Cash McCall

by Cameron Hawley

  With the spirit of a man about to sit down at a chessboard, Will Atherson waited for the arrival of the files.

  2

  Maude Kennard walked briskly toward Broad Street, unmindful of the thin spatter of snow-rain that the wind was whipping out of the gray clouds. She was vibrant with high-keyed speculation, intensely alive to the startling probability that Cash McCall owned the Hotel Ivanhoe.

  Intuition argued in the affirmative but she knew that her instinct was not always a reliable informant. But this was more than intuition. She had seen that instant of revelation on Atherson’s face, too fleeting to be really studied, too quickly gone to be analyzed, yet it was obvious that something she had said had tripped him up.

  “… under the delusion that he owns the hotel” … yes, that was the sentence that had caught him … the sentence and the word … owns.

  She turned the corner and her breath was momentarily snatched away by the wind. Pivoting, she walked backward for two steps and then, recovered, went on. Suppose it were true … it might not be but suppose it were … if Cash McCall did own the Ivanhoe …

  Park Cady had told her this morning that Cash McCall had suggested bringing the Andscott breakfasts to the Ivanhoe. Would he have bothered to do that unless it meant something to him?

  Her mind began a frantic juggle to adjust itself to a new set of circumstances. A moment before she had been proud of her adroit handling of Atherson, the way she had watched him in the mirror reflection in the glass of the teller’s cage, not looking up at his balcony office as he had expected her to do, forcing him to come to the banking floor to see her. Now all that was meaningless trickery. Atherson didn’t count any more.

  And the time she’d spent with Everett Pierce this morning had been wasted effort, too. Or had it? If Cash McCall were the owner of the hotel … and Pierce should make the mistake of trying to throw him out … yes, that would cook his little apples and good!

  Maude Kennard, General Manager … no, Managing Director was better. And why not? She was the manager of the hotel … the real manager … everyone knew it …

  Everyone?

  A grimace of regret twisted her lips. It had been a mistake to let Pierce handle so many of the arrangements with McCall. But the little fool had been so upset about losing his suite … and there were so few things that he could do. No, she had to face facts … letting McCall slip out of her fingers had been an inexcusable error. She hadn’t talked to him more than half a dozen times since he had moved in. That had been a bad mistake, but it wasn’t too late to correct it.

  She was at the corner of Chestnut Street now and remembered that she had promised Everett Pierce that she would see Judge Torrant. Was that still the thing to do? Yes, now more than ever. Torrant had handled the legal work when they had bought the building next door in order to get extra space for the kitchen. Surely he would know who really owned the hotel. But what excuse could she have for asking him?

  Did she need an excuse?

  A passing man gave her a strangely puzzled look and she realized that he must have misinterpreted her smile.

  3

  Clay B. Torrant, Esq., was the fourth generation of his family to hold membership in the Philadelphia bar, a fact that largely accounted for what little legal practice he had. He was usually called “Judge” but that, too, was more a tribute to his heredity than himself. He was by no means an incompetent attorney, particularly in those phases of the law that had once been the backbone of the profession, but he had little aptitude in the skills of the accountant and a hearty contempt—slightly flavored, perhaps, with the taste of sour grapes—for his fellow members of the bar who were following up their lucrative discovery that the best rewards of the “legal” profession fell to those who most successfully searched out ways by which clients could reduce their income tax payments.

  Since he was never a busy man, Clay Torrant had ample time to pursue his two diversions. One was his place on the House Committee of his club, The Wharf. The other was the composition of what he called his “papers.” He had written a great many of these essays which, although masked as humorous puncturings of the foibles of the legal profession, were penned with an acid bite, never more so than when they were directed at the “Bureau boys,” Torrant’s appellation for lawyers who went in for tax practice. Some of what he wrote found publication in the Quarterly and that gave him much pleasure, all the more because there had been so little happiness in his life.

  The message that his secretary had just given him was a sharp reminder of the unhappiest period he had known. Maude Kennard was outside, waiting to see him.

  Miss Fitch seemed to share his disturbance. “I told her that you were very busy and I didn’t know whether you’d be able to see her or not.”

  Clay Torrant nodded, accepting the white lie that he was busy but wishing that the subterfuge was unnecessary. He should be capable of simply telling Maude Kennard that he didn’t want to see her—but that, he knew, was something he could not bring himself to do. He had never been able to tell Maude Kennard anything that he had wanted to tell her, whether to come or to go, nor to resist any demand that she had ever made upon him—except the one demand that she had never known she had made, nor known that it had imposed upon him the most severe test of character to which he had ever been subjected.

  “You are going to House Committee meeting, aren’t you?” Miss Fitch asked.

  That was a ridiculous question. She knew that he never missed Tuesday at The Wharf, occasionally a Wednesday luncheon when the place was jammed with visitors but never the committee meeting on Tuesday. She must have something else on her mind. “Yes, Miss Fitch. Why do you ask?”

  She blushed—which he considered rather silly for a woman of fifty-two, but explainable on the ground of her being a spinster and undoubtedly still a virgin—and he guessed that her concern about his taking a long lunch hour meant that she had an appointment with the doctor who was treating her to alleviate the effects of menopause.

