Part 2

Arthur put down the phone and came in to bum a cigarette from Larry. “That was Tom, looking for some free legal advice,” he said with an easy, self-contented smile.

Larry looked up and gave him a light. “Well, Tom’s not a bad lawyer. Someday you may want to ask _him_ for some legal advice.”

* * * * *

Through the open door he had a good view of Arthur H. Bemrose’s enormous room--the heavy walnut desk with carved rope edge and morocco top, the lawn of billiard green carpet, the stained oak walls, woodburning fireplace and gold draperies. The Old Man’s room had been shabby by comparison, filled with black leather and horsehair. This Fifth Avenue decorator’s job might alarm some of the firm’s older clients but it must go down easy with the Washington boys. Larry tried to concentrate on his brief, soothed by the quiet answers Miss McVail gave Bemrose as he probed for details about her family that might be pertinent to settling the grandmother’s estate. Her quiet ought to appeal to him, Larry mused. With his hectic practice, he should be able to use a little peace and quiet at home.

The phone rang again, and this time Larry gathered that it was Jim Carson of the _Evening Star_. Larry had read a story of his only last week with a Moscow dateline. He must have just returned to this country. He had read Carson ever since he had met him once at Bemrose’s office, a slightly built man with deep scars in one cheek and missing front teeth so that every time he talked he made static. From what Bemrose was saying, Larry gathered that Carson wanted to change his will. Arthur invited him for dinner at the University Club and made Carson’s legal work incidental to hearing about Russia. He put himself out to cultivate good newspapermen, and they didn’t come any better than Jim Carson.

Before Bemrose hung up Larry heard him say, “If she’s a friend of yours, I’ll talk to her, Jim. I’m writing it down. Baldwin, Janice Baldwin. What did you say she writes for? Okay, I have it. Don’t worry. I won’t let her put me out.”

Larry shoved aside the pages of his brief, deciding that he might as well try to concentrate at the information desk in Grand Central. How could a fellow keep up the clip at which Bemrose lived and not show it? The same way a tennis champ could cover the court and look as if he hadn’t moved, Larry figured. It was a trick of easiness they all had, the good ones, whether on a tennis court, a putting green, in the ring, or in a law office. To look at Arthur H. Bemrose in the tweed suit that he bought extra big in order to have three inches leeway in the vest, anyone would take him for a gentleman farmer who had nothing but show dogs or a greenhouse on his mind. It wasn’t only the easy way he handled himself. It was the way he looked. At law school Arthur H. Bemrose had started a small, uneven mustache which had refused to thicken in twenty years. Its untidiness went with his flappy, oversized ears. His frame ambled and his arms hung loosely. With Bemrose for his lawyer, a client could be in hot water and still feel at ease. Larry wondered about Miss McVail, whether she had begun to let go a little.

He returned to reading his brief, this time from back to front, the way he sometimes read a magazine or a newspaper when he had trouble concentrating. One of the new point headings stopped him: _Mr. Alonzo Iturbi alias Newcomb_. A Bemrose literary touch. Arthur H. was making it sound like a murder mystery. It didn’t seem to Larry like the kind of language that would win an appeal in a higher court, but judges were human and probably liked to be entertained as much as other people. There was this to be said for Bemrose’s instinct in such matters. He had used it to advantage in Albany more than once, while this case was only the third Larry had ever taken to the Court of Appeals. He wanted to be sure his brief was a good one, as sure as a lawyer could ever be. It was damned nice of Bemrose to look it over and take the trouble to re-dictate the brief.

Larry saw Miss McVail edge forward in her chair as Arthur’s secretary broke in on them, apologizing because Mr. Carson’s friend, the magazine writer, was on the phone and sounded as if she had to talk to Mr. Bemrose. Urgently. The carefully schooled secretary explained, especially for Miss McVail’s benefit, that she knew Mr. Bemrose didn’t wish to be interrupted when he was with a client, and she had tried to take his calls for him, all those which seemed as if they could wait, but this woman was persistent and----

Half-heartedly Miss McVail offered to wait. Bemrose rewarded her by sounding almost peevish with Miss Baldwin, the writer. Larry caught most of what Arthur was saying. He was insisting to the girl that there _couldn’t_ be much public interest in another story about the Supreme Court. The readers of her magazine wouldn’t care if their average age were twenty-five and they all crooned like Bing Crosby, they must be sick of those same nine men. Larry gathered from Arthur’s end of the conversation that Janice Baldwin wanted to quote him on what Judge Haynes would have thought of the present day court if he were alive. Curtly Arthur told her that he wasn’t Conan Doyle and hadn’t any short wave set tuned into the hereafter. He couldn’t presume to speak for the dead. Besides, Judge Haynes had been his friend.

