Sweet and Low_An Emma Lathen Best Seller

by Emma Lathen

  Martini’s lips folded into a tight, grim line. “Go to hell!”

  “Just a minute, you two.” Detective Udall had shouldered his way forward, pulling a card from his pocket. “Before you say anything else, Mr. Martini, I am about to advise you of your rights. You have the right to . . .”

  When he finished intoning, Russ Martini slumped in his chair without uttering a word.

  Curtis Yeoman could not resist any opportunity to sound authoritative. “You need a lawyer,” he said. “Is there anyone you’d like us to call?”

  It was enough to remind Howard Vandevanter of a grievance. “You’re damned helpful about lawyers so long as it isn’t me in jail,” he said in tones that would have blistered paint.

  Rarely had a charitable impulse been more untimely. And, thought Thatcher, it wasn’t as if Curtis Yeoman had so many.

  Happily Leo Gilligan rescued them all. “The one you want is Jim Mears, Martini’s partner,” he told the assembled authorities. “Why don’t you stop in their office across the hall? That’s okay with you, isn’t it, Russ?”

  This stratagem cleared the room of the police, the unknown woman, and Martini. It did not deflect Howard Vandevanter.

  “Now I’ve been very patient, Thatcher. I’ve done everything you wanted without asking questions,” he said untruthfully. “But what the hell is going on? What is all this about a car rental agency? Amory Shaw was killed right in this building.”

  “But Dick Frohlich wasn’t,” countered Thatcher.

  Vandevanter blinked. He had been concentrating on the murder imperiling him.

  Cautiously Yeoman ventured back into the conversation. “Do you mean to say that Russ Martini killed Frohlich? But he wasn’t even in Dreyer with us.”

  “Which makes him all the more suspect. What do we know about Frohlich’s murderer?” Thatcher prepared to enumerate. “We know that he called motels in Dreyer to find out where Dick Frohlich was registered. That immediately suggests he was not in the official party. In addition, the murderer spent a long time lurking in the underbrush waiting for Frohlich to come home. That was unnecessary if the murderer had a room in that courtyard, as you and I and Amory Shaw did.”

  There was a pause. Yeoman’s unspoken question trembled on his lips, but he was not risking Howard Vandevanter’s wrath again. With some amusement, Thatcher let him stew in his own juice for several moments before continuing.

  “Vandevanter, here, could also have avoided the bushes. Quite apart from the fact that he could have dictated Frohlich’s movements so that they met elsewhere, he would never have chosen a murder plan so peculiarly dangerous to him.”

  The president of Dreyer was seeing offense everywhere. “Why would it be more dangerous for me than for anyone else?” he asked resentfully.

  Thatcher was beginning to think that the Leonard Dreyer Trust asked more of its trustees than it was going to get.

  “The motel was filled with Dreyer employees, every one of whom would recognize you,” he replied crisply. “Furthermore, you would have had to pass under that floodlit archway twice. Most men could hurry by with their heads down. But you? Could you afford to have a witness say that the only thing he remembered was a man with a head of brilliant yellow hair?”

  “Oh,” Vandevanter still looked unaccountably affronted.

  Gilligan took over the questioning. “All right. I can see you’ve made a case for the murderer not being officially in Dreyer. But that leaves almost the whole world.”

  “Certainly—until you move on to consider the motive. Dick Frohlich had just returned to the country after an extended absence. By the end of one working day, he was anxiously trying to communicate with Amory Shaw—and also telling people that something was wrong at Dreyer’s New York office.”

  “Shaw was the one he’d go to if—”

  “I assumed that meant that Frohlich—”

  Vandevanter and Yeoman had collided in midspeech. Governor Curtis Yeoman yielded.

  “It’s not the kind of thing I like to say, now that he’s dead,” Vandevanter began circuitously, “but for a while I wondered if Frohlich had found some mess in Shaw’s department, and was giving him a chance to clean it up. Naturally I didn’t think that at first. But when Amory Shaw began to be so secretive about what was going on in New York, well, then I did begin to wonder.” He sat back and glared at Yeoman.

  “Now, Howard,” said Yeoman, striving to regain his old air of command, “you’ve got to remember that Amory was used to being completely independent. What seemed like secrecy to you was only a natural defense of his prerogatives.”

