No One Rides for Free

by Larry Beinhart

  The wonder and power of money. Ivy league for Wayne if he wanted it. A permanent muscle relaxer for the sense of financial tension that intermittently knotted Glenda’s back. Getting my adrenaline rushes from skiing or skin-diving, like a normal person, instead getting off by looking down the barrel of a gun. And if it didn’t buy me Christina Wood, I could rent or lease something that looked a lot like her, because women like that always seemed to end up alongside a major financial statement.

  “I am going to die soon. You are intelligent enough to run the business. I just don’t know if you are smart enough.”

  “Rockefeller Lookout” is not a political slogan or a communist threat, it is a spot to pull off the Palisades Parkway and look out from the high bluffs across the wide, wide river to the construction industry’s single greatest monument, Manhattan. It’s also a fine place to chat, relatively certain you will be microphone-free.

  “Do you know how blessed we are to be here? In America?” Uncle Vincent said to the view.

  “America, the greatest country in the world. We are very lucky,” added Michael Paley, a.k.a. Michael Pollazzio, a.k.a. Mikey Fix.

  Uncle Vincent had warned me, in very emphatic and paternal tones, not to be a wise-ass with Mr. Paley. I didn’t even snicker.

  “This is your nephew.”

  “Yes, a good boy. Smart,” Vincent replied.

  “You look like you coulda been a fighter. Ever been in the ring, kid?”

  “Just PAL when I was a kid.”

  “Yeah? Any good?”

  “Yeah, if I was only quicker, a bit stronger, had better hands and was a lot meaner, I might have been a fair Italian middle-weight.”

  He laughed. “Hey, you seen that Boom-Boom Mancini fight? A disappointment, but the kid had heart, a lotta heart. You shoulda seen Marciano, wasn’t one of these coloreds could have taken him. Kids, they grow up these days with money, they grow up soft. … How about you, you soft?”

  “Compared to what?” I said.

  “I hear you’re pretty tough,” he said. “That’s good. I like the way you took care of John Straightman’s problem. That was smart. Coming to your uncle with this problem. That was smart too.”

  Vincent nodded sagely.

  “Well, I know your Uncle Vincent from way, way back. I know how much you mean to him. I’ll put a stop to this thing, as much as I can.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means,” he said, “that the contract is canceled.”

  “That simple? If you want me to cover the five grand, I can. I wouldn’t want anyone to take a loss,” I said. And I could too, another three or four years without a vacation was worth the price of my life.

  Paley laughed again, this time longer and louder. “Thanks for the offer, but I don’t need that kinda bread. Besides, it’s nonrefundable.” Vincent chuckled with him. Even I smiled.

  “Who wanted me hit?” I asked.

  “That’s something you’re gonna have to figure out. But that should be easy, detective.”

  “Mr. Paley, if I don’t know, what’s to stop the guy from trying again, through some other avenue?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “And you don’t feel like telling me who? How about it, Uncle Vince?”

  “Tony, I would tell you if I knew,” Paley said. “This came to us from the coloreds, and I don’t know if it’s their thing, or someone asked them. And it’s not like I can go have a chat with Ricky Sams in his maximum-security cell down in Fort Hamilton with the U.S. Army all around him.”

  “If you can’t talk to him, how did you get involved?”

  “He can get messages out. Some kinda letter code, to communicate with his people. But it’s mostly a one-way thing. You understand?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Me and your uncle, we’re gonna be watching you close on this one. You handle it right, you can go a long way.”

  “Terrific,” I said.

  “Hey, hey, kid. Nothing like that. Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m talking strictly legit. I got lots of things need security contracts. Construction sites, shopping centers, factories. I got union work. All kinds of stuff. It’s not easy to find good people no more. Smart, tough. Too many of the kids have gone soft.”

  30

  THE INGRATE DEAD

  “THE WHOLE FUCKING BUNCH is as bad as I am, the whole fucking barrel is rotten … that super-WASP fuck Choate Haven … that cocksucker Goreman … and I’m gonna drag them all down with me,” Wood screamed.

