The two amateur hoodlums Roth had hired to find Jo-Jo sang like heldentenors in the last act of Siegfried. They told all there was to tell about how Jake Roth had hired them to find Jo-Jo, get the ticket, and kill him. The beating of Petey Vitanza, and the death of old man Schmidt, were just steps down the road to Jo-Jo.
“We never wanted to kill the old man,” one of them explained, as if he thought that made it okay, and we could all kiss and make up. “He just kicked-off on us, you know? Jeez, Roth was gonna give us good spots in the organization. Man, that was real opportunity!”
“Book them,” Gazzo said.
Both men were indicted on various counts of assault, and one good count of Murder-Second. The DA could have gone for Murder-One, and probably gotten it, but juries are chancy with real guilty ones, and trials cost the state money. The two bums would plead guilty to the lessers counts, all of them, and that would put them away forever.
Jake Roth vanished. When Gazzo and his men went to pick up the tall, skinny killer, Roth was long gone with two of Pappas’s lesser men who had always been friends of Roth. Gazzo got a city-wide search going. Then the hunt went state-wide, and, after a time, it got on a national hookup. But Jake Roth kept out of sight and running all the rest of the summer and into the fall.
They were laying odds on Roth in the neighborhood. Joe thought Roth should surrender to the police.
“That ticket and the stub on the Monmouth nag ain’t enough to make the Jones killing stick,” Joe said. “Besides, it was an accident. Manslaughter-Second at the worst.”
“Even the Schmidt killing could be beat with a good shyster,” Packy Wilson said. We were in Pace’s Pub as usual, with the Irish tasting better now that the leaves were beginning to fall if you could find a tree in the district. I had told Packy how he had saved us all with his story on Norwegian history. He was so pleased he was still setting up the drinks for me.
“None of it’s enough for the cops to really nail Roth,” Joe said.
“It never was,” I said, “but it’s enough for Pappas. It was always Pappas. If Myra hadn’t been Pappas’s girl, Roth would have walked in on Gazzo and taken a short one-to-five.”
“He’d be smarter to confess to Murder-Two and take twenty-to-life,” Packy Wilson said.
“He’d live a week,” I said. “In jail Pappas would get him in a week. He’d be a sitting duck.”
They both kind of studied their glasses. I tasted the fine Paddy’s Irish, and thought about the simple and happy men who had distilled it in the old country and had never heard of Jake Roth or Andy Pappas.
“All Roth’s got is a choice of how to die,” I said. “He can confess to Murder-One and take the chair. He can let the cops get him and sit in jail waiting for Pappas to give the word. Or he can run and try to stay a jump ahead of everyone.”
In the end it was the police who got Roth. On a cold day in October he was cornered in a loft in Duluth. He tried to shoot his way out and was nailed. He had lost fifteen pounds and was all alone when he died. Nobody felt sorry for him.
If this was an uplifting story, I’d probably tell you that Jo-Jo Olsen’s decision to accept his duty to himself, his dreams of being a modern Viking, had worked out best for everyone in the end. But it didn’t. With Roth gone, and with Pappas knowing that Olsen had tried to help Roth, Olsen is out.
Sometimes, when I’ve been up all night, I go past the docks and I see Swede Olsen standing in the shape-up. He’s old, and Pappas is down on him, so he doesn’t get much work even when he goes out and stands there every day waiting to be picked out of the shape. He doesn’t drink in the expensive places any more, he drinks in the cheap waterfront saloons. He’s drinking a lot, the last I saw.
Jo-Jo has gone. He never went home. Old Magda Olsen spit on him at the police station. As she said, and meant, they had five kids but only one Jake Roth to make life sweet. After all, Magda Olsen is descended from Vikings, too.
I don’t know what happened to Jo-Jo. But I know he’ll do something. He finished his schooling, and Petey tells me he’s riding his motorcycle on dirt tracks out west. I look for Jo-Jo’s name in the papers all the time. Someday I know I’ll see it. Maybe even as a member of the Ferrari team, or driving some Limey car to victory at Le Mans. Like I said before, it’s all in the background, the air a man breathes, and Jo-Jo goes all the way back to the Vikings. That was what made him run in the first place, and that was what made him come back to finish Jake Roth. His sense of what a man has to do.
Jake Roth didn’t have that, and it cost him. Andy Pappas doesn’t have it either. Maybe we’ll even get Pappas some day.