3
Luncheon was almost over in the Fontainebleau Room. There were only two tables still occupied, a party of four women at one of the alcove banquettes and a love-sick couple mooning over a deuce. Maude Kennard decided that it was safe to leave her post at the door. She told Louis, the headwaiter, that she was leaving and looked across the lobby. Frank, the bell captain, jumped at the signal of her raised hand.
“Frank, get a couple of housemen to help you and go to the second-floor storeroom. There are some barrels there—a Royal Doulton china service that I bought last month at the Dietz estate auction. I want to use it for a dinner that Mr. McCall is giving tonight. Bring them down to the kitchen, have them washed, and then take them up to the service pantry of Mr. McCall’s suite.”
She pivoted away, not waiting for his reply, picking up the house phone. “This is Mrs. Kennard. Get me the florist.”
“You want all them barrels?” Frank asked.
It occurred to her then that Max hadn’t given her the menu and a table setting couldn’t be planned until she knew what was to be served. Signaling Frank into silence, she gave a crisply detailed order to the florist and then, anger-driven, strode toward the kitchen. Frank followed her but she didn’t answer his question until she was across the Fontainebleau Room, almost at the kitchen door. “Yes, bring up everything. I’ll pick what I want afterwards. Oh, one thing more—get hold of the housekeeper and tell her to meet me on ten in five minutes.”
The clattering after-lunch din of the kitchen had subsided into a distant rumbling thunder of the dishwashing machines. The order counter and the steam tables were deserted. Only one cook was in sight, mopping his face with the tag end of a once-white towel that he had tied around his neck for a kerchief.
“Where’s Max?” she demanded.
“He go his office,” the cook said.
Maude Kennard broke her stride as she debated having Max called out, but her impatience quickly overrode her distaste and she walked on toward the chefs office, the too-well remembered evidence of one of her unpleasant defeats by Max Nicollet. When the kitchens were remodeled, her plan had put the chef’s office in its logical location—near the storeroom record clerk’s, across from the door where the kitchen personnel checked in, conveniently accessible to everyone who might have business with the chef, herself included. Max had rebelled, demanding that his office be created by remodeling an old coal bin that he had discovered down at the end of one of the rabbit-warren tunnels that connected the scattered rooms of the old cellar. It was a ridiculously inefficient location, and the change in plan had caused a sixteen-hundred dollar budget over-run that had to be balanced by an unwise cutback on the cold-storage installation, but in the end she had been forced to give Max everything he wanted, even approving the payment of the invoice for a shower cabinet that he had ordered without authorization, helpless against his defense that he had saved money by buying a cheap shower and not insisting on a tiled bathroom. There was no question about the cabinet being cheap—it was a flimsy sheet-metal affair that crackled metallically whenever it was touched—and, as the ultimate defiance, Max had insisted on having it installed beside his desk where, when the mood moved him, he could use his giant fists to pound out a thundering tin-drum obbligato to his roaring baritone.
As she approached the last turn in the tunnel, Maude Kennard heard a blast of sound that warned her that Max was actually using the shower—which she had hitherto doubted—and since he was singing in Greek and not French, imagined himself to be completely alone. She stopped, mentally gagged by the revolting expectancy of Max’s unclothed bulk, and peeked cautiously around the edge of his office door.
Max was facing the back of the shower cabinet and the white duck curtain, although bulging like a wind-blown tent, was a reasonably safe covering. She stepped into the room and screamed his name over the roar of song and water. The sound stopped as if blasted by sudden shock. Tin crackled and the cabinet rocked precariously as the too-tight fit of Max’s turning body threatened disaster.
“Get out!” he screamed, his voice breaking into a frightened falsetto. “I take the bath! Get out, get out, get out!” His big hands showed at the edge of the curtain as he clutched it drum-head tight against the great bulge of his belly.
Maude Kennard saw that the chef’s embarrassment gave her a clear-cut advantage and she made her voice chillingly cold. “Where is the menu for the McCall dinner?”
