by Emma Lathen
“Oh, they’re all still on the list. It’s not just confined to the Youngs and the Hedstroms, either. Morgan Ogilvie and Pelham Browne could both do a lot of explaining. Ogilvie’s insistence on this merger verges on the pathological. He’s trying to ram it down Hedstrom’s throat.”
“Now, John, you’re prejudiced. Admittedly, the idea to have this conference down on the Chesapeake didn’t turn out well, but that doesn’t affect the business decision.”
“Quite apart from the murder, it’s incredible,” Thatcher insisted quietly. “I would give a great deal to know how much Ogilvie has riding on the merger, how much he expects to make from it. You know, Pelham Browne is a director of Southeastern Insurance. I got the impression that he was taken aback at Ogilvie’s activities. He certainly did his best to disassociate himself from them. First he was reluctant to join us, then he disappeared. Of course, if he hired Sweeney to sabotage the merger and then arranged to meet him at the club, he had every reason for acting the way he did.”
Charlie grinned. “From what you say, human instinct would explain the desire not to join your party. But look here, the papers said this house of Hedstrom’s was new, that the Hedstroms had never been there before. So how come an appointment with Sweeney down there? Did they themselves know they’d be there?”
“Yes. One of the features of this house was that they’d been planning—all four of them—to open it this weekend for over a month. And they’ve never deviated from that plan. The men, incidentally, haven’t been there before, except for one trip to buy the land over a year ago. It might make sense to meet Sweeney someplace where they wouldn’t be recognized. Certainly Maryland would be better for a meeting than New York or Trenton.”
Thatcher was still speculating on this point when Walter Bowman came breezing in. The bulky chief of research directed a number of alarming grimaces across the desk which Thatcher took to mean that Miss Corsa’s plot was unfolding. Charlie Trinkam looked concerned.
“Anything wrong, Walter?” he asked.
“No, no,” Bowman hastily denied. “Except that trying to stay on top of Chicken Tonight is taking years off my life.”
“How’s the stock doing?”
“It’s sort of seesawing. Opened up, went down, now it’s climbing again. The market can’t make up its mind.” Bowman adopted a leisurely, diffuse manner indicating he was prepared to spin this out indefinitely.
Obedient to his cue, Thatcher said, “What can’t they make up their mind about, Walter?”
“How this murder is going to affect consumer response to Chicken Tonight. If everybody thinks that Hedstrom strangled Sweeney on sight, then they may decide that here’s a company that really stands behind its product. On the other hand, if they figure that Young was causing the shenanigans to lever Hedstrom out, then they’re not going to want to buy chicken from a company that spreads poison every time it has a little front-office rivalry.”
Charlie Trinkam recognized derangement when he heard it. “Now, Walter, baby,” he began warily.
“The sooner this murder is cleared up, the better,” Thatcher declared stoutly. “I know Wall Street is always at least three removes from reality. But it seems to be receding further and further.”
“Of course,” said Bowman, settling down for an analysis of the finer details of his argument, “this just applies to Chicken Tonight’s normal residential sales.”
“What other kind did you have in mind?” Thatcher was not sure that he was prepared to countenance outright idiocy on the part of his research chief merely to keep Trinkam from his office.
“College sales.” Bowman’s reply came like a pistol shot. “Home deliveries at Chicken Tonight are still fifty percent down, but dormitory deliveries are back to eighty-five percent of normal.”
Charlie had the solution. “The kids don’t scare easy.”
“Don’t you believe it! I say there’s something else.” Bowman was mysterious.
“Oh?” Thatcher was curious.
“The kids found out about sniffing glue, didn’t they? They’re the ones who found out about taking a trip on LSD. Well, then,” Bowman said darkly, “there may be more to these zinc salts than meets the eye.”
Inevitably Charlie was attracted by this speculation. “It may be simpler than that,” he observed. “After all, if you spend your time smoking pot and downing amphetamine pills, you probably don’t notice a little thing like zinc poisoning. Hedstrom’s probably selling to every acidhead in town.”
