“Nothing,” he grumbled, doubling a fist over the wrapped handkerchief, stuffing his hand in his pocket.
Shifting with the car as it swung the turn off Boulevard Drive, he happened to catch Lory’s eyes in the rear-vision mirror. She flashed a quick smile and now it was unmistakably for him. He settled back, reassured. Lory would get a kick out of being in Washington again … the time she’d come over from Mount Oak and they’d seen John L. Lewis at the Carlton … that G.E. vice-president saying that what had been General Electric’s loss had been …
Distracted by pleasant reverie, he had allowed the bar of caution to drop and there was the cutting stab of another memory that linked Washington to Lory … he had been in Washington that day she had come home from Maine.
“Is it your hand, dear?” Miriam asked anxiously.
“Hand?” he asked, conscious of revealed blankness, then quickly grasping the opportunity for evasion, worming his hand out of his pocket, shucking the handkerchief. There was only a pea-sized spot of blood on the white linen.
“Let me see,” she said, reaching out.
“It’s nothing,” he grumbled, resisting the tug of her fingers until he felt their damp warmth as they closed over his hand.
“Excited?” he asked, surprising himself, unaware of the instinctive reasoning that had made him say it. But she looked at him as if he had given her some special pleasure, her eyes brighter than he had ever seen them before, somehow prompting him to go on and ask with a teasing smile, “Still worrying about those gold slippers?”
“I’m not worrying about anything,” she whispered, “—except you.”
“No reason to worry about me,” he said gruffly. But he returned the squeeze of her hand, sharing her glance at the rear-vision mirror to make certain that Lory was not watching them, experiencing a moment of intimacy so rare that it completely filled his mind until they crested Orchard Ridge and he saw the airport ahead of them.
3
Gil Clark had started for the Suffolk airport immediately after Cash McCall had telephoned from Philadelphia but the B-26 was already over the field when he arrived and, by the time he had parked his car, the plane was off the runway, wing-sweeping the fence as it made a tight turn on the apron in front of the gate. He saw that Cash McCall was at the controls but, in less time than seemed possible, the door at the back of the cabin opened and Cash was impatiently beckoning him up the steps.
“This has to be fast, Gil,” he said, hurriedly by-passing the preliminary of a greeting. “I’m flying the Austens to Moon Beach and they’ll be here in a few minutes.”
Gil slipped into a lounge chair, limiting himself to a fast glance around the cabin, feeling the danger of a single unperceptive moment. Whatever it was that had happened had made some undefinable change in Cash McCall. There was still that same ease of manner, the lithe and leathery movement with which he turned to sit on the arm of the chair across the aisle, but now it seemed somehow deceptive, concealing a spring-steel tension, coiled and hair-triggered.
“That call I asked you to make yesterday morning?” Cash asked as an abrupt introduction. “The call to Andscott?”
“Yes?” Gil responded, stiffening, racking his brain to recall every word that he had said to Keening, searching for something that might have been an unperceived error.
“I almost called you back and told you to forget it,” Cash said with a sardonic chuckle. “Which goes to show, I suppose, that it’s better to be lucky than bright. If we’d been looking for a smart move, we couldn’t have doped out a better one. That telephone call really pulled the rug out from under the General. Do you know him?”
“General Danvers? No. Only by reputation.”
“Then you don’t know him at all. By reputation, he was one of our great generals—and he must have been—but as a corporation president—” He spread his hands in a gesture of despairing rejection. “Pitiful spectacle to see a man like that finish out his career as a fumbling old fool.”
“I know the company isn’t doing too well. They passed their last dividend.”
