Cash McCall

by Cameron Hawley

  Fraud in equity includes all wilful or intentional acts, omissions, and concealments which involve a breach of either legal or equitable duty, trust, or confidence, and are injurious to another, or by which an undue or unconscientious advantage over another is obtained.

  Reread, he saw a significance that he had missed before. It was almost as if some supersensory guidance had forced him into copying the quotation. And it seemed to have been the same providence that had made him note NEUMAN v. CORN EXCHANGE NAT’L BANK & TRUST Co. 356 Pa. 442, 454 (1947)

  … deceived party need not prove that defendant’s false and fraudulent representations were the sole reason … sufficient that they constituted material inducement to his action.

  That was important, too … block any defense allegation that Austen might have acted from other motives. The case was against Clark. But what about Cash McCall? It was McCall who had to be hit … the remedy for fraudulent acquisition of stock is restoration … and it was McCall who held the stock. Should the action be against McCall in the first place?

  He slumped forward, removing his spectacles, rubbing his tired eyes. It wouldn’t be enough to strike at Clark. He had to get deeper than that … expose the whole gang … get all of their shabby trickery out in the open … the bankers who hid their adverse interests behind those glass and marble fronts, the brokers who were nothing but sheep’s-clothing finders for the operators, the pack-following lawyers who covered up their tracks for a juicy fee, the Bureau boys who got so fat off the income tax racket that …

  As miraculously as it had happened before, there was a sudden break of light … that famous line from his father’s argument in ALTIMYER v. SMITH … it is physiologically inescapable that when you step on the catspaw the sensation of pain is transmitted to the cat.

  Through a suit against Clark, he could get at McCall. Or would it be wiser to sue Clark and Corporation Associates as joint defendants … or ring in Cash McCall, too? But that didn’t have to be decided now … later … cross that bridge when he came to it.

  There was no doubt that he had his case … his case. This was his chance to make the Law what he had always wanted it to be, a shining sword to strike down the sneak thieves who preyed upon honest men, pulling the wool over the eyes of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, filching their dirty millions, living in suites at the Ivanhoe, apartments at the Carwick Arms, white-fenced gentlemen farms supported by income tax deductions, blue-ribboned horses and mink-coated mistresses … the Cash McCalls …

  He had replaced his spectacles and the first thing that his restored vision saw was the last thing he had written, the underlined reminder of what would become the foundation of his case … CONFIDENTIAL RELATION … yes, that would be the soft spot in the defendant’s armor.

  Again flipping through his pages of notes, he confirmed a truth that had suddenly revealed itself. He had traced every citation under that heading. All had involved bankers, brokers, physicians or attorneys. There was not a single case, not one that even remotely touched the confidential relationship between a retained business consultant and a corporation client. He would be blazing a new path, setting a new landmark in the Law … AUSTEN v. CLARK … cited as a leading case for the next hundred years … sustained by the Supreme Court of the United States … Clay Torrant for the appellee.

  The prospect was, if anything, too enticing. Consciously, Torrant opened his mind to caution. It would be a rough case. Cash McCall would stop at nothing. His business life would be at stake and he would fight like the cornered rat that he was … and all the rest of the rats would come running to his help … and the leader of the pack would be Winston Conway.

  Clay Torrant closed his eyes as if impelled to shut away the image of Conway’s sickeningly handsome face taunting him with the sardonic disdain of a man who held all the trumps. What chance did he have against Conway … that reputation … even the judges showing their deference.

  The old lawyer’s eyes opened and he set his jaw. There was such a thing as Justice … there had to be … something that couldn’t be bought with dollars …

  There was a case here … and he could win it! Yes, even though he was all alone … Clay Torrant v. Jamison, Conway & Slythe, Cash McCall, Will Atherson and the Freeholders Bank & Trust Company, Clark and Harrison Glenn and Corporation Associates, Lockwood Reports … all the men and money in the world and, damn it, he’d still lick them! And he wouldn’t take a penny for himself … spend every cent of his fee for the help he would need to build the case … prove to those rats that there was at least one man left in the world who was above their dirty money-grubbing!