Finally she must have probed him about the current vacancy on the court, the real reason for her call, Larry figured. Bemrose was close enough to the top in Washington to furnish a pretty good dope story. Her editor would be smart enough to know that. But the subtlety of her approach had apparently been wasted on Bemrose. He told her that F.D.R. hadn’t taken him into his confidence, and if she wanted to find out about the next incumbent, she’d better try the White House herself.

Then, unexpectedly, he laughed, and Larry guessed that Miss Baldwin had gotten through to him. “Sure I’ll mind, and so will Newton. Only call us anyway.”

Miss McVail dandled her watch at him and suggested, when he had hung up, that they finish another time.

“She’s on her lunch hour,” Tim reminded him in a shaky treble.

“She’s been more than considerate about the interruptions,” Arthur told Tim. “I think we have enough facts to get started, and maybe if you both can arrange to drop in one day next week-- This office tries to do right by any friend of Tim’s, you know,” he told her gently.

When Larry went in to say goodbye to Hoxter, he saw that Arthur had her by the hand and was letting it gush. The persuasive Bemrose charm that trapped juries was turned on full. Trying to resist it was like damming up Niagara, and Miss McVail was no engineer. She smiled, and a light spread over her pale, amber skin. It was like one of those breathtaking effects in a Fifth Avenue window, the kind display men use to convey an atmosphere of quality. Inside Larry whistled, pleased with himself for having waited out Miss McVail the past hour. He knew when he saw her in the reception room that she had something. Something beside trouble with her brother. His hunch had been right, and he felt as if the market had gone up two points the day after he bought a block of stock.

When Tim and the girl had gone, Arthur H. Bemrose, lost in looking at the carpet, marked off the room’s length pigeon-toed, linking heel with toe. “What do you know about Janice Baldwin?” he asked suddenly.

“She writes feature stories for _Everett’s_,” Larry offered. “I heard you talk to Carson.”

Bemrose slid into an easy chair opposite Larry, and bore down on the backs of his heels which were extended in front of him.

“Why do you want to know? Did she sound good looking?” Larry asked.

“I wouldn’t say good looking. She sounded smart.” Arthur laughed. “Could you figure out what she wanted from what you heard? She wanted me, as the only authentic living spokesman for Judge Haynes, that’s how she put it, to give her a story on what the Old Man would have thought of the Supreme Court. I should have told her that what the Old Man would have had in mind wouldn’t fit the print.”

“Tim Hoxter wants you to take it up with the President,” Larry said. “He thinks you ought to give him hell for packing the Court. You ought to tell him it’s unconstitutional. He was giving me an earful out there in the reception room about how Judge Haynes wouldn’t have approved----”

“He’s a sweet old guy.”

“He has a sweet ward. If that’s what she is to him.”

“Miss McVail?” Arthur asked.

“I forgot. You go for brunettes.”

“What’s Miss McVail? A blonde?”

“Oh, my God.” Larry covered his ears.

“All right. Next time I’ll look,” Arthur promised.

“No, you won’t. You’ll never look.”

“The trouble with giving Miss Baldwin her story about the Court is that it’s strictly law journal stuff,” Bemrose said. “I’ve often thought about writing it, and someday I’ll get around to it, but when I do it will be what _I_ think, Bemrose trying to stand on his own two brains, and not what the Old Man-- Have you stopped to think, Larry, how easy it is to grow up a spokesman when you’ve lived around a great personality? Forty-two ought to be a good age to _stop_ being a spokesman, even if there’s publicity in it.”

“I haven’t heard a word. I don’t listen to anyone who is too busy to notice women like Miss McVail. I figure a fellow like that has a blind spot, and eventually it’ll show in his work.” Larry pretended to be busy with his brief. “You forgot the date.” Laboriously he printed J A N U A R Y 1 5 , 1 9 4 1 across the cover page. “That writer, the Baldwin woman, really called up to buzz you about the C.J., didn’t she? She didn’t give a damn about the old stuff on a packed Court. She probably wanted to find out how much you know, and figured that if you hadn’t heard anything from the hill, then nobody----”

“Yep.”