“Danvers had been trying to get in touch with me all day yesterday. There was a collection of frantic notes and telephone messages when I got back to the hotel—very urgent, had to see me immediately—so I invited him down for dinner. I was certain that he knew about the Gammer Corporation buying Suffolk Moulding, and I suspected that he’d somehow found out that I was the Gammer Corporation. I imagined that he was going to put the heat on me to install the new press that he’d been trying to get Austen to buy. Instead, he came storming in, all pop-eyed and red-faced, accusing me of being all kinds of an unprincipled blackguard. I discovered from what he told me that I was out to ruin him and wreck the Andscott Instrument Corporation by refusing to let Suffolk Moulding go on supplying them with molded parts.”
Gil stared, dumbfounded. “But how could he accuse you? They’re the ones who—”
“Danvers informed me that no gentleman would stoop to such a low trick as hiring a spy and sending him down to Andscott on the pretense of looking for a job.”
“He didn’t mean Paul Bronson?”
“He’s thoroughly convinced that Bronson is one of my—I believe he called them my undercover operatives.”
“But that’s ridiculous.”
“According to the General I have dozens of them, but it was Bronson who sneaked out the information that Heckledorf wouldn’t take the Andscott business.”
“Wouldn’t take it? I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t either at first, but by sitting back and letting Danvers accuse me of all the despicable things I’d supposedly done, I finally got the story.” He snapped a light to a cigarette. “Did you talk to Bronson about his having been down at Andscott?”
“Yes, I—well, actually he talked to me. Paul’s a decent chap and he wanted me to know that he’d—”
“Did Bronson tell you anything about Andscott’s operations, anything at all?”
“He talked mostly about his interview with General Danvers—the kind of impression he’d gotten.”
“What was that?”
“Very much the same as yours—that he was fumbling pretty badly. That’s the main reason Paul wasn’t interested in the job they offered him. He said that trading Austen for Danvers would be like jumping from the frying pan into the fire.”
“Did he mention anything about patents?”
“Patents? No, sir.”
“Do you know anything about a patent that Austen took out in ’44—assigned to the Suffolk Moulding Company—a method of eliminating hand wiring in electrical instruments by molding a grid of connectors into a plastic base?”
Gil Clark’s first impulse was to excuse himself for never having made a detailed study of all the dozens of patents that Austen had taken out, but he was suddenly struck by what seemed extreme good fortune, a clear recollection of that rainy afternoon when Grant Austen had wasted two hours with a meandering reminiscence of all the things he had invented in the good old days. Grateful now that he had forced himself to listen, Gil was able to resurrect a reasonably detailed description of the patent to which Cash McCall had referred.
“Yes, that checks out,” McCall said, stamping out his half-smoked cigarette. “Sounds like the one he was talking about. Austen never did anything with the idea?”
“Well, he was talking about doing some more work on it but I doubt if he ever did. He’s let things like that slide pretty badly these last few years. And then, of course, there have been some new developments that have come along since—printed circuits and that sort of thing. I’m no expert but I’d guess they’d be cheaper.”
“Apparently the Andscott engineers don’t agree. They’ve sold Danvers that the basic idea is the salvation of their business.”
“This patent of Austen’s?”
“At least a variation. As I pieced the story together, some engineer at Andscott had worked it out on his own, but when they made their search they found themselve
s in interference with this Austen patent. Does the name Gratz mean anything to you—Ray Gratz?”
“He was one of Suffolk’s engineers. Quit a couple of years ago and went to work for Andscott.”
“I thought so,” Cash said grimly. “He’s the supposed inventor of this process.”
Gil Clark’s amazement was no longer containable. “Did General Danvers tell you all this?”
Cash chuckled wryly. “There’s nothing like anger to loosen a babbling mouth. Every time Danvers accused me of knowing something I shouldn’t know, he told me something I didn’t know. All I had to do was sit back and listen.”
“Does this tie up in any way with the new press they wanted?”
“They had to have that big press to try out the process on a full production scale. They still weren’t certain that it was going to work.”
“Do you mean they were going to let Suffolk hold the bag?” Gil demanded, transferring to himself the corporate indignity of the Suffolk Moulding Company. “That if it flopped, it would be Suffolk instead of Andscott that was out the quarter million?”
