If organized labor was a tremendously profitable business, it was also the key mass in American life where the Bolsheviki would attempt to strike, and he kept his finger on labor’s pulse and had specialists, such as Louis Buchalter and Jacob Shapiro, and hundred of their lieutenants throughout the labor movement report to Bill Tobin the slightest evidence of Communist infiltration, which, God damn them, was where Tobin was compiling the most revolutionary information on Soviet plans any agency, official or otherwise, had ever seen. The government had nothing like it. The President was a child in Communist affairs. Let them get their own information. He would sit and sift and judge what his people were constantly ferreting out and when the time came to act he would act. The certain point was that there did not seem to be any immediate danger. As America continued to grow, as the market continued to rise, as the people grew wealthier and more secure, the Communist conspiracy did not have a chance.
The year 1927 had been a record-breaker for everyone and it seemed that there was no stopping it. He had acquired a substantial interest in sixty-seven companies and sat on the boards of fifty-four of these. However, it had not been a good year entirely. Don Vito Cascio Ferro had died in Palermo’s Ucciardone prison. He had been arrested in 1927 by Mussolini’s police prefect, Cesare Mori, on a trumped-up charge of smuggling. He had ignored the court during his trial, much as if he had been sitting in his own flower-lined patio overlooking the bay. When his lawyer had appeared to be pleading for leniency, Don Vito gratingly had admonished him for speaking “in conflict with my principles and my authority.” He was permitted to address the court before it sentenced him. He spoke briefly and disdainfully to the judges. “As you have been unable to obtain proof of any of my numerous crimes, you have been reduced to condemning me for the only one I have never committed. May God have mercy on you.” Don Calogero Vizzini succeeded Don Vito. He was cordial and most helpful to Congressman Rei when the banker arrived in Palermo in the late spring to pay his last respects at the grave.
The anxiety over the Soviet threat (which could not be coped with tangibly enough) and the pressures of work, travel, decisions and public appearances (four honorary degrees in 1927) were all taxing, and Edward had to release the tension somehow. In March 1928, Rhonda Healey called Tobin at his new sixteen-room apartment at 64th and Fifth Avenue, where a clever architect had managed to use twelve hundred and eighteen square feet for closet space, to say that Eddie had beaten up one of her girls so badly that the girl was in critical condition at the Midtown Hospital and that she was afraid, when she regained consciousness, her brothers were going to force her to tell where it had happened and who had done it to her and that the worst kind of trouble could develop. Tobin hurried to the hospital.
The girl had a fractured skull, a broken jaw, multiple fractures of the right arm and seven badly splintered ribs that had edged her over into pneumonia. She was on the hospital’s critical list. It was a simple matter to hold off the police investigation, but her family were waiting—in the hospital—in a near hysterical state. Did Mr. Tobin wish to talk to them? He thanked the doctors, but he said that meeting would have to wait for the moment. He paid a nurse a relatively large sum to sedate the three brothers without their knowledge, and for their own good (and for the good of the hospital) because in their enraged grief they were approaching violence; this was managed with coffee and with milk. He left instructions as “lawyer for the patient” that no expense was to be spared for medical care. He telephoned Congressman Rei from the telephone facing the waiting room and the three leather-jacketed brothers. They were very large men who sat, red-eyed and despairing, bursting irrationally into questions at each other in loud voices. They were workingmen. He hoped they were teamsters or stevedores.
“Hello, Ben? Bill Tobin. Fine. Yourself? Good. Ben, we have a little emergency here and, to tell the truth, I don’t know exactly what kind of muscle is needed, but suffice to say, for the moment anyhow, one can’t buy one’s way out of this particular contretemps. I’m at the Midtown Hospital in New York. Yes. That would be marvelous. Suppose you ask him to ask for me at Manny Wolfe’s at the corner of Forty-ninth and Third? Fine. I’ll be at the bar. Thank you, Ben. And you can be sure this is very much a business call involving our peerless leader.”
There was no change in the girl’s condition when he left fifteen minutes later. The brothers were much calmer, however. In thirty-five minutes he saw the bartender nod in his direction and two men who introduced themselves as Al and Reggie Sciortino joined him. Willie explained the problem in vague terms, because that was not what they were there to discuss. “Suffice to say accidents are accidents, but the three brothers will not accept that it could be an accident. And the point is if they started backtracking to the girl’s employer and making a lot of noisy trouble there, if they began to beat up on one of the girl’s coworkers and got some kind of an idea of who had caused the accident, that would all be pointless. They are very large, very strong, very violent, agitated men and they have to be discouraged.”
“If we get them outta the hospital, there ain’t nothing to it. Was the broad a hooker?”
“Yes.”
“You the mout’piece for the operation?”
“Did anyone tell you to ask me any questions? Do I have to make the same phone call all over again?”
The other man touched his forearm. “He’s only human. Forget it.”
“I’m genuwinely sorry,” the first man said.
“I have no idea how these things are done,” Willie sniffed. “The girl’s name is Carmela Palermitano, and her brothers are in the fifth-floor waiting room.”
“Okay, fine. We’ll handle it,” the older brother affirmed.
