Crime of Their Life

by Frank Kane

  Tom Conway bobbed his head resignedly. “Because you inherited the stock from your father.”

  “That’s right. And as easily as I made you vice president, that’s how easy I can throw you out.” She frowned at the lack of concern on his face. “You understand that, don’t you?”

  The man pursed his lips, nodded his head again. “Sometimes I think that might be the nicest thing you could do for me. Life was a lot simpler when I was working the city-side on the Dispatch.”

  “You didn’t think so then.”

  “Didn’t know then what I know now.” He pulled himself out of his chair, crushed out the cigarette. “I’ll meet you in the bar. I just have time to grab a drink before dinner. And I’m not up to facing that motley crew without a drink.”

  “You sure you’re not going up there to meet that Swede?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it, but it sounds like a good idea.” He crossed to the door, slammed it behind him before she could retort.

  CHAPTER 15

  Tom Conway stood at the bar in the French Quarter Salon and contemplated the changes ten years had made in his life. What would he have done that afternoon in 1952 when he walked into the city room of the Dispatch if he Could see what lay ahead of him?

  The city room was on the ground floor of the old Globe Building on Park Row. It was a huge room with desks scattered around in organized confusion. Scraps of paper, crumbled newspapers that had been clipped, then tossed at oversized wastebaskets and had missed their mark, lay on the floor where they fell.

  Tom Conway picked his way through the welter of desks to the unpainted one that had been his base of operations since he returned to civilian life after five exciting years as managing editor of an overseas newspaper. He flipped through the telephone messages that had been taken by the switchboard, tore one off, reread it curiously.

  It merely said: Mr. Lucien Garrett, chairman of the Board of Garrett Advertising Service would like to see you in his office at 6 p.m. tonight. It was signed by Letty, the chief operator.

  Conway walked over to the glass enclosure that housed the switchboard, waited while Letty took an incoming call. Finally she looked up, grinned. “Hi, Tom. How’s the demon reporter?”

  “Good.” He shoved the penciled notation under her nose. “You take this call?”

  The girl nodded.

  “This is what he said?” Conway wanted to know. “He wants me in his office at six, or he wants me to call him. Which?”

  Letty shrugged. “I didn’t talk to him. I talked to his secretary. She didn’t ask to talk to you or anything. Just left the message and hung up.”

  Conway tapped the paper on his thumbnail for a moment. “Get him on the phone for me, will you, Letty?”

  The girl at the switchboard nodded, reached for the directory. Conway walked back to his desk, dropped into his chair, laced his fingers at the back of his neck. He started slightly as the telephone on his desk shrilled.

  “This is Mr. Garrett’s office,” a cool voice informed him.

  “Tom Conway of the Dispatch. Mr. Garrett called me?”

  There was no hesitation on the part of the girl at the other end. “Yes. We’re expecting you here at 6 p.m., Mr. Conway.”

  “Could I talk to Mr. Garrett? Today is a pretty bad day and—”

  The voice on the other end was unruffled. “Mr. Garrett never accepts telephone calls. He’s leaving town in the morning. I’m afraid tonight at six is the only time he can see you.” She wasn’t curt. Just final.

  Conway considered. Garrett had the reputation of being a crackpot and a dictator. He was also chairman of the board of an advertising agency that placed hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of dollars’ worth of business with the Dispatch. “I’ll be there.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Conway.” The receiver clicked as the connection was broken at the other end.

  Lucien Garrett had the penthouse on the 54th floor of the building that housed Garrett Advertising Service. A thick, wheat-colored broadloom stretched from the elevator doors to the double, ground-glass doors that bore the gold inscription: Lucien Garrett, Private.

  Tom Conway pushed open the doors, walked into the outer office of the suite. A cool-looking blonde in a black knit dress sat behind the desk. She glanced up with no change of expression as Conway walked in.

  “Conway of the Dispatch. I have a six o’clock appointment.”

