by John Lutz
"This is Alo Nudger, Joan," Alison said gently.
Joan stared at me, without surprise now. She looked worse than her photograph. The upturned nose lent her a wary, haunted expression that matched the hollowness of her eyes. Her hair was much lighter than in her snapshots, cut short and carelessly tousled.
"Alison's told me about you," she said in a calm voice. She was about to say something else, then caught herself and stared at me with cautious appraisal.
"You don't have to worry now about Congram or Gratuity Insirance," I said.
Something flared in her eyes for a second, something I couldn't decipher. "You know about them?"
"Just enough," I said. "I'd like for you to tell me the rest. It's the only way now, the best way."
She seemed to withdraw to someplace beyond me to consider that, walking absently to a chocolate-colored sofa and sitting lightly.
"You're working for my father," she said, as if it were an accusation.
"And for you, Joan. At this point your interests are the same."
Alison sat next to her, rested a soft hand on her arm. "He's right, Joan. You should see your only way out of it now. Do what he asks."
Joan laughed, almost a bitter sort of cough, and looked up at me. "You're not going to tell me my father's concerned with my safety?"
I shook my head. "I'm not going to pass judgment on your father. All I said was that your interests coincide."
"I don't have to go back."
"No, and if you do go, you don't have to stay."
Joan leaned back on the sofa, breathed out her uncertainty and tension in a long sigh. She'd reached a decision; for everybody's sake, I hoped the right one.
"All right," she said, "what do you want me to do?"
I sat opposite her in an armless chair. "From the beginning, tell me about Victor Talbert and Gratuity Insurance."
She didn't move; her dark eyes locked on something low and invisible on the other side of the room. "I loved Vic… We loved each other. And things were beautiful until he lost his job." Now she did look at me, frowning and haggard despite her youth. "You have to understand what losing the job meant to Vic, what a crushing thing it was to him. He was ambitious, hard working and dedicated-not just to his job but to everything he did. The idea that he might fail never entered his mind, because he wouldn't let it. Nobody wanted success more, or feared failure as much."
I waited for her to continue and didn't say I could have introduced her to more than a few Victor Talberts.
"Vic tried to get another job," Joan continued, "and he could have had several with starting salaries and responsibilities below what he considered his level. He refused them, out of personal and professional pride. Then he decided to go into business for himself, and he went all over trying to get financing, but no one would give him a loan. That's when he began to get sour on himself, really depressed, and that's when Jerry Congram came along."
"Had he known Talbert before?"
"No, Congram said his 'research and recruiting department" had recommended Vic to him. Vic was impressed with Jerry. So was I and so was everybody. Jerry can tell you things, make you believe in yourself, make you believe almost anything. When he was gone, sometimes you'd begin to wonder… But then he'd be back, with all his fire and all his belief. I'll admit, Vic and I were dazzled, and Vic had hope again, and something to suit his abilities."
"A position with Gratuity Insurance?"
Joan nodded her head, kept it bowed.
"Joan, I need to know how Gratuity Insurance works, how many people are involved."
She didn't hesitate. "There were fifteen, including Vic. I wasn't actually an employee, but I was going to be and Congram trusted me. Congram recruited junior executives and other strongly business-oriented people to work for him. He was very careful; he'd learn everything about someone before even considering approaching them for recruitment. Everyone has to be loyal to him, ambitious, aggressive, and believe in the system."
"What system?"
She looked at me curiously and moved an arm in an encompassing wave. "Why, everything… the way things work. Only without the hindrance of self-doubt. Jerry believes in realism without rationalization, self-honesty and the decisiveness to act on fact and not fancy…" She seemed to realize that she was parroting someone else's words and thoughts, and her voice faded. Her jaw muscles flexed and she swallowed before continuing.
"Every Gratuity employee is extensively trained," she said, "before actually being used in the field. A trained agent will gain audience with a carefully chosen top executive on whatever pretense will work best. Then, in private, the agent implies that one of the few in the business hierarchy above the chosen executive has sent him, and if Gratuity's instructions are followed, certain obstacles to advancement will be removed."
She was parroting again, but telling me what I wanted to know.
"If the executive doesn't follow Gratuity's instructions, he'll suffer the consequences. Sometimes that would be an arranged accident, or even a false suicide complete with a note the victim was forced to sign. The agent instructs the executive to bring about some minor policy changes that will in some obscure way benefit one or more of his superiors. All this is used for is a convincer. Then the executive is assured that what is happening to him is now common practice, and surely he must understand, as did his superiors, that if he goes to the police or in any way fails to comply, not only will he destroy his career, but he must be killed as a matter of minimizing projected risk factors. The names of other Gratuity subjects like himself are mentioned to him and he's warned not to contact them. These are names of subjects who are classified as risks. When some of these names appear in the obituary columns, it serves as the clincher on the deal. At that point the executive is instructed to send large sums of company money to an anonymous address, which is how Gratuity Insurance derives its income. When a predetermined sum, which only Jerry knows, is reached, the company will be liquidated."
"It boils down to simple extortion," I said.
