The Longer the Thread

by Emma Lathen

  “Sure,” said Annie generously.

  Cesar Romero emerged from his coffee cup. “I confess I discounted Nadal myself. But I was not so ready to dismiss politics entirely. For a while, I found myself suspicious of Dr. Ramírez. It was clear that Prudencio Nadal was being lured beyond his depth. And I asked myself who would profit from this. One answer was that Ramírez was smearing a potential opponent. When we all left the Convento to watch the fire, all of us except Ramírez, I wondered if he had no need to follow us. Most independistas in Puerto Rico are opposed to violence, indeed they are afraid of it. The fire would have disgusted many people with Nadal.”

  “What did you think when the kidnap note came?” Thatcher asked curiously.

  “Then I knew Ramírez was out of the picture entirely. He was bound to suffer from the consequences. The whole independence movement had been discredited.”

  The plebiscite returns, which had been announced the day before, made further discussion unnecessary. The independence vote had been minuscule.

  “I came to the same conclusion about Ramírez,” Thatcher said. “Quite clearly, he is not a man to undertake violence. Moving behind the scenes, making alliances, exerting pressure—those are the tactics he would employ.”

  “He sees himself as an ambassador to the United Nations,” Annie said with vast contempt.

  There was so much sinister meaning in her voice that Thatcher would have liked to pursue the topic, but Pete Olmsted had no intention of leaving the tale unfinished.

  “All right,” he allowed, “so politics was out. Somebody was going to buy Bayamón at rock-bottom prices. But who? I can see Marten doing it. But then I could make out a reason for David Lippert doing it, particularly with Harry’s murder. Excuse me, Cesar, but you could have done it. And for a while I almost convinced myself that Norma had wiped Domínguez out as the easiest way of getting Slax back to normal.”

  Thatcher became meditative. “I think you’ll find that some of your suspicions cancel each other out, Pete. Norma had no motive for the sabotage, and no one has denied that she was genuinely attached to her brother. If she murdered Domínguez, then nothing else was explained. David had a motive for murdering Harry Zimmerman, but not for the sabotage. It was the sabotage that was the thread linking everything together. If you refused to be distracted from the sabotage, then there were only two reasonable suspects.” He smiled apologetically at Romero. “You and Marten. And with Zimmerman’s murder, there was no longer any choice at all.”

  “I follow you down to the two,” Olmsted said doggedly, “but there you lose me. Harry must have found something out, so Harry was murdered. That’s the way it looks to me, but it doesn’t eliminate anybody.”

  Cesar took up the case against himself with some gusto. “That is correct. Harry was upset all that day, we have any amount of evidence to that effect. But he had started the morning by quarreling with David. That may have accounted for it. We cannot assume he discovered anything.”

  “Come, now. The David argument won’t wash. Zimmerman was always finding some mistake by his brother-in-law. We know how he reacted.” Thatcher ticked off the possibilities. “Either he decided to ignore David’s sensitivities and solve the problem, in which case everyone at Slax heard about it, or he decided peace in the family was more important. His intention to leave Puerto Rico right away suggested that David’s feelings had won this time. We have every right to assume Zimmerman discovered something, because something very unusual happened that Monday.”

  “The fire,” Annie supplied.

  It was rare enough that Annie Galiano made an error. Thatcher rather enjoyed putting her right.

  “No,” he said genially. “Zimmerman was dead before the fire. You have forgotten that fifty thousand dollars’ worth of finished goods moved unexpectedly out of the Cataño warehouse. And Harry Zimmerman was at the docks that morning. It was afterward that he launched into his abnormal activity. We now know what happened. He went to the freight forwarder’s office to complain. There he learned that no effort at all had been made to move the stalled goods. Zimmerman did not need a diagram. He knew immediately that Eric Marten was doing the unforgivable. He was holding back shipments, destroying good will, losing customers. At best. I expect that Zimmerman could have predicted a fire at that moment. He went into action on the spot. First he ordered the freight forwarder to take immediate action. Then he headed for San Juan and a showdown with Marten. He should have been more careful in tangling with a murderer.”

  “But,” Olmsted protested, “Harry said he was going to the ILGWU.”

  “Where he expected to find Marten,” Thatcher retorted. “If you think back to Zimmerman’s schedule, it all makes sense. Sunday evening, before anything had happened and when he still thought he had plenty of time in Puerto Rico, he promised Annie that Marten would look over some details in the union agreement. Right?”

