But that second excuse was admittedly petty, unworthy of an Atherson, and it was almost in the spirit of penance that he had finally agreed to stop at Conway’s office for a few minutes. It was the first time he had ever been in the Jamison, Conway & Slythe offices—in fact, the first time he had ever engaged in a private conversation with Winston Conway. Until now, he had “known” him only in the same sense that he “knew” several hundred other Philadelphians whom he occasionally encountered and greeted at public affairs. What little special attention he had ever given Conway was accountable only to his reputation as one of the city’s most able attorneys, and his status as legal counsel for one of the Freeholders Bank & Trust Company’s most important customers. Winston Conway was neither a Main Liner nor a member of The Wharf.
Now, sitting across the desk from the handsomely white-haired attorney, Will Atherson found himself perceptibly annoyed by Conway’s rather obvious implication that Freeholders was somehow involved in whatever it was that was going on between Cash McCall and Grant Austen.
“Let’s get one thing clear, Mr. Conway,” Atherson said coolly. “My only reason for calling you was that Mr. McCall once asked me to do so in the event that I happened to pick up any seriously malicious gossip. I may have been wrong in putting this rumor in that category, but I felt it better not to take the chance.”
“Quite so—but am I to take it that you regard yourself as not being personally involved?” Conway asked with annoying blandness. “After all, Mr. Atherson, you do own the hotel, don’t you?”
Will Atherson was startled. He had once told Cash McCall that he controlled the Ivanhoe but he had not expected Cash to pass along that information to Conway.
“Which would make Mrs. Kennard an employee of yours,” the lawyer added.
The banker was taken aback by the clear implication that he was responsible for Maude Kennard’s stupid gossiping, and for any harm to Cash McCall that might arise from it. Reluctantly, he admitted, “Yes, in that sense I suppose I am concerned,” more than ever convinced now that he was ready to sell the Hotel Ivanhoe.
“It would seem so to me,” Conway said.
Regaining his poise, Atherson said, “I wouldn’t be too concerned, Mr. Conway. Apparently Mrs. Kennard is upset about something—very bad judgment for her to have talked to Grant Austen, of course, and I intend to take steps to insure having no more of it—but I feel quite certain that it was nothing that Austen would take seriously.”
“Unfortunately, Mr. Atherson, that doesn’t seem to be the case.” Conway paused as if waiting for his words to hit with their full impact. “Fortunately—and I might say, thanks to the promptness with which you advised me—we were able to get a couple of Lockwood men to the airport in time to pick up Mr. and Mrs. Austen and trail them downtown.”
“Lockwood men?” Atherson asked blankly, unable to complete a vague association.
Conway seemed surprised, as if he had assumed knowledge that did not exist. “Lockwood Reports, you know? We occasionally use them in cases of this sort.”
“I see,” Atherson said, his surprise quickly fading as he accepted the fact that the use of a private detective agency by a law firm was not essentially different from the bank’s use of skip tracers and credit agencies, both of whom employed men who did what was essentially detective work.
“I had a progress report just before you arrived,” Conway went on, turning over a sheet of notes that, until now, had been lying face down on his desk pad. “The Austens took a cab to the railroad station where Mrs. Austen got out. She went to the information desk and was told that the next train to Suffolk, Pennsylvania, would not be until two-ten. She seemed very upset, quite nervous. Went into the women’s rest room and when she came out she appeared to have been crying.”
“But what could that have to do with—?”
“I don’t know,” Conway cut in. “I’m giving you the whole story in case any of it registers as being significant. Here’s the rest of it—and this, of course, is directly pertinent. Austen continued down into the city. He went to the Hotel Ivanhoe and met Mrs. Kennard in the lobby. They went up to her office and were there about ten minutes. Austen came down and took a cab. The address he gave to the driver was the address of Clay Torrant’s office. That’s where he is now.”
“But I still don’t see what Grant Austen could—” Will Atherson felt himself fumbling and took a moment to collect his thoughts. “What’s it all about, Mr. Conway?”
“I wish I knew!” the lawyer said fervently.
“You have no idea?”
“None. Do you?”
“No. I can’t for the life of me imagine what Austen could be concerned about. He got a handsome price for his company—settlement’s been made—no, I’m at a complete loss. I realize that Mrs. Kennard told him that he’d been victimized in some way—but he couldn’t have given much weight to that. He knows very well that he got every cent his company was worth.”
Conway folded his sheet of notes. “The only thing that’s occurred to me—I know this wasn’t in what you picked up, but it’s possible that Mrs. Kennard may have learned that Suffolk Moulding was being sold and told him about it in one of their earlier conversations. If she did tell him that Mr. McCall was getting three hundred thousand shares of Andscott Instrument stock for—”
“Andscott Instrument?” Atherson heard himself ask.
“I thought you knew,” Conway said. “But I’m sure that there’s no reason why you shouldn’t know—now that it’s all signed, sealed and delivered.”
