Cash McCall

by Cameron Hawley

  “Or perhaps,” she countered with adroitly hidden haste, “since you’ve gotten off to such a fine start here at the Ivanhoe, you may be able to drop back now to one of the more commercial hotels. Of course the atmosphere would be different but you could save a few dollars by going to—”

  “Heh, what are you trying to do, get rid of us?” Park Cady demanded in a fat-throated gurgle. “Can’t do that, Mrs. Kennard. No sir, you can’t back out now. You just reserve that room for Andscott every Tuesday morning. No, wait! Next week it will have to be Wednesday.”

  “Consider it reserved,” she said, noting with satisfaction that he had reached for the gold pencil in his vest pocket.

  He scrawled a hasty signature on the check and handed it to her. “I’m a man that likes breakfast. Always say that breakfast is the best meal of the day. What’s that you were saying about what we’d have to eat next week?”

  She raised a forefinger, smiling. “I’ll bet I know something else about you, Mr. Cady.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Unless I’m mistaken, you’re the kind of man who likes to be surprised.”

  His eyes opened wide behind his horn-rimmed glasses and there was that belt-bouncing chuckle again. “Say, you’re all right, Mrs. Kennard. Yes sir, you’re all right.” He took a single backward step to confirm his estimate by seeing all of her at once, rolling his round head as if it were a ball precariously balanced on his shoulders. “See you next Wednesday, Mrs. Kennard.”

  “Until Wednesday,” she said softly.

  He started a turn to the door and stopped. “Say, if you should see Mr. McCall, will you just tell him everything worked out fine? I guess you know him, huh? I mean he lives here, doesn’t he?”

  “Is Mr. McCall a friend of yours, Mr. Cady?”

  “Knew him when I was with Padua Furniture. Just happened to run into him on the street the other day. He gave us the idea of trying this out—so you just tell Mr. McCall that everything was fine.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Cady.”

  The gratitude in her voice was feigned. Knowing that someone else had a lien on her accomplishment destroyed the satisfaction that had been so warmly felt a moment before. The skirt of her black gabardine suit snapped as she walked quickly across the lobby toward the grilled opening through which she could see the telephone operator.

  “What was that call, Mrs. Adams?”

  “Mr. Pierce. Shall I get him for you? He’s in his office now.”

  She hesitated. “No, that can wait. I want to check the kitchen first.”

  Crossing the lobby again, she was aware that the two bellboys on duty were watching her intently and she chose to believe that it was at least partially because of her physical self. It was a thought unusual enough to make her conscious of its rarity. Perhaps that twelve dollars hadn’t been a waste after all. Actually, she didn’t need a girdle, and there weren’t many women of thirty-nine who could honestly say that, but it did give her a pleasantly slim-hipped feeling, close-held and competent.

  “Where’s Frank?” she asked the first boy, suddenly recalling that there was a change to be made on the bulletin board.

  “Frank? He’s doing something for McCall on ten. Anything I can do to help, Mrs. Kennard?”

  “No.”

  This second intrusion of Cash McCall’s name was a compounding of irritation and it was only after she had crossed the Fontainebleau Room that her annoyance lost itself in her overriding consciousness of the dank dishwatery odor that hung in the passageway to the kitchen. She felt again the nausea of frustration that the back of the house always incited. The original kitchen had been hopelessly small and the only solution had been to break through the walls into the semi-basement of an adjoining building. Despite the installation of modern equipment and as much remodeling as was physically possible, the kitchen was still a badly arranged assortment of odd rooms, an echoing bedlam of dish-rattling confusion, poorly ventilated, and so damp that there was an eternal scabbing of paint from the walls.

  The extra waiters who had helped to serve the Andscott breakfast stood in a ragged cluster around the time clock, their poise and dignity stripped off with the green and gold jackets that now hung on the uniform rack in the locker room.

  “Good work, boys,” she said crisply. “Fine job this morning. Same thing next week. You’ll get a call.”

