Murder for Lunch

by Haughton Murphy

  For six years, George Pierce Bannard had been the one-man band, the Executive Partner of Chase & Ward. Bannard looked the part—jet black hair despite his sixty-six years (there was some, but not much, intraoffice cattiness about the genuineness of the color), topping a six-foot, two-inch frame that had once been sleek and athletic but now reflected its owner’s abandoning of strenuous exercise. His ruddy complexion echoed his sturdy New England farm ancestors, but there was nothing rustic about him. Bumptious and sometimes ill-mannered, perhaps, but not rustic.

  If someone had asked George Bannard how he had come to be the first among equals—the one-man band—at one of the country’s preeminent law firms, he undoubtedly would have said “merit,” echoing Jefferson and Horatio Alger in the bargain. In a way he would have been right; his linear progression from Harvard undergraduate to successful law student at Penn to diligent Chase & Ward associate to eager young, then older, partner certainly plotted an upward graph that indicated success.

  But there were those at Chase & Ward who might have substituted “luck” for “merit” as the essential propellant to Bannard’s rise. He was, after all, the son and the grandson of successful Wall Street lawyers. That alone had given him a certain acquired-at-the-dinner-table ease with the jargon and outward mannerisms of the successful practitioner—plus the financial backing to cushion life’s early shocks, whether in the form of inedible college meals, a railroad flat in Greenwich Village or a meagre apprentice’s salary at Chase & Ward.

  Bannard had been lucky, too, in being born in 1918, and born with poor eyesight at that. As a result, he had finished college in 1941 and begun law school at a time when his contemporaries were being drafted (law school at Penn; Bannard’s preoccupation with Scroll and Key’s antics and similar amusements at Yale had foreclosed admission to a more prestigious law school). Deferred from selective service because of his eyesight, Bannard finished law school in 1944 and went to work at Chase & Ward immediately. (Luck had helped here. Bannard had done well enough at Penn Law School, but it was not then a prime recruiting ground for firms of the caliber of Chase & Ward. Timely intervention by his father with Phineas Ward took care of all that, however; merit, in those days, was a malleable concept where the son of a good friend was concerned.) So Bannard arrived at Chase & Ward with plenty of time to ingratiate himself with his seniors before the arrival of a flood of GI-bill law school graduates who had served in the war.

  More good luck followed. As a successful young man-about-town he met and soon married Eleanor Coward, an attractive Smith graduate three years his junior. Thoroughly conventional—to the point of boredom in the view of some—she was exactly the kind of wife who appealed to Phineas Ward and the other aging WASPs who then ran the firm.

  Bannard’s selection as a partner in 1954, after what was then a normal, underpaid ten-year apprenticeship, was thoroughly predictable. No one said Bannard was brilliant or even very imaginative. But he had acquired a reputation for dispensing sound, straight and practical legal advice, qualities that had in recent years made him one of the most sought-after business lawyers in New York. His ability to cut through complex problems, to clarify issues and to suggest workable solutions was well known. At the same time, he was an indifferent legal draftsman and impatient with the minute details required to bring transactions to fruition; as far as he was concerned, these matters could be left to subordinates who were more accomplished technicians. It was enough that he was there to enshroud often nervous and unsure clients with the bright beam of the self-confidence he always projected, at least in public.

  A college friendship at college with Alan Young, one of the first and leading conglomerateurs, sealed Bannard’s claim, if any sealing was necessary, to the Executive Partner position. Starting out with a small family business in Massachusetts, Young created a multibillion dollar company through an aggressive and continuing acquisition program. He had sought out Bannard early, and Bannard had been his personal lawyer as the company grew to be one of Chase & Ward’s largest, most active and most lucrative clients.

