No One Rides For Free - Larry Beinhart (31 page)

30
THE
INGRATE DEAD

THE WHOLE FUCKING
bunch is
as bad as I am, the whole fucking barrel is rotten . . . that
super-WASP fuck Choate Haven . . . that cocksucker Goreman . . . and
I'm gonna drag them all down with me," Wood screamed.

"It ain't bragging if you can do it," Dizzy
Dean said. But Wood was bragging, and he couldn't. Usually bragging
is merely an unattractive character trait, but when the wrong person
believes the braggart, it can be a fatal flaw. Edgar Wood never knew
the secret he had died for. But someone who had a secret believed he
did. So had I, and I had spent the entire investigation looking for
that as the key.

Judge McCarthy was the first one to pick up on it. If
Wood had had something really hot, he would never have met the judge.
He would have stopped the lawyers, if what he had was on them, or he
would have forced Goreman to stop them. As a last resort he would
have cut a deal with the D.A. in the process that Mel Brodsky liked
to call "trading up." It was a long chain from the man who
wanted the killing done to the two men in the parking lot who had
committed the execution with a tire iron. LeRoy Johnson, who had
fingered Wood, led us to Alexander, Jr., who ran to Wellby. In spite
of my bragging at the Goreman lawn party, I had never expected to
connect the link from Wellby to. . . ?

Wellby was too well insulated and more than tough
enough to keep himself that way. He had proved that by having me
shoved off the cliff; when that failed, he had turned what connected
him to Wood into a corpse.

But the killer had stayed in character. He fell for
my bragging just like he fell for Wood's. The order went out to kill
me. It started out on the same route that the order to kill Wood had
taken, then diverged because of our locations. In Virginia the
contract had gone to Wellby, in New York to Mikey Fix.

Paley had let me know that the contract had come from
Sams. And if Sams could reach out to Paley, he could reach out to the
Doctor.

But Ricky Sams didn't give a shit about Edgar Wood or
me. He probably had never heard of either of us before. There was,
therefore, one more link, the person who had asked Sams to do the
job. There also had to be someone to tell the unknown party where
Wood was, so Sams could tell Wellby to tell Alexander, so Alexander
could talk to LeRoy. I also knew who had lingered Wood. That was me.

I had given that information, at the right time, to
Lawrence Choate Haven, who was also my only suspect in a position to
communicate with Sams.

Ol' squash buddy, Ol' Chip, an associate in Trusts
and Estates, was helping to set up Sams's estate. While an associate
may do all the actual work, every case actually belongs to a partner.
The most senior partner in T&E was Choate Haven, and if he wanted
to go along to a meeting with Sams, Ol' Chip, living in the law-firm
world of competitive paranoia, would be aware of one thing only, how
Choate Haven was judging the performance of Chip Riggins.

There were two places that such a meeting was most
likely to have taken place. At Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, or in some
sort of holding facility when Sams came into Manhattan to testify. In
either place, there would be a record. It was the kind of information
that a judge like Stew McCarthy could ask for, and he was kind enough
to do so. Choate Haven had met with Ricky Sams several times,
including dates immediately before his meeting with me, at which
point he may have been given a way to communicate with Wellby
directly, shortly after the Hamptons party.

There was still the remote possibility that he was
bird-dogging for Charles Goreman. Over & East was the sort of
client that an attorney might do anything to keep. It was also
remotely possible that he was acting to protect someone else at
Choate, Winkler, Higgiston, Hahn & Moore, in the fear that they
could not survive a scandal on top of scandal. I had an afternoon
with Christina and I told her that I was close.

"My angel, my beautiful brown-eyed angel, "
she said.

"When I'm with you, the whole rest of the world
disappears. "

I understood that. There was an anger bubbling away
deep inside me, waiting. The taste of fear that Whelan had roused was
still fresh on my tongue, dry and foul as a lick of tobacco ash. A
new fear was building, too, of what I might have to do. All of that
was gone, over the rooftop and across a wide wide river, when she was
there.

Everything that Laurie and I had been reaching for
that angry, drugged night, pushing to the point of pain and failing
even to simulate, was right there with Christina all by itself, as
free and deceptive as a gift from the gods.

"Do you now how crazy I am about you?"

"Yes, I think so," she said.

"No. You don't. You have no idea. I'm crazy
enough to ask you to marry me. Even though I have a notion that it's
a terrible idea. I'll ask, and if you said yes, I would do it."

"That's only because you think you can trust me
not to say yes."

"The thing is, you don't really believe it."

"I don't know. I know you're my angel and you
shouldn't love me too much. "

"What if I were free, and if I had a lot of
money, then what?"

"Hush," she said, kissing me softly to
close my lips.

"Don't talk of things like that. "

"No?"

"Just hold me, kiss
me, come inside me."

* * *

Goreman had told me there were many things that Wood
did not know, including what had happened in Hungary, the story of
the first $80,000 that Goreman had tripled to take over Samson. I had
to be sure, and when I called Goreman he reconfirmed that he had not
told Wood those things. Then I made up a story. I wove it out of
wisps of information, old news clips, and what the women said: look
for the overachiever.

Choate Haven was active in refugee organizations as
early as '39 when it was hardly fashionable. As a side effect, or
even as an ulterior and primary motive, it brought funds into Choate,
Winkler, Higgiston, Hahn & Moore at a time when an ongoing
depression and a Democratic administration were doing nothing to
boost business at an old-line Republican Wall Street law firm. Some
of those funds must have been quite substantial. Anyone in Europe who
had an ounce of sense and the means was transferring cash and assets
to Switzerland or America.

