CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Food made her ill. She forced herself to get out of the house. She walked four miles every day. She had an electric bicycle sent from Abercrombie’s. She volunteered for work at the Great Neck Hospital, and she stopped going to church because prayer had the effect of driving her back into herself. The exercise helped her appetite. The hospital got her mind engaged. After five weeks she noticed that the detectives Edward had assigned to watch her movements had gone away. He must have decided that she would remain in seclusion at West Wagstaff and had put aside her threat to humiliate him.

Edward telephoned many times, but she hung up when she heard his voice. He came to the house several times, but she would not see him and had the locks changed on the doors. Danny was at summer camp because he had said all the other boys would be there and he just couldn’t afford to be left out. As the end of the camp season came around she decided she would call for him there and they would drive up to Canada for a few weeks. Then he could go directly to school and wouldn’t have to come home to that empty house until she had become more used to it herself. He probably wouldn’t even mention his father, because normally they met only about two times each year, and the boy wouldn’t be likely to miss him.

The house gave her solace. It helped her to remember what “transitory” meant. The house would go on and on for centuries after she and Edward had escaped each other in death.

But the long Canadian visit with Danny changed everything. Totally. All the strength of her terrible resolve left her. He made her see her selfishness. This trundling from camp to school to camp couldn’t go on. Let attendance at the Gelbart Academy be Edward’s illusion, and let him have the chance to see his son and live with him. Thanksgiving Day would be there soon. Danny would be home. She would have to try explaining the inexplicable. She had to practice now seeing Edward as a guest in the house—her house—not as a stranger but as a person removed from her feelings and entitled to her best courtesy. She must work at this until a habit formed and until a hard shell grew over the habit. Everything had changed. She had to make her peace with the fact that life never had been meant to be what it had been before. Change was the only consistency. Change was a masquerade. Some change seemed cruel, some even brutal. Some changes were sweet and most changes invisible, but there was only change from nothing into the human form—from nothing to life, then to death, then from death the change underwent its own change.

Edward had changed. If he had died she would not have sat beside his corpse for years, but in this change he had died for her and yet she would not leave his corpse.

She called Bill Tobin and asked him to drive out for dinner. She talked it all over with him. He was more helpful and understanding than the priests had ever been. He saw clearly why she must accept the essence of change and open the doors of her house to Edward again, forgetting conceits and the tyranny of regulating his life if he were to be allowed to stay. Either he had been sick and was now cured by their joint experience—just as she had been cured of her innocence—or he was still sick. If he was sick she and his son had to help him. She would take Danny out of that damned school and send him to the school down the road where they could see Edward together every day.

She would have called Edward the day she decided all that, but it was a Thursday. Monday would be the first day of a new month. The letter arrived on Saturday morning, typed on the same defective typewriter. She opened it casually, because she knew that nothing like this could touch her any more. He had done the worst and it was over, no matter what this note would say.

The letter said that Edward owned eight of the principal brothels in New York, three of the largest gambling houses, that his long tenure as a leader of the prohibition movement had been criminally insincere, because he had been active in that movement only in order to profit from the criminal organizations he controlled throughout the United States. Had she read about Owney Madden, Legs Diamond, the Purple Gang, Al Capone, Little Augie Orgen, Egan’s Rats? They worked for her husband. “All these are startling allegations,” the letter said, “and most certainly require substantiation. Therefore, if you will show this letter to William Tobin, executive vice-president of Horizons A.G., with offices in the West National Bank Building, your husband’s employee in charge of illegal liquor procurement, and to Arnold Goff, Park Central Hotel, Seventh Avenue at 58th Street, New York, your husband’s employee in charge of all underworld financing, you will learn that this letter is accurate and true. Sincerely, A Friend.”

She remembered the Silver Slipper and Goff, and Edward’s frightened reaction to Goff, and Bill’s telephone call to Goff to book the table. Irene solved the newest rats’ maze by getting pneumonia.

Time became a blur. Edward and Danny and priests were there. She thought she had spent time with Clarice and wept when she came out of the fever and remembered she would never see Clarice again. One afternoon Bill was beside the bed. She had been asleep. She opened her eyes and he was there with such pathetic sadness in his face that it seemed as splintered as a broken mirror.

