Mile High

by Richard Condon

  “Well?”

  “You better talk it over with him.” The Leader stood up. The meeting was over. “Straighten it all out, Eddie. We don’t want trouble.”

  Eddie went to the Franklin Street saloon and sent out a runner to locate Paul Kelly, who, since winning his murder trial with Paddy West’s help, had applied to the courts to have his name changed back to Vacarelli. He had retired from the gang business and had gone into the labor-union business and had changed his residence from the Lower East Side to East 116th Street. By the process of elimination it was determined that Vacarelli must be in a poolroom in East Harlem, his uptown headquarters.

  He greeted Eddie warmly in the pool hall. They spoke Sicilian. Eddie said he wanted to have a little meeting someplace, so Vacarelli stopped playing pool and they went outside to sit in a wagon.

  “What’s up, paesano?”

  “I just left the Leader.”

  “Yeah? I saw him this morning.”

  “I know. He said you wanted to take over my district.”

  Vacarelli shrugged. “Why not? It’s near my business.” He ran the waterfront.

  “Because you don’t know politics, Paolo. It’s a family profession and very complicated.” Eddie was calm and reasonable. “What is it you think you can get out of the leadership that I can’t get for you? Did Paddy ever let you down? I’m Paddy now.” Eddie was taking the sincere, straight way because he had a lot to do that day and all this blather was such a minor part of it. Vacarelli didn’t have a chance of taking over the First, and all of them knew it; this was just to reestablish his position and maybe win a few points if he could.

  “You gonna be district leader, kid?”

  “I’m running John Kullers.”

  “He’s all right, but he’s yours.”

  “Ours, Paolo. John and I will take care of everything for you.”

  “That’s good.”

  “You’ll tell the Leader it’s all straightened out?”

  “I’ll tell him today.” They shook hands and Eddie went downtown.

  The biggest men in the city were in the Franklin Street saloon, retasting the vigor of Paddy’s funeral. Some, who had five days of alcohol in their systems, were misty-eyed or openly weeping. One leading actor was asking all who would listen if they had caught him when the news of Paddy’s death had come to him. Eddie shook a lot of hands and accepted a lot of commiseration with his long face and his cold eyes and his blatted Gelbart Academy accent. When he found the chance he told the head bartender to send Willie Tobin upstairs as soon as he could be found. Willie was Jiggs Tobin’s son, a bail bondsman Paddy had used as a runner to the judges, the police and the prosecutors across the street. Paddy had made Willie take the bar examinations three times until he had passed. He was two years older than Eddie, a born lobbygow and second gravedigger.

  Willie came into the shabby office cautiously, as he did everything else, closing the door behind him. He was a small-boned, dapper man with a vaguely epicene air. Eddie didn’t tell him to sit down so he didn’t. “How long were you with Paddy, Willie?” Eddie asked.

  “Since I’m thirteen. Half my life almost. God rest his soul.”

  “This was Paddy’s office, but this afternoon your name goes up on that door.” The offer seemed to make Willie nervous. “‘William Tobin, Attorney-at-Law,’ it’ll say. It’s your office now.”

  “Why is that, Eddie?” Willie’s teeth were working on his lower lip.

  “New brooms sweep efficiently, and I’m the sweeper here, Willie. John Kullers is the new leader. John will run the district and all the saloons. Rhonda will handle the cathouses and I’ll make an arrangement for the gambling rooms. But you’ll run all the contracts. No more than that. It’s work you know well. I wouldn’t ask for the impossible.”

  “But how’ll I know which contracts to take? Paddy always decided that.”

  “You’ll know because I’ll tell you. There’s the phone. And you’ll always know where I am. And I’m bumping you to thirty a week.” Eddie got up and put on his hat. He looked slowly around the shabby office. “I’ll never be back here,” he said and started out. Willie called him.

  “I think it oughta be fifty, Eddie.”

  “Thirty. When I see how you settle in I’ll put you on a percentage basis and you’ll make some real money.” He left, closing the door loudly. The telephone rang. Willie picked it up.

