Cash McCall

by Cameron Hawley

  “Grant Austen?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m sure of the name because I asked him to repeat it. Do you know who he is?”

  The pipe came out of Atherson’s mouth. There was something about the timbre of Pierce’s voice that sent a prickle of apprehension up his spine. “What did Mr. Austen want?”

  “Well, he insisted on talking to Mrs. Kennard—said something about his having talked to her before from Moon Beach.”

  “Yes, he’s down there at a convention,” the banker acknowledged.

  “But this call was from Norfolk, sir.”

  “Norfolk?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Go on.”

  “As I say, I’d seen Mrs. Kennard go out to the kitchen, so I had the operator switch the call there. I didn’t know what it was about until—well, you see, I was worried about what might be happening between her and Max—you know what it would mean to the Ivanhoe if we lost Max—so I went down to the kitchen. She was gone by the time I got there but—I don’t know, sir, maybe there isn’t any point in my telling you all this, but I know that Mr. McCall is a friend of yours, so—”

  “Yes, yes, go on,” Atherson said impatiently, unaware until he saw the spill of ashes that his pipe had tipped in his hand.

  “I guess Max wouldn’t have told me this except that he’s quite a friend of Mr. McCall’s—and then, of course, hating Mrs. Kennard the way he does—but anyway, Max heard her telling this Mr. Austen how Mr. McCall had cheated him out of a million dollars, how he was the head of a gang that had gotten Mr. Austen’s company away from him.”

  The banker’s hand gripped down on his pipe, quieting its rattling tremor. Cautiously he asked, “Were there any other names mentioned?”

  “No—well, you see, I got all this secondhand from Max—maybe there were some other people mentioned but Max didn’t say anything about it. All I know is that this Mr. Austen is getting in on a plane at noon and she’s arranged for him to see some lawyer.”

  “Lawyer!”

  “That’s the way Max got it, sir.”

  Will Atherson recovered enough to light his pipe. “I don’t suppose you’d know who the lawyer is?”

  Pierce hesitated. “Not for sure, sir—but there is one lawyer that I know she knows—and when I mentioned his name to Max he thought it sounded right.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “His name is Torrant, sir—Judge Torrant. But, as I say, I couldn’t swear to that.”

  Blue smoke curled from Will Atherson’s lips as he waited through the moment that allowed him to say with masking casualness, “That isn’t very important anyway, I don’t suppose.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have wasted your time with all of this,” Everett Pierce apologized. “The only thing is—well, maybe Mr. McCall isn’t the sort of guest we ought to have at the Ivanhoe but as long as he is a guest—well, it just seemed to me that it wasn’t right for Mrs. Kennard to involve the hotel in something like that. That’s always been my attitude—the Ivanhoe has to come first.”

  “You did the right thing, Everett,” Atherson said quickly, putting a quick end to Pierce’s apologetic jitters. “Glad you came over. Suppose you do this—let this thing sit for the time being. Don’t say anything to anyone about it.”

  “Not even to Mrs. Kennard?”

  “No, definitely not. Give me a chance to think about this over the weekend. I’ll give you a ring sometime Monday.”

  Pierce stood. “That’s fine, sir. Well—”

  “Goodbye, Everett, and thanks again. As usual, your judgment was excellent.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Pierce said with a lighthearted laugh that Will Atherson wished he could share.

  As soon as Everett Pierce was out of the office, Atherson called his secretary and told her to get Cash McCall on the telephone. After a seemingly endless wait, she reported back that there was no answer. He told her to keep trying and then, as a second thought, told her to get Winston Conway at Jamison, Conway & Slythe. The whole thing sounded so ridiculously implausible that it hardly merited repetition, yet it was probably best to get word to Conway. Cash McCall had instructed him, a long time ago, that if he ever picked up even the faintest rumor of any threatened legal action, Conway was to be advised at once.

