Murder Takes a Partner

by Haughton Murphy

  Frost and his client both had Bloody Marys.

  “What’s your problem, Flemming?” Frost asked.

  “I’m not sure I have one,” Andersen responded. “In fact I’m almost certain I don’t. But I want to get your opinion.”

  “Fine.”

  “I suppose your meter’s running for this,” Andersen said.

  “Why, Flemming, I’m glad you reminded me. I never would have thought to turn it on otherwise,” Frost answered, in a slightly acerbic tone.

  Frost realized that many of his colleagues would consider an obligatory weekend with a client time for which that client ought to be charged—indeed, perhaps even charged at a premium rate. But Frost was less prone to charge others for his time (especially now that he had so much of it). He was, however, sick of a lifetime of kidding by clients—even as good a one as Flemming Andersen—about hourly rates, meters running, inflated bills and countless other cheap shots carrying the implication that lawyers overcharged as a matter of course.

  Seeing a slightly puzzled look on Andersen’s face, Frost realized that his ironic remark had perhaps been misunderstood.

  “No, Flemming, this consultation is on the house,” Frost said quickly.

  His colleague described his encounter with Jeffrey Gruen. Frost listened noncommittally, then assured Andersen that his fears were almost certainly groundless.

  “Flemming, I don’t think AFC’s a very likely target. I know you gave Casper his parachute just in case, but the real reason for that was to show how much you loved him. No, Gruen and his kind want to raid companies that are badly run, where the management is vulnerable when attacked. Whatever your shortcomings, AFC is undeniably well run.

  “And another thing,” Frost went on, “these raiders want operations that they can chop up and sell off in pieces. AFC’s far too integrated for that. I can’t believe you have anything to worry about.”

  These assurances seemed to cheer Andersen up greatly. He ordered a second drink and began moving about the cabin, tousling the head of his granddaughter, flirting with Cynthia and petting Winston. This last move was a mistake; once roused, the dog exhibited a strong case of cabin fever, moving furiously around the confined passenger area and barking loudly. Dorothy Andersen tried to calm him without success; finally her father shouted “Sit!” in a commanding voice and Winston returned to his benign, though loud-breathing, state.

  Frost turned his swivel chair around to observe the pre-weekend festivities. He was glad he had buoyed up Flemming, and hoped he was right. But once the idea was planted, it would not go away. Maybe Gruen would be interested in AFC. Under Flemming’s careful and conservative management, it was certainly cash-rich, and cash was catnip to raiders like Gruen.

  But it was all very unlikely, except that … Frost, with an effort, cut off his own speculation; there was no obvious “except that,” and the annual celebratory Andersen weekend, about to begin when the plane landed, was no time to dream one up.

  FAMILY GATHERING: I

  2

  Saturday was a bright, clear day, more remindful of autumn than summer, but hospitable to the athletic activities that accompanied an Andersen outing. With golf and tennis behind them, the participants gathered on the vast green lawn behind the main building of the Mohawk Inn for a late-afternoon bout of water-balloon tag.

  The origins of this odd custom were clear—the elder Laurance Andersen had decreed that it was to be a part of the schedule. Why it continued year after year was more obscure; the silly game did not appear to have any ardent devotees. Yet most of the visitors uncomplainingly went through the ritual.

  The older guests, like the Frosts, were excused. (Reuben, even as a young man, had treated the tag matches with the contempt he reserved for all athletics. And Cynthia, an active ballerina in those earlier years, had begged off on grounds that the whole thing was too dangerous to her body.) So the tag matches were a contest between the next two generations.

  The rules of the game were simple—profoundly so. The contestants divided into two teams. One defended a flag—picturing a bogus Andersen family “crest”—while the other tried to capture it. The players on each side had access to a large supply of water-filled balloons, supplied by the hotel. The object was to tag a member of the opposition with one of the rubber missiles; if the effort was successful, the tagged player had to leave the game. The first team to capture the flag three times was the winner.

