by Emma Lathen
Gloria’s eyes widened. “But surely you don’t think . . . ?” she faltered.
Dick avoided her glance. “He might have bribed that girl so that he could stay on at the company,” he said unwillingly. “You remember how he felt about it?”
Who could forget? The prospect of losing the dignity and perquisites attached to his position had thrown Milton into a frenzy. It was all too easy to imagine him attempting a mad piratical coup. With growing reluctance Gloria recalled the details about Barbara Gunn which, only this morning, had been of such academic interest. The girl was nervous and guilty, going to pieces in public. Police theorized she was on the point of telling all. If Milton’s previous behavior was any guide, how wildly would he meet a threat of disgrace and prison? There must be some alternative.
“Naturally Milton didn’t like being forced out. But that was some time ago,” she said in a last ditch attempt to retain her blinkers. “There’s no reason to suppose he hasn’t settled down by now. Are you sure you aren’t making a mountain out of a molehill, Dick? I’ll bet nobody else has these suspicions.”
Dick produced a travesty of a smile, thin, tight and painful. “What do you think has got me going? A week ago Standard Foods decided to play a waiting game with our patent suit in order to put financial pressure on the other company. Today they decided to rush into court no matter what concessions they have to make. Sanders didn’t make any bones about the reason for the change. He said they wanted to get the patent situation settled, before there were any further revelations about Vandam’s. Those are his exact words.”
Gloria stared at him aghast. Like everyone else she tended to undervalue the judgment of those close to her. After all, she had seen what Dick was like when the AC broke down, and she was almost as familiar with the behavior of other Vandams in moments of crisis. But she accepted without hesitation the wisdom of strangers sitting in a board room in Chicago. She could even dimly remember entertaining two of them, solid, substantial men not given to fits and starts. If they saw this menace on the horizon, it was no figment of the imagination.
Gloria Vandam prided herself on her cool competence. When her daughters were expelled from select private schools, when they took up residence with undesirable lovers, when her father-in-law threatened to burst into the tabloids, she kept her head. But nothing had prepared her for this moment. Desperately she cast about for a domestic panacea.
“You know, Dick,” she said with iron graciousness, “I think tonight we might have brandy with our coffee.”
It was in the best tradition of her long reign. Unfortunately the façade cracked with her next sentence.
“God knows I could use it!”
Chapter 21
Transplant Shock
FRAN Pendleton had been raised in Tennessee, attended college in North Carolina, and spent her adult life in Puerto Rico. None of these experiences had prepared her for the rigors of a howling blizzard in Chicago.
“And the way things are going, we’ll have to spend the whole winter here,” she wailed.
Her complaint was necessarily directed to Eric Most. Howard was doing battle at the airline counter, while his junior stayed in the rear, guarding the mountains of documentation piled on the floor.
Instead of joining in the lamentation, Eric made the mistake of assuming that manly reassurance was required. “It won’t be as bad as that, Fran,” he said indulgently. “I’m sure they’ll find some space for us tomorrow if not today.”
“Fat chance,” she snapped, nursing her pessimism. “I’ll bet Chicago is populated entirely by people so exhausted by trying to leave, they gave up and settled here.”
This was their third trip out to O’Hare. The flight on which they had originally been scheduled should have left before the blizzard struck. Unfortunately, it had originated in Denver, and Colorado had been flattened six hours earlier than Chicago. By the time their second flight was due for departure, O’Hare had become an arctic wasteland with record drifts and gale-force winds. They had returned down-town to discover their hotel rooms unavailable, spent a miserable night in inferior accommodations and, at the first hint of one open runway, made their latest break for freedom. So had several thousand others. At the moment O’Hare looked like the airport of a third world capital, with enemy tanks entering the city.
Every successive frustration made Howard more irascible and Fran grumpier. Now she spotted further grounds for dissatisfaction.
“I hope you realize that this blizzard is going to travel with us straight back to New York.”