  2

  Among its many remarkable abilities, the human brain has a marked capacity for self-protection. When the imprint of stimuli continues at a level where the resultant sensation becomes overpowering, there is a normal dulling of perception. That had happened to Miriam Austen. The fear that had struck when Grant had come back to their suite at midnight had in no way lessened, but there had been a slackening of the tension of terror. She still had no idea what would happen after they arrived at Philadelphia, but her brain refused to spin out new apprehensions—or perhaps it was only because the possibilities had been exhausted. During the long hours of the night, her mind had explored every conceivable horror to the limit of her imagination.

  Now, as the plane climbed from its take-off, she saw the city of Washington falling away and, almost without emotion, accepted the inevitable. The hope that Grant would turn back was gone. There was no point in further argument. Nothing that she had been able to say had made the slightest impression upon him, even her last-ditch threat that Lory would hate him for the rest of her life if he tried to interfere. His response had been to stare at her with those glassy eyes and say again, “This doesn’t have anything to do with Lory.”

  She did not believe him. She had seen those eyes before. They were her father’s eyes on that night when her mother had told her of the mad behavior that led him to defraud the Suffolk National Bank. “It’s in the family,” her mother had said. “He’s going the same way his father did.” And that had reminded Miriam where she had seen those eyes even before that—her grandfather on that night of her early childhood when two strange men had come and taken him to what, afterwards, was always referred to as “The Home.” Later, at the time of her grandfather’s death, she had discovered that the place where he had spent his last years was a private sanitarium for the mentally ill.

  Miriam Austen had never forgotten her mother’s distraught voice saying, “It’s in the family,” and the fear that she herself might become the victim of hereditary insanity had always been a challenge to reason in times of emotional stress. Now there was a transfer of that fear. She suspected—almost to the point of conviction—that what she had seen in Grant’s face was what she so long had feared that she might find in her own mirror.

  At midnight last night when Grant had flung open the door of the suite, she had thought he was drunk. Improbable as that explanation had seemed—so far as she knew, he had never been drunk in his life—she had momentarily accepted it, reasoning that since this was her first convention, it might have happened before without her having known about it. And she remembered what he had told her about the unpredictable behavior at the Associates Reception of even some of the most respected members of A.A.P.M.

  But she had been wrong about his being drunk—and wrong, too, in her earlier belief that he would be relieved to know that Cash and Lory had arrived safely in Philadelphia. Her guess had been right—Grant had told her that, but almost nothing else, lapsing then into a stony silence, turning out the light and telling her to go to sleep.

  All through the night she had listened to his restless tossing, trying to talk to him when she was certain that he was awake, receiving no reply except an unexplained cursing of Cash McCall, in itself a denial of his claim that his madman’s behavior had nothing to do with Lory.

  Sometime in the night she had heard him talking on the telephone about plane schedules to Philadelphia and, even before dawn, he was up and starting to pack. The sun was only a fiery break on the sea horizon when they got into the car that he had ordered. She had not known until they arrived that they were driving to Norfolk, and only deduction had explained that catching the Washington plane was the fastest way to get to Philadelphia.

  At Nor
folk he had spent almost the entire waiting time in a telephone booth. When he came out, she had tried to talk to him but his ears had been as unhearing as his eyes were unseeing. At Washington, he had again disappeared into a telephone booth. That was when desperation had driven her to threaten Lory’s hatred if he tried to interfere between her and Cash. The only result had been his maniacal repetition of the claim that what he was going to do did not concern Lory. It was then that she had given up, no longer looking at his madman’s eyes, accepting the surcease of attention that her mind demanded.

  But the self-protective dulling of perception is not as simply explainable as it seems. Ears that have been closed to the continued pounding of some constantly repeated noise are still oddly capable of being alerted by the interjection of a strange sound, the ticking of a watch suddenly louder than the smashing crash of some great machine. It was that phenomena that caused Miriam Austen to hear her husband’s almost inaudible sigh.

  “All right, I’ll tell you,” he said, the words spilling out as if his brain lacked the normality of self-protection and could only save itself by disclosure. “Those crooks cheated me out of my company! McCall is nothing but a gangster and they’re all in his gang—Conway—Gil Clark and Harrison Glenn—even Will Atherson.”

