Right on the Money

by Emma Lathen

  His witness was lost, Giorni realized, when Pepitone stabbed the intercom.

  “Tell Ives I’m coming in to see him,” he ordered.

  The secretary’s breakdown was now complete.

  “Oh, I’m not sure that’s such a good idea, Phil,” she moaned despairingly.

  “Well, I am!”

  Pepitone was already on his feet, speaking more to himself than to Giorni. “If I find out that Gardner is behind this, that stuffed shirt is in for the roughhouse of his life. By the time I get through with him, every single member of the board is going to realize how Sparling was his wonderful baby.”

  Abandoned unceremoniously, Inspector Giorni was left to review the reactions he had provoked. Sam Bradley, so insistently a spectator rather than a participant, had committed the ultimate absurdity of trying to join Giorni as another outsider looking in at ASI. Wiley Quinn was so rattled, he could be hiding anything. And Phil Pepitone found the burdens he was carrying, whatever their nature, so onerous that he was ready to seize any opportunity for open combat.

  But in the end, like most policemen, Giorni preferred facts to personalities. Sam Bradley might conceivably have a motive to kill Victor Hunnicut. Quinn undeniably had opportunity. Only Phil Pepitone looked as if he could qualify on both counts.

  Chapter 24

  EXTRA DIVIDENDS

  Gardner Ives never knew what hit him. Two hours later he was still white and shaken, shock waves were reverberating through ASI, and Phil Pepitone was crowing to his secretary.

  “Relax, Irene. Ives is going to find another patsy,” he announced. “He’s agreed that it won’t be Philip S. Pepitone who carries the can for Sparling.”

  Irene was overjoyed to hear this, and so was Sam Bradley when he burst in shortly thereafter.

  “. . . and I’ve got something else you ought to see,” he exclaimed.

  Pepitone was still savoring his moment of triumph. “If it’s more trouble, I don’t want to hear about it right now.”

  “Just the opposite.” Bradley flourished his copy of the Winstead report. “I thought all you people studied the insurance company’s review of Ecker.”

  “Days ago,” Pepitone agreed.

  “Well, you missed the most important part.”

  “What the hell do you mean?” said Pepitone narrowly. “Winstead proved Ecker’s sound as a bell financially. What’s more important than that?”

  Bradley was practically licking his lips. “You should have read the footnotes about the test lab. Frayne never breathed a word to me when I was up there, but it looks as if Ecker has made a real breakthrough. They could be on the verge of producing a digital reprogrammer.”

  “Suppose you talk English,” Pepitone growled.

  Putting a curb on his enthusiasm, Bradley obeyed. “Digital programmers screw up if there’s a power outage. You can set the microwave, but all it takes is a momentary glitch in the current for you to find a burned-out roast or a hunk of raw meat.”

  Now that Pepitone knew what they were talking about, he was ready with objection. “But that’s on the market now. It’s a necessity for production lines.”

  “Those devices are for heavy industrial applications. They’re complicated and they cost more than a whole kitchen. Ecker is cracking the consumer market with something much smaller.”

  “And simpler, I suppose.”

  “It’s so simple, it’s elegant,” relied Bradley, his technical appreciation displacing commercial considerations. “I can’t get over this. It’s unlike anything Conrad Ecker has ever done before. That old geezer is really something. He’s going out in a blaze of glory.”

  Pepitone began to share the excitement. “You’d better go up to Ecker to check it out and make sure it isn’t pie-in-the-sky. Get everything you can out of Frayne. This could be damned important.”

  “Exactly,” said Bradley, beginning to lecture. “You realize, Phil, that this defuses your Ecker problem, too. Nobody can question your judgment now.”

  “Yes, Sam, I realize that,” said Pepitone, who had already figured this out. “But it’s bigger than that. If you can call back and tell me everything’s kosher, I’ll be able to light a fire under Ives. We’re going to have to move fast to keep ahead of the pack.”

  “I shouldn’t have any trouble. By now Frayne must know the cat’s out of the bag.” Bradley rose to leave, then, with Southern courtesy, added, “Phil, I can’t tell you how pleased I am the way things are turning out.”