Fran’s depression was not really based on the weather. Most of it was caused by the resumption of legal hostilities impelling the Pendletons eastward instead of southward. Those precious floribunda were going to be transshipped in Miami without her personal supervision. In Fran’s opinion, professional meetings were a necessary evil; appearances before the board of patent interferences were not.
Eric was misguided enough to fancy himself as an expert at jollying along middle-aged women. Cunningly he began with agreement.
“Of course, it’s too bad we have to make this side trip to New York. I know you’re anxious to get back home and I am too,” he said chattily. “There’s a lot of work that needs my attention. But you can hardly call it a waste of time. I don’t really trust those lawyers to understand my notebooks unless I’m there to guide them every step of the way. They’re only laymen, and it would be foolish to leave this in the hands of a bunch of New York lawyers. Everything else at IPR is secondary right now, Fran. We haven’t come up with anything this big in years and, while I hope the stuff I’m working on these days will turn out a real winner, we’ve got to go with the odds. After all, there aren’t many break-throughs like this. So you do see that it’s essential, don’t you?”
He ended with less conviction than when he had started. The look of concentrated venom on Fran’s face was enough to give even Eric Most second thoughts. Hastily reviewing his speech, he decided it could bear amplification.
“Of course, it’s Howard and me together in this thing. I didn’t mean to imply I worked on Numero Uno alone.” When Fran still did not relax, he laughed lightly to show her how insignificant his omission had been. “That’s why we both have to go to New York.”
In a voice of icy precision, Fran set him straight. “In case you’ve forgotten, Eric, IPR was well established years before your arrival. And everything else at IPR is not secondary. My floribunda happens to be a major development that may rival Numero Uno. And my delphinium took an All-America just three years ago. Quite a lot is going on at IPR besides your research, and a good deal of it is being done by me.”
Eric blinked, then reddened. As Fran listened to his disjointed phrases of explanation, she deliberately refused to unbend. It was time Eric Most learned a lesson.
For over two decades Fran had watched young assistants parade through IPR. Some she had liked and some she had not. It made very little difference as every single one of them left within three years. This turnover was not because of personality conflicts or professional jealousies. The Pendleton establishment was remarkably free of both. Brute economics dictated the revolving-door policy. IPR was too small to support a hierarchy in which beginners could rise through the ranks. Because of the caliber of its research, IPR had a reputation as a solid place for fledgling Ph.D.’s to start their careers, and then move on. Under these circumstances Fran did not usually work up any heat if a young man failed to accord her sufficient respect. But Eric Most’s continual remissness in this area was beginning to get to her.
Howard’s return saved them both from the prolongation of an awkward moment. He was sputtering angrily, too absorbed in travel arrangements to notice anything else.
“God knows if we’ll ever get out of this place,” he said, unknowingly echoing his wife. “The best that damned fool could do was give us standby status. So let’s get all this stuff down to the boarding area. This may be the only plane that takes off this morning.”
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br /> With Howard sending off waves of nervous energy, there was no time to talk or think about anything else. Obediently all three snatched up their loads and began the long trek. It was, of course, the most distant boarding gate at O’Hare. Howard, swinging two bulging briefcases, strode imperiously down the bleak corridor. Eric, panting and embracing a large cardboard box, managed to keep up. Fran trotted along in the rear, rounding every corner a little farther behind the pack.
The next half hour was filled with dramatic tension. Ticketed passengers, shrouded in outlandish winter gear, straggled in, one by one. Inexorably the plane began to fill. Then came the exhilarating rumor that a connecting flight from St. Louis had been delayed. If it failed to appear, eight seats would be free.
Fran, who embraced Oriental fatalism when she traveled, had plenty of time for her irritation with Eric Most to be transmuted into something else. Once her attention was directed toward the problem, it was not difficult to pinpoint the reason for her mounting annoyance with him. Almost unnoticed Eric had broken with the pattern of his predecessors. He had already been at IPR for five years and he gave no signs of leaving. At the recent meetings he had been almost embarrassingly underfoot. Not once had he slipped away to canvass potential employers. What in the world made Eric, the most conventional and imitative of men, strike out a new line of behavior?
