It was, Gil knew, as full-bodied a compliment as Winston Conway could offer. “Thank you, sir, but—well, I’m happy enough with the spot I’m in right now.”
“Getting into your blood?”
“I guess that’s it.”
The lawyer said with a teasing grin, “As I recall, yesterday morning you were hoping that Cash would hang on to Suffolk Moulding and let you run it.”
Gil felt the warmth of a blush. “That seems a lot longer ago than yesterday morning.”
“Suffolk Moulding would be a little dull after this, eh?”
“Well, I—I’ll have to admit it’s pretty darn exciting to be in on one like this.”
Conway nodded. “Yes, it’s good to have someone like Cash in your life. Makes your blood run a little faster—even if you’re only hanging on to his coattails trying to keep up with him. So many clients these days are so damned dull—so unrelievedly, impossibly, never-endingly dull!”
Gil laughed. “That’s one thing you can say about being around Cash McCall—it’s never dull.”
“Right you are!”
“And as you were saying at breakfast yesterday morning—you can’t outguess him. I never had any idea that all of this would happen—and in less than forty-eight hours.”
“Neither did I,” Conway said. “Anyone else would have been fussing around with a deal like this for six months. But this is a fast one, even for Cash.”
“I just hope it isn’t too fast.”
“So do I,” Conway said, his face sobering. “But for the life of me I can’t see a single hole. It’s the most beautiful job of knitting a deal together that I’ve ever seen.”
“And the best part of it is that everybody comes out a winner.”
“Of course,” Conway said, but as if he was surprised that Gil had missed some obvious point. “That’s the essence of the McCall technique—and very clever, too. If you get everyone in the same camp, there’s no one left to ambush you from the other side of the fence.”
For an instant, the word clever reverberated in Gil’s mind, flashing the suspicion that Winston Conway didn’t really understand what a sound and solid man Cash McCall really was. But of course he did.
“Well, let’s check up on how the boys are coming,” Conway said, starting to the door. “The Andscott attorneys are breathing down our neck. They want to get those proxy forms on the press. You’ll be here in the morning, won’t you?”
“I’m not sure,” Gil said uncertainly. “I really ought to run over to Suffolk—there are some things that will have to be done there—but I’m not certain yet. I haven’t been able to reach Cash.”
“I’ve been calling him, too,” Conway acknowledged. “He must have gone out somewhere for the evening.”
“Probably.”
They started down the corridor. A fountain clerk from the drugstore on the first floor was going from office to office with an enormous coffeepot and a carton of paper cups.
4
The light snapped off as Grant Austen started to open the door of the telephone booth. He stopped his hand, accepting the compelling invitation of darkness, trying to think, staring at the mouthpiece of the telephone instrument. Cash McCall’s plane had not returned to Suffolk.
In the ten minutes that he had spent on the telephone, first trying to get someone to answer at the airport, then putting through a call to the home of the watchman, he had imagined himself steeled against tragedy. But so long as there had been the faintest of hopes he had not fully faced the prospect. Now his brain was strangled by the clutch of terror, the flow of image stopped dead on the news picture of a crashed airplane. He saw no movement, not the slightest sign of life. But then he heard sound, the tin drum beating of fists pounding against hollow metal, and he felt himself driven toward the wreckage, fighting his way through the trees, narrowing the span of his vision until he saw only the door of the cabin. He clawed at the latch, pushing and shoving, suddenly aware that the trunks of the trees around him were marble columns rising from an underbrush of potted palms. Strangely, the plane was still ahead of him and he plunged toward the gaping hole in the fuselage.
“Floor, please?”
Why had he waited so long? It was almost midnight now and the plane had crashed at noon … the police should have been notified hours ago … search parties …
“What floor, sir?”
The face of the elevator operator wavered as if seen in watery reflection … Miriam … yes, that’s what he had to do now … tell Miriam … “Three.”