  “Hello?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Bill Tobin. Did you expect Paddy?”

  “Lemme talk to Eddie.”

  “No.”

  “No? You know who this is?”

  “Tell me what you want and I’ll get back to you.” There was an uncertain pause at the other end. “Or hang up,” Tobin said.

  “You don’t wanna know who this is?”

  “So far what for?”

  “This is Mike Segal.”

  “Hello, Mike.”

  “Hello, Willie.”

  “There’s been a change, Mike.”

  “What?”

  “Everybody calls me Bill.”

  “Why not?”

  “What can we do for you, Mike?”

  “I got a contract. Benny needs a gun permit. Unlimited.”

  “I’ll get back to you tomorrow.”

  “Jesus, its got to be late this afternoon.”

  “I need Eddie’s okay and Eddie’s on a horsecar somewhere. I’ll get back to you by five o’clock.”

  “Call me at Benny’s. We need the permit by tonight. In case.”

  Willie Tobin had failed the bar examination twice on his father’s orders. The Tobins were crafty Irish who looked at the world out of the corners of their eyes and used a smile like an entrenching tool. Jiggs Tobin had decided long ago that Paddy West was the Tobin family career. It wasn’t that the idea was all that different from the old days. The Tobins had always served a chief in the most comfortable position that he had to offer. They knew the value of a smile and all the kind of talk that could foam out of those kinds of smiles. Paddy West was a bigger chief in the City of New York than any goatskin-clad Druid cringer of a Tobin had ever found to keep a roof over his head. Jiggs knew how to work Paddy. He’d gotten two city jobs out of it, jobs that required no more of him than showing up once a week at the Sanitation Office to pick up his pay check. And he’d gotten his own horse, hansom and hack license, the dream of his life, without it costing one cent because he knew how to think ahead of Paddy while always seeming to be thinking far behind. That was why he made Willie fail those examinations. It paid to look dumb when you were working for a pea-brained elephant like Paddy West, and there was no better way to prove how dumb you were and no better way to write insurance on Paddy’s gratitude than making him not just a benefactor for sending the lad through law school and keeping him on a job loaded with money and power but for turning him into a superior benefactor. Paddy couldn’t have passed the bar examination if he’d taken it fifty-eight times, but under the Tobin family system it was proved he was fifty-eight times smarter than this Tobin clot who muddled along and couldn’t get to be a lawyer until the third time. Jiggs and Willie and Bridey Tobin, God rest her soul, had many a laugh over that. In fact Paddy West gave them more fine entertainment and good rib-aching fun than anything shown in any theeayter.

  Willie wasn’t smarmy. If he had discovered the Tobin system he could never have lived long enough to protect it. On the surface he was a tenth-generation fink, to the world and the Wests. He was the kind of dim-witted—well, damned near dim-witted—twit who always absolutely miraculously not only got the job done but got it done quick and in the best way.

  Jiggs Tobin said the secret of rising as a courtier was to demonstrate every day of your life that you were abjectly dependent on the boss’s orders, that you couldn’t move across a room unless the smartest captain God ever sent to earth charted your course and did all your thinking for you. You had to insist on getting orders, then you had to be vocally grateful for receiving the
m, marveling all the way that the human mind could coordinate and project such intricate boxes within boxes, each containing a new and more splendid pearl. Then, of course, Jiggs said, you go out and get the job done your own way and do it fast and at the least cost. If the Man ever—which wasn’t likely—complimented you on a job well done in a tone of astonishment that you could find your ass with either hand, then—instantly!—flash the dumb-ox expression across the face and look him square in the puss with dismay and stammer out like you couldn’t comprehend why the hell he should be praising you when all you was doing was trying to carry out orders which, thank God, were so detailed that how could you make a mistake?

  Jiggs was a master tobin, but Willie was far better at the family profession than his father, which made the father ecstatically proud because he had been just that much better an ass-kissing stumblewit than his father.

  Willie was a new kind of tobin. They had always been lumpy men, with shoulders for pushing through a crowd ahead of the Boss, with eyes like awls to everyone but the Boss, with stained teeth and heads of hair like sea grass, tangled and long. They had been farters and belchers and friends of the rubber mat under a spittoon.