  Her deep blue eyes flicked over him impersonally. “I’ll tell Mr. Garrett you’re here.” She flicked the key on the intercom, whispered into it, flicked the key off. “He’ll see you now.” When she stood up, she was taller than he expected. She walked to an inner door, held it open.

  It was a large room with a beamed ceiling. There was a peculiar absence of sound, almost like a vacuum. The floor was covered with a thick, gray-green carpeting, the leather furniture was polished to a soft gleam. One side of the room was given over to a huge bookcase, and in the center, facing the door, a highly polished desk dominated the room.

  The man behind the desk was very short, very wrinkled, very gray. His hair was flattened across the dome of his skull, his eyes were sharp, piercing; his nose thin and pinched. He made no effort to rise as Conway walked into the room, but waved the reporter to a chair.

  “Glad you could come.” His voice was nasal, he bit his words off in a staccato manner. “I’m leaving tomorrow for two months in Europe. Want to settle this matter before I leave.” He leaned back, laced his hands across his midsection. “Mr. Conway, what do they pay you at the Dispatch?”

  Conway stared for a moment. “Now, just a minute—” The gray-haired man waved him down impatiently. “In your job, you ask impertinent questions of other people. Why shouldn’t anybody ask them of you?”

  “Because it’s nobody’s business how much they pay me.”

  “I intend to make it my business. I’m considering offering you a job. I’d like an answer to my question, please.”

  “I didn’t apply for any job. As it happens—”

  “I intend to pay you well enough so that you will. Your present salary?”

  Conway started to get up, decided to hear the proposition through. “I get $8,000 a year, a $500 bonus at Christmas and three weeks’ vacation.”

  The man behind the desk dug into his pocket, brought out a folded square of paper. His eyes flicked over the scribbled notes on it, he looked up. “That’s exactly right.” He nodded his approval.

  Conway got to his feet. “You mean you knew what I was getting? That you were checking me?”

  Garrett returned the folded sheet to his pocket, looked impatient. “Please. No dramatics. Of course I was checking you. I wouldn’t have a man working for me who was a liar. Please sit down.” There was a snap in his voice.

  Conway surprised himself by dropping into his chair.

  “That’s better. I can’t stand talking to a man towering over me.” His fingers drummed on the arm of his desk chair, giving the impression of a man who couldn’t stand repose, a man who thought as he acted. “I’m offering you $25,000 a year, roughly triple what you’re making. There will be the usual fringe benefits, the share of the executive bonus—which I can assure you will be substantially more than $500,” he inserted dryly, “and vacation.”

  Conway’s jaw sagged. “What would I have to do for that kind of money? Kill somebody?”

  “Hardly. I’d want you to organize a public relations department. And head it.” He leaned back again. “I feel that many of our accounts could do with some public relations advice and help. A man with your background should be extremely helpful. Well?”

  Conway shook his head as though to clear it. “This is pretty sudden.”

  “Not with us. I’ve had you carefully investigated. I’ve read and analyzed all of the articles and special features you’ve done for the Dispatch over the past few years. They show the background and grasp of subject I consider invaluable.”

  “But I’m a reporter, not a public relations man.”
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  “Where does one stop and the other begin?” He glanced at his watch, frowned his impatience. “I can’t spend much more time with you. Do you want the job,” he rolled his eyes up to Conway’s face, “or not?”

  “A contract?”

  Garrett bobbed his head impatiently. “Of course.”

  “You’ve got yourself a boy.”

  The gray man looked at his watch again. “I never had any doubts. If you’ll call tomorrow, speak to our Mr. Latimer in the legal department, he’ll arrange everything.” His tone signified that Conway had been dismissed. “When I return from Europe, I’ll expect that your department will be fully organized and functioning.”

  Tom Conway found adjustment to his new affluence both easy and pleasant. An unlimited expense account, an end to the daily battle with deadlines and a three-hour lunch hour offered no hardships.