Larry sensed his mood. If Arthur H. Bemrose had been told by the President or by Tom Newton who would succeed Justice Hughes as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he wasn’t picking any confidants.

“Does it read all right?” Arthur pointed to the brief.

“You’ve cut the hell out of it,” Larry complained. “I thought this stuff on page twenty was a pretty good argument----”

“Irrelevant. They’re interested in the law. There’s a big difference between presenting it to the Appellate Division and to the Court of Appeals.” He expounded on the jurisdiction of the Albany court.

“I’ll take the brief home and read it. You have your own work to finish,” Larry offered.

“Stick around.”

Arthur let the phone clatter a few times before picking it up. He swung a long, loose leg across his knee, and directed the operator to give him the call. “Yes, Davis, did you receive the opinion?”

It must be Bemrose’s client, Davis Shore, president of Eastern Power and Light. Bemrose had pulled the utility out of a jam, salvaged its franchise by bearing down on his Washington connections. Without Bemrose they probably still would have been cooling their heels in Washington, waiting for someone with authority to talk to them.

“Skip it. What the hell, Davis. You have enough business to take up at this meeting,” Arthur said.

“It isn’t stalling,” he insisted. “I’ll get around to it one of these days. Anyway, we won, didn’t we? Your credit’s good.”

He hung up and turned to Larry. “That was Davis Shore trying to get me to name a fee. They have a board meeting this afternoon.”

“Their stock’s selling at fifty-one,” Larry offered. “This sounds like a damned good time to send him a bill.”

“I don’t think I’m going to charge him a fee,” Arthur said.

The talk downtown was that Bemrose had received one hundred grand for a retainer before he even touched the case.

“You’re kidding,” Larry said. “You mean that your retainer covered the fee.”

“I didn’t ask for a retainer. I never take one from a friend.”

“Then you’ll have to charge him a fee.”

“I don’t think so,” Arthur protested. “I’ve collected a couple of fees this year. I’d be giving most of this one back in taxes.”

“I don’t get it. I just don’t get it,” Larry said. “Why did you take the case? To pass the time?”

“Hell, no. It was a swell fight.”

“And you had so much fun you decided to throw away a hundred grand. You know it was worth that to them. Every cent of it. Who do you charge if you don’t charge Eastern Power and Light? Jesus Christ, I don’t get it.”

“You have to give eighty percent of it back today,” Bemrose pointed out. “I’ll wait to charge them until I can hang on to the money. Right now I’m more interested in being good. Once you get the reputation for being good-- Look at the Old Man.”

“You do all right now.”

“When I’m really good they’ll know about me. They’ll want me around, and not just for business. When I really get to be good enough.”

“_Get_ to be, huh.” Larry shrugged. “I thought you were. I thought I was. I thought it was all down in black and white in the Declaration of Independence.”

Arthur knew what he was driving at. They had been trying to shell it out for twenty years, ever since they were kids, that concept of men being free and equal, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that was ever settled with talk.

“You know it. I know it. The trouble is _they_ don’t know about us being free and equal,” Arthur said. “Can you be anyone’s pal? _Can_ you?” He leaned over and tapped the desk irritably.

“Why not?” Larry said. “I’m _your_ pal----”

“And I’m Thomas Jefferson. I think Larry Frank is every bit as good as the next guy.”

“Thanks.” Larry grinned and watched Arthur H. Bemrose get red in the ears.

“I didn’t mean--” Arthur apologized.

“Go on, I was riding you.”

“When you’re getting started at the law, you have to do something big for them to notice you. You can’t just plug along turning in a decent job. You have to produce something brilliant. You have to pick your chances.” He rocked a pencil between his fingers. “Once you’re good enough----”

“I want to get it straight.” Larry’s narrow forehead pleated. “Who doesn’t get a bill? Just Eastern Power and other million dollar corporations, or that McVail girl that our friend, Tim, brought in? What do you do about her?”

“I look after her all right,” Arthur assured him.

“Thanks, I feel better. I just wanted to make sure.”

