he would still make a great deal of money through his subsidiary companies in construction, planning commissions and advisory committees. And the publicity would be invaluable.
Inch was one of the richest men in America. His father had been the usual hard-nosed big-city landlord, failing to maintain heat in apartment buildings, skimping on services, forcing out tenants in order to build more expensive apartments. Bribery of building inspectors was a skill
Louis Inch learned at his father's knee. Later, armed with a university degree in business management and law, he bribed city councilmen, borough presidents and their staffs, even mayors.
It was Louis Inch who fought the rent control laws in New York, it was
Louis Inch who put together the real estate deals that built skyscrapers alongside Central Park. A park that now had an awning of monstrous steel edifices to house Wall Street brokers, professors at powerhouse universities, famous writers, chic artists, the chefs of expensive restaurants.
Community activists charged that Inch was responsible for the horrible slums on the Upper West Side and in the Bronx, in Harlem and in Coney
Island simply by the amount of reasonable housing he had destroyed in his rebuilding of New York. Also that he was blocking the rehabilitation of the Times Square district, while secretly buying up buildings and blocks.
To this Inch retorted that these troublemakers were people who, if you had a bagful of shit, would demand half of it.
Another Inch strategy was his support of city laws that required landlords to rent housing space to anyone regardless of race, color or creed. He had given speeches supporting those laws because they helped to drive the small landlord out of the market. A landlord who had only the upstairs and/or the basement of his house to rent had to take in drunks, schizophrenics, drug hustlers, rapists, stickup artists.
Eventually these small landlords would become discouraged, sell their houses and move to the suburbs.
But Inch was beyond all that now-he was stepping up in class.
Millionaires were a dime a dozen; Louis Inch was one of the hundred or so billionaires in America. He owned bus systems, he owned hotels and he owned an airline. He owned one of the great hotel casinos in Atlantic City and he owned apartment buildings in Santa Monica, California. It was the Santa Monica properties that gave him the most trouble.
Louis Inch had joined the Socrates Club because he believed that its powerful members could help solve his Santa Monica real estate problems.
Golf was a perfect sport for hatching conspiracies. There were the jokes, the good exercise and the agreements struck. And what could be more innocent? The most rabid investigator from congressional committees or the hanging judges of the press could not accuse golfers of criminal intent.
The Socrates Club turned out to be better than Inch expected. He became friendly with the hundred or so men who controlled the country's economic apparatus and political machinery. It was in the Socrates Club that Louis Inch became a member of the Money Guild that could buy the entire congressional delegation of a state in one deal. Of course you couldn't buy them body and soul-you were not talking abstractions here, like the Devil and God, good and evil, virtue and sin. No, you were talking politics. You were talking of what was possible. There were times when a congressman had to oppose you to win reelection. It was true that 98 percent of the congressmen were always reelected, but there were always the 2 percent that had to listen to their constituents.
Louis Inch dreamed the impossible dream. No, not to be President of the United States, he knew his landlord imprint could never be erased. His smudging the very face of New York was an architectural murder. There were a million slum dwellers in New York, Chicago and especially Santa Monica who would fill the streets ready to put his head on a pike. No, his dream was to be the first trillionaire in the modern civilized world. A plebeian trillionaire, his fortune won with the callused hands of a workingman.
Inch lived for the day when he could say to Bert Audick, 'I have a thousand units.' It had always irritated him that Texan oil men talked in units-a 'unit' in Texas was one hundred million dollars. Audick had said about the destruction of the city of Dak, 'God, I lost five hundred units there.' And Inch vowed someday to say to Audick, 'Hell, I got about a thousand units tied up in real estate,' and Audick would whistle and say, 'A hundred billion dollars.' And then Inch would say to him, 'Oh, no, a trillion dollars. Up in New York a unit is a billion dollars.' That would settle that Texas bullshit once and for all.
To make that dream come true, Louis Inch capitalized on the concept of airspace. That is, he would buy the airspace above existent buildings in major cities and build on top of them. Airspace could be bought for peanuts; it was a new concept, as marshlands had been when his grandfather bought them, knowing that technology would solve the problem of draining the swamps and turn them into profitable building acres. The problem was to prevent the people and their legislators from stopping him. That would take time and an enormous investment, but he was confident it could be done. True, cities like Chicago, New York, Dallas and Miami would be gigantic steel-and- concrete prisons, but people didn't have to live there, except for the elite who loved the museums, the cinemas, the theater, the music. There would of course be little boutique neighborhoods for the artists.
And of course the thing was that when Louis Inch finally succeeded, there would no longer be any slums in New York City. There would simply be no affordable rents for the petty criminal and working classes. They would come in from the suburbs, on special trains, on special buses, and they would be gone by nightfall. The renters and buyers of the Inch Corporation condos and apartments could go to the theater, the discos and the expensive restaurants and not worry about the dark streets outside. They could stroll along the avenues, even venture into the side streets, and could walk the parks, in comparative safety. And what would they pay for such a paradise?
Fortunes.
Summoned to the meeting of the Socrates Club in California, Louis Inch began a trip across the United States to confer with the great real estate corporations of the big cities. From them he exacted their promise to contribute money to defeat Kennedy. Arriving in Los Angeles a few days later, he decided to make a side trip to Santa Monica before going to the seminar.
Santa Monica is one of the most beautiful towns in America, mainly because its citizens have successfully resisted the efforts of real estate interests to build skyscrapers, voted laws to keep rents stable and control construction. A fine apartment on Ocean Avenue, overlooking the Pacific, cost only one sixth of the average citizen's income. This was a situation that had driven Inch crazy for twenty years.
Inch thought Santa Monica an outrage, an insult to the American spirit of free enterprise; these units under today's conditions could be rented for ten times the going rate. He had bought up many of the apartment buildings. These were charming Spanish-style complexes wasteful in their use of valuable real estate, with their inner courtyards and gardens, and their scandalously low two-story heights. And he could not, by law, raise the rents in this paradise. Oh, the airspace above Santa Monica was worth billions, the view of the Pacific Ocean worth more billions. Sometimes Inch had crazy ideas about building vertically on the ocean itself. This made him dizzy.
He did not of course try to directly bribe the three city councilors he invited to Michael's but he told them his plans, he showed how everybody could become multimillionaires if certain laws were changed. He was dismayed when they showed no interest. But that was not the worst part.
When Inch got into his limousine, there was a shattering explosion. Glass flew all around the interior of the limo, the back window disintegrated, the windshield suddenly sprouted a large hole and spiderwebs appeared in the rest of the glass.
When the police arrived, they told Inch that a rifle bullet had done the damage. When they asked him if he had any enemies, Louis Inch assured them with all sincerity that he did not.
The Socrates Club's special seminar on 'Demagoguery in Democracy' commenced the next day.
Those present were Bert Audick, now under a RICO indictment; George
Greenwell, who looked like the old wheat stored in his gigantic Midwest silos; Louis Inch, his handsome pouting face pale from his near death the day before; Martin 'Take It Private' Mutford, wearing an Armani suit that could not hide his going to fat; and Lawrence Salentine.
Bert Audick took the floor first. 'Would somebody explain to me how Kennedy is not a communist?' he said. 'Kennedy wants to socialize medicine and home building. He has me indicted under the RICO laws and I'm not even Italian.'
Nobody laughed at his little joke, so he went on. 'We can dick around all we want but we have to face
