by Ross Thomas
When Amos Woodrow Coulter died unexpectedly in 1964 from infectious hepatitis at the age of 51, unmarried and alone, he left most of his estimated $500 million fortune to several foundations and the Federal government, noting in his will that the government “will probably get it anyway,” but including the carefully drawn provision that the money be used to build a gallery or museum in Washington to house his vast art collection and to acquire “other works of merit, interest, worth, and significance as they appear on the world market.”
Coulter had made his fortune in electronics, and most of the gadgets that his firm patented and manufactured were snapped up by the government to guide its missiles and steer its rockets to the moon and beyond. When not making money, Coulter and his extremely knowledgeable agents toured the world and spent it on art in wholesale lots when possible, on individual works when not. His formal education had been ended by the depression of the thirties when he was a sophomore at Texas Christian University but even then possessed by a love for art in all its forms. There were those who claimed that Amos Coulter never married because he never found a woman who was willing to let him hang her on a wall. In any event, his eye for art more than matched his passion. He made his first purchase, a Modigliani, in 1946 shortly after he made his first million. From then, until the time of his death, he spent lavishly and bought shrewdly on a rising market. When he died, his collection, exclusive of his other holdings and interests, was conservatively valued at $200 million.
Coulter himself designed the museum that was to bear his name and it stood now just off Independence Avenue on several acres of ground formerly occupied by “temporary” World War I buildings that had been hastily thrown up in 1917 and were still in use almost a half century later. An act of Congress in 1965 had donated the land for the museum and, although in existence for only a few years, it was already acknowledged, with a few carping exceptions, as one of the finest in the world. Those who didn’t like it didn’t like the Guggenheim either.
It was an impressive building in a city of impressive buildings. Although only five stories high it still managed to soar a little, and if it didn’t command awe, it at least earned admiration and respect. Built of Italian marble and textured concrete, it covered almost a block and somehow created the atmosphere of a friendly gallery instead of a municipal jail and it seemed to beckon the passer-by to come in and look around. I admired it while the cab made its approach, and when inside a guard informed me that Mrs. Wingo’s office was on the fifth floor and that the elevators were just to my left. On the fifth floor a discreet sign pointed the way to the director’s office and when I walked in a young Negro girl looked up from her typewriter, smiled, and wanted to know if I was Mr. St. Ives. When I said that I was she said that Mrs. Wingo was expecting me.
Mrs. Frances Wingo, director of the Coulter Museum, sat behind a boomerang-shaped desk of inlaid wood that had nothing on it other than a pair of rather hideous African statues about nine inches tall and a telephone console that seemed to have at least three dozen buttons. Behind her, to the east, a window provided a view of the Capitol building which looked no more real than it does in those movies about Washington where it always seems to be just across the street from every man’s office, even if he works in the basement of the Pentagon out in Virginia. It was a large room, nicely carpeted, about the size of that awarded to an under-secretary of State or the majority whip in the House of Representatives. There was even a fireplace at one end with some club chairs and a couch grouped around it. There were a number of paintings on the cork-lined walls and I recognized a Klee and thought it a shame that it was tucked away out of public view.
“I rotate the paintings in here every week, Mr. St. Ives,” said Frances Wingo, the mind reader. “None is kept from public view. Do sit down.”
I sat in something comfortable that was made out of down-stuffed leather and wood. There was no ashtray in sight, but Frances Wingo opened a drawer and placed a blue, oblong ceramic dish in front of me. I decided not to smoke. She was a little over or a little under thirty, and rather tall unless she was sitting on a couple of pillows. She wore a dark brown dress of some nubby weave and that slightly defensive expression that most female executives wear who have reached the top before they are thirty-five. After that, the expression usually hardens into grim resolve. She had cut her dark hair short, perhaps too short, and for a moment I thought that she might be a practicing dyke, but her eyes were too soft and brown and large, although it may have been that she was having trouble with her thyroids. Her nose tipped up slightly and she hadn’t bothered to disguise the freckles that were sprinkled across its bridge. Her mouth was wide, but not too wide, and it was hard to tell whether she wore lipstick. Frances Wingo, I decided, was a long way from being beautiful, but she had a face you could remember with pleasure and it probably looked the same at breakfast as it did over cocktails.
“You come highly recommended,” she said.
“By whom?”
“By your Mr. Greene and by whoever stole the shield.”
“I understand that they asked for me.”
“Not asked,” she said. “Insisted.”
“I’m not sure that I’m flattered.”
She opened a desk drawer and took out a yellow, unsharpened pencil and absently began to tap its eraser against the top of her desk. “Senator Kehoel on our executive committee also had some nice things to say about you.”
“That’s because I wrote some nice things about him,” I said. “A long time ago.”
“Four years ago,” she said, still tapping away with the pencil. “Just before your paper folded. I’m surprised that you’re no longer writing; you had an interesting style.”
“Not enough newspapers to go around; at least not in New York.”
“And elsewhere?”
“Elsewhere thinks I’m too expensive.”
She glanced at a watch that she wore on her right wrist. “The others should be in the dining room. You can save your questions until after lunch. All right?”