And the answer was lying there for anyone to see. At IPR, they had all grown older. Fran, at 45, sometimes forgot that her husband was 20 years her senior. Now she looked at him, trying to see him with the eyes of an outsider. Howard was concentrating on the final countdown, his watch aggressively displayed, willing the clerk to declare those seats available. To her, he looked exactly the same as he always had. Partly this was because Howard had been 40 when she first met him, partly because marriage is the worst vantage point for dispassionate observation. Fran was far more conscious of the changes in herself, from bride to grandmother, from size ten to size fourteen.
“All right, folks. There’s going to be room for eight of you.”
Victory! With enthusiastic yelps the fortunate eight gathered up their belongings and humped them out to the waiting plane. The seating could not have been better from Fran’s point of view. The Pendletons were placed side by side in the tail, while Eric was accommodated on the aisle seven rows ahead. As she watched him make a fuss with the stewardess about the disposition of his box, Fran was granted another insight. It was neither forgetfulness nor bad manners that led Eric to overlook her professional achievements. She was a stumbling block in his path. Eric wanted to become head of the whole shebang. And this golden vision was possible only if Fran herself were relegated to the status of consort, so that when Howard went, she went too.
“Eric wants to take over IPR,” she announced, impelled into speech.
“I know,” grunted Howard, already immersed in a magazine.
Really! Fran glared at her husband. It was like him to recognize the situation and dismiss it.
“And just where did he get this idea?” she demanded.
“Not from me,” Howard said cheerfully. “The poor sap hopes I’m going to retire.”
More and more was becoming clear to Fran. Eric’s brazen attempts to push himself into prominence, his insistence on a key role in the coming lawsuit, his huddles with the Vandams, all these constituted signals that he was the heir apparent. On the other hand, the signals were all emanating from a closely defined area.
“He’s trying to grab credit for Numero Uno!” she gasped.
Howard was not cheerful anymore. “He certainly wants Vandam’s to know all about his part.”
“Then why are you letting him get away with it?”
Juniors trying to corner more than their fair share of glory were nothing new at IPR, or at any other laboratory. But Howard had never been slow to slap them down.
“Actually, Eric did do the lion’s share of the work. You know, Fran, he’s a better researcher than we thought when we hired him. Of course I kept an eye on him, and I was ready to steer him clear of mistakes. But it’s surprising how little supervision he needed. Once I laid out the dimensions of the problem and the direction we’d be working in, he went right down a straight line. I was more and more pleased with him at every one of our weekly conferences. You know, I made a couple of suggestions he disagreed with, and most of the time he turned out to be right.”
“Researcher!” said Fran contemptuously.
Fran herself regretted any minute not spent in her laboratory. Years ago she had gratefully resigned the administrative burden to her husband. But Eric Most, in spite of his much vaunted talk, really preferred going to international conferences, receiving foreign dignitaries, holding forth at university seminars.
“You can’t fight facts,” Howard reminded her.
“If we’re talking about facts, you’re the senior man on the project and Eric is way out of line.”
Howard hunched a defensive shoulder. “It doesn’t make any difference,” he said, retreating into his reading. “We did Numero Uno on contract.”
Howard was pretending that since Vandam’s would hold the patent on Numero Uno, there was no need to deprive Eric of his cherished limelight. This, thought Fran, was so much nonsense. Both the Pendletons had reacted to the murder of Barbara Gunn with the same sense of loss and distress. But when Captain McNabb’s last round of questioning had painted Barbara as a paid informant, they parted company. Fran, shocked and appalled, wanted to know more. Howard had gone from disbelief to a refusal to discuss the situation. He would not join Fran in speculation or theorizing. Fran knew that, emotionally, Howard was far more fastidious than she was.
