Cash McCall

by Cameron Hawley

  “—convention?” Cash asked, his voice materializing out of thin air, the word climaxing a question that she had not heard him ask.

  And her father replied, “Matter of fact, that’s what held me up this morning—on the phone canceling our reservations. Just happened to think I’d forgotten to do it. We’d been planning on going down tonight on the special train—but that was before this came up.”

  “No reason why you shouldn’t go,” Cash said. “After all, you must have a lot of old friends that you’d like to see.”

  “Sure, you bet. Well, I was thinking of it, but—”

  “Then why don’t you? No reason why you shouldn’t.”

  “Well, I’d thought that Gil Clark might be going and I didn’t want to butt in after I’d—”

  “Gil? No, I’m sure he isn’t. Look—when does the convention begin?”

  “Well, it doesn’t actually start until Friday morning—but there’s the Associates Reception tomorrow night.”

  “And you’d want to be there tomorrow, wouldn’t you? Of course. Look, Mr. Austen—suppose you be out at the airport tomorrow morning—Moon Beach, isn’t it? I’ll pick you up in my plane and you’ll be there in two hours. There is a field right there, as I recall.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t want you to—yes, there’s an airport, all right—right near the hotel. I was over there last time I was down. Harv Bannon, you know, president of Cavalier Chemical? Has his own plane and some of us took a run over to see it. Beautiful.”

  “Would nine o’clock be too early?”

  “No, be fine—if you’re sure that it isn’t going to be too much trouble?”

  “Mrs. Austen will be with you?”

  “You bet. I mean—well, she was planning on going—”

  Lory was caught unaware as Cash asked, turning with the question, “How about you? Join us?”

  “No, I’m sorry.” She said it too quickly but, once said, it could not be withdrawn. “I’m afraid I can’t spare the time.”

  She saw the look of resigned disappointment on her father’s face and then, strangely, there was the suspicion that Cash seemed almost pleased.

  Her mother was in the doorway. “Well, if you folks will come in the dining room—”

  5

  In the Coffee Shop of the Hotel Conomissing, a blue-lighted and blue-glassed cavern that represented the hotel’s one faltering attempt at modernization, Gil Clark sat down to breakfast with Winston Conway. He had met the lawyer on the staircase and eagerly accepted his invitation to breakfast together, hoping that Conway might be willing to answer some of the questions that were in his mind.

  Disappointingly, Winston Conway evidenced no inclination toward conversation. He sat silent as he studied the menu, his aristocratic face hidden except for the top bulge of his high forehead and the shock of white hair that surmounted it. Waiting, Gil experienced a fading of hope, realizing that there was no real reason to expect the lawyer to be any less cautious this morning than he had been all during this past week. Although he had been friendly enough, and reasonably willing to talk about anything else, he had pointedly deflected every effort to draw him into a discussion of Cash McCall.

  Suddenly the menu dropped, slapping the table, a gesture out of character with Winston Conway’s normally deliberate manner. The newly revealed expression on his face was something of a shock. If he had been an ordinary man, untrained in the long-practiced art of concealing his feelings, the break in Winston Conway’s composure would not have been notable. As it was, Gil was immediately certain that he was deeply disturbed about something.

  “You talked to him?” the lawyer asked, his tone betraying a struggle for self-control.

  “Mr. McCall? Yes, he stopped by my room for a minute.”

  “You know that he’s on his way out to Austen’s?”

  “Yes, I know. He said—well, that’s what he told me he was going to do.”

  “Why?” Conway demanded. “Why is he stepping in and handling it himself? He’s never done anything like this before—never—not once in all these years. Usually he won’t even meet the seller. What’s up? Something is.”

  Gil found his own position strengthened by the clear fact that Winston Conway knew no more about what was happening than he did. “He said that he was in a hurry to get it over with, that’s all I know. I gathered that he was anxious to get away.”

  “That’s all he told you?”