  Again there was the reflex of caution and now, finally, he listened to the question that his subconscious mind had been whispering for the last two hours. Would Austen stand his ground and go through with it? Or would he lose his guts and back out … make him look an old fool … a has-been lawyer desperate for a case? It happened constantly in every legal practice, the irate client who was ready to sue everyone in sight until the chips started going down … and Austen had obviously been in a neurotic state. And there were weaknesses in his story, holes that anyone could see … questions that still had to be answered … yes, he should have dug a little deeper … but he had gone as far as he could, Austen as keyed up as he’d been.

  But was there any doubt that Cash McCall was guilty, any doubt at all? If this were the first time it might be different … it wasn’t … McCall had done it again and again, millions upon millions. Everyone knew that … every decent right-minded man in Philadelphia knew it was time someone clipped that vulture’s wings!

  Austen couldn’t back down now! Damn it, why had he let him get away? There wasn’t a minute to lose … Austen had to be convinced that he did have a case … and that he had to go through with it! There was a million dollars at stake here … but more than money … more than a company … more than one man or one lawyer or one …

  Without conscious decision, he had gotten to his feet and plunged to the door. “Miss Fitch, put in a call—Mr. Austen at Suffolk. If he isn’t there yet, keep trying.”

  “Yes, Mr. Torrant,” she said, again as sullenly grim as she had been before lunch. “There’s a message on your desk.”

  He suspected from Miss Fitch’s manner that the message would be from Maude Kennard. It was. She wanted him to call her at once. The message was more than a half hour old. Instinctively, he hesitated—and then decided to put through the call himself without bothering Miss Fitch. It was strange about Maude … always seemed as if she never cared about anyone but herself … but it was Maude who had brought him the Austen case … AUSTEN v. CLARK …

  “Wait a minute,” Maude Kennard said when she heard his voice. He waited, hearing a door close in the background. Then, in a barely audible whisper, she said, “A man’s been here trying to dig information out of me. His whole story was phony. He claimed he was with the Luxor Hotel chain but I’m sure he was a Lockwood man.”

  There was a click and the connection was broken. After a stunned moment, Clay Torrant stabbed at his buzzer.

  When Miss Fitch appeared, he demanded, “Wasn’t there someone out there with you just now?”

  She shook her head. “Just a salesman for one of the office supply places.”

  “Which one?”

  “I don’t know. Some new one. There wasn’t anything I wanted, anyway.”

  “Did he ask you any questions?”

  “Yes,” Miss Fitch said, her voice acidly sharp. “He asked me how long I was going to have to put up with that old wreck of a typewriter.”

  “Oh,” Torrant said, deflated. “Yes, we’ll have to do something about that, Miss Fitch. What about Mr. Austen?”

  “I haven’t been able to call him yet. You were on the line with Mrs. Kennard.”

  She closed the door without giving him a chance to reply.

  Ten minutes passed before she came back to tell him that the girl who had answered at Mr. Austen’s home had said that he was attendin
g a convention and wasn’t expected home until some time Monday.

  8

  “Yes sir, Mrs. Austen,” the taxi driver said, relieving her of the necessity of speaking but destroying the anonymity that had been her shield in the station at Philadelphia and on the train to Suffolk, forcing her now to face the truth of arrival.

  This return home had been her goal through the hours of waiting, but now she realized that her motivation had been a blindly groping hope that was impossible of fulfillment. Her guilt was as inescapable as her identity. Selfishness was her sin, blindness her curse.

  All through the night, and until their plane had taken off from Washington, Miriam Austen had suspected insanity in her husband. Then, finally, Grant had told her how he had been victimized by the Cash McCall gang. That had turned the accusation of insanity upon herself and no argument had been able to dislodge it, seeing herself nakedly revealed as a horribly abnormal creature, so incorrigibly hungry for her own happiness that she had completely missed even the vaguest sensing of her husband’s burden. She had failed him again as she had failed him through all of their marriage. The convention had been her chance for a new life, and she had destroyed hope with the same blindness that had always cursed her.

