A Client Is Canceled

by Frances Lockridge

  “He says that very frequently,” the Pooh said. “A pet word. We all have them.”

  There was not, Ann said, much she could tell him, except that she hadn’t shot Uncle Tarzan and didn’t know who had.

  “I don’t think I did much good,” she said. It was an odd way of phrasing it, and she realized that in a moment. “I suppose I mean for Dwight,” she said. “But it’s ridiculous to think—” She stopped, then. Then she said, “Just because—” and stopped again. Then she said, “You really want to see the table?” as if she didn’t believe it for a moment. Neither did I, but we looked at the table. It was a round table with a white marble top, and the Hibbards wanted a hundred and thirty-five dollars for it, which was absurd. We looked at it very carefully, which also was absurd. We said we’d think about it and went back out into the yard and pulled up deck chairs under the apple tree.

  “I’m glad you came,” Ann said, “I’ve felt so—so isolated. It’s all been so—abrupt. What do the police really think?”

  “I’m afraid,” the Pooh said, “they think Oh-Oh and I killed Uncle Tarzan for fifty thousand dollars.”

  Ann said that that was absurd, too. I said, “Well, thanks, Ann.”

  “Because of the pistol?” Ann asked. I wasn’t surprised that Heimrich had told her about the automatic; I’d begun to assume he told everybody everything—or, perhaps, almost everything. I couldn’t figure out where it got him, but I supposed it got him somewhere. She didn’t seem surprised about the fifty thousand dollars, so I supposed he had told her about that, too. I agreed the pistol entered into it. I said we thought somebody had stolen it to kill Uncle Tarzan with. I said I also supposed Heimrich didn’t think that. Ann said she didn’t know what he thought, but that she was afraid—

  We waited.

  “I’m afraid he thinks it was Dwight,” she said. “I know it wasn’t because—because he’d never shoot anybody in the back.” She managed half of a grin. “I ought to know,” she said. “In the face, yes. But not when you weren’t looking.” She paused. “I don’t mean literally,” she said. “I mean—like calling me Vixen. But I think only when I was there to—to get mad.”

  She had felt isolated and now she didn’t and that made her talk, or helped make her talk. And she had just been answering questions Heimrich asked, and that had an odd effect on people, as I’ve said. You kept on talking to him, more fully than you meant to, and perhaps it put you in the habit.

  “That’s all over now,” Ann said. “It has to be. But I’m still on Dwight’s side, I guess. In a way.”

  “Why does Captain Heimrich think it was Mr. Craig?” the Pooh asked. “Did he have some reason to kill my uncle?”

  “It’s absurd,” Ann said. “Of course not.”

  We waited again.

  “Only Dwight was handling the Blends account,” Ann said. “And Mr. Barlow apparently wasn’t satisfied. That’s no reason at all.”

  It didn’t, certainly, sound like a reason. It merely sounded like all I had ever heard about the clients of advertising agencies, few of whom get killed by account executives—which is surprising, in view of the way most account executives talk. Unless, of course, Uncle Tarzan had really been putting pressure on in a heavy-handed way, such as telling Dwight Craig never to darken Blends’ door again. I supposed a person making whatever Craig was making—twenty-five thousand or more; maybe a lot more—might take losing his job, if it was going to come to that, with some seriousness. After all, if the Pooh and I could have killed Uncle Tarzan for fifty thousand dollars—which we could have, if we had been the sort of people who wanted money a lot, and didn’t mind killing—Craig might have done it for twenty-five thousand or up a year.

  “Dwight isn’t even upset by it,” Ann said. “Or wasn’t, last night. I mean when we were at the inn.”

  He had, apparently, been enough interested in it, if not upset by it, to mention it to her. That alone, I thought, might interest Heimrich, although probably all he had said when Ann told him—as unquestionably she had—was “naturally.”

  The Pooh said she supposed Heimrich had to consider all possibilities.

  Ann supposed he did. She said he had seemed to be considering a good many. He had asked her if she had seen something like a quarrel between Francis Eldredge and Uncle Tarzan and, when she admitted she had noticed friction, asked her to describe the scene. She had done that.