  Lucien Garrett’s two-month trip to Europe was lengthened to a nine-month stay by a coronary he suffered in Rome. By the time he returned to the States, Tom Conway had difficulty remembering how it had been possible to exist on the salary the Dispatch had paid him in the pre-Garrett days.

  And when Garrett did return, something had been added. Laura Garrett had been studying abroad. Now the old man felt it was time for her to come home and start building a dynasty.

  Conway met her the first week the Garretts were home. She was about twenty-eight, short, thin. Her eyes were too closely spaced, her nose a trifle too long to be called beautiful. But the eyes were a good color, her thinness was not to the extreme of gauntness. She was standing at the window, her coat thrown back over her shoulders when Conway walked into the old man’s office.

  If Garrett had been gray before his trip, he was ashen now. He performed the introductions, nodded Conway to a chair, then turned to the girl. “If you don’t mind, Laura, I’d like to talk to Conway. Then we can get on home.”

  Laura smiled at Conway, obediently headed out of the office. When the door closed behind her, Garrett closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. They were the only live thing in his face. “Things are going to change around here, Conway,” he told him. “I’m going to have to give up active control of the company. Doctor’s order.”

  Conway felt the chill finger of apprehension down his spine. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  The old man nodded. “So am I. Thompson will be acting chairman as well as president. I suppose you know he has opposed the new department right along?”

  The premonition was now a fact. Conway had encountered the company president’s open hostility to him and his staff many times during the past nine months. He had counted on the old man’s support to stave off any actual calamity. Now that could no longer be counted on.

  “What about my contract?”

  The old man sighed. “It was for a one-year period renewable at our option,” the old man told him. “Thompson has indicated to me that he will not pick up the option.” He shrugged his thin shoulders. “I thought you ought to know.”

  Conway slumped in his chair. The thought of going back to a reporter’s salary after nine months of living on an expense account was almost unthinkable. He did some fast figuring, realized that his salary at the Dispatch wouldn’t pay the rent on his new apartment, the payments on his car and furniture.

  “But surely, Mr. Garrett, you’ll still be able to—”

  The old man shook his head. “I still own controlling stock in the company. But I’m not up to a fight with Thompson, Conway. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.” Conway shook his head like a punch-drunk fighter, got to his feet. “It was nice while it lasted,” he grunted. He walked to the door, tugged it open.

  Laura Garrett was sitting in a chair in the outer office, leafing through a magazine. She looked up as Conway walked out, smiled.

  The thin face, the too-close eyes and the pinched nose dissolved in front of his eyes and in their place he saw the old man’s stock control of the company. He smiled back and in that moment, his future was decided.

  After a whirlwind courtship, Tom Conway and Laura Garrett were married in time for her to give him the power of attorney on her late father’s stock. With it he was able to persuade the acting chairman of the board to reverse his stand and pick up Tom Conway’s option.

  Conway wondered what he would do if he had it to do all over again. He looked up to see the amused eyes of Ingrid Sorenson on him. She walked over, took up a position alongside him.

  “My, you look serious tonight, Mr. Conway. Serious and grim. A cruise is no place to look like that. You’re supposed to be having fun. You can be serious and grim at home.” She glanced idly around, satisfied herself that no one was within earshot. “Anything wrong?”

  “The usual. My wife.”

  The blonde made a moue of distaste. “She’s been giving me dirty looks all day, too. You think she suspects something?”

  “I’ve given up caring. After this trip, I’m walking out.”

  “We’d better talk that over,” Ingrid murmured. “Can you get away from her tonight? Around midnight?”

  Conway masked his lips with his glass. “Your cabin?”

  The blonde considered, shook her head. “Too dangerous. Your wife has already tried to bribe my stewardess to keep an eye on us.”

  “But you said you could trust the stewardess.”

  “That’s one stewardess. Suppose your wife tries to bribe a couple of them?” She looked around as if bored by the desultory conversation. “You know where the crew’s infirmary is?”

  “No.”

