Murder to Go

by Emma Lathen

  Thatcher could understand Robichaux’s vehemence. In modern America, where cigarette firms were buying hotels and where frozen-food producers were diversifying into razor blades, such surprise argued a powerful insulation from the forces of the marketplace.

  “I’m not sure that Southeastern Insurance is such a good catch,” he observed calmly.

  “Now, don’t get me wrong,” Robichaux urged, tacking sharply. “Southeastern isn’t composed entirely of fossils. When we gave them the report on Hedstrom, most of the management was ready to bow to the inevitable. Hell! The offer was too good to pass up. Only a couple of the old trouts stood out.”

  Thatcher grinned. He often thought that Robichaux’s own private calendar had become permanently stuck during Prohibition. “But still no real enthusiasm?” he persisted.

  “What could you expect? The simplest thing for Hedstrom to do with that management is sweep it out!” Robichaux spoke with an enthusiasm which might have surprised his clients in Philadelphia. “But it was still too good not to recommend to the stockholders.”

  “Very altruistic of them,” Thatcher said dryly. “I suppose Southeastern’s management owns stock, too?”

  Robichaux drew his head back like an affronted walrus. “Well, what do you think?” he demanded indignantly.

  “I’d like to think that Hedstrom knows what he’s doing,” Thatcher said gloomily.

  “That boy isn’t taking shots in the dark. He probably figures that with the right management, Southeastern can take a real spurt. You can bet that he took a long cold look.” Suddenly Robichaux was reminded of his own grievances. “He probably made up his mind in half the time it took me to persuade Southeastern. I’d still be at it if one of the directors didn’t happen to be a big broiler king. He was hot for the deal, knows all about Hedstrom.”

  “A broiler king?” Things were worse than he had thought, Thatcher decided.

  “He owns one of these huge chicken places. God knows what they call them. It can’t be farms. They raise thirty thousand birds at a time. They sound more like factories. Anyway, he supplies Hedstrom, so he knew all about him.”

  Thatcher nodded. “All right, Tom. You’ve sold me—for the time being, at least. Hedstrom is a reasonable bet and so is Southeastern. I’m willing to go along.”

  Robichaux signaled to the waiter for coffee and relaxed. “Amazing when you stop to think of it,” he said. “Hedstrom may well give Getty and Howard Hughes a run for the money.”

  “If what you say is right . . .”

  “And the whole thing rests on a chain of chicken restaurants . . .”

  A spoon hovered as Robichaux continued, contributing some personal philosophy.

  “Just between the two of us, John—and I wouldn’t like it to go any farther—I’m old-fashioned. I still think of railroads and oil—or even cars or soap. But chickens? Well, that’s one helluva way to make big money!”

  CHAPTER 2

  TOP WITH CRUMBS

  WALL STREET financiers might well view Chicken Tonight with incomprehension, but Wall Street financiers have time, money, cooks and canard à l’orange at their disposal. In less rarefied strata it is otherwise. For years young wives have pushed their carts along supermarket aisles, done a little comparative pricing and turned chicken into America’s economy food, not its luxury. “What chicken again?” has become the lament of the rising young executive.

  But while husbands asked rhetorical questions, American housewives got to the root of the matter: “Why cook?”

  The answer was promptly provided by pioneers in the field of food delivery. Call us up, they said, and we’ll deliver fully cooked chicken, with side orders of cole slaw, to your front door. But the frontier days of primitive fried chicken and cole slaw were numbered. Almost overnight, the food-delivery field was revolutionized. While purists and conservatives stuck to fried chicken, Chicken Tonight with its twenty-five, thirty-two, forty-one delicious varieties of chicken was born. And, with lightning rapidity, it grew and prospered.

  One reason that this phenomenon (and the soaring price of Chicken Tonight stock) bemused Tom Robichaux and most of Wall Street was that, unlike the neon-lit hamburger stand, Chicken Tonight was largely invisible to its patrons. Frank Hedstrom did not waste money on showy downtown locations. Chicken Tonight in Willoughby, New Jersey, was typical. It occupied three converted storefronts in an old building two blocks off Main Street. It boasted only a modest sign. Many of its steadiest customers did not know where it was. The important thing, however, was that regularly every Wednesday night they phoned in their orders:

  “For the seven o’clock truck, OK? One chicken Oregano, one chicken Mandarin. Two side orders of fried apples, one cranberry relish, two muffins . . .”