  Once again Pepitone was ahead of him. Sam Bradley was not the man to rejoice in the victories of others. If he was seeking allies so eagerly, he expected to need them.

  “I wasn’t sure whether you’d be willing to talk,” Bradley said to Alan Frayne when he reached Bridgeport.

  Now that Conrad Ecker and the Laverdieres were reconciled, now that orders were pouring in, now that another Ecker triumph was waiting in the wings, Frayne was his old self.

  “I wouldn’t have a month ago,” he said cheerfully. “And I wasn’t crazy about letting in the Winstead team. We were still trying to keep it under wraps. But while we were all running around in circles with the police, my crew ironed out the final bug in the production process. We’re home clear now. The patents are filed, and we’ll be turning these things out before you know it.”

  “What a shame you didn’t have the reprogrammer in time for the show.”

  Alan Frayne’s smile threatened to split his face. “This one sells itself. We don’t need all the hype. Would you like to see a demo?”

  Bradley accepted the offer and, afterward, overflowed with congratulations.

  “You know,” he said as he was preparing to leave, “everybody’s been on my case because of ASI’s research. There’s been static about funding, about security, about project selection. But I’m beginning to think the trouble is that I don’t have somebody like Conrad Ecker.”

  Bradley had barely cleared the premises when a familiar figure entered.

  “Lord, not again,” Frayne groaned.

  Inspector Giorni politely requested a few minutes time.

  “That’s one way of putting it,” Frayne grumbled, leading the way back to his office. With the door closed, he launched into complaint.

  “When is this going to stop?”

  Giorni was mollifying. “There’s no need to get hot under the collar. Now that the charges against Mr. Laverdiere are being dropped, we hope you people here can help out with a timetable for the trade show. I’ve already spoken with the others.”

  Even as a witness rather than a suspect, Frayne wanted to see the last of the police.

  “Nobody likes having us around, but don’t forget that you’ve got a big stake in getting this thing cleared up,” Giorni said persuasively.

  “Oh, all right. Fire away.”

  “Let’s start when Mr. Laverdiere complained to you and Conrad Ecker about Hunnicut.”

  Frayne, expecting the familiar questions about Bob’s rage, temporized. “The Laverdieres have already admitted they were mad.”

  “I want to know what time you think that was.”

  “Time?” Frayne said blankly.

  Patiently Giorni tried the usual promptings. Had Frayne eaten lunch, and did he remember when? How long until Ken Nicolls had surfaced? Could he estimate the length of the indignation meeting with Bob Laverdiere?

  Giorni covered every minute until the confrontation with Gardener Ives, then commented, “That’s all pretty hazy. Can you be more specific about what you did afterward?”

  “I decided to do my job. We have two reasons for going to the show. We display our own goods, and we keep an eye on the competition. I’d already covered some of the exhibits in the morning. After Ives I did the rest.”

  “So you went directly from ASI to a tour of the hall?”

  Now that he had been put through the process of reconstruction, Frayne worked harder on his replies.

  “Well, not directly. I’d done my best to soothe Ives’s ruffled feathers, bu
t Conrad had still been boiling when he left. I thought I’d try my pacifying technique on him, too.”

  “You wanted him calmed down for the famous apology he was supposed to get?”

  Frayne was amused. “Hell, no. Hunnicut wasn’t important to us. But Conrad meets a lot of people at the show who are. I wanted him in fighting trim for all those big customers. That’s why I swung by our booth. But it was a washout because Conrad wasn’t there. In fact, there wasn’t anybody there except Phil Pepitone, and I’d had my fill of ASI, so I ducked out.”

  “Now I want you to think carefully, Mr. Frayne. Did you see anybody from Ecker or ASI as you were circulating around the floor?”

  His brow wrinkled, Frayne concentrated. “I don’t think so. In fact, I couldn’t have. Obviously, if it had been anybody from Ecker, I would have stopped to talk. And, as I say, I was gun-shy of the ASI team, so I’d remember them.”

