Right on the Money

by Emma Lathen

  “Damn fool,” Conrad argued. “He should have known it would never pass as an accident.”

  “You’re underestimating Frayne,” Thatcher retorted.

  “You sure are,” Giorni agreed. “If he hadn’t gone on to kill someone, the fire wouldn’t have raised such a stink. And he had bad luck with it, anyway. First, the alarm went out too soon. If the fire hadn’t been discovered until the night watchman came back, it would have been harder to tell that some lab books had been gutted. And the acetone he used is water-soluble, so there’s a good chance you’ll miss it with the spectrometer. Besides, Frayne made damn sure this was a non-technical fire. He didn’t monkey with the sprinkler heads, he didn’t use a detonator or timer.”

  Thatcher did not regard Frayne’s plan as beyond criticism.

  “Not using a timer was an error,” he pointed out. “The Laverdiere home in Westport was the number posted for the fire department. They had to be home to take that call but Frayne was not notified until the following morning.”

  Recalling the hectic atmosphere of that predawn emergency, Bob agreed. “I thought of calling Conrad, but not Alan. And even if I’d called him from the plant, he would have had time to get home.”

  “In spite of the confusing element introduced by Hunnicut’s presence in Bridgeport that night,” Thatcher continued, “the most likely people to burn Ecker records were always the people at Ecker. That’s why Frayne bent over backward to make it seem as if the financial books were the target of the blaze.”

  Tina was no longer amused. “So having made sure I’d be chief suspect, Alan could relax and proceed happily.”

  “Certainly he had every reason to congratulate himself on his foresight when Sam Bradley showed up, frankly asking to see the material on rejected ideas. But near misses can be tension-inducing and Frayne’s luck ran out at the trade show.”

  “You mean something happened there we don’t know about?” Bob asked.

  “Far from it. In fact, you and Gardner Ives unwittingly conspired to convince Frayne he was facing a deadly peril.”

  The old Bob Laverdiere reemerged.

  “Me?” he gasped, reviewing his behavior at Javits. “I didn’t do anything; I was done to. Hunnicut unloaded that pile of garbage on me, and I was thrown for a loop. As for Ives, I never even saw him.”

  “But your rendition of what passed between Quinn and Hunnicut was misleading. Mind you, Ken Nicolls was confused, too. At first he thought Hunnicut’s remarks about the sale of ideas from the lab related to Ecker rather than to Bradley. Your version encouraged Alan Frayne to make the same mistake. On top of that, you assumed Hunnicut was the man who would be handling Ecker for ASI. When you transmitted that alarm to Frayne, he would have remembered Hunnicut’s wide-ranging questions in Connecticut.”

  “They had me confused, too,” Tina admitted. “After the inspection trip and the session in Princeton, I didn’t know where Victor Hunnicut stood at ASI.”

  “To make matters worse, Frayne could not get satisfactory answers to his questions from Gardner Ives.”

  Again, Tom Robichaux stirred to life.

  “I’ve had that trouble with Gardner myself,” he said chattily. “The man wanders all over the place.”

  And when Tom complained about divagation, thought Thatcher, things were really bad.

  “Ives simply wanted to end the encounter,” he said hastily, “but to Frayne it seemed as if ASI were evading any discussion of Hunnicut’s status. So there Frayne stood, with a Hunnicut who was going to be established at Ecker, with a Hunnicut who already suspected what Frayne had been up to. The danger was self-evident and Hunnicut had to go.”

  It did not look that simple to Tina. “I still can’t get over the risks Alan took,” she said. “When the police suspected us, it seemed so absurd. Imagine doing something like that at a crowded exhibition hall.”

  “I’m sure he took normal precautions,” Thatcher reasoned. “He didn’t grab the skewer from the Ecker display until Pepitone had left. And, as nobody has come forth as witness, he must have been careful when he steered Hunnicut to the elevator. Of course Frayne had to chance what he’d find when the elevator doors opened in the basement. God knows what he would have done if some innocent trucker had been standing there.”

  These days Bob Laverdiere could afford to joke about that.

  “Instead Alan got clean away and the innocent trucker saw me.”

  “Yeah, but that same elevator always made you look like a wild card,” Giorni announced, confessing earlier doubts. “That’s why I moved so fast the minute Thatcher suggested following up on Frayne’s list of rejections. As soon as you had a motive for him, he stuck out like a sore thumb.”

  This time Conrad suspected Monday-morning quarterbacking rather than pure dumb luck. “Why should Alan stick out more than anybody else?”

  “Because Hunnicut was told by his boss to find you and apologize,” Giorni said promptly. “The easiest explanation for the elevator was that somebody told him you were in the basement and offered to take him there. The only one likely to pull that off was Frayne. And he was a little too casual about putting Pepitone by the skewer at the right time. As soon as I thought that one over, I realized he was taking out insurance.”