  “No, I cannot agree that Shaw’s behavior was natural.” Thatcher had decided not to give Yeoman any more leeway. “Why should it have been, given the situation with which he was coping? When Frohlich complained about dirty work in New York, he could only have been referring to his own department, or Shaw’s. And Frohlich’s office turned out to be in apple-pie order. To the outside world, that meant skullduggery by Shaw or to Shaw. And he knew it. Amory Shaw was determined to scotch the scandal himself. As Yeoman says, he was jealous of his prerogatives. With a new president he was certainly not going to undermine his strength by having someone else conduct the exposure.”

  Vandevanter rose to a handsome gesture. “He was right to worry. I didn’t like New York being so independent. If I’d found a loophole Shaw had overlooked, I would have used that to weaken his position with the board.”

  “And a loophole that resulted in murder would certainly have impressed the board with its gravity,” Thatcher said grimly. “But Shaw was a very puzzled man. He could not put his finger on the corruption. That’s why he went haring off to Frohlich’s relatives, in hopes of finding a clue. And, in fact, he got one.”

  Yeoman’s head came up alertly. “What was that?”

  “The trade with Martini on the day before the murder.”

  “But Shaw himself told us that was just peanuts,” Vandevanter protested.

  “Yes. The trade itself meant nothing, only the timing. Unfortunately before Shaw could concentrate on that, he was diverted by news of the row with Orcutt. That turned his thoughts closer to home.”

  Everybody swiveled to look at Gene Orcutt, who tried becoming invisible by sheer willpower.

  “Well, Gene,” Leo Gilligan said easily, “now’s the time to come clean. What did you and Dick Frohlich tangle about?”

  “But that wasn’t the problem,” Orcutt blurted, then hurried to cover his lapse. “There wasn’t any real tangle. I came back to the office to find Frohlich rooting around the orders for the day. Knowing how Mr. Shaw disliked anyone seeing them, I tried to take them away. And he blew up like a rocket.”

  Gilligan had not made a fortune in cocoa by ignoring lapses. “Then what was the problem?” he pressed remorselessly.

  Orcutt looked for help. When none was forthcoming, he said stubbornly, “There wasn’t any.”

  “Perhaps I can help,” Thatcher intervened. “When Shaw was looking for a weakness in his office, his thoughts first turned to you. He knew that you traded on your own account?”

  “Everybody does,” Orcutt gritted.

  “Yes, indeed. But I expect he could also make a good guess as to the results of your trading.”

  “What does that have to do with it?” Yeoman demanded.

  Gilligan squinted down the length of his cigar. “Been losing your shirt?” he asked Orcutt gently. “Not meeting your margin calls?”

  There was a painful pause.

  “I don’t know why you say that,” Orcutt muttered at last.

  “I’ve listened to some of your suggestions about the Dreyer account,” Gilligan replied amiably.

  Orcutt flushed. “Well, Mr. Shaw certainly never listened to my suggestions. But when I asked to put off my vacation, he seemed to guess why.”

  “Couldn’t afford one, eh?” Gilligan nodded to himself. “That figures.”

  Vandevanter was staring at his hand-picked junior executive in horror. �
��Do you mean that’s all you’ve been hiding? In the middle of a murder investigation, you’ve been acting mysteriously simply because of losing money?”

  Gilligan was amused. “I think Gene figured that wouldn’t be much of a recommendation for Shaw’s successor.”

  “Shaw realized that Orcutt was the perfect paid informant,” Thatcher explained. “But here he hit a stumbling block. The one thing everybody assured us was that Shaw never took Orcutt, or anyone else, into his confidence about his trading.”

  Orcutt at last found his tongue. “I didn’t expect him to, before the trading. But at least he could have explained to me afterward.”

  “Wait until you’re over sixty-five and they force a young assistant on you,” Thatcher advised. “But there we have the whole situation as it looked to Shaw until the day he was murdered. It only took one departure from routine on that day to make the whole thing crystal clear to him.”

  “Now wait a minute.” Leo Gilligan had retired into his own furious thoughts, traces of which could be seen in his furrowed brow and tapping finger.

