The Wabash Factor

by Howard Fast

  “I appreciate that and it’s thoughtful of Mr. Comstock, but I don’t have the time.”

  “It’s not your decision,” he said. “You must wait.”

  Then he started toward me, evidently to pick up my somewhat worn one hundred and forty-eight pounds and perhaps put them in a safe place until Mr. Comstock’s associate arrived. I moved quickly until my back touched the wall. I like to have a wall against my back in tight places. And then I took my hand out of my coat pocket and with it the automatic pistol that I had put there on the previous day.

  He stopped when he saw the gun, and I said, “You know, sonny, whatever you are thinking, don’t. Don’t even think of how quick you could be, because they only take loaded guns away in the movies. Move one inch and I will shoot you. This gun is semiautomatic. Five shots in your balls and prick. You’d still have your pretty face, but only a squeak could come out. Now drop your jacket on the floor! Quick!”

  He did so.

  “Loosen your belt. Unbutton the top button in your pants.”

  He looked at me with his mouth open.

  “Hands over your head. Lock your fingers.”

  He did it, and then, before he could think of what came next, I jammed the gun past his belt into his pants and against his groin. He moved involuntarily, and I yelled, “Hold it, buster, or you’ll be a fuckin’ eunuch!”

  Doors began to open now. People came into the corridor.

  “The gun’s on automatic,” I said to him, “and my finger’s got the trigger in. I let go and you’ll have a dozen slugs in your young manhood.”

  “God almighty, don’t do it!” he screamed.

  The hall had filled with men and women now, Comstock among them, and I shouted, “This kid and I are going out of this building! I’ve got an automatic pistol against his balls! There is no way you can take me! If you shoot me, I let go and he’ll have twelve slugs in his groin. My arm is locked in his belt, so play it smart.”

  “He’s my son!” Comstock yelled. “You son of a bitch Jew bastard, that’s my son!”

  “You’ll never have a grandson if I let go, so why don’t you just let us walk out of here quietly, and you’ll have your son back, and no one gets hurt.”

  Comstock was shouting unintelligibly. The men and women in the corridor were beginning to crowd me.

  “Comstock!”

  Suddenly, it was silent. They stood in a circle around me. “Comstock,” I said, “get them back—out of my way. I’m taking him to the elevator. I’m going down the elevator, just him and me. No one else and no one in the lobby downstairs. No tricks! And you, sonny boy, don’t even jostle me.”

  They stood back at Comstock’s order, and, pressed against the young muscleman, I got into the elevator, and dropped down to the lobby, where the guard at the desk had his hands up. Evidently, Comstock had gotten word to him. “I’m not making a move, Lieutenant,” he squealed. “Not a move.”

  Two people entered the lobby, pausing to stare at us. The guard waved them away. We went through the doors into the street, and I snapped at the kid, “Drop your pants!”

  “Drop your pants!” I repeated when he didn’t react. “Now—quick or the gun goes off.” His hands trembling, he dropped his pants. The gun was free. I kicked his backside with all my strength, and he tripped over the pants and fell on his face, and then I ran as I hadn’t run in years.

  His voice, pitched to its utmost power, followed me, “You bastard! You degenerate Jew bastard! You fuckin’ bastard!” and so forth and so on until I turned the corner.

  I saw a taxi, hailed it, leapt in, and sank panting onto the seat.

  “Where to?” the driver asked.

  I could barely speak, my heart was pounding so out of a mixture of fear and exhaustion. I had not run with that kind of speed and abandon in years. Uniformed cops run, detectives run, but a lieutenant of detectives doesn’t run. He sits on his backside and gives orders and uses his brain, if he has one.

  “Thirty-fourth and Madison,” I said to the driver.

  Then I sat back and reflected that no one in that crowd of smartass private detectives, operatives, or whatever else they called themselves, had enough brains and cool to remember that no automatic pistol—at least none that I had ever heard of—fires an automatic clip when the trigger is released. A hand grenade does that. In a pistol, the trigger is pulled.

  Then I told myself that I could thank God that Fran had not witnessed this maniac ploy. But what else could I have done? What other way of getting out of there alive?

  Chapter 10

  I WALKED OVER to the Primrose Hotel. Fear is a diarrhetic and also an emetic, and while I had been a cop for seventeen years, I had never come up against anything like this. I used the toilet, and while I did not throw up, I came close to it. Then I splashed water on my face, dried my face, and stared for a long moment at the sad, dark-eyed lonely visage that returned my stare from the mirror.

  There was a telephone message from Fran, which had been slipped under the door. It said: Beginning to pick up bits and pieces. See you later.

  I called Oscar.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “Harvey said he’d rather lunch with you than Shultz, with whom he’s lunching tomorrow. ‘The one who pulled that incredible Vermeer ploy? And he’s your brother?’ Well, he pushed Shultz up a day, and he’ll meet you at twelve-thirty at the Harvard Club.”

