Corruption City

by Horace McCoy

  John looked at the paper. It was Cicero Smith’s State Bar Certificate and, looking at it, John thought of the many impressive offices he had been in that day where the walls were covered with degrees and plaques and licenses—just decorations. Here was inescapable irony; none of those substantial citizens would help, but this outcast, this derelict ...

  “I’d be honored to work with you,” John said, handing back the certificate.

  Tears flooded Cicero Smith’s eyes. He tried to speak, but only his lips moved.

  John looked at him. “Would you like a drink?”

  Cicero shook his head. “I stopped at noon today,” he said. He was trembling.

  “Sit down,” John said. He helped the older man into the chair. “I want you to move in here with me,” he said.

  Lieutenant Michael Conroy had his feet on his desk, sitting all the way back in a swivel chair, talking on the telephone to his wife. “Here’s the poop,” he said. “He checked in at the Manchester Hotel. He was with Fogel this morning. He had a list of twenty names and he’s out now trying to recruit a staff of assistants. I’ve got Ansel and Eimick spotted in the hotel and they’ll flash me the minute he comes in. I’ll stick here until then!”

  And something else, he said. Judge Helen Waycross had called twice, inviting them to cocktails, specifically requesting that they bring John. Mike Conroy wondered what the hell the angle was with Judge Waycross. They had been friends a long time ago, thirty years ago, and he had never before been invited for cocktails.

  Mrs. Conroy was not so sure that they should go. She wasn’t sure she had anything to wear.

  Mike laughed shortly. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he said. “And you got lots of stuff to wear. Get dressed. I’ll be bringing the boy around with me to pick you up soon.”

  Then he hung up the telephone and sat with his face in his hands a moment, remembering Crespi’s orders, and the lies he was going to have to tell his own son. Oh, God, he thought, how far does a man have to sink?

  Mike crept almost furtively down the hall to Suite 4B. He paused at the door, glanced around nervously several times, and then tentatively knocked. There was no response. He knocked again, and when there was still no response he put his ear to the door and listened, hearing a sound from a shower. He raised his fist and banged.

  John, wet, dripping, a Hotel Manchester towel around his waist, ripped the door open. “What the hell is this?” he demanded angrily, and then he saw his father. “Dad!”

  Hating himself, turning his hat slowly in his hands, Mike put on a very poor-mouth face. “Son,” he said heavily, “do you mind if I come in a moment ... and sit?”

  “Of course not, Dad,” John said, stepping back from the door. “Can I get you a chair?”

  “Thank you, son. Thank you,” Mike said and slowly, his knees cracking a bit, sat down in the lavishly tapestried and upholstered chair. “Ah,” he said with contentment and put his hat in his lap and smiled upward at his still wet and dripping son. “Oh, no, no, no,” he said suddenly, “I didn’t mean to interrupt anything you were doing—please, be about your affairs, boy, I was just ...”

  “No, Dad. What is it? Tell me,” John demanded, suddenly concerned.

  “Ah, well, it’s nothing,” Mike said, beginning to remember Nemo Crespi’s words and feeling deathly sick inside himself again, sick as if his heart had shriveled. “It’s ... it’s just that I’d like to say I’m sorry, John. I’d honestly like to beg your pardon, if I may, boy.”

  “Oh, Dad. Now, look. Really!”

  “No, no, no. I mean every word of what I’m saying to you. Take my oath if I don’t.” Mike wiped his nose with a finger. “Oh, a long time ago, boy, I felt as you did. I used to feel that ... oh, there were good things to be done, you know, in this world. So part of the world, this old world of ours, was bad—well, all right. But good could still be done. And that was the way I used to feel when I was young, when you were just a bit of a little thing, a babe

  “Dad! You ...”

  “No, hear me now as I talk to you, John. I wish very much to finish my apology.” Mike looked stern, very stern—he was being stern with himself. “This morning when you presented me with a certain opportunity—and I shan’t name it, but it was a great opportunity—I turned you down. I talked about my pension,” Mike said in disgust, and then raised his face. “I was thinking of my pension—two hundred and ninety dollars a month.” His eyes filled with tears. “Boy, I was thinking of money!”