  During these last few months, Miss Fitch’s flush-faced nervousness had often incited his sympathy and he frequently wished that there was something he could do to ease her burden, but the subject was unmentionable and it seemed that the only kindness he dared show her was to disregard her distress and overlook an occasional error in typing of which, before, she would never have been guilty.

  “I have an appointment,” she said, flat-voiced. “I could cancel it.”

  “No need for that, Miss Fitch. And don’t worry about getting back. I won’t need you until at least two-thirty. Give me about two minutes to clear my desk and then send in Mrs. Kennard.”

  Miss Fitch went out, stiff and straight-backed, and he could feel the loneliness that she took with her and the loneliness that she left behind. He was glad that it was Tuesday and that he had the committee meeting to attend.

  But first he had to see Maude Kennard. In a way the two things were connected—if Maude’s father hadn’t been a member of The Wharf it would never have started in the first place.

  The Wharf—its full and proper name is The Company of the Free Wharfholders—is one of the half dozen clubs that stand at the top of a long list of organizations dedicated to the preservation of a Philadelphian aristocracy. The members, all of whom are fair-minded gentlemen, concede that the Fish House is older, having been founded in 1732 in the reign of George II, but they make no further concessions of superiority on any score.

  The exact date of the founding of The Wharf cannot be authenticated because the nature of the original enterprise was such as to demand secrecy and an absence of written records, but it is known to have been functioning prior to 1754. In the beginning it was an organization of merchants whose prosperity depended upon the importation of goods. Thinking themselves penalized by a monopolistic alliance of those who owned the wharfs and controlled the waterfront, the merchants established The Company of the Free Wharfholders. The purchase of a stretch of waterfront was enough of a threat to force the old wh
arf owners into line, but the organization continued to hold the land as a safeguard.

  The land was rented and, according to legend, when the members were unable to agree as to how the rent money should be distributed among the shareholders, a compromise was reached by deciding to use the fund to pay for free meals to be served at noon on all Wednesdays, except those falling during the month of August, in a small waterfront building on the land that the organization had acquired. As the rental money increased with the growth of the port, the noon luncheons grew to banquet scale. The building being small, there was not room enough to accommodate all the members at tables. The service was from mahogany hunting boards and the meals were standup affairs, the origin of a still maintained tradition.

  The land was sold to a shipbuilder during the War of 1812—an act forced by patriotism—but the organization persisted. Enough of the profit from the sale of the land was withheld to acquire an uptown residence which was converted into a clubhouse. Long before the Civil War the privilege of membership had been solidly established on the basis of inheritance. There was no more highly prized legacy of a well-born son than a Wednesday noon place at the hunting board of The Wharf, nor no censure so severe as having his silver plate withdrawn from the rack and delivered to his home, that being The Wharf’s way of dropping a member who had been judged not to have fulfilled the promise of his blood. The power of dismissal was not only held but exercised and high position was no guarantee of grace. The hopes of one man who might have been governor of Pennsylvania had been blighted one cold morning after a dark night, when he found his silver plate from The Wharf lying on his doorstep.

  Although most of the members were comfortably well-to-do, wealth was no prerequisite. If it had been, Maude Kennard’s father could not have belonged. John Bardon had no more than his salary as a clerk at City Hall, but he had been accepted on Wednesdays as a gentleman and accorded a special respect for the fact that he kept his desk through all changes in city administration. Bardon had been in a position to do an occasional small favor for Judge Torrant around City Hall and it was in that way that a minor friendship had grown, never to the point where their at-home social life was mingled, yet warm enough so that when John Bardon had come to his law office that hot morning in mid-June of 1932, Clay Torrant had been able to accept the visit as a quest for personal advice rather than legal counsel. There was, in fact, no legal action that could be taken. The runaway marriage of Bardon’s daughter, Maude, to young Wilfred Kennard was an accomplished fact. Neither was there much that Clay Torrant could offer by way of personal advice, except to counsel patience and forgiveness. He told John that young Kennard might not turn out to be such a bad sort after all and that there were worse places for his daughter to live than Chicago.

  Privately, Judge Torrant had no faith whatsoever in the Kennard boy—his family had been a harum-scarum lot ever since Wilfred’s grandfather had married into that Pittsburgh blood—and subsequent events confirmed his stand. Two years later, Maude came back to Philadelphia. Kennard had deserted her. John Bardon died that summer and, whatever the doctors may have said about the cause, everyone knew that it was a broken heart.

  Even in those days, Clay Torrant’s wife, Margaret, had been an invalid and it had seemed to be in his family’s best interest, as well as a humane gesture to the daughter of a member of The Wharf, to offer Maude Kennard a chance to make a home for herself as a combination practical nurse and housekeeper. It was the bottom of the depression, there was no other employment available, and desertion had left her penniless. There had been no other motive in what he had done—he could swear to that on his honor as a gentleman, and subsequently did, after Margaret’s neurotic jealousy finally reached the point where he had no choice but to accede to Maude’s suggestion that perhaps it would be better if she left.

