Executive Suite

by Cameron Hawley

  At thirty-eight, Julia Tredway Prince was still filling in the blank pages of a lost life. At seventeen, in the month of her father’s suicide, overwhelmed by the enormity of her loss, and almost as much by her mother’s attitude that the disappearance of their fortune was even more of a tragedy than Orrin Tredway’s death, Julia had been unable to hold her mind under a tight enough rein to prevent a headlong flight from the world of reason.

  She had spent the next seven years in a sanitarium for the mentally ill. Those seven years had been lost in the mists of a clouded mind, so completely lost that she could trust none of her memories of those endless months. She could never be sure that some remembered thing had actually happened. There had been a long time when reality was undistinguishable from fantasy. She could not even be certain of when Avery Bullard had started coming to see her in the sanitarium because there had been a vast expanse of dayless months when he seemed to cross fade in and out of her vision, changing places with her father’s image on the chair beside her bed.

  Her trustworthy memories went back no farther than the day when she had finally come to the unshakable realization that Avery Bullard was not her father. His hand holding hers was too strong, his voice too uncompromising in its demand that she rise and walk and think and talk again.

  Sometime near the end—she could not know exactly when because she had not progressed far enough yet to link the days with numbers on a calendar—she had talked to Avery Bullard about the payment of her bill at the sanitarium. Actually, what she said had begun only as the parroting of the overheard conversation of another patient, but he had been so pleased at this evidence of rational thinking that he had talked to her about her financial situation. Driven by a terrific urge to earn more approval, she had somehow forced her mind to understand. The old Tredway Furniture Company had grown into the Tredway Corporation. A part of her father’s holdings, valueless when the company had been faced by the bankruptcy that had forced a pistol to his temple, had been salvaged for her and already had considerable value. Some day, he told her, she would probably be wealthy. The old house on North Front Street—the home that she had loved as a child, not the Cliff House mansion whose vast loneliness was a part of her terror—was ready and waiting for her. “You can go home any time that you can make yourself want to do it,” Avery Bullard had said. A month later she had done it, walking out of the sanitarium alone and unaided, her body miraculously relieved of torture, her mind as clear as the rain-washed sky of that windy April day.

  Julia Tredway was twenty-four years old when she returned to the normal world, but in many ways she was still seventeen. Seven years had gone by as a blank. Nature, in minor repayment for its major cruelty, had aged her mind to a maturity beyond seventeen—as it ages wine in a hidden and neglected cask—but she was still far from a normally developed person of her age. She had not accumulated the myriad interlaced impressions that usually accompany the transition from adolescence to womanhood, so her mind was poorly stocked with the raw materials of thinking, but there was some compensating advantage in the lack of mental clutter and the added receptiveness and impressionability of a young mind. As a net result she was, in those first months after she left the sanitarium, like a precocious child with unusual maturity and a startling capacity for learning.

  Her adjustment to society was difficult for she had neither anchorage nor reference points. Her mother’s death—now only a formless cloud in those hazy lost years—had left her with no close relatives. The thin bonds of childhood friendship had long since been broken. There was only Avery Bullard.

  During the first year she left the house and its grounds only to attend an occasional social affair, and always because he insisted. Except for pleasing him, she found little pleasure. The too bright smiles of the people she met, coupled with the way that everyone so pointedly avoided any mention of her years in the sanitarium, were barriers to comfortable friendship. She felt that way even about Avery Bullard’s wife and he was understanding enough to realize it. After a few months he no longer asked her to his home, but then he came more often to hers.

  The house was an important part of her first happiness. One of the strongest of her new impressions was of the day she came home from the sanitarium. Despite her remembered love for the old house, she had been terrorized that seeing it again might recall dangerous memories. But no fear of terror could stop her from responding to his demand that she walk through the gate in the white wall, up the bricked path, and into the house. Miraculously, there were no memories. She had been afraid to ask him how much the house had been changed for fear of betraying herself and disappointing him, so it was months before she learned that he had completely redecorated and refurnished the house. When she had finally been able to talk about it, he had brushed aside her thanks. “You’ve nothing to thank me for, Julia. Everything was bought with your own money.”

  Nina had been there waiting that first day, a strange little woman with a sharp nose and a tight-drawn Psyche knot and a stiffly starched never-spotted apron, but with great black knowing eyes that always mirrored understanding. It was Nina who guided her to comfort and security and provided the constant flow of warm affection that she needed so much—and it was Avery Bullard who had given her Nina. No one else could have found her, no one else could have known that it was Nina she needed.

  In the early days of her recovery, when she had not yet made the transition from thinking of herself as a child, Avery Bullard had seemed an elderly man. She had broken through the confusion that tended to identify him with the image of her father, but he still evoked something close to filial response. Later, when she finally awakened to the realization that she was a mature woman, the years that had been so quickly added to her age seemed to dissolve the span of years between them. By that time her affection for him had grown to such proportions that it was undeniably the love of a woman for a man, no longer the adoration of a child that loved without hunger for consummation. The hunger grew until it became such an overwhelming passion that she was afraid her mental balance might again be lost.