“The desk, the desk,” Max screamed. “On the desk! Get out, get out!”
She advanced toward the desk as Max glowered over the top of the curtain rod, a furious elephant trapped in a tin coffin.
The menu, handwritten but legible, was lying on the green blotter pad and she read it quickly.
“What,” she demanded, “is Faisan à la McCall?” ready to recite the standing order that no dish was ever to be added to an Ivanhoe menu without her specific approval, then suddenly smiling at the realization that Max, unwittingly, had played into her hands. Cash McCall couldn’t help but be pleased that she had had a dish created expressly for him.
She closed her ears to Max’s scream-cracked falsetto and hurried back toward the kitchen, driven by a strange sense of excitement that, finally recognized, proved disturbing. She was so seldom affected by any emotion that she could not immediately trace to its source, that she felt herself oddly disabled in not being able to do so now. Could it be that crazy idea that old Judge Torrant had put into her head … that she and Cash McCall were in love?
Crazy?
Why?
The impact of thought was physical, blocking, stopping her at the door of the Fontainebleau Room. It had been years since she had considered the possibility that she might ever again marry. There had been no man with enough to offer. But this was different. Cash McCall owned the Ivanhoe. If she married him, she would be in complete control. There would be no more Everett Pierce, no more bowing and scraping to Will Atherson. No one would dare stand in her way … no, not even Max! She would be rich … no more skimping and scraping, no more discount chiselling at grubby little dress shops … no more worrying about getting old and …
Old?
In another year she would be forty.
It was the first time Maude Kennard had allowed that realization to be more than a passing shadow across the face of her mind. Now, permitted to linger, it became the last weight on the scale. Her decision was made and, once accepted, it seemed in no way strange or unusual, but so completely sensible and logical that it was difficult to imagine why she had never thought of it before.
Calmly, smiling pleasantly at a pimply-faced bus boy who was punching out at the time clock, she took the service elevator to the tenth floor.
4
The strain that Gil Clark had felt during the twenty minutes that he had spent waiting to see Harrison Glenn was as nothing compared with the tension that had built up during this hour and a half that he had sat in his own office, waiting for the president’s call. What he had then thought of as a headache had, by now, built itself into a brain-pounding torture that was exploding pain bombs with every beat of his heart.
He heard the door behind him open and spun around in his chair. Harrison Glenn’s enormous frame all but filled the doorway.
“Talked to him,” the president said. “You’re to have lunch with him tomorrow noon. His suite at the Ivanhoe.”
Gil Clark’s throat seemed to have been dried by a blast of flame. His lips moved but no words came.
“What were you about to say?” Harrison Glenn asked after a long pause.
“Would you mind telling me who he is, Mr. Glenn? I mean—if I’m going to have to talk to him—” He stopped, tortured by silence as he waited for the reply.
“I thought you knew,” Glenn finally said.
“No.”
“His name is Cash McCall.”
The name came like a sneak punch, slipping past the guard of his self-control, striking without the warning consciousness of its impact, a
wareness coming only after he felt the weakening peristaltic wave of reflexed revulsion.
“Do you know him?” Glenn asked.
Gil shook his head, knowing that an explanation was impossible. The quickly debated attempt had confronted him with the recognition that his total impression of this man named Cash McCall was based upon nothing more substantial than washroom gossip. Yet even that recognition did not alter his instinctive judgment. The stories he had heard about Cash McCall, no matter how heavily discounted, still made him the cleverest of all the jackals and vultures that preyed upon the laggard members of the business pack. Even the gossip-mongers made the man seem more legendary than real, but he had known enough other operators to shape the pattern in his mind—the quick-money boys he had been forced to work with during those two years when he had been with Simonds, Farrar & Peters, beasts of prey who were forever lurking in the background, waiting to ambush some unsuspecting company through a loophole in the tax laws. There had been Nathan Rosset who had pounced on the Shag Knitting Corporation and liquidated it with a million-dollar profit for himself, Evans who had trapped Rainer Brothers in an estate-tax squeeze, Eiseman who made a fortune out of his nefariously legal juggling of canning companies—the worst of the lot, Harry Guizinger. It was Guizinger who had finally made him give up and leave S.F.&P.
