Green Grow the Dollars

by Emma Lathen

“Mary Larrabee told me. The Pendletons are on the same floor she is.” Even as he spoke, Charlie was straightening. “You know,” he continued slowly, “I don’t think it’s such an awfully good idea for this bunch to meet up right now.”

  “You’re right!” said Thatcher, who was already on his feet.

  Events might have turned out differently if Ned Ackerman had not had a headache. But there was a crowd in front of the SF building waiting for taxis, New York was enjoying a respite from dirty weather with a clear, dry, bracing day, and Ackerman decided to blow away the cobwebs by walking back to the Hilton. He therefore arrived at his destination an hour later than he might have.

  As soon as he rolled into the crowded Hilton lobby, he was set back on his heels. There, emerging from the Kismet Lounge, was Scott Wenzel.

  And, at his heels, was Eric Most.

  Ackerman blinked at this unlikely duo. The seed that Earl Sanders had planted began to germinate. With a muttered oath, he stumped across the lobby to Wenzel’s side.

  “What’s Most doing here?” he demanded.

  “Don’t ask me,” Wenzel said irritably. “Ask him. He seems to think I’m his father confessor or something.”

  If Ackerman had not been blinkered by suspicion, he would have realized that Wenzel was more amused than exasperated. The triumph of MF-23 had softened some of his cutting edge.

  “What’s he confessing to?” Ackerman demanded.

  “You’ve just got to understand how I feel,” Eric Most intervened earnestly. “God, when I see what happened I don’t know how I can face you or anybody else.”

  “Great,” said Wenzel without interest. “Why don’t you just roll away then?”

  But Most wanted more than confession; he wanted absolution.

  “I didn’t realize what I was doing or how it would all end up,” he said in a cracked voice. “You can believe that, can’t you? But Numero Uno was so big I just lost my head. I’ve only come to my senses now.”

  To Ned Ackerman, every word was chilling corroboration of Dick Vandam’s theory. To Scott Wenzel it was all a distracting buzz from a contemptible worm.

  “You never had any sense. You just had an inflated— Ned! For Lord’s sake, what are you doing?”

  With an inarticulate noise in the back of his throat, Ackerman had reached past Wenzel to clutch Most’s shirt.

  “I’m going to shake the truth out of him,” he threatened.

  As his other hand had doubled into a clublike fist, Wenzel abandoned attempts to reason with his partner. Instead he shoved himself between the antagonists. Unfortunately Most accepted this reprieve as another opportunity. When Ackerman thrust him loose so roughly that he staggered, he did not retreat to safety.

  “Look, I know you two have got a right to be mad at what I’ve done,” he said with a pathetic stab at dignity. “I’m apologizing to both of you. What more can I do?”

  “I’ll tell you, you little turd!” Ackerman thundered.

  By now Scott Wenzel was expecting the hotel security forces to start converging on their corner.

  “Could you hold it down, Ned—” he began before being cut off.

  “Hold it down?” Ackerman gulped. “He’s doing a lot of bleating about what he did to us. What about what he did to Barbie?”

  Most went white. “Barbara? What are you talking about?”

  “Pendleton’s blown the whistle on you, Most. You’re lucky not to be in jail right now. But that’s where you’re going to end up, I swear it,” Ackerman vowed.

  Most tried and failed to say something, his mouth working soundlessly.

  “Are you going to explain any of this or do you just want to stand there and yell?” Wenzel challenged his partner.

  With deadly economy Ackerman outlined Howard Pendleton’s theory.

  “That’s crazy,” Wenzel said instantly. “Most going directly to Barbara? Never in a million years.”

  “Stop being so hipped on the Vandams that you can’t see straight.”

  “I’m not hipped on the Vandams!”

  In spite of his surface eccentricities Wenzel was incapable of losing his temper as thoroughly as Ned Ackerman. Instinctively Ackerman recognized that, with Scott, the i’s would have to be dotted and the t’s crossed.

  “All right, all right,” he said more calmly. “I admit that Dick Vandam wants his people off the hook so he’s trying to make it sound as if the whole rotten deal never passed through Vandamia. But you only have to listen to this little rat to see that he was involved. And how many people were likely to be in on it? You said yourself it was easier to fake up something in a small lab than in a big one.”

