Double, Double, Oil and Trouble

by Emma Lathen

But Shute could not leave it alone. “All right. But they are all outsiders. Nothing has happened to imperil our contract, has it? Even if Engelhart was—”

  Simon Livermore was not making any commitments. “I am in no position to comment,” he said distantly.

  For once Hugo Cramer had to remedy Shute’s clumsiness. “It’s a helluva thing,” he said rising like an old man. “But I guess this isn’t the place to chew it out. I think we’d better move on.”

  Neither of the Livermores pressed their guests to stay.

  “I’ll be in touch with you tomorrow, Livermore. Possibly by then, the situation will be clarified,” said Arthur Shute.

  “Yes, indeed,” said Livermore tonelessly.

  Cramer was apologizing to Mrs. Livermore: “. . . make a real night of it at the best restaurant in London,” Thatcher overheard him saying, as they eddied into the corridor.

  Jill Livermore rebuffed him. “Perhaps we can get together sometime. Good night, Mr. Cramer.”

  “You sure made a hit with her,” Charlie remarked, as they rode down in the elevator.

  “Nothing that an expensive dinner won’t take care of,” said Cramer offhandedly. “She’s a party girl. She didn’t understand what was going on.”

  “And neither do I,” complained Shute. “Hugo, do you think—?”

  Still casual, Cramer said, “Right now I don’t know what to think, except I didn’t like that crack about Volpe. I think we’d better get over and make sure Paul doesn’t get himself, or Macklin, into deeper trouble.”

  Here was where the Sloan cut off. “Then,” said Thatcher firmly, “we’ll be leaving you.”

  “What are you thinking about, John?” Trinkam asked, when they hailed a cab.

  Thatcher was thinking about money.

  “The ransom?” Charlie asked. “The ransom that Francesca Wylie claimed she didn’t have?”

  “That,” agreed Thatcher, “and money in other forms as well.”

  Chapter 19

  Wildcatting

  Journalistic reaction the following morning was violent. Davidson Wylie’s kidnapping had made the headlines. His wife’s death filled the front pages. Without compunction, newsmen focused on the Wylies as archconspirators. Thereafter, the medium shaped the message.

  For tabloids, the story was a natural. They knew the classic recipe for concocting a tragic figure—start with unpromising beginnings, rise to astronomic heights, then plunge to a fated doom. With a little ingenuity, Francesca could be fitted into this mold. They saw her as struggling through a war-torn childhood , she had been three when the war ended, to become a familiar of the great, the publicity stills showed her with notable Italian directors and actresses, only fall prey to the inexorable demands of the third act, encompassing divorce, crime, and death. There was a strong suggestion that Davidson Wylie had been her Svengali, and that her desperate attempts to free herself had merely hastened their predestined ends. This broad treatment, avoiding all problems of consistency and probability, satisfied the tabloids and also many of their readers.

  One group particularly spellbound by this version of the Wylies was the staff of a small hospital in northern Greece. They had plucked Davidson Wylie out of a car smash and made him whole, only to have him die in yet another car a few weeks later. It had seemed as if they were the victims of some playful deity. But no longer. Now they saw themselves as part of a deep, sinister, and incomprehensible plot.

  “Can you believe it? He involved his own wife in his misdeeds,” said a pharmacist disapprovingly. “That is not right.”

  “And she was so beautiful,” breathed a young nurse, mooning over a large photograph.

  The ambulance driver was shocked. “That’s not her, that’s Sophia Loren.” He pointed to the second woman. “This one is Francesca Wylie.”

  “She’s still beautiful,” the nurse said stubbornly.

  TV commentators had neither the time nor the desire to be fanciful. For them, it was yet another sordid example of the unscrupulous materialism they regularly espied in elected officials, business executives, blue-collar workers, suburbanites, and everyone leading a life unsanctified by a major network. Davidson and Francesca Wylie were dismissed as criminals who had chosen to live by the sword and die by the sword. Unlike tabloid readers, TV viewers were expected to provide their own romance.

  Gwen Trabulsi had no trouble at all.

