by Emma Lathen
But nothing could have been more obliging than his overview of the operations of the Ecker Company. He described the size and workings of his plant in Connecticut, the success of the enterprise started several years ago in Texas, and the current plans for its enlargement.
“I wasn’t crazy about the idea when Doug suggested expanding outside our local area, but he was right as usual. We haven’t had any problems with the manager he put in there.”
Again Thatcher noticed that this casual encomium to the far-distant manager in Texas was not matched by a similar tribute to the nephew. Or perhaps Ecker felt that the success of the Connecticut plant was too well-established to require further comment?
Ecker was equally forthcoming about other experiments.
“Conrad, it says here that you’ve started importing some of your switches from Korea. Are you satisfied quality-wise?”
After due consideration Ecker said, “So far, everything’s been first-class.”
When everybody waited expectantly, he vouchsafed a little more. “But maybe they’re making a special effort because it’s early days. We keep watching.”
Only on the subject of forthcoming innovations did he become evasive.
“I’m working on a couple of things,” he admitted. “But it takes time to iron out the bugs.”
Ives smiled benignly. “We’re not asking for classified information, Conrad,” he murmured. “We realize you have to be closemouthed about projects still in the design phase. And God knows, your product line is more than adequate for our needs. If there’s anything more in the pipeline, we’d regard it as so much frosting on the cake.”
A more polished man might have responded to the implied compliment, but Conrad simply stuck to the work at hand.
“The main thing, as I see it, is for Tina to get together with your bunch and explain the lay of the land.”
“Of course, of course, I’ll have them come in right now,” Ives agreed.
But when the accounting team entered, Victor Hunnicut was trailing in its wake.
“I hope you don’t mind, Phil,” he said deferentially, “but I can’t finish my report to you on the plant inspection without some answers. And when I asked Roy, he seemed to feel I’d better join you.”
Roy, the senior accountant, added a slight emendation. “Well, I did say that Mrs. Laverdiere is the only person who can fill in the blanks.”
“Fine, fine,” said Pepitone largely. “Why don’t we get that out of the way first?”
Brandishing a clipboard with extensive notes, Hunnicut began by asking the age of several major pieces of equipment.
Tina replied that she would not have specifics until the files had been completely redone.
Not surprisingly, Hunnicut’s questions about service and replacement schedules produced the same rejoinder.
Evincing dismay, he exclaimed, “I didn’t realize the fire had literally destroyed your basic documentation, Tina. They told me it was just minor damage. I hope we can make at least some progress on this.”
When he doggedly pursued her into the realms of depreciation, Thatcher had to give Tina Laverdiere full marks for her conduct. Without the slightest loss of composure she turned to Roy and, soaring into the higher reaches of accounting, described her program for recovering this data. Thereafter, whenever Hunnicut spoke, she addressed her fellow accountants, sucking them into a discussion that was meaningful to them alone. As this systematic exclusion continued, Hunnicut leaned farther and farther across the table, while his voice became more and more hectoring.
The strange duel lasted a full fifteen minutes. Thatcher was unable to understand why. Even if Hunnicut was too myopic to see that Mrs. Laverdiere was gaining points on every exchange, he should have noticed the reactions of his own superiors. Phil Pepitone drummed his fingers on the table and Roy was openly restive.
“I think that does it for now,” Pepitone said at last.
“If you say so, Phil,” Hunnicut said grudgingly. “But, with the fire knocking out all the essential information, I don’t see how I can come up with any conclusions.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Roy snapped. “With Tina’s guidelines, my boys won’t have any problem. It may take a couple of weeks to get everything, but the major stuff is already available. Just leave it to us.”
Pepitone was swift to follow his lead.
“Sounds like the right idea to me, so we’ll let Roy handle it. Thanks for dropping by, Hunnicut,” he concluded on an unmistakable note of dismissal.