“If there are enough of them,” said Walter Bowman, staunchly pious, “we may save our twelve million yet.”
Thatcher had listened to this exchange absently. His thoughts were still with his earlier statement.
“Clearing up this murder and the Sweeney mess, Walter, would enable Chicken Tonight to appeal to a larger clientele.”
Charlie Trinkam had heard that tone before. He leaned forward. “Just remember one thing, John. This bozo has already killed once to keep his identity hidden. He may not be through with Chicken Tonight.”
CHAPTER 16
SQUEEZE THE LEMON
BACK IN New Jersey, Captain Johnson of the State Police was still concerned with the damage which had already been done to Chicken Tonight. The news of Clyde Sweeney’s murder and urgent requests for cooperation from the Maryland police did not cause him to renew his efforts along these lines. They had never flagged. He had been quietly working, extending the inquiry to include Sweeney’s bowling team and bookie, his fellow truck drivers and roomers. At the same time, earlier witnesses had been reinterrogated.
Mrs. Menotti, as the most likely source of hard information, got special treatment. Captain Johnson was inclined to view the landlady as a mass of sludge which might, with luck, contain a nugget of gold. He acted accordingly. The men he sent to interview her were so many strainers. Each time she was put through a finer mesh.
It was not until the day after Sweeney’s murder that this delicate dredging operation, to a limited extent, paid off.
“The old lady finally came up with something,” Sergeant Bousquet announced.
Johnson sat up. “Something about the actual doping of the Mexicali?” he asked hopefully.
It was already established that Clyde Sweeney had used Mrs. Menotti’s cellar one day. There, undoubtedly, he had opened his pilfered boxes, introduced the zinc salts and resealed the cartons. Captain Johnson was convinced that their best hope of progress lay in further information about those moments. The packets of zinc salts had probably come from Sweeney’s employer. They might yield a clue to his identity. They might even carry fingerprints.
Bousquet shook his head. “No, not about that. You know how it goes. Mrs. Menotti knew damn well that stuff in her basement was stolen. She thought Sweeney wanted a safe place to store it. She figured he was paying her five or ten bucks to turn a blind eye, and that’s exactly what she did. Her story is that she was out of the house while he was using the cellar and, when she came back, the cellar had been cleaned up. She’s got no idea what he did there or what happened to any trash, like empty packets. The hell of it is, it’s probably just like she says.”
Johnson sank back. “Then what did you get out of her?” he growled.
“I was taking her through that phone call again, the one Sweeney got to meet someone who paid him a thousand dollars.”
“The guy in an orange-and-brown sport shirt and tan slacks,” murmured Johnson, who knew the description by heart. “If she’s been sitting on the fact that he also mentioned that he was six feet one and a quarter, weighed two hundred and seven pounds, had red hair, green eyes and a wart on his nose, I’m going to go out there and have a little talk with Mrs. Menotti.”
“It’s not anything like that good,” Bousquet said sadly. He was tired of Mrs. Menotti. “But she did manage to remember that Sweeney repeated the place of the meeting. The lobby of the Hotel Granada, over in Bellsboro.”
Johnson was skeptical. “And she’s just happened to remember no
w?”
“Well, she says she would have forgotten all about it. The Granada didn’t mean anything to her. But her nephew got a job in the kitchen there this weekend, and that brought the whole thing back.”
Both men silently pondered this explanation. This, they finally agreed, was the way that the memory of a Mrs. Menotti worked.
“‘It’s nice to know,” Johnson summarized. “But if the guy was a stranger around here, it’s not going to do us much good until we’ve got him in the lineup.”
Bousquet sighed and rose to his feet. “And that’s not going to happen until somebody finds out where Sweeney beat it to when he blew out of Willoughby.”
The New York City police were doing just that.
From the point of view of the authorities, a dead Clyde Sweeney had some advantages over a live Clyde Sweeney. Backtracking over the last few days of his life was easier than searching for a fugitive.
“Surprising how much difference that haircut made, isn’t it?” commented an officer in the precinct house.