  She had known why Grant had turned to Lory—because that was where he had found understanding—and yet, knowing, she had still failed in the opportunity he had given her to redeem herself.

  Even when Grant had told her, over and over again, that what he was worried about had nothing whatsoever to do with Lory, she had been so stupidly self-centered that she hadn’t believed him, her jealousy such a corrupting thing that it destroyed all understanding. Now she could see the depths of her depravity, the revolting abnormality of a mother so jealous of her own daughter that she had tried to drive her from their home, so anxious to get rid of her that she had pushed her off on the first man who had been willing to take her away. Grant was right … she should have told him it was Cash McCall who had gone off with Lory day before yesterday … the face in the book, the man from Maine … but the self-seeking hope of being alone with her husband had blinded her to the truth that all Cash McCall was after was Lory’s money.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Austen,” the cab driver called back, a remark frighteningly pertinent until, as a delayed perception, she was conscious of a jarring thump.

  “They ought to do something about this street,” the driver complained. “It’s the frost that does it—heaving the pavement.”

  “I know,” she said. It was the first time she had spoken aloud since she had bought her ticket in Philadelphia and the sound of her voice seemed oddly calm, strangely mismatched with the mind-spoken words of madness, and she stored the sound-image of what she had just said as something to be repeated when Anna told her that Lory hadn’t been home last night.

  The cab turned sharply and, before she could call out to tell the driver to bear left for the garden entrance, he had swung right and stopped at the front porch.

  The opening door brushed back a pile of mail that had been dropped through the slot and she stooped immediately to gather it up, sorting out Grant’s mail as she walked toward the library to put it on his desk even before she had taken off her hat, an unconscious grasping at even this minor chance to serve him. There was an inch-thick pile of letters and telegrams, the corner cards identifying a few more of the dozens of investment brokers and charitable organizations that, with equal zeal, had been writing and wiring him ever since the rumor had gotten out that he had sold Suffolk Moulding, the flow increased now that the sale had been confirmed. Momentarily, she considered destroying this pile of mail as a way to protect Grant from the painful recollection of what had happened, but then realized that she was thinking with her own mind, not her husband’s … Grant was strong enough to face the truth and not try to hide it.

  She placed the mail on his desk pad, squared it to a neat pile, and then walked back to the center hall, stopping at the mirror to take off her hat. Suddenly, overhead, there was the sound of footsteps. Her flash reaction was that Anna was late in doing the upstairs work today, but the rhythm of the steps was as identifiable as a voice and she knew, even before she saw her daughter at the head of the stairs, that Lory was home.

  “Mother!” Lory exclaimed, the single word as expressive as a dozen questions.

  The very act of looking up was a subjection to apology and Miriam Austen climbed the stairs as a penitent striving for the expiation of a sin. There was only one way she could save herself now … make Lory understand how much her father needed her!

  “What in the world has happened?” Lory demanded.

  “The most awful thing,” Miriam Austen said, her voice as stiff as her body, rigidly restraining the impulse to gather her daughter in her arms, subconsciously denying herself the outlet of emotion as if its containment were a demanded part of her penance.

  “It’s Father, isn’t it?” Lory asked.

  “Yes,” she acknowledged, suddenly deciding that her easiest course would be to pretend ignorance of any relationship between Lory and Cash McCall. “Your father has found out that he was cheated by this man McCall—and, even worse, that so many other men he thought were his friends were all in on it—Will Atherson and Gil Clark and Mr. Conway. They were all part of the same gang.”

  Lory, in her quilted challis dressing robe, her eyes wide with astonishment, looked even more childlike than usual and Miriam Austen felt herself achieving some slight command of the situation.

