Murders & Acquisitions

by Haughton Murphy

  “I do. But the circumstances are also pretty unorthodox.”

  “Granted,” Dunning said. “I’m going to take you at your word. That you won’t do anything to try and stop the publication of Diana’s book. I know of your reputation and that of your fine firm’s. So here’s what we’ll do. We’ll make an office available where you can read the manuscript, for the rest of the day if you like. We can’t go beyond that, because Christopher’s working on it. Are you free to start now?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s one other thing. There’ll be no photocopies of any of it. And we’ll ask you not to take any notes. Agreed?”

  “If you insist,” Frost said, angry at the pompous lawyer’s inconvenient conditions.

  “Yes, I’m afraid we do,” Dunning answered. “Can you see if there’s an empty room for Mr. Frost?” he said, turning to Terry.

  “Sure.”

  “Good. It was a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Frost,” Dunning said. Frost shook his hand without comment.

  Frost and Terry went back to Terry’s office. Just as Frost had guessed, the Andersen manuscript had been almost under his nose when he had been sitting in the office before.

  “Here it is,” Terry said, handing Frost four or five pounds of typewritten pages. “You’re not going to like what you read, but if it’s any help in solving the murders—I really don’t see how it can be, by the way—I guess it’s worthwhile.”

  “I’m grateful,” Frost said. “As I said, I have no ulterior motive in wanting to read—”

  “Reuben, I know that,” Terry interrupted. “Ed Dunning likes to show off a little. And I think dealing with a high-powered attorney like you probably made him nervous.” Terry did not apologize for his colleague, but he came close.

  “Let me show you to a vacant office down the hall,” Terry went on. “We’re keeping right up with the fashion here at Miller’s and having a cost-cutting party. We’re trying to turn success into demoralizing failure, just like every other successful communications company in America. This office belonged to the other deputy editor. She left last week.”

  The office was probably the same size as Terry’s but empty, and without piled-up papers, it looked bigger. Frost sat down at the desk and placed his day’s work before him.

  “Take your time with this, Reuben,” Terry said. “Frankly you’ve given me an excuse to spend a day away from Diana’s output. There’s something to be said for that, as you will see. If there’s anything you need, just ask my secretary.”

  “Thanks,” Frost said. “I’ll try to finish just as soon as I can.”

  He got his first jolt when he removed the blank sheet atop the manuscript pile. Beneath it was a page bearing the title Women’s War: The Struggle to the Tap.

  The page where the first chapter started contained a handwritten note, “Introduction?” presumably by Christopher Terry. Realizing that he would not be spoon-fed with any sort of summary of the author’s arguments, he plunged ahead into the initial chapters. Diana’s thesis, or at least one of them, soon became evident: there was a male conspiracy against women in business, keeping them in a subordinate role, despite money or brains or both.

  Even when a woman achieved economic control of an enterprise, Diana argued, she was still made to feel dependent by a web of male lawyers, accountants and bankers. Women were traditionally the “underclass,” whether in the executive suite, at the stockholders’ meeting, on the assembly line or—just for good measure—in bed. (“The missionary position is still another example of male domination of the female underclass.”) Frost had thought “underclass,” as used by his young friend Ken Auletta and others, referred to the poorest members of the society; the only qualification for membership Diana set was that the subject be female.

  The confrontational prose made Reuben Frost uneasy. Married to a woman who was, professionally, one of the most successful in America, he found it difficult to sympathize with a millionairess who regarded herself as part of an underclass. And when, as the Executive Partner of Chase & Ward, he had insisted that greater efforts be made to recruit more women lawyers, he had really not cared what positions they had assumed, or were expected to assume, in bed.

  But if Frost was appalled at the canons of the author’s “Postmodern Feminism,” he was even more appalled, as he read on, at Diana’s diatribe against her family, which occurred in the middle chapters of Women’s War.