  “He said, ‘That’s very interesting, Miss Dean, naturally,’” Ann told us. “Then he said, ‘But Mrs. Townsend persuaded them to shake hands?’ He seemed interested in that, too.”

  Faye Townsend had made peace. I had been a little surprised at the time, since Uncle Tarzan wasn’t too easy to handle, particularly when he’d made a point openly and was stuck on it. Faye apparently had more influence with him than most people. I wondered whether that was why Heimrich had thought the situation interesting. I’d never thought of Faye Townsend and Uncle Tarzan being in any way close, but then I had never thought much about them one way or another. For all I knew they might have been Tristan and Isolde. Perhaps Faye’s lacquered surface concealed tempestuous emotion, directed in Uncle Tarzan’s direction. This seemed ludicrous at first and then didn’t, but only a little improbable. Even Uncle Tarzan, I realized, might have seemed lovable, from a certain point of view; certainly he had been, if one could bring oneself to look at it abstractedly, a very considerable physical specimen. Certainly fifty-five isn’t old, or anyway not too old.

  I realized that I was making a somewhat prodigious leap in the dark, starting from nothing—from the fact that Faye had quietened Uncle Tarzan very easily and that he had smiled down at her with rather uncharacteristic gentleness, and that once or twice during the previous afternoon he had patted her with apparent enjoyment. From, in other words, nothing whatever. I wondered if Heimrich were also flying through space, after a similar take-off. I then tried, of course, to picture Jovial George in a flame of jealousy, killing for the woman he loved.

  I can imagine a good many things, but that one threw me. I didn’t suppose he’d like it if Faye and good old P. J. hit it off too obviously, but I rather supposed that, whatever the circumstances were, he wouldn’t let any such situation become obvious to him. I knew very little about beaming George Townsend, or what might be under the neatly arranged white handkerchief in his breast pocket, but a man who smiled as much as he did must, I thought, manage to see going on around him only those things which he considered appropriate.

  “—in the way they look at each other,” the Pooh was saying, “in little movements, inflections of the voice. Oh, a hundred ways. Don’t you think? They weren’t.”

  “I know what you mean,” Ann said. “I wasn’t paying attention. Probably you’re right.”

  Without the context, which I had missed while trying to imagine Jovial George giving all (or seeing that Uncle Tarzan gave all) for love, I knew what the Pooh was talking about. She believes that, seeing a man and woman anywhere together, knowing nothing about them, one can tell the degree of their intimacy. “Shared love betrays itself,” she had written once in a poem rather more serious than most of hers—an Atlantic Monthly type of poem, which was where it had been printed. “The hands reveal in tiny—” No, that was wrong. The word wasn’t “tiny.” I couldn’t remember what it was. If we were thinking of the same thing, which was extremely probable—our trains of thought run parallel, more often than not—Faye and Uncle Tarzan had not betrayed shared love.

  “And Uncle Paul was very conservative,” the Pooh said. “He moved with care. He regarded laxity as—” She paused a moment. “Probably as unathletic,” she said. “He wasn’t a casual sort of person.”

  “No,” I said. “Nothing impromptu. Deep, hard drives well inside. No drop shots.”

  The Pooh said she supposed so, if she knew what I meant. Ann said it made for rather dull tennis, she thought. I agreed. I said that Uncle Tarzan had, nevertheless, played a good hard game and been difficult to beat, until he came up against some
body very definitely better.

  “Somebody who used drop shots,” the Pooh said. “He did finally, didn’t he?”

  He certainly had.

  The point seemed to have got a little lost; it was difficult to stick to the point lying there in deck chairs, in the sparse shade, with the heat pushing in—pushing down. We seemed to have agreed that Faye and Uncle Tarzan had not been great lovers of stage and screen. It had all, I thought, been an idle excursion down a tempting side alley.

  “Of course,” the Pooh said, “if he could have arranged it in an orderly manner, I don’t know. But we’re making a great deal out of very little.”

  We weren’t, actually, making a great deal out of anything. We were rummaging around among people, trying to find one who fitted; trying to find a reason which fitted. We had picked up Jovial George—although none of us had actually mentioned him—and “Motive: Jealousy,” and now we seemed to be laying them down again. I wondered if Heimrich had done the same.