  As Chase & Ward’s Executive Partner, Bannard was expected to “show the flag” on the firm’s behalf, which he did as the director of several corporations and as a Trustee of the Museum of Modern Art. The Museum trusteeship he had in effect inherited from his father, a thoughtful, cultivated man and an art collector in a modest way, who had served with distinction for many years on the Modern’s board, almost from the time of the Museum’s founding. George Bannard did not share his father’s enthusiasm for modern art; indeed, given his poor eyesight, there was some question about just what he saw when looking at a Picasso or a Braque, let alone an Agnes Martin. In private, he had been heard to endorse the any-child-can-do-this theory of modern art, but he was nonetheless an enthusiastic, if not terribly well informed, supporter of the Museum and, with his wide business contacts, a diligent and successful fund-raiser for the institution.

  On this particular Tuesday morning, George Bannard was standing at the corner of Park and Seventy-ninth, waiting for the Wall Street express bus. As a senior partner of Chase & Ward, Bannard could well have afforded a more elegant means of commuting to his downtown office. A private limousine would have been affordable, and a taxi certainly would have been. But with his inheritance of New England frugality, he regarded limousines as ostentatious and taxis as simply not worth the money. The premium-fare Wall Street express bus was just fine, saving him as it did from the vagaries of the subway system which, when Bannard had stopped using it the year before, had seemed to be deteriorating on a daily basis.

  This morning he was carrying both an attaché case (he was oblivious to the small envelope theory) and a small overnight bag, since he was leaving later in the day on a business trip to Chicago. When the bus arrived, Bannard pushed toward the door, using both the attaché case and the overnight bag as offensive weapons, in a manner best described as aggressive. Given his size, he was something of a menace in crowds and queues, particularly when armed, as he was this morning.

  Seventy-ninth Street was one of the first stops for the bus, so Bannard had no trouble getting a seat. He unfolded The Wall Street Journal and, like Graham Donovan, was attracted to the front-page story on “insider” trading. He, too, was mentally confronted once again with the Stephens press release mess, but his attitude was different from Donovan’s. Bannard’s thoughts were ones of anger, directed at Donovan’s carelessness in sending the sensitive release to the Chase & Ward files through the normal distribution system. That system was usually reliable, and not as a rule subject to leaks, but the Stephens release was sensitive enough, Bannard thought, to have been kept locked up in Donovan’s own desk until after the Stephens public announcement had been made.

  Donovan was probably too busy thinking about Anne Singer, Bannard concluded, damning his partner’s foolishness. He was sure Donovan thought no one knew about his little dalliance, but secrets like that simply could not be kept in the small town that is New York. What had happened in Donovan’s case was fairly typical: their partner, Fred Coxe, while dining with his artist son in SoHo, had seen Graham and Anne together in a remote and rather offbeat restaurant. The office busybody, Coxe had immediately sought to gain Bannard’s favor by reporting what he had seen. Bannard thought nothing more about the matter until several weeks later when he heard a similar report from another partner. Then a picture of Graham and Anne appeared in W, the high-society gossip sheet—noticed by Eleanor—and there remained little doubt in Bannard’s mind what was going on.

  Bannard hoped against hope that the steam of the Singer/Donovan affair would evaporate of its own accord. As Chase & Ward’s Executive Partner for six years, he had managed to survive in that thicket of egos without a major blowup, and he had hopes that the remaining two years of his tenure, before he was required to step down at age sixty-eight, would be placid as well. He was less concerned about Roger Singer’s reactions—Roger was so burnt out and beaten down that Bannard didn’t believe Anne’s b
ehavior would upset him—than about those of his partners. There was Marvin Isaacs, who could bring an almost terrifying Old Testament righteousness to questions he viewed as moral issues. Or Peter Denny, Knight of Malta and straight arrow (Donovan’s being a lapsed Catholic not helping in this department, either). Or Nigel Stewart, pursed-lipped Calvinist. Yes, there was an ecumenical coalition that would readily conduct Donovan’s auto-da-fé if the chance arose.

  Not that Chase & Ward was precisely a Sunday school. Many of the partners, if not a majority, had been divorced, some more than once. (Even the young ones, Bannard reflected. Marrying early and shedding a wife during or right after law school seemed common. Bannard had noted, for whatever it was worth, that this was particularly true of Stanford and Berkeley graduates.) But old or young, a partner simply did not take up with another partner’s wife.