  When it rained, snowed, grew very hot or very cold, regulars and others called Monday and Tuesday as well. On the weekends, everybody called.

  What customers did recognize was the gaudy gold-and-orange Chicken Tonight truck, currently parked behind the store. Its dazzling stripes were always carefully polished; there was a model chicken over the driver’s cab, and, inside, a heating system from which each order was plucked, already packed. The trucks, driven by high-school boys, sped around Willoughby after dark with youthful exuberance.

  Indoors, the Willoughby Chicken Tonight was like every other Chicken Tonight in the country. There was a vast array of stainless-steel equipment, from ingredient bins to microwave ovens to giant refrigerators and pumps dispensing prepackaged mixes. A telephone order, taken by one of three girls, was relayed instantly to the tall young man standing near the phone desk; he pushed buttons and sent a complete order down an assembly line of dippers, turners, cookers, packagers and wrappers. In seven minutes your order was cooked, packed in heat-retaining containers and whisked to the waiting truck. The truck left every twenty minutes. Vernon Akers, who owned the Willoughby franchise, had reported these speeds to the home office and was still trying to match Chicken Tonight in Needham, Massachusetts, where orders took five minutes to fill and trucks left every fifteen minutes.

  And the meal delivered to your door, while it could not rival a French chef’s quail under glass, was guaranteed (money back) to be hot, tempting, ample and cheap.

  This, in short, was what had mystified John Putnam Thatcher—automated chicken.

  From four o’clock in the afternoon to midnight, Chicken Tonight in Willoughby was an orderly bedlam. Just now it was ten in the morning.

  “. . . and two boxes of chicken Paprika, two of chicken Tarragon and four of chicken Mexicali. Right?”

  Vern Akers nodded.

  “Say, that chicken Mexicali is really going over big, isn’t it?” Clyde Sweeney drove the weekly supply truck from Chicken Tonight’s Trenton warehouse. He sounded incredulous. “What the hell is it?”

  “Don’t ask me. I don’t know what’s in half the flavors.” Akers was busy checking invoices against his order list. “Dodie! What’s in the Mexicali?”

  His wife looked up from a ledger. She was a bustling energetic woman with a short crop of wiry dark hair. At the moment, her face was marked with a long streak of ink where she had rubbed a finger against her cheek.

  “Chili powder,” she said absently. “Oh, hello, Clyde, you’re early this week.”

  “I’ve been rushing to get to the Akerses’. They have the best coffee on my route.”

  Dodie grinned. “All right. I can take a hint.” She pushed back her chair. “It’ll be a relief to get away from these damned books.”

  “Now, Dodie,” her husband said, “it’s a lot less work than cleaning out all these tanks. And, if you’re getting coffee, how about some of those breakfast rolls you made?”

  While his wife was out of the room Vern Akers finished checking the invoices and handed back the flimsies. Clyde Sweeney slapped his order book closed as a signal that business was suspended. He became social.

  “I’ve got a hot tip on the second race at Garden State tomorrow, Vern. Be a crime to pass i
t up.”

  Vern Akers shrugged. “No, Clyde. I don’t know how it is. I used to get a real kick out of the ponies, but not any more.”

  Clyde Sweeney shook his head dubiously. He was a small, jaunty man with long carefully trimmed sideburns. He was wearing the gold-and-orange uniform of all Chicken Tonight drivers. Off duty, however, he was a dapper dresser, recognizable two blocks away as a sport, a bachelor, a man who always had money riding on the horses, the World Series, the Celtics or the Rangers. Now the missionary spirit moved him.

  “Give yourself a break, Vern,” he urged. “You work plenty hard. You deserve a little fun.”

  “That’s just the trouble, Clyde,” Akers explained. “It’s no fun any more. I tell you, once you’ve gambled your life savings on starting your own business, marching up to the five-dollar window isn’t much of a thrill. In fact, playing dominoes is a lot more exciting.”

