The old man hunched his shoulders and his neck seemed to disappear.
Pilcher, sensing resistance, pressed on. “A lot could be done with Tredway. Excellent production facilities but inadequate management. The real trouble, of course, is that Bullard’s running a completely one-man show.”
“That’s bad?” the old man asked blandly.
“Of course. All you have to do is look at the ratio of net return to invested capital to realize that—”
A flutter of Steigel’s pudgy hand cut him off. “My boy, you are a good lawyer—you know the law. Also you are a good financial man—you know stocks and bonds. I know something, too. I know companies. All my life I watch companies. I want to know why they are a success. Always it is the same answer. You hear, always the same answer—always one man. You remember that, Mr. Pilcher. Always when you find a good company it is what you call a one-man show.”
“Perhaps during the early stages, the period of expansion and development, but when a corporation—”
“You have the right man, you have a good company. You don’t have the right man, you have nothing.”
Pilcher hesitated. The size of his salary prompted perpetual diplomacy, yet his ambition forced him on. “Perhaps the point I want to make, Julius, is that a company needs a different management technique during different stages in its development. While it’s going through a period of major expansion, breaking into new ground, there’s no doubt that it takes a two-fisted dictator with a whip in both hands to make things go—an Avery Bullard. However, when that period is over future success depends upon efficiency of operation and maintenance of position. Then you need a different kind of management.”
A twinkle played around Julius Steigel’s watery eyes. “Nice speech, Mr. Pilcher.”
“It’s true. Take any of the big corporations. The promoters who put them together weren’t the men who stayed on to make them operate.”
“Mr. Bullard don’t do so bad. Last year, four million net after taxes.”
“It should have been twice that on the volume of business they did.”
The twinkle broadened to a grin. “Mr. Pilcher, if Tredway is such a bad company why do you say I should take stock instead of the cash? A bad company, it is a bad stock.”
Pilcher shook his head. “It’s an excellent company—potentially. All they need down there is some modern management—sound organization. Do you realize that Bullard doesn’t even have a second in command? Fitzgerald, who was executive vice-president, died last March and Bullard still hasn’t appointed anyone else to take his place. There are five vice-presidents, all with equal authority. Imagine!”
Steigel’s grin broke again. “They have Mr. Bullard. Maybe that is enough.”
Bruce Pilcher chose to disregard the obvious fact that Julius Steigel was having a bit of fun at his expense. “Suppose something would happen to Avery Bullard?”
“He is a young man.”
“Fifty-six on the nineteenth of September,” Pilcher flashed back, hoping to impress the old man with the meticulous accuracy of his information.
Steigel shrugged. “Fifty-six is a young man. When I am only fifty-six I am just getting started. You know how old I am, Mr. Pilcher? My next birthday, seventy-one.”
Dutifully, Bruce Pilcher picked up the cue. “Not really, Mr. Steigel! No one would ever suspect it.”
“Seventy-one,” the old man repeated, his eyes glinting guardedly with the satisfaction of again having bested his new president in an argument. He disliked Pilcher but it was very necessary to keep from showing it. He needed him. Business had gotten so complicated these last few years that you had to have someone like Pilcher. It wasn’t enough any more to know how to run stores and buy and sell furniture. Last year alone, Pilcher had saved almost two hundred thousand dollars in taxes.
A siren moaned to a stop on the avenue below the window and Pilcher turned, looking down, accepting the chance to avert his eyes. He was keenly disappointed at his failure to maneuver himself into a Tredway directorship. Odessa was only a rung on the way up. Tredway was the top of the ladder. If he could get on the Tredway board there was no telling where he might go. Avery Bullard would be no harder to handle than old Julius Steigel had been.
The ambulance had stopped and the thick crescent of the crowd opened and closed like gaping pincers, swallowing up the hurrying man in white. Pilcher sharpened his interest only enough to block the aggravating drone of old Julius’ voice. The man in white was signaling and the driver was pulling out a stretcher, swinging it to force back the crowd, straightening it, bending down to lift the body.
