Mile High (10 page)

When Mr. O'Connell left Tammany Hall he was shaken and frightened. The Leader had not only been greatly shocked, but every bit of it had been news to him.

CHAPTER FOUR

Eddie West, handling routine work at his desk in the bank, waited for the call that had to come. It arrived at 11:35
A.M.
Mr. C. L. Pick, Jr., was calling.

“Ed?”

“Yes, Charley?”

“Is your secretary on the line?”

“Are you on, Miss Mechanic?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get off, please.” They heard the click. “Go ahead, Charley.”

“Ed, never mind how or why, but they have my father in the Tombs on a murder charge.”

“Charley!”

“Can you do anything?”

“You're goddam right I can do something. Go to the saloon just across Center Street, in Franklin Street. I'll get there as quickly as I can.”

“Thank you, Ed.”

“Charley, please! I'm so glad you thought to call me.” He hung up, grinning. He sauntered to the hatrack, popped on his high-crowned derby and left the office.

By the time the Leader had sent for John Kullers of the First Assembly District and O'Connell had watched Kullers pull the same true-blue blank stare that convinced O'Connell that he had nothing to do with the setup, and by the time Kullers had taken him to the Franklin Street saloon to find Willie Tobin to get him to call Eddie (while the Leader began his tirade at the Fire Department, carefully avoiding doing anything about the Tombs until he could find out more about what was going on but promising everything), Eddie had met C.L., Jr, had heard the whole outrageous story and not only had C. L. Pick, Sr. out of the Tombs but had removed every shred of paper relative to his arrest and detention and turned them over to Charley.

He packed the tiny, dazed old man into a taxi with his son. The cab drew away from the curb just as O'Connell came sprinting across the street from the saloon. He called after Eddie. Eddie turned. “Pardon me, sir,” O'Connell said, “but was that C. L. Pick you just put into that cab?” Eddie stared at him coldly until O'Connell apologized and properly identified himself as C.L.'s partner. Eddie confirmed the passenger's identity, adding that he had roomed at law school with Charley Pick and that he had been happy to help out. O'Connell was greatly impressed. The Leader had been helpless. The district leader who very nearly lived in the Tombs was helpless. But this young lawyer had done everything required. “Who are you?” O'Connell asked.

“I am Edward Courance West, president of the West National Bank.”

“But how—?”

Eddie shrugged charmingly. “My father was Paddy West.” he explained, “and I'm happy to see that they still remember him in there. And now—Mr. Heller. We'll have to do something about him. Want to come along?” O'Connell fell into step beside him. “And after that the goddam Fire Department,” he said.

Eddie stopped. “The Fire Department?” O'Connell explained in an angry torrent. Eddie grew indignant. “Someone must be framing you, Mr. O'Connell.”

“Yes. That's what it is. And if I have to spend every dime I ever made I'm going to find out who it is.”

Eddie gripped O'Connell's shoulder with sincerity. “First we'll see that your partner is off Ellis Island and comfortable, then I'll just have one good, hard look into this whole thing. When I get finished you can be sure of one thing, Mr. O'Connell—we will have gotten to the bottom of this.”

“He's one of the finest young men I've ever had dealings with,” F. A. O'Connell told his partners in Marxie Heller's office, because the walls in C. L. Pick's office were being restored, “and I think we're obligated to try to do something substantial for him and get it all settled between us before he gets here.”

“Can't offer a bank president money,” Heller said.

“Yes, we can, Marxie,” C. L. said in his trembling flute of a voice. “We control funds and we can see that a fair portion of them are deposited in the young man's bank.”

“Yes. That's the way,” O'Connell said. “We won't ask him, we'll just start depositing.”

“Marxie, you can persuade Mr. Morgan to speak to the Treasury people about reallocating some of their funds in the city.”

“If he comes in with proof of who did this to us,” Heller growled, “by God, I'll open an account with him myself.”