“That was the general idea,” Cash said. “But there was another angle too. I gather they thought that if they could get Austen deeply enough involved, he wouldn’t dare kick up a fuss about patent infringement.”
“But that was stupid!” Gil protested. “He would have given them a license. Do you really mean that they weren’t going to use this new press for cabinets at all—that the whole thing was a phony—just like this story that Heckledorf was ready to take over all their molding business?”
“There may have been a certain legitimacy to the Heckledorf threat,” Cash said. “They did go as far as to give Heckledorf samples of all the parts and ask them to figure prices. Danvers’ real mistake—this sounds almost incredible but he admitted it himself—was that he got ants and jumped too fast. He pulled the bluff on Austen before he had his answer from Heckledorf.”
“And I’ll bet Heckledorf’s prices were a lot higher than Suffolk’s,” Gil anticipated.
“Yes, but that wasn’t the worst blow. Apparently Heckledorf has some smart boys over there. They found out that all down through the years, Austen has been taking out patents on special presses and mold constructions.”
Gil was stunned by the implications of what Cash McCall had discovered. “Do you mean that a lot of Andscotts’ parts are tied up by Austen’s patents?”
“That’s what the despicable Mr. McCall is supposed to have known,” Cash smiled. “But apparently Austen didn’t even know it himself.”
“At least he never realized what it meant,” Gil said groggily. “But how can Andscott keep on operating without molded parts?”
“They can’t—at least until they work out ways to get around the Suffolk patents. That’s possible, of course, but it will take a long time—just to rebuild the molds if nothing else. And a lot of cash, which Andscott doesn’t have.”
“General Danvers must be crazy!” Gil exclaimed. “Why would he ever let himself get into such an impossible position?”
“To quote the General himself, he finds himself outflanked—due, of course, to the unscrupulous tactics of a blackguard named Cash McCall.”
“Unscrupulous!” Gil exploded. “What does he call what they were trying to do? It sounds like one of those stories you hear about what used to go on back in the robber baron days. Doesn’t the man have any ethical standards at all? What does he think—that you can run a business nowadays the way you fight a war—that anything goes?”
“Maybe so,” Cash said tolerantly. “But don’t be too hard on the old boy. He’s really in a spot. If Suffolk Moulding stops supplying molded parts, Andscott is practically out of business for at least six months, maybe longer.”
“Well, he’s dug his own grave, let him lie in it,” Gil flashed back, then suddenly conscious that his show of anger, by contrast with Cash’s equanimity, betrayed a serious lack of poise.
Cash saved him by saying, “Yes, I’ll have to admit that was my own first reaction. Danvers had me a little annoyed.”
“I should think so.”
“But I can understand why he feels the way he does about me. You see, I sold Andscott a cabinet plant a year or so ago—the old Padua Furniture Company. It was a good property, worth every cent he paid for it. At the time, Danvers thanked me for giving them the chance to buy it, but afterwards someone discovered that the plant had been offered to Andscott a year before at about half the price they’d paid me. That made the General look like a fool—and there’s nothing a man of that stripe hates worse.”
“I know,” Gil said, thinking of Grant Austen.
“As I said,” Cash went on, “Danvers had gotten my back up with his nasty cracks and my first reaction was to make him pay for it—but there was no fun in that, kicking an old man after he was down—so I offered to keep on supplying him.”
“You did!”
“Oh, I wasn’t being entirely altruistic,” Cash said brusquely, almost as if he had been accused of soft-heartedness. “You see, I still have the Andscott stock that I got for Padua Furniture—not that I’ve wanted to hold it, simply because I haven’t been able to get rid of it at a fair price—but, in any event, I had a selfish motive.”
“But didn’t Danvers know that you were a stockholder when he accused you of trying to wreck the company?”