And not a moment too soon, thought Thatcher, who disliked being forced to waste time. Hunnicut’s entire performance struck him as self-defeating. Ken Nicolls would certainly have assumed it was designed to paint Ecker as incompetent. Instead it had given Tina the opportunity to flaunt one area of Ecker professionalism.
This made Thatcher’s last glimpse of Victor Hunnicut all the more puzzling. In the stir caused by Roy’s instructions to his team and their preparations to carry off Tina, the young man made his way to the door unnoticed. There he turned and Thatcher, shifting in his chair, saw the mask drop from those nondescript features to reveal a faint smile of satisfaction.
Chapter 8
AGGRESSIVE DISCOUNTING
Whenever an enlightened CEO decides to emerge as a public benefactor, somebody else puts in the overtime. If, for example, ASI had sponsored a golf tournament, preparations would have consumed hundreds of man-hours before Gardner Ives could step forward to present the trophy.
But for five long years ASI’s actual contribution to the enrichment of American life had been more cultural than athletic. This was the direct result of Ives’s sister’s third marriage. After husbands in the theater and the arts, Polly had rounded off the set with the managing director of a nearby public television station.
The wedding toasts were barely down when her lucky third seized on his new relative.
“Would ASI man the phones during your fundraiser?” Gardner Ives echoed, liking the sound of it. “Why, of course. I’m sure we’ll get an enthusiastic group to volunteer.”
So orders had gone out, landing inevitably on someone who could neither dodge nor feint—in this case Wiley Quinn, one of Vic Hunnicut’s fellow assistant division managers. Quinn knew from firsthand experience how precious time was to the average working couple. Without burdening Ives with any of the tedious details, he manfully performed prodigies of scheduling. He arranged for children to be picked up at day-care centers, he organized the reshuffling of car pools and, more than once, he ensured dinner for an ailing parent. He was rewarded every year by having Gardner Ives sweep into the studio and tell the world that it was a privilege for ASI to contribute its mite to the cause of quality programming.
Some things, however, were beyond Wiley Quinn’s power to control. He could corral a respectable working party. He could commandeer food and drink to fuel their efforts. But he could not shanghai a TV audience.
This year the outlook was bleak. The New Jersey Nets, playing at home, were on a hot streak. ABC was airing a blockbuster movie. And, with Christmas looming, shoppers were deep into their frenzied countdown. It was hard to believe in viewers clamoring to write checks for the news in depth, for experts from stray fields of human endeavor, or for a mixed bag of BBC imports. About the only action Quinn expected that night was his own pep talk to the first-time volunteers.
“It seems simple enough,” a young programmer said at the end of the instructions. “We just follow these guidelines.”
An old-timer was cautionary.
“Oh, we’ll follow them,” she said. “But will they?”
Her forebodings were not put to an immediate test. Nonetheless Quinn, strolling around the room, was surprised to see his troops happily chatting in groups despite silence from the telephones. Curious, he approached more closely.
“Yes, but have you heard the latest?” a woman anxious to top her companions was whispering. “They’re saying that Phil Pepitone may be on the take.”
“But we picked them up years ago,” someone objected.
“And we got taken.”
Someone else pushed on to the inevitable corollary. “You mean they were losing money at the very time Phil suggested the acquisition?”
The expert shook his head portentously. “It sure didn’t look that way, which means they were pulling a fast one. But Phil pushed them down the board’s throat. And he must have had a damn good reason.”
There was a pleased intake of breath as the group gathered its forces for another onslaught on Phil Pepitone.
Wiley Quinn listened and wondered. He knew all about routine backbiting. But generally ASI was not a hotbed of malice. Partial enlightenment came from the back of the room, where he found another reputation being shredded.
“. . . well, I agree with Vic,” said a bespectacled youth from the controller’s office. “Somebody should take a look at what Sam Bradley’s been up to.”
“Research isn’t like production,” retorted an engineer. “You can’t guarantee results.”