  “If you were listening to me then, why the hell won’t you slow down and listen to me now?”

  “Because I don’t want Barbie’s killer to get off scot- free!”

  For a moment it looked as if Scott Wenzel would resort to some shaking of his own. “Her killer isn’t going anywhere,” he promised.

  Their altercation absorbed them so totally that neither noticed when Eric Most, still ashen, took one last look, then slipped away.

  Whatever John Thatcher expected to encounter at the Hilton did not include a pitched battle between the two partners of Wisconsin Seed.

  Charlie Trinkam had a knack of taking things as they came. “Looks like they can’t stand success,” he said, observing the hostilities judiciously. “But at least this way of passing the time keeps them from fingering anybody.”

  Thatcher was only momentarily taken aback. There were endless reasons for Ackerman and Wenzel to quarrel, but they were unimportant. He and Charlie were here for only one reason, to be absolutely sure that Howard Pendleton was safe in his room. Or, better yet, safe somewhere else.

  Without hesitation he approached the combatants. “Ackerman! Wenzel!” he snapped to claim their attention.

  Wenzel was glad to see him. “You’re just in time! Will you try talking sense to Ned? I think he’s losing his marbles. I had to stop him from strangling Eric Most with his bare hands.”

  “Eric Most? You’ve already seen him!”

  “Uh-oh!” said Charlie. “I knew this wasn’t going to be as easy as it looked.”

  Ackerman was still seeking supporters. “Wait until you hear what Sanders has come up with,” he began urgently.

  “I already know about that,” Thatcher cut him off, “but where’s Most?”

  Wenzel was more interested in his own complaint. “And Ned won’t stand still long enough for me to set him straight.”

  Ackerman, however, had responded to Thatcher’s question with a discovery. “My God, Most’s gone. He’s making a run for it.”

  “I can think of something else he may be doing,” Thatcher said grimly. Memories of past efforts to get information from the Hilton desk rose to haunt him. “Let’s pray Pendleton isn’t in.

  Because they’ll never give us his number in time.”

  “Four-oh-six,” said Wenzel immediately. “You don’t think—”

  Thatcher did not pause for thought. Wheeling, he headed for the elevators with Wenzel right at his side.

  The others were just in time to tumble in after them.

  “But Pendleton’s already told everybody his story,” Ackerman protested. “What would be the point?”

  “No point at all,” Thatcher said sadly. “We don’t have to depend on stories anymore. There’s written proof on its way from Puerto Rico. But he doesn’t know that.”

  The fourth-floor corridor was long and claustrophobic. The door to 406 was at the far end.

  “Lord,” said Charlie, breaking into a dogtrot to keep up. “You don’t think we’re too late, do you?”

  But as they pelted ahead Thatcher could hear voices, angry voices, behind that door.

  Where there were voices, there was life.

  Then two things happened almost simultaneously. Scott Wenzel brought his fist crashing down on the door and there was the shocking explosion of a gun firing.

  With a lazy prote
st from its hinges, the door swung open and a man, clutching his shoulder, staggered into the corridor and collapsed into Scott Wenzel’s arms.

  The uproar was immediate. Hotel guests seemed to pour out of every room on the floor, Charlie rushed to help Wenzel and Thatcher stepped over the threshold.

  Time is relative. There was only one occupant of the room and he still held his gun pointing at the door, his face convulsed with despair. To John Thatcher it seemed as if he had hours to repent his folly before the barrel turned away. To those in the corridor it seemed only a moment before the second shot resounded.

  “Mr. Thatcher!” a familiar voice cried in alarm.

  “I’m all right, Mrs. Larrabee,” said Thatcher, shaken, “but Dr. Howard Pendleton has just blown his brains out.”

  Chapter 26

  Easy to Pick

  HOWARD Pendleton’s suicide was a confession, not an explanation. Eric Most, recovering at Mt. Sinai Hospital, was the major beneficiary but the other actors in the Numero Uno drama also profited. They could now stop circling each other warily, suspicious of every move. The great clarification had even made it possible for Scott Wenzel to help Dick Vandam arrange for the withdrawal of the Vandam patent application.

