by Emma Lathen
For the first time Francesca was not contemptuously angry. “They know that a woman emptied out that numbered account in Zurich. If she was a casual amorous involvement, she didn’t have to come to Houston, fight with David about the money, then kill him. She could simply have taken the ransom out of Switzerland and gone to the other end of the world. That is the way the police reason. But a wife, still legally tied to David, might find it easier to murder him.”
“That is an absurdity, it goes without saying.” Now that he was dealing with specifics, Engelhart had regained his equanimity. “Surely the police know that you and Dave had already separated. And no man in his senses would enter this sort of conspiracy with an estranged wife.”
“They have managed to deal with that difficulty, too. In fact, they have alternative explanations. The separation was simply a smokescreen to deceive people. Either David and I were genuine partners at first, but I decided he was a liability when Interpol insisted on questioning him thoroughly. Or else ...”
“Or else what?”
Francesca’s voice sharpened with malice. “Or else you and I were in league and you, Klaus, with your vast engineering experience, arranged the bomb. Now do you understand why we should not be holding hands in Houston?”
His response was immediate. “We should not be in Houston at all, if that is what the police think. They cannot force us to stay, but they can make it very uncomfortable for us if we do.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” she said slowly. “I still have to get someone to handle probate, but I could do that in New York.”
“Good God, you agree with me, don’t you?”
“I do about leaving, but not about anything else. I knew David to his very marrow, and he was the last man to conceive this mad embezzlement plot.”
Klaus was impatient with failure to accept reality. “If there is one thing that has been proved incontrovertibly, it is Dave’s actions. Maybe he did not originate the idea. After all, he was in his forties. Men that age can go completely wild over a girl 20 years younger. A modern young student could have thought the whole thing up herself—and also made the bomb.”
“That’s possible,” Francesca said coolly, not liking the reference to young girls. “But one thing is certain. David kept some kind of control over the money. I can assure you that he was still the same old David about cash in hand as late as last week. The girl didn’t blow him up because they quarreled over a division. She did it because he was going to pieces.”
“He was not himself the night before he was murdered,” Klaus admitted. “But I put it down to drink.”
“That’s why he was drinking. I tell you, even before the Interpol man arrived, he was on the verge of hysteria. He could never have sustained several days of questioning. David never expected to explain away three weeks. He thought it was all going to be easy. As soon as it became unbearably difficult, he would have offered to deal—give the money back, turn state’s evidence, name his accomplice—anything to protect himself.”
Klaus Engelhart felt they should concentrate on essentials. “You may be right. What difference does it make why some imaginary girl killed him?”
“And you pretend to be a businessman, Klaus.”
With crystal clarity, Francesca explained, “If David had that money when he died, there is a million and a half dollars lying around somewhere. Now I think that’s interesting. Don’t you?”
Chapter 13
Freezing in the Dark
The Sloan Guaranty Trust had more than a casual connection with the affairs of Davidson Wylie. There were people on the sixth floor who had stayed up half the night hand-counting crumpled bills on his behalf. But they barely glanced at the headlines screaming his murder. Unlike Houston, New York was wrestling with inflation, a whimsical bond market, and the eeriest economic forecasts since Hammurabi. Wider horizons did not afford much relief. French vineyards were being accused of mislabeling, British Leyland was being accused of international bribery, and the Japanese were being accused of almost everything.
Everett Gabler, the bank’s doomsday prophet, was reveling in so many fiscal post-mortems that he had no spare attention for the real thing in Texas. Walter Bowman, chief of research, was too busy preparing the Sloan for next week’s debacles to have time for yesterday’s bankruptcies, let alone its murders. The utilities of the nation, bludgeoned by one rate-making authority after another, had so inundated Charlie Trinkam with lamentation that he almost forgot he had ever been in Houston.
