Accounting for Murder

by Emma Lathen

  Mrs. Cobb frowned slightly as her thoughts moved elsewhere. “You know, Clarence was really a very sweet person. He and Emily were happy together for a long time.” This was offered in a carefully emotionless voice. “I wouldn’t want you to think that because I haven’t mentioned my relationship to him, I haven’t felt this murder very keenly. Or that I haven’t tried to do what I can to find out why it happened.”

  Thatcher assumed a look of grave sympathy, and reflected that he would not like to have Mrs. Cobb tracking down; there was a rather frightening detachment about her. She held her slight body no more than energetically erect, but he had a sudden impression of a majestically tall, iron-willed figure of retribution, ready to plumb the depths of the mystery that surrounded Clarence Fortinbras’s death.

  “. . . and around here, of course, he was looked upon as an eccentric. I admit that he was hot-tempered, and occasionally self-willed. But that is not unusual in men who have spent their lives in academic surroundings. And Clarence had made a great name for himself as a brilliant accountant. But he was more than that. He was an extremely intelligent, reasonable man.” She broke off and looked intently at Thatcher.

  “He impressed me very favorably when we met,” he replied, wondering if the remark sounded patronizing.

  “Some people were inclined to think that he . . . he was a bit of a clown.” It was a question, not a statement.

  “Oh, I don’t believe anybody who met him and talked seriously with him was in any danger of underestimating his remarkable intelligence,” Thatcher said, wondering why Mrs. Cobb needed reassurance on the point.

  She told him. “I’m glad that you feel that way,” she said. “Because if you didn’t I wouldn’t say what I’m going to say. The staff at National Calculating and the police have dismissed him as a sort of pest, and I’m not sure that they would take my comments seriously.”

  “Comments?”

  “Clarence was very close-mouthed about his work,” Mrs. Cobb began, then she smiled, revealing the woman who lurked behind the forbidding public personage who was Dr. Margaret Cobb. “I know that he seemed to be a nosy person, but when it came to things that really count—his work, for example—he was very reticent. He didn’t confide in me, and I didn’t ask him to. But since he knew I was interested, he occasionally let things drop.”

  Thatcher felt the stirrings of interest. “Did he tell you what he was doing?” he demanded baldy.

  “He said that he felt he was going to find something more important than ineptitude at National Calculating. God knows, there’s plenty of that. But Clarence said that he had uncovered a fraudulent scheme.” Mrs. Cobb looked across the desk at Thatcher. “He said he had rarely seen such artistry in fraud.”

  Tribute indeed, thought Thatcher. Aloud, he said, “I thought it must be something like that.” He turned over in his mind the information he had been given about National Calculating: Harry Blaney and his disappointing Commercial Sales, Jay Rutledge’s profitable Government Contracts, Table Model’s slow and steady growth, R & D which had produced nothing. Plenty of elbow room for fraud, but what kind? Fortinbras was so superior an accountant that it was not only possible, it was likely that his thorough and punitive methods would uncover something that the ordinary accountant, using the ordinary accounting methods, might miss. Thatcher truly valued Addison, but he knew that he lacked the Fortinbras demon.

  “He said,” Mrs. Cobb continued with great care, “he said that he thought only a physical inventory could confirm his guess. Then he said that it would be as big a scandal as the old McKesson-Robbins case. I don’t know what that was, but I do remember that it was McKesson-Robbins.”

  She looked hopefully at him, and Thatcher, puzzling over the late Clarence Fortinbras’s remarks, had a tiny but not uninteresting revelation: Mrs. Cobb was talking to him not because she was shaken by her encounter with Jay Rutledge, and far less because she wanted a comforting shoulder. She was consulting him, as coolly as she would consult a mathematician, for professional advice. Margaret Cobb did not understand what her brother-in-law had told her; she felt the police would fail to make use of her information as she felt it should be used. Therefore, she was deliberately consulting Thatcher as a man likely to be interested and, more important, professionally knowledgeable about financial and accounting details.

