of his wine mixing unhappily with beef and potato.
    “Mayo was swell,” he said, scraping his fork through a pool of gravy. Dad would have read George Taylor’s notes already. That’s what Joe Kennedy paid the world for—advance notice of disaster.
    “Does it hurt?” his father asked abruptly. “—cutting those pills into your leg?”
    Jack glanced up. “No,” he said.
    “Think they help?”
    “I’m here, aren’t I?”
    His father reached out and clapped him on the shoulder. “Attaboy. Can’t keep a Kennedy down.”
    They lingered a moment in the club’s foyer while the girl got their coats. J.P. was holding out a folded dollar and smiling at her in a way that made Jack uncomfortable. Foscarello’s face rose suddenly in his mind.
Your old man’s swell. Out dancing with a hatcheck
girl.
    “Where’s our Katie, then?”
    The girl’s dark eyes dropped to the counter. Her thin white hands rested there, trembling slightly, the nails painted blood red. “I couldn’t say, sir.”
    His dad’s smile grew more fixed. “Out on the town with some young man?”
    “If you’ll excuse me, sir—”
    The girl disappeared behind the curtain.
    “Didn’t you read the paper this morning, Dad?”
    Joe looked at him, perplexed.
    “There was a murder out back in the alley last night. A hatcheck girl—stabbed to death.”
    “
Murdered?
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—”
    “Her name was Katie O’Donohue.”
    “I knew her people in Boston, Jack.” His father looked white and shocked in the foyer’s gentle light. “Truth be told—I got her this job.”
    Jack fished awkwardly in the pocket of his overcoat. “Here,” he said, handing his dad the Simon Templar novel. “I got you this today. For the crossing.”
    Joe stared at the stick drawing of the haloed Saint. “Thanks. I haven’t read this one.”
    “I didn’t think you had.”
    “Little Katie,” Joe murmured, his gaze sliding past Jack, to the shadows around the door. “It’s a terrible world, you know that?”
    “I’ll get us a cab,” Jack said.

FOUR. LOOSE ENDS
    “TAKE A LOOK AT THIS.” J. Edgar Hoover passed a folded square of newsprint to Roosevelt, who adjusted his glasses and peered at the black-and-white image of a Manhattan alley, police in the foreground. A shrouded form, humped and miserable, bisected the shot.
    “That’s the girl we were tailing. She was murdered the other night while you were in New York.”
    “Really?” Roosevelt glanced over the edge of the newspaper. “And your tail never saw me plunge my knife into her heart, Ed? You’re slipping.”
    Hoover grimaced. “Mr. President, I never meant to imply—”
    “Just a joke, Ed.”
    “The girl was
murdered
, Mr.