Cash McCall

by Cameron Hawley

  “You may have forgotten,” Atherson said, “but several years ago you asked me to let you know if the Suffolk Moulding Company ever came on the market.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” McCall’s voice came back, loose syllabled with lounging ease.

  “It’s for sale. Grant Austen is here in the bank now.”

  “In your office?”

  “He’s outside at the moment, making a phone call. Are you interested?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Will. Possibly.”

  “I believe it might be worth looking into.”

  “Have any idea what the price tag would be?”

  “He’s asking two million. I have a good file on the company with a year-end balance sheet and operating statement. If you’d want to see the file, I’ll bring it over.”

  “Oh, I don’t think that’s necessary, Will. Perhaps later.”

  Atherson hesitated. “I doubt if it stays on the market too long. Austen is anxious to sell and there’s someone else moving in. If there’s any chance of your being interested, I’d suggest that you have a chat with him right away. It could be arranged quite easily. He’s meeting his daughter in the lobby of the hotel at three o’clock. If you’d want me to, I could—”

  “His daughter?”

  “Yes—Lory. You may have forgotten, but you met her that summer up in Maine. I recall that you mentioned it to me at the time.”

  “He’s meeting her here at three?”

  “Yes. If you want to have a talk with Austen, I could bring him over and—”

  “No, don’t bother about that, Will. If I decide I want to talk to him, I can pick him up easily enough in the lobby,”

  “Yes, I suppose you could,” Atherson said, masking his annoyance at this repetition of McCall’s persistent tendency to play the lone wolf. “But do you think—perhaps it might not be a bad idea if I were to mention it to him—so that he’ll at least know who you are?”

  McCall’s voice came back, smile toned after a moment of hesitation. “I’m afraid you’re a little slow on this one, Will.”

  “Slow?”

  “I knew about Suffolk being for sale. I’ve had it from another source.”

  The banker felt himself stunned into silence.

  “But I know that Austen’s an old friend of yours,” McCall went on. “And I suppose you would like to let him know that you’re in on it, too, wouldn’t you? All right, Will, tell him that I might get in touch with him—but make it might. No promises. It all depends on—”

  Atherson lost the last of the sentence, seeing that the door of his office had opened and that Grant Austen was listening. There was nothing more that he dared say except to acknowledge McCall’s ending of the conversation.

  “Well, I’ll be on my way,” Grant Austen said.

  “Get your man?” Atherson asked from the surface of his mind, his thoughts still with McCall.

  “No, Gil wasn’t back yet and Harrison Glenn was out, too. But they’re both expected in a few minutes. I’ll call them from the hotel.”

  Atherson rose and walked to the door. “I made a telephone call too, Grant.”

  “This fellow you were telling me about?”

  “There’s a possibility that he may have you paged in the lobby of the Ivanhoe. Nothing definite about it, but he might—so I’d wait around for a few minutes if I were you.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Cash McCall.”

  Grant Austen’s expression made it obvious that he had never heard the name before.

  “Grant, tell me something. You said that you’d told this man from Corporation Associates that you were thinking of selling?”

  “Yes?”

  “Anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “You told no one else?”

  Grant Austen shook his head. “Absolutely not. I haven’t mentioned it to a soul—well, except Lory, of course. Why?”

  “Didn’t want to cross lines, that’s all.” He extended his hand. “Let me know what happens, Grant, and if I can help you in any way, give me a call.”

  After the door had closed, walking to the glassed front of his office, he watched Grant Austen go down the spiraling staircase and out across the banking floor, but the seeing was without impression, his mind occupied with the task of attempting to fit together the jigsaw events of the last hour. In spite of what Austen had said, it was still possible that he might have tipped off someone else, perhaps unknowingly. Grant had acquired the bad habit of talking too much. But if it were true that the only person that Grant had told was this fellow from Corporation Associates … and Cash McCall had been tipped off … damn it, why couldn’t Grant have kept his mouth shut! This put him in a hell of a spot, letting someone else get ahead of him with Cash. Made him look like a fool.