“Fine.”
We rose and she was as tall as I expected, nearly five-eight or -nine. The loosely cut brown dress failed to disguise her figure, but she probably knew that and used it for business purposes. I followed her across the room to the door and admired the sway of her hips and the curve of her calves which, I was pleased to note, were encased in nylon and not in cotton webbing or linsey-woolsey. When it comes to women’s clothes I seem to have decidedly reactionary tendencies, but it’s something I’ve been told that I may grow out of.
Frances Wingo paused at the door and looked at me with a kind of flickering interest, as if I were a slightly audacious water color that, while amusing perhaps, was not something one would purchase.
“Tell me something, Mr. St. Ives,” she said.
“What?”
“When you fill in that blank on your income-tax form which asks for occupation, what do you put down?”
“Go-between.”
“And that’s really what you are?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s really what I am.”
It had all started casually enough four years back, just before the newspaper that I worked for folded, the victim of a prolonged strike, an unworkable merger, a forgettable new name, and rotten management. I wrote a feature five days a week about those New Yorkers of high, middle, and low estate who caught my fancy, and because I have a fairly good ear, a high-school course in shorthand, and a careless personality (my ex-wife called it permissive, but then she was always up on the latest clichés), the stories were usually well received. It also caused me to become acquainted with a large collection of oddballs and once there was even talk of syndication, but nothing ever came of it.
My new career began when a client of Myron Greene’s was robbed of $196,000 worth of jewelry (the insurance company’s reluctant estimate) and the thief let it be known that he was willing to sell it all back for a mere $40,000 provided that I served as the intermediary, or go-betw
een. “I read his colyum,” the thief had told Myron Greene over the phone. “The guy don’t give a shit about nothing.”
Myron Greene and a representative of the insurance company approached me, and I agreed to serve as go-between provided that I could write about it once the negotiations were concluded. The man from the insurance company balked at that because he seemed to feel that a dose of clap was preferable to publicity. “After all, St. Ives,” he had said, “we certainly don’t want you to write a primer on extortion.”
Eventually he agreed because he didn’t have much choice, and on the day of the transaction I hung around nine different public phone booths where I received instructions from the thief. The exchange was finally made at 3 A.M. on a subway headed for Coney Island. The thief got his money; I got the jewelry. The affair provided me with a couple of good features and it even got mentioned in the press section of Newsweek. I was just about to suggest a raise when the notice went up on the city room’s bulletin board that as of 6 P.M. that very day, the newspaper no longer existed.
They caught the thief, a small-timer named Albert Fontaine, three weeks later in Miami Beach where he was spending too much money on the wrong people. I visited him in the Tombs once after extradition because I had nothing better to do. He wanted to know if I was going to write him up in my “colyum.”
“The paper folded, Al,” I said.
“That’s a goddamned shame,” Fontaine said, and then, because he wanted to say something else, something nice, I suppose, he said, “You know something, I thought you wrote real good.” They finally gave Albert Fontaine six years.
My wife and I, perfectly mismatched as if by computer, parted shortly thereafter on a pleasantly acrimonious note and just as the severance pay was running out, I received another call from Myron Greene, the lawyer. He wanted me to serve as a go-between again.
“Your clients seem to have a lot of trouble,” I said.
“Well, it’s not really my client. It’s the client of a friend of mine who remembers how you handled the other thing.”
“What is it?” I said. “More jewelry?”
“Not exactly. It’s a little more serious than that.”
“How much more?”
“Well, it’s a kidnaping.”
“No thanks.”
Myron Greene’s asthma got worse. I could hear him wheeze over the phone. “Uh—there may be a slight risk involved.”
“That’s why I said no.”
“My friend’s client is perfectly willing to compensate you, of course.”
“How much is a slight risk worth to him?”
“Say ten thousand dollars?”
“Nobody pays that much for a slight risk.”
“Well, there’s—”
“Hold on,” I said. I thought a moment and then asked: “How much do you charge for divorces?”
“I’ve never handled a divorce,” Myron Greene said, a little stiffly, I thought.
“Well, if you did, how much would you charge?”
“I don’t really know, there’s—”
“Get me a divorce and the ten thousand and I’ll do it.”
It was Myron Greene’s turn to think. “All right,” he said after a few moments. “Can you be at my office at five?”
Despite the high-priced and perfectly sound advice of the attorney who was Myron Greene’s friend, the family of the kidnap victim refused to call in either the New York police or the FBI. Instead, they insisted on following the kidnapers’ instructions exactly. The instructions weren’t very innovative. They had me drop a satchel stuffed with $100,000 in used ten- and twenty-dollar bills along a lonely stretch of New Jersey farm road at 3:30 in the morning. I then drove for three minutes at exactly 20 miles an hour until my headlights picked up the family’s heir, a 20-year-old youth who was staggering down the center of the road, his hands tied behind him. He was also completely hysterical.
The story never made the papers, but it got around, and the police and even the FBI started to drop in on me at odd hours. When they began to mention the penalty for neglecting to report a felony, I called Myron Greene who called his friend who called his wealthy client. The client presumably called the mayor or the governor or God, and the visits from the FBI and the police stopped.