Only the man himself could say when it had started.
He would have heard stories of the death camps early on. He might not
have believed them and waited until the end of the war when the
American troops stumbled on the ovens. And on the long, carefully
recorded tabulation of the numbers dead. At that point he would have
been certain that many of the people who had entrusted their funds to
him would not return. Neither would their spouses, children,
grandchildren, cousins, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces. No one
would return to claim that money.

Maybe he began to embezzle it just because it was
there and didn't seem to belong to anyone. Maybe it was simple greed.
Maybe he couldn't keep up his dues at the N.Y.A.C. and the Harvard
Club. Maybe there was a golden investment he couldn't pass up or his
sister needed an eye operation or his wife wanted a cosmetic
mastectomy. To me, the reasons didn't matter.

Then bodies rose from the ashes. Like Charles
Goreman, son of Itzhak Oberetstock. As in Goreman's case, Choate
Haven denied when he could, stalled as long as he could and paid when
he had to.

At some point the ratio between embezzled dollars and
the number of survivors swung the wrong way and the claims of the
living exceeded the amount stolen from the dead. To cover the
shortfall he went looking for clients with unreported, untraceable
cash. The kind of money Ricky Sams had. I made a guess that the roots
of that relationship went back in time to the forties or fifties.
Sams did not pick Choate, Winkler from the yellow pages; someone had
recommended the fine old firm to him.

Court clerks, particularly those working in an area
as dry and dusty as probate court, remember any contact with the
famous, the notorious, the glamorous. I located several old-timers;
one down in Sarasota remembered Choate Haven handling crime figures.

He had been surprised, which is why he remembered it
so well, to see Haven represent the estate of Philip and Vincent
Mangano. Phil and Vince had founded one of New York's five families
way back in '3l. In '51 they made their last headline together when
Albert Anastasia took over their family. He had Philip murdered, bnt
Vincent only disappeared, presumed dead, which made for some fun
probate.

I had a lot of answers. I knew who, how and
understood why. I had other kinds of answers, about my own life, from
Vincent, Mikey Fix, Glenda, and a confused answer from Christina.

I had answers. The more answers I had, the more
problems I had. Not one was a solution. To make them mean anything, I
had to do something with them.

It was funny. The whole thing had been unnecessary.
The murder of Wood; the murder of Alexander, who probably deserved
it; the attempt to get me, who certainly did not. For once I
completely failed to see the humor in it.
 

31
NAKED

"
H0W WOULD YOU
like to be a big-time detective agency? Have some nice fat security
contracts, all money, no work? You could do your gambling down in
Grand Bahama, or even hit the casino at Monte Carlo, instead of
taking that grubby bus down to Atlantic City. How would you like to
set up a trust fund for your grandkids, for their college? Would you
like that, Joey?"

"Is this idle chatter? Or are you talking about
something? You sound like you got something eating you. "

"
I got an offer, two offers. Uncle Vince, he'll
take me into the family business. Construction. Big money. And Mr.
Paley, he says he can throw lots of business our way, strictly legit,
he says. That's just in case I don't wanna go into construction."

"Is this for real?"

"
Did they really say it? Or is it for real? I
know they really said it. I was there."

"I don't want anything from the likes of Michael
Pollazzio. I don't trust nobody who changes his name."

"Don't you ever get tired of scrounging? Being
half fucking broke? Wouldn't it be nice to take a real vacation . . .
I don't mean sitting at home waiting for the goddamn phone to ring
because there's no work. I don't mean going down to Florida and
trying to live off social security. I mean a real fucking vacation.
First-class in the plane. First-class hotel. Good restaurants. Maybe
you would like to take a cab once in a while, just 'cause you don't
feel like riding the subway. Just 'cause you don't feel like it, and
not worry about an extra five dipshit dollars."

"Do you really feel that way?" he asked.

"Does the Pope shit in the Vatican?"

"So you're thinking about working for those
kinda people," he said with contempt.

"Oh, by the way, there is a catch."

"Of course there is," he said, like I
should know that there always is. I did.

"They're watching to see how I handle things
with this one."

"What does that mean?"'

"How the hell do I know?" I snapped.

"How are you going to handle it?"

"How would you handle it?" I threw it back
to him.

"I don' know. It's a tough one."

"Fucking A, it's a tough one. There's not word
one I can prove. I can't prove Alexander took his orders from Wellby,
I can't prove that Wellby got the contract from Sams, and the only
connection between Sams and Haven is absolutely, perfectly
legitimate. That, he can prove. Can I prove that Haven was an
embezzler, forty years ago? Even Goreman, with all his money and
power—and he's the one who got stung by it--didn't try. This guy is
untouchable."

"So what are you going to do about it?" he
asked, worried. I was sounding wound up tight, and it was more than
the cocaine I was still doing. He picked up on my anxiety, but not
the drug use, or he would have said something about it. He would have
had alot to say about it.

"What do you think I'm gonna do?"

"I don't know, Tony, tell me."

"Maybe when I figure it out, I'll tell you."
But I don't think I was trying to figure it out. I think I had it by
then, or maybe a long time ago.

"Don't do anything stupid."

"I won't," I lied to him, then I closed the
door behind me as I left.

I splurged. I took a cab all the way home.

"
I'll be away for a few days. Don't worry about
me. Don't worry about yourself or Wayne either, I got that part of
things settled. There are a few things that still need to be worked
out. It's really better if I'm away while I do that. Please don't
worry. I love you and Wayne very much," is what I wrote in the
note that Glenda would find when she got home. I read it over, then
added, "Three, four days, at the most. Promise. Then I'll see
you."