Right on the Money

by Emma Lathen

  The mulish cast to Conrad’s face suggested that he was capable of denying that two plus two equals four. Furthermore he was unwilling to admit any connection between the two crimes.

  “So investigate the fire,” he growled. “Nobody’s stopping you.”

  But Bernard Stillman had not traveled to Bridgeport to avoid facing facts.

  “Our legitimate interest goes well beyond the fire loss,” he said evenly. “We carry a lot of your other insurance. Your product-liability coverage, for starters.”

  As this was one of the areas in which the police hoped to find Bob Laverdiere’s motive, they were now on thin ice.

  “You’ve never had a single claim for us on that policy,” Conrad retorted.

  “I am well aware of that, but your financials went up in smoke as well. Under the circumstances, Winstead would like to be assured that the reconstruction is disinterested.”

  “You’re saying we’re liars.”

  Stillman was neither surprised nor perturbed by his reception. In his experience, hostility signaled only a troubled mind. And Conrad Ecker had more justification for anxiety than most. Family loyalty might dictate a posture of complete confidence, but behind that facade, Ecker must be desperately uncertain. No wonder the man sounded like a bear at stake.

  Unfortunately Stillman tried to indicate understanding.

  “Look, I’m saying that it’s to the best interests of everybody to get this thing straightened out so we know where we stand. Ultimately we have the same goal.”

  Sympathy was the last thing Conrad wanted.

  “You come in here calling us a bunch of crooks and then say we’ve got the same interests?”

  “Cool down, Conrad,” Frayne urged. “He’s just saying Winstead wants our bank or our accountants to participate. Tina could probably use the help. We don’t want to make a federal case out of this.”

  But Conrad Ecker was past making fine distinctions. Heaving himself to his feet, he glared defiantly across the desk.

  “There’s not a damn thing crooked about my company.”

  “No one would be happier to be assured of that than Winstead.”

  “Crap! What you really mean is that you think we’re up to our elbows in some kind of dirt.”

  Looking into the red face hovering over him, Stillman tried to lower the temperature. “Not at all. We merely want to clear away some of the doubts that have been caused by these crimes.”

  “Oh, yeah!” Conrad shot back, drawing himself up to his full height. “Then I’ll tell you what. Bring in your own accountants and do the job by yourself. You won’t find a single thing wrong.”

  Frayne sighed. “You don’t mean that, Conrad. There’s no reason this can’t be a joint undertaking.”

  “Like hell I don’t mean it.” Already circling his desk, Ecker swiveled toward Stillman. “You heard me. Winstead can reconstruct the files. Be my guest, have yourself a ball.”

  Swift to capitalize on this rash invitation, Stillman nodded.

  “We can have our people in here tomorrow.”

  Conrad was already at the door.

  “Go ahead. Just don’t give me any of this horsewater about common interests.”

  The slamming door supplied the punctuation.

  It was Alan Frayne who had the unenviable task of breaking the news to Tina.

  Taut as a whip, she repeated his statement in tones of stark disbelief.

  “Winstead takes over completely? I’m totally out of the picture?”

  “That’s what Conrad agreed to.”

  Tina’s fingers were flexing and unflexing like claws. “Conrad might as well have come out and said I’m not to be trusted. How could he do that?”

  “Conrad got himself into one of his states,” Alan said wearily. “He was accusing and denying and this was just his way of throwing down a challenge to Winstead. He didn’t think how it would look.”

  “Then why didn’t you make him understand?”

  “You know what Conrad’s like when he gets going. Nobody could have stopped him. And maybe it’s not such a bad idea anyway.”

  Tina’s level glance flicked across Frayne.

  “You, too, Alan?”

  “Oh, for Chrissake! You know better than that, Tina. But the pressure is going to stay on until this is cleared up. What difference does it make who does the job? It’ll be a relief to have it over and done with.”

  “The rest of you don’t know what pressure is. Bob’s the one who’s under arrest for murder. And how in God’s name do I explain this to him?”

  Frayne shifted uncomfortably. “This doesn’t have anything to do with Bob,” he mumbled.