  11

  Into the twenty minutes that had elapsed since she had felt it safe to leave her post at the door of the Fontainebleau Room, Maude Kennard had crowded a brusque interview with a linen salesman, a mezzanine conference to adjudicate a jurisdictional argument between the Housekeeper and the Chief Engineer, the initialing for payment of a stack of bills, and the dictation of three short letters. She was about to escape her office when Nathan, the room clerk, appeared in the doorway.

  “He just came down, Mrs. Kennard,” Nathan said in a conspiratorial whisper. “That Mr. Clark who had lunch with Mr. McCall?”

  “Did you find out who he is?”

  Nathan’s saccharine smile made it plain that he had. “He’s with Corporation Associates, Dear me, I knew that his face was familiar but—”

  She stared past him, unseeing … Corporation Associates … the same firm that had made that study of the hotel’s operations last year … if Cash McCall had called in Corporation Associates again it might mean that he was getting ready to sell the hotel …

  “Thank you, Nathan,” she said, dismissing him, rising to close the door, attempting to insure the few minutes of privacy that she needed.

  Her instinct had warned her yesterday that she would have to work fast … and she had been a fool last night … new dress … all ready to step in and handle the service of his dinner and then, at the last minute, she’d lost her nerve and called in Louis. No, she hadn’t lost her nerve! It was only that … whatever it was had been a mistake. The dinner party had broken up at ten. She could have gone back to see him afterwards, asked him whether everything was all right … Faisan à la McCall. Of course! That would have given her the perfect excuse … she was thinking of putting it on the Fontainebleau Room menu and …

  Was it too late now?

  Cash McCall was in his suite, alone.

  She started out of her office, stepped back for a quick inspection in the mirror, retouched her lipstick, and then made a second start. At the doorway, the sweep of her eyes picked up a shadowy figure on the other side of the mezzanine, a man standing beside one of the pillars in front of the elevator bank. The man was Cash McCall.

  It was her first reaction that this was a stroke of luck, that she’d be able to talk to him now without invading his suite. But, second-glancing, she saw that he was watching someone down in the lobby. Her eyes followed the direction of his fixed stare. A young girl sat in one of the high-backed chairs against the far wall, reading what looked like a travel folder, looking up now toward the door, obviously waiting for someone.

  The girl half stood for an instant, straightening her dress and there was something about the quickness of her movement, the supple grace of her body, the flash of her sweeping hand … who was it?

  She tried to blink away the hallucination that had plagued her for so many years—but not for a long time now—that every girl was that high school bitch in Chicago … that little tart that Wilfred had …

  Out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of Cash McCall starting down the steps. Stepping quickly into her office, she snatched up the phone and asked for the desk, drumming her fingers impatiently until Nathan answered. “There’s a girl in
the lobby. I want to know who she is. Make some kind of excuse—”

  “Oh, it’s perfectly all right, Mrs. Kennard. She’s waiting for her father. Mr. Austen, you know—the gentleman who came in this noon with Mr. Atherson.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Quite all right, Mrs. Kennard. I do agree with you that we can’t be too careful.”

  Nathan had guessed what she was thinking … and Nathan wasn’t wrong!

  Was there any connection … Austen with Mr. Atherson this noon … this fellow Clark whispering to Austen … then having lunch with Cash … now Cash going down to talk to Austen’s daughter? Could it possibly have anything to do with Cash selling the hotel?

  12

  Lory Austen’s first sight of Cash McCall so perfectly matched the onset of so many other delusionary moments that her reaction was one of irritated rejection. She looked down and forced her eyes to focus on the fine print of the paragraph on PASSPORTS AND VISAS, fighting back the disappointing realization that she had not yet completely healed the mind fault that kept making him appear out of the solid blankness of a wall as he had appeared out of the darkness that night on the wharf, or seeing him walk down a flight of stairs as he had walked down the rocky path that day in Eagle Harbor …

  Involuntarily, her eyes glanced up and in the instant when there was still acknowledgable sensation, she saw Cash McCall standing in front of her. He spoke her name and there was the crashing descent to the truth of his presence … this was no dream!

