Dry Bones

by Peter Quinn

  In practice, since becoming a publicly traded company, ISC didn’t have partners. Whether “associates” or “specialists”—the new designations of choice—all were salaried employees. Dunne’s contract would either be renewed (or not) at the end of the year.

  Louis Pohl had thrown himself out a window of the adjacent Commodore Hotel the previous February. Though Pully didn’t leave a note, it seemed certain he’d suffered a nervous breakdown. He’d called down to the front desk, gibbering about the walls in his room turning into blood and the chairs talking to him. By the time the house detective reached his room to see what was going on, Pully was splattered on the sidewalk below.

  Dunne and Roberta were vacationing in Havana when it happened. There was no funeral. He sent a note of condolence to Pully’s mother in Forest Hills, and she wrote back an anguished, painful-to-read response that he kept in his desk drawer. She had her son’s ashes in an urn on her mantel. She couldn’t understand why he’d taken his own life. He’d always been “serious and individualistic,” never seemed suicidal. She wished she’d known of his intent. She was sure she could have talked him out of it.

  “To lose a child is to have your heart forever broken,” she wrote. “You don’t recover. You go on. But to lose an only child and in such a manner—oh, Mr. Dunne, you can’t imagine.”

  She was wrong. Though he could never fully comprehend, he could imagine. Soon after he returned from Europe, he’d visited Peter Bunde’s parents in Buffalo, sat with them in their living room for a long winter’s afternoon. Grief was lined deep in their faces like the ruts water carves into rock.

  On the practical side, Dunne knew that with Pully’s demise he no longer had a “rabbi” to watch over him in the inner ranks of management. A new generation of button-down business school graduates in their late twenties and early thirties—one or two who’d served during the Korean conflict but never made it overseas—was surging into leadership positions and pushing to hire consultants to help “identify and implement long-overdue efficiencies” and “reengineer the company’s basic business model.”

  They had already succeeded in a number of cosmetic changes, scrapping “departments” in favor of “sections,” which, they maintained, rid ISC of the musty odor of “old-fashioned bureaucracy.” (The Private Investigation and Security Section was known in-house by the tongue-in-cheek acronym PISS.) They made no secret they thought “partner” detracted from the image projected by the new corporate motto, ISC: Where Management Is a Science—coined by Ken Moss, Junior Associate, the Communications and Public Relations Section (CAPS)—which they applauded.

  The part-time arrangement proved more than amenable to Dunne and Roberta. They found they enjoyed the city more than when they’d been full-time residents, going to the theater and trying out new restaurants. Though the city could be a sweatbox in summer—unlike the heat in Florida, a shroud that rarely lifted—it came and went in waves. The apartment and office were air-conditioned. Each July, Roberta got away with her girlfriends (all married to well-to-do husbands) on a month-long vacation, which this year had turned into a two-month cruise to the Orient.

  In years past, Roberta and he had taken long weekends on Block Island or Shelter Island, staying at one of the inns. But with her away, Dunne was content to stay in the city and wander around Greenwich Village, where new-style “beatniks” had replaced old-time bohemians, or Little Italy, where you could sit outdoors and linger over a glass of wine for hours at a time.

  Once he walked toward Dry Dock Street, thinking he’d visit where he’d lived as a kid. Quickly reminded that everything between Avenue C and the East River Drive had been torn down—or was being torn down—and rebuilt, he turned around and didn’t bother.

  Now and then, he rode the subway up to the Bronx Zoo. He liked to smoke and watch the animals sleep, especially the polar bears. Ferocious as they were reputed to be, their placidity struck him as profound. He felt it wasn’t merely a seasonal torpor or depressive resignation to captivity. They periodically roused themselves for a rowdy splash in the icy-looking pool.

  Roberta accompanied him one visit. He shared his observation with her.

  “You’re indulging in anthropomorphic projection,” she said. “The poor animal is bored out of its mind.”

