CHAPTER FIVE

Arnold Goff’s finished brief was delivered directly to Mr. West by Goff’s fiancée, Miss Bella Radin, to his apartment in the Buckingham Hotel on Fifth Avenue at Fiftieth Street in one day less than the maximum bonus period—completed in fifty-nine days. It was five weeks after West had rescued Pick, Heller & O’Connell and, in a way, identified their oppressor. (“Because I value your son’s friendship, Mr. Pick,” and “I am an attorney before I am a banker, Mr. Heller, and I ask you to banish from your mind any possibility of rewarding me for what is nothing more than professional courtesy,” and “If there is the slightest repercussion from Paul Kelly or whoever his client may be I will depend on you to ring me at once, Mr. O’Connell.”)

The Goff brief was magnificently comprehensive. It comprised eleven volumes of about five hundred pages each, neatly typed in double spacing and bound sensibly, volume by volume, in buckram. A sixty-three-page précis accompanied it as well as a bibliography. Eddie was pleased. It was a Friday afternoon. Before she left he asked Miss Radin to please tell Mr. Goff to come to see him at the hotel on Sunday at noon.

Eddie untied his tie slowly as he stared down greedily at the massive brief, standing in the center of the high-ceilinged, enormous room that had been combined from two apartments to recreate the feeling of the interior of an English country house of the first third of the nineteenth century (just about the time his father was escaping the Irish famine by teaching himself to chew and swallow English corn). He had installed a nine-foot-high white marble fireplace. The facing sofas were deep-dimpled black leather, each with hundreds of shiny black buttons. He worked at a heavy, wide library table that stood on a thick Chinese rug with royal blue markings on a field of gold. The room had two large, square standing safes, each covered with a Spanish shawl, each wired to explode five seconds after forced entry, each holding nests of locked strongboxes, because the West operation took in and paid out large amounts of cash at all hours of the day and night.

He took a bath, put on silk pajamas, a dressing gown, woolen socks and slippers, poured himself a glass of ginger ale, then settled down at the table to begin examining the brief. He read until three-fifteen the following morning, then slept until nine o’clock, when he showered, shaved, dressed and had a light breakfast. He read again until ten that night, slept until five the next morning, then read until eleven forty-five. Goff arrived promptly at noon, wearing the same mauve necktie he always seemed to wear.

“Don’t you have any other ties?” Eddie asked as greeting.

“I only wear mauve ties. I have twenty-two mauve ties.”

“Why?”

“My fiancée likes mauve. Besides, it goes with black suits and white shirts and I collect those too.”

Eddie asked him to sit down and offered him a drink.

“I don’t drink,” Goff said.

“I don’t either.”

“Let the chumps have it.”

“I liked your brief.”

“Good.”

“What do I owe you?”

Goff handed Eddie an envelope. Eddie removed the bill and studied it.

Bonus	$1500
Assts. (4)
16 wks at $15	960
Typists (5)
12 weeks at 112	720
	$3180

“What’s this sixteen weeks for assistants?” Eddie asked. “You did it in eight weeks.”

“You authorized four for a hundred and twenty days.”

“And that’s a lot of money for typing.”

“Is it? Can you buy a typist for only twelve dollars a week?”

“You haven’t charged me for supplies and typewriter rentals.”

“My treat, Mr. West.”

“All right. This is a fair statement. I’ll pay it.” He took out his wallet and tossed it across the room. Goff caught it. “Keep the wallet as a memento,” Eddie said. “My treat.” Goff took the money out of the wallet and counted it. His face flushed deeply. “This is exactly three thousand one hundred and eighty dollars,” he said slowly.

“So long as it’s correct.”

“Now I guess you expect me to ask you how it happened that there was exactly three thousand one hundred and eighty dollars in the wallet.”

Eddie shrugged.

“You put a plant on me.” Goff was deeply offended and it showed. “Were you trying to tell me something?”

“I thought you might like to work for me,” Eddie said. “And I like to have suspicious people working for me. Plants don’t happen to suspicious people, not to careful people. For instance, as I told you the day I retained you, I don’t think you should have told your girl who your client was.”

“What’s the job?”

“I want a man to handle money. We do informal short-term financing. There are other payments and collections.”

“Is it legit?”

“No.”

Goff drummed on the arm of the chair with his white fingers. “Then it isn’t something I could do as a lawyer, is it?”

“Entirely up to you.”

Goff stared at him with those hard, hard eyes.

“You said you wanted to be a professional gambler. I own three gambling houses. I need one manager for all of them. I’d want you to see that you got yourself publicized as a gambler. I’d like it if everyone thought of you as Arnold Goff, the sportsman.”

“Why?”

“Gamblers are always handling large amounts of cash-passing it from hand to hand.”

“What’s the pay? I assume I could keep what I win.”

“You may keep it if you bet your own money, and you’re not likely to get any of mine for that. I’ll pay you two percent of all the money you handle, going out and coming in. Until you learn the trade you can have five hundred a month on a drawing account.”

“I’ll need to talk it over with Bella, Mr. West.”

“Marry her, sure. But why tell her my business?”

“Because we want to be a family. Because sometimes life is nice. Maybe most of the time. I wouldn’t be giving her my respect if I only shared the good things with her.”

“She was my plant.”

“What?”

“I said your fiancée was my plant with you. I paid her a hundred dollars. She told me how much the bill would be when she brought the brief Friday afternoon. She told me how you refused to charge me for the rent of the loft because it was your father’s and you got it for nothing. Now, that was chump stuff. That was silly and sentimental.”

Goff looked stricken. He didn’t speak. His right hand pressed hard on his diaphragm. He looked as though he were going to be sick.

“A plant is a plant,” Eddie said. “Anybody can set a plant, because money is grease and I’ve got the grease.” He stared down at Goff with ice-water contempt. “Never tell anyone anything. Never trust anyone. When you told her who the client was she was in business for herself.”

Goff’s face was sunken. He gripped his whole lower face with his widely opened right hand and clung to it tightly as though his head were himself, all of himself, and he needed to grip hard to hold everything together.

When he spoke, minutes later, he said, “When do I start?”

“Wednesday night. Be here at eight. We’ll have dinner, then I’ll take you on the rounds. Would you like some tea?”

“No, thank you, Mr. West.”