  “It ain’t bragging if you can do it,” Dizzy Dean said. But Wood was bragging, and he couldn’t. Usually bragging is merely an unattractive character trait, but when the wrong person believes the braggart, it can be a fatal flaw.

  Edgar Wood never knew the secret he had died for.

  But someone who had a secret believed he did. So had I, and I had spent the entire investigation looking for that as the key.

  Judge McCarthy was the first one to pick up on it. If Wood had had something really hot, he would never have met the judge. He would have stopped the lawyers, if what he had was on them, or he would have forced Goreman to stop them. As a last resort he would have cut a deal with the D.A. in the process that Mel Brodsky liked to call “trading up.”

  It was a long chain from the man who wanted the killing done to the two men in the parking lot who had committed the execution with a tire iron. LeRoy Johnson, who had fingered Wood, led us to Alexander, Jr., who ran to Wellby. In spite of my bragging at the Goreman lawn party, I had never expected to connect the link from Wellby to …?

  Wellby was too well insulated and more than tough enough to keep himself that way. He had proved that by having me shoved off the cliff; when that failed, he had turned what connected him to Wood into a corpse.

  But the killer had stayed in character. He fell for my bragging just like he fell for Wood’s. The order went out to kill me. It started out on the same route that the order to kill Wood had taken, then diverged because of our locations. In Virginia the contract had gone to Wellby, in New York to Mikey Fix.

  Paley had let me know that the contract had come from Sams. And if Sams could reach out to Paley, he could reach out to the Doctor.

  But Ricky Sams didn’t give a shit about Edgar Wood or me. He probably had never heard of either of us before. There was, therefore, one more link, the person who had asked Sams to do the job. There also had to be someone to tell the unknown party where Wood was, so Sams could tell Wellby to tell Alexander, so Alexander could talk to LeRoy.

  I also knew who had fingered Wood. That was me.

  I had given that information, at the right time, to Lawrence Choate Haven, who was also my only suspect in a position to communicate with Sams.

  Ol’ squash buddy, Ol’ Chip, an associate in Trusts and Estates, was helping to set up Sams’s estate. While an associate may do all the actual work, every case actually belongs to a partner. The most senior partner in T&E was Choate Haven, and if he wanted to go along to a meeting with Sams, Ol’ Chip, living in the law-firm world of competitive paranoia, would be aware of one thing only, how Choate Haven was judging the performance of Chip Riggins.

  There were two places that such a meeting was most likely to have taken place. At Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, or in some sort of holding facility when Sams came into Manhattan to testify. In either place, there would be a record.

  It was the kind of information that a judge like Stew McCarthy could ask for, and he was kind enough to do so. Choate Haven had met with Ricky Sams several times, including dates immediately before his meeting with me, at which point he may have been given a way to communicate with Wellby directly, shortly after me Hamptons party.

  There was still the remote possibility that he was bird-dogging for Charles Goreman. Over & East was me sort of client that an attorney might do anything to keep. It was also remotely possible that he was acting to protect someone else at Choate, Winkler, Higgiston, Hahn & Moore, in the fear that they could not survive a scandal
on top of scandal.

  I had an afternoon with Christina and I told her that I was close.

  “My angel, my beautiful brown-eyed angel,” she said. “When I’m with you, the whole rest of the world disappears.”

  I understood that. There was an anger bubbling away deep inside me, waiting. The taste of fear that Whelan had roused was still fresh on my tongue, dry and foul as a lick of tobacco ash. A new fear was building, too, of what I might have to do. All of that was gone, over the rooftop and across a wide wide river, when she was there.

  Everything that Laurie and I had been reaching for that angry, drugged night, pushing to the point of pain and failing even to simulate, was right there with Christina all by itself, as free and deceptive as a gift from the gods.

  “Do you now how crazy I am about you?”

  “Yes, I think so,” she said.

  “No. You don’t. You have no idea. I’m crazy enough to ask you to marry me. Even though I have a notion that it’s a terrible idea. I’d ask, and if you said yes, I would do it.”