  Maybe. But they didn’t have to hunt their next meal; didn’t worry about retirement or medical care; never thought about how their lives would end, regrets they’d carry to the grave, opportunities that had escaped their grasp, about usefulness or relevance. He thought he heard something deeper than resignation or stupor in the sighs they emitted as they slumbered. He was sure he’d never met a human being capable of such contentment.

  In the short period of full retirement several years back, Dunne faced up to the fact that although he was financially set after the sale of his agency to ISC, he wasn’t ready to let go. The arrangement with ISC was a happy one. At least it had been. He was aware of the change that had taken place since he’d returned the month before. At first he imagined he was reading into things. No longer. The memo from Ken Moss announcing ISC’s new motto proclaimed that “we are moving to take hold of the future and position ourselves on new growth trajectories.” He wondered if and when those trajectories would rocket him out the door—lately, more when than if.

  In hindsight, he recognized that ISC’s interest in PISS had been waning for some time. Nobody had been fired (at least not at the upper levels). But after Louis Pohl’s suicide and Jeff Wine’s retirement, the L.A. office closed and the slots left by other retirees went unfilled. The section was profitable. Whether in its present configuration it exhibited the “dynamic growth characteristics” the annual report touted ISC as demanding from all its sections remained to be seen.

  The new emphasis in Private Investigation and Security, it was explained, must be on selling, installing, and servicing electronic security and surveillance systems, a business requiring far fewer employees and in which profit margins were far higher. It also avoided the personal volatility and unpleasantness endemic to private investigations such as occurred the previous year when Pepsi-Cola chairman and CEO Alfred Steele indicated the company had a matter of “utmost delicacy” that needed handling.

  Mrs. Steele, formerly Academy Award–winning actress Joan Crawford, had traded in her fast-fading stardom to become his wife and help burnish the image and boost sales of the perennial also-ran to Coca-Cola. Two days before, she’d received a blackmail threat. Postmarked L.A., it claimed to have a copy of a stag film she’d made in the days when she was Lucille LeSueur, a sexy, intensely ambitious Midwesterner clawing her way from chorus line to front and center on the silver screen.

  Steele said his wife denied the authenticity of the film yet feared even a coincidental resemblance to one of the performers could be used to embarrass her. Dunne advised Steele his best course was to go to the police because even if he paid what was demanded and got the film, there’d be no way to ensure the blackmailer wouldn’t have more copies and keep coming back. Steele listened and said he’d discuss it with his wife.

  The next day, Dunne was dictating a letter to his Miss O’Keefe when Joan Crawford, tightly girdled, elegantly decked in pearls, white turban, and black dress, arrived unannounced in his office. She ordered Miss O’Keefe out and closed the door.

  She perched on the edge of his desk. He lit her cigarette for her. Sleek and polished as chrome, eyebrows arched and emphatic, she sucked it so hard she squinted.

  He’d met her at the Pepsi Christmas party at the Waldorf Astoria. She sat next to him, crossed her legs, shapely ankle brushed his thigh, perhaps accidentally. They exchanged a few pleasantries. Beneath her cosmetic facade and quiet elegance, mink stole, mink hat, mink cuffs, was a wartime urgency, physical, immediate, demanding.

  He left the party right after and hadn’t seen her since. Until now.

  She leaned back and exhaled. “My husband conveyed your advice. You think we should go to the police?”

 
“From my experience, that’s the only way to—”

  “That’s bullshit, Dunne.” Her nostrils flared, voice rose. “Do you think my husband retains mugs like you to sit on your keisters and tell him to fuck off the first time he gives you a real job to do?”

  He endured her angry monologue on “the low-life, backstabbing scum” in Hollywood and “the lazy, greedy cocksuckers” who worked for her husband in New York, interrupting at one point to warn that if she didn’t want the whole office to know her business, she should lower her voice.

  She ignored him, pacing back and forth. If she was putting on an act, playing a fury-fueled Amazon determined to do what had to be done until she got what she wanted, it was an award-winning performance. She left as abruptly as she’d arrived. Her parting words: “I want that film, Dunne. I don’t give a rat’s ass how you get it.”

