Sweet and Low_An Emma Lathen Best Seller

by Emma Lathen

  Everybody made sympathetic sounds. But with that formality out of the way, Thatcher was not averse to a direct question.

  “Then I suppose you didn’t see him shortly before he died. The police are anxious to talk with anyone who did. He seems to have been upset about something.”

  Corwin shook his head regretfully. “Mr. Shaw asked me the same thing. But no, the last time I saw Dick was three or four months ago. I was in town on business and we had dinner. He seemed great, not worried about a thing.”

  Howard Vandevanter’s gasp was audible. “Really, Amory,” he said indignantly. “Bothering poor Mrs. Corwin at a time like this.”

  “It’s a shame though, isn’t it,” Shaw said blandly. “Frohlich might have talked more freely to someone who wasn’t from Dreyer.”

  “He certainly seems to have had his troubles with those who were,” Vandevanter snapped. “What’s all this I hear about Orcutt?”

  Further hostilities were delayed by the return of Eleanor Corwin. Her face was shining clean and she was embarrassed.

  “I’m so sorry. I never expected to break down like that. But it was the mug.” She put out a forefinger and gently traced the remains of gold and red letters. “Dick and I got them when we were children. We sent in boxtops and used them to brush our teeth. I have no idea whatever happened to mine.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Thatcher doubted if Eleanor Corwin was old enough to realize that she was saying goodbye not only to a brother, but to her childhood as well.

  Then she shook herself and deliberately changed the subject. “Oh, there was one other thing, Mr. Shaw. It came in the mail this morning and it seems to be about cocoa.” She produced an envelope from the drawer of the writing table.

  Shaw stood beside her, dwarfing her by his height, as he examined the enclosure.

  “No,” he said at last. “This isn’t anything to do with us.”

  He was refolding the letter when Vandevanter interrupted. “What is it, Amory?” he asked sharply. “If it’s about cocoa, it must be about Dreyer.”

  Shaw bristled at the tone, but handed over the envelope. Then he watched with sardonic amusement as Vandevanter frowned in puzzlement. When he finally spoke, it was as an instructor.

  “That is a commodity broker’s statement,” he said slowly and distinctly. “It records a purchase of ten cocoa contracts.”

  Vandevanter’s brow was still creased. “You mean Frohlich was trading on his own account?”

  “That’s right.” Shaw turned again to Mrs. Corwin. “And the trade will make or lose money for the estate, depending on how the market goes. You should put this aside, with your brother’s other financial papers, for the lawyer.”

  “But look here, Amory. This trade was made on the day of the murder.” Vandevanter was too excited to watch his language and this was the first time that word had been used here. Its effect was immediate. Eleanor Corwin paled and Curtis Yeoman’s lips folded together in disapproval. Thatcher noticed Rodger Corwin reach forward and press his wife’s hand reassuringly.

  Only Amory Shaw seemed not to notice the slip. “I don’t see what difference that makes. Dick had just gotten back from Africa. It’s natural that he’d want to look into his account and make a few changes.”

  Yeoman forestalled Vandevanter’s reply. “Surely we can discuss this some other time, Howard,” he said, his dramatic eyebrows semaphoring rebuke. “Mr. and Mrs. Corwin can’t possibly be interested, and they’re obviously very busy.”

  Vandevanter shot one horrified glance at his hostess and changed tack immediately. “Of course, of course.” He made a curious ducking motion with his head and squared his shoulders.

  The signs were familiar to Thatcher, who had seen them on all sorts of platforms. He reminded himself that, at least on the basis of precedent in Dreyer, Howard Vandevanter’s public speeches were short and to the point.

  “Mrs. Corwin, I have asked Governor Yeoman and Mr. Thatcher to accompany me today so that we could express the deep regret of the Leonard Dreyer Trust at the loss . . .”

  One of the drawbacks to short speeches is that they do not allow the speaker to lose sight of his original preoccupation. Howard Vandevanter barely allowed Shaw time to settle in the taxi.

  “That broker’s statement was a complete surprise to me, Amory. I don’t like the idea of Frohlich trading on his own account. And I still think the date may be—”

  “Why don’t you like it?” Shaw interrupted. He sounded amused.