As for Rose Theresa Corsa, in sunshine or in shadow she remained untouched by vulgar curiosity. But she was always alert to the slightest strain on the delicate web of contacts she had spun throughout the Sloan. Mr. Elliman, down in travel, was fast coming apart under the onslaught of Macklin’s erratic demands. First there had been Mr. Thatcher’s stopover in London, involving hotel rooms and transatlantic flights unauthorized by the travel department. Then there had been the trip to Houston, first postponed out of deference to Davidson Wylie’s convalescence, then hastily reinstated without reference to Mr. Elliman. Finally there had been the wholesale dislocation of yesterday’s agenda due to Mr. Trinkam’s arrival, fresh from the blood-laden streets of Houston. The time had come for Miss Corsa to speak to her employer. She was ready and waiting when the elevator deposited him at nine-thirty.
She began by thanking him for the gift which had finally completed its leisurely postal route to Queens. This time it was an embroidered luncheon set from Zurich, although Thatcher had been sorely tempted by a pair of lederhosen. Then came the formal charges.
“. . . reorganize your appointment calendar for this week, Mr. Thatcher,” she was saying, as she followed him into his office. “Mr. Meager’s secretary hopes that you will be able to make it this time at three o’clock on Friday.”
“Splendid,” said Thatcher, settling at his desk.
“And the letter to Associated Industries should go out tomorrow morning. Commercial credit has been waiting for your approval of the second paragraph for over two weeks.”
“Send it,” Thatcher directed after a cursory glance.
She persevered. “Mr. Considine sent over the minutes of the Downtown Association committee meeting that you missed. If you have any comments, I’m to phone him so they can be incorporated into the printed report.”
“Any comments I have,” said Thatcher comfortably, “are certainly unfit for your ears, Miss Corsa, let alone, the printed word.”
“Yes, Mr. Thatcher,” she replied, deaf to frivolity.
“And what’s this?” he demanded, making a random pass at his desk.
She was delighted to inform him that it was a list of important persons urgently wishing to talk with him. Many of them, she further informed him, had been unable to do so for over three weeks.
The duel continued with meticulous regard for the niceties. Miss Corsa brandished ample evidence that, when he departed from her script, all hell broke loose. Thatcher, an old campaigner, made no attempt to convince her that these digressions did not constitute a simple search for pleasure. Instead he methodically demonstrated that nine-tenths of all calls, letters, memoranda, and reports normally reaching him were, in fact, nonessential.
They had barely finished their preliminary warmup when they were interrupted.
“Good!” boomed Walter Bowman, gallantly letting Miss Corsa squeeze past him. “I’m glad I finally caught you. It seems as if every time I’ve tried to get you for the past month, you’ve been tied up with Macklin.”
Thatcher gestured invitingly to a chair. “Well, you have me now.”
But Bowman’s omnivorous memory had been triggered into recalling a scene he wanted to share. “Say, did Miss Corsa tell you that maintenance put up the big TV screen in the lobby so that everybody could watch you and Charlie making the payoff?”
“She was too tactful to mention it,” said Thatcher pointedly.
Walter was insulted in more ways than one. “It wasn’t just the eyes of Texas that wer
e on you. Now, I’ve got a dilly of a capital-spending estimate for you. Just take a look at this . . .”
At this juncture Everett Gabler arrived, bent on analyzing every unsatisfactory twist in the Sloan’s portfolio position since the election.
“. . . absolutely essential that we regularize the Sloanvest situation,” he concluded. “As I have stressed more than once, unless the Sloan guarantees the assets—”
“God help us!” said Walter, who had long since written off the Sloan’s ill-fated real estate investment trust. “Anyway I thought Charlie was handling that mess.”
“Charlie has been otherwise occupied,” retorted Gabler, whose views on schedule disruptions were even stronger than those of Miss Corsa. “He has been swept up by every vagary at Macklin until a good deal of his work has landed on my desk.”
For form’s sake, Thatcher felt obliged to demur. “You cannot dismiss the Noss Head contract as a vagary, Everett. And Charlie was in Houston working out the preliminary financing arrangements. I will concede that his timing was unfortunate.”
