Mile High by Richard Condon Page A

compile a precise legal history of the prohibition movement in this country. You are authorized for up to four assistants at fifteen dollars a week for sixteen weeks each. I want it as close to county by county as you can get it.”
    Goff had become very pale. His lips looked blue. His eyes looked harder because they were desperate. He had saved eighteen hundred dollars toward his marriage and the money was banked jointly with Bella Radin, who was patient and understanding and believed in him as a gambler as in everything else, but there had to be limits, as with everything else. He would have to borrow an additional seven hundred dollars from his father to cover this bet. How could he explain such a bet? It wouldn’t be easy. He had to pay off within twenty-four hours, because this expressionless man with his long neck and cold, bony face just happened to be one of the men in the city who could make or break a lawyer.
    â€œI suggest a fee of three thousand dollars, payable in advance,” West was saying. “That fee should convey how important this brief is to me and how painstakingly it must be made.” Before the bet Eddie had decided to offer a fee of a thousand dollars, but the bet took up the slack. The net cost for the brief would now be only five hundred dollars and he would have put a lock on Goff. “I’ll pay for clerical expenses weekly as they’re incurred, but the brief must be completed in one hundred and twenty days. Can you do it?”
    Goff answered slowly, knowing he had to say he could do it because there was no other way to get the money to pay back West. “I think so. But I’ll need six assistants.”
    â€œI’ll pay for four. If you want six, you pay for the extra two.”
    â€œWhat if I can finish in ninety days?”
    â€œTwenty percent bonus.”
    â€œSixty days?”
    â€œIt can’t be done in sixty days.”
    â€œJust supposing.”
    â€œI’d pay a fifty percent bonus,” Eddie answered.
    Goff figured it like a baseball bookie figuring bet hedges from behind first base. A bonus off fifteen hundred dollars would pay a hundred assistants for one week at West’s rates, but he had no intention of paying anybody fifteen a week. With enough assistants—mainly with Bella and her relatives, the smartest family in the United States of America—it could be done in two months. He could win the bonus, and almost make a profit after paying off the bet, for a case that any Wall Street firm would have charged West fifteen thousand for, if they would have accepted it at all. But, and a great big but, he’d have West on his side and they wouldn’t. That was the big bookmaker edge.
    â€œI want social explanations insofar as they exist,” West was saying. “Why has the temperance movement struggled so long and why have they failed so miserably decade after decade? I want geographic and economic reasons. Earnings. Plant costs. Book values. Inventories. Brewery and distillery locations. Trade associations will have all that. A brief, in short, whose limits are confined only to the talents of the man who writes it. When can I see an outline?”
    â€œSunday?” This was Friday.
    â€œ Sunday? ” Eddie said. “Better make it Wednesday.”
    â€œNot if it counts against the bonus time limit.”
    â€œWe won’t start counting until Thursday morning”—and Goff had gained five and a half days; by the time West okayed the outline they’d be well off and running.
    Eddie spoke slowly. “I hope we will do business again, Mr. Goff. But there is a very special rule for that. The fact that I am your client must be regarded as privileged information. You may not tell anyone that I am your client.”
    â€œMy fiancée is my effective partner.”
    â€œLet this be understood. If I hear it around that I am organizing information about the prohibition movement, you will be