  John knelt beside his father’s chair. “Cut it out,” he said gently. “What the hell, Dad. I understand. I’m your son.”

  Mike had his face in his hands. That Nemo Crespi, he was thinking, that son-of-a-bitch, making me con my boy this way.

  “Oh, Dad!” John said. “Don’t cry. Please don’t cry, Dad.”

  Mike Conroy wiped his eyes. “John, can you ever forgive me?” he asked in a whisper. “And ... John ... can you let me back on your team?” And, almost afraid, he held out his hand, open, waiting for it to be clasped, waiting for it to be shaken.

  John pushed the hand aside and put his arm around the older man’s shoulders. “An hour ago I was just about ready to give up,” he said. “Now it looks like we’ve got an investigation after all. This calls for a celebration. Get Ma on the phone and tell her to get herself right down here.”

  “I already did,” Mike said. “We’ve been invited out for cocktails.”

  “That’s all right,” John said. “I can meet you later.”

  “You’re the one she wants. Your mother and I are just going along as sight-seers.”

  “She? Who?”

  “Judge Waycross.”

  “Helen Waycross?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why me?” John asked.

  “I’m curious about that, too,” Mike replied.

  Helen Waycross, the only woman judge of the Superior Court, lived in an eight-room apartment with three servants, on the tenth floor of the Grosvenor House, overlooking the upper river. The salary of a Superior Court judge was not big enough to sustain this kind of overhead, but everybody knew that Helen Waycross’s late husband had left her three or four million, and those who thought about her position took a certain pride in the fact that, although she could very easily afford a life of leisure, she had maintained her seat on the bench.

  She was a handsome and distinguished looking woman. Fifty-two years old, she had the figure and face of a young girl. Neither of these was accidental. She worked very seriously at keeping young. Looking at this magnificent woman in her own living room, relaxed and utterly sure of herself, it was simply not possible to believe that she had ever known anything else but this kind of background.

  But Mike Conroy knew. He had grown up with her—that long-legged, snotty-nosed girl whose name then was Helen Nagle and who was eight years old before she knew that girls wore drawers, too. She had been part of his neighborhood, part of the hierarchy of his neighborhood—Black Mike Conroy, Sneaky Eamon Harrigan, and Crum-Bum Nagle, the strutters, the toughies who roamed far and wide, masters of all they surveyed.

  That had been a long time ago, forty years or more. Mike often wondered how they had missed the big house, but they had; somewhere along the line they had veered—he and Eamon to go into the police department and Helen to go work in the Welfare Office. From that moment on Helen was determined to have another life. Harrigan had been in love with her and had planned to marry her when he went from rookie to full patrolman, but by the time that had happened Helen had raised her sights ...

  “I thought it would be better if they met here,” Judge Waycross was saying to Mike and Mabel Conroy. “Amanda was determined to see him, and when Amanda makes up her mind ...”

  “She’s got a lot of you in her, Helen,” Mike said.

  “I’m afraid she’s still an idealistic college girl,” Judge Waycross said. “She actually caught fire from this. It’s been her pet subject since she got out of school three years ago. The John Conroy
influence. I only hope he isn’t prejudiced against woman lawyers.”

  John came into the living room from the terrace with two empty martini glasses. “Are we being rude?” he asked.

  “How?” Judge Waycross said.

  “By staying outside.”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “Thank you.” John moved to the coffee table and poured two drinks from a glass martini mixer. “It’s nice out there,” he said. “Won’t you join us?”

  Judge Waycross smiled at Mike and Mabel Conroy. “Do you really want us?” she asked.

  “Not really,” John said, smiling.

  He went back to the terrace and handed Amanda her drink.

  “Well, thank you,” Amanda said.

  “For what?” John said.

  “For the appointment to your staff.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “Right now. You are drinking to it.”

  “Oh!” he said. “Is that what you think we’re drinking to?”

  “I am.”

  “I’m not. That was the farthest thing from my mind.” His voice was provocative. He stared at her flatly.