  “Yes—at least as far as going out to Austen’s is concerned. I thought, too, that it was a little unusual for him to step in and take over on his own.” He made his words a conscious prod, hoping that it would incite Conway to some revelation, but the waitress came up then—skeleton-thin and thrusting out a bony hipbone as she slumped beside their table—and any reaction that might have come from Winston Conway was lost as he again raised the menu to shield his face.

  “What’ll it be, boys?” the waitress asked.

  Gil waited deferentially for a moment and then ordered. Conway still sat silently studying the menu, finally ordering the three-minute eggs that he invariably ate for breakfast. When the menu dropped, his face was a re-set stage, all evidence of inner conflict safely behind the scenes, and there was what seemed a slight undertone of embarrassment in his voice when he spoke, as if he realized that he had exhibited an unseemly lack of self-control. “I regret having given you the impression, Mr. Clark—which apparently I did—that there was any standardized procedure. There isn’t. The mere fact that he’s never done anything like this before doesn’t make it unusual. With Mr. McCall, only the unexpected is to be expected. He’s a decidedly unpredictable man.”

  Gil saw a chance to smile and grasped at it. “I’m beginning to understand that.”

  “Nevertheless, there’s always the temptation to attempt outguessing him—what my father used to call the fascination of futility. It was a phrase that he’d coined to explain why he spent hours playing a variety of solitaire that someone had taught him. The game was reputedly impossible to win—and he never did, yet he kept on playing it for years. It’s a bit like that with this game of attempting to outguess Cash McCall.”

  “I know I don’t have much chance,” Gil said. “But, of course, I’ve known him for only a week.”

  “That, I should say, is less of a disadvantage than you might imagine it to be.”

  “But you’ve known him for a long time.”

  “Known him?” the lawyer repeated as if testing the words. “I’ve been associated with him for some eight years, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Yes, I—”

  “But the fact of acquaintance should not be interpreted as carrying the implication of knowing him—using knowing, in this instance, as a synonym for understanding. I dare say you know him as well right now, at the end of your first week, as you ever will. At least that’s been true in my case. To repeat myself—he’s a most unpredictable man. But that, of course, is the key reason for his success. His unpredictability is his greatest asset. No one is ever able to anticipate him—and the art of strategic surprise, I might note in passing, is no less valuable in business than it is in war.”

  “I know,” Gil acknowledged, “but I can’t see the point in keeping his own people in the dark. After all, how can we help him if we don’t know what it is that he’s trying to do?”

  “Quite right, he’s a difficult man to help,” Conway acknowledged crisply. “I’ve been attempting it for some years now but, I fear, with only indifferent success.”

  Gil felt himself cued to say, “I doubt if he’d agree with that, sir.”

  For the first time since they had sat down at the table, Winston Conway smiled freely. “I sometimes suspect that my only real value to him is that I am occasionally able to advise him as to what a normal, intelligent, straight-thinking man would do when faced with some particular set of circumstances. Then Mr. McCall takes precisely the opposite tack and makes a great success of it.”

  An answering smile was indicated and Gil man
aged it.

  Conway went on, “You’ll see him go off on some kind of a tangent that appears to be the wildest sort of a fool’s errand. You’ll counsel him against it. And do you know what will happen? Before it’s over you’ll find the dunce cap on yourself, wondering how you could possibly have been so stupid as to have missed seeing something that should have been evident from the beginning. After he’s done it, it always appears so damnably evident, so painfully obvious.”

  “But I still don’t see why there’s any point in keeping his own people in the dark,” Gil persisted.

  Conway looked at him, “There is always the possibility, of course, that we’re no more in the dark than he is.”

  It took a moment for the implication to come clear. “Are you suggesting that he doesn’t know himself what he’s going to do with Suffolk Moulding?”

  “I suggest nothing beyond the fact that it’s possible,” Conway said. “With Cash McCall, anything is possible.”

  “Do you mean that he might not—well, that he might not sell it?” Gil asked, guardedly hopeful.

