Murder Takes a Partner

by Haughton Murphy

  “Yeah. The other one is that Turnbull woman. All you tell me about her, Reuben, intrigues me. But was she mad enough to hire Wilson? I want to know more about her. For instance, what was she like up in Syracuse? How did she behave up there? I may just go upstate and do some checking around.”

  “Yes, it might be worth it,” Frost said. “Besides, you’ll love Syracuse.”

  “I’m sure,” Bautista said glumly. “In and out real fast is what I have in mind.”

  “There are only two things you need to know about Syracuse,” Frost said. “You’re too young for this to have much meaning, but Syracuse was the largest city in the United States to vote for Alf Landon in 1936.” Bautista looked puzzled, so Frost explained further. “That was the year Franklin Roosevelt won every state except Maine. There were damn few cities anywhere that voted for Landon, but just remember Syracuse was the biggest one.”

  “Okay, what’s the second thing I need to know?”

  “Some years ago, a fellow tried to start a first-rate jazz club up there—real stars, real musicians. But the place went broke inside of a year. The local paper, the Herald as I recall, interviewed him and asked what went wrong. ‘I learned my lesson,’ he said. ‘If I put on the Last Supper in my club with the original cast, these cheap bastards in Syracuse wouldn’t pay a fifty-cent cover charge to see it.’”

  “You sure make it sound attractive,” Bautista said, laughing. “No wonder Mrs. Turnbull wanted to get out of there.”

  “I wish you luck,” Frost said. “As I told you the other night, I’m off to Portland, Oregon, tomorrow and will be back Thursday. When will you go upstate?”

  “Probably Thursday.”

  Realizing that Frost had a morning flight, Luis and Francisca got up to leave. As they did so, Frost said to Bautista, “Let’s talk Thursday night to see what’s new. Though I can’t imagine I’ll have any news after my day in Portland.”

  15

  DETOUR: I

  Wednesday morning, Frost hailed a cab in front of his house to take him to LaGuardia Airport and the ten-fifteen United flight to Portland. On the way he noted with satisfaction that the Times gave full coverage to the NatBallet performance in honor of Clifton Holt, including liberal quotations from Cynthia’s remarks. Her speech really had been very gracious and he was pleased to see it accurately quoted.

  At LaGuardia, he proceeded directly to the gate, as he carried only a small overnight bag for his brief trip. It was all rather silly, he thought—traveling almost across the country to have a meeting with Earle Ambler. All to discuss corporate maneuvers that he was sure had little relevance to Ambler’s broadcasting company.

  But inconvenient as the trip was, Frost was not entirely ungrateful for the chance to get away from the investigation of Holt’s murder. Besides, Ambler had been a good client and if now, as a lonely widower (his wife Sarah having died two years earlier), he wanted to have Frost keep him company, Frost couldn’t complain too much.

  There was a short wait at the gate until Frost was issued his first-class boarding pass. (He knew the first-class fare probably violated Chase & Ward’s guidelines, which said that travel should be in accordance with the client’s policies. Knowing how close Ambler was with his money, and how tightly he operated Ambler Broadcasting Company, he suspected Ambler policy might well be to travel by Greyhound bus. Frost had never actually bothered to ask what Ambler’s travel rules were. At his age, if he was going to make a transcontinental overnight trip, he was going first class, thank you. The new business class, or whatever they called it, probably would have done nicely, but too bad. He had always traveled first class before, and Ambler had never made a fuss when the disbursement showed up on the Chase & Ward bill.)

  The Boeing 727 was not crowded, and Frost had a window seat with an empty aisle seat beside him, for which he was grateful. The plane left the gate on time, and there was no delay in leaving the ground. Almost instantly the rather bookish-looking young stewardess came around offering drinks.

  Frost was always taken aback at the prospect of drinking in the morning and refused the woman’s offer. He asked instead for a plain tomato juice and was told he would have to settle for something called “Snappy Tom,” which he knew from past experience was a thoroughly vile concoction purveyed by the airlines as a base for Bloody Marys.

  “It’s very good,” the stewardess said.

  “No, it isn’t,” Frost snapped. “Give me a Perrier.”