  At the Second Avenue stop, Bannard saw Tom Agnew, a partner in Harvey, Handelsman & Linde (a respectable downtown law firm but, in Bannard’s view, no Chase & Ward), approaching down the aisle. Roughly the same age, Bannard and Agnew had been classmates at Penn, where they had had a class or two together, but had not been friends. Rutgers (Agnew’s alma mater) and Yale simply did not mix, at least not in the 1940s when they had been at Penn. Bannard and Agnew had begun work at their firms the same year and had become partners within months of each other.

  For reasons that Bannard could never understand, Agnew had become increasingly friendly over the years. Since he found Agnew a total bore, this disturbed Bannard. Did it mean he was a bore, too, with likes attracting? When they had started out in New York, the two were barely nodding acquaintances. “Hello, George … Nice to see you, Tom” was about the extent of it. Then Tom became increasingly active in Pennsylvania Law School fund-raising activities and solicited Bannard with some frequency for money—the law school annual giving fund, a memorial scholarship for a classmate killed in Korea, dues for the alumni association, reunion gifts, and so on and so on. Each solicitation and each encounter brought their friendship, at least in Agnew’s mind, to a new level of intimacy.

  Bannard quickly opened his Journal and buried himself in it, but it did no good.

  “Mind if I sit down, George?” Agnew asked, doing so before Bannard could reply.

  Bannard had never figured out whether Agnew was smart or stupid; if pressed, he would have said that he was dim. If pressed further, he would have admitted that this was based as much on Agnew’s physical appearance as anything else—his large, round head and slack face, all offset with a grin that could without much exaggeration be described as moronic.

  Agnew’s clothes heightened the unfortunate effect. This particular morning he was wearing a badly fitting and hardly pressed brown suit, scuffed brown shoes and a shiny rep tie that decidedly was not silk. A bit of Agnew’s composition shirt peeked out from under his vest, which did not quite meet the pants, and a bit of flesh showed above his anklet hose when he crossed his legs and settled into his seat.

  Bannard was no fashion plate; his clothes were tailor-made and expensive but unimaginative, and most outsiders would have been shocked to know how few suits the highly successful Executive Partner actually possessed. Yet he knew slovenliness when he saw it. He was repelled by Agnew’s hayseed appearance. How could a Wall Street lawyer, and presumably a prosperous one, dress this way?

  Bannard tried to conceal his distaste, grunting a barely audible good morning to him.

  “What’s new, George?” Agnew asked, in his flat, South Jersey accent. “Busy these days?”

  “Yes, thanks, I am. And you?”

  “I’ve never been so busy in my life.”

  Bannard ignored the fact that Agnew unfailingly said this, leading Bannard to think that business at Harvey, Handelsman & Linde might not be as brisk as Agnew would lead one to believe. Besides, even if Agnew were busy, his work was, at least in Bannard’s opinion, exceptionally tedious. Bannard enjoyed the trust and confidence of the top officers of his clients, advising them on interesting and often delicate matters of policy. Agnew, by contrast, was a scrivener, turning out thoroughly routine loan agreements for insurance companies and other institutional purchasers of corporate debt. Perhaps there was an excitement there, but it had always eluded Bannard. As far as he could see, the principal traits of Agnew’s practice were to be obsequious to often self-important house lawyers at the insurance companies and to be able to articulate the word no in a variety of ways to the hapless borrowers from those companies.

  “Still doing private placements, Tom?” Bannard asked.

  “Oh, sure. Can’t get away from it. Everybody’s got money to lend and they don’t seem to have any trouble pushing it out there.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear you’re busy. If you weren’t you might get into mischief.”

  “Oh, George, always the joker,” Agnew guffawed. “Just the way you were in law school.”

  Agnew’s statement was absurd, Bannard fumed to himself. He was not then, nor was he now, by any stretch of the imagination a “joker.” And besides, Agnew had not the faintest idea of what he had been like at law school.