  Or so Ned Ackerman reported.

  “Scott was pretty damn cordial. He agreed it was only natural for Vandam’s to have been fooled by Pendleton. For him, that’s the equivalent of kissing and making up.”

  Earl Sanders surveyed the dinner table with disappointment. “I thought Wenzel was joining us.”

  For a full week Sanders had been nagging Thatcher to provide a casual background against which Standard Foods could renew its overtures to Wisconsin Seed. Thatcher had been at a loss for the proper atmospherics until another Sanders ambition surfaced. The first public reaction to Mary Larrabee’s screen debut had made her a hot property. Standard Foods yearned to cast her as queen of their TV kitchens. The embryo Larrabee account at the Sloan was looking better and better. Tonight Charlie Trinkam was sitting on one side of the table, hosting the Larrabees. On the other side, Thatcher balanced him with Sanders and Ned Ackerman.

  “Scott’s coming. He wouldn’t miss this for the world,” Ackerman promised. “But he’s visiting with Mrs. Pendleton right now so he may be a little late.”

  It was not Earl Sanders’ desire to criticize Scott Wenzel but compassion for the bereaved made him protest. “My God, doesn’t the lady have enough trouble on her hands?”

  Ackerman grinned. “That’s what I thought myself. But Scott’s been over there every day this week and she hasn’t thrown him out yet. So he must be doing something right.”

  “Mrs. Pendleton is the wife of the man who killed that girl in Chicago,” Mary Larrabee explained to her husband.

  In her own eyes Mrs. Larrabee had redeemed her failure of nerve in Chicago. Faced with Eric Most bleeding all over the Hilton, she had brushed everybody aside and gone to work. Without a woman like her, the paramedics said, Most would have died.

  “I’d like to find out what it’s all about,” said Pete, as amiable as ever in spite of the bandages circling his brow. He had already explained these decorations as mementos of the ice rink at Rockefeller Center. “Back in Chicago everybody was saying that either Vandam’s had stolen something from you or you’d stolen something from them,” he added to Ned Ackerman.

  “God knows that’s the way it looked to me,” Sanders supported him.

  Charlie saw why everybody had made this mistake. “Bound to look that way,” he commented. “The whole thing started with a patent suit. You had two companies, each maintaining that the tomato belonged to it. It looked as though one of them had to be lying. So the basic problem seemed clear, and we all got started on the wrong foot.”

  “You may have put your finger on a weakness in the whole judicial approach,” said Thatcher, attracted by this tempting byway. “The adversarial process necessarily begins by boiling everything down to a two-sided contest. If you reduce your quarrel to the wrong two principals, you can miss the boat entirely.”

  “That’s very interesting,” said Mary Larrabee kindly, “but it doesn’t explain anything.”

  Thatcher hastened to make amends. “Let me start at the beginning. Six years ago the big canners and soup companies lost their last-ditch battle, and it became legally possible to patent a tomato.”

  Sanders was pained by this formulation. “You make it sound as if we were trying to rob somebody, when we were trying to ensure the rewards of competition to the American consumer,” he said piously.

  Charlie hooted, Ackerman guffawed, and the Larrabees looked incredulous. But Thatcher’s reaction was worst of all.

  “What you managed to do,” he said, “was convince Scott Wenzel there was gold in them than hills. He realized the tomato was so central to the giant food processors that the man who developed a real breakthrough could name his own price.”

  Ned Ackerman had undergone a transformation since the successful unveiling of the MF-23. He had always affected a casual style but now he was really unbuttoned, leaning back and watching life parade by with infinite indulgence. His genteel surroundings were certainly not inhibiting him. Mary Larrabee might be sipping a distinguished white wine, lovingly chosen by Charlie, Earl Sanders might already be on his second round of some exotic aperitif, the other men might be upholding solid conservatism with straight Scotch, but Ned had insisted on plain old Pabst.