  “Sun deck forward.”

  “Near the gymnasium?”

  “No. All the way forward. In the crew section of the ship.”

  “I’ll find it, I guess. But suppose someone—”

  The blonde shook her head. “There’s no one in it and I have the only key. No one will disturb us.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Dinner that night started out to be uneventful.

  Martin Sands was already at the table when Johnny Liddell walked in. Harry and Belle Doyle were in their seats for a change and were carrying on an animated conversation with Hilda Phelps. Jack Allen, the cruise director, obviously relieved at the diversion of the old woman’s attention, was carrying on a desultory conversation with Sands. He looked up as Liddell slid into his chair.

  “Well, Mr. Liddell. We missed you this morning. Get over to the island at all?” he asked.

  Liddell shook his head. “I slept in. Guess I was more tired than I realized.” He broke off as Martin Sands’s “niece” came to the table. Her eyes were red and puffy. She avoided the eyes of the others as she took her seat, busied herself with her napkin.

  “Guess you heard we lost a couple of our table-mates?” Allen indicated the empty chairs where the Keens had been the night before. “Decided to stay at Grenada for a couple of days instead of continuing the cruise.”

  Hilda Phelps broke off her conversation with the Doyles, turned to Liddell. “Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous? Can you imagine any white person in his right mind wanting to stay there?” She shook her head.

  “I thought it was a very pretty island,” Belle Doyle volunteered. “That view of the harbor from the hotel took my breath away.”

  “But the people. All Negroes,” Mrs. Phelps argued.

  “Well, they do have a right to be there. After all, they’re natives—” Belle Doyle pointed out.

  “Not actually,” Jack Allen told her. “When Columbus discovered the island on his second voyage, the natives were a people called Caribs. The white men exterminated them by working them to death. That’s when they imported African Negroes as slaves to work the spice and cocoa plantations. Today, nine persons out of ten in the Windward Islands are Negroes.”

  “Slaves? Like the ones we had down south?” Martin Sands entered the discussion.

  Allen bobbed his head. “But they got around to emancipating them before we did. In 1837. And with less of a fuss.”

  “I didn’t know
Grenada was one of the Windward Islands,” Harry Doyle put in.

  “The capital of the Windwards. The governor of all four islands lives in St. George’s.” Allen was obviously warming up to his subject, and Liddell was beginning to wish the subject hadn’t been brought up. “Did you know how they got the name, the Windward Islands?” He looked around, didn’t wait for an answer. “Because they are more exposed to the trade winds than the other group called the Leeward Islands and—”

  They could hear rather than see the Eldridges’ entrance into the dining room. There was a momentary break in the conversation at the captain’s table. The men stared, the women stared, then whispered.

  Fran Eldridge was still too thin and bony, but a high-necked dress did not advertise the fact the way her other clothes had. Her hair was still mousy colored, but it was set in a fashionable bouffant style, and the magic of expertly applied make-up had transformed her normally plain face into one that was more than passably attractive.

  Her new appearance had done something to her posture. She walked alongside her father, head high in contrast to the hunched forward shuffle they associated with her. She was slightly flushed, pleasantly aware of the stir she was creating.

  The white-haired man held his daughter’s chair, apologized to the captain for their tardiness, was rewarded with one of Delmar Rose’s rare smiles. His eyes flicked from the girl’s face to Robin Lewis and back, reflected his approval. He said something to the girl that brought a flush of pleasure and a shy smile instead of the giggle with which she had responded to everything.

  The silence at the table dissolved and there was a chatter of excited conversation and compliments. Carson Eldridge sat back in his chair, beamed. Lew Herrick, sitting at the other side of the girl, hadn’t spoken more than a dozen words to her at any meal, suddenly discovered they had many interests in common.

  At Jack Allen’s table, Hilda Phelps sniffed. “Looks like a freshly painted billboard,” she snapped somewhat illogically in view of the hennaed hair and outlandish make-up.