by Emma Lathen
“Don’t talk to me that way, Jason,” he said shrilly. “I was running R&D before you were born.”
“Well, I wouldn’t brag about it. The only thing you ever came up with turns out to belong to somebody else!” Jason said.
“I came up with?” Milton bounced on his deficient perch. “For the last year you’ve been telling the world Numero Uno was your idea. And just for the record, how are you claiming to have gotten it? Are you admitting that you bribed a stupid girl and bribed her to get the wrong tomato at that?”
“Milton, if you weren’t twice my age—”
Behind the small scarred desk, Dick Vandam shut his ears to this exchange. By rights, he should have insisted on order. But Vandam was like a battered boxer, desperately trying to answer the bell. For weeks he had known he was losing ground, but the full extent of the loss had been decently obscured until yesterday afternoon. Earl Sanders’ parting words still rang in his head as he surveyed Jason and Milton.
“My God, are you two still at it?” he broke in on their insults. “Don’t you realize what Wenzel has just done to us?”
Silencing Milton had never been that easy.
“Wenzel, always Wenzel!” he cried. “Your trouble is that you’re obsessed with the man. Now if ever is the time to think about Vandam’s. I know you and the rest of the family think Jason here was simply over-zealous. Well, I won’t fight. Possibly after assisting me for a while, he may grow into the job.”
“If you think I’d work for you, you old fool—”
“Shut up, both of you!” Vandam said wearily. “Get it through your heads that SF is probably going to fire all of us.”
If he had not been so disheartened, Vandam could have enjoyed their responses. Milton stared, pop-eyed. Jason, on the other hand, looked as if he had bitten into a sour apple. Struggling to recover, Milton seized on an old grievance. “Well, you don’t have anything to worry about, Dick. You’ve got a management contract—”
“Oh, God, will you wake up and forget these pipe dreams. Management contracts, who’s going to head R&D they’re things of the past.” With as much emphasis as he could muster, Vandam continued, “Now that we don’t have Numero Uno, Vandam’s is fair game. And if anybody called Vandam is indicted for robbery, or, God forbid, murder, then SF will wash their hands of all of us. As a matter of fact, I expect—”
“Now wait a minute,” Jason objected. “Sure, we’re in a hole, but aren’t you overreacting?
Vandam’s is rock-solid. Numero Uno isn’t that important to us.”
Vandam looked at him for a long moment. “You know better than that, Jason,” he said evenly.
Flushing angrily, Jason said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Before Vandam could reply, the door was flung open, buffeting Milton on the shoulder.
“I’m not sure if Mr. Vandam can see you now,” protested the girl, clinging to the doorknob.
“He’d damned well better,” said Howard Pendleton grimly as he brushed past her.
“Howard!” Vandam exclaimed apprehensively. “What’s this all about?”
“What’s this all about?” Pendleton repeated with savage mockery. “You were in the courthouse with us, weren’t you? What do you think it’s all about?”
Pendleton had shed his customary self-control. He was openly enraged. Ignoring everybody else, he stalked straight to Vandam’s desk and loomed over it.
“Of course I was there,” Vandam said, stung. “I simply wondered . . . Well, at any rate, I assume you’re upset about this latest announcement of Wenzel’s. We all are, that’s what we’ve been discussing. But Howard, we’ve come to the conclusion that it would be wise to reserve judgment. Wenzel’s claims haven’t been checked out. For all we know, this is another one of his con games.”
Pendleton laughed humorlessly. “Sure,” he snapped. “And pigs can fly!”
All the confidence Vandam had built up as he spoke collapsed, leaving him helpless. Milton shrank away from Pendleton’s oversized fury. Only Jason was capable of a coherent reply.
“Now calm down, Howard. There’s no use going off the deep end until we’re sure that Wenzel isn’t simply grandstanding.”
With a brusqueness more offensive than anger, Pendleton dismissed him. “You think I don’t intend to check that out myself? I put Fran onto the night plane to Washington so she can look into all this field testing. No, I’m not in the habit of leaping to conclusions, and I don’t intend to start now. But it’s a waste of time. We’re just going through the motions, and Fran knows it as well as I do.”