“It’s possible that he doesn’t know. I transferred my Andscott stock to the Aurora Corporation and he may not have taken the trouble to find out that I control Aurora. Anyway, I told him that Suffolk Moulding would go on supplying him.” He interjected a brief smile. “But I did tell him that there’d be a ten per cent price increase right across the board. I thought that was letting him off easily enough, particularly since I knew from what he’d said that the Heckledorf bids had been even higher than that.”
“Now you’re talking!” Gil exclaimed, his mind already at work recasting the prospects of the Suffolk Moulding Company. With the Andscott business restored and prices up ten per cent there was no question that the company could be made extremely profitable.
Cash McCall was shaking his head. “Danvers turned it down.”
“Turned it down! But what else can he do?”
“He wants to buy Suffolk Moulding.”
“Buy it? But how can—”
“It’s his opinion that a fine company like Andscott Instrument dares not jeopardize its future by having vital parts produced by a source of supply controlled by an operator like Cash McCall.”
“I don’t see how you kept from socking the guy,” Gil marveled.
“Oh, he’s an old man,” Cash tossed off. “Anyway, he wound up by offering me three hundred thousand shares of Andscott common.”
Gil found his mind torn between an instinctive urge to fight back against the sale of Suffolk Moulding Company and the realization that there was an enormous profit to be made—if, as he recalled Paul Bronson having told him, Andscott stock was selling for about ten dollars a share.
As had happened so many times before, Cash McCall seemed to have read his mind. “Yes, if I could get the market price—somewhere around ten—it would be a good deal. But of course I couldn’t, not as things stand now. The market for Andscott stock is thin as the devil. Has been ever since they passed their last dividend. I know because I’ve been trying to work off some of the stock I already have. If someone were to dump a sizable block—even ten thousand shares—the price would hit the skids.”
“Then you aren’t going to sell?” Gil asked, barely managing to hide a show of relief.
“I don’t know,” Cash mused. “The darned thing has me intrigued. If I could somehow manage to get control—”
“Control of Andscott?”
Cash nodded. “With the stock I’d get for Suffolk—what I already have and what I know I could pick up—I could put together about a half million shares.”
“But it would take a lot more than that for control, wouldn’t it?”
&nb
sp; “Yes, there’d still be a long way to go—and if I missed I’d really be stuck, several million tied up in Andscott stock and no way to get out from under. But if I could pull it off—”
There had been the savoring of danger in the sound of his voice, the look of high excitement in his narrowing eyes, at last an open revelation of the tension that Gil had sensed the moment he boarded the plane.
“You’d change management, of course?” Gil prompted.
Cash nodded, but as if the response had come from some detached segment of his mind. The racing mainstream of his thought seemed uninterrupted, his voice unable to keep pace, snatching out a phrase here and there, almost as if he were making notes. “Wash out that white elephant television business—hopeless without a distribution system. Get back to the basic electronic business—beef up research-build back the development staff—concentrate on computers and automation components. Put the whole company on an economy diet—get rid of the belly-fat. A year and we could have operations in the black again. One decent dividend and there would be a market for the stock—get the price back to where it was—fifteen—”
Fifteen! Gil Clark’s hope that Suffolk Moulding might not be sold was overwhelmed by the prospect Cash McCall opened up. If the Suffolk Moulding block could be sold for fifteen dollars a share, there would be a profit of two and a half million dollars! And that was only part of it. Cash had two hundred thousand more shares to sell. That would mean at least another million in profit. And it would all be a capital gain. Suffolk Moulding couldn’t add that much to cash surplus if it were operated for twenty years. They would be crazy not to sell if …
They? For the briefest instant, barely perceived, Gil Clark was conscious of the plural pronoun. Whatever reserve he may have had before was submerged now in the excitement of participation.
“It sounds terrific,” he heard himself say, conscious after he had spoken that what he had said might be out of context with Cash’s last unheard words, then hurriedly adding, “But it would all hinge on being able to get control, wouldn’t it?”
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