Louse Diamond , Legs Diamond actually left his endlessly patient wife sitting in the Albany speakeasy where they were celebrating his latest courtroom acquittal, promised to be back in an hour and headed straight for a midnight tryst with his longtime inamorata, the Ziegfeld showgirl Kiki Roberts. Four hours later, he decided he could use a little sleep and repaired back to his own hotel, and Legs was snoring away when underworld executioners slipped into the room and finally succeeded in dispatching him to the sweet bye and bye. Alice got the call about 5:45, at the speak, where she was still waiting.

This was the third time in 14 months such a call had come to her, and twice already had her husband been administered last rites, and twice had he miraculously come back from the abyss. But this time, the rubout took; in the early morning hours of Friday the 18th of December 1931, Legs Diamond - the Clay Pigeon, the papers called him, the Human Sieve - was dead at last.

As a good gangland wife, Alice had always known it would come to this. "Goodbye, boy," she whispered in the rain at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Maspeth, Queens, as clumps of unconsecrated mud covered over his copper coffin, two days before Christmas.

Jack Diamond's reign as New York's flashiest gangster-about-town was relatively brief, and it was not widely realized that there even was a Mrs. Diamond until his time here was already mostly used up. Alice Schiffer had married Jack in 1926, long before the papers ever started calling him Legs, but there'd never been a public sign of her - not when he got famously gunned down with Little Augie Orgen at Norfolk and Delancey Sts. in October 1927, not when he supposedly took over most of Arnold Rothstein's rackets after Rothstein got put on the spot in November 1928, not when he openly shot and killed a couple of mugs at the bar of his Hotsy Totsy Club in July 1929 and had to disappear from Broadway for eight months till five witnesses vanished and the heat went down. It was during this absence from things that rival mobs squeezed him out of his metropolitan operations and forced him to go into the beer business in the Catskills instead. Visiting the upstate Diamond farm, in the village of Acra in Greene County, a fortress of a place equipped with searchlights and machine-gun pillboxes, reporters finally turned up Mrs. Legs, the lady of the house.

Alice was a plump little thing, a deeply religious woman, and she was devoted to Jack for all time, forever, come what may, prepared to forgive him anything, even glamorous Kiki Roberts. It was Kiki with whom Legs was dallying at a midtown hotel on Sunday the 12th of October 1930 when gunners showed up and shot him full of holes, and it was Alice who stayed at his hospital bedside for weeks as he fought off death. Alice was always telling reporters that she prayed for Legs day and night, and she just glared when they asked her what she knew about this Kiki doll. "She is not worth discussing," Alice sniffed.

And after that she nursed him back to health at the Acra compound, stuffing him with affection and good home cooking, until early in April, when Legs informed her that Kiki was moving in.

This unusual domestic situation made the New York papers right away. "The happy little threesome," snickered the Daily News. Actually, Alice soon moved out, and thereafter, Legs - who despite his elegant reputation was never more than a strong-arm thug - went about the business of muscling into the beer rackets of Greene, Ulster and Sullivan counties, Kiki often in tow. She was, in fact, in the car the night that Legs and his boys forced a local truck driver named Grover Parks off the road, tied him to a tree and set him afire.

Alas for Legs, Parks survived to name his assailants, and Gov. Franklin Roosevelt immediately sent racket smashers into Greene County, and so did the federals, and Legs got indicted for Prohibition violations even as outraged Acrans were forming vigilante squads to go after the handsome city slicker with pitchforks. Legs was jailed for two days. Two days after that, as he stood at the window of a country roadhouse, shotgun blasts from outside cut him down.

Kiki Roberts disappeared right away - indeed, while many figured that it was Acra farmers who had done the shooting, there were also those who thought Kiki might have set Legs up herself, that the gunners were Legs' own disgruntled boys who didn't much like the way he slapped Kiki around - and to the hospital rushed faithful Alice Diamond, crashing past state policemen to be with the grievously wounded husband who had called for her.

"He didn't ask for any other woman?" she asked plaintively. A cop assured her that Legs had not, and she broke into sunbeams.

In June, the loyal Alice refused to testify before a grand jury convened by state Attorney General John Bennett to break up Legs' Catskills empire. In July, she was with Legs in court in Troy when a jury acquitted him of having assaulted Grover Parks. "You dear," she said, fondly patting his hand. And early in August she wailed bitterly as he was convicted of the federal liquor charges in Manhattan and sentenced to four years in prison, pending appeals.

In October, Kiki Roberts suddenly reappeared and surrendered to state authorities. There wasn't much against her, and soon she was back before the footlights on Broadway. By late November, as every tabloid newspaper reader in New York City knew, Kiki and Legs were an item again.

Retried in Troy on a variant of the old Grover Parks charge - a flimsy state case at best, truth to tell - Legs was acquitted again at 8:30 on Thursday night the 17th of December 1931, and Alice leaped over the chairs and hurled herself upon him, showering him with hugs and busses. Thereafter the Diamonds and a party of friends went into Albany to live it up for the evening.

About 1 a.m., Legs excused himself. He'd be back in an hour, he promised.

"He loved her and I loved him," Alice explained simply.

"Alice knew all about Kiki Roberts," her sister Mae said later. "But Alice wasn't the kind to bear a grudge. She recognized that Jack was so constituted that he could never be a faithful husband, and she knew she held in the hollow of her hand the best and finest part of his emotional side."

Within weeks of Legs' demise, the widow had put together a stage show - "to teach a moral lesson to young and old," she said piously, "that crime is futile and that the old straight-and-narrow path is the only one to follow" - and for a few months she took the act through small vaudeville houses across New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, dressed in mourning. "The World's Most Talked-Of Woman," she billed herself. Kiki Roberts, meanwhile, was by now touring with a Legs show of her own. "I wish her all the luck in the world," Alice said. Kiki's production was rather the more successful of the two. By the summer of 1932, Alice was down to working the Coney Island freak tents, selling autographed photos, booked alongside the Armless Musician and the Twins from Peru.

Late on the afternoon of Friday the 30th of June 1933, Legs Diamond's largely forgotten widow, age 32-ish, was found on the floor of her sparsely furnished room at 1641 Ocean Ave. in East Midwood, Brooklyn, a bullet through her brain. There were three cups of coffee on the table, indicating that Alice had welcomed her callers, and police let it be known that an expression of disbelief was frozen across her dead face.

It was theorized for a time that she might have been ready to come forward with information about Legs' death and accordingly been silenced. More probably, as it turned out, she had merely overheard too much about a petty neighborhood killing. There were suspects, but nothing was ever pinned on them.

Alice was buried with Legs at Mount Olivet, together with her boy for all the rest of time.