“You’ve never met McCall?” Harrison Glenn asked.
“No.”
“You’ve heard of him?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Not much,” Gil Clark said evasively. “But enough so that—well, I’d hate to see him get his hands on Suffolk Moulding.”
“Why?”
“I’ve seen it happen to too many good companies. They’re never the same after some fast-buck operator puts them through the wringer.”
There was the break of a long silence before Harrison Glenn said, “That’s not like you, Clark—making up your mind before you have the facts. You’ve admitted you don’t know him. Wait until you do.”
Gil Clark nodded grimly, recognizing the criticism as justified but finding it no less hard to take.
Harrison Glenn went on. “But let’s get one thing straight so there’s no possibility of a misunderstanding later on. Grant Austen is a client of ours. If he wants to sell his company, we have a professional obligation to help him get the best possible price.”
“Of course.”
“We can’t keep anyone from bidding on the property.”
“I know that.”
“If Cash McCall is willing to outbid Andscott and Grant Austen decides to accept his offer, that’s no affair of ours. It’s Austen’s company. He owns it.”
“Yes sir.”
The door closed and Gil was alone. The draining away of resistance left dregs—the almost incredible suspicion that there might be an undercover alliance between Cash McCall and the president of Corporation Associates. If there weren’t, why hadn’t Harrison Glenn tried to save the Suffolk account by fighting back against Grant Austen’s plan to sell the company? Why was Glenn so willing to let the company be sold? Why had he been so anxious to get in touch with McCall?
There was a background for suspicion. The partners at Simonds, Farrar & Peters had more than once nudged a client into selling a company and then cut themselves in for a secret profit on the deal. But was it possible that a man like Harrison Glenn would stoop low enough to share a vulture’s carrion?
No, it couldn’t be true! Harrison Glenn was an honorable man. That’s why he had been so anxious to make certain that selling was Grant Austen’s own idea, to make sure that nothing had been done to encourage him. And Corporation Associates did have a professional obligation to help Grant Austen get the best price he could! Harrison Glenn had been right, too, when he had said that there was no reason why anyone shouldn’t be given a chance to bid. If Cash McCall was the high bidder …
A single thought floated upward, detached, freed from the turmoil that raged in Gil Clark’s mind. No matter who bought Suffolk Moulding, someone would manage it. With Grant Austen gone, there would have to be a new president.
Five
1
For the last hour there had been the bustle of comings and goings in and out of the pantry door of Cash McCall’s suite as Maude Kennard had kept a half dozen employees scurrying about the hotel searching for the hundred and one things out of which, only now, a finished table setting was beginning to emerge.
Twice, with the table almost set, she had ordered everything removed and a fresh start made. The pantry shelves were loaded with the silver and china that she had first ordered and then discarded as, with the metamorphosis of her attitude, her objective had been changed. In the beginning she had been guided by a hotelkeeper’s standards, but the longer she had worked the more clearly she had seen herself in the role of Cash McCall’s wife, and the table as one over which she would preside as the hostess in her own home.
Maude Kennard’s mind was no lazy loom spinning the gossamer stuff of daydreams. It was a machine, precisely geared to the realities, seldom deceived by false hopes, set in motion only when she was certain that her desire was an achievable possibility. In two hours of weighing and testing the idea of marrying Cash McCall she had discovered only one reason for caution—the prospect was, if anything, too totally appealing.