  “Will club soda do?”

  “I suppose so,” he replied grumpily.

  Several of those around him did not share his compunction about morning drinking, and dipped eagerly into the bourbon and Scotch. Why did they do it? Were they trying to drink up their fares? Or were they simply incapable of saying “no” when a drink was offered, whatever the hour? He had never known how to explain the phenomenon.

  Frost drank his soda water gloomily. He regretted again that he had not had a chance to talk to the M&A experts in his office before this trip, but he was confident, as he had been on Monday, that he could field the expected barrage of Ambler’s questions. He was sure that Ambler was seeking “country-club” advice, the term Frost had once invented for legal advice that was probably not going to be used in a client’s business, but would stand the recipient in good stead at his country club when talking with other captains of industry.

  A decade earlier, country-club advice had centered on “going public.” Ambler Broadcasting, after much agonizing on Earle Ambler’s part, had done so in the 1960s, selling off forty percent of its common stock to public shareholders, though leaving Earle Ambler firmly in control. But the subject had been discussed incessantly before the decision had been made and Frost knew that Ambler talked over going public with other prosperous company owners at his golf club and, indeed, had heard him do so on more than one occasion.

  Now, Frost was sure, the subject would be “going private”—getting rid of the Ambler public shareholders by some sort of buy-out, or perhaps by a sale of the whole company. This was the craze of the 1980s—the investment bankers’ way of earning fees (shared to a lesser extent by lawyers) now that every business except the corner hash house had “gone public”—and Frost was sure Ambler wanted to be up-to-date. As a result of Frost’s brief trip, Ambler would be able to pepper his nineteenth-hole conversations at the Oswego Lake Country Club with references to “my lawyers in New York think” or “Chase & Ward thinks” when the subject of “going private” came up.

  Frost’s thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of lunch—a dark brown lump of steak with mysterious gravy, underdone sliced potatoes and overcooked carrots. He found eating steak before noon almost as repellent as having a drink, but he picked at the plate put before him, while declining the proffered California red wine.

  At the end of the meal, the stewardess brought coffee with what she chose to call “cream.” Frost was ready. Always loyal to his roots in the dairy country of Upstate New York, he knew at a glance that the little vial of “nondairy creamer” had almost every ingredient known to man except any that had ever been near a cow. Besides, he was convinced that oily dairy substitutes were bad for his stomach.

  “Could I have some regular milk, please?” he asked. The stewardess smiled tightly—he had interrupted the flow of the coffee-serving routine—but brought him the milk he had requested when she finished her coffee rounds. (In times past, Frost had sometimes explicitly pointed out that the dairy substitute being served was not milk, let alone “cream.” But this had on occasion led to his being treated like an unwelcome vacuum-cleaner salesman, or at least being subjected to a pained expression on the flight attendant’s face that had “crank” written all over it. The compromise was to ask, as he had done, for milk, hoping that the message of the downtrodden dairy farmer would get through nonetheless.)

  Lunch over, Frost napped until the plane landed in Denver. There was to be an hour’s wait, so he left the plane to stretch his legs in the airport. He had no wish to b
uy anything, but looked over the “native handicrafts” in the gift shop. His short foray proved his theory that the telltale sign that one had left New York was the hats of the men. Clothing and accessories in airports, in New York or anywhere else, were not that different—lots of blue jeans, bright-colored composition slacks on most of the women (usually the ones with the broadest bottoms, too), backpacks—but men’s hats were. Once one saw big Stetsons with bands of feathers, one knew that he was west of the Hudson River (maybe only as far as Albany or Harrisburg, but definitely west).

  Once Frost had reboarded the plane, he declined United’s kind invitation to have a second lunch. Although the hop from Denver to Portland was short, he napped once again, awakening only when the seat-belt announcement was made as the plane approached the Rose City.

  Frost took a cab directly to the Ambler Broadcasting offices on Broadway, hearing a detailed recital from the driver as they went about the severity of the recently ended winter. But the ride was pleasant enough, since the driver spoke English, knew where he was going, did not play the radio and drove a car that might even have been cleaned recently (all signs, Frost thought, just like the feathered Stetsons, that one had left New York).