“Nobody expects R and D to meet any quota. But we’ve been pouring money into it, and Bradley’s hired some good people. When that goes on for years, something should come out.”
“But nothing has,” a plump woman pointed out.
“Nothing for ASI. The question is, where’s it gone?”
There were half-shocked gasps.
“You mean you think Bradley might have sold the worthwhile stuff from his lab?”
With a belated pretense of objectivity, the bespectacled youth shook his head. “I’m not saying that. But other people are. And it sure looks as if something fishy’s going on.”
Far from quarreling with this conclusion, everybody had an imaginative—and slanderous—variation of his own.
Wiley Quinn thought he was beginning to understand. He already knew that the potential Ecker acquisition was stirring up heat. He had not heard Victor Hunnicut sounding off about it, but he had heard him on plenty of other subjects. And it stood to reason that Hunnicut, having no chance himself, would be opposed.
“Nerd,” he said to himself, with the automatic superiority of an ex-quarterback from Bates.
Furthermore, Quinn’s common sense was affronted. Opinions might differ as to whether or not Victor Hunnicut was a loudmouth. But sneaky attacks on upper management could lead him into deep trouble.
The prospect did not cause Wiley Quinn any pain. But selfish pleasure had to yield to good works. The phone rang in front of a file clerk.
“Me first,” she exclaimed, snatching up the receiver. “May I help you?”
Within seconds she was in difficulties.
Clamping a hand over the phone, she hissed to the room at large. “He’s pledging ninety dollars, but he wants the sixty-dollar gift. Can we do that?”
The wayward public continued to make difficulties throughout the evening. Thanks to a recent Al Jolson retrospective, one of the lures was a Jolson album.
“But I don’t want it unless it has ‘You Made Me Love You, You Dog,’” an elderly male voice enunciated. “Otherwise I want the book on lions.”
The volunteer was a young woman who knew all about the saccharine music of the older generation.
“Are you sure you have that right?” she asked indulgently.
The voice, becoming arctic, said the whole world knew that song.
Shaken, she agreed to check for him.
A cheerful young programmer thought he was equal to anything.
“Do the T-shirts run large?” he repeated. “Well, I don’t know, but I do know my wife bought a small and she’s . . .”
He listed his wife’s dimensions, then fearlessly sailed onto the far more delicate ground of weight distribution.
His caller, equally uninhibited, responded in kind, taking him well beyond his depth.
“Maybe I’d better ask one of the women here,” he said cautiously.
Only after muffling his receiver did he turn to the old-timer.
“She takes a 38-D bra and she wants a T-shirt, for Chrissake!”
“Tell her to order a large.”
“Are you sure it shouldn’t be an extra large?”
“Not in a man’s size.”
“But these are unisex,” he protested.
Irene’s scorn was crushing. “That’s what unisex means.”
“Oh.”
Victor Hunnicut could have learned a lot about the unpredictability of human behavior simply by manning a phone that evening. It would have disabused him forever of the notion that he could expect his scandal-mongering to run in tidy, preordained channels.
The lower echelons at ASI, like their superiors, were really interested in the place where they spend half their waking lives, not some unknown outfit in Bridgeport. Hunnicut would have been disappointed to discover that the Ecker Company was barely mentioned. For all practical purposes Bob Laverdiere and Alan Frayne did not exist. Instead almost every conceivable wrongdoing at ASI was being canvassed.
By ten o’clock only one possibility had been overlooked. Then a change in programming gave the assembled throng its final chance.
It was the manager’s habit to discourse, for eleven months of the year, on the failure of commercial broadcasters to offer adequate entertainment to the literate mind. In their insensate search for profit, the major networks relied on infantile pap. But when the time for fund-raising came, the manager confronted certain depressing truths. People pledge only if they watch. They watch only if there is something they wish to see. And so, for one brief nonshining moment, Jove had to nod. Two nights ago it had been Al Jolson. Tonight it was an old Fred Astaire. On the principle that if you can’t lick them, you adopt them, Ginger Rogers was being presented as an exclusive discovery by the discerning intelligences at public television.