  “You still haven’t got Scott figured out,” he corrected after taking a swig. “When I got hold of him, he was still wet behind the ears commercially. All he wanted was to do his own kind of work. He was babbling about being able to write his own ticket with one of the big labs if he got his name on that patent. It was news to him that he could have his own big laboratory.”

  Ackerman smiled benignly at the gathering. “In fact, you could say I’m the one who’s money-minded.”

  Thatcher had no doubt that Earl Sanders was going to discover that for himself when the negotiations between Standard Foods and Wisconsin Seed began in earnest.

  “Good for you!” said Charlie enthusiastically.

  Before Mary Larrabee could call them to order once again, Thatcher hurried on. “But Wenzel had already mentioned the idea when he was still working at IPR. Pendleton of course saw the economic possibilities but he dismissed the notion as more empty talk from his bumptious assistant. Imagine his jealousy when, later, Barbara Gunn innocently told him that Scott was making great advances on the project. He immediately realized that, if anybody was going to patent that tomato, it had to be him.”

  This evoked a chorus of protests.

  “Now wait a minute,” growled Ackerman. “I know our society is supposed to be filled with corruption, my son keeps telling me about the rotten world I’ve brought him into, but there are still lots of honest people around. I don’t say they might not be tempted by something smack in their path, but you’re saying Pendleton took off from a standing start. Why should a successful accomplished scientist turn crooked overnight?”

  “That’s what they want to know over at Vandam’s,” said Earl Sanders, underlining the fact that Standard Foods had merely inherited Howard Pendleton. “He’d never stolen anything before.”

  “Surely it’s staring you in the face. Scott Wenzel kept telling us that Pendleton was a . . .” Thatcher paused to remember some of the choicer epithets that had peppered Wenzel’s descriptions. “A has-been, a bag of wind, a professional joke, were some of the expressions I recall.”

  Ackerman snorted. “You know the kind of swollen head that Scotty’s got. You have to take his descriptions with a grain of salt. For God’s sake, if he’d been a young physicist 20 years ago, he probably would have described Einstein as a has-been.”

  But Charlie, more detached, was slowly shaking his head. “I don’t know if I go along with that. Sure, that kid of yours has got a damned good opinion of himself. But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong calling the shots about other people. Look at IPR. He
said Eric Most was a dumbbell, and he certainly seems to have been right. And he’s always been respectful about Pendleton’s wife.”

  “Exactly,” said Thatcher. “Just because Wenzel is overflowing with confidence doesn’t mean his professional judgment is invalid. And quite apart from that consideration, we had a good deal of confirmation. After all, Sanders, you’ve told me that Jason Ingersoll was constantly saying that under Milton’s guidance R&D at Vandam’s hadn’t come up with anything big in years.”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  Thatcher swept over him. “And Eric Most dinned into the ears of anybody who would listen that Numero Uno took priority at IPR because it was the only major breakthrough in ages.”

  “And he was wrong!” Sanders retorted triumphantly. “Fran Pendleton had produced a winner with her delphinium. It’s true that it didn’t go to Vandam’s, but it was there all the same.”

  “You’re missing my point. I agree that everybody was grinding his own ax. Jason was interested in undermining Milton. Eric Most was so self-absorbed that he forgot there was any other work going on at IPR. That’s why we missed the remarkable unanimity coming at us from all directions. Scott Wenzel, Jason Ingersoll, Eric Most, were all saying the same thing—that Howard Pendleton hadn’t produced any important research for a long, long time.”

  He had convinced his audience, but they all reacted differently.

  “You know, Scott’s got more sense than I give him credit for,” Ackerman murmured approvingly.

  “What the hell were they doing at Vandam’s, not to notice?” Sanders demanded.

  “It must be a wonderful business to be in,” marveled Pete Larrabee. “Nobody cares whether you’re winning or losing. It’s a lot different in hardware.”

  Remorselessly Thatcher returned them to the straight and narrow. “So this was not an overnight collapse by Howard Pendleton. IPR looked all right to outsiders because the other sections were doing well. But he knew he hadn’t had a major idea in ten years. And he was at a critical stage. Only vigorous, productive scientists go on working into old age. Has-beens are supposed to retire at 65.”