Gabler was a hard man to please at the best of times. Recently, the decline and fall of Sloanvest had taxed his limited reserve of patience. It was only to be expected that he would produce a burning indictment.
“First, they inveigle you and Charlie into delivering their ransom for them. Then departure dates for Houston are turned on and off for the convenience of a man who now stands revealed as a proven felon. As if that were not bad enough, this Wylie is murdered and Charlie, far from finalizing any agreements, has to spend days at the beck and call of the local police.” Gabler paused in his awe-inspiring list to give his glasses a vigorous swipe. “Granted that the Macklin financing is substantial enough to warrant the Sloan’s best attention. Still, we do have other serious claims on our time. Presumably Macklin should be able—”
“Mr. Thatcher,” said Miss Corsa from the doorway. “Mr. Lancer’s office has just called. Could you step upstairs for a few moments?”
Everett subsided into pulsating disapproval but Walter Bowman came up with the trained researcher’s educated hunch. “And three guesses what it’s all about!”
Somewhere in his ascent from the sixth floor to the executive tower, Thatcher left behind the trust department’s parochialism.
“Sorry to call you away from your desk when you’re so busy,” said George Lancer, intercepting Thatcher in the hallway outside his suite. “But you’re closer to the Macklin situation than the rest of us.”
Thatcher raised an eyebrow. “The rest of us?”
“I’ve got Upton and Roberta Ore Simpson in there,” Lancer explained in a lowered voice.
“They’re on Macklin’s Board of Directors with you, aren’t they, George?” asked Thatcher easily, accompanying Lancer into quarters that could have accommodated the United Nations. “Are you hatching a palace revolution?”
“Certainly not!” said George stoutly. “But it is an appropriate time for the outside directors to take an overview of what has been happening, both in Zurich and in Houston. You must agree with that.”
“Nothing to do with directors’ liability?” Thatcher asked with a grin.
George did not dignify this slander with a reply.
In the good old days, notable Americans could sit on the board of directors of any Fortune 500 company, collect a handsome honorarium, and attend an infrequent meeting without a qualm. But scandal and excess ultimately led to legislation. Overnight, members of the board developed a nervous interest in what management was doing. Very often, finding out made them feel even worse. None of these generalities applied to one of Macklin’s outside directors.
“Roberta, I don’t think you have met our senior vice president, John Thatcher,” said George Lancer. “John, this is Roberta Ore Simpson.”
Some women in public life are invariably known by three names. Occasionally this designation provides continuity for a career begun under a maiden name and continued after marriage. More often it serves as a warning to the uninitiated that the lady’s claim to fame rests on the grandeur of her own family rather than on her consort. But sometimes the polysyllabic mouthful signals the inadequacy of the English language. Under certain circumstances, “Mrs.” and “Miss” can be grotesquely inappropriate while “Professor” and “Doctor” are irrelevant.
Certainly, in Miss Simpson’s case, a mere academic title would scarcely have done justice to her wide-ranging activities. On her mother’s side she was descended from an eminent Quaker family. Her father had been the founder and guiding light of one of the nation’s most illustrious accounting firms. Roberta Ore Simpson had taken this mixed heritage and forged therefrom a unique approach to the American experience. 25 years earlier she had been appointed president of a small college in Michigan. From this power base, she had moved onto the larger scene as a voice of morality. Corporations, innocently assuming that here was yet another innocuous do-gooder, began appointing her to their boards. Her unfailing response to any suspicion of irregularity was to throw out the company’s auditors. New accountants were unleashed on the clear understanding that evidence of skulduggery would be enthusiastically received. Nor were her interests confined to financial chicanery. Miss Simpson was concerned with the whole ethical thrust of big business, and in this cause she wielded her accountants like a virtuoso. She had discovered that conglomerates were making components that they themselves did not know about. She had bared ties with repressive regimes, stripped the mask off union kickbacks, and pursued campaign contributions to their final resting place.