  The most vigorous player of all, who actually seemed to enjoy the whole exercise, was Randolph Hedley. A lawyer, like Frost, he was a middle-aged trust and estates partner in the sedate and proper New York firm of Slade, Beveridge & Dalton. As the lawyer for the Andersen Foundation, he was a fixture at the annual outing.

  Reuben Frost seldom saw Hedley except at the Mohawk Inn. The other lawyer was at least thirty years younger, and they were not social friends. And while he knew Hedley was a good, solid attorney, Frost nonetheless had reservations about him. Hedley was a model of rectitude, there was no question about that. But Frost sometimes felt, to use his old-fashioned phrase, that Randolph Hedley had a screw loose.

  How else did one account for the younger man’s current behavior? Frost thought, observing the water-balloon struggle from his rough-hewn Adirondack chair. How else did one make allowances for a grown man getting a kick out of tossing balloons filled with water at people?

  “Aha! Got you, Dorothy!” Hedley shouted maniacally, as he tagged Laurance Andersen’s daughter almost on top of Reuben’s chair.

  To each his own, Frost concluded. And if Hedley was a comfort to Sorella Andersen Perkins, who had the heavy responsibility of running the Andersen Foundation, let him be.

  As if summoned by his thoughts, Sorella Perkins came up beside Frost’s chair and sat on the arm.

  “Quite a sight, don’t you think?” the woman said. “I must say it gives you great confidence in the legendary New York Bar—look at Randolph Hedley, solicitor to the rich and famous! Look at him!”

  Hedley was now chasing Sorella’s young daughter.

  “Do you think he sees something sexual in this little game, Reuben? Look! He’s absolutely crazed, trying to splash young Kate.”

  “Just a game, Sorella,” Frost said calmly. “Randolph plays to win, whether it’s Foundation business or balloon tag.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” she replied. “But it’s a little hard to reconcile this frenzied man with our calm legal adviser at the Foundation.”

  “Any harder than to realize that the man over there in the Harry Truman shirt is one of the captains of American industry?” Frost asked, pointing across the balloon-tag playing field.

  “Oh, Father, you mean? Yes, I can believe it. Appearances are deceiving, after all. Don’t you think there are people around who say, ‘Does that mousy little creature run the Andersen Foundation?’ I’ve been in meetings where I’ve heard whispers that I’m sure were saying just such things.”

  “I doubt it, my dear,” Frost said. “Or at least, they didn’t say it after dealing with you for more than about two-and-a-half consecutive minutes.”

  Sorella protested modestly, but Frost was right. In outward appearance, Sorella Perkins was an unlikely candidate for running a multimillion-dollar foundation. She was athletically built, like her mother, but was bespectacled and, although she was thirty-eight, freckle-faced. She was reticently shy and was even quite capable of blushing in group conversation.

  Yet when Sorella Perkins felt at ease with a person she could kid and speak with the assurance she had just shown in talking with Reuben.

  They concluded their conversation as the tag match broke up—Hedley’s team, despite his strenuous exertions, had lost to the one headed by young Dorothy—and a sweating, exhausted group shuffled its way toward the locker rooms in the basement of the main hotel building.

  “See you at dinner,” Sorella said. “Let’s hope none of our players has overdone.”

  Saturday dinner was the main social event of the we
ekend. Unlike the informal Friday night buffet, Saturday’s dinner was black tie, and place cards (prepared and set out by the AFC staff in accordance with Sally Andersen’s strict instructions) dictated where each person sat.

  Reuben Frost, in a white dinner jacket, and Cynthia, in a fire-engine-red linen dress, mingled with their fellow guests at the reception preceding dinner. The cocktail hour was always long and amply catered; a Scandinavian appreciation for strong drink had not been bred out of the Andersen genes, though Black Label had long since replaced aquavit as the drink of choice.