  “Just think, Vic,” she said, her eyes like stars, “we were sitting right next to them while they were arguing what to do with a million and a half dollars.”

  For once, Vic had not a single deflating sentence at the ready. He might accuse his wife of overdramatizing, but Walter Cronkite?

  “He was trying to cheat her,” Vic remembered. “That was plain enough.”

  “Yes.” Eagerly Gwen began to embroider the theme. “That must be why she killed him.”

  The course of 20th century history was teaching Vic to beware the sweeping generalization. Instead of a crisp negative, he hazarded only a personal impression.

  “She sure didn’t look like the kind of lady that makes her own bombs.”

  Only the elevated portions of the press, those expecting their public to keep abreast of disarmament negotiations, the ballet, and African geography, regarded the Wylie deaths as constituting something less than a closed circle. Of course it was possible, they conceded, that Francesca had killed her husband and then committed suicide, but this explanation left a good many questions unanswered. Had the separation and divorce been a sham? Why had the couple then disagreed so violently? What had happened to a million and a half dollars?

  “None of it makes sense,” Charlie Trinkam decided.

  “Certainly the police don’t think so. Have you noticed that every statement they’ve released avoids any mention of suicide?” Thatcher agreed, following Charlie out of the cab and into the Hilton.

  There the low-ceilinged lobby was packed with chattering groups, barring access to the elevators. “I wonder if this hotel will ever return to normal,” Thatcher remarked, detouring around a mountain of luggage.

  “Not until we all forget that heat wave. It’s not just Americans flocking in. They’re getting the Japanese and the South Americans and—”

  Thatcher took Charlie’s elbow and turned him in the direction from which they were being hailed.

  “And the Germans as well,” he said, as a threesome approached. “Good evening, Grimm. Good evening, Engelhart. So this is the uncomfortable site of your deliberations.”

  “Just so.” Leopold Grimm was still hankering for the delights of Zurich. “Engelhart you know, but I do not think you have met Herr Pleuger, the managing director of Norddeutsche Werke.”

  Herr Pleuger was the first to suggest that they repair to the bar. Grimm seemed to welcome enlargement of his party. Only Klaus Engelhart remained wrapped in gloom.

  As soon as they were settled, Charlie faced the problem of condolences. “Must have been hell for you, Engelhart, finding Francesca Wylie’s body that way,” he said with unforced sympathy.

  “It was extremely unpleasant.” After gazing into his glass for a moment, Klaus expanded on his constrained response. “What makes it harder is that I might have saved her if I had been earlier. The police are not sure how soon she died before I arrived.”

  Tact came naturally to Charlie Trinkam. It was not part of Herr Pleuger’s armory. He shook a finger at his subordinate and said: “You must learn to face disagreeable facts, Engelhart. What the police are really saying, is that they are not sure she was dead before you arrived.”

  “I am well aware of that. It is not particularly surprising to me,” Engelhart said woodenly. “After all, if the police do not accept suicide, and I myself told them that was out of the question, they must suspect someone of her murder.”

  “I fail to see why it is out of the question. Surely it explains everything, if she killed her husband and then became remorseful.”

  Engelhart’s fingers tightened on his glass. “F
rancesca did not commit suicide,” he repeated stubbornly. “You forget that I spoke with her on the phone the day she died. She was eager to see me. She was even looking forward to going out with the Volpes. Women do not gas themselves immediately before a dinner engagement.”

  Pleuger, a pontifical man, did not enjoy having his theories punctured by his juniors. “Much may have happened after you spoke with her. Perhaps evidence of her crime was coming to light.”

  “As for Francesca killing anybody, that is absurd. She could not even bring herself to believe that her husband planned his own kidnapping.”

  As Herr Pleuger was looking alarmingly apoplectic, Thatcher interceded. “It’s not as if the police were devoting themselves exclusively to Engelhart. Naturally they link both Wylie deaths together, which makes them suspicious of everybody who was first in Houston, then in London. They’re asking quite a lot of people for alibis, including Trinkam here.”

  “They sure are,” Charlie said feelingly. “I’ll bet that Engelhart and I didn’t get much of a workout compared to the Macklin boys. Hell, Paul Volpe tells me that they took him through his trip back to the hotel with a stopwatch. And they still don’t like the fact that he was 25 minutes late.”