Mr. West's arrival was announced. They offered him a drink, but he didn't drink. They offered him a cigar, but he didn't smoke. Then Heller couldn't stand it any more and he asked if Eddie had found out who had been trying to frame them.

“You have enemies, gentlemen.”

“I should hope so,” Heller replied.

“There is a certain man—politically and otherwise very powerful—whose name is Paul Kelly, born Paolo Vacarelli. He is boss of the waterfront among other things.”

“The gang leader?”

“Well, he calls himself a labor leader now.”

“We have never had anything to do with him,” C. L. Pick said flatly.

“Of course not,” Eddie reassured him. “But Kelly handled the arrangements. A certain person hired Kelly to have you harassed, thinking you would make an uproar and all of it could get into the newspapers. Hoping, I would say, that it might ruin you.”

“Who is it?” All partners leaned forward.

“At this moment the name is unknown to me. If you wish, I'll have another talk with Kelly. However, Kelly's client is said to be a well-known figure in the shipping business. I thought perhaps you might be able to deduce who he might be.” The law firm had been in publicly fought litigation for nine years with the Evans-Dwye Steamship Lines and had won, so far, eleven of the seventeen law suits filed. The litigation and its bitterness had seldom been out of the financial pages. Heller banged his fist down with force on the arm of his chair. “It's Evans!” he yelled. “Let's break his goddam back!”

CHAPTER FIVE

Arnold Goff's finished brief was delivered directly to Mr. West by Goff's fiancée, Miss Bella Radin, to his apartment in the Buckingham Hotel on Fifth Avenue at Fiftieth Street in one day less than the maximum bonus period—completed in fifty-nine days. It was five weeks after West had rescued Pick, Heller & O'Connell and, in a way, identified their oppressor. (“Because I value your son's friendship, Mr. Pick,” and “I am an attorney before I am a banker, Mr. Heller, and I ask you to banish from your mind any possibility of rewarding me for what is nothing more than professional courtesy,” and “If there is the slightest repercussion from Paul Kelly or
whoever
his client may be I will depend on you to ring me at once, Mr. O'Connell.”)

The Goff brief was magnificently comprehensive. It comprised eleven volumes of about five hundred pages each, neatly typed in double spacing and bound sensibly, volume by volume, in buckram. A sixty-three-page précis accompanied it as well as a bibliography. Eddie was pleased. It was a Friday afternoon. Before she left he asked Miss Radin to please tell Mr. Goff to come to see him at the hotel on Sunday at noon.

Eddie untied his tie slowly as he stared down greedily at the massive brief, standing in the center of the high-ceilinged, enormous room that had been combined from two apartments to recreate the feeling of the interior of an English country house of the first third of the nineteenth century (just about the time his father was escaping the Irish famine by teaching himself to chew and swallow English corn). He had installed a nine-foot-high white marble fireplace. The facing sofas were deep-dimpled black leather, each with hundreds of shiny black buttons. He worked at a heavy, wide library table that stood on a thick Chinese rug with royal blue markings on a field of gold. The room had two large, square standing safes, each covered with a Spanish shawl, each wired to explode five seconds after forced entry, each holding nests of locked strongboxes, because the West operation took in and paid out large amounts of cash at all hours of the day and night.

He took a bath, put on silk pajamas, a dressing gown, woolen socks and slippers, poured himself a glass of ginger ale, then settled down at the table to begin examining the brief. He read until three-fifteen the following morning, then slept until nine o'clock, when he showered, shaved, dressed and had a light breakfast. He read again until ten that night, slept until five the next morning, then read until eleven forty-five. Goff arrived promptly at noon, wearing the same mauve necktie he always seemed to wear.

“Don't you have any other ties?” Eddie asked as greeting.

“I only wear mauve ties. I have twenty-two mauve ties.”

“Why?”

“My fiancée likes mauve. Besides, it goes with black suits and white shirts and I collect those too.”

Eddie asked him to sit down and offered him a drink.

“I don't drink,” Goff said.