  “Good God! He had all sorts of inside information. It could have made difficulties.”

  Shaw was remorseless. “What difficulties?”

  “How should I know?” Vandevanter exploded. “You’re the expert on the Cocoa Exchange.”

  “Then if I’m the expert, listen to me. The only inside information Dick Frohlich had was his own forecast of the crop—exactly the same information he gave us. Dreyer dominates the market. Frohlich’s trading was peanuts. He couldn’t have affected our position at all.”

  Vandevanter hesitated. “I suppose there wouldn’t have been any point in Frohlich’s doctoring his reports to us?” he asked slowly.

  “For Christ’s sake!” Shaw made no attempt to hide his exasperation.

  “You saw the statement. It was a piddling trade for ten contracts. And Dick Frohlich had been our best cocoa buyer for years. You’re talking slanderous nonsense, Howard.”

  By this time Thatcher was congratulating himself on having snaffled the front seat. No doubt Amory Shaw had reason on his side. Nevertheless, he seemed to be going out of his way to goad Vandevanter.

  “I shouldn’t have said that about Frohlich,” Vandevanter conceded.

  “After all, he was the one who was murdered and he was the one who was worried about something in the New York office. Maybe he caught on to some fancy trading by one of the other buyers. I think we should get to the bottom of this.”

  “There’s nothing to get to the bottom of,” growled Shaw.

  “Howard, you’re making a mountain out of a molehill,” said Curtis Yeoman, hurling himself into the fray. “We don’t know that Frohlich’s murder had anything to do with those remarks of his at that poker game. And the only trading we’ve seen is a small flyer.”

  Opposition simply made Vandevanter more obstinate.

  “It wouldn’t do any harm to circularize all our staff in the New York offices, asking them if they maintain private trading accounts,” he argued. “At least that way we’d find out the extent of the problem.”

  “If that’s all you want to know, you don’t have to bother with any circularizing,” Shaw retorted. “I can tell you. They all do.”

  “And you’re satisfied with that? Why, if they were front-office executives dealing in company stock, they’d have to list every transaction for the SEC!”

  “I know that. I’m a vice-president myself.” Amory Shaw was very controlled. “The reason for that requirement is to protect stockholders in cases where executives might profit from inside information. This situation is entirely different. First of all, commodity exchanges aren’t regulated the same way that stock exchanges are. Second of all, none of these boys have inside information in the sense you mean. It’s safe to say that the only person who knows what position Dreyer is going to take on cocoa futures at any given moment is me. And even I don’t know until I do it. It’s all a matter of split-second timing”

  Thatcher could see all too clearly the terrible abyss yawning ahead. In an attempt to keep Vandevanter from falling into it, he ventured a general comment. “The split-second timing seems to pay off.”

  “Dreyer’s record on hedging is the best in the industry,” Yeoman agreed at once.

  Shaw smiled sourly. “And in case you’re dying to ask, Howard, yes, I do trade on my own account. That is my third point—the custom of the trade. Everybody who has anything to do with commodities has something invested—stockboys, warehousemen, people at the Department of Agriculture. You have to accept that
as a fact of life. But I’ll tell you something else. In over 30 years, I have never put in my own order before the company’s order.”

  Howard Vandevanter was in full retreat. First he had been forced to recant his suspicions of the dead man. Now he had to assert his faith in the head of Dreyer’s New York office.

  “Good God, Amory! Not for one moment was I suggesting any impropriety in your behavior. Your reputation speaks for itself. You’ve been Dreyer’s trader as long as anyone can remember. I was merely pointing out the temptations that might exist for one of our younger, inexperienced men. Some of them are still on relatively small salaries and . . .”

  His apologies and explanations lasted until the cab pulled up in front of the Sloan Guaranty Trust. Thatcher extracted himself, slammed the door, and waved his companions off. Only then did he realize with what expertise the president of Dreyer had been deflected from at least one of his discoveries.

  Somehow they had all lost sight of the fact that Dick Frohlich’s last trade had taken place on the same day as his murder.

