Mile High (27 page)

The body was discovered by a chambermaid, Mrs. Mary Gonnerty, at 11:35
P.M.
that evening. The extraordinary prestige of the murdered man and the remaining contents of his filing cabinets caused such consternation and so many dangerous published newspaper conjectures that New York City Mayor James J. Walker found it necessary to request the resignation of his police commissioner, Joseph A. Warren and to appoint Grover A. Whalen to investigate the case. Carrying the investigation forward vigorously, Whalen also changed the automobile traffic pattern of the city, instituting one-way streets for the first time. Traffic became so snarled that the public attention paid to the Goff murder was mercifully lessened.

Congressman Rei waited for instructions at the Waldorf until ten o'clock the next evening, when Edward West telephoned to him to call John Torrio out of retirement to take over Goff's duties as a short-term commercial banker for Horizons A.G. enterprises. Business was able to continue as usual within the week without inconvenience or financial loss.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

After the fire companies had left, Edward made an inspection. The foundation was still smoking. He fished out a brass sextant that had belonged to Walter Wagstaff, of whom he had been fond. The garage was intact. Before he went to bed in the staff quarters over the garage he called Willie to ask about the cement contractors. Willie said the crews would be there at eight-thirty the next morning. It was one forty-five. He asked Willie to ring him at eight o'clock, then he took a hot bath because he knew he could expect to be stiff when he awoke after manhandling so many gasoline drums. He washed his shirt, underwear and socks, brushed his suit, then went to bed.

He awoke refreshed when the telephone rang.

“Where is Irene?” he asked Willie.

“She's here.”

“Good.”

“She's seen the morning papers.”

“The papers?”

“She knows about the fire.”

“Good.”

“And about Goff.”

“Goff?”

“Goff was killed in his hotel apartment last night by a person or persons unknown.”

There was a silence.

At last Edward spoke briskly. “Call Congressman Rei. Tell him I want John Torrio called out of retirement to take over Goff's work and invite him to dinner at Fifty-fifth Street at seven.”

“Irene leaves for Palm Beach this afternoon and she—”

“Please acknowledge the instructions concerning Congressman Rei.”

“Rei instructions acknowledged. Irene is going to take Dan to Florida with her.”

“Anything else?”

“The contractor's name is Nonie-Wintour. They'll send a triple crew and four rolling mixers.”

“Thank you, Willie.”

The cement people were twenty-five minutes late. Edward made himself a pot of coffee. He let them wait in the burned area, calling his name, until he had finished his coffee, then he went out. Some of the crew saw him and passed the word. They found the boss, who came up to him saying, “We been looking all over for you.”

“Not all over.”

“Where's the job?”

“You're twenty-five minutes late.”

“We got lost.”

“I want that building foundation cleared to whatever point you decide it has to be cleared before it can be entirely sealed over with cement. I want the job finished by five o'clock this afternoon.”

“All sealed in? Smoothed over? You want it like a parking lot?”

“And please have a man bring me a chair out of the garage and place it wherever you think I'll have the best view of the work.”

“You gonna stay here til we finish?”

The job was completed at four o'clock. It was a wonderful day to sit outdoors, one of those rare Long Island days, soft and nearly hot in the April sun. He sent to the village for a straw hat at eleven o'clock when the contractor had a car going into town to get food. He and Mr. Wintour ate submarine sandwiches, as Edward called them, or Guinea Heroes, as Mr. Wintour called them—loaves of long French bread cut in half, then packed with salami, ham, zucchini, beans, sausage, olive oil, parsley, garlic and Swiss cheese. His sandwich was so good that Edward accepted a tumbler of homemade Chianti wine. “You Italian?” he asked the contractor.

“Yeah.”

“What kind of a name is Wintour?”

“Izza company name. My fadder-in-law. My name is Angie Gennaro. Whatta you makin' here?”

“It's a grave,” Edward said cheerfully. “I am entombing a house and everything that was in it.”

“I told the boys to grade it good. You might wanna make a tennis court some day.”

“Thanks, Angie.”