Pilcher began to speak but his voice froze in his throat. The man they were putting on the stretcher was unmistakably Avery Bullard.
The old man was at his side now, puffing a little as he strained over the sill. “It looks maybe like—”
“It’s Avery Bullard,” Pilcher said, sharply grim.
A low moan escaped from Julius Steigel’s lips.
A blanket blotted out the figure on the stretcher and Pilcher swung around, standing stiffly, his eyes narrowed. “He’s dead.”
Julius Steigel was an old man, at the moment a very old man, mystified and staring. “Only a minute ago you are saying, what if something should happen.”
Pilcher brushed past him, snatching at the telephone on the desk. “This is Mr. Pilcher. Get me Caswell & Co.,” he barked at the receiver. Then a warning flashed in his mind … George Caswell would be too inquisitive … he was a Tredway director.
“Wait!” he commanded. “Get me Slade & Finch. Mr. Wingate.”
He covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “Might as well salvage what we can out of this.”
He was talking to the old man’s slumped shoulders, black against the light of the window. The sound of the siren faded away and finally lost itself in the overtone of street noises.
The call came through. “Wingate? This is Bruce Pilcher. Now make this fast!” He flicked a glance at his wrist watch. “There’s only twenty-one minutes before the bell. Start selling Tredway common short. Feed out everything you can before the close. What? I said everything you can get rid of. Call me back at my office.”
The receiver clattered down in the silence of the room. Steigel was facing him, gray-faced, wetting his thick lips. “You—you think—?”
“When the street finds out in the morning that Avery Bullard is dead, that stock will break ten points.” He glanced at his watch again. “Damn it, only twenty minutes. We’ll be lucky to get short of a couple of hundred shares.”
Steigel looked at him, slack-lipped and staring. “There are some ways it don’t seem right to make money.”
A lip-twisting smile formed on Bruce Pilcher’s face. “If you’d prefer, Julius, I’m quite willing to handle this on my own account.”
Bruce Pilcher watched the door close, beating a fast tattoo on the desktop with the tips of his long-fingered right hand. He felt a tremendous surge of exhilarated pride in the speed and decisiveness with which he had acted. There had been too many times in his life when he had fumbled opportunity, tripped by caution and fear. Poor old Julius was showing his age. The slightest excitement now and the old boy had to go to the toilet.
2.44 P.M. EDT
Alex Oldham, manager of the New York branch office of the Tredway Corporation, was having the kind of an afternoon that he always had when he knew that Mr. Bullard was in the city. He might decide to drop in and he might not … you never knew. All you could do was sit on the griddle and fry, sweating it out, waiting, keeping an eye on the office to be sure no one started any horseplay. If you relaxed for one minute and let some fool thing happen, that was sure to be the very instant old Bullard would come busting in the front door. That’s the way he was … you could have one undusted piece in the whole showroom and, by God, he’d walk right up to it!
Oldham poured a glass of water out of the silver carafe on his desk. The water was lukewarm and tasted like dust, gagging him. He spat it back
in the glass and felt as if he were about to retch.
“Mr. Oldham, I—oh, I’m sorry.”
It was his secretary, Mary Voskamp, backing embarrassedly through the door she had just opened.
“No, no! Come here!” he commanded. “Miss Voskamp, would you mind making certain that I have fresh water every morning?”
“But you almost never touch it. I—yes, sir. I’m sorry, Mr. Oldham.”
“What is it?”
“Mr. Flannery called and wanted to know if he could bring Mr. Scott over at four-thirty. It’s about that finish complaint on those tables. But if you’re too busy—”
Oldham worked his lips nervously. “I don’t know. Mr. Bullard’s in town. He might stop in.”
“Mr. Bullard? Isn’t he going back to Millburgh on the three-five?”
“Three-five?”
“We got him a Pullman seat and sent it over to his hotel. He called in just before lunch.”
“You might have told me!” he flared.
“I didn’t know that you were—I’m sorry, Mr. Oldham.”