  It was curious how all that afternoon, although we did not see him again until the evening, Heimrich seemed to be present—his eyes half closed, his attitude sleepily one of invitation to talk too much. At least, that was true for me, and afterward the Pooh said it had been, also, true for her. She said he was a very pervasive man; that one could feel him around, absorbing.

  “What, precisely, is a catalytic agent?” Ann asked.

  I told her as well as I could: an ingredient which, in combination with others, causes a reaction while remaining itself unchanged. I asked her why.

  “Captain Heimrich seems to think I may be one,” Ann said. “He didn’t explain. He said, ‘You’ll see what I mean, Miss Dean. Naturally.’ I can’t say I do.”

  I shook my head, to indicate I couldn’t, either. I looked at the Pooh, who was looking at me. Then of course I did see. Because of her, of her reappearance, Dwight Craig might react. Because of her something which might before have been of little importance to him might have come to be of great importance. Like, I thought, losing a job paying twenty-five thousand a year. I wondered if Ann Dean didn’t really see what Heimrich had meant; whether she wouldn’t let herself see.

  Then Dwight Craig arrived, in a Jaguar with the top down. It was, in a quiet way—a Jaguar doesn’t make much noise—an impressive arrival. I suppose that it is almost impossible not to be impressive in a Jaguar with the top down, and Craig looked precisely as a man ought to look in one. I was impressed; I had never before actually known a man who owned a Jaguar and, as Craig swung out of his, I said as much to the Pooh. I asked her if she thought it would be all right for me to touch him, so that afterward I could say I had. She said she thought I might, if I did it unostentatiously, even touch the car itself.

  Ann had got up when she saw the car and walked over to it. Now she turned back, with Craig beside her. She wasn’t smiling, let alone grinning. Neither was Craig; they both looked very serious. Craig said “Hello” to us without, I thought, a great deal of enthusiasm. I stood up and said we seemed to keep bumping into one another.

  “Don’t we?” Craig said. I was tempted to say we were just going, but I thought it would be rather obvious. Craig managed part of a smile in the direction of the Pooh, and then gave his attention to Ann. His errant eyebrow was higher than it had been the afternoon before, or seemed to be.

  “You’re all right, Vix?” he said to Ann. He said it rather peremptorily, as if she had foolishly been getting herself into trouble, as if he were a little angry with her.

  “Of course,” Ann said.

  “Has he been bothering you?” Craig asked her, with the general air of one who would shoot whoever had been. It was interesting, I thought, that all three of us knew at once who Craig meant.

  “He was here,” Ann said. “He asked me some questions. He was very—it was all right.”

  “About me,” Craig told her.

  “About everybody,” she told him. “You—Mr. and Mrs. Townsend, the Otises here—everybody.”

  Dwight Craig said, “Damn.” He looked around for a chair and found one and sat down in it. He looked at the Pooh and then at me. He said to me, “So you lost the gun.”

  “That’s right,” I said. I hadn’t particularly liked his tone and didn’t expect him to like mine. He continued to look at me for a moment and I looked back. Suddenly he grinned and his whole face changed.

  “And found fifty thousand dollars,” he said. “Somebody must love you two dearly.”

  But the animus had gone, or seemed to have gone, out of his voice.

  “Well,” I said, “you lost a client. A gun is smaller than a client.”

  “According to Heimrich, we were also about to lose an account,” Craig said. “Did he tell you that? I suppose he did.”

  I said he hadn’t. Craig said that was surprising; that he had begun to think Heimrich told everybody about everything. He said that Heimrich had told him about my gun and the Pooh’s inheritance; added some details to what he already knew about Eldredge and P. J. Harlow, although none that essentially changed that picture; and asked him to agree that the Blends account was the only sizable one Townsend Associates had left.

  “That was no secret,” Craig said.