Out of the elevator, the long hall was an uptilting tunnel, steeper and steeper as he climbed, the suite door gained only with the last gasp of effort. The living room was dark and he plunged through it, heading for the lighted door of the bedroom.
Miriam was in bed, sitting against propped pillows, her magazine dropping as he opened the door, exposing a smile that was shockingly insensitive to what had happened. He had pre-set his mind to a sympathetically slow breaking of the news, but the blandness of his wife’s expression made him blurt out, “It’s Lory!”
“What about Lory?” she asked, irritatingly calm.
“They never got there!”
“They never got where, Grant?”
“Good god, Miriam, can’t you understand?” He started toward the bedside table. “We’ve got to do something—find them—call the police—”
Her arm reached out to stop him, holding his hand from raising the telephone.
“Grant, what do you know?”
“I called the airport. His plane never got there.”
“What airport?”
“What airport?” he repeated, hurling the question at the irritating imperturbability of her face. “What airport do you think I’d call?”
“Grant, listen to me. All you know is that Mr. McCall’s plane didn’t get to the Suffolk airport. Isn’t that true?”
“What more do you—” His voice was sucked out of his throat by the enigmatic smile on his wife’s face.
Miriam said quietly, “If they didn’t go back to Suffolk, they went somewhere else, that’s all.”
“Somewhere else?”
“Didn’t Mr. McCall say that he was going to Philadelphia?”
“He said that he was but—”
“Then Lory went with him. They probably stayed over for the evening—dinner and then maybe a show.”
“You mean that Mr. McCall invited her to—” There was an emptiness now where there had been terror before.
“Of course,” she said gaily, almost laughing. “Didn’t you see them look at each other when we got off the plane?”
“What are you talking about?” he asked blankly, a new fear rushing in to fill the vacuum. “What do you mean—when we got off the plane?”
“Oh, Grant, it was so plain. You’d have seen it yourself if you hadn’t been so—”
“Miriam, you’re crazy. That’s impossible! Lory’s only a—why, he’s old enough to be her father.”
“Don’t be silly, dear. I don’t know how old Cash is but I’m sure he isn’t over—”
“Miriam! You don’t know what you’re talking about. Lory wouldn’t—she couldn’t—”
In the agony of attempted comprehension he looked away, missing the transition of expression on his wife’s face. When he glanced back, he saw that her smile had been blended with confident determination.
“Grant, this is partly my fault. I should have told you last night. But I wasn’t sure then.” There was a meaningful pause before she added, “They were together all morning yesterday.”
“Together? Yesterday?”
“Don’t you remember, she took him out to the airport?”
“Sure, but—”
“She didn’t get home until after noon. They went somewhere in his plane.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Didn’t you ask her?”
“No.”
“Miriam! How could you—”
�
�Why should I? She’s no child. She has a right to live her own life. If she’s in love with Cash McCall, it’s her own—”
“Love!” he exploded. “She’s only known him—” His plunging voice smashed against the hard barrier of memory. That day in the lobby of the Hotel Ivanhoe … McCall had said he had met her before … somewhere …
The pull of his wife’s hands was timed to his collapsing weakness and he let himself be guided down to the bed, sitting beside her.
Miriam’s voice softened. “Grant, don’t you remember when he was at the house yesterday morning, how I kept saying that he looked so familiar? When I saw him again this morning, I knew where I’d seen that face before. Grant, he’s the man in that first book of Lory’s—those drawings she did after she got back from Maine. Don’t you see what must have happened? She met him that summer—”
Maine! The energy of inner explosion was lost in the upward propelling of his body, the surge of outrage muffled by the still frightening memory of Miriam’s outburst on that night when Lory had come home from Maine, the mysteriously maniacal fury with which Miriam had lashed out at him. What he had faced then had been not only the revelation of something unsuspected within his wife, but also a weakness within himself, a crumbling that could be denied only by an avoidance of repetition.