  Reuben moved easily in the crowd. As a general rule, he had always tried to avoid social and personal involvement with his clients. Flemming Andersen and his family had been the exception, with Flemming insisting that the attorney-client relationship be warmed up. Frost knew all the family, though the grandchildren had an uncanny way of changing their shape and size—not to say mode of dress—from year to year.

  By the time dinner was announced he had made the rounds, drinking two gins-and-tonic in the process. Dinner was served at a series of round tables for eight. Frost found himself between Flemming Andersen’s younger daughter, Diana, and Dorothy, the winning water-balloon captain.

  Diana Andersen was not Frost’s favorite family member. She was, to put it most charitably, an ugly duckling. In her mid-thirties and unmarried, she had been known to denigrate loudly both the institution of marriage and men in general. Frost had not himself been treated to such an outburst, but he had heard about them from the woman’s father, who had become increasingly disturbed in the last year or two over Diana’s militant feminism.

  “I’m all for women’s rights,” he had told Frost just recently. “Didn’t I marry one of the original feminists—Sally Bryant, the tennis star? And look at AFC’s record, for God’s sake. But I find it harder and harder to tolerate Diana’s stridency and that Concerned Women’s outfit.” He was convinced that the “militant loudmouths” in Concerned Women were bleeding his daughter for money.

  “You having fun, Mr. Frost?” Diana asked, as Reuben pulled out her chair for her.

  “It’s passable,” Frost said, smiling.

  “I’m glad—and you with no family ties to drag you here. Family loyalty’s a wonderful thing when it can get the likes of me up here to the mountains. I hate the climate and this creepy inn—and I’m not madly in love with most of my family, either.” The woman laughed loudly, pulling a cigarette from the pack she was carrying as she talked to Frost. He instinctively reached for a match, but there were none at hand or in his pocket.

  “Never mind, I’ve got it,” Diana said, flicking on a Bic lighter. She was a chain-smoker and always traveled fully equipped.

  “They usually don’t let you smoke here, you know. Very prudish. But since Daddy rents the whole place, there’s not much they can do about it,” she went on, laughing again.

  During the first course, a new variety of SUPERBOWL mixed vegetable soup, Diana Andersen explained to Reuben that she really came to this August weekend to attend the family business meeting held each year on Sunday morning after church services and breakfast.

  “When you’re a woman in a big, rich family, you never know anything that’s going on,” she said. “The boys run the business, of course, and know what’s happening. But the women—they’re second-class citizens. Seen and not heard—that’s what’s expected.”

  “I’m sure that’s true in a lot of families,” Reuben answered. “But is it true of your father? I’ve always thought he was fairly open about the Company.”

  “Oh yes, he’s better than most. We have this annual meeting, and he’s always willing to answer questions—but don’t try to exert any power, or to express any opinions.”

  “Have you ever pressed him on that?” Frost asked. “Have you ever asked him if you could sit on the AFC Board?”

  Diana looked startled, then cross. “Of course not. Why would I? I know what his answer would be. I wouldn’t humiliate myself by asking.”

  Roast beef—good, simple, slightly overcooked roast beef—had arrived, and Diana Andersen turned her attention to it. She had not liked having her set view of her father challenged, and her displeasure showed.

  Frost was relieved to be able to turn to Dorothy Andersen on his left, although he had slight trepidation there, too, remembering from an encounter the year before, or perhaps two years before, that the girl spoke in expressionless monosyllables.

  But the young woman had changed radically since then. All Reuben had to do was turn in her direction, press an invisible “on” switch, and she was off on a free-form monologue. Frost heard about her summer in Spain, her freshman year at Brown before that and her plans for the coming fall in Providence. The talk was so unremitting that her listener had to urge her to eat.

  The girl took two hurried bites of her dinner and then veered into still a new subject. “Do you like dogs, Mr. Frost?” she asked.

  “Mmn. I guess so. Cynthia and I have never owned one, though,” he replied.