“Bill?”

“Irene!”

“What does Horizons do?”

“We are a Swiss company.”

“What kind of a company?”

“A holding company.”

“Do you control gangsters?”

“Irene!”

“Do you?”

“I don’t understand the question. You’ve been very ill. You’ve been delirious. Do you know how long you’ve been here?”

“No.”

“Five weeks. You almost died.”

“I tried to die.”

“Irene. Please, no.” His face had fallen into shards again. She realized then what had happened to him. He was in love with her. She compressed time so that she could feel the past. Yes. He had always been in love with her. She must not torture him any more. She went to sleep.

She returned from Arizona in April. She was very thin and very brown. She looked very, very fit but quite dead. The outside was flawless and there was no inside. She let the house at West Wagstaff run into her emptiness for two days, then she called Arnold Goff.

“Mr. Goff, this is Irene West. Do you remember me? Edward West’s wife?”

“I most certainly do.” He had been weighing heroin on a jeweler’s scale with three wholesalers with whom he was about to close. He could not turn his back on the three men, not with nine kilos of heroin on the table, yet he could not have them see his shock, so he relied on moulinage, the process whereby the raw silk becomes processed silk and reels itself around the bobbin.

“I called to ask if you would give me a card to your friend, that darling Mr. Levin. I would adore to get some of his clothes at the true wholesale prices.”

Goff was almost unmanned until he realized what had come over her. She was bored with her husband and had gone gangster-happy. She was in that wicked, romantic-pirate stage of fifty other women whom he had allowed to take him into their beds, and he was possessed concomitantly with the keenest pleasure at the thought of surrendering to E. C. West’s wife. He thought of Bella. He thought of five million dollars worth of Liberty bonds. He thought of Joe Masseria and Frankie Yale and Frankie Marlowe.

“Mrs. West, nothing would give me more pleasure. Shall we meet at one at Moriarity’s tomorrow?”

“That would be simply wonderful, Mr. Goff.”

“Please call me Arnold.”

“If you’ll call me Irene.”

Jane Winikus told Edward that she had seen Irene lunching with Arnold Goff at Moriarity’s. He told her she must be mistaken. She replied that she had thought she must be mistaken herself, so she had stopped by the table and had spoken with them. She had called Edward because someone else who hadn’t talked to Irene might have called him, and she wanted to be sure that he knew that the lunch was entirely innocent. Mr. Goff was going to take Irene to Levin’s Covered Buttons & Sequins Dresses Inc. to buy clothes wholesale, and every woman enjoyed buying clothes at wholesale once in a while.

West put watchers on Irene for the second time, but it would take a sandstorm to hide a tail out in the country.

Propinquity is a reliable aphrodisiac. Goff became so absorbed in getting Mrs. Edward Courance West into bed in order to have it on her husband that he convinced himself she was the most desirable woman he had ever seen. But the more he pressed forward to climb her thighs the further she retreated. Irene became intensely aware of her extraordinary desirability, and it thrilled her so fulfillingly that she began to feel dizziness about this man who could find her so desirable. She could taste lust at the back of her throat. She could feel talons digging into the floor of her stomach. But if she got into bed with him before she found out what she had to know, she was afraid he would fall slackly out the other side, a free man. She had to keep a lock on him, but, in a manner that she had never felt before in her life, she had to have a man soon—any man, anywhere.

After three weeks in which Irene and Goff had been seeing each other five and six times a week at race tracks, in nightclubs until dawn with gunmen and con men, West sent for Goff even though in four more days they would have been having their regular quarterly business meeting.

“What are you trying to do?”

“With your wife, you mean?”

“Answer me!”

“I am trying to screw her.”

West started involuntarily out of his chair, but he caught himself. He settled back, trembling. “Have you forgotten Joe Masseria?”

“You did that once, West. You can’t make it stick now. All I care about is screwing your wife. And the crazy thing is I am so crazy about her that I can sense a lot of things about her and one of them is that you can’t even understand what it is I feel about her because you never felt it yourself.”

West looked like death, death that was dying and death that brings death. At last he spoke. “I love her. Can you say that?”