“All right, all right,” he said, straining against collapsing anger. “Not your fault, Miss Voskamp. Just—well, it’s been one of those days.”
“I’ll tell Mr. Flannery that it would be better to wait until tomorrow. He said that would be all right if you were tied up.”
Oldham nodded gratefully. “Yes, make it tomorrow.”
He waited until he heard the door close and then slipped the palms of his hands over his face like a blanking curtain, shutting in the terror. Something’s happened to me … never used to let things get me this way … maybe I’m cracking up … like Wally in Detroit. No! I’ve got to hang onto myself. If old Bullard ever gets an idea that I’m slipping … if he ever suspects …
“The bastard,” he whispered aloud—and then he said it again. The syllables made burning little puffs of air in the damp palms of his hands. It’s the waiting that raises hell with a man … how can you help having an ulcer … all this damned waiting … never knowing?
2.51 P.M. EDT
Anne Finnick opened the door of the women’s washroom just wide enough to assure herself that there was no one else inside. Then she slipped through the door, snatched a paper towel, and with three quick steps shut herself inside a toilet compartment.
Swallowing hard, she opened her hand bag and lifted out a soggy, filth-stained man’s wallet. Gingerly spreading the wet leather, she saw a thick sandwich of green bills. Her lips trembled through a moment of indecision and then she clutched the money into a crumpled wad and jabbed it inside the front of her blouse, holding herself against flinching as the shock of the wet cold struck the warm valley of her breasts.
Breathing heavily she sat down on the toilet, looking furtively about the narrow enclosure, trying to decide what to do with the wallet. It was full of little cards. She began peeling them off the wet pack that they made, reading the type and the water-blurred signatures. They were membership cards in clubs, credit cards for hotels, insurance identification … Avery Bullard … Avery Bullard, Millburgh, Pennsylvania … Avery Bullard, President, Tredway Corporation.
“No guy like that needs it like I do,” she whispered silently, standing. One by one, she tore the cards into little bits. They made a swirl of multicolored confetti in the water of the toilet bowl, spinning like a kaleidoscope when she pulled the flush lever.
It was a shame to throw away the wallet. Those initial dinguses might be real gold. Maybe it would be all right when it was dried out and she could give it to somebody. But not to Eddie! She wasn’t ever giving Eddie anything again … a cheap guy that would let a girl worry herself sick, saying every day that he was going to get the money for that doctor. Now she had the money herself. Eddie could go to hell!
Her eyes blinked back tears and she began to tremble violently. It almost hadn’t happened. It had been so close to not happening. Today was the first time she’d gone out for a chocolate malted in a whole week. If she hadn’t gone just when she did, she’d never have seen the wallet lying there in that muddy mess at the curb in front of the Chippendale Building. It almost made a person believe in something.
Someone was coming in the washroom.
Anne Finnick flushed the toilet again. The sound was a protection against the terror of silence.
“I’m not stealing it,” she said to herself. “Sometime, when I get it, I’ll pay it back. I won’t forget his name—Avery Bullard.” She looked at the gold initials … they would help her remember … A.B. for Avery Bullard.
2
MILLBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
2.54 P.M. EDT
The telegram that Avery Bullard sent from the Chippendale Building in New York was received at the Western Union office in Millburgh, Pennsylvania at 2.54 P.M. As the words TREDWAY TOWER spattered down on the uncoiling yellow tape, Mary Herr immediately swiveled her chair to face the keyboard on which she would retransmit the message to one of the battery of teletype printers in the Tredway Tower. As she turned she flicked her eyes toward the window through which she could see the sky-thrusting shaft of the Tower, dazzlingly white against the heat-faded blue of the sky.