  Mutely Pete Olmsted nodded.

  “Monday morning Zimmerman’s schedule changes,” Thatcher rolled on remorselessly. “He fights with the Lipperts and decides on an early departure. His next stop is Bayamón, where he sees Eric Marten. Marten, remember, is going to San Juan only a few blocks from the ILGWU office. Zimmerman, who wants everything ironed out before he leaves, tells Marten to check over the agreement. He admits to a fight with David. Then, probably because he is still irritated and wants to take it out on somebody, he goes to the freight forwarder. At that point, all his thinking changes.”

  Romero had been following the recital intently. Now he nodded suddenly. “That explains something that has always puzzled me. When he called me from the docks, Harry said nothing about leaving that day. He did ask me about the snarl at the freight forwarder, but I thought he was simply annoyed that David had left all that to Marten.”

  “He had abandoned all thought of leaving Puerto Rico. That’s why he didn’t mention it to you or to Pete when he stopped at the Sloan. He intended to corner Marten at the ILGWU and have things out with him. Of course, as soon as he saw Annie’s empty office and heard she wasn’t there, he knew Eric wasn’t there, either.”

  “It’s a shame I wasn’t there,” Annie reflected. “I would have gotten the whole story out of Harry in five minutes.”

  “And settled Eric Marten’s hash in another five, I’m sure,” Thatcher rejoined gallantly.

  “Well, then, what did happen?” Olmsted impatiently rose above this exchange.

  “I imagine he met Marten on the street. Remember, Marten was just leaving an appointment two blocks away, and Marten drove himself into San Juan. They probably got into Marten’s car and within a very few minutes Marten knew that his only salvation lay in murdering Zimmerman and tying it in with an atrocity by radical students.”

  “You mean Harry just got into a car with a murderer?” Olmsted protested.

  “I doubt if he was thinking of Marten as a murderer. He was thinking of him as a sabotage expert. Zimmerman wasn’t in Puerto Rico when Domínguez was murdered, and he was always more concerned with the attack on Slax. Nor had he given up the idea that Nadal was the prime mover. He may well have thought of Marten as a paid tool of the radicals.”

  “It makes sense,” Annie said almost grudgingly. “And it left Marten wide open on the freight-forwarder story.”

  “Yes, that’s why he went berserk at the end. Nothing could explain away the anomalies there. Freight forwarders who are being pushed for action don’t suddenly make a major shipment without telling anyone. Marten was stunned, after the fire, when he found out what Harry had done. He knew that, if anyone started looking in his direction, there were too many clues for comfort.”

  “Such as?” Annie demanded.

  “Whom would Zimmerman be looking for at the ILGWU, other than you? Romero was always at the plant. That was his job. His very immobility made it unlikely that he was the saboteur, or that he had any meeting with Harry anywhere except in Bayamón. The Lipperts were not having anything to do with the ILGWU settlement, or with you. And, i
n spite of the fantasy about an invitation from Prudencio Nadal, Zimmerman was in no mood for meetings under the second oak tree from the left. If he had consented to see the boy at all, it would have been at the office. Then we come to the fiesta. Eric Marten was the one wandering around alone. He said he was escaping from his wife’s cultural activities, but he was late to dinner, too. He had ample time to set the fire. And it was there, at the fiesta, that he tried to dodge Annie’s question about coming up to the ILGWU offices.”

  Annie was getting into the spirit of things. “Then there was the talk about looking for a job. Everybody kept saying that Cesar was looking for a job. Why wasn’t Eric?”

  “I never thought of that,” Pete Olmsted admitted. “He had his job already planned, hadn’t he?”

  “I think so,” Thatcher said. “I had a few words with Señora Romero and she gave me a good deal of information about Marten’s in-laws.”

  Cesar grinned. “Elena told me about that. You couldn’t have gone to a better source. Of course, Marten’s in-laws were all eager for a good investment. He would have had no trouble forming a company, taking over Bayamón and continuing as manager, if not part owner. As a matter of fact, I did understand that part of his behavior. He was quite wild when Norma decided not to sell. It was not difficult to guess that he was planning to make a rock-bottom offer. But I thought he was simply exploiting a situation someone else had brought about”

  “Eric Marten was not the man to wait for chance to provide exploitable situations. He created his own.” Thatcher paused. “The mystery to me is that he took so long to develop into a murderer.”

