A Key to the Suite

by John D. MacDonald

  “Oh dear Jesus! ’S dawn, Freddy! Cold, gray dawn.”

  “Alma, the reason I called …”

  “Hol’ the phone a minute.”

  He held the phone a long long time. “Now what?” she asked, and her voice was clear and almost precise.

  “Jesse is coming down. To a convention. He’ll get here today.”

  “This is a reason to wake me up, for God’s sake? He’s a dear man, and we’ve had our laughs, Freddy, but sleep is important.”

  “Alma, I always had the feeling you liked Jesse Mulaney.”

  “I guess I do.”

  “More than just … on a business basis.”

  “What the hell are you getting at?”

  “Alma, maybe he’s in trouble. He didn’t ask me to get in touch with you. It’s my idea entirely. I was just thinking … maybe you could help.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “There’s a lot of changes going on, in the company. There’s a man going to be at the convention, and he will maybe be making the final report that’ll tie the can to Jesse. I was just thinking that … if this man had a hell of a good time down here, and if it got to be … well, say a little bit obvious toward the end, he wouldn’t be so anxious to take the wrong kind of word back.”

  “It isn’t exactly a new problem, Freddy dear. I suppose this man would have his guard up. I mean to say that if he’s bright, which I suppose he would have to be, he might be expecting this sort of thing, and so it wouldn’t work.”

  “There’s that chance, Alma. So it would depend on the talent, I guess.”

  “It would indeed. It would indeed.”

  “On the other hand, maybe Jesse has a better plan worked out, and wouldn’t want to try anything like this. But I figured it wouldn’t do any harm to check it out before he gets here, so it could be lined up in case.”

  “This man you want should have a fine time—young?”

  “Early thirties.”

  “That makes it a little rougher, you know. Married?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a small help, usually. There would have to be some good reason for having the girl there, you know. Have you thought of that?”

  “Yes, as we’ve been talking I’ve thought of it, but it would have to be a cover story that would fit the girl, Alma.”

  “You know, you’re always just a little sharper than I expect you to be, Freddy.”

  “Should I say thanks?”

  “While we’ve been talking, dear, I’ve been weeding out. I have a very lovely little friend who might work out just right. But it would depend on how she takes to it. She’s kind of complicated. She’s certainly not what you’d call obvious. Sometimes she’s more trouble than she’s worth. Now don’t get nervous, dear. I don’t mean she gets taken drunk or neurotic. I mean she’s too damn selective sometimes. And stubborn as can be. But let me put it this way, Freddy. For any truly high-level guy wanting to meet a nice little friend, I’d have every confidence in Cory. Her name, dear, is Corinna. But then, how many high-level guys are ever in need?”

  “Jesse is in need.”

  “In another way, of course. But when can you let me know for sure?”

  “Before four o’clock this afternoon. Will that be okay?”

  “That will be fine, Freddy dear. But this business about a favor for dear old Jesse has nothing to do with … your little token of gratitude for setting it up.”

  “You know I wouldn’t try to short you, Alma.”

  “I think you might try, but it wouldn’t work. I should warn you, dear, the whole thing might work out a little high.”

  “A lot of little things can get buried in a convention tab.”

  “If you tell me it’s a deal, we’ll set it up over the phone where Cory should meet you for the briefing. Okay?”

  “That would seem to do it, Alma. I’m sorry I woke you up.”

  “I’m glad you did, really. You know, I ought to feel a little angry with you, Freddy. I haven’t heard from you in ever so long. Way last Christmas, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. I remember. It’s this way, Alma. There was this merger, over a year ago, and things have got pretty tightened up. They put in these damn control systems, and it clamps down on me, so I don’t get the chance to operate like in the old days. I mean it would have to come out of my pocket, and that sort of slows me down. Even that deal last Christmas, I could only swindle half the tab, so it was a calculated risk.”

  “But weren’t they darling girls?”

  “They sure were.”

  “Weren’t the men some kind of politicians?”

  “A special purchasing commission from Alabama. The deal was to get the low bid thrown out so we’d be the ones to get it.”

