The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [49]
“The jury didn't believe him,” Tim recalls with relish. “They believed me.” But although the jury absolved Mara and Kenny, the bank wouldn't. For two years the case dragged through the higher courts, and the County Trust won its appeal. When it tried to collect, the bank found that Mara was legally destitute, although he appeared the picture of prosperity. He had founded a large and flourishing coal firm, the Mara Fuel Company; his wife and his brother owned all the stock in it. His sons owned the football team, now consistently profitable. As for the bookmaking business conducted under his name, Tim said he had no financial interest in it; he was just a manager. Tim's credit customers of the track received weekly statements and settled by check, but he had no bank account. When the customers won, they got checks signed by Walter Kenny, Tim's cashier, who is a son of his codefendant.
Tim's destitution does not interfere with his enjoyment of life. Daily he visits the various business enterprises in which he has no financial interest. During the racing season, he still spends all his afternoons at the track, nowadays in the character of a simple bettor. Periodically he makes trips to Washington, from which he returns with casual anecdotes of what he said to important politicians and what they said to him. Occasionally he plays golf. Last fall, shortly before the Elks made him an honorary life member, he presented them with an organ. Jimmy Walker accepted the gift in the name of the lodge.
Tim has his sentimental side. He enjoys singing ballads like “The Rose of Tralee.” He even has his softer moments at the track. During one spring meeting at Jamaica, he was touched to the core by the fine spirit of a man who insisted on paying him fifty dollars which the man said he had borrowed from Tim fifteen years before. Tim accepted the money under protest. In the next race, the mysterious stranger bet him two hundred dollars on a horse named Galloping, 2 to 1 to show, and won four hundred dollars from him. “Maybe,” Tim says, “it would have been better if I'd never seen the bum.”
• Your Hat, Sir? •
n the year 1904 a man named Harry Susskind, then in his early twenties, looked through a window of Captain Jim Churchill's crowded restaurant at Fortysixth Street and Broadway. He noticed that the male patrons laid their overcoats and hats on chairs and balanced their walking sticks precariously against tables. This represented a loss of income to Captain Churchill, a retired police officer, since obviously if every third or fourth chair was occupied by an overcoat, the space available for customers was reduced by a third or a quarter. To Susskind, the overcoats represented a financial future. He went in and proposed that Captain Churchill set aside a corner of the vestibule for coat racks. He offered to provide a couple of girls to help customers off with their coats, to check them, and return them as the customers went out. This would, incidentally, relieve Captain Churchill of responsibility for hats that customers sometimes exchanged by mistake and for canes that bibulous owners insisted they had brought into Churchill's when as a matter of fact the sticks were safe in the umbrella stand at home. Susskind promised to wear a uniform and personally supervise the checking. Over and above all the services he proposed to render, he offered Captain Churchill three thousand dollars a year. Churchill had considered