  They nodded to acknowledge her favor and Louis, the headwaiter of the Fontainebleau Room, began tearing pink pay slips off the pad in his hand, but stopped suddenly as she passed him.

  “Madame?”

  “Yes?”

  “This dinner party tonight. For me it is the evening off, but if you should wish—”

  “What dinner party?”

  “You do not know? But Max tells me last night that Mr. McCall is having—”

  She strode off without waiting for an explanation, knowing well enough what it would be. Cash McCall had gone directly to Max again! Who the hell did this character McCall think he was? Just because he was paying a thousand a month for a suite didn’t give him a right to act as if he owned the place!

  Max Nicollet, only now reporting for duty, was standing with Julius, the second cook, who had supervised the breakfast. Normally, Maude Kennard would have approached with caution—the chef de cuisine was a man of cyclonic temper—but now, goaded by anger, she bore down on him with unflinching purpose. “Max, what’s this I hear about you talking to Mr. McCall?”

  The chef took a deep breath, inflating the enormous balloon of his body to even more startling proportions. “So what is it I do?” he asked, his voice oddly accented by the half dozen languages that he had attempted to learn during his lifetime.

  “You know very well, Max. There’s a standing rule that no special orders are to be accepted from any guest without the approval of my office.”

  “Ahah!” Max shouted, a battle cry announcing that he was fully ready for the fray, his black eyes blazing, the waxed points of his mustache bristling fiercely. “So now I am good only to slave in this rat hole of a kitchen. To the guests I must not speak. That is what you are saying?”

  She saw that all work had stopped in the kitchen, that she was encircled by watching eyes. “Now, Max—”

  “One man in this garbage can of a hotel who knows what he eats—for the rest it could be slops for hogs—but to this one man I must not speak!” His gigantic arm swept up, snatching his tall white cap from his head and hurling it to the floor. “Madame, I do not take the insult!”

  “We’ll talk about it later,” she said, her face blanched as she turned back toward the Fontainebleau Room, struggling for self-control. Max was excusable. Good chefs were always a little crazy, the better the crazier, but it was high time that something was done about Cash McCall!

  She crossed the lobby, remembering when she was halfway up the stairs to the mezzanine that Everett Pierce wanted to see her. Their offices were side by side, marked by glass signs glowing green in the rainy-morning gloom. She went past her own office and opened the door of his.

  He was holding the telephone as she entered and exhaled his relief as he saw her. “Oh, there you are. I’ve been trying everywhere to find you.”

  She knew immediately that he was frightened, that in a moment he would be begging her to tell him not to worry, asking for her promise that she would take care of whatever it was that was wrong.

  “The income tax people are after McCall,” he blurted out. “They had a special agent in to see me this morning.”

  She looked at him without expression, consciously withholding the opiate of assurance that his eyes were begging her to administer.

  “What do you think of it?” he asked, his lips puckered with anxiety.

  “They’re after most people these days, aren’t they?”

  “I have a feeling this is different.”

  “Why?” she asked, knowing the reason but forcing him to acknowledge it.

  “I know what Mr. Atherson’s reaction would be if—well
, it wouldn’t help the hotel any, being mixed up with some sort of gangster.”

  Pierce’s voice had dropped off with his last words, suggesting that his suspicion had been weakened by exposure to the light of day. She moved quickly to restore it, but so circuitously that her motive could not possibly be discerned. “I don’t see how Mr. Atherson could hold you responsible. He was the one who sent him here. Anyway, it might not affect the hotel too much. Remember the Kefauver investigations—Costello having his hair cut at the Waldorf-Astoria?”

  “Costello?” Pierce said, looking up at her with the startled expression of a little gray rabbit.

  “The Waldorf managed to survive,” she smiled.

  “Yes, that’s true,” Everett Pierce said, but his blank stare remained unbroken and she knew that the seed had been planted. All she had to do now was let it grow.