  “And you did?”

  “Sure enough, Alma. So I got the rest of the fee back out of my override, and it worked out. But I don’t think it’s ever going to get back to the way it was back in the good old days when Jesse was down here in my job and I was working for him.”

  “It’s the way everybody is cracking down on expense accounts, Freddy, and believe me, it’s put the bind on my business. I’m down to about a third, honestly. Those were the good old days, I guess. Remember when Jesse had that special sign made up for me? For my desk? Technical Consultant—Sales Staff—American General Machine—Southeast District. I’ve still got it around here someplace. You know, aside from the laughs, I’m awful damn grateful to Jesse on another count. In fifty-one, it was, he started me in buying AGM. Before that all I ever bought was government bonds. For three years I bought AGM, and then it started to look as if I had holes in my head. Honest to God, Freddy, two years ago it dropped like a rocket. I called Jesse long distance about it a half dozen times. Did you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “He kept telling me to hang on, and thank God I did. That merger thing made me fat. I got three shares of GAE for every two of AGM, and you know where the hell that has gone to in the last year.”

  “I know, I know. Speaking of GAE, that’s where this Hubbard came over from, the one maybe Cory will get to meet. Actually now we’re the AGM division of GAE, Inc.”

  “Anyhow, tell Jesse I’m grateful. Give him my new number, Freddy dear, and tell him to give me a ring while he’s in town. Maybe he could come over here for a drink. Will Connie be with him?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

  “Where is this deal?”

  “The Sultana.”

  “So it’s a ten-minute cab ride. He could slip out. How are things with you, Freddy? How’s Bert?”

  “Well, not so good. It’s a change of life thing, I guess, but she doesn’t want to admit it. She’s always been a nervous woman anyhow. Anyway, the kids are doing good. Kit’s getting good marks in Gainsville, and the Marines just sent Tommy to a special school, some kind of radar thing.”

  “You get Bert onto some hormones, Freddy, and you’ll see one hell of a change in her.”

  “There better be a change before she drives me nuts.”

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give Cory a special briefing on this and tell her that it means a lot to me personally if she does a good job.”

  “I’d appreciate that a lot, Alma.”

  “She’s got a college degree.”

  “That could be a help in a deal like this. There’s more than just Jesse involved. He was the one hired me. We’ve been close ever since. Maybe I’ve done a little too much bitching about all the contol systems they’ve stuck in. I guess I wouldn’t have done so much bitching if I’d realized they might get rid of Jesse.”

  “Why would they want to?”

  “Maybe he’s too old timey, Alma. Hell, I don’t know. He could sell sun glasses in a coal mine, but he couldn’t write up a ten-page analysis of how anybody else should go about it, and he doesn’t know a market survey from a bagel.”

  “Isn’t a convention a crazy place to come to to fire a man?”

  “They don’t do it that way.
He wouldn’t be fired here. We got tipped off they’d been evaluating him in every other aspect of his job, and this is the last part of it left, how he handles himself in this kind of a deal, how much good he does AGM. Hubbard is one of the guys they got doing those evaluations. They’re a cold-fish operation. They’ve weeded out the other divisions, and now they’ve got around to sales, promotion and advertising. What they don’t understand, there was never anything wrong with AGM sales. When we slipped, it was on account of they fell behind on the design and research, so the other outfits had better products on the market. We’re damn near caught up already.”

  “Somebody at the door, dear. You phone me a yes or no, okay?”

  “Okay, Alma. And thanks a lot.”

  He hung up and went up into the main lobby. The convention registration desk had been set up. COLUDA and NAPATAN delegates had begun to arrive. Their baggage had begun to clutter the lobby, awaiting the rooms being vacated by the delegates of the convention which had just terminated. The cashiers were busy checking out the APETOD people. There was a worn, weary, rueful flavor about the APETOD people checking out which was in sharp contrast with the holiday anticipation of the groups of men who stood near the convention registration tables. Fred Frick, moving toward the table, had to stop a half dozen times to shake hands with friends employed by other outfits in the industry, most of whom he hadn’t seen since the last regional convention.