  It was a sobering thought, and she confirmed it explicitly. “I don’t know what Clarence meant,” she said, “and I thought that you would.” There was a simple finality about her statement, but no humility. Margaret Cobb knew what she knew, and knew what she did not know.

  “I think I understand what he meant,” Thatcher said slowly. “Or rather, I think I have a vague idea. But I’m not the accountant that Fortinbras was, and it will take a little research . . .”

  She did not press him. Having reported her information to the proper authorities, as she saw them, Margaret Cobb was prepared to trust them. Thatcher began to feel the burden of that trust.

  The message transmitted, Mrs. Cobb let her eyes stray meaningfully back to the pile of documents in her in-basket. Thatcher obediently took the hint, and made his departure.

  Outside of her office, he stood for a moment, then, for no particular reason, expelled a sigh of relief. Mrs. Cobb often had this effect on her male colleagues.

  Not for a moment did Thatcher believe that she had hidden her relationship with Clarence Fortinbras for any reason but the one she had explained. Although her personality was powerful enough to embrace a capacity for murder, her response to Fortinbras’s death left no doubt about her innocence. Or no doubt with him. Possibly it was merely the forcefulness that surrounded her.

  His opinion of Morris Richter went up a few notches. If that young man could work with Mrs. Cobb, and incur nothing more than her mild contempt, if he could ferret out secrets that she was trying to keep, then there was more to him than met the eye.

  And, as Mrs. Cobb had remarked, Morris Richter was curious. Having indulged himself so far, Thatcher decided to go whole hog and pump Richter.

  He turned the corner to Dr. Richter’s offices, and passing through an empty secretary’s cubicle, knocked on the door.

  “Come in,” Richter’s resonant baritone replied.

  His luck held. Richter was in conference with General Cartwright, and they greeted him with flattering cordiality.

  “I don’t want to interrupt,” he said, “but I thought I’d come by to catch my breath. I’ve just been party to a nasty disagreement between Mrs. Cobb and Rutledge, and I wanted to get some details . . .”

  “Well, now,” General Cartwright interrupted with a grin. “That must have been a real shindig. Isn’t Mrs. Cobb something? You know, we had a little difference of opinion the other night, and she as good as told me that I didn’t know my business.” He let his grin broaden admiringly. “The only people who tell me that sort of thing nowadays are congressmen, you know. And Mrs. Cobb.” It seemed to have made a great hit with him.

  Richter smiled, but Thatcher thought he detected constraint. It was all too obvious that Mrs. Cobb must have favored him with her opinion of his work at one time or another.

  “What were you arguing about, General?” he asked.

  “Well, I don’t want to bore you . . .”

  “Oh, you’re not boring me.”

  Cartwright looked up at him, then shrugged slightly. “We were on our way out to the Boat Show on Long Island. Calvin Cobb is a lawyer, but he’s interested in boats, and I am too. And we got to talking about one thing and another . . .”

  Thatcher tried to control his impatience; having fallen into General Cartwright’s arms, so to speak, and having unearthed some information that piqued his curiosity, he felt it behooved him to contain himself and wait out the General’s diffuseness of manner. Richter, he noticed, was eying him curiously. No fool, young Richter.

  “. . . then about the TCR. I don’t know why, but I mentioned the fact that I told Jay we hoped you people in R & D would figure out a way
to make them last a little longer than one year. I guess I shouldn’t have done that instead of going through channels, but you know, when you have to go up to the Hill to justify an annual budget of over fifty million dollars . . .”

  “One year?” Richter repeated.

  The General let a shade of sternness cross his boyish face. “Now don’t tell me that I’m going to have to go through the same thing with you!”

  Richter opened his mouth to reply, but Thatcher overruled him.

  “Tell me about your discussion with Mrs. Cobb,” he said firmly.

  Imperceptibly the atmosphere in the office had altered; with a frown the General looked first at Richter, then at Thatcher. Rejecting the question that rose to his lips, he replied in a much more sober voice. “I told Mrs. Cobb that when the TCR wears out, we ship it to National Calculating for a trade-in . . .”