  “By the way, George, are you going to the reunion?”

  “Law school, you mean?”

  “Yes, it’s our fortieth, you know.”

  “I guess I did get something in the mail about it. But no, I’m not. I can’t think of anything more painful. All the class losers will be there, hoping to drum up some referral business from their successful classmates. And all the successful ones—or the ones that think they are successes—will be standing around preening and waiting for the losers to flatter them.”

  “Oh, George, it isn’t like that at all. Have you ever been to a class reunion?”

  “No. But I just know what they are like. I just know—oh, aren’t you our class president or something?”

  “Reunion chairman, George,” a subdued Agnew replied. “Well, here we are. Sorry you won’t go to the reunion. But I’ll give you a full report on all the losers.” Again the guffaw and the simpleton grin. “It was good to see you, old fellow.”

  “Good-bye, Tom. And, all kidding aside, I hope all our classmates who go down to Philadelphia have a splendid time.” It seemed the least Bannard could say to the hurt reunion chairman of his class, even if he disliked him.

  As he got off the bus at the Battery, he thought of his colleagues in midtown firms and for a moment envied them. They could walk to work and have elegant and leisurely lunches at the Four Seasons or Le Cygne. But he checked his hedonistic thoughts. Downtown was the place to be. Uneventful, but that was good; it let you concentrate on your work without distraction. And the simple, no-nonsense fare at the Hexagon Club was better for you than the tempting excesses available in midtown. Having convinced himself anew, he strode purposefully toward One Metropolitan Plaza.

  Bannard’s analysis of life downtown was to prove wrong that Tuesday. For, at Chase & Ward, there was to be a very large distraction in the dramatic death of Graham Donovan. And in the Hexagon Club at that.

  REUBEN FROST

  3

  Reuben Frost looked up from the morning Times as his wife, Cynthia, handed him a large glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. He took the cool glass eagerly and downed its contents with what, had he been in public, would have seemed ill-mannered haste. At seventy-four, he was much too old to have experienced the “rushes” modern young people said they experienced when taking drugs. The lift from rapidly drinking a glass of orange juice first thing in the morning (and the satisfied burp that usually followed) were quite enough for him and the effect, he was sure, was not unlike that of sniffing cocaine.

  The combination of the Times, delivered each morning to the door of his East Seventieth Street townhouse, and his glass of orange juice, prepared unfailingly by his wife, formed a ritual that had been followed since his wedding thirty-nine years earlier. The Times did not always fill him with contentment, but the orange juice did, both physically and psychologically.

&nbs
p; The day they had returned from their honeymoon, Cynthia Frost had bought a juice squeezer and, on almost every day when they had both been at home since, had prepared a glass of orange juice for her husband. He regarded it, rightfully, as a loving domestic gesture from a wife who had many other things to do to fill up her day.

  Frost’s marriage to Cynthia Hansen had created much incredulous surprise among both his friends and hers. He had first met her when she was a promising star of the newly founded Ballet Theatre. Her vivacious, lighter-than-air technique, employed most notably in the title role of Anton Dolin’s new production of Giselle, had caused much favorable comment in the dance world (a smaller world then than now, but nonetheless the world that mattered above all else to young Miss Hansen from Kansas City, Missouri). She had made a distinctive mark at age twenty-three, and the city’s balletomanes adored her. Equally vivacious offstage, she seemed an unlikely bride for a fledgling Wall Street lawyer.

  Frost first met his bride-to-be in 1940, at the very start of her career in New York. A college roommate of Frost’s at Princeton, working as an investment banker in New York, had known her growing up in Kansas City and had introduced Reuben to her on a double date. Frost, who knew nothing whatever of the ballet (dancing lessons were perhaps familiar in Kansas City, but not in the Adirondack mountains in Upstate New York, where he had grown up), was intrigued by his new acquaintance. Soon he found himself attending performances at the City Center and shyly asking the ballet’s star for late suppers afterward. Or, on more than one occasion, dashing to the City Center stage door after a late evening of work at Chase & Ward.