The rocketing sensations that exploded in Will Atherson’s mind were totally unidentifiable. His life had provided little experience with fear, none with terror. What was happening within his brain was as mysterious as death—and no less fearsome. He seemed to have lost the power to think, his mind stopped dead on a single exposed memory, the frighteningly clear recollection that he had advised Grant Austen not to consider selling the Suffolk Moulding Company to the Andscott Instrument Corporation.
5
It was Clay Torrant’s first impression that Grant Austen was under even more nervous tension than Maude Kennard had been—and my story at least equally open to distrust—but the longer he listened the more clear it became that what Austen was telling him checked out surprisingly well. Corroborative testimony is usually accepted as reflecting favorably upon the reliability of both witnesses, but in this instance Torrant weighted it heavily in Austen’s favor. There were places, of course, where Austen’s story might be slightly colored by prejudice—but having been cheated out of a million dollars was a much more acceptable justification than the female vindictiveness that had so obviously motivated Maude Kennard.
Torrant had confidence in his ability to judge a man’s character and no doubts troubled his estimate of Grant Austen as a very decent sort of man, not the brightest in the world—he had been grossly negligent in not informing himself about the character of the people with whom he had done business—but even that lapse was, in a way, a reflection of essential honesty. The most commonly duped were those whose own righteousness aroused no suspicion of others.
There was still a very real question in Torrant’s mind about taking the case—he was not forgetting the pitfalls of trying to prove conspiracy—but since he had gone this far, there was no harm in going a little farther. Pulling his note pad toward him, he asked, “Now as I understand it, Mr. Austen, you feel that you have been the victim of a conspiracy?”
“Don’t you?” Austen demanded. “You talked to Mrs. Kennard, didn’t you?”
“Well, at this stage I’m not in a position to have an opinion,” Torrant said mildly, slow-pacing his voice and smiling in a way that he hoped would calm Grant Austen. “Suppose we start back at the beginning and trace this thing through, step by step.”
“Sure, you bet,” Austen agreed, almost eagerly.
“You say that you’d never really thought about selling your company until last week—Tuesday. That would be the twent
y-fourth?”
“Yes, Tuesday.”
“And on that Tuesday you were visited by this man Clark who is the representative of a firm you had retained to advise you in the management of your business.”
“Corporation Associates,” Austen supplied. “It’s Harrison Glenn’s company—or at least I thought it was. Now I know that it’s nothing but a Cash McCall cover-up.”
“Oh, yes—Harrison Glenn,” Torrant said, syllabizing the name as he wrote it. Here was something he had missed … McCall was clever, all right … Glenn was another of those holier-than-thou characters that no one would ever suspect of being a front. “Now, Mr. Austen, you’re quite certain that you did not make your decision to sell your company until after your talk with this man Clark?”
“Absolutely. I didn’t decide until—I thought it over that night, talked to my daughter about it, and then I decided—I mean I more or less decided.”
“Now what was the nature of your conversation with Clark? I believe you said before that he advised you to sell. How did he do that?”
“He said he thought I’d be smart to do it,” Austen said, his tone ironic as he added, “He said I might even get as much as two million dollars—if I was lucky enough to find the right buyer—as if he didn’t know all the time who the buyer was going to be!”
Torrant overlooked the outburst, going calmly on. “And it was Clark—not you—who suggested the two million price?”
“How could I suggest anything? I didn’t know what Suffolk Moulding was worth. Selling a company isn’t like selling a bag of flour. There isn’t any standard price. A company is worth whatever somebody is willing to pay for it.”
“And Clark told you that if anyone offered you two million, you’d better take it in a hurry?”
Austen hesitated and then nodded, sullenly silent.
“And since you had retained Corporation Associates as your management counsel, you felt that establishing a fair and equitable selling price for your company was a service that you had a right to expect from them?”
“I know better now.”
“But at the time, Mr. Austen—were you disposed to accept this valuation of two million dollars?”
“I just didn’t know. That’s why I went down to see Will Atherson.”
“At the Freeholders Bank?”
“That’s right.”
“Tell me this, Mr. Austen—did you have reason to believe that Mr. Atherson would give you a fair appraisal of your company’s worth? In other words, give you advice that you could rely upon?”
“Why wouldn’t I? I’d done business with him almost from the very beginning, way back to ’28.”
“And you thought he was a trustworthy friend of yours—at least a business friend, if I may call him that.”
“Sure, after all these years.”
“Now did you, or did you not, talk to Mr. Atherson about that two million dollar price?”
“Yes, I—”
“And what did he say about it?”
“Well, he said I’d be lucky to get it.”
“In other words, the same thing that Clark had said?”
“Judge, you don’t have to dig around to know they were all in cahoots,” Austen said, breaking out of the straitjacket of cross-examination. “All you have to know is this—Gil Clark told me that I ought to get one buyer bidding against another—you know, so I could get the price up?”
“I understand.”
“Well, I thought that’s what I was doing, but the whole thing was a frame-up to pull the wool over my eyes. Gil said he had a buyer—and Will Atherson said he had another buyer—but when it got to the showdown, they both turned out to be the same man.”
Torrant felt himself lost. “Did you say there was bidding? I thought I understood you to say before—”
“How could there be any bidding?” Austen demanded angrily. “There was only one buyer.”
