Mile High (26 page)

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.