He broke off. Then: “Vandam’s must be feeling pretty pleased, the way you led me down the garden path. What did you promise Eric Most? His own research funds? His own laboratory? Or were you so stupid you thought you could deliver IPR to him?”
For a moment, nobody took in what he was saying. When the light finally dawned, Vandam was dumbfounded.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mumbled.
“Like hell you don’t!” Pendleton shot back. “Scott Wenzel developed Numero Uno and while you’ve been diddle-daddling in Vandamia, he’s perfected the next generation. How he managed it, I’ll never understand. But one thing I do understand, that you and Eric Most have been playing games for years. And if you think I’ll let anybody pull the strings at IPR, you’ve made a big mistake.”
Again, it was Jason who spoke for Vandam’s. “Making a lot of wild charges isn’t going to get us anywhere. Suppose—”
“Wild charges, hell! I may have been blind, but Fran practically drew me a diagram. How often Eric was in contact with Barbara, how he called the shots on the basic research. But one thing she couldn’t tell me, how Vandam’s was funneling data stolen from Wenzel to my assistant.”
As Pendleton paused to draw breath, Dick Vandam inconsequently noted how deceiving looks could be. Pendleton was not a tall, tweedy scientist but a human battering ram.
His words packed a punch too.
“If you goddamn people were so hell-bent on stealing research, why didn’t you do it on your own territory? But no, you wanted to keep Vandam’s hands clean, so it was IPR, wasn’t it? You probably enjoyed hearing me tell you how well the work was going. How did you keep straight faces?”
Vandam made an anguished attempt. “I assure you, Howard, that whatever may have been done,
and I regret it as much as you do, it was not with the connivance of the company. Possibly some misguided individual—”
“Oh, God, are you trying that old line?” Pendleton snarled. “Do you seriously believe that you can sacrifice one or these two” he jerked a contemptuous thumb toward Milton and Jason”then make everything all right? Forget it. As far as I’m concerned, you’re all up to your necks mud.”
“Howard, even making allowances for the fact that you’ve had a blow—”
“Blow?” Pendleton interrupted. “You should hear Fran on the subject. It’s bad enough that you spread your filth around IPR, but what sticks in her craw is what you did to Barbara Gunn. And it makes me sick to my stomach too. It wasn’t enough to corrupt that poor child, you set her up to be killed.”
Vandam floundered in an appalling position. He could scarcely deny that Barbara Gunn’s murder was linked to Numero Uno, nor could he expand on Jason and Milton. He could only retreat into platitude.
“We are all deeply disturbed by the tragedy, as well as by the discovery that, however innocently, we have been trying to exploit someone else’s findings. But we’ve got to keep our perspective, Howard. Vandam’s has always valued its association with IPR and I certainly hope we can put all this behind us and work together again.”
The olive branch was shot from his hands.
“You’re out of your mind,” Pendleton rasped. “Or else, you think I am. Vandam’s will never set foot in IPR as long as I live. That’s what I came here to tell you. And once I track down that little prick Most, he’s getting thrown out on his ear. So you can forget about your insi
de man. From here on, the only way Vandam’s touches anything IPR develops is at open auction.”
Having delivered this statement, Pendleton wheeled and headed toward the door so fiercely that Milton nervously ducked out of his path, chair and all.
There was a silence after Pendleton’s turbulent passage. Then Jason grimaced.
“Whew!” he gasped. “I’ve never seen him like that before. I didn’t know he had it in him.”
Still looking after Pendleton, Vandam said flatly, “He doesn’t like the dirt piling up inside his own operation. Neither do I.”
Milton began a bleat of protest, but Jason cut in ruthlessly. “You know, Dick, he gave me an idea with all that ranting of his.”
Vandam was not encouraging, but Jason persevered. “I’m beginning to think we don’t have to take the heat for what’s happened.”
“Then you haven’t been listening,” Dick retorted. “We’re not geneticists, and Pendleton is. You just heard him. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that Wisconsin Seed is faking. Where does that leave Vandam’s?”