  It was now three-thirty local time, and Frost knew Ambler was expecting him. The friendly receptionist confirmed this—she recognized Frost from earlier visits and greeted him warmly—and told him to go straight in to Ambler’s office.

  “Reuben! Good to see you. You must have been right on time,” Ambler said by way of welcome. He got up from behind his desk and shook hands with enthusiasm. He was a stocky, ruddy man about a head shorter than Frost and dressed, as he usually was in the office, in a blue blazer and gray flannel slacks (no three-piece banker’s uniform here). “Your flight okay?”

  “Fine, except they wanted to feed me too much—and to start me drinking at dawn,” Frost replied.

  “I know, I know. But that’s how they keep you strapped in and not making trouble.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Put your bag and coat over there,” Ambler said. “I thought we could talk for a while; then we’ll take you over to the Benson. Are you free for dinner, by the way?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. I’ve made a reservation at the Couch Street Fish House. We’ve been there before.”

  “Yes. I remember it well.”

  “Is that okay? Maybe you’d like something fancier. Or Prima Donna, perhaps.” Ambler guffawed.

  “Prima Donna?”

  “A good, noisy jazz joint over by the University. Very popular. But I don’t think it’s for two old geezers like us.”

  “It doesn’t sound it.”

  “How about some coffee, Reuben? Or a soda? We’ll save the serious drinking for later.”

  “Thanks, Earle, coffee would be fine.”

  Ambler went to the door and asked his secretary to bring coffee. She did—and it came with a small pitcher of real cream.

  “So what kind of trouble are you in, Earle?” Frost asked after the secretary had left.

  Ambler guffawed again. “No trouble, Reuben. No trouble at all. I just need some advice on a couple of things, and besides I wanted to see you. How’s Cynthia, by the way?”

  “She’s just fine, thanks. She sends her love.”

  “Good. Wonderful wife you’ve got there, Reuben. Hold on to her.”

  “I do my best,” Frost said, smiling.

  “How old are you, Reuben?” Ambler asked, changing the subject. “Seventy-three?”

  “Seventy-five, I’m afraid.”

  “You look good for such an old fellow, you know.”

  “Thanks, Earle. You don’t do so badly yourself.”

  “Well, I’m a mere kid compared to you—seventy-two. And that’s really why I wanted to see you. I’ve got to get my affairs in order so that this outfit isn’t a complete wreck when I die. Got to take care of ABC.” (Ambler had always facetiously called his Company “ABC”; it was not as large or as well known as American Broadcasting but was, for its size, even more profitable.)

  “It doesn’t look like that’s about to happen,” Frost said.

  “I hope you’re right. I love this business and I’m going to keep going as long as I’ve got my health and my marbles. That reminds me: there’s an old fellow I see over at the Club—eighty-eight if he’s a day, and still running his chain of department stores. Still the chief executive officer. He’s been talking about dying for years—‘When I die, when I die,’ he’s always saying. But he’s still the CEO, and recently he’s changed it—he now says ‘If I die, if I die.’ Silly old fool, he’s going to be six feet under just like the rest of us, but he thinks he’ll live forever!”

  “I know the type. And I hope I never get like that,” Frost said.

  “Me too,” Ambler replied. “Anyway, everybody’s got a lot of ideas about what I should do. I’ve got scarcely any family, you know. No children and now no wife. Just a sister and two nieces and two nephews. They’re all very nice, and very nice to me. But none of them’s interested in running this business. My sister, the mother of the other four, moved to California when she got married years ago and they all live there. I don’t think any of ’em would want to move back to Portland now.

  “The result of all this,” the old man went on, “is that I’ve got one investment banker after another in here with all kinds of schemes for ABC. There must be one of them here once a week at least. From all over the country. And one crazier than the next.”

  “What do they think you should be doing?”

  “Some of them want to find a buyer. They say that all the media giants would be delighted to buy ABC and then break it up. Sell off some of the stations and a lot of the cable TV operations. They say I could get a good price—well in excess of the current stock price. But I don’t want to do that. I want to stay here and run what I’ve built. At least for a few more years.”