Experience had taught her to be suspicious of any proposition that seemed to be too much in her own favor. The too-perfect prospect usually meant that there was some deep-hidden fault. Yet, try as she would, probing the idea from every angle, she had found no hint of flaw. It was a good deal, two-sided as a good deal always had to be. He would give her the Ivanhoe and she would give him a home, a real home, not the emptiness of a lonely hotel suite but the kind of home where he could live as a rich man had a right to live, dinner parties where she would entertain for him as …
The housekeeper stood before her with a pair of heavy brass vases in her hands, outstretched for inspection.
“No, I’m sorry, Mrs. Schilling, those won’t do at all.” The vases were from the Fontainebleau Room, too obviously hotel, not the sort of thing she would ever have in her own home. “Here’s what I want you to do. Go down to the Wharf rooms. Get the key from Frank. There’s a pair of low silver bowls on the sideboard under that big ship model.”
Mrs. Schilling’s gray eyes voiced her silent shock at being asked to violate the order that never, under any circumstances, was anything to be borrowed from the ninth floor.
“Get them,” Maude Kennard ordered. “You can return them the first thing in the morning.”
The housekeeper went out and Maude Kennard followed her to the pantry door, closing it and turning back to give the table a final inspection, circling it slowly, touching a knife to move it a fraction of an inch, centering a service plate and then shifting a wineglass, finally reaching the head of the table, standing with her hands on the back of the chair where Cash McCall would sit, lifting her eyes to follow the thin blade of light at the edge of the door to the living room, an opening that she had purposefully gauged to be invisible from the living-room side but wide enough to let through the sound of a voice. An hour ago she had heard Cash McCall tell someone over the telephone he would pay four hundred thousand dollars for some company, tossing out the offer as casually as if he were flipping a coin on a check girl’s tray. What she had heard had been complete confirmation of everything Judge Torrant had told her.
She was suddenly conscious of the feel of cold metal in the palm of her right hand and, looking down, saw that she had, without volition, crossed the dining room and reached out to touch the polished brass knob of the living-room door.
The door, unlatched, yielded to the weight of her hand. The living room was deserted, but Cash McCall must be somewhere in the suite. She hadn’t heard him go out. She hesitated, inventing the protective excuse of asking him to approve the table setting, and took three soft-footed steps into the living room. She stopped, listening. Silence. Three more steps and
she was clear of the turn of the wall, looking through the arch into the foyer. The door of his bedroom stood ajar. Through the opening she saw a corner of his dressing table, an emerald glass bottle and a leatherbacked brush, a thin slice of the mirror that hung over the table.
A white-brown image flashed across the mirror and, an instant later, she heard the sound of a turning faucet and the whish of the shower. She realized then what she had seen but her reflexed movement had been faster than thought. Without volition, she found herself back in the dining room again, the door solidly closed behind her. Her reaction was not immediately explainable and she stood rigid, frightened as always when she caught herself doing anything that had not been purposefully willed. Then came the slow fading in of critical understanding.
Now she saw the flaw in the too-perfect prospect. She had been a fool to imagine that she could win with no more than an exhibition of her talent as a hostess. That wouldn’t be enough to satisfy him. He was a man. There was only one thing that ever satisfied a man.
Again there was the consciousness of an uncontrolled reflex, a shudder that was an unwilled attempt to loosen the grip of taut muscles. It was impossible to explain away the feeling that had come over her, this ridiculous importance that her subconscious mind had given to something that wasn’t important at all. What a man wanted of a woman was such a simple thing … a lot of fuss about nothing. But it had been such a long time.
Admittedly, some of what she felt was the trepidation of an actress facing the necessity of re-creating a long-forgotten role … Ted Sprague in that awful Wilmington hotel room … Jimmy in the greenhouse … what-ever-his-name-was from Princeton in that basement room where the dance decorations were stored, the tinsel starting that rash on her thigh that had frightened her so terribly until the doctor had assured her that it was only an allergy. But it wouldn’t be like that now … Cash was no hundred-handed young fool in the back seat of a jaloppy … no sex-mad maniac like …
Cash McCall Page 13