by Emma Lathen
Sanders chuckled. “You should hear Dick Vandam on the subject. He’s having more trouble with his father.”
“What’s wrong with retirement?” asked Ackerman. “Lots of people like it.”
“Not Howard Pendleton. He was too fond of playing the great man. He didn’t intend to sit back and watch someone else lord it over IPR. Of course I doubt if he thought all this out until Barbara Gunn unwittingly showed him a simple way to continued grandeur.”
“Now that’s what interests me,” said Mary Larrabee, leaning forward so eagerly that she knocked over her neighbor’s glass.
“Watch it, Mary,” exclaimed Charlie as a waiter rushed to mop up the damage. “Flourishing those nails of yours is like waving around a couple of pitchforks.”
“They’re not mine,” she replied indignantly, viewing the long talons with disfavor. “They put some kind of gel at the end of mine to make them like this.”
Little by little, Mary’s sponsor was turning its attention to every visible inch of her body. No doubt she was soon to be sporting eyelashes that constituted a public peril.
Pete Larrabee voiced the thought in everybody’s mind. “They look god-awful, don’t they?” he remarked affectionately.
Mary was making the best of a bad job. “At least they’re not fragile. Once the cement sets, they’re like iron.”
“Wonderful for you, not so hot for the rest of us,” Charlie said, moving his replacement glass to the other side of his setting.
“Never mind about that,” she directed. “I still want to know about Barbara Gunn.”
“We’ll never know exactly what Pendleton said to her,” Thatcher reminded them. “Both parties to the conversation are dead. But I doubt if he had much trouble. He was a high-pressure salesman and she was used to accepting his judgments. He probably delivered all the usual clichés about being in the right place at the right time, doing what everybody else in business does. She was genuinely ignorant of the value of the tomato and, of course, the money was a temptation.”
Sadly Ned Ackerman agreed. “I’ll go along with that. But how come he took the chance? He must have realized that the minute the pressure came on, Barbara would go to pieces. Are you telling us he intended to murder her all along?”
“No, no. There wasn’t supposed to be any pressure. You’ve been associating with Scott Wenzel too long,” Thatcher argued. “I think you still don’t appreciate the magnitude of the miracle he pulled off.”
But Ackerman was beyond the reach of such barbs. “You haven’t forgotten that I’m the one who keeps the books?” he asked gently. “I’m the one who’s made the cash-flow projections for next year.”
“You sure weren’t exaggerating when you said you were money-minded,” Charlie rebuked him.
“John is talking about the experimental miracle.”
“Charlie’s right,” Thatcher said. “Howard Pendleton was overly respectful of Vandam’s. The basic laboratory work was pretty much a one-man operation. By feeding stolen data to Eric Most, Pendleton could keep IPR synchronized with Wisconsin Seed. Once it became a matter of extensive field testing, he assumed as obvious that there was no way Scott Wenzel could keep up with the manpower, the money and the other resources that Vandam’s could lavish on the project. He never considered the possibility that by using high school boys and botany students, that by working like a dog himself, that by never making a mistake, Wenzel could bring in his final results on the same schedule as a giant corporation.”
“That boy was a slave driver. He damn near killed us all,” Ackerman recalled fondly.
Mary Larrabee was confused. “What difference did the timing make? Dr. Pendleton still stole the tomato, didn’t he?”
“Yes, but researchers are quite often independently working on the same development. If Vandam’s had filed for its patent two years before Wenzel was ready to do so, he wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on. It’s very hard to claim that somebody who’s far ahead of you is picking your brains. What’s more, his suspicions wouldn’t even have been aroused. So there wouldn’t have been any lawsuit and there wouldn’t have been any pressure on Barbara Gunn. It was the neck-and-neck finish that put the fat in the fire.”
“If you say so.” Mary was still dubious.
“After all, it’s the reverse situation that came about. When Wisconsin Seedsmen revealed the second-generation tomato, Vandam’s threw in the towel because it was clear Wenzel was the one who was way ahead.”
Ned Ackerman was willing to buy this. “That means Pendleton didn’t have to be completely crazy. Only a damned fool. He didn’t even get progress reports from Barbara about the field testing.”
“Apparently not,” Thatcher agreed. “IPR was no longer working on the tomato in Puerto Rico. Pendleton was confident that Vandam’s would give him the necessary lead time—there was no point in increasing the danger by needless transmission of information. Far better to let Barbara forget her part in all this.”
The whole picture had suddenly become clear to Sanders. “Sweet Jesus,” he muttered. “Then it all broke on him from out of the blue. First the patent suit by Wenzel, and then Barbara Gunn going to pieces all over the place.”
“Precisely,” said Thatcher. “My secretary put her finger on the solution when she reasoned that the killer’s timing had been thrown off by the actions of others. We wasted that insight by considering minor surprises. But Pendleton was the one who had a major surprise at the last moment.”