  He went to the NAPATAN table where a rather briskly officious young lady said, “Welcome to the seventeenth annual convention of NAPATAN, Mr.…?”

  “Frick. Fred Frick, American General Machine.”

  She quickly extracted a card from her index. A slip of cardboard was stapled to the card. She tore it off at the perforation, deftly inserted it behind the transparent plastic of a lapel button. “Here, sir, is your badge. This is your convention program. This is your book of tickets which should be presented at all lunches, dinners and official cocktail parties. You will find one ticket for each event in your book.” She looked at the card again. “There are fourteen in your group?”

  “Yes. Ten in the hotel and four local.”

  “I see the whole group is prepaid, sir, except for the registration fee itself. That will be ten dollars. Do you wish to pick up the badges and programs and booklets for your entire group right now?”

  “Thanks. I’ll have someone else do that a little later, Miss. Uh … on second thought, I’ll get the things for Mr. Hubbard now. Floyd Hubbard.”

  He paid her twenty dollars and walked diagonally across the lobby to the hotel registration desk. There he acquired an envelope. He put Hubbard’s materials in the envelope, hesitated, then scrawled across the front of it, “Welcome aboard!!!! Fred Frick.” He had the envelope placed in the rack for 847.

  He moved along to the next section of the registration desk.

  “Yes sir?”

  “You have a reservation for me? John Dempsey.”

  “Ummmm … yes, Mr. Dempsey. A single. Are you with the convention?”

  “No,” Frick said, filling out the registration card.

  “How long will you be with us?”

  “I’ll leave next Sunday.”

  “We can offer you a choice of …”

  “Put me as far from the convention accommodations as you can get me. A nice room, please, but I don’t have to stare at the ocean.”

  “Ummmm … eleven-oh-two is a nice room, Mr. Dempsey, in the main part of the structure here on the street side. Your luggage is here?”

  “It’ll be along later.”

  “Is this a charge, sir?”

  “Cash. Do you want any right now?”

  After a slight hesitation, appraisal, decision, the clerk smiled and said, “That won’t be necessary, sir. I hope you’ll enjoy your stay with us. Shall I have a boy show you …”

  “Not right now, thanks,” Frick said and pocketed his key and walked away from the desk. It was standard procedure devised a long time ago by Frick and Jesse Mulaney, and they had picked a name easy to remember even when drunk. The most predictable aspect of any convention was the certainty that the unpredictable problem would arise. And the availability of an anonymous room far from the turmoil of convention was a handy device. When checkout time came, the room could be billed right along with the rest of the AGM tab.

  He went up to 1102 and found it a pleasant, sizable twin-bed room. It was a few minutes after twelve. He phoned the AGM suite, and Bobby Fayhouser answered.

  “How are you doing, Bobby?”

  “Okay, I guess. I raised some hell, and they’re yanking a big rug out of here and replacing it. Near as I can figure, somebody built a camp fire in the middle of the main room here and put it out with catsup. I had three assistant managers up here clucking about it. Otherwise the place is okay.”

  “How about that little diarama display?”

  “It’s on the way over.”

  “Who have you got there with you?”

  “Charlie and Les.”

  “When can I come make an inspection?”

  “We should be all set by one o’clock anyway, Fred.”

  “Better than I expected. Look, I checked myself in at the convention desk, and I picked up Hubbard’s stuff too. That check you got made out to NAPATAN is for a hundred ’n forty, right? Okay, first chance you get, go down and pick up the crap for the whole group and get twenty cash out of her, which you’ll owe me. If she makes a fuss, tell me. She looks like a little doll who enjoys fussing. One thing I forgot to tell you. Scrounge all the glasses you can. I’ll be around later on.”

  Next he called his home. Bert said, “This is a real considerate time to tell me whether or not you’re coming home for lunch.”

  “Honey, I told you I can’t be home for lunch or dinner, not while the convention is going on.”

  “You may think you told me but you didn’t.”

  “Honestly, honey, I don’t like this any better than you do, but I swear I don’t have any idea when I’ll be able to get home tonight.”