  “Elena has a theory about that.” Romero searched for words with which to express his wife’s swooping flights into speculation. “She says that until recently he was content to drift. You know he had spent his whole life in the islands, wandering from one to another. Then, a year ago, he married and became part of a clan. Elena thinks his vision of himself changed. He was ready to become a man of substance, a patriarch. And that role did not include being an employee. I know he began to resent having to recognize David as his superior.”

  “And about that time, there were riots at the university,” Thatcher mused. “That may have been the beginning of his idea to use the student radicals as a smoke screen for his own activities.”

  Olmsted disliked this entire line of conversation. The decision by the Sloan Guaranty Trust to hand Puerto Rico over to International still rankled. Innes’ offer to let Commercial Credit stay in the picture long enough to wind up the transfer of Slax’s Bayamón plant had added insult to injury. Now Thatcher was telling him that murder had been brewing for months.

  “Speaking of student radicals,” he said firmly, “what did they ever do with Prudencio Nadal? They caught him down in the Old City when we were up at El Morro. When is he coming up for trial?”

  “What trial?” Romero was surprised. “What could they charge him with? He did not do anything—except keep quiet and take the credit for various deeds of sabotage.”

  “You mean he didn’t do anything at all?”

  “Not a thing.” Romero looked into the future. “That may be the course of his whole professional career. And you do not arrive in a jail cell that way.”

  “Oh, he’ll get there yet,” Annie prophesied, “unless he learns to start looking a gift horse in the mouth.”

  “So Ramírez ends up the winner on that duel,” Olmsted concluded. “I suppose he’ll pick up some of Nadal’s support.”

  “Ramírez has other interests as well.” Cesar Romero was obscurely amused. “I suspect that one of the new owners of the Bayamón plant is a straw man for Ramírez.”

  “You can be very sure of it. We looked into that.” Thatcher never let straw men stop him when he was interested in principals.

  “All things considered, they came up with a pretty good price,” said Olmsted, once again a functioning banker. “It didn’t take Norma long to straighten out and make up her mind to sell, once the murder was solved.”

  Cesar Romero still responded to his old loyalties. “Norma was never in any confusion about the correct business decision. She did not consider business important if David was in danger.”

  “She must have been damned sure that he was the murderer then.”

  Romero shook his head. “I do not think it was that simple. Norma had two men who were important to her. She had just lost one. She was not taking any chance at all on losing the second. Originally I think she may have suspected David of killing Domínguez. She could have understood the motive there. Then, when it seemed as if Harry had been kidnapped in revenge for Domínguez, she turned against David in her grief and guilt. But that was momentary hysteria. Certainly they are very happy now.”

  “Have you seen them?” Thatcher asked curiously.

  “Oh, yes. I had dinner with them last night in Scarsdale. David is in charge of the New York office now.” For a moment Cesar Romero shed his years and became mischievous. “I understand Norma drops in to help occasionally.”

  Unexpectedly Annie commented, “I expect them to make a go of it. The Slax plant in Georgia is going great guns. We’ve renegotiated our contract there. I’ll be able to get along with them fine.”

  Pete Olmsted could not believe his ears. “You mean to say you and David are getting along without any trouble?”

  “David?” Annie blinked. “Don’t be silly. As soon as Norma has those kids in school, she’ll take over. She’s just getting on with the business of life right now. And it’ll be a good day for Slax when she’s not tied up any more. She may be stubborn as a mule, but she’s not beyond listening to reason—eventually.”

  Cesar Romero and Pete Olmsted were lost in bemused silence. It was left to Thatcher to say weakly, “Oh, yes?”

  Annie expanded her encomium. “Why, it didn’t take me more than six or seven sessions to persuade her about that day-care center in Georgia. It’s going to be called the Harry Zimmerman Center. I knew Norma would want some kind of memorial for Harry,” she concluded solemnly.

  “Now, wait a minute, Annie.” Olmsted was incensed. “You’ve just held up the sale of Bayamón for over a week because of their damned nursery school. You said the new management had to go ahead with it.”

  Organized labor on the other side of the table drew itself up stiffly. “Of course they had to go ahead with it. The work line had received a promise.”

  Olmsted was proving he could add one and one. “But that means you’ve come out of this with two day-care centers,” he said in tones of outrage.

  Annie produced a battered look of innocence.

  “Well, now,” she marveled, “what do you know about that?”