  She turned away, flushing. “Won’t you give me a job?” she asked over her shoulder.

  He said in the same provocative voice, “When you ask somebody for a job, you ought to look him in the eye.”

  She turned back, almost defiant, and looked him in the eye. The luminosity in the sky from the lights of the city highlighted her face. Her eyes had narrowed and her nostrils were distended and her lips were parted just enough for him to see her teeth. He got a swift feeling—an atavistic flash—that she was an animal about to spring on him.

  He was aware that he was having trouble with his breathing, but he managed to say, “That’s better—”

  She did not move. She did not even blink her eyes. She was a little angry, a little embarrassed and, staring at his strong face and his rugged body, she felt the blood run hot in her veins ...

  He laughed shortly and the moment was gone. They both knew it. They had felt it leave. But each knew that it could be summoned again.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “A dirty, rotten, vicious, evil mess like this. Why do you want to get involved? You’re a nice girl. You’ve got everything in the world you could possibly want.”

  “Except a job on your staff.”

  “We’ll talk about it at dinner. Alone.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “No job, no dinner,” she said.

  “You know a good place to eat?”

  “The best. The Golden Cock. It’s so good Helen and I almost never have dinner at home.”

  “Is there a dark corner where you and I can sit?”

  “Not too dark—”

  “You’ve got a job,” he said.

  “You’ve got a dinner date,” she said and smiled.

  A hundred and fifty years before, it had been called the High Road, and it was still the entrance to the town from the south and east. It had been over this road that the farmers brought their products into town until an ordinance was passed. Then the farmers stopped on the outskirts and sold from their wagons. A stall or two appeared, and eventually it became the wholesale fruit and vegetable district of the city: forty-five square blocks of dingy streets and alleys and buildings and markets devoted exclusively to produce. The High Road was called Lavorno Street. There were the shippers, the brokers, the distributors, the packers and the jobbers; and there also were the offices of Nemo Crespi.

  The sign said:

  608 Lavorno

  Offices

  CRESPI AND COMPANY

  Potatoes and Onions—Wholesale Only

  It was a small, two-story building, musty like a dungeon on the first floor with its concrete floor and a long, sunken trough through the middle, and small stalls with sacks of potatoes and onions piled high. The upper floor was Nemo’s office and quarters—sparsely furnished, stern and severe, suggesting the rigors of a monastery. Certain facts about Nemo Crespi were known and those facts proved that the United States was a land of as much opportunity for a penitentiary graduate as for a Princeton graduate. Spawn of the filthy alleys and dark hallways, Nemo was not the only poor boy from the slums who got rich; but he was one of the few to stay rich—brains, luck and jungle caution had kept him alive to rule a vast and mysterious underworld. It was said that his syndicate could fix everything from narcotic smuggling to petty theft, and that he influenced politics in a dozen cities.

  Some of that could have been newspaper and magazine romance, but it was known that when he was ten years old he quit school to sell newspapers and run a crap game as his first enterprise—made successful only by paying off the cop on the beat. In 1923, with speakeasies running in a thousand basements, he threw his bankroll into the rum trade. The profits were enormous, but so were the risks. Armed competition made every man’s part hazardous. Nemo Crespi saw the handwriting on the wall. Too many guys on the same side were killing each other. They had to be organized. But the boys didn’t want that. Nemo Crespi fixed it; he slaughtered the hold-outs and banded the others together under one management—his management.

  After repeal, several times a millionaire, he looked around for new outlets. He tried to buy hotels. Refused in this, he quickly saw that hotels could not operate without laundries, so he bought laundries. Hotels had to have food, too, but he could not fight the meat industry. They were bigger than he. But the vegetable business was scattered and independent and there was the weak link. Nemo opened a wholesale house on Lavorno Street as a cover and went after them—and they became his boys, too.

  He had gotten everything he had gone after but the newspapers. In order to soften them up, he had burned the warehouse. He had imposed his will on the community for so long that it never occurred to him that anybody would revolt. But they had, and now he had a gubernatorial investigation on his hands.

  Nemo was worried. In spite of Eamon Harrigan’s assurances that with Mike Conroy on their side the investigation would fail, he was worried. The jungle instinct, the animal caution, was beginning to stir.