Joan's eyes were vague and dark, somehow innocent. "It's simply business, Mr. Nudger, business without hypocrisy." She seemed to realize what she'd said and looked away. But there was nothing to look at but extortion and murder, and her own fear.
"How many 'projected risk factors' were actually killed?" I asked.
"I don't know… A small percentage, according to Jerry. After the initial contact, the subject is watched closely for a while. Sometimes, if he does anything suspicious, Gratuity breaks off all contact with him rather than eliminate him and use him as an example. And if a subject goes to the police, he won't be killed. Too much danger to the operation."
"The operation, the company, was everything, wasn't it?"
"It was more important than any one of us," Joan said with fervor, despite the past tense. "Jerry held meetings as often as possible, and each meeting began with a short oath of allegiance to the company. There was no way not to be caught up in the zealousness and the feeling of purpose."
"What made Victor Talbert want out?"
"Jerry was away for more than a week, long enough for his personality and his ideas to lose some of their effect on us. And Vic got his loan. It was too late then- Jerry would never let him go. But Vic knew he could have made it without Congram and Gratuity, and that seemed to change him. We decided to run."
"From the apartment on Oakner?"
She seemed surprised as she nodded, raking her fingers through her mussed hair in an oddly careless gesture.
"Why did you choose Layton, feeling as you do about your father?"
"Vic and I knew what would happen if Gratuity found us. We thought that by giving the impression we were under my father's protection, even if we really weren't, it might stop them or at least give us time. So we moved to a little house in Layton, calling ourselves David and Joan Branly, and kept it a secret from everyone."
"How did you sell that idea to Melissa?"
"We let her continue to call he
rself Melissa Clark, and we told some of the neighbors I was divorced and she'd kept her father's name."
"But Congram found you," I said.
"Yes, and he tried to talk us into rejoining Gratuity. Jerry promised Vic everything-money, position… He was convincing. But Vic refused and I chose to stay with him. We swore to Jerry we'd keep our former affiliation with Gratuity a secret, and he pretended to believe us on the basis that we'd be incriminating ourselves if we talked. But he showed us a newspaper with a story about a Gratuity-arranged death, and he had the back of the house sprayed with bullets that night to demonstrate how easily he could deal with us if we did talk. I think he really did all that just to convince us that he thought we were scared enough to remain silent, and to make us think he was sincere about leaving us alone. But all he was doing was trying to figure out the best way to get rid of us without suspicion. Vic and I didn't believe him, and we decided to move again. Then Vic…"
"I know," I said, thinking of the photos of the young man in the blood-spattered jacket.
Joan clenched her fists hard enough to whiten the flesh. "I didn't know what to do… I was terrified, for myself and for Melissa. I packed what I could. I didn't dare take Melissa; I was afraid she might be killed along with me. So I left her with the next-door neighbor and took a bus to Orlando."
Probably that was what Congram wanted, I thought, to get her away from Layton to where she could be killed without an intensive investigation, just another unidentifiable corpse in the bowels of some large city.
"I didn't know what to do," Joan said, "where to go. I left Orlando. Then I stayed in New Orleans for a while, but I never felt safe, and I was running out of money and hope. Finally I thought of Alison, the things she'd done for me, how she'd told me to come to her if I ever needed help. And I remembered what she did for a living."
And wound up here with very little hope, 1 thought. I felt sorrow for Joan Clark, for whom a lot of things had ended, if not her life.
"You have to understand, Mr. Nudger, Gratuity employees don't see themselves as criminals. We-they are ambitious and aggressive business people, in a close-knit enterprise, who simply are carrying the precepts of business to ultimate reaches, where they're headed anyway." The autonomous voice had taken over again, the rote excuses for exploitation and murder. "Visionaries ahead of their time," she added, "no more criminals than the manufacturers of unsafe but profitable products that endanger life, no more extortionists than the lobbyists who twist the appropriate arms with personal knowledge to gain favorable treatment. Vic wasn't evil. He became what Congram told him he was-a genuinely honest businessman, a pragmatist without rationalization or apology."
"Do you believe that, Joan?"
Her body was trembling. "I did… and some of it I still do."
I understood her lingering belief. Gratuity's success depended upon its victims' believing that someone above them in their organization would employ polished potential killers in the course of business. And with relatively few exceptions, like Manners and Blount, the victims believed-and paid.
I couldn't blame them. I'd have paid. Manners and Blount and Tad Osborne should have paid.
"Melissa is with Gordon," I told Joan.
"I know. Alison found out for me. I was afraid to try to see her."
"You'll see her shortly," I said. "Then I'd like you to see your father."
"Is it safe? Is it over?"
"Almost. The dangerous part."
I could see that something in her mind rejected what I'd said while every other part of her wanted to accept it. Her thin body squirmed on the sofa, and she began to cry away the part that rejected.
Alison hugged her, appeared close to crying herself. Wouldn't that have been something to see? I got up, paced, and casually brushed the moisture that threatened my own right eye.
I used Alison's phone to call Dale Carlon. After explaining the situation to him and accepting his thanks, I let him talk to Joan.