“I think I probably loved Bella the way you think you love your wife. But if that’s all it is, then nobody would have had any kids from the beginning. I mean I don’t want to live without your wife, and if she doesn’t want me, then go ahead and have me killed and do me a big favor. You go right ahead and tell how you love her. That’s how I feel about her.”

“I may do you that favor.”

“That’s fine. Good. That’s the best way. No horseshit. Whoever wants her the most gets to keep her.” He stared at West contemptuously. “You’re just another hoodlum to me, E.C. I’ve seen a thousand of ’em. And hear me, pal. You aren’t the only one who can hire a gun. And let me tell you something else before you remind me how you made my fortune. I have enough on you in my files at the hotel to blow up this whole nice, big bank you have here. And I happen to have figured out exactly how to use it.”

A spear went through West with enormous force, pinning him to his smothering fear. Goff was the Communist plant! Here was the enemy out in the open! With a controlled effort West pulled the invisible garments of the Mafia over himself. He became the restrained, quiet-spoken man of respect.

“There is nothing else to say, Arnold. Get out.”

Goff got up. He walked across the room toward the door, then turned. “Actually there is something else to say. I don’t want you to think I am altogether a heel.”

“What is it?”

Goff began to laugh. Whatever he was going to say was giving him such enormous pleasure that he might not even be able to say it. “I don’t want you to think—” He had to hold his side with one pressing hand while he laughed uncontrollably. “I don’t want you to think I’d tell Bella Radin what we talked about today.” He opened the door and tottered out of the room. The door closed behind him, but West could hear his laughter ringing and receding as he walked away.

West talked to Tobin on the direct line and told him to come right down.

“Arnold Goff is your Commie rat, Willie. He’s been keeping a thirteen-year-old file on me at his hotel.”

“He said that?”

“Get him out of the hotel tonight for as long as possible. Call Rei and have him find you a locks-and-safes man. Comb those files tonight. I want everything out of there. Take them to Fifty-fifth Street, and we’ll burn them in the fireplace.”

Tobin had Rhonda Healey write a letter to Goff on a sheet of Irene’s West Wagstaff notepaper and had her sign “Irene.” He took the letter to the Park Central Hotel and gave it to the bell captain with a dollar bill to be taken up to Goff’s apartment. Tobin sat in the lobby facing the elevator bank, screened by moving people. It was twenty minutes to seven.

When Goff came out of the elevator he wasn’t looking for anything in the lobby. He moved jerkily toward the Seventh Avenue exit. Tobin followed him, and through the window of the florist’s shop he watched him get into his car. Then Tobin went to a telephone booth and called the house on 55th Street. West answered at once. “Goff just left for West Wagstaff,” Tobin said into the telephone.

“West Wagstaff?” West was shocked.

“He was very excited, Ed.”

“What time did he leave?”

“Just now. Maybe at a quarter to seven.”

“Have you seen his files yet?”

“Not yet. I’ll go up as soon as the expert gets here.”

“Don’t miss anything, Willie.” West was working to stay calm—Tobin could almost hear him screaming at himself inside his head to stay calm. The telephone crashed into its cradle.

Tobin left the telephone booth and returned to the chair in the lobby. The specialist, Doc Yankel, arrived at seven-fifteen. He was a small, alert man of fifty who carried a doctor’s satchel. He went to the bell captain, who directed him to Willie.

They walked sedately down the corridor on Goff’s floor. “This is it,” Willie said. The door had three locks. Doc Yankel peered at each lock, then selected keys from his overcoat pocket and opened each in turn. They went in and Willie bolted the door. Tobin looked in every room and every closet and he pounded walls for hollow places but he could find files only in ordinary filing cabinets in a walk-in closet. Doc Yankel drank a celery tonic with his gloves on. Willie asked him to open the files. Yankel tried five keys before he got the right one. “It takes a little longer,” he said, “but I think it’s better than forcing.” There were twelve file drawers in all. Willie began by taking A to F out to the table and started reading at seven-forty. He finished at ten after ten. He filled his small suitcase with the papers that mentioned West, Rei, Horizons or himself, but the papers he left behind were hot enough to burn big holes in some very big hoods and civilians in the country.