  “Not at all,” Conway said. “He’ll sell it, of course—but he may not have made up his mind as yet what tack he’ll take in going about it. In such an event, his reluctance to discuss possibilities is quite understandable. I, myself, hate nothing worse than to be forced into talking about something that hasn’t fully jelled in my mind.”

  The waitress served their orange juice in pinch-waisted glasses, holding much less than their appearance indicated. Conway, draining his with a single draught, scowled at the deception. Then, smiling again, he said, “In any event, Mr. Clark, you should not get the impression that Cash McCall’s action in this instance evidences any lack of faith or confidence in those of us who work with him. It doesn’t.”

  There was, at first, the suspicion that Conway was talking to convince himself, but when Gil recalled all the revelations that Cash McCall had so freely made on the day of their first meeting at the Hotel Ivanhoe, he found himself forced to nod in honest agreement. “No, I must say that he’s been completely open and aboveboard as far as I’m concerned.”

  “As far as everyone is concerned,” Conway said forcibly. “Unfortunately, those who know him only by rumor sometimes get quite a different impression. The secrecy with which most of his operations are necessarily conducted tends to make many people think of him in the wrong way.”

  “I’ll have to admit that it took me a little while to get my own perspective. You see, I’d spent a couple of years with Simonds, Farrar & Peters, so—”

  “Oh, then you do know something about operators, don’t you. I had a bit of contact on one occasion with that fellow Peters. Hardly a savory character, I’d say.”

  “The place was full of them,” Gil said, recalling a Christmas party where someone had put up a sign that labeled the client’s conference room: VULTURE’S NEST. He recounted the incident and Conway laughed appreciatively, saying, “I hope you’ve learned by now that Mr. McCall is no vulture.”

  “If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”

  Conway seemed highly pleased. “I’m glad you feel that way, Gil.”

  “I do,” he said, not missing the fact that Conway had used his first name, an unprecedented informality. “As a matter of fact, I don’t know when I’ve met any man who has impressed me as being so completely—well, I guess you’d say ethical.”

  Winston Conway sighed. “Yes, the practice of law would be much more pleasant these days if there were a few more gentlemen of the Cash McCall stripe—and I use the word gentleman in its true meaning. They’re becoming rare, you know, men who recognize the difference between a thing being morally right and legally right. Perhaps it’s only an old man’s viewpoint—the tendency of age to decry the deterioration of the younger generations—but it does seem to me that more and more we find the viewpoint that legality is synonymous with morality. You don’t agree?”

  Gil realized that his smile must have given Conway the wrong impression. “No, I do agree. I’m just surprised to hear you make the distinction.”

  “Between legality and morality? Of course there’s a distinction. Why are you surprised?”

  “I didn’t suppose a member of the legal profession would acknowledge it.”

  Conway pressed a palm to his right temple, flattening the bulge of his bushy white hair. “I make no pretense of speaking for the bar—although I dare say you’d find less disagreement in the profession than you’d imagine. By the way, do you happen to know Clay Torrant—Judge Torrant?”

  “Only by name.”

  “And I don’t suppose you see the Review, do you? No, of course you wouldn’t. There was a piece by Torrant in the last issue on this same point—the tendency to increasingly accept the letter of law and the regulations of the Federal Bureau of Internal Revenue as a code of conduct among businessmen. Can’t say that I put too much stock in Torrant’s scribblings—he’s a gadfly sort of character with a vinegary outlook on life—but I must admit that in this instance he was thinking soundly.” Conway had taken out his notebook. “I’ll send a copy along to you. Perhaps you’ll find it of interest—at least as a definition of the type of man that Mr. McCall most definitely is not.”

  “I’d like to read it,” Gil said honestly, anxious to grasp at the chance to continue discussing Cash McCall. But the waitress arrived with their eggs and toast and there was a necessary delay before he could go on.