  Looking back now, remembering, it seemed that there were times when her sanity had been lost. Only insanity could have driven her to do what she had done. A reasonable mind would have known that Avery Bullard, despite the momentary physical response that her guile produced, could never be trapped against his will. The year after his wife had divorced him, Julia had made the most insanely desperate try of all. There had been moments when she thought she would hold him forever—but years afterward she knew that what she had really done had only served to push him away from her.

  Desperation had lingered on after he had stopped coming to see her except when some business affair demanded it. Even seeing him under those circumstances still carried a hope and she went to wild ends—shamefully remembered—to make him come to her house. When he made her a director of the company she suspected, with a suspicion born of frustration, that it was done only to force her to come to the office and to wipe out any excuse that she might ever have to ask him to come to her home. In consequence, she had never attended a directors’ meeting.

  It was out of a chance remark that she had discovered Avery Bullard’s fear that the control of the company might be challenged if she ever sold her stock to someone else. Thus the threat to sell her stock became a new way to make him come to her and, in the last throes of her desperation, she had used it over and over again, hating herself for her shamelessness but unable to restrain her desire.

  When she called him it was always Erica Martin who answered and her voice was a constantly harrowing reminder that it was she who was with him from morning until night—and it was an easy step to the suspicion that Erica Martin was with him in the nights as well.

  In the end, Julia Tredway had won the victory of defeat. Avery Bullard had shocked her into it. One night when she had made him come to her with a ruse so transparent that she was forced to admit what she had done, he had said, “Julia, remember that you lost seven
years of your life. If you keep on the way you are going, I’m afraid you’ll lose the rest of it.”

  His demand for sanity was irresistible, as all of his demands had always been irresistible, and she had started a new life. Her marriage to Dwight Prince was the real beginning. She had not been in love with him nor, she suspected, he with her. Dwight’s greatest asset was that there was nothing about him to remind her of Avery Bullard. He had neither strength, dominance, nor the ability to demand subjection. Furthermore, he needed her—needed her money to live the gracious but useless existence which was all that his inheritance and training had fitted him to live. He paid for it with an understanding and a gentle kindness that had given her more happiness than she had expected and there had grown up between them something that was not true love but was, at least, a relationship that she recognized as more desirable than what passed for love in many marriages.

  Through the exercise of tight control she had kept herself from thinking of Avery Bullard and, as the years had gone by, it had become easier and easier to do—until today when Bruce Pilcher’s call asking her to sell stock had been a too sharp parallel to the memory of other times when she had called Avery Bullard with that same threat.

  She pivoted on the stool again, her eyes on the tip of the Tower. Yes, she had been right in giving the message to Alderson. Avery might remember … probably not … but he might.

  5

  NEW YORK CITY

  6.22 P.M. EDT

  Bruce Pilcher, debating a third Martini, decided against it. Alcohol gave him false courage and that wasn’t what he needed now. He had to think. Mrs. Prince had promised to call him back within an hour. It was almost an hour now and she hadn’t called.

  After he had telephoned the hospital and been told that Avery Bullard was not there, Bruce Pilcher had wasted no time in searching the Final editions of the newspapers that had been brought to the library at his request.

  Now, more as an aftermath of an earlier desire than anything else, he absent-mindedly crossed to the table where Andrew had dropped the papers. His thoughts were occupied with the just made decision that he would wait another fifteen minutes for Mrs. Prince’s call. If it had not been for his eyes’ being caught by the name of the building in which he had his office, he would have missed the little item that was tucked in to fill the bottom of a first-page column.

  UNIDENTIFIED MAN DROPS DEAD IN FRONT OF CHIPPENDALE BUILDING

  An unidentified man collapsed at about 2:30 this afternoon while getting into a taxi in front of the Chippendale Building. He was pronounced dead upon arrival at Roosevelt Hospital. The man was described by police as being well dressed, six feet three inches tall, weighing about 220 lbs., dark hair, brown eyes, probable age between fifty-five and sixty. The only clue that police have to the man’s identity is the initials “A.B.” which appeared on some of his personal effects.

  The news struck Bruce Pilcher with stunning effect, creating the sensation of being snatched from the deep black hole of total terror and suddenly elevated to the brilliantly lighted heights of complete self-justification. He’d been right all the time. It had been Avery Bullard and Avery Bullard was dead! The body’s not being identified was a freak … accident … not his fault … something that he could not possibly have foreseen.

  Self-confidence welled through Bruce Pilcher’s mind, as quick-acting as a powerful stimulant. He should never have lost faith in himself … that was the only mistake he had made … losing faith in himself.

  Unnoticed, Andrew had entered the library and was standing across the table, waiting for him to look up.

  “Yes, Andrew, what is it?”

  “Telephone, sir.”

  Bruce Pilcher did not hesitate. “I haven’t time to answer. Tell her I’ve already left the club.”

  “It isn’t a woman, sir. It’s a Mr. Steigel.”