“You want them hit?”
“The point is this: They have to be completely discouraged from persisting in following up the idea of who caused this accident. If you can talk to them and discourage them, that would be fine. If you have to beat them to discourage them—well, they have to take their chances with the rest of us.” Willie was losing patience.
“But if they won’t listen?”
“As I said, quite distinctly, Mr. Sciortino, they have to be discouraged. What you have to do to discourage them is your job.”
Carmela was able to see him, with Rhonda Healey, in five days. The brothers were no longer at the hospital. Rhonda introduced Willie as her lawyer. Carmela said she had a bad headache but otherwise everything was okay.
“Every job has its on-the-job problems, Miss Palermitano,” Willie said.
“Yeah,” Carmela answered.
“But, on the other hand, every cloud has a silver lining.”
“Yeah?”
“I want you to take this little check—it’s for fifteen hundred dollars—and I want you to sign this little paper—one of those formalities—”
“It’s okay, Rhond?” Carmela asked.
“Baby, how can you lose? He’s also paying all expenses.”
Carmela signed the paper. Then she looked at the check. “Gee, thanks, mister.”
“Enjoy your rest here,” Willie told her with kind interest. “Order whatever you want, and if you feel like having your hair done every day, you just pick up that phone and order it.”
Carmela smiled gratefully. “First I got to get this plaster cast offa my head,” she said.
Danny West was fourteen years old and in his freshman year at Gelbart, to which his mother had agreed to send him with much trepidation because it was a “mixed” school, i.e., Protestants were allowed to attend. Irene was driven to see him once every week and obeyed his instructions meekly not to enter the school grounds more often than once a month. They met at the back of an ice cream parlor in town.
That March, after she had returned from her regular weekly visit, Irene found a letter waiting at the 55th Street house. It was typewritten. It said: “Dear Mrs; West: It is time you knew you were married to a pervert who beats and tortures prostitutes for his pleasure. He has nearly killed a prostitu
te named Carmela Palermitano. She is now in serious condition at the Midtown Hospital in New York, quite near your house, suffering from multiple fractures. Very truly yours, A Friend.”
That night she and Edward dined alone and she told him about the letter, saying it was insane and frightening.
“‘Let me see it,” Edward said.
He read the letter. He folded it and put it in his wallet. “This is outrageous,” he said. “This little letter is going to the postal authorities tomorrow.”
“Can they trace it?”
“That remains to be seen. I am very upset about this. Irene, in the future I think it best that you do not touch any mail that comes for you. We may be able to keep the sender’s fingerprints intact that way. That is to say, your fingers might smudge his prints.”
“But, darling, the mailman will have handled it and heaven knows how many people at the post office.”
“That is true. Well, I can only say that this is a rotten, desperate thing to do to a man and his wife—as fruitless a gesture as it is.”
The next day West had Willie transfer the Palermitano girl from the Midtown to a good, small hospital in Brooklyn so that she would be nearer her family. He leaned hard on the postal authorities to no avail. He retained the typewriter expert, Martin Tytell, but aside from Tytell’s opinion that the message had “probably” been written on an old-fashioned Oliver machine having a circular keyboard and showing weak stems on the t, the f and the j, there was no clue to the identity of the sender.
“This could be a Communist trick, you know,” Willie said.
“How?” Edward shot the question.
Willie shrugged. “They have to break you. If they can get at you through Irene—if they could smash your marriage—”
Edward said, “I won’t accept that theory yet, but I most certainly will not rule it out.”
In April the second terrible disaster of the year fell upon the Wests when Walter Wagstaff and Clarice were lost at sea in a storm off Palm Beach. Their deserted sloop went aground below Daytona. No trace of them was found. Edward chartered a Ford Trimotor and he and Irene flew to the scene, where Edward took personal charge. Both the Navy Air Arm and the Coast Guard did everything they could. At last they gave up hope, and Irene asked Bishop Nolan to sail with them out into the deep water all along the coast, where he consecrated the ocean and asked for the Lord’s mercy on their souls.
Irene was distraught. She couldn’t bring herself to leave her father’s house so soon. She was shockingly grieved and shocked to see that death could possibly come so unexpectedly to a woman as religious as she. She kept thinking, too, that if Danny hadn’t been at school for his first time away from home, she and Edward would have gone to Palm Beach with Clarice and Daddy and would have been aboard that sloop with them and Danny would have been an orphan boy.
After a week of hopeless searching, Edward simply had to get back to his duties at the bank, but Irene pleaded to remain at Palm Beach. He went to New York without her. She returned without announcement three weeks later, tired and weak, and found a typewritten letter waiting for her on the silver tray in the hall at West Wagstaff. It was a registered letter, so it had been separated from the mountain of messages of commiseration. “Dear Mrs. West:
It was too bad you did not follow up the information concerning your husband’s brutal abuse of the prostitute Carmela Palermitano, I have enclosed in this envelope a key to the apartment of Miss Alouette Tazin (the only such name in the telephone directory), who lives on Park Avenue in a flat that is paid for by your husband, who visits her on Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoons between five and seven o’clock. See for yourself. Use this key. However, you may choose not to believe me again. Therefore, why not visit the prostitute Carmela Parlermitano at the Sante Croce Nursing Home at 1192 Smitter Street, Brooklyn. Ask her who mutilated her. With all my best, I am, Sincerely yours, A Friend.”