  Chapter 7

  The Exchange & cinéma vérité

  Back at the Cocoa Exchange, meanwhile, Charlie Trinkam was unabashedly having a whale of a time. He had been delighted to meet the legendary Amory Shaw however briefly. Then he had offered to accompany Leo Gilligan on some errands. These too proved enlightening.

  “Let me check with my brokers for a minute, Charlie. They’re just down the hall from Dreyer,” said Gilligan, heading for Martini & Mears.

  “Be my guest,” Charlie replied. He was here to get a feel for the cocoa world and this was one way to do it.

  While Gilligan plunged into conversation with a thin, serious man, Charlie took Martini & Mears’ measure: two desks for the principals, two secretaries, and eight telephones. It was very unassuming, yet Charlie knew many flossy operations uptown that did not handle half as much money as Martini & Mears.

  Or a tenth as much paper work.

  “. . . but Mr. Martini, this is a refund check from the Hertz people. I don’t understand how or where I’m supposed to enter it . . .”

  The secretary’s voice rang with every bookkeeper’s exasperation over a misplaced entry. The rumble answering her was an indistinct baritone.

  “But it’s not a credit, Mr. Martini! And, it’s made out to you personally, instead of Martini & Mears. So you see, I can’t—”

  Martini’s voice and Martini himself reached Charlie simultaneously.

  “Just give it to me, and forget all about it, Jeanne!” he was saying as he emerged into the waiting room. Jeanne was still mutinous but Martini settled the matter by plucking the offending check from her hand, jamming it into his pocket, then turning to Charlie.

  “Hi,” he said. “Anything I can do for you?”

  Charlie explained that he was with Gilligan.

  “Oh, is that Leo in with Jim?” Martini asked. “I want a word with him . . .”

  Just then Gilligan appeared, trailed by Martini’s partner. He and the two brokers put aside the minutiae of cocoa trading for more casual conversation with Charlie. But not for long.

  “You know,” Mears remarked, “it’s a real shame. I was just telling Leo here. Poor Dick picked up a couple of thousand dollars in his account, while he was in Ghana. And now it won’t do him any good.”

  There was a silent consensus that you can’t take it with you.

  “And it doesn’t do Martini & Mears any good either, losing customers like that,” Gilligan observed.

  “If we had to live on commissions like Frohlich’s, we’d starve to death,” Martini said unsentimentally. “Speaking of which, I want to talk to you for a minute if you’ve got the time, Leo.”

  “Sure, go ahead,” said Charlie when Gilligan looked inquiringly at him. “But I think I’ll wait for you downstairs.”

  Martini and Gilligan were deep in the complexities of stop-loss orders before the door closed behind him. Even new-breed brokers, with their informal manners, are as inaccessible as the blue bloods of money management. Charlie knew better than to think that all the action was downstairs, on the Exchange floor. But that was where some action could be viewed.

  At the public entrance to the Exchange there were the usual anonymous men, moving to and fro. There were strays with the unmistakable air of tourists—amateurs from Duluth and Seattle, come to see where their money came and went.

  There was also a hairy sextet, brandishing movie cameras under the nose of a beleaguered official.

  “The Exchange is closing,” he was saying with bureaucratic precision, “in exactly 12 minutes. It is absolutely impossible . . .”

  “Hold it!” said a bulky, bush-jacketed man modeled after Ernest Hemingway. “We need hours of time, not minutes. Glasscock promised us cooperation . . .”

  “Cooperation?” the functionary squeaked. “It . . . is . . . utterly . . . out of the question . . . to keep the . . . Exchange . . . open . . . past . . . three . . . o’clock.” He drew himself up. “Even for Public Broadcasting!”

  In the ensuing chorus of protest, one of Ernest Hemingway’s handmaidens turned and caught sight of Trinkam.

  “Why, Charlie,” she said, clanking in his direction. Barbaric hangings, chains, and twin curtains of cloudy hair momentarily thwarted his notable eye for women. Then, it came.

  “Sonia,” he said warmly.

  “You recognize me?” She was disappointed.

  “Anywhere,” said Charlie, gallantly lying in his teeth. When last seen, Mrs. Sonia Libby had been wearing a mink coat, an Antigua tan, and a wedding ring worthy of Jason B. Libby, Industrial Real Estate. Now, with not a diamond in sight, Charlie prudently did not ask how Jason, and the children, were.

