Murder for Lunch

by Haughton Murphy

  “No names, Cynthia. Heaven knows when you may be imploring her to support one of your worthy causes.”

  “Support for the arts is a very democratic thing, dear,” she answered. “But anyway, how certain do you think it is that Draper is the murderer?”

  “I think my policeman friend, Luis, is pretty convinced, and so am I,” Reuben said. “Thank God he’s Hispanic, by the way. His conversation in Spanish with Carlos Faghater was pretty hot and heavy, but it got results.”

  “So you should know tomorrow?”

  “That depends on what Luis finds out at the plant. But I think the case is as good as closed.” Being able to make that statement, and the wine he had consumed (from a good bottle, selected to celebrate the occasion), made him feel very content.

  “What does George Bannard think?”

  “I haven’t told him.”

  “Oh, Reuben, you really are naughty.”

  “Well, he was gone for the day by the time Bautista and I had sorted it out,” Frost said defensively. “Besides, his behavior in this whole thing has been a little exasperating. He wants to know about everything but is always running off to Chicago or to a board meeting or whatever despite everything that’s going on.”

  “Well, you’d better tell him tomorrow morning.”

  “Maybe. But I think I’ll wait till Luis gets back from New Jersey.”

  “He’s your former partner, dear. Surely he’s entitled to full disclosure, as you lawyers say.”

  Cynthia had started to clear the table when the buzzer at the front door sounded. Frost went to the intercom and found out that Arthur Tyson was outside.

  “What on earth do you suppose he wants, arriving unannounced at this hour?” Frost asked his wife.

  “Maybe he wants to confess,” Cynthia said.

  “Very funny,” Frost shot back as he went downstairs to admit his visitor. “Unless this is some sort of batty social visit, which I doubt, I’ll talk to him in the library.”

  “Good evening, Arthur,” Frost said, after unlocking the front door. “Come on in.”

  “Frost, what I’ve got to say won’t take long and I can say it right here.”

  As he spat out that one sentence, Tyson showed all of his less pleasant qualities—bullying aggressiveness, a splenetic temper and general rudeness. Frost had seen him in fits of temper before, but never had encountered the livid anger now on display before him. It was as if Tyson were again facing down a Big Ten lineman on a crucial play.

  “Oh come, Arthur, let’s not stand here. Come on up to the library.”

  Frost led the way up the stairs to the second floor.

  “How about a drink?”

  “I don’t want a drink, you snaky son of a bitch, I want an apology!” Tyson shouted.

  Frost was not used to being called a son of a bitch, most especially by a Chase & Ward partner more than fifteen years his junior.

  “Arthur, please calm down. You’re not making sense,” Frost said. “And sit down, as well.”

  Tyson did so but continued his tirade. “Maybe I’m not making sense, but nobody else is either. First that sniveling drunk Coxe, giggling about how I was suspected of murdering Graham Donovan. And then you, you doddering old fool, playing Dr. Watson to that spic cop.

  “All I want to know,” Tyson went on, bounding out of his chair, “is why in the name of heaven you gave him my name! Who do you think you are, playing private dick, whispering ideas into that thick cop’s head? You’re a damned senile Iago!”

  Not Siegfried and Benno after all, Frost thought, but Othello and Iago. He was amused but dared not show it. In fact, Tyson was also making him extremely nervous. Frost put his hands out flat and moved them in a calming gesture, but this only infuriated Tyson more.

  “All I can say, Reuben, is that I’m not going to put up with it! I’ll sue you for slander! I’ll have a guardian appointed, since you’re clearly senile. How could you do it? How could you possibly tell that dumb cop to interrogate me?”

  “Arthur, Arthur, Arthur. This past week has been hell for all of us. Especially for those of us who were Graham’s friends,” Frost said, regretting at once the implication that Tyson was not. But Tyson was too angry to notice the slight. “I’ve been cooperating, everybody’s been cooperating with the police, trying to get this awful thing solved. Nobody’s been running around accusing you, except you yourself. First your behavior at the morgue, which the police knew about quite independent of me, despite the unfortunate joke I made to you about being a suspect. And then your attack on poor defenseless Fred Coxe. Yes, I did tell Detective Bautista about that, but I did it in a context in which I explained that you had a terrible temper which, judging by this little séance, is undeniable. All I can say is that you were better off having me tell him than having him hear the story, at about fourth-hand and luridly embellished, later on.”