The third time that I heard from Myron Greene was four months later just as the ten thousand dollars was nearing its end, the victim of my profligate ways and a visit from a polite but firm representative of the Internal Revenue Service. This time Myron Greene suggested that we enter into an agreement whereby he would negotiate my fee in exchange for ten percent of whatever it was.
“In other words you want ten percent of my ten percent,” I said.
“It would be decidedly advantageous to you,” Myron Greene said.
“I didn’t think you would walk across the street for a thousand-dollar fee.”
He paused and I listened to his asthma for a while. “It’s not the fee really,” he said. “It’s not that at all. It’s simply that I find such proceedings fascinating.” He sighed a little, a wheezy sort of a sigh. “I really should have been a criminal lawyer.”
“It would just make your asthma worse.”
I decided that Myron Greene could throw in a few more services if he wanted to be a go-between’s agent, so we negotiated at length in his Madison Avenue offices. Finally, he agreed to accept my power of attorney and to perform such onerous chores as filing my quarterly income-tax statements on time, paying my bills, keeping my alimony payments current, and even maintaining my checkbook in some kind of order. His secretary, a forty-five-year-old dynamo whom Myron Greene called Spivack, would do the work and the lawyer would get ten percent of whatever fees came my way and the pleasure of being, vicariously at least, in the company of thieves.
During the four years that followed I found that it was not a vocation or profession that needed advertising. The lawyers and the thieves and the insurance companies and even the cops spread the word that I could be trusted to follow instructions and that I was as honest as could be reasonably expected. Nearly all of the assignments came through Myron Greene, four or five or six a year, and they netted me a satisfactory if not gaudy living, even after the alimony payments were dispatched once a month.
Most of the thieves eventually got caught, but some never did—the kidnapers, for example—and those who did wind up in jail always gave me a warm recommendation to anyone who cared to listen. Sometimes I visited them or sent cigarettes and magazines. I felt that it was the least I could do to encourage the source of my income.
“Yours must be a curious sort of life, Mr. St. Ives,” Frances Wingo said as we walked down the hall to the museum’s executive dining room. “I don’t believe I’ve ever met a professional go-between before.”
“Few people do until they need one.”
“Do you have much competition?” she said.
“No,” I said. “Only my better judgment.”
CHAPTER THREE
I KNEW TWO OF the three men who stood at the small bar at the far end of the dining room. The tall, fragile one with the salt and pepper forelock that kept flopping down into his melancholy eyes was Senator Augustus Kehoel (pronounced “curl” for some reason) of Ohio, who was the delight of the political cartoonists. They always made him look like a grief-stricken sheep dog. At twenty-four and just out of the World War II army with something of a hero’s record, he had married into a car-wax fortune and over the years had spent goodly chunks of it getting himself elected to the state legislature, the U.S. House of Representatives, and finally to the Senate. It was as high as he would ever go although he once had hinted to me of some yearning to be vice-president, which only demonstrated that he was a reasonable man of limited ambition.
Next to him, with a carefully manicured hand in firm control of a double martini, was Lawrence Ignatius Teague, president of the million-member Aluminum Workers of America (AFL-CIO), and pink of cheek and white of hair. I wondered if he still used a blue ri
nse. During an internal union scrap five or six years before, one of his dissident staff members had sneaked us both into Teague’s suite at the Waldorf, ushered me into a bathroom, and grimly displayed a bottle of blue rinse that he swore the labor leader used faithfully, but I didn’t think it was anything to hang a man for.
“You know Senator Kehoel,” Mrs. Wingo said.
“Senator.”
“Good to see you, Phil,” he said, and we shook hands.
“And Lawrence Teague.”
“Hello, Larry.”
“Wonderful to see you, Phil,” he said, putting his glass down and grabbing my right hand with both of his. “Wonderful.” It really wasn’t, but this was called the Teague touch and I suppose it had helped him to stay in office for more than two decades at sixty thousand a year plus an unlimited expense account. For all I knew, he was worth it.
I told him that I thought it was wonderful, too, and then turned to the third man at the bar who stood quietly, a seemingly untouched drink at his elbow, and separated by far more than space from the senator and the union president. Only his green eyes moved as I turned to him. They settled first on my face, then traveled down to take in and assess my tie, jacket, trousers, and shoes, and finally rose again to fix themselves on a spot an inch or so above my left eyebrow. Somehow I resisted the impulse to finger the spot to find out how deep the hole went.
“And the chairman of our executive committee,” Frances Wingo was saying, “Winfield Spencer. Mr. Spencer, Mr. St. Ives.”
When Spencer moved, he seemed to do so reluctantly, as if it cost him a great deal of effort. He extended his right hand and I accepted it. Although not at all keen on meaty handshakes, I did expect something more than I got from Winfield Spencer, who held his own hand perfectly still while I either pressed or massaged or fondled it, I’m still not quite sure which, but he didn’t seem to care much for whatever I was doing and neither did I, so I dropped it as soon as I could.