  But what gain she had made was immediately canceled by the coldly adult tone in which Lory asked, “What have you been told?”

  “Your father will tell you himself as soon as he gets home.”

  “It isn’t true.”

  “Lory, listen to me—please.”

  “He wasn’t cheated.”

  “Oh, he was, Lory, he was! They were all in on it together. I know how hard it is for you to believe it. I couldn’t believe it myself when he first told me.”

  “And if you believe it now, you’re believing a lie,” Lory said, not raising her voice.

  Her daughter’s frigid calm was more devastating than a shrieked outburst, and Miriam Austen helplessly dropped her voice to a poor match of Lory’s tone. “You don’t know what happened. Gil Clark talked him into selling—”

  “I do know what happened. Wasn’t I with him when he decided to sell—that night down in the library—alone with him? You know I was.”

  Miriam Austen recoiled as if struck by a blow.

  “And didn’t I go to Philadelphia with him? And I was with him in Cash’s apartment when he sold the company. I know what happened—and I’m the only one who does know. Cash didn’t cheat him. No one cheated him. If there was anyone who did anything wrong it was Father. You say that Gil Clark talked him into selling. That isn’t true. Do you want to know why he sold—and in such a hurry? I’ll tell you. Because he thought he was going to lose half of the plant’s business—and he thought he could trick someone into buying before they found out about it. If you want the truth, there it is.”

  Lory backed a step and then turned to the doorway of her bedroom, closing the door behind her.

  Miriam Austen was so certain that the door would be locked against her that reaching out to the doorknob was a gesture of hopelessness. But the door was open.

  9

  During the few minutes that he had flown the plane, Gil Clark had all but forgotten that Cash McCall had said he wanted to talk to him. The instant Cash had taken over the controls again, however, there was a full return of curiosity, sharpened by the memory that he had said he wanted him to “get together” with John Allenby—whatever that meant. But there had been no break in the silence. Cash had said nothing. He was lost in thought, totally preoccupied and clearly not with the handling of the airplane—he flew as “Pappy” White had flown, every move a reflex so well conditioned that there was no need for conscious thought.

  It was not until they were on the ground, and after Cash ha
d turned the airplane over to a white-jumpered mechanic with instructions that it was to be serviced for a five o’clock take-off, that he suddenly started to talk. His first crisp sentences were enough to disprove Gil’s earlier guess that Cash had been thinking only of Lory Austen. It seemed then that every second of silence in the cockpit of the plane must have been used in preparation for what now developed into an astoundingly incisive analysis of the management problems that would be faced in a reorganization of the Andscott Instrument Company.

  Gil had seen prior evidence of Cash McCall’s amazing ability to capture and hold endless detail—his mind apparently retaining an instantly available carbon copy of every fact-filled page of the Lockwood report—but this was his first encounter with Cash’s capacity for creative thinking on management problems. Many of his ideas were bold, some to the point of unorthodoxy, but everything Cash proposed was grounded upon a sure knowledge of the company’s specialized problems. He drew the plan with broad strokes, wasting no time on fine shadings, yet constantly exhibiting a profound knowledge of operating detail.

  Gil was so professionally intrigued that he all but lost curiosity about his own future, so occupied with the task of keeping pace with Cash’s racing mind that he hardly noticed the passage of time or distance. It came as something of a shock when he saw that they were already in downtown Philadelphia, surprise compounded by Cash abruptly asking, “Where do you see yourself in the Andscott picture, Gil?”

  Caught unaware, Gil hesitated and then gave himself another moment to think by saying, “That’s up to you.”

  “No ideas?”

  “I didn’t know I was going to be in the picture.”

  “That’s for you to decide—but I have been playing with one line of thought that might intrigue you.” Cash twisted on the seat, half facing him now. “This may be blue-sky thinking but it seems to me that Andscott Instrument might give us a chance to learn some things—maybe more important in the long run than the money we’ll make on this one deal. We’re breaking into electronics here and that’s an enormous field.”