  It was impossible to respond to his greeting. There was not the faintest stirring of breath in her lungs. Her heart, too, had stopped. But suddenly, it awakened from the deathlike suspension of its beat and burst into a flurry of mad pumping, driving toward her brain the hot flood of remembered embarrassment … this was the moment she had left him … the door of his room at the Inn … pushing her away from him …

  There was the explosive impulse to run away now as she had run away before, but she was stopped by the raising of his hand, seeing the movement but not realizing until the sensation of touch that she had reached out to take it, experiencing the momentary indistinguishability of fire from ice. He spoke again but the words came into her mind as separate sounds without connected flow, hopelessly tangled by reverberation, and she heard them in one fantastic rearrangement after another, meaning changed and distorted with every rehearing, ending finally in the fantasy that he had said that he wanted to meet her father.

  Now it was not Cash McCall who was an apparition but her father, materializing out of the spinning glass-glint of the revolving door, walking toward them in the onrush of the climactic moment of a nightmare’s pseudo memory. Somehow, struggling against the clammy grip of terror, she managed the introduction.

  Her father’s astonishment was uninterpretable until Cash McCall said, “Lory and I met some years ago at a cocktail party—Jefferson Clark’s, as I recall.”

  “Say, that’s fine,” her father said, broadly smiling, and she knew then that his surprise had not been what she had feared, but rather the prelude to some discovery of great good fortune.

  “Never had any idea that you two knew each other,” Grant Austen went on, glancing at her approvingly as if she had done him a highly appreciated favor, then looking back at Cash McCall again. “Will Atherson said that you might be getting in touch with me.”

  “Could you spare a few minutes now?” Cash McCall asked.

  “Sure, you bet,” Grant Austen said affably. “All right with you, Lory?”

  She said something meaningless, not understanding what was happening.

  “Then suppose we go up to my apartment,” Cash McCall suggested.

  She stepped back, withdrawing, but her father took her arm. “No, Lory, you come along. This concerns you, too.” He turned to McCall. “My daughter is our second largest stockholder, so if you don’t mind I’d like to have her sit in, too.”

  Protest died in her throat, overwhelmed by the realization that Cash McCall was considering the purchase of the Suffolk Moulding Company. In the shock-deadened interval of hesitation she was swept along into the elevator, only half hearing their conversation, struggling to capture the poise that would have to be mustered before she could manage a crossing of the threshold of Cash McCall’s room.

  But, strangely, it was not the entering that mattered when it finally happened, stepping into the apartment’s foyer as Cash McCall held the door for her, but rather the sight of the living room that she saw through the open arch, the impact of actuality against the unreasoned expectation of finding herself in his cretonned and wicker-chaired room at the Inn. She walked ahead, seeing the living room not in detail but in totality, her overwhelming impression one of dominant masculinity—and Cash McCall, passing her as she hesitated a step beyond the arch, became the animated source of the room’s endowment.

  She took the chair that he offered her, not daring to look up to meet his eyes, glancing away. And then she saw it—her frontispiece drawing for The Knight of the Hawk, framed and hanging on his wall.

  A moment before, it had seemed that she had passed the limit of surprise but this was a shock of surpassing weight. She was powerless to prevent the reflex that made her turn back to Cash McCall. His eyes met hers, not accidentally but as if he had been expectantly waiting, and in the moment of locked glances he seemed to ask for her silence, making the picture’s presence on his wall an intimacy that was not to be shared with anyone, least of all with her father.