  “That’s only because you think you can trust me not to say yes.”

  “The thing is, you don’t really believe it.”

  “I don’t know. I know you’re my angel and you shouldn’t love me too much.”

  . “What if I were free, and if I had a lot of money, then what?”

  “Hush,” she said, kissing me softly to close my lips. “Don’t talk of things like that.”

  “No?”

  “Just hold me, kiss me, come inside me.”

  Goreman had told me there were many things that Wood did not know, including what had happened in Hungary, the story of the first $80,000 that Goreman had tripled to take over Samson. I had to be sure, and when I called Goreman he reconfirmed that he had not told Wood those things.

  Then I made up a story. I wove it out of wisps of information, old news clips, and what the women said: look for the overachiever.

  Choate Haven was active in refugee organizations as early as ’39 when it was hardly fashionable. As a side effect, or even as an ulterior and primary motive, it brought funds into Choate, Winkler, Higgiston, Hahn & Moore at a time when an ongoing depression and a Democratic administration were doing nothing to boost business at an old-line Republican Wall Street law firm. Some of those funds must have been quite substantial. Anyone in Europe who had an ounce of sense and the means was transferring cash and assets to Switzerland or America.

  Only the man himself could say when it had started.

  He would have heard stories of the death camps early on. He might not have believed them and waited until the end of the war when the American troops stumbled on the ovens. And on the long, carefully recorded tabulation of the numbers dead. At that point he would have been certain that many of the people who had entrusted their funds to him would not return. Neither would their spouses, children, grandchildren, cousins, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces. No one would return to claim that money.

  Maybe he began to embezzle it just because it was there and didn’t seem to belong to anyone. Maybe it was simple greed. Maybe he couldn’t keep up his dues at the N.Y.A.C. and the Harvard Club. Maybe there was a golden investment he couldn’t pass up or his sister needed an eye operation or his wife wanted a cosmetic mastectomy. To me, the reasons didn’t matter.

  Then bodies rose from the ashes. Like Charles Goreman, son of Itzhak Oberetstock. As in Goreman’s case, Choate Haven denied when he could, stalled as long as he could and paid when he had to.

  At some point the ratio between embezzled dollars and the number of survivors swung the wrong way and the claims of the living exceeded the amount stolen from the dead.

  To cover the shortfall he went looking for clients with unreported, untraceable cash. The kind of money Ricky Sams had. I made a guess that the roots of that relationship went back in time to the forties or fifties. Sams did not pick Choate, Winkler from the yellow pages; someone had recommended the fine old firm to him.

  Court clerks, particularly those working in an area as dry and dusty as probate court, remember any contact with the famous, the notorious, the glamorous. I located several old-timers; one down in Sarasota remembered Choate Haven handling crime figures.

  He had been surprised, which is why he remembered it so well, to see Haven represent the estate of Philip and Vincent Mangano. Phil and Vince had founded one of New York’s five families way back in ’31. In ’51 they made their last headline together when Albert Anastasia took over their family. He had Philip murdered, but Vincent only disappeared, presumed dead, which made for some fun probate.

  I had a lot of answers. I knew who, how and understood why. I had other kinds of answers, about my own life, from Vincent, Mikey Fix, Glenda, and a confused answer from Christina.

  I had answers. The more answers I had, the more problems I had. Not one was a solution. To make them mean anything, I had to do something with them.

  It was funny. The whole thing had been unnecessary. The murder of Wood; the murder of Alexander, who probably deserved it; the attempt to get me, who certainly did not. For once I completely failed to see the humor in it.

  31

  NAKED

  “HOW WOULD YOU LIKE to be a big-time detective agency? Have some nice fat security contracts, all money, no work? You could do your gambling down in Grand Bahama, or even hit the casino at Monte Carlo, instead of taking that grubby bus down to Atlantic City. How would you like to set up a trust fund for your grandkids, for their college? Would you like that, Joey?”

  “Is this idle chatter? Or are you talking about something? You sound like you got something eating you.”