  “Oh, Grant, that can’t be true. Mr. Atherson is one of your oldest friends.”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” he said, madly bitter. “But I know better now. I can see the whole thing. I tried to get him to let me sell to Andscott. No, I couldn’t do that! He wouldn’t let me. I had to sell to this McCall. Now do you know what they’ve done, that rotten gang of thieves? They’ve turned right around and sold to Andscott! Three million dollars. They’ve cheated me. Stolen a million dollars from me. That’s why I’m going to Philadelphia. I’ve got to see a lawyer. They can’t do this. They can’t make a fool out of me!”

  3

  As Miss Fitch closed her notebook, Clay Torrant said, “When this man Austen comes, send him right in.”

  His secretary only nodded, still as grim-visaged as she had been all during his dictation of a memorandum to record the essence of his conversation with Mrs. Kennard. As usual, Miss Fitch made no effort to hide her dislike of Maude Kennard and, as if she was not certain that her viewpoint was strongly enough registered, she gave the door a vicious little slam as she went out.

  Clay Torrant knew that he had every reason to be annoyed with Miss Fitch’s petulance—a man couldn’t let his secretary dictate his life—but he found it difficult to disagree with an attitude that so closely paralleled what he imagined his own to be. When Maude Kennard had called him at home and announced that she was coming to see him the minute he arrived at the office, he tried to sidestep but, as had happened so many times before, he found himself powerless to resist. She had told him that she was bringing him the most important case he had ever handled. And she was right, it would be … if this man Austen’s story checked out … and if he decided to represent him.

  Now that Maude was gone and his notes dictated, he sat doodling multi-faceted diamonds on his note pad, imagining that what was going on in his mind was a debate over the pros and cons of taking the case. Actually, the sensation of calmly weighing considerations was a delusion. He did not—and could not—weight the scales with a recognition of his odd compulsion to do anything that Maude Kennard wanted him to do. Nor could he admit to himself that he was being egged on by a blind—and clearly unprofessional—dislike of Cash McCall and everything the man represented. Still more deeply buried, far below the level of recognition, was his relief that the affair between Maude and McCall had broken up—but, even though there had been that awareness, he could not have admitted his sharing of Maude Kennard’s malicious desire for revenge.

  Admittedly, Maude had been in a state of extreme nervousness and that was usually an indication of unreliable testimony. Furthermore, she had flatly refused to tell him how she had learned all of the things she claimed to know. Yet, even with due allowance for prejudice, the main outlines of her story had the ring of truth. It stood to reason that Cash McCall wasn’t pulling off those big deals of his without something going on under the table … and he was a clever devil, setting up a shakedown gang with such a perfect front … no two men in all Philadelphia were less open to suspicion than Winston Conway and Will Atherson.

  The thought of Conway brought a twisted smile to Torrant’s face, an anticipation of the satisfaction there would be in giving that pompous pretty-boy his comeuppance … it was about time somebody showed up that phony for the crook’s pimp he really was! But there would be even more justice in exposing Will Atherson.

  In the same manner that a wound becomes more painful after inspection, Clay Torrant now recognized how much Atherson had hurt him over the years … never speaking to him at The Wharf unless he was forced into it, yet never forgetting that he was a member of the House Committee when there was something to complain about … those shavings that the carpenters had left in the coat closet back in ’45 … that chipped goblet in ’48 … the fan that had rattled last summer … those silver bowls that had been missing last week. To see Will Atherson going around The Wharf with that self-satisfied smirk on his face … and that stinking pipe! … you’d think no one else in Philadelphia even had a great-grandfather! The truth was that Nathaniel Torrant had been a distinguished member of the Pennsylvania Bar when Isaac Atherson had been nothing but a street-corner loan shark … actually no more than a pawnbroker!