  The original Laurance Andersen was, of course, excoriated for the unfair, sexist manner in which he willed his property. And Flemming—Reuben’s friend Flemming, a patient, wise and occasionally brilliant businessman—was found wanting both as father and executive. His daughter considered him conventional and plodding, a pillar of exploitative capitalism, indifferent to workers’, and especially women’s, rights. (Frost was glad that the manuscript, when attacking Flemming’s antifeminism, was out-and-out polemic, unsupported with facts. Flemming, like Reuben, had pioneered in encouraging equal employment rights for women; his mistake had been in overlooking his daughter when it came to the governance of AFC.)

  But however purple the prose, Flemming Andersen came off infinitely better than Diana’s brother, Laurance. Laurance and cousin Billy O’Neal were characterized as the male successors to power at AFC, and their shortcomings were detailed at considerable length.

  Her view of Laurance was scathing, and violative of the standard of privacy that Sally Andersen had always tried to impose on the family. Most of her revelations were new to Frost, close as he had always been to the Andersens. There was, for example, the matter of Laurance’s bad checks at St. Paul’s and Yale (scandal being averted by Flemming’s willingness to make his son’s rubber checks good); the forced marriage to a pregnant secretary at the AFC offices averted by an abortion, illegal at the time, allegedly arranged by the Andersen family doctor; his three divorces; his near-bankruptcy—but for another rescue by Flemming—in the ski-resort escapade he had become embroiled in before his recent plunge with the Californians. All in all an unflattering portrait—to say the least—and one designed to show his unworthiness as an heir to the AFC business.

  Billy O’Neal fared little better at the pen of his cousin, although the section on him was devoted principally to his alcoholic escapades and sexual peccadilloes. The author seemed to resent the fact that O’Neal had not gotten into more trouble, the reason he had not being “the ambitious rescue efforts of members of the family or, more often, the efforts of a faithful and highly paid family legal retainer.” As he read, Frost breathed a sigh of relief that he had not been described in harsher terms (and a second sigh for not being mentioned by name).

  As he finished the description of Billy O’Neal, Frost realized that it was midafternoon. He did not feel especially hungry—his unappetizing reading matter helping in this regard—but knew that he must eat something if he were to plow through the rest of the manuscript by the end of office hours at Miller’s. Rather than attempt to get food sent in, he went down to the lobby of the building and had a quick sandwich at the lunch counter there. He also bought a cup of coffee to go and took it back with him.

  Returning to the manuscript, Reuben found that the women had their turn in the next chapters. Sally, Diana’s mother, came under the fiercest barrage. In Diana’s version, Sally Andersen viewed her years as a tennis pro as somehow disreputable and, as a result, had desired respectability above all else from the time she gave up tennis and married Flemming. She had looked on her daughters purely as “narcissistic extensions” of herself; her only concern was that the two girls behave in a manner consistent with their mother’s notions of “respectability.” This of course provoked a rebellion—Sorella married Nate Perkins, the first man who had ever showed a real interest in her, while Diana openly avoided marriage and spoke out against it.

  “I was determined to shape my life in a way that would differentiate me from my mother and free me from the confining expectations she had for me. Avoiding marriage and refusing to have childre
n were the most dramatic statements I could make to the cold, loveless and manipulating woman who was and is, as far as I am concerned, my birth mother and nothing else,” Diana wrote. Sally received no affection from her daughter, that affection being reserved for the “consummate social activists” of Concerned Women.

  Frost was both weary and dispirited as he read on, reaching Diana’s fiery conclusion. The struggle of women, in “an indifferent post-feminist generation,” was a class struggle, Diana wrote, calling it “Women’s War I.” Women were a class unto themselves, to which men were neither welcome nor wanted; as a class, women must work to destroy both the family and the capitalist institutions of the society.

  “In my own case, I am going to sell my stake in American free enterprise, my stock in the Andersen Foods Corporation, as expeditiously as possible, consistent with getting a fair price. The money I receive can be better spent helping to secure victory for the female underclass in Women’s War I.”