  “To get back to what we were talking about before, Mr. Conway, I still—well, I’m perfectly willing to agree with everything you say about Mr. McCall—obviously, he’s a high type man with a great deal of ability—but the whole situation still doesn’t make sense to me. I just don’t see what he can accomplish with the kind of a life he leads. Oh, I know he makes a lot of money—probably clears more on one deal than the total salary I’ll earn in the rest of my life—but what satisfaction can he get out of it?”

  “As contrasted with what?” the lawyer asked.

  “Well, as contrasted with the sense of accomplishment that a man can have after he’s built up a company, or started a new industry, or created—well, so that he has something to show for his life.”

  “In your case, yes,” Winston Conway agreed, solemnly judicial. “You’d ask no more of life than a chance to take the Suffolk Moulding Company and build it into a hundred million dollar concern.”

  “I’d be willing to settle for a lot less than that,” Gil said hurriedly, momentarily disconcerted by Conway’s shrewd exposure of his inner desire.

  “You’re a builder,” Conway went on. “It’s your way of life. But what you must recognize, Mr. Clark, is that Cash McCall is a very different sort of man. He’s a trader.” There was a beat of hesitation and then he added with unexpectedly sharp emphasis, “And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a perfectly honorable occupation.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply that there was, sir.”

  “Are you sure?” Conway probed. “You said a moment ago that he made more on one deal than the total salary you’d earn in the rest of your life. Aren’t you—perhaps subconsciously—harboring a little resentment at that state of affairs?”

  “No sir,” Gil said positively. “All I meant to say was that—well, I can’t see how just making money can mean anything to him. He can’t use two suites at the Ivanhoe—or two B-26’s—”

  Conway broke into a free laugh.

  “But isn’t it true?” Gil demanded.

  “If you’re asking me to agree that he could be a great success as an industrialist, I’m quite willing to concede that he has the essential requirements—courage, imagination, a capacity for leadership, everything except one necessary qualification.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The desire. It isn’t what he wants.”

  “But what does he want?”

  Winston Conway poised a knife over his egg. “If you ever find out, Mr. Clark, I’d consider it a great personal favor if you’d let me know.” He brought
the knife down and there was a spill of yellow-orange yolk into his cup. “In the course of my lifetime I’ve learned a few truths. One of the least assailable is that the desires by which men shape the living of their lives are strangely varied and rarely explainable.”

  “I guess that’s right,” Gil said dully, giving up and starting to eat.

  “Most of us,” Conway went on, “encounter enough difficulty in attempting to explain our own desires, let alone those of our fellow men. In my own case, for example, I’ve not infrequently searched without result for the factors of character that attracted me to the law—yet that attraction was always there, even as a child. In consequence, I’ve never felt myself the thwarted man—and I’ve had, by my standards at least, a happy life.”

  “I can believe that.”

  Conway pounced, suddenly the cross-examiner. “You can? Then don’t you see that my success, such as it is, measures up to absolutely nothing by your standards? I’ve built nothing. A law firm, yes, but there’s nothing physical or tangible about that—a few desks, a library of books. I can point to no great assemblage of bricks and mortar and say—ah, there’s my monument, the great company I built!” He spooned his egg. “Think about that, Gil. All men don’t want what you want.”

  “Oh, I know that.”

  “And do try to accept the fact that Cash McCall is one of those who doesn’t. You’ll be happier if you do.”

  The waitress finally brought their coffee and, sugaring his, watching the circling spoon as he stirred, Winston Conway said, “Be that as it may, there are many times when I’m tempted to believe that true satisfaction is more likely to be found in how a man lives than what he actually accomplishes. Not exactly an original thought, I’ll grant you—the basis of most religious philosophy, the old conflict between the end and the means—but it’s still valid. There’s something fine and good about a man with Cash McCall’s standards. Time after time, I’ve seen him pass up extremely attractive deals, perfectly legal in every way, simply because he felt that—no, not even that there was a moral flaw—simply because he suspected that someone might think him unfair. Or, perhaps, unsporting is the better word.”