Willie had a car standing by at noon. Edward left at four-ten and was in town at six. He bathed, changed, made eight telephone calls in response to business messages and was ready to receive his guests when they arrived at seven.

As Congressman Rei had prospered he had filled out. He was as stocky as a bucket of sand, and his lumberyard cheekbones made his head seem even bulkier than it was. He was a well-disposed man who enjoyed work or play, and the dinner jacket he was wearing, like shellac over an Iron Maiden, had required twenty-three fittings. “Good work,” was the only comment Eddie made about the Goff business, then it was necessary to tell Willie, before he forgot, that he had talked to London and that a syndicate of Scottish distillers would be arriving on the
Mauretania
and he wanted them to be royally entertained and sounded out as to whether they would consider selling all or part of their distilleries. The value estimates would be on Willie's desk in the morning. “Prohibition will be fading fast,” Edward said. “We face a major overhauling.”

The guests had two cocktails each before dinner. Edward drank the excellent Spanish Solares water. They dined well on ptarmigan (which Willie said he detested), spaghettini alla Siracusa, which was a miracle of oregano, capers, eggplant, black olives, garlic, anchovies, green peppers, tomatoes and olive oil combined with the pasta of Torre Annunziata. They rounded off with abbachio alla cacciatora, a Rei favorite, with some braised escarole and an eggplant pie. They drank Falerno wine from Naples, bottled by Giulio Coppola. When they had finished they smoked cigars and Edward said, “Did you reach Mr. Torrio, Ben?”

“I had the call out all day. He got back to me half an hour before I left for here. The proposition is okay with him. He'll be on the first boat, and he'll have everything all tidy in three weeks.”

“I want him to have a year if he needs it.”

“A year? You know John!”

“Goff worked for me because we started that way in 1911. But Mr. Torrio doesn't know who I am or if I'm on earth, and we'll keep it that way. Mr. Torrio will work for you.”

“Fine.”

“At the end of a year you and he will have to be ready to lay it on the line, to have all the affiliates working together. The way they work now is all right for prohibition, but in four or five years prohibition will be gone.”

“You really think so, Zu Eduardo?”

“Yes. I'll even help it along a little.”

“Why?”

“There is too much waste this way. As long as liquor is against the law the affiliates will go on making the messes they are making now. The Detroit people are impossible. The Chicago people are ridiculous. Capone has to go. No, no!” Edward added hastily seeing the consternation on Congressman Rei's face. “Not now. And there won't be any gang wars when he does go. What we are doing right now is setting out what we are going to do. The first thing is the basis of the plan for the affiliates so that they can understand the coming prohibition tapering off without panic. You and Mr. Torrio have to build this plan in detail so the affiliates will see the advantages of working in combinations, sharing enforcement problems, getting the maximum out of labor-union opportunities and reinvestment possibilities, coming under a common umbrella of political protection and many, many other advantages. Why, with narcotics alone—”

“You think this can work?”

“How, work?”

“The pool idea, group advantages—the cartel idea?”

“Of course it will work. You're as trained a businessman as I am. You just haven't thought about it. True, you'll have the job of making a rather strange conglomerate of mentalities and responses understand what you'll be talking about.”

“They're not so dumb, Zu Eduardo. We can make them see it. Anyway, this is what I'd like to say. Legal liquor aside—forgetting that prohibition can disappear—this is an imperative thing you have conceived, because it is the only chance for continuity. I mean, in theory anyway, they could kill each other off unless there is some centralization. What I am saying is that I see in what you are telling us that if there isn't a common stake in the whole country and a sense of national cohesion, as the old men die or are knocked off—What do the young men know? They know muscle and guns. But if there can be continuity, the families will not have to react so opportunistically. They can have their young men educated as business leaders so we have to get stronger. You put your finger on what has been worrying me for a long time. What happens when you go—when I go? Is all this work going down the drain or have we started something here such as my people started in Sicily three hundred years ago? That was small—I mean, nothing compared to what we have here and can have here in fifty years, a hundred years. But what we have now is like ninety-four separate little General Motors companies instead of one big cohesive unit—a major force, a part of the American culture, if you will—an elastic, flexible organization with the advantages of centralization where that applies and decentralization where
that
applies. What you offer us is the only possible way we can go if we are to become the factor in American life that I know we can be.”