Mary Herr’s quick glance at the Tredway Tower had no direct relationship to the handling of the message. It was something that she, in common with almost everyone else in Millburgh, did a hundred times a day. There was no part of the city from which the Tower could not be seen, and there was no man or woman whose eyes could long escape its attraction. Most often they looked without seeing, as a sailor involuntarily glances at the sky, or an office worker at the clock, but there were other times when they stared in conscious awe. Early-rising men, on their way to work, frequently marveled at the way the warm sun would strike the top of the Tower while they still walked in the predawn chill. In the evening, after the sun had set for the rest of the city, they would sometimes see the upper reaches of the Tower still bathed in an unworldly glow of flame-colored light. On days when clouds came scudding in through the Alleghany passes and filled the whole river valley with gray mist, the top of the Tower would occasionally be lost in the sky. It was then that they looked upward most often, staring and uneasy, as if their minds were incapable of coping with their imaginations, as if some needed thing had been unfairly snatched away.
If the Tredway Tower had been built on the island of Manhattan, it would have been only a tree in a forest, possessing neither distinction nor magnificence. In Millburgh, it is the wonder of wonders. No other building is taller than six stories. The Tower rises an incredible twenty-four. Almost as impressive as its size is its whiteness, a white so startlingly clean that it almost seems as if some supernatural intervention protects it from the film of soot that smudges the low-lying clutter of old buildings that make up most of the downtown area.
There are only a very few people in Millburgh who do not regard the Tredway Tower as a thing of great beauty. W. Harrington Dodds is one of the few. Although two decades have passed since it was built, Mr. Dodds’ criticism of its design has grown no less bitter. He still calls it “an architectural monstrosity inspired by an Italian wedding cake and designed by a pseudo architect who should have been a pastry cook.” Such remarks by Mr. Dodds are usually accepted as the acid result of a bad case of sour grapes. At the time the Tower was built he had been the leading architect of Millburgh and a man of some standing in his profession, the former vice-president of the state chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Nevertheless, old Orrin Tredway had completely passed him by and had given the architectural commission to a New York firm. He had not even tossed W. Harrington Dodds the face-saving designation as “consulting architect.”
Despite the circumstantial evidence against the validity of Mr. Dodds’ criticism, there is more than a little justification for some of his caustic oberservations. The Tredway Tower does bear more than a little resemblance to an enormous wedding cake. The first twelve stories are a frosted white block, fitted as squarely to the four streets as if the
y were the edges of the pan in which it had been baked.
On the foundation of the twelve-story block, off center, rises the constantly narrowing tower of the building. The higher it rises the more elaborate its ornamentation becomes. Around the setbacks at the sixteenth and twentieth stories there are garlands of intricately worked white-glazed terra cotta which, as Mr. Dodds is fond of saying, would be “highly appropriate for a Gothic Christmas cookie.” They are reputed to be the finest work of a great sculptor, but their artistic merit can only be judged by an occasional high-flying pigeon, for they are completely invisible to the earth-bound observer.
The final thrust of the Tower, the lance of the shaft, is so highly embellished with a bristle of minarets that it appears from the street to be an area completely separate and distinct from the rest of the building. It is. Orrin Tredway had wanted it that way. He had planned it himself and the architects had not argued. On the twenty-third floor he had placed the offices of his vice-presidents. To the twenty-fourth he had transplanted three rooms that he had torn out by the roots from a sixteenth-century manor house that he had bought in England. The oak paneling had been dissembled by museum workers, marked piece by piece for re-erection, and the twenty-fourth floor of the Tower had been designed with no other consideration than to form a shell for the transplantation. What once had been a library for nine generations of the English peerage became the office of Orrin Tredway. The adjoining study, where at least three Prime Ministers had sat in conference, became the office for Orrin Tredway’s secretary. The old main hall had become the directors’ room and Orrin Tredway sat at the head of the same table, and in the same chair, that had been used by six lords of England. There were no other offices on the twenty-fourth floor. Orrin Tredway had wanted no other man to touch his feet to its hallowed parquetry without his personal invitation.
Eight months after he moved into his office, Orrin Tredway was dead. One night in January, Luigi, Cassoni, the operator of the private elevator that served the Executive Suite, heard what was unmistakably a shot. When he finally got up enough nerve to break the rule that Mr. Tredway was never to be disturbed by opening the door of his office, he found that Mr. Tredway was beyond being disturbed.
Executive Suite Page 2