  “I am sure that what you say is true and that Macklin is enduring much annoyance. But—” and Pleuger came at last to his real grievance “—they can console themselves with the knowledge that they profited from their association with Davidson Wylie.”

  Leopold Grimm could not let this pass. The memory of his travail in Zurich was still an open wound. The proverbial salt was supplied by the knowledge that he and Thatcher had played their puppet roles in response to a chimera.

  “Mr. Wylie embezzled a million and a half dollars from them,” he said in unforgiving tones.

  “What is a paltry million and a half dollars?” Pleuger asked magnificently. “He got them the Noss Head contract, didn’t he? No matter what your calculations, Macklin remains a gainer.”

  As his resentful gaze rested on his subordinate, his thoughts were obvious. Should Scotland Yard sweep Klaus Engelhart far from the haunts of man, he would leave no such golden legacy for NDW.

  Goaded, Engelhart retreated to his time-hallowed contention. “If Wylie had not been kidnapped, NDW would have gotten that contract.”

  “What the hell,” said Charlie cheerfully. “You win some, you lose some. There are a lot of big outfits playing the oil game.”

  “I am not so unreasonable as to expect to win all major construction bids,” said Pleuger, lying in his teeth. “I merely expect intelligence from the field that is accurate enough to permit NDW some advance planning on a rational basis.”

  So that was Engelhart’s crime, thought Thatcher. He had failed to forecast the outcome.

  “Am I expected to anticipate mock-terrorist outrages?” Engelhart was addressing the heavens, rather than Pleuger. “Who would have expected the British to bend over backward merely because of some obscure fellow feeling? So they have had their IRA experiences. We have had Munich.”

  Pleuger was icy. “It was not necessary to predict, only to recognize!”

  Thatcher was beginning to understand why Grimm had been so eager to leaven his little band with newcomers. Fortunately, Pleuger waved aside the suggestion of a second round, announcing that he and Engelhart were due to study a Norwegian invitation for bids.

  “Now, more imperative than ever. Perhaps in Oslo there will be no inducement to foolish optimism,” he declaimed, sweeping his employee along in his wake.

  As Grimm, too, decided that it was time to retire, he paused for a last aside. “You must not judge Herr Pleuger by this evening,” he said to Thatcher. “NDW had been hoping to arrange certain financial accommodations with Union Suisse, which we would have been happy to provide to the prime contractor for Noss Head. However, it has been my unhappy duty to inform Pleuger that NDW would be well-advised to defer its plans for the present. Under the circumstances, a certain amount of nervous irritability is only to be expected. I am sure you meet with this situation at the Sloan.”

  “We understand,” Thatcher assured him gravely.

  There had, indeed, been many unfortunate experiences with this kind of nervous irritability at the Sloan. Now the room reserved for breaking the bad news was stripped of throwable objects and furnished with a powerful pneumatic door-closer.

  Charlie waited only long enough for their recent companions to move out of earshot. “Well, Engelhart sure isn’t NDW’s boy wonder anymore, is he?”

  “Fair’s fair,” Thatcher countered. “Engelhart himself seems baffled by his failure to sell the British.”

  Charlie was unimpressed. “He’s got to say something with Pleuger chipping away at him. After all, he’s getting it on all sides. Pleuger isn’t crazy about his choice of girlfriends, either.”

  “I think it’s a little more than that.”

  “I know, I know. The police probably wonder if Francesca and Klaus didn’t team up to do a job on Wylie, and then Klaus decided to go it alone. Pleuger doesn’t care for that kind of image in his marketing manager. I don’t know that I blame him.”

  But Thatcher was not thinking about NDW’s personnel policies. “Has it occurred to you that all the theories we’ve heard about these crimes involve some falling out among co-conspirators? First there was talk of some unknown paramour turning on Wylie, then it was his wife, and now Engelhart and Mrs. Wylie are supposed to have united in killing Wylie, only to divide thereafter very rapidly.”