“You did see Mr. Bannon, didn’t you?”
“Bannon?” He was caught off guard, reacting before he recalled that seeing Harvey Bannon had been the excuse he had given Miriam for going back to the second floor again.
“He telephoned just after you went down. I told him that you were going to stop at their suite.”
He grasped at the chance to get away, moving quickly to the door. “I’ll have to go back.”
Miriam was ahead of him. “Oh, Grant, why do you have to go now? Can’t it wait until morning?”
“Won’t take but a minute,” he said, brushing past her, out through the door and down the full length of the long hall before he had exhausted the blind energy of escape.
He was stopped by the rail of the stairwell, his senses slowly awakening, hearing the cacophony of sound that drifted up from the second floor, the thumping march of a snake dance down the corridor, the crash of a bottle, the high-pitched scream of a girl’s laughter and then the echoing howl of male glee. Bannon or no Bannon, he wasn’t going back into that mess again! It was Harlan Bostwick he really wanted to see … Bannon was only an excuse to keep Miriam from knowing until it was settled … and she didn’t know! How could she? She was only guessing that Lory was in Philadelphia with …
A grotesquely foreshortened couple on the floor below had come into view as he looked down. They wove a drunken path across the visible rectangle of the second floor hall, collapsing in a clumsy embrace as they came to the stair railing. A shudder of revulsion went through Grant Austen’s body as he found himself looking straight down into the wanton face of the girl. She had thrown back her head, her parted lips lewdly inviting, her arms offering no resistance to the snaking exploration of the man’s hand. Grant Austen started to back away, feeling himself nauseated by the stench of stale cigarette smoke and spilled whiskey that came up the flue of the stairwell. Now the man had produced a room key, dangling it mesmerically in front of the girl’s face, still waving it long after she nodded, even after she had started to drag him away down the hall.
“Down?”
Blinking, he saw that the elevator door had opened in front of him. He must have pushed the button.
“Second!” the elevator operator announced.
The door opened and faces swam in from the gray-smoked sea, crushing down upon him, pinning him against the cold steel wall. And then he was alone again, alone as he had been alone in every crowded room tonight, staring back at the circling eyes of the telephone dial.
“I’m sorry, sir, but your Suffolk number doesn’t answer. Shall I try again in twenty minutes?”
He exhaled a grumble of resignation and started to hang up, then suddenly struck with an inspiration so clear-minded that he felt himself completely recovered from the lethargy of shock. “Operator!”
The connection had been broken and he had to dial again. “Operator, get me the Hotel Ivanhoe in Philadelphia.”
While the call went through, he tried to prepare himself for what he would say to Cash McCall, suddenly conscious that anything he said would provoke frightening complications. If McCall was in his apartment …
A distant voice repeated, “Hotel Ivanhoe,” for the third time before he could ask, “I wonder if you could give me some information?”
“Yes, sir?”
“What I want to know is—I wonder if you could tell me whether or not Mr. McCall got back to the hotel this afternoon?”
“I’m sorry, sir, but that’s information we wouldn’t have.”
“What do you mean—wouldn’t have?” he snapped, then quickly dropped his voice to a placating softness. “All I want to know is whether he—you see, Mr. McCall was flying back to Philadelphia this afternoon and all we want to know is whether he got there all right.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but we wouldn’t know that.”
“Now just a minute, young lady. This is Mr. Austen—Grant Austen of the Suffolk Moulding Company—” His tongue had slipped again and the recognition momentarily blocked his recall of the name of that woman he knew at the Hotel Ivanhoe … Kennard? … yes, that was it. “It just happens that I’m a friend of Mrs. Kennard’s.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but Mrs. Kennard—” The voice wavered indecisively. “One moment, sir.”
The heat of his resentment cooled as he waited through a long silence, the final chill imparted by the shock of a voice saying, “Hello, Mr. Austen. This is Maude Kennard. What can we do for you?”