  When he had finished, Frost took the manuscript back to Christopher Terry. He wanted to ask the editor what he thought he was accomplishing by publishing such gibberish, but did not. Terry had, after all, cooperated and let him see the work.

  Frost was relieved to be rid of the splenetic manuscript and left the ugly Flachman building as quickly as possible.

  WISE WOMEN

  19

  Despite the distance, Reuben Frost decided to walk home. The city’s air, polluted as it might be, seemed to him fresh after he had been confined for a full workday in an airless, windowless office with only Diana Andersen’s militant prose for succor. As he walked up Lexington Avenue, he kept trying to put unpleasant thoughts out of his mind. No, he told himself, his opinion of Diana Andersen’s lifestyle had nothing to do with his newly developed conclusion that her hatred might have become homicidal. And neither did her venom against his old friends Flemming and Sally have anything to do with it. The truth was that Diana, in her own words in her own manuscript, had displayed an anger so ferocious that one could not exclude murder as a logical extension of her rage.

  Frost was pleased to find his wife at home. He needed to talk to someone about the day’s painful reading and she, as always, would be a shrewd and sympathetic audience of one. He knew that she had spent the day at the Brigham Foundation and was undoubtedly tired; dinner out was in order. He proposed that they go to Orso, a modest but chic Italian restaurant in the heart of the theater district. It was not especially convenient from the Frost’s house, but they both liked it, so the trek west was worthwhile.

  Orso was an odd spot. Its decor could have been done by Michael Graves (or a spaced-out Philip Johnson), relying as it did on curved archways and columns, all painted in odd shades of blue, pink and green. Yet for all the postmodernist suggestions, it was basically a comfortable trattoria. The menu was relentlessly Italian, though the pizzas were of the thin, austere, weightwatching variety and the pasta sauces tended less to the customary tomatoes than to salmon, shrimp and other seafood.

  “They’ve done their best to turn pasta into sushi,” Reuben had once remarked to Cynthia. But the reality was that the seafood sauces, often made with odd combinations of vodka and cream, were usually good, often startlingly so.

  Dinner at Orso had a predictable rhythm: a hectic sitting for playgoers that ended just before eight, a leisurely two-hour hiatus when the restaurant was only partially filled, often with agents and producers making deals, or play doctors making whispered suggestions to despondent playwrights and directors, followed by a crowded after-theater phase when an often amusing mix of actors and spectators formed the crowd.

  The Frosts arrived shortly after eight, as the midevening downtime was starting. They were greeted warmly by the staff, mostly attractive out-of-work actors and actresses, but not the sort—for which the Frosts were grateful—who behaved histrionically when reciting the menu or serving the food. Reuben found them all appealing and, from regular visits, knew much about them. (The young women all called him “Mr. Frost,” which was all right, while to the male employees he was “Reuben.” This matter-of-fact approach, not at all intended as disrespectful, was all right, too; it was not often that a lawyer of his age and eminence could escape being called “Mr. Frost,” except by equally aged contemporaries. He liked being called by his first name by these youths roughly one-third his age; their camaraderie, while certainly not making him one of the boys, did give him the pleasant illusion that he was younger than he really was. And the young women, when they called him “Mr. Frost,” did so in a way that was not condescending or designed to make him feel like a superannuated fossil.)

  The Frosts ordered quickly and began drinking the excellent house Bardolino. Reuben told his wife about his day with Diana Andersen’s manuscript. Cynthia listened with horrified fascination.

  “Do you think she’ll withdraw it, now that her father and sister are dead?” Cynthia asked.

  “I don’t think there’s a chance of it,” Reuben said. “If she was willing to write the vile things she’s written while her father was alive, why should his death change anything?”

  “Poor Sally,” Cynthia said, shaking her head. “It’s bad enough having an ungrateful daughter without having her advertising it all over the country.”

  “I know,” Reuben answered, starting to eat his pasta.

  “I met one of her friends from Concerned Women yesterday,” Cynthia said.