  Sweeney was pained but tolerant. “Now, look, Vern,” he protested, “you can’t be in any real trouble. I deliver your orders. They’re getting bigger every week.”

  Vern Akers struggled to express himself. His bewildered frown had become almost permanent in the last eighteen months.

  “Oh, it’s not how much we’re selling,” he said.

  “Well, then?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” said former Master Sergeant Vernon Akers in a burst of frankness. “Running your own business isn’t like being in the Army.”

  “Christ! I should hope not! Wasn’t twenty years enough for you?” Clyde Sweeney had never been in the Army, but he had heard about it.

  Akers was unresentful. “There’s a lot to be said for the service,” he ruminated aloud. “You’ve got your own job to do, and you don’t worry about anything else. But here you’ve got a hundred things to worry about. If it isn’t the help not turning up, it’s figuring out what supplies you’re going to need. And as for getting anything fixed—well, that’s hopeless. Honest to God, I sometimes think Dodie and me spent too long in Japan and Germany and Alaska. We’re out of touch.”

  Clyde Sweeney broke into the recital. “But you’re making a go of things here. So what are you complaining about?”

  “I’m not complaining. I’m just trying to get things straight. If it weren’t for the way Chicken Tonight has got things organized, we could never have gotten off the ground. We lease all this equipment from them, you know, and that training program they gave us was great. And of course the whole preparation of the orders is standardized.”

  “Coffee!” Dodie announced, returning with a tray. She helped them to cream and sugar and then extended a plate to Sweeney. “Try one of these, Clyde. They’re homemade, believe it or not. The only thing around here that is.” She looked around with mock disgust at the array of ovens and freezers lining two walls. “When Vern broke it to me that we were opening a Chicken Tonight, I thought my twenty years of cooking was going to come in handy. Instead, he’s running a factory while I’m a bookkeeper.”

  Vern grinned. “That’s what I was explaining to Clyde. They’ve got the whole thing down to a science. We get the different mixes in a dry powder. All we have to do is to dump them into the pumps. Just the right amount of water is automatically added. Then, when you slide a chicken under the spigot, the right amount is pumped out. Then the ovens do everything but make change for you. That’s what I call management.”

  Dodie was unimpressed. As she poured more coffee, she said, “If they’re so smart, why don’t they automate the bookkeeping?”

  “Maybe they will,” her husband replied. “They’re putting in a new system to cut down on the work in the warehouses and the trucks. You watch your step, or you’ll be automated right out of a job.”

  “Like me,” said Clyde Sweeney. “I was meaning to tell you. This is the last time I’ll be around. I’ve already got my layoff notice. They’re cutting back the drivers by fifteen percent.”

  The Akerses looked at him in concern.

  “Oh, Clyde,” said Dodie with quick sympathy. “That’s awful. What are you going to do?”

  Sweeney gave a snappy little thumbs-up gesture. “Don’t worry about me, Dodie. Mrs. Sweeney’s little boy learned how to take care of himself a long time ago. I’ve already got something else lined up.”

  “That’s good. But I still say it’s too bad,” Dodie persisted. “We’ll miss you. Will you still be in these parts?”

  “I expect to do some traveling. But don’t tell Sue yet. I still want to see if she’ll break down and come out with me Saturday night.”

  Dodie was not encouraging. Sweeney had been trying to date her daughter for the last six months. “It’s no good, Clyde. I think she’s just about ready to get married.”

  “Let me make one last try. I just saw her out in the parking lot. By the way, here are the new menus. I think I’ll go out and start unloading the truck.”

  He left, and clucking gently, Dodie turned her attention to the familiar cardboard folders, zebra-striped in gold and orange.

  Vern too had returned to business. “Well, what do you know?” he said, looking up from some literature from the home office. “You know how many delicious flavors of chicken we’ve got now, Dodie? We’ve got forty-three!”

  Specialization has its drawbacks. Wall Street, including John Putnam Thatcher and the Sloan Guaranty Trust, concentrated on Chicken Tonight, Inc., its assets and liabilities, its rate of growth and earnings per share. Chicken Tonight proprietors, like the Akerses in Willoughby, charted the success of the new chicken Mexicali and reviewed the sales of chicken Magyar (sour cream) and chicken Arabian (pistachios). On balance, both Wall Street and Willoughby were cautiously optimistic.