  “Mrs. Laverdiere says she was doing the rounds about then, too.”

  Frayne was not bothered by this. “No reason for us to bump into each other. I’d already done the right-hand side of the hall, so I stayed on the left. And some of the booths had a real crowd.”

  “And when did you hear about the murder? Were you still on the floor?”

  “Depends what you mean. I was at the Black and Decker booth when someone said there’d been an accident. We could see guards and people hurrying to the rear of the buildings. But it wasn’t until I came back to our display that I heard Ken Nicolls had found a body. Even then, I didn’t know it was Hunnicut until the police began questioning us.”

  Giorni had deliberately introduced neutral subjects to act as a buffer before the next turn in his interrogation.

  “All that may be helpful, you never can tell,” he said, pocketing his notebook and leaning back casually. “Now I’d like to consult you as an expert.”

  “An expert about what?”

  “I want to talk about the problems of stealing ideas from a lab.”

  Frayne was silent for a moment, then he asked unhappily: “This is about Sam Bradley, isn’t it?”

  “I see you people have heard the talk,” Giorni commented.

  “Conrad’s been keeping tabs on ASI. You can’t blame him, with the merger and everything, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything to what Hunnicut was saying.”

  “I realize that. I haven’t forgotten he said the Laverdieres were crooks and you were covering for Ecker’s senility.”

  The mere repetition of these charges raised Frayne’s hackles.

  “Not one word of which is true,” he ground out.

  “We know the guy was flinging around anything he could dream up, but the talk still has to be checked out. In Bradley’s case the starting point seems to be that his lab hasn’t produced anything his company could use.”

  “Which could just be a run of real bad luck. Inspector, let me say one thing. We’re a very successful outfit and we’ve introduced a bunch of good products. Yet, at a rough guess, two-thirds of Conrad’s ideas bit the dust and don’t go anywhere. Even so, he’s practically a legend. You talk to anybody in the industry and they wonder how we can do it. Because everybody knows that most ideas, for one reason or another, never make it to market. It’s unfortunate that ASI hasn’t come up with at least one new development, but it doesn’t prove anything.”

  Giorni duly noted that these were the kindest words about Sam Bradley that he had yet heard.

  “Like I said, we’re just checking,” he rumbled. “Another one of the accusations was that Bradley doesn’t run a tight ship. That’s really what I want to discuss. I suppose a lab has to take some precautions. Otherwise, what’s to stop one of Bradley’s young scientists from realizing he’s got something worth a mint and simply pocketing it?”

  Frayne spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  “I’m the last person to ask. Of course you’re right fundamentally, but we don’t have those problems here. Bradley’s sitting on top of a big operation with a lot of hired hands. If it’s like most big outfits, there’s a fair amount of turnover. ASI must do something to protect itself, but I don’t have a clue how they work it. Over here, it’s a different ball game. Conrad Ecker is our R and D operation. There’s no question of riding herd on a pack of his assistants.”

  Alan Frayne clearly wanted to avoid attacking Sam Bradley, but there was still merit to his position. Giorni was willing to concede that Ecker and ASI were different animals. Returning to his chief concern, he said, “Okay, let’s forget about how someone might steal the stuff. Let’s go on to what he’d do with it once he had it. I suppose he’d sell it?”

  “Well, that would be the name of the game, wouldn’t it?” Frayne asked cautiously.

  “Yeah, but I don’t understand exactly how he’d go about it. I suppose companies buy ideas.”

  “All the time,” Frayne agreed, “and at every level. Most companies have a program where they pay employees for cost-cutting ideas. It can be fifty dollars for a simple improvement up to thousands for a biggie about production. At the opposite end, you can go off and buy another company to get its ideas. That’s basically why ASI is after us.”

  Giorni knew he was not getting what he wanted, but it took him several moments to analyze the inadequacy.

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” he said at last. “In both those situations the buyer actively wants something and is trying to find it. But what about the reverse? When the seller is trying to find a buyer?”