  Willie was effete compared to the tobins who had lived before him. He was light-boned and graceful. He was a dude who put his savings squarely on his back and who had set himself to the task of wheedling jeweled stickpins out of Paddy, because people gave Paddy every sort of thing they kept in the backs of their bureau drawers when they didn’t have money to give, because, after all, that was what loyalty meant in Paddy’s eyes, not just the straight-ticket vote, Willie wore his beige hair in three, beautifully kept waves that ascended like lights from the elegant widow’s peak that he had become so grateful to find on his forehead. Willie wore a ring on each hand that he had coaxed patiently out of Paddy, claiming that rings and stickpins bespoke affluence when he dealt with the cops in the Tombs and the judges and the DAs in the courts across the street. He was a nimble tobin in every way, but he was hauntingly epicene and therefore a new tobin. He specialized in merchandising the soft answer and the sweet request, and it worked, because when he had to he could put the old feudal steel into his voice and back them all down, because, as the newest of a long, long line of tobins he knew well his place and his power of place within the fief.

  “It isn’t an assignment that will be long or demanding,” Eddie said to William Glass, dean of the Law School at Columbia University. “Just library research. Nights and weekends.”

  “Law students need their nights and weekends, Mr. West. That’s when they learn to be lawyers.”

  “Law students can use money too. And I’ll pay well.” Eddie’s tall, white, stiff, collar seemed to support his long neck and bony head, giving him a swamp-bird’s dignity.

  “We have our graduates, the young lawyers who don’t immediately set the world on fire.” Dean Glass lifted a card file from a desk drawer and began to riffle through it. “Here is a brilliant young man. Arnold Goff. Straight As, and we haven’t had many of those in our history. Editor of the law journal too.”

  “I’ll take him.”

  “He’s a lawyer, Mr. West. Explain your problem and he’ll tell you whether he’ll accept your offer.”

  Goff’s office was in the St. Paul Building at 220 Broadway, below Chambers Street. Goff was a medium-sized man with soft skin, as pale as cigarette paper, with pale, shiny hair, wearing a black suit and a mauve necktie. He had the hardest eyes Eddie had ever seen, and that made Eddie marvel; harder than Paddy’s and colder; harder than those of the men who had sat in Paddy’s office above the saloon. Goff shook Eddie’s hand, motioned him to a seat, but did not speak. He had mastered the compulsory law course wherein lawyers are taught to let others do all the talking in order to create an aura of mysterious wisdom and to avoid revealing the extent of this wisdom.

  It was a pleasant small office with two windows that looked up Broadway, and off to the right, one could see City Hall. The walls displayed diplomas and impressive certificates, but those hung above reading level were dental-school diplomas that Goff’s fiancée had bought at auction. There were also many pictures of large numbers of men in white aprons who were eating beefsteaks in happy congress, all the pictures framed in pencil-thin black wood and also purchased in quantity by Goff’s fiancée from the estate of a defunct restaurateur.

  Goff didn’t say as much as “What can I do for you?” He sat in repose, with his fingertips touching under his chin, waiting for the petitioner to explain his presence.

  It was child’s play for Eddie. His father had challenged and rewarded him for not speaking long before his school days. That and his money gave him an edge. They sat in silence for one minute. Then three minutes. After about four minutes Goff said imperturbably, “What can I do for you?”

  “I am an attorney. Dean Glass said you were a gifted briefs man.”

  “Thank you.” Goff did something indefinable with his pale left hand, exposing his open palm, making a loosely clenched fist, then opening it to release nothing, thus turning his two words into a sardonic statement.

  “That is what I know about you as a lawyer. What will I find when I investigate the rest?”

  “Do you think that will be necessary?”

  Eddie nodded pleasantly.

  “If it is necessary to investigate an attorney at law beyond questioning the dean of his law school, then the retainer must be extraordinary. If that is so, why aren’t you in Wall Street talking to one of the big firms? I would add that it might be more in line if I were to investigate you.”