  “Attack, you said,” Tyson screamed. “What I said to Fred Coxe was an attack? No, it wasn’t! This is an attack!” Before Frost could stop him, Tyson had grabbed a vase of flowers from the table beside him and flung it as hard as he could with both hands at Frost’s feet. “That was an attack! Not like your assault on my character, but still an attack!”

  Frost was horrified and frightened. The vase had broken and splashed water on the cuffs of his pants. How was he to get rid of this raving madman before he did further damage to the room—or to Frost?

  “Arthur, you’ve made your point,” Frost said, as slowly and as calmly as he could. “And I’ve made mine. So I suggest we call it a night and that you leave now. Right now.”

  Tyson was almost gasping for breath, and he seemed to wither under the coldest and most intense gaze Frost could muster under the circumstances.

  “All right. That’s fine with me. I’ll go out. And you can go to hell.” His face distorted once again, Tyson abruptly turned and ran down the stairs and out the door.

  Frost sat down in a chair, physically and emotionally exhausted and still frightened.

  “And what was that all about?” Cynthia asked, as she came into the library.

  “Oh, just a courtesy call on a poor old retired Executive Partner—by one of his potential successors,” Frost answered. “Help me upstairs, dear, and I’ll tell you.”

  MORE BREAKS

  21

  Reuben Frost was grateful on Wednesday morning that he had a new drafting project to occupy his time. He wanted to concentrate on the present, forget the unpleasantness with Tyson the night before and avoid speculating on what Bautista was finding in New Jersey. And, if he were lucky, he could plead (however unconvincingly) that he had been too busy that morning to bring George Bannard up to date.

  The previous day an old curmudgeon client of the firm, Earle Ambler, had sent him for review a contract for the acquisition of a television station prepared by an in-house lawyer at Ambler’s company, named, aptly enough, Ambler Broadcasting Corporation.

  Ambler, an old friend of Cynthia’s who had gotten his communications industry start practically in the days of the nickelodeon, had years ago become eminently successful as a chain broadcaster, owning television and radio stations in unlikely cities around the country. Ambler had modestly, and with a knowing sense of humor, always referred to his company as “ABC.” It wasn’t, but over the years Ambler’s stations in out-of-the-way places had appreciated in value so that “ABC” was a very profitable enterprise.

  Since the earliest days, when Ambler first had come to Chase & Ward at Cynthia’s suggestion, Frost had been Ambler Broadcasting’s lawyer. Now that it was a settled enterprise, the company had a legal staff of its own, but Earle Ambler still insisted, when more than $3.98 was at stake, that Chase & Ward be involved. And he had further insisted, even after Frost’s retirement, that Frost personally handle the business.

  In busy times gone by, Ambler’s insistence on Frost’s personal attention had been a great pain in the neck, and it flew in the face of Chase & Ward’s boast that its partners, if not complete
ly fungible, still had a wide enough dispersal of legal skills that no client had to depend—or should be permitted to depend—on one partner. But in his late years as a partner and since his retirement, Frost had no longer been annoyed by Ambler’s insistence on personal attention but had instead relished it.

  Earle Ambler was a great one for attempting to “upgrade” his provincial empire, so he bought and sold stations as rapidly as was permitted within the confines of the Federal Communications Commission’s strictures against “trafficking in licenses.”

  From the tone of Ambler’s letter that morning, Frost gathered that the old man was dissatisfied with the contract for the purchase of a television station forwarded with the letter. Reviewing it now, Frost realized that Ambler had been quite right. Sitting at his glass-covered worktable, Frost groaned audibly as he read. The inexperienced young Ambler lawyer had committed one of the drafting sins Frost loathed: the use of totally extraneous whereases, saids and other “snake-oil” words, as Frost called them, designed to make perfectly straightforward English sentences appear “legal.” But what was worse, the author had based his draft on an earlier agreement that apparently had dealt with acquiring something other than a broadcasting station, since there were none of the clauses Frost knew were necessary when a station was being bought—representations as to the status of the station’s Federal Communications Commission licenses, for example.