  “I see what you mean. Well, the world is filled with people who think they’ve got a better mousetrap, and the mail does bring offerings from crazies. But there are more commercial ways of going about it, and every now and then you hear of an established company buying an idea. I don’t really know how it’s arranged.”

  “The Ecker Company has never bought an idea through the commercial system?”

  Alan Frayne froze. Then, with an angry flush, he burst forth: “Look, is all this just a roundabout way of getting back to that bullshit about Conrad being senile? Let me tell you, he’s just come up with another miracle. Hundreds of people have been after this one. And I’m not talking about guys fooling around in garages. Conrad’s beaten out a pack of big R and D outfits. A year from now the stores will be filled with our digital reprogrammer and the industry will be yakking about the Ecker magic all over again.”

  Abandoning his casual posture, Giorni snapped upright. “What’s this about a new product? This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “We were sitting on it until the Winstead people picked it up while they were nosing around here.”

  “Was ASI one of the outfits working on this idea?” Giorni demanded bluntly.

  Frayne stared. “How the hell would I know? Off the top of my head, I’d say not likely. It isn’t in their line. But then, they’re trying to expand out of their line.”

  Entirely new possibilities were jostling and thrusting within Giorni’s mind. Trying to stay on top of his churning thoughts, he deliberately slowed the pace of his questions.

  “Let’s take this one step at a time,” he said. “That fire you had here. It wasn’t just the financials that went up in smoke, was it? There were lab books there, too?”

  Giorni’s habit of hopping from one subject to another again disconcerted Frayne.

  “Sure. That’s all in the fire marshal’s report.”

  “And there’s no way you can tell if it all got burned or if something was stolen?”

  “No, but I don’t see where this is leading.”

  “What if somebody was after your new product, and the fire was just a cover?”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense. For Chrissake, Inspector,” Frayne exploded, “just because I said we don’t have the same problems as ASI doesn’t mean we don’t have any security at all. Those were old lab books. Everything current is kept right here in my lab in a nice fireproof safe armed with all those anti-burglar devices. We don’t send material over to records
until a new development is fully protected or until it’s turned out to be a dud. There wouldn’t be any point to stealing from records. Everybody knows that.”

  Silently Giorni provided an addendum to Frayne’s last remark. Everybody at Ecker knows that. Was it possible that someone who had not been present during ASI’s inspection had made a natural error?

  “My mistake, it was just a passing thought,” he muttered. Then, with another of his sudden veers, he continued, “So let’s go back to your movements at the show and see if we can fill in any blanks.”

  As Inspector Giorni left, he was reflecting on the universal misconception about what was useful to the police. Virtually everybody at Ecker had ended his session by apologizing for an inability to pinpoint times and places at the trade show. Tina Laverdiere had provided a notable instance. She remembered glimpsing Sam Bradley at one of the exhibits, but could not recall its name, its position, or the time. All she retained with any clarity was her spasm of irritation at the clothing worn by a woman demonstrating the rotisserie.

  “They had outfitted her in a pink ruffled apron, a teased hairdo, and the highest heels I’ve ever seen. No woman has looked like that at a barbecue since World War Two. But then,” she had smiled ruefully, “that’s not the sort of thing you want to know.”

  On the contrary, this was exactly what Giorni wanted to know. Armed with these details, he would have no trouble determining all those specifics that Tina could not supply. In a similar manner, Conrad Ecker had contributed a previously unknown reference mark. He admitted that, after his bout with Ives, he had purchased a roll of antacid tablets and consumed two on the spot.

  “They claim those things work right away, but it took ten minutes for them to kick in. Honest to God, if I advertised my products that way . . .”

  There followed a sweeping indictment of antacid claims, including a few of the pithy comments with which he had favored the salesperson.

  But Alan Frayne remained the most egregious example of public naïveté. He, too, had excused his performance, in blissful ignorance that he had placed Phil Pepitone by the Ecker booth—at exactly the right moment to steal the murder weapon. And his disclosure of Conrad Ecker’s new brainchild provided the first light on a nagging problem.