  “Says who?”

  “. . . so the Winstead boys will be going in there tomorrow,” Tom Robichaux concluded his report.

  “Very satisfactory from everybody’s point of view,” Thatcher commented. “And this came about because Conrad Ecker lost his head and challenged them to do their damnedest?”

  “That’s what Winstead claims.” Robichaux paused to take the first critical sip of his vodka martini. “Don’t believe it for a second myself.”

  As usual, Tom Robichaux’s utterance could stand clarification.

  “You think Winstead’s lying?”

  “No, I don’t believe the old man lost his head.”

  It was rare indeed for Tom to cast himself as a percipient analyst of human motivation.

  “Go on,” said Thatcher, enthralled.

  Robichaux, after glancing around for enemy ears, lowered his voice. “Fact of the matter is, same thing happened over at our shop years ago. My father told me about it. They began to suspect one of the youngsters was diddling his accounts but it was awkward, his being family. They didn’t want to start anything themselves, so they goaded the outsiders into demanding an investigation. Back at the turn of the century, that was.”

  Nobody likes scandal in their organization but Thatcher felt that after a hundred years it was no longer necessary to whisper.

  “So the Robichauxs have a skeleton in their closet,” he said bracingly. “What difference does it make by now?”

  But Tom was waggling his head solemnly.

  “Wasn’t a Robichaux,” he intoned. “It was a Devane.”

  “Ah!”

  Some things remain constant. For four generations Robichaux sprigs had sowed wild oats with wine, women, and song. The Devanes, Quaker to a man, had been cut from different cloth. They dissipated their youthful high spirits by driving ambulances for the American Friends Service Committee. The shots from Sarajevo had barely died away before they were speeding around the trenches. Subsequent decades had given them more continents to play with. At this very moment, Thatcher recalled, Francis Devane had a grandson in Ethiopia.

  “That’s interesting,” he said, tactfully turning to less sensitive areas. “So you think Conrad Ecker did this deliberately? It makes sense, of course. He has more reason than anyone to want to know what’s happening.”

  But now that Robichaux had remembered that even a Devane could go wrong, nobody was above suspicion.

  “Unless he already has a damn good idea.”

  Although Conrad Ecker dispensed with fancy cars and country clubs, he was the beneficiary of at least some perquisites of power. Regularly, if unconsciously, he drove his companions wild—and they never retaliated. Today was to prove a gold-star exception.

  Having shoveled his difficulties onto other backs, Conrad carefully removed himself from the fall-out area. Arriving home flushed with success, he incautiously answered the phone. The voice that pierced his eardrum resembled a whistling teakettle.

  “Dear Lord, what is going on there? They’ve arrested Bob and Tina won’t talk to me, I don’t know what—”

  “Virginia? Will you calm down? I can’t understand you.”

  “Calm down? I saw it all on TV. They have my son in jail, where anything could happen to him. It must be some terrible mistake and . . .”

  It was typical of his sis
ter, thought Conrad, that she had seen the coverage of Bob in custody and failed to catch the footage of his release.

  “Bob’s not in jail anymore,” he bawled over the nonstop flow.

  “What’s that?”

  Alice had now been attracted by the bull-like roars emanating from her husband. Wildly Conrad semaphored toward the kitchen.

  “He’s out on bail,” he continued. “So you can relax.”

  “If he’s home, why doesn’t he answer my call? All I ever get is the answering machine. There’s something you’re not telling me,” the dental drill said accusingly.

  With profound relief, Conrad had heard the click of an extension.

  “Virginia, it’s me, Alice. There’s nothing we’re not telling you. But Bob and Tina are being hounded by the press, so they’re probably not listening to their messages.”

  “My poor baby, going through this all alone,” moaned Virginia, erasing wife and uncle in one sweep. “I’ll fly out as soon as I’ve packed.”

  Conrad, who had carried the phone to the limit of its cord, was shaking his head furiously at the kitchen doorway.

  “You mustn’t do that.”