  “How many properties do you have now?” Frost asked.

  “Well, there’re the six television stations—you know all about them—and, let’s see, eight radio: four AM and four FM. In cable, we’ve expanded a lot. We’re now in twenty towns, some pretty big, others fairly small, but with about sixty thousand subscribers in all.”

  “That’s a big increase.”

  “You’re right. All in the last three years. And the going price to sell seems to be about fifteen hundred bucks for each subscriber. That’s ninety million total for the whole cable operation. Not bad, heh?”

  “Not bad at all,” Frost replied. “What’s your investment in cable?”

  “Not much. Eighteen, twenty million tops. The thing’s a money machine. Once you hook a town up, all you’ve got to do is get a girl to send out the bills and to cart the money to the bank when it comes in. It’s even better than practicing law.”

  “Many things are, Earle.”

  “Anyway, I’m not going to sell the cable, or anything else.”

  “What other ideas do your banker friends have?” Frost asked.

  “Oh, plenty. The one they all seem to be crazed about is a leveraged buyout—‘LBO,’ isn’t that what they call it? Get my managers and officers to buy out the public shares, and pick up part of mine. And, of course, the investment-banking boys—and girls, I might add—suggesting this usually want to buy a piece of the action themselves.”

  “At a special cheap price, I bet.”

  “Always,” Ambler replied.

  The two old men launched into a serious discussion of an LBO for ABC. How many employees would be involved? Could they ever hope to borrow the money? And if they did, was there any prospect that the company, however profitable it might be, could generate enough income to pay the loans back?

  Then there was the question of Ambler himself. Would he stay on, or retire? Or gracefully and gradually remove himself from running things? He said he would only stay on long enough to effect an orderly transition, but Frost had his doubts.

  The conversation went on
for better than an hour but ended, just as Frost had predicted, without any resolution as to Ambler’s future, or his company’s.

  “One of these days—and very soon—I’m going to make up my mind what to do,” Ambler said. “Then I’ll need your help. Have you got people who can do these things?”

  “Oh, yes. Many. In your case, matters are not too complicated. I think my young partner—former partner—Peter Denny would be good. I don’t believe you’ve met him. And Keith Merritt, whom you do know, could do the tax work.”

  “Fine. I’ll let you know as soon as I decide anything,” Ambler said. “Now, you must be tired, so why don’t I have one of the boys run you over to the hotel? I’ll pick you up there about quarter of seven in the lobby. Our reservation’s for seven. All right?”

  “Fine, Earle. I look forward to it.”

  Frost took a nap after checking into the Benson. Fortunately, he remembered to leave a call, so he was awakened at six-fifteen, in time to prepare for Ambler’s arrival. His client appeared in the ornate Benson lobby promptly at six-forty-five.

  “Have a nap?” Ambler asked.

  “Yes, I did,” Frost replied, somewhat defensively. It was clear that Ambler had come directly from his office—or at least, he had not shaved. Was he now patronizing Frost, three years his senior? Frost chose to think not.

  “Come on, my car’s outside,” Ambler said. They got in, and Ambler deftly maneuvered his Buick through the early-evening traffic. Frost was admiring; he had never learned to drive properly and felt that, behind the wheel, he would either kill or be killed.

  The restaurant was not far away, and Frost and Ambler soon were seated in a comfortable and relatively private corner table in the Couch Street Fish House.

  “Martini, Reuben?” Ambler asked.

  “If you insist,” Frost answered.

  “I’ll have one too,” Ambler said to the waiter.

  “You know, Reuben,” Ambler said, as they drank their cocktails, “fifty years ago I never thought I’d be sitting around with a high-powered—and high-priced—Wall Street lawyer talking about LBOs. I started out with one asset—one radio-broadcasting license—a few hundred dollars’ worth of junk broadcasting equipment and a two-year lease on a two-room studio. The bank owned me, and we were a staff of two, Sarah and me. We did everything—sold ads, read the news, you name it. And then, like every other broadcaster, we got lucky. The station made good, and we kept buying more of them. Television came, and we were ready. Then cable. And now a corporation worth four hundred million. Not bad, would you say?”