Whatever his reasons, Carlon must have expressed heartfelt relief to Joan at finding her safe, because by the time she'd hung up the phone I could tell that things were at least bearable between father and daughter.
"What now?" Alison asked.
"Now you stay here with Joan," I said. "For the time being, this is still the safest place for her."
"Where are you going?"
"Where you wanted me to go in the first place. The police."
I told Joan and Alison that I'd be back and left the apartment, thinking of my soon-to-be fifty-thousand-dollar bank account. The drop in the elevator was somehow soothing, like a dropping away from my problems.
It's that way sometimes after you've punched the down button.
25
I got directions to the nearest precinct station, an old brownstone building with arched and shadeless windows.
The inside of the building was similar to that of a thousand other precinct houses, caged booking counter, interrogation cubicles, several steel-gray desks supporting typewriters, wire baskets and telephones. From a receiver somewhere, the ever-present crackling voices of a dispatcher and the answering cars read like a litany. Familiarity with this scene was a part of me.
At the desk a sergeant was talking to a plainclothesman. I walked over and identified myself as a private investigator, bringing about momentary interest, then polite boredom.
As I told my story, I could see that Sergeant Hartenstein was my main obstacle. He refused to believe that any matter was urgent or actionable without predetermination of every insignificant fact. He was a ruddy-faced, gray-haired man with a perfectly trimmed mustache, a slow and correct thinker. I was reminded of Sergeant Avery, in Layton.
"You say they're an insurance company?" Hartenstein asked, rolling a broken-clipped ball-point between sausage fingers.
"They say that," I told him.
His blue eyes shifted to the right and looked past me at a tall, broad-shouldered man in a lieutenant's uniform. The man had straight black hair, watery, sensitive dark eyes and an oversized nose that hadn't been set after a break.
Sergeant Hartenstein looked relieved, his facial muscles noticeably relaxing. "Tell your story to Lieutenant Morri," he said.
I did.
"That's beyond our jurisdiction," the lieutenant said, looking inscrutable and scratching the side of his neck.
"I figured that. Don't you have a cooperative arrangement with these other departments?"
"Sure, under certain circumstances, or if they request it."
"Who's your superior?" I asked him.
The lieutenant didn't care for the question, but he gave me the name and phone number of a captain.
I asked if I could use the phone, and they pointed to a black wall phone near the interrogation cubicles. On the gray-painted wall around the phone were penciled dozens of phone numbers, most of which probably belonged to bondsmen or lawyers.
Lieutenant Morri seemed worried, but he didn't have to be. Instead of phoning the captain, I called Dale Car Ion.
The situation enraged Carlon. He said he wasn't sure what he could do, but that he'd do something. Money speaks louder than words and usually has the final say. But we were a long way from Layton. When I hung up, I mentally gave Carlon a slightly better than even chance of being able to make things happen.
One thing Carlon definitely hadn't made happen was the arrival of the press. But nobody's flawless. The press was with us at Devon Acres, equipped with cameras, recorders and mobile TV unit vans.
Lights still glowed in the windows of the house of the Gratuity meeting, as they did in the windows of the other completed houses scattered about the graded development. The night seemed darker, and I tried to stay out of the way while the operation took form.
I remembered when, years ago, my brother had sold life insurance and I'd helped him work on his sales approach. The company he sold for had used, on tough customers, a tactic they called "the hard sell death knell." "If tomorrow you die…" was the salesman's opening
line of the horror story. Gratuity Insurance had assumed control of the "if" of that opening line.
Within minutes, exits from Devon Acres were blocked, and men were stationed in the wooded area to cut off a retreat in that direction.
Several unmarked cars drove up slowly to park around the house, then four patrol cars rushed to block the driveway and park in strategic positions along the street. I saw several dark shadows move swiftly to the rear of the house. Car doors swung open, figures crouched, and I saw the thick barrels of riot guns. Police from three departments were ready for a shootout if necessary.
Cued by a radio command, dozens of spotlights popped into brilliance and were trained on the sprawling ranch house, giving it the unnaturally bright, unshadowed look of a movie set.
The law had provided the lights, the press the cameras. Whether or not there would be action depended on Jerry Congram.
The major who was in command asked, in a polite but professionally firm voice, for the occupants of the house to come out unarmed. He then explained to them that they had no choice. But for the lights that shone in the windows and the cars lining the driveway, he might have been talking to an empty house. Beside me a man braced on a patrol car fender kept a portable TV camera aimed at the spotlighted house while he murmured something I couldn't understand under his breath.
The major with the bullhorn repeated his instructions.
Around me there was talk of tear gas, of high-density firepower.
Then the front door opened, and Congram led them out.
There were ten of them-six men and four women- all walking with hands raised to shoulder height, squinting at the brightness concentrated on them. Some of them appeared frightened, some baffled. Con-gram looked like a man whose worst suspicions had been confirmed. His expression was resigned, enduring, distantly amused.
As the line of Gratuity employees reached the police, there were flurries of motion and the clamping on of handcuffs. Several armed patrolmen rushed into the house through the front door, seeking more prisoners. Everyone around me began to close in on the now-diffuse scene.