Jason dismissed this objection. “No, that’s not what I’m talking about. Let’s say Wenzel did develop Numero Uno. . . . Oh, pipe down, Milton. If Pendleton is right, Eric Most found a way to steal Wenzel’s findings. But why does Vandam’s have to come in? This could all have been Most’s bright idea, something he pulled on his own. My God, Dick, we’re as much innocent victims as Howard Pendleton.”
Dick Vandam was pitiably eager to grasp at anything that exculpated Vandam’s, particularly anything that kept criminal indictments a long way from Vandamia. As Jason spoke, his uncle began to see possibilities.
His cousin was less enthusiastic. “That means nothing wrong happened at Vandamia, so everything stays the way it is,” he said sourly.
“Milton,” said Dick with some of his old forcefulness, “get it through your head, you’re never getting your job back. Right now, concentrate on staying out of jail, and keeping your dividends up. Go on, Jason.”
“It makes a lot of sense,” said Jason, marshaling his arguments as he went on. “There’s no obvious reason that Eric Most couldn’t have swung it alone.”
“What about the $15,000 bribe?” Dick asked quickly. If there were flaws in this theory, now was the time to find them.
“Pendleton runs a tight shop. There’s no way Most could have siphoned off that much money.”
But Jason was ready. “What if he paid the girl out of his own pocket?” he said persuasively.
“Why not? He was going to be the big winner, after all. He made sure that everybody in Chicago thought he was the brain behind Numero Uno. And it was his notebooks and records used to support the application. If Most had pulled this off, he’d be an established name before he was 30. That’s a pretty good return for a $15,000 investment.”
“And Pendleton did say that Most occasionally met the Gunn girl. We don’t want to forget that, either.”
Even Milton got caught up. “Didn’t Most graduate from the University of Wisconsin? No doubt, he returned to visit while the Gunn woman worked in Madison.”
Jason nodded, then hammered the final nail. “And it makes more sense if she was murdered because she was mixed up in a one-man show. With her out of the way,” he said significantly, “with her out of the way, there are no witnesses.”
Vandam considered. Then slowly, he said, “I like it. I like it very much, Jason. But you see what it means, don’t you? We all have to stick together.”
Carefully, they avoided looking toward the weak link.
“Oh, all right,” said Milton ungraciously.
For the first time that day, Dick Vandam smiled. “You know,” he said, “I think it would be wise for me to give Earl Sanders a ring. Immediately.”
Chapter 25
Cut Back Hard
ONE reason that Earl Sanders constantly turned to John Thatcher in moments of turmoil was his lack of confidants within Standard Foods. A year ago Sanders had hogged all the credit for arranging the marriage between SF and Vandam’s. Now that the happy couple was having trouble, his colleagues were conspicuously aloof. And the Sloan, after all, was paid to simulate interest in the problems of its clients.
But payment or not, Sanders was unable to reach Thatcher with his latest communiqué. By the time that his secretary buzzed through for the fourth time to announce that Thatcher’s line was still tied up, Sanders had reached the point of accepting surrogates. Fortunately two of them were sitting on the other side of his desk.
Not that the meeting with Ned Ackerman and Paul Jackson was going as planned. After a futile morning with the experts, SF’s front office had accepted the demise of Numero Uno, and Sanders was hoping to score Brownie points with Wisconsin Seed by a prompt and generous waiver of all patent claims. But Ackerman, suffering from a richly deserved hangover, was unimpressed.
“Is that all you wanted? Hell, we could have handled this on the phone and saved the trip,” he said, reaching for his overcoat.
Sanders decided to put more meat on the bare bones of his announcement. “I speak for everyone here at Standard Foods when I say how much we regret this entire misunderstanding. Of course we acted in good faith throughout. We had no reason to doubt the claims of—”
“Sure, sure,” Ackerman cut him off. “How could you know what was going on in Vandamia?”
“That’s just it,” Sanders persisted. “When it all comes out in the wash, it may develop that Vandam’s was an innocent victim of this misrepresentation as well.”