  It wasn’t now, anyway; practically nothing was. I wondered how Heimrich had got his information so quickly and then realized that Heimrich wasn’t all of it; that Heimrich was only, or chiefly, what appeared above the surface; that under him Sergeant Forniss, and probably a good many other men, were absorbing information and sending it along up, as roots absorb whatever roots do absorb and send nutriment up the trunk of a tree. I was rather pleased to think of Heimrich as a tree—particularly since he so much appeared to be carved from wood—nourished from beneath.

  It seemed to me that the uniqueness of the Blends account in Townsend’s agency would provide sufficient reason for everybody concerned to cherish the Blends’ advertising manager and very little to shoot him in the back. I said as much. Craig said one would think so, in a tone which implied that Heimrich didn’t.

  “So far as I can tell,” Craig said, “Heimrich appears to think P. J. was about to withdraw the account and that somebody—George or I, I suppose—got very annoyed and shot him. He seems to feel it’s a toss-up which of us it was.” Craig was morose about it.

  Ann said Heimrich must be crazy. She asked what either Townsend or Craig, or any other Townsend Associate, could expect to gain by that. It seemed to me an obvious enough question, but Craig didn’t answer it at once. Then he said there could, he supposed, be a way to figure it. Then he said he might as well tell us what Heimrich apparently had in mind, since Heimrich undoubtedly would, sooner or later.

  It was true that, until Uncle Tarzan had proved too penetrable to stop a forty-five calibre slug, he had been vice-president in charge of advertising and sales of Blends. It was true that he had placed the account with Townsend Associates. It wasn’t true, however, that he was the only one at Blends who could make final decisions on advertising. He was one of four men who, on vital issues—like putting a little more maple syrup in Blends or taking a little out, I supposed—met and decided what was to be done. A change of advertising agencies would have been such a decision. Heimrich had, Craig said, the idea that maybe the other three big Blenders were happy as clams with the job Townsend Associates were doing and that P. J. Barlow dissented. In which case—

  “But that wasn’t true, was it?” Ann said, in a tone which meant she hoped it wasn’t. Craig hesitated again and then said he supposed it could have been.

  “Actually,” he said, “I don’t think it had gone that far, or was going to. As I said last night”—this was to Ann, directly— “P. J. was growling a bit. But clients always growl. He thought he could do a better campaign himself, but clients always think they can do a better job themselves. I don’t think he was planning to pick up his marbles, or to persuade the rest of them the marbles ought to be picked up.” He paused. “Which he probably could have done,” Craig said, and paused ag
ain. “Of course,” he said, “it’s George’s show. I just work there.”

  I looked at the Jaguar, very low, very tough, very beautiful. I thought it must be a pretty good place to work.

  “But you’d know,” Ann said. “Of course you’d know.”

  “I’d think so, Vix,” Craig said. “Unless—” He stopped and considered. Then he shrugged. “I’d probably know,” he said.

  “Of course you would,” Ann said.

  Craig told her she was quite a girl. She started to grin and then, I thought, remembered they weren’t married any more; that all of that was washed out. “I told the Otises you always hit people in the face,” she said.

  “That’s damn nice of you, Vix,” Craig said. “Show them your bruises?”

  “Was Uncle Paul especially fond of Faye?” the Pooh asked, as if she hadn’t the faintest idea she was interrupting anything. Both Ann and Dwight Craig looked at her for a moment as if they were surprised to find her there, and didn’t know what she was talking about. Then Craig’s face rather carefully, I thought, lost expression, and he said he wouldn’t know. He roused himself enough to ask why she asked, and the Pooh said she had just wondered.

  “I think Captain Heimrich is interested in that, too,” Ann said.

  He hadn’t, Craig said, seemed to be when he talked to Craig. He’d seemed to be interested in the business aspects—and in Pauline Barlow. He said that of course Mrs. Otis knew about that, and Mrs. Otis looked extremely blank, which is quite a trick with the Pooh’s face. I must have looked blank, too. I said, “Knew about what?”

  “Why,” Craig said, “that Pauline isn’t actually P. J.’s daughter; that the Barlows adopted her.”

  He looked at the Pooh, who was looking blanker than ever. He said surely she knew that. After a moment, the Pooh got around to shaking her head.

  “So that’s what he meant about the hair,” the Pooh said. “Why didn’t he—” She stopped and shook her head again.