Doc Yankel locked the files and they left the flat, locking the three locks securely behind them. Yankel left through the 58th Street exit. Tobin went out to Seventh Avenue.

Irene almost ran into the living room, unable to believe the servant had gotten the caller’s name right. It was he. She stood swaying at the raised entrance to the room, staring at him with excitement. He was very pale. He was breathing unevenly as though he had run to her. They walked toward each other without speaking. Her arms went around his neck. His hands slid over her. They kissed and her legs gave way as though they had been turned to water. She crumpled to the floor, pulling him down upon her as Edward smashed a stone bench through the window far across the room.

They sat up like electrified puppets, eyes unblinking, totally alarmed by tribal guilt. West climbed through the window as the butler and the downstairs maid appeared in the doorway. West spoke to the servants first. “I want everyone out of this house and on the way to New York within the half hour. Telephone the bank for instructions tomorrow morning. If you are out of here and in the station bus in a half hour you will receive a handsome bonus. If you are not, you will have to sue me for back wages. Get out.”

The two servants fled.

Edward rushed to Goff and pulled him to his feet to knock him down again. He was wearing brass knuckles that tore away a large piece of flesh from Goff’s cheek. Irene screamed and pulled at Edward, but he flung her away. Goff kicked out from the floor, catching Edward in the chest, but he was badly dazed from being hit and he was ineffective. West pulled Goff up and began to beat him rhythmically, blood spattering everywhere. Irene lay on the floor. Her head had hit the corner of a fireplace and she was unconscious. When Goff was a mass of blood—face, hair and clothes—Edward dragged him up the three small steps to the main hall, across the hall, leaving solid tracks of blood on the white carpet, out the front door and across the graveled yard to Goff’s car. He got into the car and backed it up, then drove it so that its cowl touched the building wall, pointing directly into the ruined living room through the smashed window. He sat the groggy Goff behind the wheel and made sure he was awake, then he went into the room through the open window to where Irene was whimpering and stirring. As Goff looked on hazily, Edward pulled Irene into a sitting position, then grabbed her bodice with his right hand and ripped the dress away from the front of her. He kept ripping and tearing until the front of her was naked. He dropped on top of her. When he had finished he stared down into her shocked, wild eyes. He spat into her face.

Goff and his car had gone. Irene pulled herself to her feet and put on Goff’s topcoat. She ran out of the room, sobbing. Edward left the house unsteadily and walked slowly along the path to the garages. People were getting into the long airport buses that West Wagstaff used to transport the servants. Kershaw, the butler, came forward to steady him. “Everyone is out, sir,” he said.

Edward nodded. “Send them into the city and have them put up at any hotel. You get one of the big cars out and roll it to the front of the house, then go into the hall and shout up the stairs to Mrs. West that it is you and that you have the car ready to drive her to New York.”

“Very good, sir.”

Edward called Willie at 55th Street from the estate office in the garage. “Did you get the files?”

“Yes. Everything.”

“I want you to do two things.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I want Goff hit tonight. Call Rei. Goff will be back at his hotel within the hour. Then I want you to find me a cement contractor and send him to West Wagstaff with triple crews.”

“Eddie! Is Irene all right?”

“She’s all right. I’m sending her into New York.”

When Willie hung up he called West Wagstaff, Irene’s private number, immediately. The phone rang for some time, but she answered. “Irene? Bill. Thank God I got you. Are you all right?” She began to sob softly. He said, “Has there been trouble?”

“Terrible. Terrible.”

“Kershaw is going to drive you into New York. You must go to my place. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” She hung up.

Rei was in New York at the Waldorf. Tobin reached him there just as he was going to bed and gave him Edward’s message.

“That’s a very important contract,” Rei said in his reflective way. “You’re absolutely sure there’s no mistake?”

“I’m sure.”

“I’ll have to handle this myself. There’s going to be one helluva big mess over this one.”