  “But not in one year!” Richter could not keep from protesting.

  The General’s sternness became pronounced. “Seems to me you people don’t know what you’re doing with both hands,” he snapped. “Don’t you know how Rutledge’s contract reads? Sure, we ship them in for a trade-in . . .”

  “And you get credit toward a new one,” Richter interrupted, bringing a real scowl to the General’s brow. “But not each year. You must have made a mistake . . .”

  Diplomatically, Thatcher intervened. “What did Mrs. Cobb say, General?” he asked. Light was beginning to dawn, and to judge from Richter’s horrified expression, Thatcher was not alone.

  General Cartwright again abandoned Richter. “Well, I told her we never got more than one year’s wear out of a TCR on range use.” He paused for a moment, to let the military certainty of his remark sink in on their consciousness, then resumed his easy, off-duty manner. “And do you know what Mrs. Cobb said? She said I was all wrong.” He chuckled genially, although Richter’s remark along those lines had not visibly delighted him. “Had quite a set-to with her. I will say that she certainly sounds convincing. And nice as she is, there’s no budging her, is there? Nothing would make her admit that the TCR doesn’t last about a year . . .”

  “I should think not,” Richter said grimly. “And she’s completely right!”

  Chapter 19

  The Clash of Arms

  There was a pregnant pause during which General Cartwright gathered his forces for a knockout punch. He underestimated the nervous, but positive, volubility his opponent.

  “We know about them, General, even though they’re Government Contracts products and we aren’t encouraged to do much with them. Harry Blaney asked us if we could develop a small Information Storage Unit, one that he could sell separately to the trade. You know that the ISU that goes into military hardware operates under much more stringent conditions . . .”

  What was needed here, Thatcher realized, was a steady guiding hand. Irritated though he was, the General could not resist any discussion of the TCR.

  “. . . heavier and probably more sensitive than you would want in commercial use,” Richter was continuing earnestly.

  “Yes, we have to have pretty narrow tolerances,” Cartwright agreed.

  “Yes,” Thatcher said hastily. “Now, Dr. Richter, I take it that you are fairly familiar with the . . . the Information Storage Unit, was it? Would you tell me exactly . . .”

  “The Target Control Release,” said General Cartwright with a proprietary air that bespoke affection and pride, “is basically composed of two components . . .”

  Richter the scientist winced.

  “. . . the Photoelectric Circuit is in effect the trigger, and the Information Storage Unit is what you might call the brain. It programs the information that it receives . . .”

  “I see,” Thatcher lied. “Tell me, how would you allocate costs?”

  “Allocate costs?” repeated the General with severity. “Now what do you mean by that?”

  The tone was calculated to depress the pretensions of impertinent junior officers, but the AEF was a long way behind John Thatcher, and he had never been impressionable.

  “I mean that if a TCR costs four thousand dollars . . .”

  “Some of them are as expensive as ten thousand dollars,” said the General admiringly. “They’re the ones we use to support the heavy artillery . . .”

  “Yes, yes,” Thatcher muttered, rubbing his chin. The task was not merely to unearth the facts he wanted; it also involved avoiding the flow of information that these specialists were eager to impart.

  “. . . beautiful,” General Cartwright was saying with real feeling. “You know in the Louisiana Maneuvers last year we got 96 percent efficiency . . .”

  “Ninety-six!” Richter exclaimed. “I hadn’t realized that you had reached that level . . .”

  Ruthlessly, Thatcher dragged them back to the question at issue. “Costs,” he repeated bluntly. “How much of this four thousand dollars—or ten thousand dollars—would you say was the cost of the Photoelectric Circuit?”

  “Oh, I see what you’re getting at,” Richter said.

  Thatcher resisted the temptation to snarl. He waited. Richter frowned. “I’d say the Photoelectric Circuit could be replaced for—oh, let’s say five hundred dollars. Of course, the bigger models . . .”