  “How can you say that, Alice? My place is at my son’s side. If it were Doug, you wouldn’t hesitate for a second.”

  It is difficult to tell someone that her mere presence may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. But Alice, more concerned for Bob and Tina than for her husband, knew she had to come up with something.

  Infusing her voice with grave anxiety, she said: “It’s the children, Virginia. That house is no place for them. If there’s no improvement, the best thing would be to send them to you.”

  Virginia’s neutral murmur suggested that she was torn between the roles of tigress mother and savior grandmother.

  “I know Tina’s at her wit’s end,” Alice continued slyly. “But I suppose the children could go to her family.”

  That did the trick. Unfortunately, Virginia was now free to turn to other matters.

  “How could anyone think of Bob as a murderer? It’s just so absurd. And why isn’t Conrad doing something? You’d think that after fifteen years . . .”

  Alice was able to run interference with Conrad’s sister, but she was out when his daughter called. The ensuing conversation was alarming enough to make Betty take the unusual step of speaking to her ex-husband twice within the same week.

  “Alan, I’m worried about Daddy.”

  It had been a long, hard day for Frayne.

  “And I’m worried about everyone. Bob and Tina are just about at the breaking point.”

  “Oh, so little Miss Efficiency can’t handle this one,” purred his ex-wife with malicious satisfaction.

  Frayne sighed. Tina had always been a problem for Betty. On the one hand, as she became more and more captive to the Westport way of life, Betty found employment at the Ecker mill unspeakably plebeian. On the other hand, she had never warmed to the sight of her father and her husband and her brother including Tina in their business discussions. To be absolutely fair, Tina had not helped the situation any with her open boredom at the long recitals of Betty’s cultural triumphs.

  “God, can’t you lay off for a minute? We’ve got enough on our plates. The last thing any of us needs—and that includes Conrad—is a lot of sniping from someone on the other side of the country.”

  Affronted, she retreated into dignity. “I am naturally concerned about my family.”

  “Crap! You want to be part of the action in Bridgeport when it suits you, and forget about us the rest of the time. You’re the one who decided to take off. So now, why don’t you just butt out?”

  One of the underrated joys of divorce is the glorious freedom from previous inhibition. When Alan Frayne finally hung up, he reflected with pleasure that some other man was going to have to cope with the inevitable sulks.

  Taking a leaf from the Laverdieres’ book, Conrad Ecker had resorted to the answering machine himself. But this was no protection when trouble loomed right in his own precious workshop.

  “I don’t see what you’re bellyaching about,” he told a white-faced Bob Laverdiere.

  “Like hell you don’t!”

  After two irritating exchanges with his female relatives, Conrad was ripe for blood.

  “Don’t blame me for your problems,” he thundered. Then, with considerable satisfaction, he reviewed his nephew’s blunders. Bob had started a fight with Victor Hunnicut, waved a skewer around, and told a bunch of stupid lies. “Naturally you’re in hot water. It’s all your own silly fault.”

  Over the years Conrad had become accustomed to dismissing his nephew without a second thought. But this time he sparked a fierce counterattack.

  “Oh, sure! Who got the wonderful idea of selling in the first place? Who decided that ASI was the way to go? Who brought that little shit Hunnicut up here? You set the whole stage for big trouble, and then you act as if forcing Ives into an apology solved everything. Like hell it did. All it did was save your face.”

  Genuinely outraged at the suggestion of flaws in his own performance, Conrad took his stand on what he regarded as unassailable ground.

  “Don’t forget you’ll make a mint out of the sale.”

  “Listen, you’re not talking to Mother now,” Bob flashed back as if he possessed second sight. “Tina and I have given you fifteen years of hard work and loyalty. And as soon as the insurance company uses a little muscle, what do you do? You throw Tina to the wolves.”

  “That’s not what it means—”

  “You might just as well have accused her of fraud.”

  Alice, fluttering around the belligerents like a moth, tried to mediate.

  “Now, you’re both saying more than you mean.”

  Her husband, striving to regain his usual dominance, paid no attention. “That’s crazy,” he blustered. “I’m just letting them do the dogwork. It isn’t as if—”

  “In fact,” Bob broke in, “anybody would think you know there’s something wrong.”