  Ah, the use—or rather misuse—of precedent, Frost thought. He conceded to himself that every lawyer, good, bad or indifferent, uses a precedent for drafting almost any kind of agreement. But why, why, do mediocre lawyers invariably select a bad model, a precedent that is clumsily written or imprecise or wordy or, more likely, all of the above? And why, if the subject matter of the transaction is a broadcasting station, use a contract for the sale of a shoe store—or whatever—as a model?

  Frost had a stack of sharpened number two pencils beside him. He wielded them like scalpels as he cut away at the hapless draftsman’s legal prose, attempting to perform surgery that would make the proposed contract viable.

  But even though he thoroughly enjoyed drafting, and took great satisfaction in improving the legal writing of others, he still was not able to concentrate fully on the work before him. Graham Donovan’s unsolved murder was like very loud music in the background; it could not be ignored, it would not go away and it impinged on everything else that was going on.

  By early afternoon—Frost ate a sandwich at his desk (the better to avoid Bannard, who had not called)—Frost had resuscitated the Ambler contract and sent it for recovery to the office word processing center. Bautista barged into the office just as Frost was tossing the heavily edited—or more properly, redrafted—contract into his outbox.

  “Sit down, Reuben,” Bautista said, in his excitement dropping the formal “Mr. Frost” for the first time. “You won’t believe our luck. It turns out my buddy knows the Draper plant well; it’s on his regular beat. So we went to see a guy there he deals with a lot—the production supervisor, name of Barlow. Well, it turns out—and this is hard to believe—that Barlow recently had a fight with Draper personally. Over this stock deal, in fact. It seems that old Barlow got wind of the stock offering and that Draper and some of the officers who owned stock in the company were about to make a bundle. Barlow never had been given stock, and didn’t know that others had until that registration statement you showed me, which lists the major stockholders, got circulated around the plant.

  “Barlow was one mad guy,” Bautista went on. “And apparently Draper was not too sympathetic when Barlow confronted him. So anyway, Barlow was ticked off as hell and was ready to tell us anything we wanted to know about Mr. Chairman of the Board. Apparently Draper had been filching painkillers from the plant for years, which not even the Chairman of the Board is supposed to do when controlled substances are involved. Then my pal asked if it was only painkillers, and old Barlow said well, as a matter of fact, no. Only a week ago, Draper had asked for a small supply of the digitalis derivative used to make Pernon!

  “So there you are, Reuben. I think we’ve got our man,” Bautista concluded triumphantly.

  “I’ll be damned. The conniving bastard. When will you arrest him?”

  “That’s up to you. Since he lives in Jersey and the plant’s in Jersey, we could go through the rigmarole required for an interstate arrest. Or—”

  “Or?”

  “We could invite him to New York and arrest him here. Maybe not the most kosher way to do it, but I thought you might like to be in on it. Am I right, Reuben?”

  “Yes, I suppose you are,” Frost said slowly. “In fact I know you are. But there’s one little hitch, I’m afraid. There’s no way I can lure Draper to this office; I’ve never had any dealings with him, and I’m just an old retired crock as far as he’s concerned.”

  “So what do we do?” Bautista asked.

  “The only person who can lure him here is George Bannard. To discuss the future of his representation by Chase & Ward.”

  “You sure, Reuben?”

  “Absolutely. But that’s all right. It’s high time George Bannard did some of the heavy work in this case.”

  Within minutes Luis Bautista and Reuben Frost—Pat O’Brien and an unnamed actor, Siegfried and Benno, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Othello and Iago—were explaining the new developments to a startled George Bannard.

  “What do we do now?” Bannard asked, after he had been fully briefed.

  “George, Mr. Bautista has told you it would be neater and cleaner to have Draper arrested here in New York. And you’re the only one who can get him here.”