Clyde Sweeney had not attempted much in the way of disguise. He had taken his long dark hair and his sideburns to a barber and they had been ruthlessly shorn to a minimal crew cut. The results were out of proportion to the effort. The shape of Sweeney’s skull seemed different. The forehead had been heightened and the jaws broadened. His ears stuck out at a noticeable angle.
The mortuary photographer in Maryland had worked hard to produce a publishable picture, emphasizing these changes and glossing over the effects of strangulation. The picture had appeared in the morning papers. The first fruits had been a visit from a barber on West Forty-second Street and a telephone call from a hotel manager around the corner.
“Martino’s identification was positive,” the officer continued. “Says he’s not likely to forget that haircut in a hurry. But the important thing is that he remembers the date.”
“And it fits in,” the detective across the desk said. He was brooding over a list of dates with scribbled notes. “That morning the story about the poisoning hit the papers. They didn’t know it was deliberate poisoning. They didn’t even know it was Chicken Tonight then.”
“But they knew it was chicken. Seventy-six people in the hospital after eating chicken, that was the story. And they made a big splash with it, warning everybody about the symptoms and telling them to get pumped out. It’s easy enough to see what happened. Sweeney knew he’d put something into that mix, but he thought it just had nuisance value. Then he wakes up, sees the headlines, and knows he’s in big trouble. He realizes there isn’t going to be any problem fingering him. So he gets off his ass and hightails it to a barber.”
“And then?”
But the officer had come to the end of his reconstruction. “‘Maybe they can tell you that at the hotel. You’d better get on down there, Dougherty.”
The West End Arms was not as magnificent as its name. This came as no surprise to Dougherty, who had visited it professionally before. It was one of the innumerable small, shabby hotels clustered around Times Square. Here, on the night of his departure from Willoughby, Clyde Sweeney had registered under the name Curt Slattery.
“Sure, I remember him. I signed him in,” said the manager, a small, moist man called Sert. “He was just like all the rest. Got his bags upstairs and then went out to have himself a time.” He leered hopefully across the counter. “Didn’t get back till three or four in the morning.”
Dougherty remained expressionless. “And the next day?”
“Same thing. Slept late, sat around, then went out for the night.” Sert paused dramatically. “Next day, he started to act different. Had his hair cut, stopped going out at night, hung around the bar and grill next door.”
“And didn’t you make anything out of that?” Dougherty asked.
“Jesus Christ! It happens all the time!” Sert was indignant. “You know how it is. They come to the big city with a roll. They give themselves a big time until the roll starts to run out. Then it’s all different. They’re up early. They buy themselves a paper first thing to read the help wanted. They get their meals on the cheap, they spin out their beers in the bar. Then they leave.”
Sert rattled off glibly a routine he had seen a hundred times.
To Dougherty’s final question he also had a pat reply. “No, that picture they ran last week didn’t mean a thing to me. I didn’t see much of him those first two days. Afterwards, he was around all the time. I get my beer next door, too. That’s the way I remembered him, with the crew cut.”
Sert’s analysis of Sweeney’s behavior was rejected, however, by the newsie in the lobby.
“Nope,” he said unshakably, “he wasn’t after the help wanteds. I can spot them a mile away. You can tell a lot by the way a guy opens his paper. This one, he was the kind who takes a look at the headlines, then folds to the sports page.”
The denizens of Riley’s Bar and Grill were even more helpful. They had seen a lot of Curt Slattery and, for once, were not averse to talking. It was, Dougherty knew, the thrill of being associated with a sensation. These men spent their lives on the periphery of experience. They were not going to waste the chance of being, for once, at the center of things.
If Dougherty had seen the bar and grill down the street from Mrs. Menotti’s in Willoughby, New Jersey, he would have recognized that he was now in its spiritual twin. In his hour of need, Clyde Sweeney had returned to the surroundings which spelled security. Here he could forget anxiety, talking about the Celtics, discussing the events of the day, drinking beer, eating corned beef and cabbage.
“He was in here most of the day,” the bartender told him. “Sat around with the others. Didn’t seem to have anything else to do. Quiet, worried sort.”