  Thatcher watched these efforts appreciatively.

  “A departure . . .? Oh! I get you. Shaw came on the floor before he was ready to buy in person. He must have caught Martini in the act.”

  “Exactly!” Thatcher beamed. “Now what do you think happened before the first murder? Remember the sequence of Frohlich’s movements.

  First, he saw Shaw, then he did some trading of his own, through his broker, Russ Martini. The next thing, he’s back across the hall, reviewing Shaw’s trade for the day. Finally he urgently wants to consult Shaw.”

  The furrows and tappings were things of the past. Gilligan’s brow was cloudless, his expression serene. “It’s as plain as the nose on your face,” he concluded.

  “Possibly to you,” said Curtis Yeoman huffily. “Would it be too much trouble to enlighten the rest of us? I think I speak for Howard as well as myself.”

  Appeals for solidarity to Howard were not going to be honored for some time. Vandevanter gave him one jaundiced look and dissociated himself.

  “I think I see what you’re driving at,” he said, as irritatingly as possible. “Frohlich caught both ends of some transaction.” Wisely, he decided to leave it at that.

  “Sure,” said Gilligan. He turned to Thatcher. “I assume you mean that Martini was using the information for his own profit.”

  “More than that. He was putting his own trades through first, regardless of the consequences to Dreyer. The worst thing a commodity broker can do.”

  “They’re all bastards,” Gilligan said largely. “But it makes plenty of sense. This is the way it worked out. Shaw phones an order to Martini in Frohlich’s hearing. Martini doesn’t know that. Then Frohlich hears Martini placing the Dreyer trade ten minutes too late. It doesn’t click right away. When it does, he wants to check with Shaw’s records. He still doesn’t have a watertight case, but he’s got plenty to talk to Shaw about. Thinking that they’ll both be at the banquet, he leaves for Dreyer.

  “In the midst of all this, Martini learns that Frohlich wants to speak with Shaw urgently. There were plenty of people—”

  “Sir?”

  Again every eye was on Orcutt. He gulped unhappily. “I think maybe I can explain that. I told Mr. Shaw that Frohlich was looking for him in front of Mr. Martini.”

  Gilligan glared at his subordinate. “And what else did you tell Martini?”

  But this time Orcutt could shake his head decisively. “It wasn’t me. It was Mr. Shaw,” he declared confusingly. “He was in a bad mood. He kind of snapped at me not to interrupt. It couldn’t be very important, he said, because Frohlich had been here only a little while ago, when the Russians and the Americans linked up in space. Then he sent me on some errand. I think he repeated Frohlich’s joke as soon as he got me out of the way.”

  “There you have it,” Thatcher said, pleased at this unexpected corroboration. “Every radio in New York was tuned to the docking. I’m sure Martini’s office was no exception. To his horror, he realized that Frohlich had been privy to both ends of the transaction and had immediately set out in search of Shaw. That was quite enough for Russ Martini to know he was in deep trouble unless he could prevent the meeting. I assume that Shaw would have had no doubts about what to do.”

  “Good God, no!” Curtis Yeoman exploded. “Amory was a fanatic about the integrity of the Cocoa Exchange. He would have had Martini stripped of his license and probably sent to jail. Wayne Glasscock wouldn’t have shillyshallied with a complaint made by Amory Shaw.”

  Howard Vandevanter was more concerned with Dreyer than with Wayne Glasscock. “But this must have been going on for some time. How did Martini get away with it?”

  “He was protected by Shaw’s own habits of secrecy,” Thatcher reminded him. “Besides, he must have been prudent enough to wait for a confused market when he could explain away—”

  Thatcher halted as the door was flung open. Mrs. Macomber was too excited for apologies.

  “Oh, Mr. Gilligan,” she stammered. “Mr. Mears is on the line. He’s all upset. Cocoa has just hit ninety! He can’t leave the floor, and no one’s in his office. What should he do about your stop orders? Is he still your broker? He doesn’t know—”

  “Lord!” Gilligan was surging from his chair, beating out a shower of sparks from his cigar. “Orcutt, I want you with me.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “It happened even sooner than I expected. Boy, is Dreyer going to make a pretty penny out of this!” Gilligan’s running commentary was a song of triumph as he stalked toward the hall. “If we can catch it before ninety-one, we’ll be in gravy.”