By rights, her name should have been poison to any profit-making institution. But her fervor had often produced unlooked-for benefits. She had a keen eye for spotting contract overruns before they snowballed. Twice she had nagged her sponsors into the orderly termination of facilities that, a year later, would have been catastrophically closed by the FDA or the EPA.
Then, just about the time that industry was deciding her tactics might pay for themselves, they discovered they could not afford to ignore her. While they had been deliberating in closed rooms, Miss Simpson had transformed herself into a personality. That she should testify indefatigably before Congress was predictable, but she had unscrupulously seized every other forum that existed. She appeared on early-morning talk shows and late-night specials; she wrote newspaper articles, took part in panels, and addressed every conceivable convention. The blocky figure, the haphazard clothes, and the wisps of iron-gray hair were familiar to millions. By the time the great Lockheed scandal had rocked every firm that ever bribed a foreign official, there were two courses open to companies faced with embarrassing disclosures. They could make professions of repentance that nobody believed, or they could let in Roberta Ore Simpson and her kamikaze accountants.
Macklin had chosen to go the second route, and the result was Arthur Shute in the president’s chair and an almost new Board of Directors. Not entirely new, however.
“And I know you haven’t met Norris Upton,” George Lancer continued.
“No,” agreed Thatcher, thinking he would have remembered. Copper-skinned plainsmen dressed in creamy buckskin are not common in Manhattan. “How do you do.”
Norris Upton was a survivor from the bad old days. A department-store tycoon from Dallas, he frankly believed that management should concentrate on earnings and let the chips fall where they might. Needless to say, he and Roberta Ore Simpson had been to the mat on almost every aspect of Macklin policy, with the luckless George Lancer acting as middle-of-the-road mediator. On the subject of repressive regimes they had nearly come to blows. Miss Simpson, her attention directed to the Middle East for the first time, had been aghast. Norris Upton did not see the problem.
“For Lord’s sake!” he had said. “If your business is construction for oilfields, you have to go where the oil is and deal with whatever government you find. For all I know, Austria’s got the cleanest government in the world. But it’s a cinch that Macklin isn’t going to do a hell of a lot of
work there.”
“There is a difference between dealing with a government and countenancing its domestic policies,” she had replied militantly.
That time they managed to tie up Lancer for three days. But Davidson Wylie’s shenanigans, Thatcher was happy to see, had generated rare unanimity among the outside directors.
“Arthur Shute has been keeping us up to date,” Lancer began. “From what he says, there’s no longer room for doubt. Wylie faked that kidnapping, from beginning to end.”
“A guy like that, I’m not surprised someone blew him up,” Upton said laconically. “They crucified those guys at. Lockheed and they were just doing their best for the company. This bastard was lining his own pockets.”
Roberta Ore Simpson had been hit where she lived. “It is impossible to overestimate the damage done by Davidson Wylie,” she hissed. “Do you realize that he invented a form of embezzlement that is accountant-proof? The money simply passes openly through the books.”
She was so overcome that she could not go on. The theme was pursued by Upton.
“You’d have to investigate every one of these goddamned kidnappings to see if it was on the up and up. And nine times out of ten, you still wouldn’t know. The only reason Wylie blew it was because of that car smash.”
Thatcher nodded and waited. Neither Upton nor Roberta Ore Simpson seemed self-indulgent enough to recruit an audience for their keenings. And Lancer was notorious for self-discipline. He certainly had not summoned his senior vice president to listen to empty complaints. Somebody wanted something.
Apparently it was Lancer’s job to tell him what. “The thing is, John,” he began slowly, “what Shute tells us is all right—so far as it goes. Wylie carried through his plan to rob Macklin with the aid of some people in Turkey and Switzerland. They got their money successfully, but then something went wrong, and Wylie was murdered.”
“But you feel that leaves a good many questions still to be answered?” Thatcher suggested.