  “He must have been incredibly nervous when you began to ask about Bradley’s chance to steal from ASI’s lab,” Thatcher pointed out. “It would take only a slight redirection of thought for you to realize how much easier it would be for Frayne. After all, Bradley headed a facility that crawled with scientists and lab assistants and clerks who knew what was in the works. Furthermore they had such a poor record that anything likely to be a success would attract mass attention. But Frayne was not only sitting next to a prolific source of good ideas, he was the only person who saw the results of both his test people and his costing people.”

  The reference to that prolific source did not escape Conrad.

  “I may have had more good ideas than I realized,” he said reflectively.

  Thatcher had been wondering if this possibility would occur to him, but Bob was mystified.

  “What do you mean, Conrad?”

  “You want to bet that Alan didn’t burn all the lab books. He probably took the ones that were promising. The next thing I know the discount stores will be importing my ice-cream maker from Switzerland. Ah, well,” Conrad continued with uncharacteristic resignation, “it’s time for me to put all that behind me, now that I’m retiring.”

  Thatcher felt that Giorni deserved an explanation. “Conrad was on the phone to ASI this morning. The merger is going full steam ahead.”

  “It’ll sure go a lot faster now that Pepitone’s in charge of it,” Conrad said peppily.

  His attempt to bully Pepitone, Thatcher knew, had met with the kind of resistance he appreciated. Poor Gardner Ives had never been any fun at all.

  “So Pepitone’s now a white-haired boy at ASI,” Giorni concluded.

  “If you ask me, he’s going to be sitting in Ives’s chair before many months go by. But I’m not the one who’ll have to deal with him. I’m letting Bob take over from now on.”

  Giorni was singularly uninterested in Conrad’s acts of contrition. “Then, if Bradley manages to hang on, everybody comes out of this fine, including Frayne for the moment.”

  “Do you think Alan will be caught?” Bob asked, seeing more headlines in his future.

  “Depends on how much money he’s stashed over there, and how savvy he is,” said Giorni realistically. “Interpol has been alerted, but none of this would be necessary if Mr. Ecker, here, hadn’t blabbed to his wife.”

  This was one charge from which Conrad demanded vindication. “I never said a word to her. Alice overheard me on the phone agreeing to get that list for you, and she added everything up. Then she put Alan wise to what was going on.”

  For some extraordinary reason, Robichaux was moved by this tale. As a man who went through in-laws like boxes of Kleenex, he regarded Alan Frayne’s tenure in the
Ecker family as a record-breaker.

  “Fifteen years,” he murmured, awe-struck. “She must be devoted to him.”

  “She is not!” Conrad shot back witheringly. “She was just thinking about the kids. Alice says she’s not having her grandchildren grow up with a father who’s a convicted killer, not if she can help it. If he’s just another guy on the run, she says he’ll be forgotten.”

  Tina was curious about something else.

  “Never mind what she said. What in the world did Alan say when she warned him?”

  “Haven’t you got it clear yet? Alice didn’t warn him, she ordered him to go. Of course I gave her hell for that.”

  Giorni, as the symbol of authority, nodded approval. “And so you should have.”

  This was enough to make Conrad reverse in his tracks.

  “I’m not so sure now. I don’t deny I’d like to get my hands on Alan’s throat, but Alice is probably right. Why the hell should the rest of us have to live with this? Let him scurry around Europe trying to sell my rejects to schlock outfits. No, what burned me up was that she didn’t tell me until this morning. She said she wasn’t going to have me interfering.”

  If Conrad expected support, he was in for a rude surprise.

  “Good for Alice,” Tina applauded.

  Conrad frowned. “The truth is, Alice is getting a swelled head with this cookbook of hers.”

  “Cookbook?”

  “Didn’t I tell you? She’s been fooling around, trying to bake and make pastry in a microwave. When she finally figured out how to do it, she wrote down the directions, and damned if some publisher isn’t going to bring it out!”

  ASI had merely noticed, and resented, all the free publicity flowing to the Eckers. Thatcher was pleased to see that Alice and some enterprising publisher intended to exploit it.

  Ecker, meanwhile, was continuing to detail his wife’s efforts. “Of course it wasn’t easy. She had to do a lot of experimenting. She just got stubborn about making the damned thing do what she wanted it to do . . . seems some fool who never tried baking a cake did the design . . . don’t see why it has to be that hard . . . why juggle the ingredients? . . . why not change the design?”

  As Conrad continued, his gaze focused on a point far away and his voice became fainter and fainter. Tom Robichaux and Inspector Giorni quietly peeled off for a discussion of ASI. But Bob and Tina Laverdiere remained so rapt that Thatcher sensed he was part of a privileged band.

  He was watching inspiration descend—on a client of the Sloan Guaranty Trust.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Emma Lathen is the pen name shared by Mary Jane Latsis, an economist, and Martha Henissart, a lawyer. Their first book written together was published in 1961.