  He was overriding Conrad with an ease that stung his uncle.

  “It’s my company. I can do what I like.”

  “Not when it comes to railroading Tina.”

  “Who the hell do you think you are? I’ll do any damn thing I like to protect my son’s interests.”

  Bob was piling on the scorn.

  “Your company, your son. What it all boils down to is you.”

  “Oh, Lord, now we’re in for it,” Alice half-whispered.

  Both men were on their feet, facing each other in bristling anger. Their legs were splayed, their shoulders hunched, their jaws thrust forward. To Alice the most alarming feature was their resemblance to each other. With Conrad so sensitive about Doug and Bob so sensitive about Tina, there would be no holding them.

  “How dare you say that!” Conrad roared.

  But Bob was going from strength to strength.

  “You’re selling out so Doug will never have to worry about money. You don’t give a damn about anything else. That’s all this company is to you—a chance to play God any way you want to. And you’re ready to shaft everybody else—me, Tina, Alan. Sure, you’ve put a lot of sweat into this, but so have we. Well, play with your toys, but keep your mitts off Tina.”

  “So you’re taking care of Tina now. Well, that’s a switch,” Conrad sneered. “For years she’s had to play mother to you.”

  Shaking his head as if he had received a blow, Bob sucked in his breath and then went straight for the jugular.

  “You know what your trouble is? We all felt sorry for Doug when he had his heart attack. But you felt sorry for yourself,” he snarled, deliberately trampling over sacred ground. “That’s the way it’s always been. All you can see is that something’s upset your apple cart. You’ve been sour as hell ever since. You’re just jealous that the rest of us are here and Doug isn’t. While you’re running around telling everybody that Tina’s responsible for the company’s finances, why don’t you go further
? Why don’t you tell them Doug set up our little systems and Doug is now in Florida managing God knows what investments.”

  With eyes bulging, Conrad slammed a meaty palm on the bench so hard he involuntarily winced.

  “Get out of my house!” he yelled. “Get out right now!”

  For the first time in many a year it was Conrad Ecker who broke off hostilities.

  Chapter 18

  RED INK

  What goes up, comes down—although usually not at the same time. Nevertheless, just as the Ecker Company catapulted into nationwide notoriety, it dropped off the radar screen at ASI. Some buzzing about Victor Hunnicut’s murder continued throughout the tabloid-reading work force, but headquarters was suddenly overtaken by something far more ominous.

  “. . . according to my sources, here’s what they’re taking to the grand jury,” said the bearer of bad news. With lawyerly exhaustiveness, he read out a list of criminal and civil charges that turned his audience pale.

  “. . . and finally, two shipments of bored pipes—that’s gun barrels in everyday language—to Gubelhaas GmbH, a front for Libya. Sparling will be charged with violating II Commerce 48–50. That carries jail time as well as a hefty fine. In other words, gentlemen, Sparling’s about to raise an almighty stink.”

  With a bleak look at Phil Pepitone, Wade Sullivan, ASI’s internal auditor, dismissed counsel’s opinion. “We already knew that Sparling is a disaster area.”

  Since everybody else grasped the difference between a financial disappointment and a public catastrophe, Sullivan’s ill-advised comment was met with silence. Around Gardner Ives’s big desk, the men charting ASI’s immediate future rubbed their jaws, fiddled with their glasses, and thought darkly about Sparling Castings, of Muncie, Indiana.

  Sparling had been ASI’s first timid venture in acquisition. It had been promoted, by Phil Pepitone, among others, as a modest expansion of ASI’s core business. Tubing, pipes, and well-digging equipment, when available at the right price, had looked like a safe and solid bet.

  But, as Sullivan had just reminded them, Sparling never really panned out. Plagued by inexplicable breakdowns, output rarely met monthly quotas. Accounting slovenliness surfaced with alarming regularity. Within two years, opinion at ASI was sharply divided along party lines. Sparling was either a bad joke, or a criminal mistake.