Whenever wayward human passions degenerated into a real mess, Fran wanted to clean it up and Howard wanted to get as far away as possible. Now he was simply exercising reasonable foresight. The new view of Barbara Gunn meant that, lurking in the future, was a denouement in which old friends would stand revealed as criminals. When that day came, Howard did not want to be front and center. He would rather let the world think it was Eric Most’s discovery that had been stolen.
Fran sighed. Sensitivity was all very well and good, but it was no way to run a research establishment.
“It doesn’t make any difference what’s going to happen,” she said, avoiding dangerous territory. “Eric’s getting a lot of the wrong ideas. He thinks we’re a couple of patsies.”
“He’s just ambitious. What’s so wrong with that?”
Exasperated, Fran found herself drawing comparisons. Scotty Wenzel had made a name for himself as a firebrand by his loud chafing at subordinate constraints, his determination to be his own man. He had been stigmatized as a youngster in too much of a hurry, with too arrogant an opinion of his own talents. Why was ambition so forgivable in one young man and not in the other? What’s more, Scotty had had the decency to be grieved at Barbara’s death, Fran remembered on a tide of warmth, whereas Eric had been markedly indifferent. Oh, she knew that Eric liked to think he barely could remember Barbara Gunn. But that was simply Eric being superior. He had carried too many personal messages to Madison to get away with that one. In fact, Eric was a nasty little egotist.
“And what’s he so ambitious to be, anyway?” she persisted. “You can’t tell me he wants to spend his life in a laboratory. Look at him up there now. That’s what he likes to do.”
Both the Pendletons were experienced travelers and acted accordingly. Howard had demanded a news magazine from the stewardess before even buckling his seat belt. Fran had provided herself with a thick paperback novel. But rest and relaxation were not part of Eric Most’s public performance. He had lowered his seat tray, unzipped a portfolio and was now, to all appearances, lost in his work. And all this play acting was for the benefit of a few passengers whom he would never encounter again.
“He’ll get over it,” said Howard, continuing his display of unlimited tolerance. “They all do.”
“He’s about four years overdue.”
�
��Come on, Fran. You just don’t like Eric and you’ve seen too much of him in Chicago. Why don’t you break down and admit you’re prejudiced?”
She had to admit that there was something in what Howard said. The truth was that Scotty and Howard had struck sparks off each other, while Eric rubbed her the wrong way. Nonetheless she was convinced that Eric, with his surface deference and his unrealistic dreams, posed more of a threat than Scotty ever had. Howard might turn the page of his magazine to indicate the discussion was over but Fran, with a bone to chew, was not that easily silenced.
“It’s all of a piece,” she grumbled. “You can’t tell what he’s thinking or what he’s planning. At least not until he’s halfway there. Then you realize you should have known all along. It’s just like Eric to think he can take over IPR and be a big shot. It’s just like Eric to steal Numero Uno.”
The words were scarcely out of her mouth before their dreadful implications came home to her. Hesitantly she stole a glance at her husband. Deep in his article, he had deliberately tuned her out. With any luck that last unfortunate phrase had escaped him.
His next remark reassured her.
“There’s hell to pay in the Middle East,” he reported. “I’m glad we turned down that desert-growth project when it was offered to us.”
“Yes,” she agreed absently. “This is no time to be running around a lot of Arab countries.”
Second thoughts had prevailed with Fran. Trying to discuss her sudden suspicion with Howard would somehow crystallize it. She would be creating a situation from which neither could retreat, which neither of them could ever forget. The legacy of those words was hard enough for her to handle on her own.
Because no matter how hard she tried, certain images came crowding into her consciousness.
Eric’s unexpected talents as a researcher, so self-evident that he could override the skill and experience of Howard Pendleton.
Eric’s submergence of all his contacts with Barbara Gunn which, when Fran began to add them up, amounted to a regular, steady trail over the years.