  “As a matter of fact, I’ve been thinking about it ever since I ran into the Volpes. They’re still on the unknown-girlfriend kick. Paul doesn’t understand why the girl should split off once they’d salted away their million and a half. Betsy doesn’t go along. She’s really got her knife into the late departed Dave Wylie and thinks it’s natural anyone would want to get away from him. But, let’s face it, Betsy’s a nice healthy girl who hasn’t had much experience with million-dollar deals.”

  “Exactly.”

  In the banking business it is axiomatic that elaborate contracts are superfluous except when the venture in question sours. Successful partners can always iron out their difficulties.

  “So we look for a scheme that was so unsuccessful it left the partners ready to lynch each other,” Charlie postulated. “And the most unsuccessful operation lying around is NDW’s bid on Noss Head.”

  Thatcher could feel his own imagination taking flight. “Suppose, just suppose, that Engelhart approached Wylie with a proposition. First, he said, you make yourself indispensable to Macklin’s presentation. Then I will arrange a fake kidnapping and all you have to do is remain passive. At the end of this charade, my company will have the business and you will have a million and a half dollars.”

  “And the beauty of it is the source of the money. Macklin gets its throat cut and foots the bill for the surgery.”

  “It would explain why Engelhart was so confident his bid would prevail.”

  Charlie decided to be counsel for the defense. “Engelhart could just be built that way.”

  “Even more, it would explain his bewildered resentment when the British went ahead and gave the contract to Macklin, anyway,” Thatcher continued serenely. “You could say the kidnapping backfired by producing sympathy.”

  “You can think up other reasons for all that.” Charlie waved away Klaus Engelhart’s emotional responses. “What I like is that it ends up with two partners who really have something to fight about. Regardless of who was sitting on the money, there was bound to be trouble. Engelhart didn’t get what he bargained for, and all those secondary contracts Wylie was trying to throw his way didn’t satisfy him. And nine chances out of ten, Wylie didn’t have his money, even though he’d done what he promised.”

  By now the two of them were no longer listening to each other. “Then there’s Mrs. Wylie’s conviction mat this was not the sort of crime her husband would have conceived,” Thatcher mused. “Perhaps Engelhart did all the thinking
for him.”

  Charlie was remembering more details relayed through Betsy Volpe. “None of the expenses to set up the kidnapping went through Wylie’s checkbook. Could be that good old Klaus was taking care of all that from Germany.”

  As befitted his seniority, Thatcher came out of the clouds first. “Wait a minute. There are a few unresolved questions still. Wylie reserved a room at that hotel in Greece for only two days. He didn’t plan to be away for the Noss Head negotiations. That delay was introduced by his car accident.”

  “Maybe he was supposed to go on someplace else.”

  “No.” Thatcher shook his head. “If he had planned to be away for three weeks, he would have had a story ready for Interpol. He wouldn’t have had to improvise. Quite apart from the unknown woman in Zurich.”

  “A girl from Engelhart’s office?” Charlie hazarded.

  “Would you trust anyone on Pleuger’s payroll to keep a secret from him? I wouldn’t. And we haven’t tackled the biggest problem of all—the money. Davidson Wylie didn’t look like the kind of man to trust Engelhart. How could he have enforced payment after the kidnapping? The girl must have been his accomplice.” Thatcher was regretful. “It’s a shame. At first sight, the Engelhart theory seemed to explain so many inconsistencies.”

  Charlie never wasted time on vain regrets. Suddenly he laughed outright.

  “Boy, the British must he wishing they’d never seen either Macklin or NDW. They were trying to run a nice, clean construction job, and look what they end up associating with. I can tell you one thing, we’re not going to be overburdened with official hospitality on this trip. First, all those immaculate civil servants start running around with Dave Wylie, and they find out he’s an embezzler. Then they’ve got to be having doubts about Engelhart. To top it off, a stuffed shirt like Simon Livermore asks Cramer into his home and, before he knows it, he’s part of the guy’s murder alibi. It looks like we’re going to be eating a lot of hotel food, John.”

  Pleasant memories of ripe apricots and the Charleston came floating to the surface. “He’s not all stuffed shirt,” Thatcher corrected.