  Cash McCall moved toward the opposite wall, lounging now against the window casing, and she imagined that his shift of position had been purposefully made to keep her father’s eyes away from the drawing, an act as seemingly calculated as the way that he immediately launched the subject of buying the Suffolk Moulding Company.

  The conversation was entirely between the two men, Cash McCall’s eyes fixed on her father’s face, and she felt it safe to watch him, hearing only scattered words, unconnected and meaningless, and when her father finally turned to her for confirmation of something that he had said, she flushed at the necessity of nodding blind agreement, afterwards listening with forced intensity to avoid a repetition of the embarrassment.

  Her father’s voice faded into her consciousness. “—be mighty glad to show you around any time you could come over to Suffolk. I’m sure you’ll find the plant everything that I’ve represented it to be. I don’t know how much Will Atherson told you about the company, or how familiar you are with the molding business, but—”

  Cash McCall’s lips moved when the drone of Grant Austen’s voice dropped off into silence. “It happens, Mr. Austen, that I know quite a bit about your business—more, perhaps, than you suspect. I believe you’ve used the services of Corporation Associates for some years now?”

  “Why, sure—yes, we have. Fine man, Harrison Glenn.”

  “Under the circumstances there’s something that I want you to know, Mr. Austen. I have a substantial interest in Corporation Associates—as a matter of fact, the controlling interest.”

  Lory Austen expected her father to mirror her questioning surprise at Cash McCall’s revelation but when she turned to look at him, there was no reflection of her own suspicion in his apparently pleased response.

  “Well, I’ll be darned,” Grant Austen chuckled. “You’ve sure kept yourself a silent partner. Never knew but what it was all Harrison Glenn’s. Well now, if you’re that close to Corporation Associates, I guess you do know something about my company, don’t you?”

  Cash McCall nodded. “I’m not active in Corporation Associates’ management but I do keep in touch. For example, I’ve seen all the studies that have been made of your operations—at least the major ones.”

  “Say, I’ll bet this is what Gil Clark had in mind,” her father said to her, then turning to speak to McCall again. “That where you found out about my wanting to sell, Mr. McCall—from Gil Clark?”

  “Yes, Harrison Glenn called me last night after Gil Clark got back from your place,”
Cash McCall said. “And when Gil was here for lunch today we discussed the possibility of my being interested in the purchase of your company.”

  Grant Austen shook his head in chuckling amazement. “This is sure a surprise to me. I thought all the time that—well, you see, it was Will Atherson who mentioned you to me, so I thought—”

  “That was a coincidence,” Cash McCall said quickly. “I understand that he’s an old friend of yours.”

  “Will Atherson? Sure, you bet. Will and I have worked together for a good many years now, going right back to the start of the company. Guess he must be a friend of yours, too?”

  “I’ve been associated with his bank on a number of undertakings,” Cash McCall said, his expression signaling the even more serious tone that came into his voice as he asked, “Tell me, Mr. Austen, have you authorized Mr. Atherson to act for you in this matter of selling your company?”

  “Well, I just told him that it was for sale, that’s all.”

  “Am I to take it then that it’s a matter that you are handling yourself? There are no agents involved?”

  “Agents? No, you see, it was only last night that I really made up my mind to sell so I haven’t had time to—no, I’m handling it myself.”

  “Tell me something, Mr. Austen,” Cash McCall said, his voice easing as he shifted his lounging position on the wide window sill. “Or perhaps you’d prefer not to tell me—which, of course, is your privilege. How interested is Andscott in buying your company?”

  Lory waited through her father’s hesitation, relieved when he finally said, “Well, I’d say, Mr. McCall, that’s more a question of how interested I’d be in the kind of proposition Andscott could offer me. You see—well I might as well make this clear, Mr. McCall—I’m not interested in a stock deal or anything like that.”

  “You want cash?”

  “Sure, you bet—cash.”

  “Then the price that Mr. Atherson mentioned—two million—means two million in cash?”

  “Yes—in cash.”

  “That’s for complete ownership, all the stock?”