  “You did? Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

  “My dear, you may not recall—and you probably don’t—that you didn’t come home last night. I haven’t had a chance to talk to you in days.”

  “You exaggerate,” Reuben said. “Though I was up much too late.”

  “Having fun with Billy O’Neal.”

  “Listening to Billy O’Neal,” Frost corrected.

  “Anyway, there was a forum yesterday afternoon, sponsored by Philip Morris of all companies, on women in the arts—silly, fuzzy topic, but there it was. My friend Lucille Margetts was running it, so I felt I had to go.”

  “Where was it?”

  “The Whitney Museum. Anyway, one of the panelists was one Molly Cayman, who’s a national vice president of Concerned Women. She was all antiman talk. Men keep women down, put women down, shout women down—and so on.”

  “Sounds just like Diana’s book to me,” Reuben said.

  “Yes. Well, I’m afraid I got angry. I was going to be quiet, but she really got to me. So I finally stood up and said I didn’t think her antimale approach was either constructive or particularly accurate. I said straight out that her point of view is rubbish when you consider the performing arts. Or the visual arts, for that matter.”

  “How did she react?”

  “She said she pitied me. That my consciousness had not been raised. I don’t think she knew who she was talking to.

  “Anyway,” Cynthia went on, “at the cocktail party afterward, she came up to me and began her harangue all over again. I told her rather firmly that I had spent more than a quarter century in the performing arts—and long before the enlightened eighties, too—and that I simply couldn’t agree with her view of men.”

  “How did she react?”

  “Violently! She was a big woman, and I really thought she was going to get physical. She leaned into me and practically spat in my face. I was a traitor to my sex, a manipulator of men—I liked that the best—and an elitist who felt that the struggle of women was for others and not oneself.”

  “What did you do, pull her hair?” Reuben asked, a tease in his voice.

  “Reuben, really. No, I said—and it was very arrogant of me—that I thought I had done more for the women’s movement by example than a lot of others were doing by their speechmaking. That’s when I really thought she was going to haul off and hit me. But, my dear, I just couldn’t help but point out to her that there was a difference between hating men and hating the attitude of some men—like those old cronies of yours at the Gotham.”

  Frost did n
ot dispute his wife’s characterization of at least some of his clubmates. He finished the last glass of wine and began eating his dish of homemade gelato—an Orso specialty that always made Frost break his resolve to pass up dessert—as he beheld in his imagination a vision of his wife’s encounter with the Concerned Women’s vice president.

  “I wonder, is that whole bunch like this Cayman person?” Frost asked.

  “I hate to think.”

  “Certainly she sounds like Diana. Do you suppose … No, no, it’s too absurd,” Reuben said, his voice trailing off.

  “What were you going to say, Reuben?” his wife asked.

  “It’s too silly.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “Do you think Diana’s friends in Concerned Women could have pushed her into the murders? Could they have reinforced her anger until it bubbled out of control?”

  Cynthia paused for a long time. “I’m afraid it’s just possible,” she finally said. Both were quiet for a long interval while they absorbed Cynthia’s conclusion. Then Cynthia spoke again:

  “You realize, Reuben, this is the second time now we’ve linked one of the possible suspects with someone else.”

  “You mean the way we think Casper Robbins and Gruen are linked?”

  “Yes,” Cynthia answered. “And if you’re going to play detective, you should think of all the other possibilities, too, however distasteful they may be.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as Billy O’Neal and Gruen, or Laurance and Gruen. Or Robbins and Sally, or Robbins and Sally and Gruen.”

  “Whoa, wait a minute. One at a time. Why Billy or Laurance and Gruen?”

  “They’re weak characters, Reuben. And probably pliable ones, too. Oh, I know they’re willful, stubborn and selfish. But I’ll just bet either one could be taken in by the power of suggestion.”

  “Maybe. But Billy just seems so weak, so pathetic, it seems unlikely. And Laurance, well, he wasn’t even in the East when his father was killed.”