  “They’re really wonderful. Do you know … Rottweilers?”

  Frost was amused. Not at the question but at the singsong of her voice, which rose on the last word of each sentence—typical teenage inflection, he thought, and a throwback to the lilting speech of her Danish ancestors as well.

  “I think I do,” Frost said. “Winston—isn’t he a Rottweiler?”

  “Yes! How do you know Winston?”

  “I made his acquaintance on the plane yesterday, if you recall. And I believe I saw him around here today.”

  “Oh yes. He’s here all right. I love Winston. I’ve been training him since I got back from Spain. You can teach a Rottweiler anything.”

  “That’s interesting,” Frost said, thinking of the wet, amiable presence that had been at his feet the day before.

  “Have you been up to Connecticut?” the girl asked. “It’s not only full of Andersens, but dogs as well. Grandma has two poodles, Daddy has his Rottweiler and Aunt Sorella has two Dobermans. I don’t like them.”

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, they just seem mean to me,” the girl answered.

  The discussion of canines was interrupted when Flemming Andersen rose, tapped on his glass and began speaking.

  It was time for presenting the sports trophies—an interminable process, Reuben knew. (Cynthia, catching his eye from an adjoining table, rolled her own, being another veteran of past trophy ceremonies.) There were endless prizes for golf and tennis, awarded in most cases to repeat winners such as Sally Andersen and Casper Robbins, who invariably won the doubles competition in tennis. (They were the only really good players in the entire group and had the added advantage of playing together regularly during the year.) Then, finally, there was a trophy for Frost’s dinner companion, Dorothy, as the captain of the winning water-balloon team.

  “Congratulations,” Frost said to her as she returned to her seat after receiving her trophy from her grandfather. It was a statuette of a person tossing a water balloon underhand. (Or so it appeared. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a figure of an ordinary bowler.)

  “Not exactly an Oscar, is it?” the girl said, giggling.

  Before she was settled in her seat she was up again, heading with the other grandchildren toward the piano, where they would perform another annual ritual, the singing of a satiric song about the Andersens.

  As she had done for several years now, one of the Andersen granddaughters, a music major in college, had written the song, a mildly humorous parody of “Ol’ Man River” directed to foibles of the family and of AFC. The grandchildren had rehearsed their performance in great secrecy that afternoon and the audience waited eagerly to hear the result.

  While the singers were assembling, a waitress came into the room and delivered a whispered message to Flemming Andersen. He got up immediately and walked purposefully toward the door, presumably to take a telephone call.

  Since Flemming was the principal tar
get of this year’s song, his granddaughter hesitated about continuing when she saw him leave the room. But she decided to go ahead anyway, and the grandchildren began singing.

  Flemming Andersen returned during the applause that followed. He had the look of one trying to project a neutral countenance—always a sure sign that something is wrong. Frost soon found out what it was, after Flemming had delivered a few extremely perfunctory remarks to bring the dinner to an end.

  Andersen headed straight for Frost’s table and all but propelled him out of the room. They ducked around a corner and found privacy in an adjoining hallway.

  “I assume you saw that I was called outside a few minutes ago,” Flemming said.

  “Yes.”

  “It was Jeffrey Gruen, making a friendly little call. Friendly little call in the middle of Saturday night to tell me that he wants to buy AFC.”

  “Good God!” Frost exclaimed. “What on earth did he say?”

  “He read me a letter he’s had delivered to the apartment in New York. It says that he’s interested in buying AFC and that he wants to sit down and talk about it—before Tuesday next week, when he says he’ll make a tender offer for the Company if he doesn’t have an answer from us. He says he’ll be filing some goddam form with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday …”

  “A 13D, I believe.”

  “That sounds right. He’s bought eight percent of the Company in the open market already, so he said he had to file this form. He wants to talk on Monday. He says he’s thinking of a price of forty dollars a share if everybody cooperates, thirty-eight if they don’t.”