  “I’m coming with you,” declared Howard Vandevanter, also on his feet. “It’s high time I learned more about the Cocoa Exchange.”

  “Then just come and don’t interfere,” commanded Gilligan without breaking stride. All three of them swept out of the office without a backward glance.

  “But you haven’t finished,” Yeoman protested to Thatcher. “What about the car? What about that woman?”

  Thatcher and Charlie were already shrugging themselves into coats.

  “I don’t think anybody is interested just now,” Thatcher said gently.

  But it is well known that foreigners have more tenacity of purpose than flibbertigibbet Americans. In the crowded week following Russ Martini’s arrest, John Thatcher did not forget Dr. Umberto Mercado and Signor Giorgio Alizio. The Leonard Dreyer Trust owed them a great deal, and two men who had yearned to see the Royal Dutch Motel must be going mad with the newspaper accounts they were reading in their hotel rooms. A telephone call confirmed this suspicion, eliciting a torrent of Italianate gratitude for an invitation to view the Cocoa Exchange.

  “And it is all just as they said,” marveled Alizio after a Cook’s tour featuring Martini & Mears, Amory Shaw’s office, and the perch from which Thatcher had seen a man die on the floor of the Exchange. “Your Daily News and Times and New York Post and Wall Street Journal.”

  Leo Gilligan, who had been acting as usher, stopped pouring Scotch. “If you’ve been following all those papers, you must know more about the murder than anyone else.”

  “Like hell we do!” Dr. Mercado’s hands might not have been designed to fondle Etruscan vases, but they could make some quite expressive negative gestures. “We know why the murders were committed—”

  “Well, that’s simple enough,” Gilligan interrupted. “Russ Martini had his hand in the till and was willing to kill anybody who caught him at it.”

  “We know how they were committed, we know who committed them, but,” Mercado said accusingly to Thatcher, “we don’t know how you broke the thing apart.”

  “And the car,” Alizio insisted. “How did that enter?”

  “The police chief in Dreyer was on to that point, right away,” Thatcher replied. “If one man killed Frohlich and drove away from Dreyer in a car, how did he get back? And if he didn’t have to come back, the
n he had never officially been in Dreyer. When I became suspicious of Martini, I remembered Charlie Trinkam had overheard a fuss in Martini’s office about the bill for a rental car.”

  “Always there are fusses about rental cars,” Alizio said resignedly. “Never do they charge the correct amount, always too much or too little.”

  “Very true. But Martini had received a personal refund that he did not wish to explain to his secretary. You can understand why he was bothered. He had deliberately not used his company credit card to prevent any flowback to his office. He did not want his secretary asking why he was driving a rented car around upstate New York on the night of Frohlich’s murder. He had paid in cash, and then the wretched refund rose to haunt him.”

  Mercado was still troubled. “I can see how it was a pain in the neck for him. But how did it help you?”

  “I remembered Captain Huggins’ interest in the murder car. So, with the help of Howard Vandevanter, I asked him a question. If he had the identity of the murderer and the name of the rental agency, could he gather any proof? His answer was enthusiastic. He was already assuming the murderer had checked into some motel at a discreet distance from Dreyer. With Russ Martini’s picture, he located that woman in under an hour—she, of course, was the motel owner. Then, with the license number, he backtracked Martini to the Hertz agency in Utica. Remember, Martini had decided to follow Frohlich to Dreyer on the spur of the moment. He had no time for elaborate planning. He flew out to Utica in the commuting rush, hired a car and committed his murder. The next morning he was up early enough to check in the car and return on another commuter flight. Apparently he was away from home at night often enough so that raised no problems.”

  “Very enlightening,” said Alizio, as polite as ever.

  “No, it isn’t,” said Dr. Mercado more candidly. “How did you get suspicious of Martini in the first place?”

  “By noticing a pattern in the Cocoa Exchange that pointed straight to him.”

  “Now, wait just one minute,” growled Leo Gilligan. “No offense intended, Thatcher, but if you noticed a pattern in cocoa last week, Amory Shaw should have spotted it within an hour.”