  Nevertheless Sonia told him.

  “. . . happier now that I’ve cut out. I realized I wasn’t a real person—only an empty, empty shell called wife and mother,” she said, flaring her nostrils. “If I’d gone on, I would have been nothing. Now, I’m finding myself. And God, Charlie . . .!”

  Charlie knew better than to encourage these dropout wives. He had a virtually inexhaustible interest in women but, of late, he had heard one too many explanations of how much better it was for the family when Mamma walked out.

  “So, you decided to come to New York and get a job?” he inquired. By force of habit, he was escorting Sonia as she drifted after her companions.

  “Craig is tremendous,” she told him intensely. “Working with him . . . Well, Charlie, you can’t begin to understand. He’s so perceptive and sensitive. I didn’t know what it is to see before I began working for him.”

  It rang a bell that coincided roughly with the buzzer signaling the end of trading on the New York Cocoa Exchange. As men streamed off the floor, Charlie placed Ernest Hemingway. Craig Phibbs was famous, in some circles, for his cinéma vérité. With a poetic camera and a disenchanted intelligence, he had produced the masterpieces that enabled Public Broadcasting to show how tawdry and commercial the rest of television was. Who could forget Incest, 15 installments about life in parts of West Virginia that Jay Rockefeller would never see?

  Then, Foetus, the frank investigation-in-depth of the eighth pregnancy of an unwed mother. And what about Suburb, which showed Elmhurst, Illinois, for what it was?

  “. . . planning to call it Greed,” Sonia was explaining while Phibbs looked around the Cocoa Exchange with curling lip. “Although some of us want to call it Amerika. That’s with a K.”

  Very few things surprised Charlie Trinkam, but this did. While not intimately acquainted with the personnel at the New York Cocoa Exchange, he would go bail that they were no different than the governors of the New York Stock Exchange, or the top brass at the Sloan Guaranty Trust. They would not be caught dead letting this cuckoo into their nests. He soon discovered he was underestimating the power of a woman clever enough to find herself without abandoning hearth and home.

  “Eve Glasscock’s husband runs this place,” said Sonia, evincing contempt for Mrs. Glassco
ck, Mr. Glasscock, and the Cocoa Exchange. “But she’s into educational TV . . .”

  “I see,” said Charlie. Presumably time would improve Sonia’s uncertain grasp of idiom. It was not easy, Charlie knew, to become an instant swinger after ten years amid the fallout of natural childbirth.

  But at least the chain of command was explained. Mrs. Glasscock had nagged her husband into token submission. Glasscock then murmured something ambiguous about cooperation to his subordinates and got very, very busy. As a result, the hot potato came to rest in the hands of a man employed to give speeches to grammar schools, Girl Scouts, and church groups entitled “The Romance of Chocolate” or “From Africa to the Supermarket—Cocoa Beans in the Modern World.” Mr. Clemence was probably the last man in the metropolitan area to use slides.

  “Now this,” he said, “is where cocoa futures are traded.”

  Six heads, plus Charlie’s, swung obediently. Four or five men were clustered around the desk, where the details of the day’s trades were being tallied.

  Sonia and company were silent. Mr. Clemence inadvertently electrified them.

  “Now here,” he said, moving toward a circular table, “here is the pit. This is where bids and offers are made . . .”

  But he had said the magic word.

  “The pit,” breathed Craig, falling into a trance. His acolytes excitedly chirped at each other:

  “. . . hours of coverage of the pit tomorrow . . .”

  “. . . catching faces . . .”

  “No, Christopher, no! One face . . . one face throughout . . .”

  Oblivious to the specter of Frank Norris, Mr. Clemence continued: “Now, when the market opens for trading, members of the Exchange come here. Orders are transmitted to them, by telephone or messenger, to buy or sell. When that happens, they go up to the pit and put in the orders. Sometimes, hand signals are used. Fingers vertically are quantity, fingers horizontally are price . . .”

  He had lost them again.

  “Hand signals,” said Craig Phibbs raptly. “Jesus, it’s like mime!”