  “Am I correct in inferring that the Photoelectric Circuit represents approximately 10 percent of the total cost of the TCR, and the Information Storage Unit accounts for the remaining 90 percent?” Thatcher demanded caustically. For men who grappled daily with knotty problems of national security and the farther reaches of modern mathematics, Cartwright and Richter were surprisingly blank at this simple question.

  Cartwright pulled himself together, a troubled expression on his handsome face. “You could say that,” he admitted cautiously.

  “Now this Information Storage Unit that accounts for roughly 90 percent of the costs of the TCR . . .”

  “It’s a complex unit, you understand,” Richter interrupted. “It involves an extremely sensitive . . .”

  “What about this disagreement?” Thatcher said bruskly. Beating around the bush would make him the world’s authority on the TCR; but he was seeking different information. “The General says it wears out in a year, and you say it doesn’t. Is that it?”

  Both Cartwright and Richter were taken aback at this extremely abbreviated version of their quarrel, but once again Richter’s verbal facility gave him the edge over his more weighty opponent. “Er . . . yes. As I was saying, Mrs. Cobb and I have worked with it for several months, testing it under operational conditions. We can prove that its expectation of life would be at least two years under normal military conditions.” He was about to continue, but Thatcher turned to see how the General took his remarks.

  He took them badly. “I don’t know what’s going on around here,” he said grimly, “but I don’t think I like it. I told Mrs. Cobb, and I’m telling you, and I’ll tell anybody, that the United States Army uses a TCR for one year. And then it goes haywire!”

  Thatcher digested this. He recognized authority when he heard it; he was prepared to believe that Richter and Mrs. Cobb had tested the TCR and found its life expectancy was two years, and that General Cartwright knew what he was talking about when he insisted that one year was all that the United States Army got out of it. If both of them were right, a rational explanation of the contradiction had some interesting implications.

  Richter was, however, as Mrs. Cobb said, young for his age.

  “You’re sure you’re not thinking of the Photoelectric Circuit alone, General?” he asked with a small and, Thatcher thought, ill-advised smile. “That would be virtually useless at the end of a year, but if you replaced it you should get another year out of the Information Storage Unit . . .”

  “We don’t,” the General said flatly.

  Richter was eager to find an excuse for the General’s error. “Or possibly your installation practices aren’t right. You know, if you don’t adjust the calibration properly . . .”

  “Our service per
sonnel”—the General bit the words—“spend a two-week training period in National Calculating’s TCR factory.” He paused to let the words sink in. “Something’s fishy here,” he said, narrowing his eyes, “and I think we’d better get to the bottom of it.”

  Thatcher was delighted to enlist an ally; the ribbons adorning the General’s tunic testified that he would be useful.

  “I think I may be able to help you there,” he said quietly.

  “How?” Richter demanded unflatteringly.

  Before Thatcher could answer, he was interrupted.

  “Dr. Richter,” said Mary Sullivan, appearing in the doorway. “We haven’t got your quarterly estimates . . . Oh, I’m sorry.” She stopped short at their forbidding looks. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  Thatcher decided to abandon his normal courtesy for a show of force.

  Without giving Richter a chance to reply, he said, “Will you come in and sit down, Miss Sullivan?”

  Miss Sullivan advanced into the room, an amused but uncertain expression in her gray eyes.

  “Do you want a secretary?” she asked, seeking an explanation for this peculiar behavior.

  “We want information,” Thatcher said grimly. He looked into her sensible eyes, and took a decision. “As you see, we’re having a high-level conference, and I think you may be able to help us.”

  She waited. His opinion of her went up. “Needless to say this is . . . this is in strictest confidence.” By which he meant he did not want this conversation reported back to Chip Mason unless necessary.

  “Yes, I understand,” Miss Sullivan replied with composure. Thatcher rather thought that she did.

  “Now,” he said, turning back to the combatants, “We have a contradiction here in your experiences with the life of the Information Storage Unit. It can be resolved easily enough—if the Army does get only one year’s wear out of a device that Dr. Richter and Mrs. Cobb are professionally certain is longer-lived. It involves some very intricate”—he recalled Mrs. Cobb’s quote—“and artistic fraud.”