“I don't either.”

“Let the chumps have it.”

“I liked your brief.”

“Good.”

“What do I owe you?”

Goff handed Eddie an envelope. Eddie removed the bill and studied it.

“What's this sixteen weeks for assistants?” Eddie asked. “You did it in eight weeks.”

“You authorized four for a hundred and twenty days.”

“And that's a lot of money for typing.”

“Is it? Can you buy a typist for only twelve dollars a week?”

“You haven't charged me for supplies and typewriter rentals.”

“My treat, Mr. West.”

“All right. This is a fair statement. I'll pay it.” He took out his wallet and tossed it across the room. Goff caught it. “Keep the wallet as a memento,” Eddie said. “My treat.” Goff took the money out of the wallet and counted it. His face flushed deeply. “This is exactly three thousand one hundred and eighty dollars,” he said slowly.

“So long as it's correct.”

“Now I guess you expect me to ask you how it happened that there was exactly three thousand one hundred and eighty dollars in the wallet.”

Eddie shrugged.

“You put a plant on me.” Goff was deeply offended and it showed. “Were you trying to tell me something?”

“I thought you might like to work for me,” Eddie said. “And I like to have suspicious people working for me. Plants don't happen to suspicious people, not to careful people. For instance, as I told you the day I retained you, I don't think you should have told your girl who your client was.”

“What's the job?”

“I want a man to handle money. We do informal short-term financing. There are other payments and collections.”

“Is it legit?”

“No.”

Goff drummed on the arm of the chair with his white fingers. “Then it isn't something I could do as a lawyer, is it?”

“Entirely up to you.”

Goff stared at him with those hard, hard eyes.

“You said you wanted to be a professional gambler. I own three gambling houses. I need one manager for all of them. I'd want you to see that you got yourself publicized as a gambler. I'd like it if everyone thought of you as Arnold Goff, the sportsman.”

“Why?”

“Gamblers are always handling large amounts of cash-passing it from hand to hand.”

“What's the pay? I assume I could keep what I win.”

“You may keep it if you bet your own money, and you're not likely to get any of mine for that. I'll pay you two percent of all the money you handle, going out and coming in. Until you learn the trade you can have five hundred a month on a drawing account.”

“I'll need to talk it over with Bella, Mr. West.”

“Marry her, sure. But why tell her my business?”

“Because we want to be a family. Because sometimes life is nice. Maybe most of the time. I wouldn't be giving her my respect if I only shared the good things with her.”

“She was my plant.”

“What?”

“I said your fiancée was my plant with you. I paid her a hundred dollars. She told me how much the bill would be when she brought the brief Friday afternoon. She told me how you refused to charge me for the rent of the loft because it was your father's and you got it for nothing. Now, that was chump stuff. That was silly and sentimental.”

Goff looked stricken. He didn't speak. His right hand pressed hard on his diaphragm. He looked as though he were going to be sick.

“A plant is a plant,” Eddie said. “Anybody can set a plant, because money is grease and I've got the grease.” He stared down at Goff with ice-water contempt. “Never tell anyone anything. Never trust anyone. When you told her who the client was she was in business for herself.”

Goff's face was sunken. He gripped his whole lower face with his widely opened right hand and clung to it tightly as though his head were himself, all of himself, and he needed to grip hard to hold everything together.

When he spoke, minutes later, he said, “When do I start?”

“Wednesday night. Be here at eight. We'll have dinner, then I'll take you on the rounds. Would you like some tea?”

“No, thank you, Mr. West.”

CHAPTER SIX

After Goff left, West went out for some air. He strolled up Fifth along the Park, then down the other side of the avenue, apparently window shopping but actually preoccupied with the problem of concealing his youth at the moment of the key confrontations, searching for some technical way he could get around this serious disadvantage. But the answer would not come. When he got back to his flat he assembled pads and pencils and editing crayons in schizoid order, then at 2:23
P.M.
he began the editing for publication.