  The pleasure that Maude Kennard had once found in the ease with which Everett Pierce could be handled was difficult to resurrect. It had been a dulled sensation since that day when she had discovered, only partly by accident, that his salary was almost double her own. That, on top of the fact that he had the whole tenth-floor suite while she was still living in a single room on six established an injustice that would have been impossible to stomach had not her experience already taught her that the spectacle of a totally incompetent man holding down a good job at a high salary was not a rarity. She had come to know many such men in her years at the Ivanhoe, stupid oafs like Park Cady who could be bribed with a pan of cinnamon buns. At least Everett Pierce was no worse than the rest. He had the sense—most of the time—to stay out of the way and not make a nuisance of himself.

  “I tied up the Andscott breakfasts,” she said, making it neither a report nor a request for approval, only a prod to test the depth of Everett Pierce’s preoccupation with Cash McCall.

  Apparently he was awakened only by the sound of her voice, unaware of what she had said. “You must admit he’s a strange character. His bill with us last month was over fifteen hundred dollars. That’s a lot of money. And he’s only here half the time, not even that. His own plane. Flies all over the country. It takes money to live like that. I’d say he spends at least fifty thousand a year, just on his own living expenses.”

  “Yes, that’s a lot of money,” she agreed, prodding him on.

  “You know as well as I do, Mrs. Kennard, that no one makes that kind of money these days—not legitimately—not with taxes what they are. It’s impossible.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Where does all the money come from? Do you know anything about his business? Has he ever told you? Why does he have a private line that doesn’t go through our hotel board?”

  “It does sound a little suspicious, doesn’t it,” she said encouragingly.

  “If you ask me, Mrs. Kennard, more than a little. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit to wake up some morning and find ourselves spread across the newspapers. That would be a nice state of affairs, wouldn’t it? How could we get up on the witness stand, you and I, and swear that we didn’t know something mighty queer was going on?”

  She modulated her voice, letting it plant another seed casually, knowing that there was nothing in the world Everett Pierce wanted more than to be restored to his tenth-floor suite. “What are you planning to do—get him out of the hotel?”

  Everett Pierce fidgeted. “Well, if it were my decision—yes!”

  “But isn’t he a friend of Mr. Atherson’s?”

  He nodded a nervous affirmative. “I’m afraid so. At least it was Mr. Atherson who sent him here—and approved all that waste of money for redecorating.”

  That was not strictly true, Cash McCall had paid for the remodeling, but this was no time to split hairs.

  She gave him another nudge. “Perhaps Mr. Atherson doesn’t know as much about him as he should.”

  He rose to the bait. “That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking. If I only had some facts—”

  “Why can’t you get some facts?”

  “How could I?”

  “Get a report on him.”

  He sighed and shook his head. “I’ve already had a report. There’s nothing in it—just that he has a high rating and is prompt in his payments.”

  “What kind of a report did you get?”

  “Dun and Bradstreet.”

  “There are other kinds.”

  He twined his fingers. “Yes, I suppose there are.”

  “You could get a Lockwood,” she said, pausing, sensing his reluctance to admit that he didn’t know what she was talking about. “A Lockwood report would give you more of a personal record on the man himself.”

  “I—well, I wasn’t thinking of having him shadowed or anything like that.”

  She noted with satisfaction that he had already made the idea his own. “I know you weren’t, Mr. Pierce.”

  “I suppose something like that would probably be expensive, wouldn’t it?”

  “Not necessarily. Lockwood might have a file on him already. They often do. Wouldn’t it be worth something just to protect the hotel?”

  “Yes—yes, I suppose it would.”

  “If you want me to, I’ll take care of it,” she went on with quiet assurance. “I know a source that could handle it without anyone ever being aware that the hotel was involved.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Judge Torrant. You remember him—he handled the legal work when we bought the property next door?”

  “Oh.”

  “He’s an old family friend.”

  His eyes were anxious, as they always were when he found himself about to be committed to a decision. “Well, if it doesn’t run into too much money—”

  “I’ll see him this morning on the way to the bank.”