“Curt was okay,” protested a regular. “Didn’t make any trouble. We used to have our openers together.”
“What did he talk about?” Dougherty asked.
“The usual stuff. He’d read his paper then. He got all shook up about that chicken poisoning. Don’t seem possible he was the one who did it.” For a moment the regular was awed by the duplicity of human nature. “Then he kept up with the sports page. Liked to read Red Smith. That’s how we pass the time of day.”
Dougherty knew all about those endless talks. He shifted his bulk restlessly and ordered another round.
“I suppose,” he said resignedly, “Sweeney never said anything about his plans.”
“‘Didn’t seem to have any.” There was surprise that anybody should. “At least, not until that last morning.”
Dougherty came to attention. “What happened then? You were with him?”
“Sure. It was like I was telling you. We were having a quick one. He was going over all the stuff about that Chicken Tonight mess. I was reading about the Green Bay Packers myself. Sounded as if they were going to have their work cut out for them on Sunday. Let’s see, that must have been Thursday. So I ask Curt if he wants to put money on the game. He didn’t seem to hear what I was talking about. I had to ask him twice. Then he started to fold up his paper and said he wasn’t going to be around on Sunday. In fact, he had to leave town right away. Next thing I knew, he was walking out.” The regular shrugged. “That was the last I saw of him.”
Dougherty was thoughtful. He already knew that Clyde Sweeney had gone straight back to the West End Arms and packed his bags. Then he checked out and late that Thursday morning disappeared into the blue.
But not for long. While many people have dropped totally from sight in this vast continent, successful vanishing acts are usually open-ended. One moment, a housewife is in her kitchen in Lexington, Massachusetts, or a counterfeiter is in his basement in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—then, nothing!
But Clyde Sweeney had been in New York on Thursday morning. On Saturday night his body was on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. While no policeman thinks that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, criminologically speaking, the area between New York and Maryland does not constitute the
blue, either.
“’Course, with planes, he could have been anywhere,” somebody observed to Captain Stotz over a ream of reports from hotels, motels, boardinghouses, railroad stations, bus stops and similar facilities in four states. “No reason he had to hang around here.”
“It’s possible,” Stotz conceded. He was as amiable to his subordinates on the Maryland State Police as he was to witnesses—and a good deal more forthcoming. “But I don’t think so, Will. Planes—I don’t figure they’re Sweeney’s style.”
Will was a good deal younger than Captain Stotz. “These days planes are everybody’s style, Captain. And Sweeney sounds just like the kind of guy who’d want to fly to Las Vegas first chance he got.” He brandished a teletype from New Jersey and recited, “Plays the ponies . . . always in to the bookies . . . likes cheap night spots. I’ll bet . . .”
But police work, like gambling, is a matter of probabilities. Captain Stotz was proved right before Will really got going on how Clyde Sweeney could have been in Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe or Reno en route to the Calvert Hunt Club.
First, the owner of the Chesapeake Bay Motel recognized a circular thrust at him by a weary detective. Second, Ed Twombley, of Paton, Maryland, reported a car abandoned in a lane on his farm.
“And two and two make four,” Stotz observed. Clyde Sweeney had rented a car in New York, driven south to Maryland, and registered on the Eastern Shore on Thursday night as Curt Slattery. Then—sometime—he had driven fourteen miles to Paton, left his car in a dirt track, and walked a half mile to the Calvert Hunt Club.
High-speed machinery and routine leg work pieced that much together from a registration number and an identification. Captain Stotz hoped that Mr. Larue Voorhis, of the Chesapeake Bay Motel, could flesh out the picture.
At first glance, this did not seem likely.
Mr. Voorhis, like Will, was younger than Stotz. But he had already matured a commercial philosophy. His forty-eight units (plus coffee shop) were not a business; they were a credo.
“. . . the human touch,” he said earnestly. “We try to give everybody that little special touch, Captain—like coffee and doughnuts free in their rooms for breakfast. The ice is free, of course. But we provide soda water too! You take your big impersonal chain of motels . . .”