Paul Jackson was openly skeptical. “The bad fairy at work again? Come off it, Sanders. You bought a lemon and you’re stuck with it.”
“That isn’t what Dr. Howard Pendleton thinks,” Sanders retorted.
Jackson and Ackerman had suspended their leave-taking activities and were waiting.
Sanders, on reflection, decided to adopt Dick Vandam’s interpretation of the evidence. “You know that assistant of his, Eric Most? Well, it seems that Most has been running up to Madison during the last five years and seeing Barbara Gunn regularly. What’s more, Most rejected a couple of Pendleton’s ideas during the research. Said he knew a better, faster way to get results. He had an inside track all along.”
Ackerman was blunt. “It sounds like a whitewash to me.”
“I assure you that Standard Foods intends to get to the bottom of this. Our interests are identical, Ackerman.”
“Like hell they are! SF wants to bury this mess so it doesn’t stink anymore. I want to find the creep who poisoned Barbara. But I’ll run your theory past Scott and see what he says.”
As the door closed behind his visitors, Sanders could not convince himself that he had made any progress in wooing Wisconsin Seed. In fact, a few more stumbling blocks had been strewn across the road. There was only one thing to do.
“Try Thatcher again, will you?” he barked into his intercom.
Ever since assimilating the glories of MF-23, John Thatcher had seen one indisputable way to establish the identity of Barbara Gunn’s murderer. He was not surprised that nobody else had been vouchsafed this vision. His technique was unlikely to occur to anyone except a banker.
His first step had been to institute a series of long-distance calls. This morning the return calls had been filtering through for over two hours. The last one had hit the jackpot.
The voice on the line had belonged to Santiago Cruzman, a valued Sloan correspondent, and the tempo had been stately enough to require self-restraint on Thatcher’s part. No matter how impatient you are, you do not rush your fences south of Key West.
“. . . exactly as you anticipated, John,” said Cruzman with creamy congratulation. “As you asked, I have had the records for the year in question examined, and there is no doubt at all.”
“Ah,” said Thatcher, expelling the breath he had been holding. The outline of two crimes had been horrifyingly clear to him since yesterday. Nonetheless, Cruzman’s confirmation ended the suspense. Documentary pro
of beats insights any day.
“. . . sending you the photostats,” Cruzman continued. “And of course I need not assure you that I, and Hector Montoya, who remembers the transaction most clearly, will be ready to testify, if that should be desirable.”
Thatcher roused himself to utter the requisite gratitude with all proper embellishments. When this time-consuming process was over, he instructed Miss Corsa to get police headquarters in Chicago.
There was a good deal to say, but Chicago marches to a different beat than Puerto Rico. Captain McNabb was ready to roll within ten minutes. He had been surprised by Thatcher’s methods, but not by his results.
“That explains why she went to the Blackstone,” he grunted before going on to discuss probable ETAs.
When he cradled the receiver, Thatcher produced a summary of the conversation for Charlie Trinkam, who had been sprawled in a chair for the last hour.
“He seemed like a pretty bright cookie,” said Charlie, more subdued than usual. “I wonder how long it will take.”
They could only stare at each other. Putting the police on the trail of a killer is a sobering experience.
It was during this emotional letdown that Earl Sanders finally broke through. From his point of view, the conversation was strangely unrewarding. Thatcher reacted with a series of noncommittal monosyllables, repressed all attempts to theorize, then rang off abruptly.
“After all, I’m going to have to discuss this in great detail with Sanders sometime in the next 24 hours,” he justified himself to Charlie. “Why waste time fabricating evasions now? Particularly when the first thing he’ll do is pass them on?”
“These people all talk too much,” Charlie said disapprovingly. “Vandam natters to Sanders, then Sanders lets it all out to Ackerman.”
Thatcher nodded. “And Ackerman is on his way back to the Hilton to tell Wenzel.”
Rhythm has its own seduction. Almost automatically Charlie continued the chant. “Where they’ll no doubt bump into Most. He’s at the Hilton, too.”
As the words sank in, Thatcher was suddenly disquieted. “Are you sure?”