  “I got an offer, two offers. Uncle Vince, he’ll take me into the family business. Construction. Big money. And Mr. Paley, he says he can throw lots of business our way, strictly legit, he says. That’s just in case I don’t wanna go into construction.”

  “Is this for real?”

  “Did they really say it? Or is it for real? I know they really said it. I was there.”

  “I don’t want anything from the likes of Michael Pollazzio. I don’t trust nobody who changes his name.”

  “Don’t you ever get tired of scrounging? Being half fucking broke? Wouldn’t it be nice to take a real vacation … I don’t mean sitting at home waiting for the goddamn phone to ring because there’s no work. I don’t mean going down to Florida and trying to live off social security. I mean a real fucking vacation. First-class in the plane. First-class hotel. Good restaurants. Maybe you would like to take a cab once in a while, just ’cause you don’t feel like riding the subway. Just ’cause you don’t feel like it, and not worry about an extra five dipshit dollars.”

  “Do you really feel that way?” he asked.

  “Does the Pope shit in the Vatican?”

  “So you’re thinking about working for those kinda people,” he said with contempt.

  “Oh, by the way, there is a catch.”

  “Of course there is,” he said, like I should know that there always is. I did.

  “They’re watching to see how I handle things with this one.”

  “What does that mean?’”

  “How the hell do I know?” I snapped.

  “How are you going to handle it?”

  “How would you handle it?” I threw it back to him.

  “I don’ know. It’s a tough one.”

  “Fucking A, it’s a tough one. There’s not word one I can prove. I can’t prove Alexander took his orders from Wellby, I can’t prove that Wellby got the contract from Sams, and the only connection between Sams and Haven is absolutely, perfectly legitimate. That, he can prove. Can I prove that Haven was an embezzler, forty years ago? Even Goreman, with all his money and power—and he’s the one who got stung by it—didn’t try. This guy is untouchable.”

  “So what are you going to do about it?” he asked, worried. I was sounding wound up tight, and it was more than the cocaine I was still doing. He picked up on my anxiety, but not the drug use,
or he would have said something about it. He would have had a lot to say about it.

  “What do you think I ‘m gonna do?”

  “I don’t know, Tony, tell me.”

  “Maybe when I figure it out, I’ll tell you.” But I don’t think I was trying to figure it out. I think I had it by then, or maybe a long time ago.

  “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “I won’t,” I lied to him, then I closed the door behind me as I left.

  I splurged. I took a cab all the way home.

  “I’ll be away for a few days. Don’t worry about me. Don’t worry about yourself or Wayne either, I got that part of things settled. There are a few things that still need to be worked out. It’s really better if I’m away while I do that. Please don’t worry. I love you and Wayne very much,” is what I wrote in the note that Glenda would find when she got home. I read it over, then added, “Three, four days, at the most. Promise. Then I’ll see you.”

  When I left the house, I walked, and walked, and walked. Finally I found myself down by the water in the West Village. Down by Morton Street Pier, where Christina had put my hand to her lips and, when I asked her if it mattered that there was a woman already in my life, said, “I don’t think so.” I had made her a promise, that I was going to find out who did it and do what could be done about it. Christina, who called me “Angel,” even when I was armed and dangerous.

  The sky was muddy gray, and the muddy gray Hudson was covered with a scum. Garbage floated, but it looked like the river had a skin, and things were stabbed halfway in. When I went after Haven I would be going over the line, like him. Like going into that river in front of me, not knowing how much would cling to me when, and if, I climbed out.

  I could think of reasons for diving in. The man had made me death’s stalking horse, then paid me with the dead man’s money. He had used Christina’s pain to pay the cost of his cover-up. “Angel,” she said to me, “you’re the only one I can turn to.” He had put my woman and my child at risk. Also, there was gold down there, under the scum. Mike Paley and Uncle Vincent had told me so. It was as if the Devil stood behind me, whispering in all his different voices, urging me on. But when I turned to look, the only thing that stood behind me was my own shadow.