  “Oh, I knew so damn well that if that Jesse Mulaney came down, I wouldn’t see you at all.”

  “Now baby …”

  “Don’t give me that now baby stuff, Frederick. It doesn’t do any good. I don’t know what you’re up to, but I know you’re damn glad to get away from me. You couldn’t wait to get out of the house this morning, could you?”

  “Honey, I’ve got a lot of responsibilities here. I got to see that the AGM part of this thing runs smooth, or that brass that comes down is going to think Fred Frick is a bum.”

  “The cat has been throwing up again.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, honey.”

  “I’ve been cleaning up after him all morning.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “If you ever happen to think of it, and you’re not too drunk, call me up again some time and say hello.” She hung up so strenuously the noise made him flinch.

  He tried 847 again. He was so convinced there would be no answer that when Hubbard said, “Hello?” it caught him off balance.

  “Oh … uh … Mr. Hubbard? This is Fred Frick. We’ve never met, but …”

  “Mr. Frick. Of course.”

  “Glad you could make it. I guess you got in real early.”

  “Earlier than I wanted to. But all they could do for me on anything later was put me on standby. So I decided at the last minute to play it safe and take a night coach.”

  “Is your room okay?”

  “Fine. Fine.”

  “What I did, I signed you in for the convention and left the badge and stuff at the desk for you. I can phone down and have them shoot it right up to …”

  “Thanks. I’ll pick it up when I go down there.”

  “As you probably know already, Mr. Hubbard, this thing doesn’t officially get off the ground until the opening banquet tonight in the Arabian Room at eight o’clock. I’d like to ask you to have lunch with me, but I’ve got to go out to the airport to meet Jes
se and Mrs. Mulaney. Would you want to go out there with me?”

  “I guess I’ll wait until they get settled in. I think that would be better.”

  “Anything you say. What I was thinking, some of my boys are getting the AGM hospitality suite in shape, and if you’re not doing anything else, I could stop by in say five minutes and take you down to the suite and introduce you to some of the boys, and we could have a little drink maybe.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Frick. Five minutes?”

  “Right.”

  Frick called the suite. Bobby wasn’t there. Les Lewis said he was due back any minute and, yes, the suite was shaping up, and they could fix a drink. Frick explained the situation.

  When he rapped at the door of 847, Hubbard opened it immediately, smiled, shook hands, came out into the hall and checked the door to be sure it had locked. Fred Frick felt slightly off balance. Hubbard was not the type he had anticipated. He was a stocky man, with considerable breadth of shoulder, and a look of toughness of body, of a resilient fitness. His black hair was cropped to a length which left just enough to comb and part. His lightweight suit, though obviously tailored to fit him very well, looked as if it was not the sort of thing he would ordinarily wear. He had big hands, a hard thrust of jaw, black and bushy brows, a nose slightly misshapen from some old breakage, a friendly grin, warm, brown, direct eyes. He gave Frick an impression of uncomplicated honesty. Frick knew the type. This man was some kind of technician. He would be more comfortable in coveralls. The hatchet men were cooler types, reserved, watchful, chronically skeptical.

  As they walked toward the suite, Frick said, “Have you been to many of this sort of convention, Mr. Hubbard?”

  “I’ve been to conventions, but not this kind. I guess they’re all alike in a lot of ways. Mine were engineering deals.”

  Frick was gratified to have hit it so closely. “Oh, you started on the production side?”

  Hubbard stopped outside the open door of the suite. “Not production as such, Mr. Frick. Once upon a time I was a metallurgist. It wasn’t so long ago, but it’s beginning to seem like a long time ago. GAE hired me away from a research and testing lab to head up a research program on high conductivity metals, and it turned out bigger than they thought, so I had to get more and more over onto the administration side. Much to my disgust, Mr. Frick, they think I’m a better administrator than a metallurgist. So I’m stuck with it for a while. And they keep exposing me to every facet of the whole deal.” He grinned, and Frick found it infectious. “They keep me in a constant condition of confusion.”