  There had been absolutely no physical basis for Margaret’s jealousy. Yet Clay Torrant could not bring himself, then or afterwards, to blame his wife for her imaginings. No matter how fantastic they were, his own had been even more so. In the horrifying dream world of his nighttime mind, he was guilty of adultery. During the aloneness of a hundred nights, Maude’s image had invaded the darkness and, together, they had committed erotic sins that were completely beyond daytime belief. Morning after morning he would awaken with a sense of terrible guilt that he could not entirely banish with the sure knowledge that it had all been a nightmare. Night after night he would go to sleep with a silently sworn resolution never again to permit such fantastic dreams, but what happened after his eyes were closed was as uncontrollable as it was unexplainable. Nothing about the whole thing made sense. He was quite certain that he had no suppressed desires, he loved his wife and willingly bore the loss of sexual relationship that her invalidism demanded, and he was sure that he felt no special affection for Maude Kennard. She was twenty years too young to offer comfortable companionship and too sharply shrewd to be appealing as a woman.

  Yet he could not escape that secret sense of inner guilt and, through a perversion of that same feeling, he felt that he had somehow wronged her. When he helped her, financially, to start her catering business in Ardmore—done in a way that could never come to light—he did so with the not quite defined feeling of fulfilling a gentlemanly obligation. At least, after that, his dreams were less disturbed.

  He had resolved then never to see her again. Unfortunately, Maude could not be told of his resolution and when the building in which she had her catering business burned, it was only natural that she should come to him for help in collecting the insurance.

  His finding her a job at the Hotel Ivanhoe had been pure coincidence. Will Atherson had mentioned one Wednesday at The Wharf that he was looking for a bright young woman with a good social background to take over the Hotel Ivanhoe’s catering department. John Bardon’s daughter, who if she had been a son would herself have been eligible for membership in The Wharf, was obviously qualified.

  After that, Maude had come to him occasionally about small legal matters—which he always handled without charge—and he had, of course, seen her several times when the Hotel Ivanhoe was buying a small property from an estate he represented. Then, too, she had come to him frequently during the period when she was campaigning to move The Wharf, after its old clubhouse had been condemned to razing, to the ninth floor of the Hotel Ivanhoe. He had been against the plan at first but, as Maude had done so many times before, she had somehow defeated him and in the end he had found himself supporting her. Admittedly, the move to the Ivanhoe had been a success and he had no reason to look back upon it with regret, any more than he had a sustainable reason for his reluctance to see Maude Kennard this morning. In his submission he accepted the inevitability of punishment, a truth that was seldom admitted in the philosophy of law but often proved by the lives of men.

  “Mrs. Kennard,” Miss Fitch announced.

  He looked up, surprised at the hard edge of his secretary’s voice, then not surprised as he remembered that all women acted a little strange when they were going through menopause.

  Maude Kennard entered smiling, offering her hand as if it were a gift, and when his fingers closed over it, feeling the warmth and softness, it was like a gift—but a gift that frightened him as he would have been frightened by the offer of a bribe.

  There was a sharp clicking sound as Miss Fitch closed the door, a sound like the cocking of a gun.

  “How nice of you to see me,” Maude said.

  “How are you, Maude? Sit down.”

  She sat quickly, not in the chair across the desk as he had planned but close to him in the chair that Miss Fitch used when she took his dictation, and when Maude Kennard crossed her legs the curve of her left ankle was so close to his leg that he was forced to sit with stiff caution.

  “How are the girls?” she asked.

  He answered that question and then others, all pointless and delaying, small talk that only heightened his perturbation.

  “You look tired,” she said.


  “No, I’m fine,” he said, incongruously wishing that he hadn’t worked so late last night on his paper for the Quarterly.

  “Well, I know you’re busy—” she finally said.

  “I am a little, this morning,” he admitted.

  She leaned forward, fingertips to her chin in a too-well remembered pose. “I need some help and you’re the only person I can count on—the only person I’ve ever been able to count on.”

  His reaction was one of on-guard caution, too quick-rising to be kept from showing on his face, and he felt the constraint of embarrassment when he saw from her expression that she was aware of his feeling.

  “Please don’t worry,” she laughed. “All I want is a little advice, personal and not financial—very personal.”

  He picked up his letter opener and sightlessly examined the intricately carved handle of yellowed ivory.

  “I do hope you aren’t going to think I’m asking something unethical,” she went on, the words still overlaid with teasing laughter. “But don’t they say that all’s fair in love and war? And I’ve heard you yourself say that one has to be practical to get along in this hard, cruel world.”

  He attempted a smile, not too successfully. What was she suggesting—that there was a man, that she had fallen in love? Or that some man had fallen in love with her? That would be more like it.

  He rolled the letter opener between his thumb and forefinger, thinking, his mind impelled by the professional habit of tracing fact to consequence. If she were to marry, he would be rid of her, once and for all. Then she would stop coming in to see him.

  “I want some information about a man,” she said.

  Hope confirmed, he hurried her by asking, “Who is he? Anyone I know?”

  “I think so.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Cash McCall.”

  The point of the ivory blade dug into the flesh of his palm. Was it possible that she had trapped Cash McCall, as clever as he was? Yes, possible. Men like McCall weren’t always as smart about women as they were about money.