Mile High by Richard Condon Page B

sorry.”
    â€œI’ll tell my fiancée, Mr. West. I’ll take my chances with that.”
    West shrugged, put on his hat and got up. He took out his wallet and gave Goff a card. “Reach me through this man,” he said. Then he put two one-thousand-dollar bills and two five-hundred-dollar bills on the shiny desk top. “I always pay cash.” They shook hands. West walked to the door. Goff said, “Mr. West, we forgot the bet.”
    â€œOh. Yes. The bet.”
    Goff scooped up the two thousand-dollar bills and one five-hundred-dollar bill and extended them to Eddie. “I always pay cash,” he said, grinning broadly even though he was very pale and his hand trembled slightly.

CHAPTER THREE
    Pick, Heller & O’Connell was the most widely influential and distinguished law firm in the United States. Their clients were the principal owners of the republic. Pick, Heller & O’Connell did on a gargantuan scale what Paddy West had done municipally all his life. Lawyers were the managers of America in the exquisitely powerful sense of managing all the managers of business, industry, religion and government. They made all the dangerous decisions. They handled the negotiations in which no manager or proprietor could safely appear. They were the high-yield gold thread in the tapestry of American wealth and power. The thread crossed all boundaries, entered all strong rooms, and infected/guided all of the consciences of a most unified colossus. The lawyers were not only the intelligence of a monolithic establishment, they were its fusion. They interlocked with other lawyers, communicating in a special dialect. Their fabric was strengthened each year by the top 10 percent of the graduating classes of the law schools of five universities.
    Pick, Heller & O’Connell employed two hundred and sixteen lawyers in their main offices in Wall Street. They practiced marine law in offices at Bowling Green, where they maintained a staff of twenty-seven lawyers.
    Eddie West had direct entry to the counsels of the firm because his roommate in his second year at Harvard had been C. L. Pick, Jr. Furthermore, Francis A. O’Connell was chairman of the Metropolitan Citizens’ Committee for Good Government and had known Paddy West well. But Eddie didn’t think those credentials would be good enough for what he wanted. He would be greeted by Mr. Pick or Mr. O’Connell, then turned over to a junior partner, and that simply would not do. He had pondered the problem. He had a first-class mind. He decided it would be better to cause each of the senior partners—C. L. Pick, F. Marx Heller, Francis A. O’Connell—to become individually and immeasurably indebted to him. The nature of indebtedness was that it had to acknowledge superior power. If it should occur to all of them at some later date that they had been framed, they would also be aware that if he had been able to frame them once he could frame them again, so they would do what he would ask. A part of his plan would offer shock and surprise. Its biggest part would depend on the fact that their advanced years and almost hermetically entrenched position at the top would have made them rusty at self-defense in the oversimplified arena of New York politics. As he saw it, no matter what they did in their panic, no matter how much muscle and cunning they brought to bear, he would be able to close all the doors.
    The plan began with the arrival of eight city firemen, under a lieutenant, all wearing fire helmets and rubber coats, who swarmed through Pick, Heller & O’Connell’s fourteenth-floor office checking wiring, pounding on walls and vents, then clearing all personnel off the floor, interrupting many serious client conferences. Word was passed immediately to F. A. O’Connell, who did not bother to leave his office to shout at the firemen but telephoned the fire commissioner. He lost his temper, which two doctors had warned