Sanders was remembering the Pendletons’ hurried side trip to Vandamia. “And Barbara Gunn wasn’t even there. He didn’t have a chance to see her until Chicago.”
“Yes, he got to her by the skin of his teeth.”
“You know, I wondered about that.” Mary Larrabee’s brow was furrowed in thought. “After we found out about the bribery, I was thinking over the night she was poisoned and it seemed to me that the murderer was taking an awfully big chance.”
Charlie was always ready to listen to the ladies. “You mean killing her in such a public place? But it worked out well from his point of view. Anybody could have done it.”
She waved this away. “No, not that. I mean leaving it until so late. She could easily have broken down and told all that last night.”
“That’s a very important point,” Thatcher congratulated her. “In fact, it more or less cleared the Wisconsin contingent of suspicion.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Ackerman said, “but why?”
“Barbara had been deeply disturbed ever since she realized she would have to testify. What’s more, she’d been talking about her trouble for days. The murderer wouldn’t have waited if he’d had access to her before. Howard Pendleton killed her at the first opportunity. You and Scott Wenzel would have done the same thing and you probably wouldn’t have had to pick up poison at the convention. You would have come prepared.”
Ned Ackerman received this without a blink. “All right, but once we were cleared out of the way, that left Vandam’s. They were in the same position as Pendleton. They hadn’t had easy access to Barbara, although God knows they kept trying.”
This reminded Earl Sanders of a grievance. “Those damned fools did everything they could to look guilty. Actually, they were just running their own cozy little war, but that wasn’t how it looked to the rest of us. Hell, I know for a fact that Dick was damned worried about how far those two might have carried it.”
“The Vandams were a godsend to Pendleton and not just because of their activities,” Thatcher replied. “First, there was Scott Wenzel’s prejudice. They had filed for the patent, they were trying to steal from him and, hence, they were responsible for everything. Even when he knew the work had been done in Puerto Rico, he continued to assume that Pendleton was nothing more than a cat’s-paw. And the Vandams themselves were not prepared to think the unthinkable. Pendleton had been a star in their firmament for so long they never suspected him.”
“And I wasn’t too bright,” Ackerman admitted. “I was so
hell-bent on protecting the security of the MF-23, I didn’t have time to think about anything else. I just went along with Scott’s suspicions.”
Charlie pointed out that he’d done a fine job on security, and it was just as well to leave the expertise to the experts.
While giving lip service to this principle, Thatcher had a reservation. “I’m not surprised about the rest of us, but I would have thought that Wenzel would have grown suspicious very early in the game. Certainly Pendleton must have been afraid that he would. I suppose that’s why he began to disassociate himself from the work on Numero Uno as soon as he got to Chicago.”
“You mean he was setting up Eric Most as a patsy?” Charlie asked intelligently.
“I think at the beginning it was instinctive. Numero Uno had turned into a mess and he therefore, very uncharacteristically, let an assistant push himself front and center. But Wenzel, of all men, would have known how uncharacteristic that was. Why didn’t he smell a rat?”
Ackerman was at no loss for an explanation. “I’ll tell you why. It would never occur to Scott to steal somebody else’s work. He could accuse a bunch of businessmen in a big corporation. But the worst he could think of Pendleton was that he was trying to curry favor by helping with a whitewash.”
Mary thought this spoke well of the young man, Charlie deprecated such innocence in a naughty world, and Sanders was inclined to suspect simple stupidity. The subject of their discussion arrived in time to defend himself.
After greetings, the first questions were about Mrs. Pendleton.
“Fran’ll be all right,” Wenzel said confidently. “She’s ridden the first shock and now she’s facing up to the consequences. But it’s been a long week. I’m glad her daughter is here now.”
Mischievously Ned told him they were all wondering why he hadn’t spotted Pendleton’s guilt early on.
“Me?” Wenzel did not regard himself as in any way to blame. “I want to know how the hell Fran could have been so blind. Howard pulled this off right under her nose. He didn’t get her out of town until the last act.”
“Oh, come on!” scoffed Ned. “You told me yourself Fran met him when she was a graduate student. She was young, she was impressed by his professional stature, she went on that way.”
Wenzel wasn’t giving an inch. “What does that have to do with it? I was young when I met him but I didn’t stay snowed for long.”
Ackerman was outraged. “You didn’t fall in love with him, you didn’t have children and grandchildren with him.”
“I don’t see what difference that makes,” Wenzel insisted stubbornly.
Thatcher could see that Scott Wenzel still had much to learn about life. “When you share vested interests with someone over the years, it is profitless to continually search out their defects,” he informed him. “You spend your time concentrating on the ones that surface by themselves.”
“It happens to the best of us,” Ned Ackerman said slyly. “I’ve noticed it happening with you and Hilary. There’s a lot you’re learning to live with.”
Now it was Scott’s turn to be outraged. “I’m fully aware of Hilary’s defects,” he said stiffly.