Lending his own prestige to this fantasy, Gardner Ives spent his annual ten minutes chatting with his brother-in-law about the rare treat in store for those astute enough to be watching.
Two responses followed, hard on each other’s heels. The tempo of incoming calls quadrupled, justifying the program if not its introduction. And almost every volunteer suddenly realized that one figure had escaped his fair share of defamation.
“You know,” said someone during the first break in phone activity, “when you come to think of it, Phil Pepitone isn’t the only one who’s been touting Ecker.”
“That’s absolutely right. Phil just proposed it, but it’s Mr. Ives who’s been really gung ho.”
Wiley Quinn could scarcely believe his ears when he heard what came next.
Chapter 9
TALK ON THE STREET
Things being what they are, Phil Pepitone heard rumors about Sam Bradley before he heard rumors about himself. At first he was inclined to dismiss them out-of-hand, although amused by the notion of Bradley running a scam.
Pepitone, however, was a veteran of many power struggles who instinctively distrusted coincidence. Allegations of misconduct within ASI’s product-development staff could be attributed to Bradley’s usual enemies. But coming just now, when ASI and Phil Pepitone were actively pursuing the Ecker Company, they made him uneasily consider linkage. Were all these brickbats really aimed at Sam Bradley?
As usual, when confronted by uncertainty, Pepitone sought counsel from his closest confidante. This did not entail leaving his own quarters. He had risen through the ASI ranks carrying his secretary with him. Pepitone and Irene had grown middle-aged and overweight together.
“I’ve always thought Sam was a washout,” he began, “but I’ve never thought he was a crook. Still, I suppose anything’s possible.”
Irene’s role was to let him ramble, then punch holes where necessary.
“Just how possible is it?” she asked. “They’ve got security over at the lab, don’t they?”
&n
bsp; ASI took all the usual precautions. Yet the question was not altogether rhetorical.
“It’s a funny thing,” Pepitone mused aloud. “But you don’t do as much checking on a man when he claims to be a failure instead of a success. Security would tighten if Sam said that he was sitting on the biggest thing since the light bulb—not that that’s likely. But I can see the whole system at the lab needs work.”
“Do it very, very tactfully,” she warned him.
He smiled, acknowledging an old joke. Irene had been softening Pepitone’s rough edges for a long time.
“I’ll figure out some kind of program, then you can figure out how we sell it,” he promised.
“No problem,” she said confidently. “I’ll manage somehow. But, Phil, that won’t take care of what’s already happened.”
He scratched his jaw reflectively. “We don’t know that anything has happened. I’m just addressing a flaw in the system. But, for all I know, this talk may be a lot of garbage. Maybe Sam’s clean as a whistle. I wouldn’t prejudge anybody because of loose talk.”
This attitude was reinforced at four o’clock, when Irene returned with her latest gleanings from the rest room.
“They’re saying what?” he bellowed.
Without change of expression, she repeated the speculations that had startled Wiley Quinn.
“They’re crazy,” Pepitone muttered.
Irene always gave him a few minutes to adjust before offering advice.
“You’d better do something about this, Phil,” she warned him. “And fast.”
When Irene was worried, Pepitone knew he was in deep trouble.
“I will, believe me. And when I find out who’s behind this talk, I’ll kill him with my bare hands.”
Sam Bradley was less combustible than Phil Pepitone. Furthermore, he was contemptuous of attacks on his ability. So long as he enjoyed Gardner Ives’s confidence—and he took great pains to cultivate it—he remained untouched. Time, he was convinced, was on his side.
Yet the current spate of innuendo, repeated by a sanctimonious colleague who thought he should know, alarmed him. To be charged with mediocrity by people incompetent to judge was something he could dismiss. Accusations of criminal wrongdoing could not be shrugged off.