Embarrassment was a voice-muffling handicap, finally surmounted. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Kennard. I didn’t want anyone to bother you but—well, you see, Mr. McCall brought us down here in his plane and we didn’t know—well, he started back about eleven and there was something in the paper about a plane crash—”
“And you were concerned about your daughter, weren’t you, Mr. Austen? Of course, you were! But there’s nothing to worry about. Everything’s all right. They got in about—oh, I believe it was about one-fifteen when they went up to his suite.”
The expelled sound of his wordless exclamation was a deflation that left his body unsupported. He reached out to brace himself against the booth wall. “Thanks, Mrs. Kennard, I—sorry to have bothered you, Mrs. Kennard—this time of the night.”
“Now don’t you worry about that, Mr. Austen. I know exactly how you feel. She is such a dear sweet child, isn’t she? And do come see us whenever you’re in Philadelphia, won’t you, Mr. Austen?”
“Sure—sure, you bet, Mrs. Kennard.”
The receiver missed the hook and fell the length of the cord, bouncing to crash against the drum-hollow wall of the booth. Groping, he made the blind moves of retrieval, no more aware of what he was doing than of the undirected wandering that carried him out across the lobby. He was only vaguely conscious of a man walking rapidly toward him, not realizing until the path ahead of him was blocked that it was Harvey Bannon.
“By golly, Grant, you’re a hard man to find!” Bannon said with a double-handed shoulder slap. “Wouldn’t have found you now if Ed Fisher hadn’t seen you go down in the elevator a few minutes ago. Listen, fellow, you and I’ve got to have a little talk. How about slipping over here in the corner for a minute?”
Grant Austen’s submission to the firm grip of Harvey Bannon’s guiding hand was more than the blind response of his preoccupied mind. It was, partially at least, an involuntary reaction to the pleasure he had always found in being accepted as a personal friend of the President of the Cavalier Chemical Company. There were a lot of Associate Members who couldn’t remember your name from one convention to another unless you were way up on the top quantity bracket, but not Harv Bannon. He was the kind of friend a man could really count on. Some o
f the fellows thought Harv was sort of a phony … he did have that funny nervous laugh and there were times when maybe he tried too hard to be one of the boys … but you could say what you wanted to about Harv Bannon and he still stacked up as about as good a friend as a man could have.
“I wish I could help you, Harv,” Grant Austen said as they came to the palm-sheltered divan, anticipating the same question about the future of the Suffolk Moulding Company that he had been asked by all the other manufacturers. “All I can tell you is that they’ve put in a young fellow named Gil Clark as a sort of general manager. As far as I know, it’ll be up to him where they buy their resins. But Gil’s one of my boys—all he knows is what I taught him—so I’d say you folks would have the inside track, Harv.”
“That isn’t exactly what I had in mind,” Bannon said.
Grant Austen looked at him, puzzled by the cat-and-canary tone in Bannon’s voice. “But that’s all I know, Harv.”
“Now come on, boy, you wouldn’t try to fox an old fox, would you?”
“Harv, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Bannon’s oddly high-pitched laugh ran ahead of his voice. “Grant, I don’t blame you for playing cagy until the thing is settled—do the same thing myself if I was in your place—”
“Settled? What do you mean? It is settled.”
“Maybe as far as General Danvers is concerned,” Bannon acknowledged. “But don’t forget it still has to be approved by the board.”
“I don’t get you, Harv.”
Bannon shook loose another strangely incongruous laugh. “Now look, Grant, I’m not bucking you. If you were smart enough to get Andscott over a barrel, more power to you. The only thing is, boy, I just want to be sure you’re doing the right thing for your own sake.”
“Harv, you’ve got this all wrong.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Bannon asked, his smile slightly frosted now. “Maybe it’s slipped your mind, Grant, but I happen to be a director of Andscott Instrument.”
“Sure, Harv, I know that—but what’s that got to do with my selling Suffolk Moulding?”
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