  “So will you stop telling me to relax?” Nemo was saying to Harrigan. He was a heavy-set man and he wore a cheap blue shirt with the collar open, a pair of flannel trousers, and he was barefooted. “I didn’t get you over here at this time of night to tell me to relax. What about this?”

  Nemo laid his thick hand on a bulldog edition of the Star-Journal that was spread on the davenport. The headlines read:

  JUDGE’S DAUGHTER ON CLEAN-UP STAFF

  AMANDA WAYCROSS TO WORK WITH CONROY IN WAR ON SYNDICATE

  “So what?” Harrigan said. “It’s not important. He’s got to have a staff, ain’t he? The bigger the staff, the bigger the flop.”

  Nemo turned and looked at the six other persons in his office, five men and a woman sitting stiffly in uncomfortable chairs. “All right, what do you think about this?” he said to them a little defiantly. “Come on, tell me. Make a suggestion.”

  “Don’t get sore,” Harrigan said.

  “I am sore,” Nemo said, “sitting up in the middle of the night talking about the governor’s punk. I’m more than sore.”

  “Well, this is considerably bigger than we thought, Nemo,” the woman said. She was Nemo’s sister. Her name was Pia Crespi Sublette and she was the complete antithesis of her brother. She was forty, well-dressed and striking in appearance. She had been educated in Europe and brought back to the United States after the repeal of Prohibition, when Nemo had begun to set up his various enterprises. She had been trained in business management at the University of Chicago and she was vice-president of the Acme Securities and Investment Company, the nerve center of the Crespi syndicate. “The story’s gone out all over the country. Our phone has been ringing all day,” she added.

  “The out-of-town boys have been calling in,” Paul Sublette said. He was a small, slender man who wore a dark blue suit and rimless spectacles. He had married
Pia Crespi ten years before in Havana—a marriage that had astonished Nemo and his friends. Pia did not realize that she had been surrounded by strong, self-sufficient men for so long that in this meek individual she had found the first man who ever needed her. He was a weakling and that was the basis of his attraction for Pia, but Nemo and his men had nothing but contempt for him. “They’re really very jumpy,” Paul said.

  “And they made you jumpy—which isn’t hard—and you’ve made everybody else jumpy,” Harrigan said. “You been jumpy all your life.”

  “Why don’t you shut up?” Pia snapped.

  “And he hasn’t been doing you any good, either,” Roy Ackerman said.

  “What do you mean by a remark like that?” Pia said.

  “How about that?” asked Verne Trickett. “The only one of us that’s been to college and the only one that can’t understand English. I’ll tell you what he means. He means that ever since you married this pipsqueak you been trying to pull outta the organization.”

  Roy Ackerman and Verne Trickett were ex-cops and the unofficial chiefs of Nemo’s private Gestapo. They talked and acted like it, too.

  “All right, that’s beside the point,” Nemo said.

  “The hell it is,” Harrigan said. “That is the point. A long time ago I got used to him softening up Pia, but I never thought he’d soften up the rest of you.”

  “I had the answer this morning,” said the man sitting beside Pia. “I still got the answer.” His name was Igo Grodzka, alias Gray, alias Gross, alias Gorman. He was dapper and had a pencil mustache and looked like a gigolo, but he was equally facile with a razor or a pistol. He was Nemo’s lieutenant, who chatted with the boss’s visitors and took care of the smaller hand-outs.

  “Sure, Igo, sure,” Harrigan said scornfully. “You always got the answer—you and your little gold-plated thirty-eight automatic. Why don’t you grow up?” He turned completely around, a look of bewilderment on his face. “What the hell is this—a bunch of two-bit crooks sitting in a back room worrying about the cop on the beat pinching them for petty theft? This is the greatest outfit of its kind ever put together. For fifteen years we been careful to stay inside the law. The only time we step outside the law is when we’re damned sure we got the law enforcement guys on our side. We’re legitimate business. Big business, like General Motors and Standard Oil. Let’s act like it. They can’t make anything stick on us.”