  “How do you mean?” Bannard said.

  “Well, you’re the Executive Partner, so you can perfectly well call him in to discuss who’s going to replace Graham as his contact here at the firm.”

  Bannard looked distressed, but he saw the logic of what Frost was saying.

  “So what should I do? Call him?” Bannard said, looking at his watch. “It’s a little late to try and get him in here today.”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Bannard,” Bautista said. “I think tomorrow morning would be fine. That way I can have some support troops here if things get sticky.”

  Bannard winced. “Tomorrow is awfully inconvenient … but I suppose I can shuffle some appointments if necessary. What time did you have in mind?”

  “Ten o’clock okay?” Bautista asked.

  “Sure,” Bannard said, “though he may think he’s important enough to discuss his business over lunch.”

  “Let’s try for ten.”

  Bannard, still showing some reluctance, asked Mrs. Davis to put a call through to Draper. The call was made and Dwight Draper said he would be happy to see Bannard at ten the following morning. “As I said at Graham’s funeral, we should get things squared away now that Graham is dead,” Draper told Bannard. Indeed, Bannard thought. He told Bautista the meeting was set.

  “So when should I be here?” Bannard asked.

  “A little before ten is fine,” Bautista said. “I’ll be here with a couple of helpers around nine-thirty. Do you suppose we could use the office next door? I’d like to have them nearby in case there are any fireworks.”

  Bannard winced again but immediately called Fred Coxe, asking him if his office might be free early the next day. Coxe said that he would be uptown at a meeting and Bannard was welcome to it, so no explanation of the impending maneuvers was required.

  “Officer, you’ll be here with me, of course, tomorrow morning?” Bannard said in a hoarse, nervous voice.

  “Yes, sir. I’ll be right at your side or, if necessary, in front of you,” Bautista replied, reassuring Bannard not at all.

  Bautista and Frost could scarcely contain their exuberant relief as they left Bannard’s office.

  “I’m sorry you’re going to miss the climax,” Bautista said, as they went down the hall.

  “Well, if there are going to be fireworks, I think it’s just as well for an ol
d man,” Frost replied.

  “You know, Reuben, unless your Executive Partner screws up, I think we’ve done it,” Bautista said.

  “Luis, I think you’re right.”

  Smiling, the aging lawyer and the young detective locked in an affectionate Latin abrazo.

  CLIMAX

  22

  Luis Bautista was back at Chase & Ward Thursday morning at nine-thirty, this time accompanied by two other plainclothes officers, one a black woman. They first went to Frost’s office and then, at his direction, to Bannard’s office. Bannard, in accordance with instructions, was waiting for them, and perfunctorily acknowledged Bautista’s introduction of Sergeant Imperatore and Officer Rush. (“Where are the sons of Erin?” Bannard thought to himself, as his stereotype of the police force was again deflated.) It was agreed that all three would wait next door until Bannard signalled for Bautista to come in and begin the questioning of Draper. Bannard was decidedly nervous, but Bautista tried to reassure him.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Bannard,” he said. “Officer Rush is the women’s judo champion of the Department. And Sergeant Imperatore used to be a sharpshooter with the Tactical Patrol. Whatever happens, we’ll be here to help you.”

  “I appreciate that, Officer,” Bannard said glumly. “I’m sure there will be no problem.”

  (And if there is, Bautista thought to himself, and assuming you’re still alive, you can always call the Mayor.)

  Bannard barely had time to finish a cup of coffee before Draper arrived, promptly at ten.

  “Good morning, George, how are you?” Draper said as he advanced across Bannard’s office, hand outstretched. “Thanks for calling me so promptly, but we need to get a new lawyer assigned to the Draper account. It may not be the biggest at Chase & Ward, but we do pay our bills on time.” Draper laughed at his own joke and took out a cigar and lit it. Bannard, as a reformed smoker, suffered in silence.

  “What about this young Phelan?” Draper went on. “I liked him and would be happy to have him doing my work. He’s a good kid. You ought to make him a partner.”