  Suddenly, Oscar was scoring points on the basis of being a cop’s brother. He took it gracefully, except that when I asked him where the Harvard Club was, he replied, with a note of incredulity, “You’ve never been there?”

  “No, Oscar.”

  “Forty-fourth Street, just west of Fifth. I believe the number is twenty-seven.”

  I walked there from the hotel. The more I avoided cabs, the safer I was. They say that New York City is the best place in the world to drop out of sight, but as a cop I can refute that. It may be true of the other boroughs, but you can walk down a street in middle Manhattan and meet two or three people you know; and since I was convinced that Wabash Protection had several hundred operatives out looking for me, I had no reason to relax.

  As for the Harvard Club, that was a part of New York life I had never studied intensely, and since the place was in another precinct, I had never even been invited to look at a robbery or a member who had keeled over from a heart attack. I was not entirely ignorant of New York City club life, that very important part of the city that keeps so low a profile that it casts almost no shadow at all. Oscar was a member of the Century Club, which, as he explained to me, has as its membership the bright nucleus of the literary and publishing establishment. If I had gone there alone, I would have concluded that the main qualifications for membership were to be age sixty or above and to wear creaseless trousers. At the Harvard Club, the ceilings were higher and the food was better and the mean age lower.

  Harvey Crimshaw was about my age, a bit taller, slender, graying hair, and a set of humorous blue eyes. I had never thought of eyes as humorous until I faced the problem of describing Harvey. He had a look in his eyes that was just short of laughter, and of course he was a man who laughed readily. He greeted me with pleasure, shook hands warmly, informed me that he was an avid reader of detective fiction, and that my own caper—his word—was better than anything he had read lately. He seemed to be genuinely delighted to lunch with me.

  “Of course, it’s a first for me. Never lunched with a lieutenant of detectives before.”

  “And I’ve never been in the Harvard Club before.”

  “Well, it’s comfortable and the food’s good. Will you have a drink?” I shook my head. “No, of course. You’re on duty. Well, suppose we order.”

  After we had ordered, Crimshaw said that Oscar had put this to him as a matter of life and death. There was a note of apology in his voice. “I mean,” he said, “that Oscar might well have felt the need to exaggerate. He needn’t have felt that way. I made him understand that I was delighted to meet you, and th
e previous date, which I canceled, was of no great importance. But just for my own benefit, is it actually a matter of life and death?”

  “The question I’ll ask you won’t sound that way, but your answer can save several lives.”

  “One question?” he wondered.

  “Just one—yes.”

  The food came. “Please,” Crimshaw said, “let’s not stand on ceremony. I want to hear that question. And call me Harvey.”

  “All right. Here’s the question. Who owns Wabash Protection?”

  “Wow.” Quietly. He sipped at his drink and stared at me with what appeared to be new interest. “Wabash Protection,” he said. “You wouldn’t want me to ask you why you want this information?”

  “Later, perhaps.” I picked at the beef stew on my plate. I had no appetite. I was still sick inside over what had happened this morning.

  “Well,” Crimshaw said, “how do we go at this, Lieutenant? I have only another hour.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Well, perhaps I could stretch it. On the other hand, since this is so desperately imporant to you—and since it’s Wabash, I can understand why it might be—I had better begin at the very beginning and spell it all out. Do you want to take notes?”

  I shook my head. “I’ll remember. I’ve had a lot of practice at that.”

  “All right, from the beginning. Private protection agencies, or detective agencies, are an old fixture on the American scene. Pinkerton is the best known, and they began during the Civil War as a private secret service for the Union Army; but until fairly recently, the private detective agencies were small potatoes and the protection agencies were not much larger. You have the image created by Dashiell Hammett and by television of the shabby little office and the private eye who barely keeps body and soul together. Well, I suppose there’s some of that still around, but by and large, it belongs to another era. The tremendous increase in crime has produced something else. But of course you know that.”

  I nodded. He took a few bites of his food and then lost interest in it. “I find this terribly exciting, but then I live a fairly dull life. Where were we? Oh, yes, do you work on the East Side—that is the Upper East Side?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you know how many streets in that area have their own uniformed private guards. Now let me just inject a bit of stock market data. Three of the most active growth industries were hardly listed on the pre—World War Two exchanges. The first, of course, is computers. Second, hospitals and all the associated industries, and thirdly, and much less known, the protection industry. This last has truly mushroomed, not only here but all over the country. Now let’s get down to Wabash. It came into being eight years ago, created by a man by the name of Ellis Wabash. I think he was a private detective in Cleveland. He had six operatives, and as I understand it, they operated out of a cheap office on West Forty-seventh Street. I’m well up on this part of Wabash history, because I had lunch last week with the analyst who covers it for our firm.”

  “Analyst?”

  “I can see you don’t dabble in the stock market.”

  “On a cop’s wages—oh, no. My wife would kill me if I did. Whatever savings we have are in money market accounts.”