Larry clipped together the pages of his brief. “I saw some pictures in _Life_ this week of Shore’s Oyster Bay place. It looks like quite a dump.”

“He asked me down for next weekend. I think I might try to get there.” Bemrose walked to the window. It looked like snow again, and a haze blotted out the River. The leaden water and sky blended with Jersey factory smoke into a flat gray screen.

Larry picked up his papers and said goodbye.

Bemrose followed him into the reception room. “What has the organization decided to do about you? Have they named you for the job?” he questioned sharply.

“Named me? A lousy district leader? Of course not,” Larry said. “The Hall’s going to stage a comeback.”

Arthur kicked through the pile of the carpet, unconvinced. “And if it does----”

“Well, I won’t be taking trips to Washington and I won’t be pals with Tom Newton, that’s a cinch. I’ll still be a two-bit politician.”

The minute Larry said it he was sorry.

Arthur H. Bemrose frowned and hesitated. “They could nominate you when there’s a vacancy on the bench and they need someone from your district. They don’t have to hold out on you because you’re honest. This was one time they should have given you a break. If they keep passing over the honest men-- The lousy bastards don’t deserve to come back.”

Larry shrugged. “I better run along.”

“Why don’t you let me introduce you to Swanson?” Arthur insisted. “You’ll stand a better chance with the labor crowd. Tammany isn’t coming back. Look, it’s seven years that they’ve been out of office, ever since the Seabury investigation ousted Jimmy Walker. What makes you think----”

“I like it around Second Avenue, that’s why,” Larry said. “I have a nice, colorful district where there’s very little discrimination.”

“Except against an honest man.”

“You never come down. You don’t know how it operates. Let me show you around sometime.”

“Go on, get out,” Arthur said good-naturedly.

“Not until you tell me what I owe you for revising my brief.” Larry shook a red paper envelope with strings that dangled, the professional badge of the New York lawyer.

“Get out.”

“What do I owe you? Remember, I’m not your friend, Shore, and what I pay isn’t going to make trouble for you with the internal revenue department.”

“I’ll win it from you in poker,” Bemrose offered. “When is the gang going to play?”

“The usual. Two weeks from Thursday. We’ll look for you.”

“I’ll be there. With poison.”

Larry shook the envelope. “Better change your mind and charge me. A man can go broke working for nothing. Especially a lawyer can go broke.”

Arthur H. Bemrose waved him out, laughing. “When I charge fees again, I’ll pick someone else to start with.”

The marble hall outside the offices of HAYNES and BEMROSE seemed less formidable than a couple of hours ago. As Larry waited for the elevator he couldn’t help thinking of all the suckers who still worked, or kidded themselves into believing that they worked to make money. Arthur H. Bemrose had other motives, different from making money, or at least he thought he did. Maybe Bemrose had arrived at something. With taxes what they were, maybe a man had to find some better reasons. Maybe if he didn’t think of his work in other terms and do it for the kind of tax-free currency that was around in January, 1941, he would wake up someday and find out that he’d been taken. Larry figured that as far as Arthur H. Bemrose was concerned it didn’t matter. Whatever motives Bemrose might have, wherever he was headed, he, Larry Frank, would stick around and observe.

_Chapter 2_

Larry had known all evening that Arthur was bothered about something. The poker crowd must have felt it, too, because right after the game broke up in Danny’s second floor dining room, they cleared out and left Larry alone with him. He steered Bemrose to a quiet booth in the bar, and Danny shuffled over to take their order.

“What is it tonight--Shelley or the Elizabethan poets?” Larry asked Danny.

The bartender marked his place with his finger in a paper-backed mystery story. “A guy’s gotta pass the time in this racket or he’ll go nuts.”

“Any of the special left?” Larry asked.

“I showed him how to vote,” he boasted, when Danny had gone up to round up the bottle of fifteen-year-old bourbon he put aside for him.

“I know. You placed his fingers on the levers and let him push,” Arthur said.

“What if I did? He had never been near the polls.”

“And sometimes you wake up nights in a cold sweat.”

“Danny’s all right. He’s a literary character. One of the best boys in the district.”

“I suppose he’s the reason you want us to keep the poker game down here.”

“What would we get any better uptown? I like to see us give Danny the business.”