  The view from Philadelphia was rather more comprehensive. Possibly because of this, the prevailing mood was not particularly sunny. Twelve sober businessmen in an ancient board room not far from Rittenhouse Square were coming to the end of a long meeting.

  For once, the board of directors of Southeastern Insurance had not gone through the motions of a meaningless ritual. For the first time in many decades, the board had had real business to get its teeth into. Chicken Tonight’s bid to take over Southeastern Insurance had seemed like a vision of Frank Hedstrom. But others, it developed, were only too willing to share the vision. The board had just learned that Southeastern stockholders were returning proxies at an astonishing rate, eloquent testimony that they wanted nothing more than to have their company absorbed by Chicken Tonight. At the present clip, the necessary two-thirds-approval would be in hand weeks before the stockholder meeting.

  The prevailing mood was well-bred astonishment punctuated by elderly regret.

  “I can’t get over it,” quavered the chairman of the board, an eminent septuagenarian. He flicked over a pile of garish brochures. “Chicken Mexicali! Chicken Neapolitan! I never thought I’d live to see the day when Southeastern became part of a hash-house operation.”

  “Oh, now sir . . .” said several voices.

  “Chicken Hawaiian!” said the chairman, with deep disgust. “Oh well, I’m an old man. You younger fellows have to have your way. Chicken Polynesian!” He rose from his place at the head of the table and, like minor royalty, made his way toward a waiting Rolls-Royce, punctiliously escorted by several junior officers of the company.

  “Poor old Cadwallader,” said another director, relaxing now that business was over. “I don’t think he’ll get over it. Of course, at his age he can’t be expected to see what a real opportunity this is.”

  “Careful,” said somebody in his ear, but it was too late.

  Buell Ogilvie, president of Southeastern Insurance, was even older than the chairman of the board. He too was clambering to his feet.

  “Well, well, well!” he said testily. “I think I’ll be going on, too, Morgan. Sad day—sad to see an old firm go. But, Roberts, you never get too old to see profits when they’re under your nose! Not if you’re an Ogilvie—or a Cadwallader! Well, I’m on my way. Give my regards to Margaret, won’t you, Morgan
?”

  Only after a second ceremonial withdrawal did conversation become genuinely unbuttoned.

  “Whew!” It was a long breath, expelled with triumphant relief. Pelham Browne was not only a member of Southeastern’s board, he was a prime mover in the proposed merger. He had taken a modest (by Philadelphia standards) inheritance and parlayed it into a million-dollar poultry farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. A large, florid man, he was not particularly sensitive to atmosphere, but he knew better than anybody else in the room just how good an opportunity Chicken Tonight offered.

  “It’s going better than I thought,” he said to no one in particular. “Of course, change always hurts—even when it’s sweetened by a good healthy chunk of dough. But I tell you, Chicken Tonight’s offer was too darned good for us to turn down. They’re really going places. Do you know they’ve upped their purchases from me five times in the last year?”

  He had finished by sounding rather defensive.

  Morgan Ogilvie, the executive vice-president and the real head of Southeastern Insurance, nodded absentmindedly. “There’s no doubt you’re right, Pel.”

  Pelham Browne was the kind of man whose feelings showed. At the moment, he was indignant. “For God’s sake! We’re all on our way to making big money, by merging with Chicken Tonight. And you’d think we were attending a wake!” he exploded.

  Morgan Ogilvie smiled thinly. “Well,” he said reflectively, “I confess I don’t like this move any better than Uncle Buell does. But, like him, I see the financial advantages. I do wish we had had more time to get used to the whole idea. After all, Pel, Chicken Tonight and Southeastern Insurance—well, it’s going to take time to get used to. You don’t give up a company that’s had an honored name for one hundred years without a twinge or two.”

  “I’ll take the twinge,” said Pel Browne rather coarsely, “when it comes sugar-coated this way.”

  His fellow-directors had heard Pelham Browne before. One of them turned to Ogilvie. “Morgan,” he said, “I know you voted to go ahead, but tell me, do you have any real reservations now we’re in the home stretch?”