  “That’s good, very good indeed. You get a well-protected nine percent or better and absolutely no risk, covered by federal insurance. I wish more people had your good sense. Anyway, the stock market is for those who can take it, and I’m afraid the country could not survive without it. Brokerage houses must know about the stock they buy and sell for their customers, and that’s where the analyst comes in. In a large brokerage house, such as ours, each analyst will have two or three or four or ten companies, or perhaps a whole industry that he must study. A really good analyst will sometimes know more about a company than the president of the company or the board of directors, and my thankless job is to whip the analysts and get to know at least a part of what each of them knows.

  “Back to Wabash. As I said, Ellis Wabash opened up some eight years ago, had reasonably good luck and good management, and in one year he was working with six operatives. He had created a good, solid reputation, and according to his wife, he was prepared to double his work force. Then he died, and his wife had to sell the company.”

  “You mean he was killed.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “He was killed?”

  “Well, not killed, no. It was an accident. He lived out in Queens, small house. Came home late one night. The garage door closed, and he fell asleep with the motor going.”

  “How simple. How very simple. All problems solved in one simple manner.”

  “Lieutenant?”

  “Just thinking. I’m sorry. Please go on.”

  “His wife got a good price for it, considering that it’s a service business. She tried to make something out of his death, because he told her that he had been asked to take on work that would have paid well, but he was afraid and refused. That’s all she knew. I suppose it was an accident, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “As I said, she got a good price for it. A man called Henson ran it for the next sixteen months. He had money, evidently a good deal of money, but we know nothing about him, not even his first name—I guess we could find out more, if we had to. Henson increased the business enormously. He took a whole floor in one of the older office buildings, increased his operative force to better than a hundred, and opened branch offices in Boston and Philadelphia. Profits soared, and after sixteen months, Henson decided that the Wabash Company would go public. That means, as I’m sure you know, they were going to sell the company to whoever bought the stock.”

  “That much I’m familiar with,” I said.

  “It was all perfectly legal, but odd. Usually, when a person or a group develop a company, they sell off a portion of the stock and keep a bundle for themselves, at least fifty-one percent if they wish to continue in control, or less if they wish to continue as investors. Of course, with a large company with say ten or fifteen million shares of stock, a small part of that might be enough to maintain control. But Henson sold every share and then took the money and ran.”

  “How much money?”

  “They issued two hundred thousand shares at five dollars a share, one million dollars, less about ten percent for expenses. A very fair price for a labor-intensive service company of that size. On the other hand, with a bit of pushing and glitz, they could have gotten twice that.”

  “Would you explain?”

  “Yes. Small companies,” Crimshaw went on, “that decide to go public and retrieve their investment—and very often a substantial profit on top of their investment—frequently sell their stock at a much higher price than the real net worth of their companies warrants. Their position is that they are selling future possibilities, managerial skill, a continuing pattern of growth. Now when you consider the growth in both size and profits of Wabash in the sixteen months of Henson’s management, you see a pattern that could extend into the future. In terms of that possibility, the price of one million dollars was low—even in preinflation money. However, the two hundred thousand shares of stock were presold, that is they were spoken for immediately. A bit of improper shading there, but it happens.”

  “And Henson was never heard from again?”

  “Oh, no. Disappeared. But there’s no law against that, is there?”

  “No, I guess not. Who bought the Wabash stock?”

  “Not easy to know that entirely at this point. But Listerman-Reed bought about forty percent of the stock, and subsequently acquired enough to give them a fifty-one percent hold.”

  “And what is Listerman-Reed?”

  “Sporting boats, fishing boats, surfboards, tennis equipment, a hockey team which they own, vitamins, some over-the-counter drugs—a nice, healthy company, sells health and very good at the job.”

  “All right, if this company makes healthy profits, which you seem to say, why didn’t they grab
all of Wabash if they wanted it? A million is not that much in your world, is it?”

  “No, indeed, it is peanuts. But a stock like Wabash is two things. It is a protection agency and it is also a money machine. Now I am sorry, Lieutenant, to have to lead you down all these twisting garden paths, but there is no easy answer to the question you asked me—and I am sure you want the complete answer?”

  “I do, absolutely.”

  “And I still have most of my hour. Now I may be telling you a good many things you already know, and I’m not trying to be insufferable. It’s just a shorter road if I lay out everything. If you had asked me about General Motors, I could have answered in two minutes. Wabash is different. Now what do I mean by a money machine? That much-maligned old gentleman Karl Marx was once asked a seemingly unanswerable question: What determines value? His answer was very clear and simple: The value of anything, in economic terms, is its price. If Listerman-Reed had owned all of the stock, there would have been no market price because there was no stock on the market. So, very shrewdly, they established a market, first over the counter, then at the American Stock Exchange, and three years ago at the New York Stock Exchange, the big board, as we call it. Now starting with a price of five dollars about six years ago, the stock went up to fifty-two dollars and then it split. Subsequently, the stock split four more times and its market price today is somewhere around sixty-one dollars a share. That’s what I mean by a money machine. That market stock, sold originally for about half a million is today worth more millions than you can count.”

  “But how did that money machine benefit them? They couldn’t sell any stock without losing control.”