  “Oh!” So the old man had thought it over and now he wanted his half of the profit on those two thousand shares? To hell with that! Julius Steigel had had his chance and he’d lost his nerve … there was no pay-off when you lost your nerve. “The answer’s still the same, Andrew. I’ve left the club.”

  He was not asking Andrew to lie. Before the old man could get to the telephone, Bruce Pilcher had walked out the door and was striding up the street.

  Walking was an aid to thinking, his footsteps tamping down the thoughts in his mind, fitting them back together into the solid pattern that he had interrupted with that hour of losing faith in himself. There was only one new fact to add … Avery Bullard’s body was unidentified.

  Unidentified? Was that good or bad? His thoughts fluttered for a moment like a sensitive scale-arm finding a balance point. He decided that the weight was a shade on the good side. The police would eventually make the identification but it would take time … several hours … maybe longer. That would give him time to do something else. Information was valuable. There were ways to use it. There were people who would pay … at least in gratitude … for an advance tip … people who had a special interest in Tredway stock. Caswell? No, not Caswell … that was too dangerous. Or was it? Caswell had a lot of connections … and Caswell was a gentleman. A gentleman wouldn’t forget someone who had done him a favor. The scale arm fluttered again. Yes or no? Yes.

  There was a drugstore on the corner and he went inside and found a telephone booth. As the coin dropped, his mind was working like a precision machine, selecting words, arranging and rearranging, polishing and punctuating. He wouldn’t say too much over the telephone, only enough to arouse Caswell’s curiosity. Caswell might invite him out to his house … that had never happened before … Caswell might even …

  A busy signal sounded.

  He hung up the receiver and the coin clattered down. He picked it up, surprised that his hand was trembling. He would wait until he got home to repeat the call … yes, that would be better … give him more time to think.

  6.37 P.M. EDT

  The way in which Anne Finnick happened to find the news item in the Final edition paralleled Bruce Pilcher’s discovery. She, too, worked in the Chippendale Building and it was the name in the headline that caught her eye. However, it was not until she read the last line and learned that the dead man’s initials were “A.B.” that the news had any personal significance. She had not, until that moment, given any thought to how the wallet had happened to be lying in the gutter where she had found it. Now she knew that it had belonged to the dead man and, because she had found and taken it, the police were unable to identify him.

  Her new knowledge complicated the already involved ethical problem with which she was faced. Until her visit to Dr. Marston, the desperate seriousness of her plight had seemed to justify keeping the money. Then the whole situation had changed. During this last hour, knowing now that she was not pregnant, she had been unable to find any argument with which she could convince herself that keeping the money was not a seriously criminal act. She could remember that a boy who had lived next door to her father’s luggage store on Third Avenue had been sent to jail for stealing a ten-dollar bill. She had stolen five hundred and thirty-four dollars. The enormity of her crime was beyond the narrow limits of her comprehension, as was also the nature of the punishment that might befall her. Her fear had now become so great that it had completely destroyed the joy that she had found in the discovery that she was not pregnant.

  In the same manner that a prisoner sees everything in terms of its potentiality as an instrument of escape, it was in that direction that Anne Finnick’s mind had turned when she read the item in the newspaper. She finally concluded, through the transmutation of hope into reason, that since the man who had lost the pocketbook was now dead there was nothing wrong about keeping the money. She was helped in arriving at that conclusion by the memory of her Uncle Rudy who had died and “left” her father five hundred dollars. The similarity of the amounts added validity to the parallel. If her father had taken that five hundred dollars from Uncle Rudy before he had died, it would have
been stealing. After his death it was all right. The money had been “left” for her father in the same way that this man whose initials were “A.B.” had “left” the money for her by dropping his pocketbook in the gutter.

  The solution of that problem only opened the way to another. Her sentimental affection for Uncle Rudy, regenerated by the recollection of his kindly wax-pink face as it looked up at her from the satin-lined casket, gave rise to an equally sentimental affection for the kindly but unknown gentleman who had bequeathed her so much money. She wished that she could go to his funeral and, as she considered the possibility, the wish became the slow-germinating seed which finally grew into the realization that there would be no flowers at the funeral. People would not know what name to put on the flower boxes. No one would come to the funeral because people did not go to funerals if they did not know whose funeral it was. Everyone who had been at Uncle Rudy’s funeral had known that the man in the casket was Rudolph Finnick.

  The solution, after she had thought about it for several more minutes, seemed quite simple. She would call the newspaper and tell them that the dead man’s name was Mr. Avery Bullard and that he was the president of the Tredway Corporation. That’s what it had said on all the little cards that she had flushed down the toilet bowl. Then they could put his name in the paper and everybody would read it and there would be a nice funeral.

  Carrying out her intention was not quite as simple as it had seemed at first. The telephone was out in the dark hall, the electric light bulb had burned out, and she had to light matches to find the newspaper’s telephone number. After she got the number she had a difficult time trying to make them understand what she was talking about, but the man who talked to her last was very nice. She spelled out the name just the way it had been on the little cards and hung up in a hurry.

  After it was all over she felt better than she had felt in a long time. Now she could even think about how wonderful it was not to be pregnant.