Edward manhandled the four drums of gasoline onto the hand truck with the large buckets. He pushed the truck across the areaway from the garage to the main house laboriously. At the back door to the house he began to fill the buckets with gasoline. He could handle only two buckets at a time. He lined the floor of the small elevator with filled buckets, leaving just enough room for himself to stand, and rode with them to the third floor. He took them out, two at a time, and walked with them to the farthest of the servants’ rooms. He sloshed the gasoline all over. He took the buckets from room to room and emptied them wildly until the top floor was saturated.

He rode down with the empty buckets, filled the lift again, then saturated the second floor of the beautiful house, returning once more with a second car full of the oil so that he could be sure that the room where they had lived was sodden. Then he worked methodically to saturate the main floor of the irreplaceable flawlessness, and at the end he dragged the quarter-filled drums into the living room and overturned them on the floor where he had raped Irene. The gasoline glistened across the surface of the room in the moonlight.

He raced up the stairs and opened all the windows on both floors. He ran down to the main floor in an insensate frenzy and smashed windows open by throwing Sheraton chairs through them. He was filthy with his work. He could not get the mocking image of his mother out of his mind, and he wanted to get at her somehow, to tear her to pieces. “She should be burning in here,” he screamed. “She should be nailed to this floor.” He sprinted out of the building to the garage. He soaked brooms under the gasoline from the pump, then he lighted them, all eight of them, and began to run in a circle around the house flinging the torches into the beautiful work of art, hearing the dull boom as the fire touched the oil and spread, until he had to fall back, then farther and farther back from the heat, and a hundred yards away he could still feel it. He stood under the trees and watched it go, and after a while he heard the fire engines coming. He fell down on the grass and went to sleep so that he could get the rest he would need to manage the work of cementing over the foundation of the house into one seamless slab that would entomb all of the shame all women had made him feel throughout his life.

Rei called Goff but there was no answer, so he got dressed slowly, then, sitting on the edge of the bed, he screwed a silencer to the end of a .38-caliber revolver and put it into an attaché case. He had to telephone twice again at fifteen-minute intervals before he got Goff.

“Arnold? Ben Rei.”

“What can I do for you, Ben?”

“I’m at the Waldorf. I have a large can of the finest. I’ll bring it over.”

“Not tonight. I don’t feel good. I’m going to bed.”

“I’m sorry you don’t feel good. But it has to be tonight because I leave in two hours for Chicago.”

“Can’t you leave it in the hotel safe?”

“Arnold, you know I can’t do that. This is a big jar of the purest. I wouldn’t hand it over to anybody but you. What is this? It’ll take two minutes!”

“Okay.”

“Fifteen minutes.”

“Ben?”

“Yes, Arnold?”

“Knock three times. Slow. I don’t want to see anybody else tonight.”

Rei knocked three times, slowly. Goff opened the door. He had put a dressing on the side of his face. Above the dressing his face was badly bruised and swollen. “Hey,” Rei said, “you took a real fall there.” Goff did not answer.

“Where’s the stuff?”

“Right in here.” Rei sat down, resting the attaché case on his lap, his hat and light topcoat still on. He was wearing gloves. “I got a little indigestion, Arnold,” he said. “Can you let me have a little shot of cognac?”

“Sure.” Goff turned away to go to the bar at the far wall. Rei moved silently. He drew the revolver out of the case, released the safety, then fired once at Goff’s back—the kind way, the Mafia way for friends of the friends, so that the victim would not know he had been killed. Goff fell forward on the carpet. Rei stood over him and fired a coup de grâce into the back of his head. He turned the body on its side with his right foot, then fired the silenced gun once more to blow the larynx away so that if, through some miracle, the man stayed alive, he would not be able to talk.

Rei replaced the gun in the attaché case, then removed from it a party tray of cards and chips and a paper bag. He dealt out six poker hands on the round, green baize-covered table on the side of the room away from the body and distributed the chips unevenly. He put four ash trays on the table and filled them from the paper bag with a used, burned cigar and cigarette butts. He tossed some match boxes and books on the table, then stepped over the body to fetch three glasses, which he half-filled with rye and water and placed near the cards and chips on the table. He moved six chairs up to the table, approximately near the cards, to look as if they had suddenly been abandoned, then he picked up the attaché case again, saw that it was closed carefully, and let himself out of the apartment.

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.