  No need to ask whether she was in the film or merely afraid of a “coincidental resemblance.” He had his answer. He made the eight-and-a-half-hour flight to L.A. With Jeff Wine’s help, he identified the blackmailer as a broken-down, boozed-up ex-screenwriter living in a dilapidated bungalow in Santa Monica. The rat’s ass turned out to be two outstanding warrants against him, one for bigamy, another for embezzlement, which Wine flushed out of the local court files.

  They greased the police to pick him up and ransacked the bungalow. They found a single copy of the film stashed in a duffel bag on the top shelf of the bedroom closet. The copy was badly degraded, grainy and faded. The sexual frolics were fuzzy but discernible, yet it was next to impossible to identify the individuals engaged in them.

  He delivered the film to Steele, who was satisfied with the results. His wife reappeared in the office soon after. Arctic instead of volcanic, she waited for Miss O’Keefe to escort her from the reception area to his office, shook his hand, and offered a few words of thanks, concluding with a coldly whispered admonition: “If this ever reaches the papers, I’ll find who’s responsible and have his balls delivered on a platter.”

  It struck Dunne as less a threat than a promise.

  ISC voluntarily surrendered the Pepsi account at the end of that year. Dunne found himself increasingly engaged in a role like that of the oversized cardboard cutout of TV host Garry Moore in the Liggett’s across the street set up to plug cigarettes or shampoo or toothpaste (he couldn’t remember which).

  He accompanied the associates and specialists to the lunches where they pitched clients on the “efficiency and effectiveness of electronic security.” He knew the prospects had been told ahead of time about his OSS and NYPD background as well as his acquaintance with “the boys at the top.” Following a few words about the “depth of talent at ISC” and the “new science of security management,” he stuck to his cardboard cutout role, wordlessly nodding as the sales pitch proceeded.

  When the deal was sealed and they came in to sign the papers, the clients were guided past Dunne’s office. He told them how much he looked forward to working with them and shook hands as they scanned the wall behind him filled with the photos and news features Ken Moss had taken care to have framed and hung. Their faces registered how impressed they were. (The fact that Joan Crawford was an ex-client and Mayor O’Dwyer and General William Donovan had never been clients went unmentioned.)

  The last to arrive at the senior staff meeting, Dunne was surprised to find Ken Moss, junior associate, in attendance. Moss wasn’t at the table with the section heads but in a chair against the wall, behind Wynne Billings, senior specialist in the Strategic Planning and Marketing Section (SPAMS). Moss was writing in a notepad and didn’t look up.

  After a round-the-table summary of present business by the section heads, the meeting was given over to Billings. A graduate of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, muscular and athletic, with a blond crew cut and a fresh, alert, narrow face, he resembled the Kansas City A’s up-and-coming outfielder Roger Maris. As with Maris, who was rumored to be a potential addition to the Yankee lineup, the scuttlebutt on Billings left no doubt he was headed for big things.

  He stood at the end of the table, behind a Kodak projector. Ken Moss turned the lights off and pulled his chair next to him.

  “Ken, let’s have slide one.”

  Moss hit the button atop the projector. Click. A sleek, propellerless airliner with swept-back wings flashed on the screen. “Take a good look, gentlemen.” Billings paused, lit a cigarette. The slight, insect-like whirr from the projector filled the room. He spoke with a slow-paced, deliberate emphasis, spacing the words distinctly: “This … is … the future.” Another pause. Whirr. “This … is … the Seven-Oh-Seven.”

  In the fall, Billings said, Pan Am would put the 707, the world’s first commercial jetliner, into transatlantic service. Home and abroad, fast as they could, all the big carriers would follow suit. The new age heralded by the H-bomb, television, Sputnik—an age in which distance ceased to matter—would take another giant leap forward.

  The wisps from Billings’s cigarette swirled like cinematic fog in the projector’s beam. Click. The Mercator map that came up reminded Dunne of the one mounted outside Donovan’s office in Paris. On this one, however, parabolic trajectories rose from New York, Los Angeles, London, Chicago, Tokyo, Paris, etc., crisscrossing continents and oceans and weaving a great global web.