  “You’ll have to watch your step, Mrs. Kennard, not get us involved—but I’m sure you realize that.”

  “I’m no fool,” she said—and meant it. Cash McCall would find that out. No one could make a fool of her and get away with it! McCall knew as well as Max did that all private party dinner orders had to be cleared with her.

  Two

  1

  Looking down upon Suffolk, Pennsylvania, from Grant Austen’s home on Orchard Ridge, the city may be seen—as his daughter Lory once pointed out to him—to bear some resemblance to the cross section of a giant tree trunk. It has the same circular shape, the same rough-barked outline, and it is not too difficult to imagine the curving streets and avenues as the annual rings of an old tree.

  In much the same way that a tree’s history can be read from the variations in its lines of growth, the development of Suffolk can be traced in the changing character of residential architecture as, street by street and avenue by avenue, the growing town spawned its new cell structure of tree-edged blocks and hedge-bordered lots.

  Jefferson Street marks the edge of the heartwood, the red brick homes of colonial days. State Street is the outer limit of the “Philadelphia rows” that were built to house the influx of immigrant mill-workers during the years immediately preceding the Civil War. Jackson Avenue was the north limit of the town at the end of the nineteenth century and, during the Gay Nineties, iron deer on the lawns of the town’s newest mansions stared sightlessly across that avenue into open fields. Now, a half century later, those gingerbread old houses are buried deep in the city’s hardwood and the cambium layer is the scarcely broken circle of real estate developments that all but ring the city. Even in mid-March the cell spawning goes on with mad prolificacy. Far up the slope of Orchard Ridge, now well beyond Boulevard Drive, there is the constant sound of a hammer and saw and the air is ever pungent with the new-building odors of sawdust and plaster and asphalt.

  It is only to the west, in the wedge between the radial lines of the state highway and Conomissing Creek, that the residential cell pattern of Suffolk is disturbed. There, as if by some accident of nature, the cells are of a radically different character. The cell walls are not shrub hedges but wire fences, high an
d barb-topped, and the odors are not fresh and clean but odd and foul—the rotten-egg stench from the Marble Chemical Works, the fetid smell spewed out by the Hermann Adhesives Company, the sharp carbolic tang of the Suffolk Moulding Company, a half hundred other strange assailments of the nostrils.

  Subconsciously, as he made the turn into Mill Street, Grant Austen’s nostrils anticipated the characteristic odor of his factory. The first whiff of phenol was a part of the pattern of his life. This morning he missed it. The windows of his blue Cadillac were closed against the cold March mist that fogged the city. The weather report in last night’s paper had predicted a clear day and the defeat of anticipation seemed a plausible excuse for his depression of spirit. Hopefully, he told himself that he would feel better once the winter was finally over. It had been a long time since he had driven to the plant with that effervescence of spirit that had often made him the first to arrive. This morning it was almost nine-thirty.

  Piloting his way down the stone-paved street, cautiously aware that the age-worn cobbles were slippery with rain, he turned in at the plant gate, parked in the factory garage, and started across the black-topped yard toward the Administration Building. Halfway, he felt the insistent nudge of instinct and, reluctant but submissive, turned back toward the tool shop.

  What he saw as he stepped through the door confirmed the suspicion that his instinct had aroused. The most important job in the shop—a set of experimental injection dies for the control panel on Andscott’s new line of television cabinets—was stopped on dead center. The machines and work benches were deserted. All of the men were in the back of the shop clustered around Ed Berger who, with the base of the hobbing press as a soapbox, was venting his highly profane spleen at “the stupidities of them goddam blueprinting engineers.”

  Grant Austen silently dispersed the men, studied the blueprints for a scant minute, saw that Berger’s idea for the relocation of a pinpoint vent might be a slight improvement over the original design—at least it would do no harm—and traded his approval of the change for a promise that the Andscott molds would be finished on schedule.