Irene telephoned Edward at the bank. He was not there. It was a Wednesday afternoon. She fought sin. She fought fear and faithlessness. She locked herself in her sitting room and knelt to pray. She prayed that this overwhelming temptation to evil would depart from her. She prayed for forgiveness for betraying Edward, though loving him as much as she did, by believing what a poison-pen letter, already once denied, told her. She could not win over herself. She telephoned the Sante Croce Nursing Home in Brooklyn. She asked if Miss Carmela Palermitano was a patient there. She was. She telephoned the Midtown Hospital. She asked for the records division and inquired if they had recently treated a patient named Carmela Palermitano. They had.
Irene had herself driven to the nursing home. It was twenty minutes to six when she got there. Miss Palermitano was wearing a stiff white casque. Her right arm lay straight along her side, fat and ridged with white plaster from her wrist to her elbow. Her face was pale and there were black rings under her eyes. She didn’t speak when Irene came into the room, as she pulled up a chair beside the bed and sat so that her eyes were at the level of Carmela’s eyes.
“I’ve come from Edward West,” she said.
“How is he?”
“He—is—fine.”
“I’m gladda see you. Evvey time somebody comes from Eddie West I make a little more money. I have nothing but troubles since he put me in here, believe me. I got a brother who was knocked off. My mother … my mother went to bed, she won’t get out. As far as I’m concerned, the whole thing started with Eddie West.”
Irene closed her eyes, and it took all her strength to open them again. “Do you hate him?”
“Why should I hate him? That’s what he does—he can’t help it. He’s like a queer or something. He paid me. I knew what he liked. What the hell?” They sat silently, then Carmela began to put two and two together. “You his wife, honey?”
Irene nodded.
“Then you got a real problem, lady,” the sad-eyed patient said.
Irene sent the car away. She walked. Later it began to rain so she went into a movie house. When they stopped showing, it was a quarter to twelve. She walked. The street clock above a jeweler’s said twenty-five to two. She got in a cab and asked the driver to take her to a hotel. “What kinda hotel?” he asked.
She sat for a moment to try to think of a hotel. “The Ritz. On Madison,” she said.
“In Manhattan?” the driver asked incredulously.
The clock in the hotel lobby said twenty after two. She paid for the room for two days in advance. When she awoke the sun was shining. Her wrist watch said one-twenty. She remembered what Edward liked to do to women. She dressed and walked to St. Patrick’s and gathered peace in the dimness. Then she went back to the hotel. The hotel clock said five minutes to seven. She went to bed. She awoke at four-twenty the next morning, got dressed and went walking. She ate lunch at 96th and Broadway, surprised at her appetite. At two o’clock she went into the beauty salon. At four o’clock she changed her clothes at the 55th Street house, dressing with care until she was satisfied with how she looked, then she rode up Park Avenue in a taxi. Half-way there she began to pound heavily on the seat of the cab. “Hey, lady,” the driver said, “watch that seat. I’m an independent.”
She pushed the doorbell and heard it ring clearly inside the flat. No one answered. She took the key out of her purse and opened the door. She did not try to walk softly. She moved toward the guttural gasping sounds that were leaking from the room directly ahead of her. Then a shrill woman’s voice cried out, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” Irene opened the door. Edward’s naked body was lax above a mass of arms and legs and hair. Irene pulled a chair beside the bed and sat as she had at the Sante Croce Hospital, her eyes almost on a level with the closed eyes of a gasping slack-jawed girl. The girl’s eyes opened. “Jesus Christ!” the girl said. Irene fell to her knees beside the bed—her eyes level with the girl’s eyes, level with Edward’s eyes as his head turned—and weeping silently, began to recite the act of contrition aloud, her hands clasped in front of her. Edward spun his body like a log,
rolling away from her off the bed, half falling on the floor. Somehow he scooped up his underwear, shirt, trousers and one shoe and bolted out of the room.
“What the hell is this?” said the shocked girl. “How the hell did you get in here, fahcrissake?” Irene’s fingers disengaged themselves from each other and took an iron grip on the girl’s wrist, pinning her down while she continued the prayer and then concluded with “Hail, Mary, full of Grace—.” The confused, naked girl lay there and struggled to get free, her breasts moving violently from side to side like one-eyed spectators at a very fast tennis game. Then she gave up the struggle. She closed her eyes tightly and gritted her teeth against the humiliation. Then she spoke urgently. “Baby, listen. I got to douche. I mean I’ll be in trouble if I don’t.” Irene stopped praying and stared. “No kidding,” the girl said. “This is serious. I’m a very fertile chick.”
Irene let go of the girl’s arm. She stood up. The girl scuttled off the bed and ran out of the room. Irene followed her slowly. She passed the girl, who was knocking persistently on a door. “Eddie, open up. It’s me. Eddie! Open up! I got to douche!” Irene ran out of the apartment.