Free Mile High by Richard Condon Page B

Boss, with stained teeth and heads of hair like sea grass, tangled and long. They had been farters and belchers and friends of the rubber mat under a spittoon.
    Willie was effete compared to the tobins who had lived before him. He was light-boned and graceful. He was a dude who put his savings squarely on his back and who had set himself to the task of wheedling jeweled stickpins out of Paddy, because people gave Paddy every sort of thing they kept in the backs of their bureau drawers when they didn’t have money to give, because, after all, that was what loyalty meant in Paddy’s eyes, not just the straight-ticket vote, Willie wore his beige hair in three, beautifully kept waves that ascended like lights from the elegant widow’s peak that he had become so grateful to find on his forehead. Willie wore a ring on each hand that he had coaxed patiently out of Paddy, claiming that rings and stickpins bespoke affluence when he dealt with the cops in the Tombs and the judges and the DAs in the courts across the street. He was a nimble tobin in every way, but he was hauntingly epicene and therefore a new tobin. He specialized in merchandising the soft answer and the sweet request, and it worked, because when he had to he could put the old feudal steel into his voice and back them all down, because, as the newest of a long, long line of tobins he knew well his place and his power of place within the fief.
    â€œIt isn’t an assignment that will be long or demanding,” Eddie said to William Glass, dean of the Law School at Columbia University. “Just library research. Nights and weekends.”
    â€œLaw students need their nights and weekends, Mr. West. That’s when they learn to be lawyers.”
    â€œLaw students can use money too. And I’ll pay well.” Eddie’s tall, white, stiff, collar seemed to support his long neck and bony head, giving him a swamp-bird’s dignity.
    â€œWe have our graduates, the young lawyers who don’t immediately set the world on fire.” Dean Glass lifted a card file from a desk drawer and began to riffle through it. “Here is a brilliant young man. Arnold Goff. Straight As, and we haven’t had many of those in our history. Editor of the law journal too.”
    â€œI’ll take him.”
    â€œHe’s a lawyer, Mr. West. Explain your problem and he’ll tell you whether he’ll accept your offer.”
    Goff’s office was in the St. Paul Building at 220 Broadway, below Chambers Street. Goff was a medium-sized man with soft skin, as pale as cigarette paper, with pale, shiny hair, wearing a black suit and a mauve necktie. He had the hardest eyes Eddie had ever seen, and that made Eddie marvel; harder than Paddy’s and colder; harder than those of the men who had sat in Paddy’s office above the saloon. Goff shook Eddie’s hand, motioned him to a seat, but did not speak. He had mastered the compulsory law course wherein lawyers are taught to let others do all the talking in order to create an aura of mysterious wisdom and to avoid revealing the extent of this wisdom.
    It was a pleasant small office with two windows that looked up Broadway, and off to the right, one could see City Hall. The walls displayed diplomas and impressive certificates, but those hung above reading level were dental-school diplomas that Goff’s fiancée had bought at auction. There were also many pictures of large numbers of men in white aprons who were eating beefsteaks in happy congress, all the pictures framed in pencil-thin black wood and also purchased in quantity by Goff’s fiancée from the estate of a defunct restaurateur.
    Goff didn’t say as much as “What can I do for you?” He sat in repose, with his fingertips touching under his chin, waiting for the petitioner to explain his presence.
    It was child’s play for Eddie. His father had challenged and rewarded him for not speaking long before his school