  Was it possible that Atherson had been fool enough to lay himself open to a charge of conspiracy? But, of course, he’d thought he’d get away with it … all bankers got away with plenty … gossip was as much their stock-in-trade as money. If you wanted to get the dope on someone, just get next to his banker. In the guise of asking for “credit information” a banker could dig up more dirt than a private detective agency.

  And that was another thing about Maude’s story that checked out … that Lockwood Reports was a part of the swindle gang … they had refused to supply a report on Cash McCall. Maude didn’t have to tell him that, he knew it himself.

  Damn it, it did look as if there might be a case here!

  But it would all depend on Austen’s side of the story … and to win the case they would have to prove conspiracy.

  In all the years of his practice, Clay Torrant had never had a case in which conspiracy was an issue, but he was well aware that its proof was a traditionally difficult legal assignment. Getting heavily to his feet, he crossed the hall and went into the windowless room that served as his law library. Going to the long shelf of American Jurisprudence, he found the right volume alphabetically—COMMERCE TO CONSTITUTIONAL LAW—and turned to the outline index at the head of the CONSPIRACY section, searching for leading topics, skimming pages, now and then dropping his eyes to pick up a footnote, discouraged to find that all of the cited cases were in other jurisdictions and difficult to appraise.

  Pushing his way along the narrow aisle between the center table and the book stacks, he started on Vale, searching for Pennsylvania cases. He accumulated a list of citations that was encouragingly long but, as he made his way through the buckram-bound volumes of the State Reports, the list shrank discouragingly. He found one case that seemed to be leading—Ballantine v. Cummings 220 Pa. 621. But one would be enough if it were the right one. A check of the tabular columns in Shepherd’s showed that Ballantine v. Cummings had been frequently cited.

  Assured, he began a careful word-by-word reading of the opinion but, try as he would, his eyes kept being drawn back to the discouraging cautions.

  When conspiracy is alleged, it must be proven by full, clear and satisfactory evidence … must be such as to clearly indicate the prior collusive combination and fraudulent purpose, not slight circumstances of suspicion.

  Taking off his glasses and burrowing the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, Clay Torrant accepted the extreme difficulty of assembling full, clear and satisfactory evidence. Pennsylvania
procedural rules did not permit discovery in aid of a contemplated suit, only after an action was started. By then he would be in the quicksand up to his neck. There was not a judge on the bench, nor a member of the Bar, who did not know that operators of the Cash McCall ilk were trapping their victims in a web of conspiracy … but try to prove it within the straitjacket of the law! Even if it were possible to get hold of McCall’s records—and it wasn’t—there would be nothing on paper. Everything would have been verbal. Courtroom interrogation would be useless. McCall was clever, he had to be … and a man with his ethical standards wouldn’t worry about an oath to tell the whole and complete truth.

  It would be an enormously difficult case to prepare … and he would be all alone, not even a law clerk to help him. Conway would have one of the biggest law offices in Philadelphia behind him … a dozen bright youngsters to do his research … specialists to advise him … a million dollars to spend if he needed it …

  Miss Fitch appeared in the doorway. “Mr. Austen’s here. He’s waiting in your office.”

  If Grant Austen had been out in the vestibule, Clay Torrant might have seen him there for a minute and gotten rid of him. As it was, he had no choice except to talk to him. But he delayed as long as he could, deciding to first wash his hands. After handling all of those dirty books, they needed it. In her younger days, Miss Fitch had been very good about keeping the library clean but, of late, she had been slipping rather badly.

  4

  An hour after Will Atherson had telephoned Winston Conway, the lawyer had called back asking if it would be possible for Atherson to stop in at the Jamison, Conway & Slythe offices during the noon hour. The banker’s first inclination had been to refuse. He had the legitimate excuse of a luncheon date—the executive vice-president of the Luxor Hotel Corporation was arriving from New York on the one o’clock train—and furthermore, if Cash McCall was running into a little difficulty with Grant Austen, it only served him right for not having asked for some advice before the deal to buy Suffolk Moulding had been closed.