“Well!” Edward preened. “Thank you very much, Ben.”

“And may
I
say,” Willie put in, “it's the only way you'll ever control the offensive publicity that indiscriminate killing generates. A Goff is one thing. There have to be Goff eliminations of course. But killing civilians or just killing people in another neighborhood gang because of some old-time feud only leads to difficulties that make trouble and a great deal of unnecessary expense to put things on ice.”

“Enforcement has to be centralized of course,” Edward said, “and how that is done will be reflected in the reorganization as a first order of business. But the major consideration here, as I see it, is that soon we most certainly will be facing an altogether different economic climate, and we will have to be fit functionally to ride that out. This market is insanely overpriced. The money mania that grips all the people is grotesque—as though they
believed
the credo of an equal chance for all! The economy is going to collapse.”

“Well, I'm not so sure about that,” Congressman Rei said. “I talk to a lot of people in my neck of the woods and everybody thinks—”

“Let me put it this way, Ben, because it will save time. Will you sell when I tell you to sell?”

“Yes.”

“Then you'll be all right, and that ‘lot of people in your neck of the woods' will be in the gutters. When the easy money goes down the drain and the people get frightened again on a permanent basis, that's when we have to be prepared to buy cheaply, to exploit a helpless labor movement that will need a strong point of view and other things, all on the one hand. But on the other hand, when the easy money stops, the same people aren't going to be thrilled and amused and entertained by a lot of hoodlums swaggering around shooting and scrounging. We have to prepare for both those very real problems. Add to those problems that beer and liquor will be legal, so that the payoffs to politicians are necessarily reduced to a fraction of what they had to be when these were illegal, and you'll find a lot of vicious, hungry and discontented politicians and police on your hands. So bear those things in mind. The big racket is about to depart. We have to develop and have ready substantial, national, profitable new rackets—or I should say expanded old rackets—to take its place or this marvelous political weapon so carefully developed will become just a disorganized mass of shake-down artists all over again instead of a controlled division of corporate personnel.”

“Zu Eduardo,” Rei said, “you really think with your head.”

“We have one job, as I see it. We've got to protect our one-sixth of the gross of every affiliate's turnover from all sources, and we've got to keep them dependent upon our available short-term commercial credit,” Edward said flatly.

“Very sound, Eddie,” Willie said.

Edward was overwhelmed with work throughout 1928, mainly in supervising the pumping of a Horizons A.G. “special” fund into the American, French, and British stock exchanges from bases in Europe and six American cities. He moved on the pooled information of Horizons partners, driving the fantastic listed stock prices still higher and higher with the fund.

Throughout the intense work his mind had never really been away from thoughts of Irene, some wonderful thoughts of the past, some of regret, but many, many thoughts of the future. He couldn't accelerate the arrival of that future because of the pressure of the work and also because he had calculated that a certain amount of time would be needed to heal their breach. He missed her at all hours of the day.

It was not until January 13, 1929, that Edward learned that Irene was in the Harkness Pavilion and about to have a baby. At first his mind went back as he convinced himself that this must be Goff's child, but he could not be sure of that, and Irene was in New York and he could not concentrate on his work any longer. The news came in the late afternoon. It was vague. Willie had been told by Rhonda Healey who knew a girl whose sister was a nurse at the hospital, and she had said that Mrs. Edward Courance West was expecting a baby there. Willie had checked the hospital immediately but they told him they had no record of any patient of that name. Edward pressed him to call Dan in Palm Beach. Will got Dan, who said his mother had gone to New York to have the baby and that Mr. Tobin could reach her at the Harkness Pavilion but he didn't know what room, so Rhonda had to pass bribes through the chain until the room number came back. It was the morning of January 14 when Edward went to see Irene. She had died in childbirth by the time he reached the hospital.