  “That seems indiscreet for an attorney at law to say.”

  “I’m not in a popularity contest.”

  “You can investigate me. I am Edward Courance West. Paddy West’s son.”

  Goff sat up very straight and his hard eyes began to be transformed into eyes that were looking at the golden medina. He stood up, walked around his desk and shook Eddie’s hand again. “I am very glad to know you, Mr. West. Now let me tell you about myself.” He moved slowly back to his chair behind the desk talking persuasively as he went.

  “I am Arnold Goff, twenty-five years old. My father is head of Goff Lite-Wayts, a leading dress house on 39th Street that has a triple-A rating. I am an only son and my parents are proud of me. I am unmarried but engaged to a young woman, Bella Radin, age twenty-three. Her family runs nickelodeons, and we will marry as soon as my circumstances permit. My father would happily finance the marriage, and for that matter so would hers, but we have declined these offers. I have had no clients other than my father’s firm, which I refuse to charge. I could pick up cases around the criminal courts if I wanted to live like that, if I had become a lawyer to do that. So, on the surface, I have no income. But I have. I gamble for a living and I am good at it. Not lucky. I am in the strictest sense of the word a professional gambler. Lightning calculator. If the truth were faced, I am even better with figures than I am at the law. But full-time gambling is out of the question while my parents are alive. They educated me to be a lawyer.” Goff’s telephone rang. “It’s either my father, my mother, or Bella, my fiancée,” he said ruefully. “Want to bet, Mr. West? I’ll give you a good price.” The phone rang again.

  “What price?”

  “Bet ten against those three names and win a hundred.”

  “What price if I name the caller, against those three?” The phone rang.

  “Name the caller and you get twenty-five to one.”

  Eddie took out his wallet. “Can you cover a hundred dollars?” He slid a one-hundred-dollar bill across the glass-topped desk.

  “You’re covered. Who’s calling?”

  “A man named Willie Tobin,” Eddie said. Goff picked up the phone and spoke into it with a casual drawl. “Hello? Who is calling, please?” He handed the instrument across the desk. “It’s for you, Mr. West,” he said almost gaily. “Mr. Bill Tobin.”

  “Mike Segal called with a contract for an unlimited,” Willie told Eddie. �
��It’s for Benny. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Eddie said. “Give it to Judge Ornstein. He’s Supreme Court in Suffolk County but he’s sitting in Brooklyn today as an extra to help clear up the calendar. Tell him I said hello to his wife.” Eddie hung up and pushed the phone back toward Goff. “This is the retainer, Mr. Goff,” Eddie said. “I want you to compile a precise legal history of the prohibition movement in this country. You are authorized for up to four assistants at fifteen dollars a week for sixteen weeks each. I want it as close to county by county as you can get it.”

  Goff had become very pale. His lips looked blue. His eyes looked harder because they were desperate. He had saved eighteen hundred dollars toward his marriage and the money was banked jointly with Bella Radin, who was patient and understanding and believed in him as a gambler as in everything else, but there had to be limits, as with everything else. He would have to borrow an additional seven hundred dollars from his father to cover this bet. How could he explain such a bet? It wouldn’t be easy. He had to pay off within twenty-four hours, because this expressionless man with his long neck and cold, bony face just happened to be one of the men in the city who could make or break a lawyer.

  “I suggest a fee of three thousand dollars, payable in advance,” West was saying. “That fee should convey how important this brief is to me and how painstakingly it must be made.” Before the bet Eddie had decided to offer a fee of a thousand dollars, but the bet took up the slack. The net cost for the brief would now be only five hundred dollars and he would have put a lock on Goff. “I’ll pay for clerical expenses weekly as they’re incurred, but the brief must be completed in one hundred and twenty days. Can you do it?”

  Goff answered slowly, knowing he had to say he could do it because there was no other way to get the money to pay back West. “I think so. But I’ll need six assistants.”

  “I’ll pay for four. If you want six, you pay for the extra two.”

  “What if I can finish in ninety days?”

  “Twenty percent bonus.”

  “Sixty days?”