  Dunne momentarily mistook the arching lines for the ones newspapers used to illustrate articles on the likely delivery paths in an exchange of nuclear-headed missiles between the United States and the USSR; Billings made clear they were the commercial routes that within a few years fleets of jetliners would regularly travel.

  “The 707 is the embodiment of the forces that will shape the decade ahead and, in so doing, decide the fate of our country and of the free world. We’re facing a sea change, gentlemen. I mean that literally.”

  Click—the next slide, a single word in capital letters: SEA. “The essence is in these three letters: S … E … A.” Billings walked the length of the table and stood next to the screen: “Synthetics, electronics, avionics.” The rehearsing he’d obviously done with Moss was paying off. He had everyone’s attention. “Let’s take them one by one. First, S.”

  Click. The caption S IS FOR SYNTHETICS appeared on the screen. “Chemistry is key, gentlemen. The economy now rests not on rubber or cotton or gold but on polymers, synthetic compounds, the man-made ingredients out of which everything from A to Z, from acrylic paints to space suits, Christmas trees, and zithers, is being made.”

  One by one everyone at the table had lit a cigarette. The glowing tips flared like fireflies in summer twilight. They stared in silence at the slide. Smoke and specks of dust churned and swarmed through the shaft of light connecting screen to projector.

  Dunne closed his eyes and stopped listening.

  Moss shut off the projector and flipped on the lights. Dunne opened his eyes. He wasn’t sure how much of Billings’s presentation he’d tuned out.

  “Aviation plus electronics equals avionics. We all know it: Whoever wins control of space will win the Cold War.” Billings tossed his red-and-gold regimental striped tie over his shoulder. He moved in front of the screen, white shirt blending into white background. “The trajectory of change is now clear, constant, and certain. Forget about the doldrums the economy is now experiencing. The country’s greatest period of growth is still ahead. These are the industries that will drive it—of that there can be no doubt.

  “Domestically, thanks to the Interstate Highway Act passed two years ago, we have in place the largest public works program in … the history … of … the world, a twenty-six-billion-dollar construction project that will result in forty-one thousand miles of unobstructed roadways. Along with fulfilling its primary purpose of allowing the quick evacuation of our cities in case of atomic attack, the interstate system will have lasting and beneficial effects on commerce and communication.

  “The future, however, no longer depends on Bismarck’s famous formula of ‘blood and iron’ or, for that matter, on co
ncrete and steel. They have their place. But it’s above, not below, in the celestial rather than terrestrial, where our nation’s and the world’s destinies intersect, where military and commercial investments merge, and present and future converge. The same ingredients that will decide who controls the skies above and space beyond will distinguish winner from loser.

  “What will change, what is changing as I speak, what is being ramped up by the revived economies of Europe and Asia, especially the surging performance of our former enemies in Japan and Germany, is the velocity … of … change.

  “The past is past, over and done, good-bye, sayonara, auf wiedersehen. The future is on the runway. The choice for us at ISC is clear: stay behind … or … get … aboard.

  “Which will it be?”

  A spontaneous round of applause accompanied Billings as he walked back to his seat. He collected his papers. The section heads crowded around as if greeting a teammate at home plate after he’d scored the winning run.

  Ken Moss unplugged the projector and returned it to its plastic case. Dunne avoided the huddle and went over to him.

  “Wynne hit it out of the park, don’t you think?” Moss’s round, beaming face reflected the supporting role he’d just played, moon to Billings’s sun.

  “Babe Ruth couldn’t have done it better.”

  “The Babe is history. Wynne is the new breed. A regular Mickey Mantle, or Roger Maris, that kid out in Kansas City, the kind destined to topple the old records.”

  “Or Willie Mays.”

  Moss’s confused expression indicated his uncertain reaction to adding a Negro to the lineup of Mantle, Maris, and Billings.

  “Ken, I’d like you in my office at eleven.” The more effective way to remind Moss of his lower status in the ISC hierarchy would have been to have Miss O’Keefe summon him. But though it hadn’t entirely disappeared, the rage he’d felt toward Moss had dissipated.