“But you did accept this offer of McCall’s?”
Austen seemed momentarily puzzled, as if he didn’t understand the question, but then mumbled, “What would you have done—everyone telling you that two million was a good price?”
“By everyone, you mean Clark and Atherson?”
“Sure, who else did I have to trust—or thought I could trust.”
Torrant wrote rapidly, catching up with his notes. “Now let’s get back to Atherson. You say that you talked to him. How much of a talk was that, Mr. Austen—a casual conversation—or did you sit down and have a real talk?”
“You remember that day, don’t you?” Austen demanded. “That’s the day I met you at The Wharf. Will Atherson introduced us. Well, after lunch we went back to his office and talked for—it must have been an hour. I remember I was going to meet my daughter in the Ivanhoe lobby at three and it was almost that when I left the bank.”
“Now, Mr. Austen, think carefully before you answer this next question. During your talk with Mr. Atherson was any mention made—any reference at all—to the possibility of selling your company to Andscott Instrument?”
“I don’t have to think about that,” Austen snapped back. “That was practically all we did talk about.”
Torrant felt the thrust of excitement, the sudden discovery of rich pay-dirt. “It was?”
“Sure, that was my idea from the beginning—selling to Andscott. You see, Judge, I knew all along that Andscott had been trying to get hold of my plant. They tried back during the war—and just before this happened they’d been pushing me to put in a lot of expensive equipment. It was all a part of this same deal—I know that now—nothing but a squeeze play to get me to sell out.”
For a moment, Torrant found himself unable to follow Austen’s reasoning. Then, suddenly, he recalled that Andscott Instrument had also bought Padua Furniture from McCall at a high price. Was that what this was going to turn into—a ring inside Andscott Instrument that was milking the company by draining off its assets with these buys from Cash McCall? There was plenty of talk around town about Andscott Instrument being in trouble and passing their last dividend. This might well be the reason. And that fight that Maude had heard between Danvers and McCall—General Danvers was a too high-type man to be involved himself, of course, but he might well have discovered that McCall and his gang were out to wreck the company.
Making a note for later reference, Torrant drew himself back to the main line of his questioning. “Now, Mr. Austen, in this discussion with Mr. Atherson about the possibility of selling your company to Andscott Instrument—am I to understand that Atherson advised you against it?”
“He sure did.”
“Precisely what did he say?”
“He said it wasn’t even worth talking to them,” Austen replied angrily. “He gave me a big story about Andscott not having any money—how they couldn’t afford to pay me what the company was worth.”
“And he advised you to sell to Mr. McCall?”
“Sure, he said that was the thing to do.”
“And you trusted him?”
“Didn’t I have a right to think I could?”
“Of course, of course,” Torrant murmured. “Now, let’s get along to your meeting with Mr. McCall. How did that happen, Mr. Austen? What were the circumstances?”
A strange flush had come to Grant Austen’s face, a dulled redness that Torrant recognized as a symptom of extreme agitation, and he decided that perhaps he had been driving the witness a little too hard. He eased his voice and supplied, “It was at the Hotel Ivanhoe?”
Austen nodded, staring past him.
“You’d never met him before?”
Austen shook his head.
“Did Atherson introduce you?”
Austen’s stare had become even more distracted. “No—my daughter did.”
Torrant’s attention sharpened. “Your daughter introduced you?”
There was no answer.
“Then McCall had managed to meet your daughter before he got to you?”
“I guess so,” Gran
t Austen mumbled, the admission obviously painful.
Torrant gave his attention to his notes again … apparently there were no depths to which McCall would not stoop!
Suddenly, Austen’s voice broke out, spilling over the dam. “They’d all told me two million was a good price. I didn’t know it was a frame-up. I didn’t know it was all the same gang. How could I—”
“Yes, yes,” Torrant slid in. “I understand your feelings perfectly, Mr. Austen—but our job now is to get the cold, unemotional facts. I’m only trying to help you.”
“Sure, you bet,” Austen admitted, chastized, blinking the stare out of his eyes.
“Well, now—” Torrant began, looking at his notes. “So you went up to Mr. McCall’s suite and that’s where the deal was closed?”
For an instant, it seemed that Austen was again going to lose his self-control, but he stiffened and nodded, tight-lipped.
“And no one else was present?”
Austen shook his head. “No, my daughter was there.”
“Oh—yes, I see.” Torrant made another note … this was a break … a witness. “And your daughter’s name, Mr. Austen?”
“Lory,” Austen said, spelling it. “I’d put some of the stock in her name so that—” He hesitated and then his words were suddenly anger-driven again. “He cheated her, too! She doesn’t know it yet—but he did!”
Torrant underlined his note. “This stock that you say was in your daughter’s name—that was your way of providing for her future welfare?”
“She’s an artist—no money in anything like that—I was trying to be sure she’d always be taken care of.”
“Of course, of course,” Torrant sympathized, Austen’s emotional state now more easily understandable … there was more involved here than money … there usually was. “Your daughter is not married?”
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