The booth was dark, and Arthur Bemrose slumped against the partition. Good, he was letting go. Larry felt useful. Bemrose would be talking it out pretty soon, getting rid of whatever was eating him. One drink, and he’d loosen up. Larry had been through it with him before.

Danny put down the bottle and some glasses. He read his book as he uncorked the bourbon. “Three murders so far, and they ain’t started.”

From an ostentatiously flickering juke box came the voices of the Andrews Sisters. Larry had put in a nickel for the record, hoping the low, sedative tones would help numb the troubles of Arthur H. Bemrose. But Arthur’s chest was scooped with fatigue, and his mustache straggled sulkily.

“I saw that writer friend of Carson’s last night,” Larry said. “I saw her and I heard her.”

“Janice Baldwin?”

Larry nodded.

“Where did you run into her? She was tied up at a dinner last night.” Arthur stiffened.

“I was one of the fifteen hundred suckers who took tickets for the dinner. British War Relief. Bessie works for them, and she dragged me.”

“And Bessie didn’t tell you she was going to be on the program?” Arthur cross-examined him.

“If she’d told me, I wouldn’t have kicked about going out in the storm. I stopped complaining when we got there and the Baldwin girl stood up in a dress--” Larry described it with his hands, “It was a blue number.” He drew a V from his shoulder to the third button of his vest.

“So you think she’s okay.” Arthur’s fingers whitened under the nail from working his glass.

“At my age I don’t know any more, but I doubt if a fellow would have to be urged. Don’t you?” Larry patted his wavy hair. “I forgot. You don’t notice them.”

“Maybe I can fix you up,” Arthur offered. “She owes me something. I’ve just done her a favor.”

“Go ahead. Bessie won’t mind. Bessie thinks she’s wonderful.”

“She wouldn’t if she knew her,” Bemrose said sullenly.

“What’s the matter? Did the Baldwin girl do anything to you?”

Bemrose shrugged.

“What is it? The story about the Court?”

“I guess that’s it,” Bemrose said. “Women with brains set me on edge. This one has too many. She did what I guess she’d call ‘research’ on Judge Haynes, and you’d think she had known the Old Man all his life. It’s uncanny the way she brought him to life in her article. I don’t think she had ever met him. I don’t even think she was in his courtroom while he was alive.”

“But she caught him?”

“She captured that quality of his that was always difficult for laymen to understand and made lawyers memorize every sentence of his decisions. That instinct he had of what the law was. Not the immediate political climate, or how public opinion might react at the moment, but his long-term sense of what was written in the law and would still be the law, for fundamental reasons of fairness and justice, long after the political climate changed.”

“She must have managed to put the Old Man in her article after all. I know you were going to try and talk her out of doing it.”

Bemrose nodded. “The article was finished when she showed it to me. She plunged right in and tackled the soft coal case, a real hot potato. By quoting that old decision of the Judge’s in _Wallingford vs. Stevens_ she showed pretty clearly what he would have thought about the government fixing the price on coal when it had just finished prosecuting the oil companies for fixing prices on oil. She used his language to make her point that what is wrong for individual oil men is wrong for the government, that same argument Higgins used in his appeal.”

“I didn’t read the decision. I never get around to them.”

“That’s what the Old Man probably _would_ have thought,” Arthur admitted. “He wouldn’t care who got mad at him for thinking so, either. What I can’t figure out is how a woman who isn’t a lawyer and who never knew the Old Man-- This stuff is involved and fairly subtle. I don’t see how----”

“You never like to admit that some women can use their heads like men, do you? I’ve often wondered if you were ever burned.”

“My senior year at college there was a girl,” Bemrose said. “We were engaged, and she was the last intelligent woman I trusted. She didn’t like the idea of waiting three years until I finished law school and another two or three years while I was getting established. That lovely, crisp intellect of hers let her fall in love with a man who could marry her right away. He happened to be fifteen years older, and not too scintillating, with a yen for nursemaids on the side, but he had the price of a respectable house in Scarsdale. Since then I’ve tried to pick them without too many brains but more sensibility. Either that, or the kind with no sensibility who are frankly out for business and don’t confuse it with talk about aesthetics.”

Larry nodded sympathetically. “Did you okay the Baldwin girl’s article?”

“Yes.”

“And now you wish you hadn’t?”