Mary, of course, wanted to know who Hilary was. She was more curious than censorious when she found out.
Scott shrugged off this digression. “All right, so Fran was turning a blind eye to the fact that Howard was through as a scientist. But I wish she’d get off this guilt kick. She seems to think she’s responsible for the attack on Eric Most, just because she let herself be sent to Washington. And she says she gave Howard the idea in the first place by beginning to suspect Eric.”
“He was already using Most as a stalking horse. After all, there wasn’t that much choice,”
Thatcher said dryly. “And when you unveiled MF-23, he knew Most would eventually put two and two together. So Pendleton took the bull by the horns, marched over to the Vandam office, and rather cleverly presented them with a palatable solution to the crime. After that, it was only a question of time before Most confronted him under circumstances that could be twisted to look like an attack.”
“What was so clever about it?” Wenzel demanded. “I heard he went over and raised Cain about Most.”
Thatcher continued his education of the young. “If he had gone over with simple suspicion of Most, it would have looked self-serving. By storming in and accusing Vandam’s of participation, he directed their attention to Most and then let them figure out for themselves how to get off the hook. There’s no persuasion like self-persuasion.”
Sanders decided to make his own confession. “You’re right about it’s being palatable. I didn’t like to say so before, but once I realized that the Vandam bank in Chicago had been used to bribe Barbara Gunn, I was afraid of what we were going to dig up.”
“Good heavens!” Thatcher was astonished. “That was what convinced me that the Vandams were out of it. If you’re trying to arrange an anonymous transfer of funds, the last place you go is a bank where you’re known.”
Sanders was chagrined that this thought had never occurred to him. While he was recovering, Ned Ackerman produced his own doubts.
“But with the Vandams and us out of it, that left Pendleton and Eric Most. How come you were so sure which was which when you went to the Hilton?”
Thatcher grinned at him. “Because I’m a banker. Once it narrowed down to two people, there wasn’t much difficulty spotting which one was the killer. I simply lifted a telephone, called some contacts in San Juan and asked which one had liquidated $15,000 five years ago.”
Charlie was amused at the general reaction. “And you people call yourselves businessmen,” he chided Sanders and Ackerman and Larrabee. “Don’t you know money always leaves a trail?”
“And if you think that’s simple, consider what narrowed the field for Captain McNabb. The only suspects staying at the Blackstone were from IPR. Barbara Gunn had been avoiding Eric Most and fled from Fran Pendleton. What did she have to say that Dr. Pendleton was determined not to hear?”
But Thatcher’s audience was turning its attention elsewhere. Pete Larrabee was bringing Mary up-to-date on family news.
“You know Betty’s gone to West Point to see her boyfriend a couple of times,” he reported. “She came back in seventh heaven. She’s really wild about army life.”
Mary paled. “You tell Betty she’s too young to get married, or whatever it is they do these days. She’s got to go to college first.”
“Hell, that isn’t what she’s thinking of. I keep telling you, you’ve got to keep up with the times, Mary. Betty is going to apply for the Air Force Academy.”
While Mary was speechless, her husband beamed around the table. “That girl of mine really has her head screwed on right. Do you know she may get an engineering degree without costing me one red cent?”
Earl Sanders had begun his tactical approach to Ned Ackerman, who was looking so guileless that Thatcher pitied Standard Foods.
“No,” said Ackerman blandly. “That wasn’t the arrangement I was thinking of. Not at all.”
Scott Wenzel had so much confidence in his partner that he wasn’t even listening. Instead he chose to make Thatcher his confidant.
“What Fran needs is to bury herself in her work,” he announced. “I told her that.”
“You may be right,” Thatcher agreed, the first to admit that Scott and Fran were probably very much alike.
“So what if she is gun-shy about having anything to do with Vandam’s again? I told her there are other outfits. For instance, there’s Wisconsin Seedsmen.”
It was Ackerman who was now listening to him.
“We’d be proud to handle her floribunda,” Wenzel continued. “We’re going to have to broaden into flowers anyway. By the time she’s ready, we’ll be able to handle production and distribution. And just to avoid any more talk about underhanded tactics, that’s what I told Dick Vandam.”
Thatcher was the first to admit that he was too ignorant to understand
the coup that Wenzel was pulling off. But an old hand from the Department of Agriculture was ready to guide him.
“Boy, I’ll say one thing for you, Scotty,” Ackerman whispered admiringly. “You sure learn fast!”
Wenzel went on to prove it. Turning graciously to Thatcher, he said, “By the way, Dick mentioned that your secretary is bringing her grandfather to Vandamia for the royal tour. Of course in Madison we don’t have that kind of Disneyland yet. But I’ll tell you what. Send them up to me and I’ll give the old man an MF-23. He’ll have the only tomato tree in New York.”
Captains of industry, Thatcher had always known, are made, not born.