Vincent could not admit that they had been virtually shadowing us. He could not even face it squarely himself, any more than he could face anything else in his crumbling, unpremeditated life. It was even possible he did not know of Jay’s calculated purpose, nor even guess at the narrow, relentless, frightened vanity behind it. At any rate, there was no point in raising that particular issue with him now.
The point was not to let him carry off his implied accusation, and still more importantly, to blunt the threat to me that their scanty information might seem to hold. At this very moment, it was most likely some such idea possessed Jay.
But if it had ever been in Vincent’s mind that he had explosive knowledge, that thought was now thoroughly dispelled. Or, more to the purpose, he saw that the danger was all to himself.
As I held the outside phone in my hand, tightening his surprise and lengthening his anxieties, his voice erupted in a harsh croak.
“Put that damn thing down, you fool. You’ll sink us all.”
I calmly went on turning the dial, with the declared purpose of reporting the accident to the police. Or rather, of reporting Vincent’s and Jay’s suspicions about it. He had to realize, fully, that I am never bluffed, or bluffing.
Actually, the number I called was Charles Talcott’s, and when he answered, my laconic report, with the pointed suggestions I planned to give, would be in effect a warning message.
But I was not bluffing. At that critical instant I was fully prepared to make the report, in fact. In that event, a much deeper explanation of the whole affair would become necessary, quite feasible, no matter how difficult. Although this whole period of Charles Talcott’s career was psychologically hazardous to him, even irrevocably sensitive, and no one knew it better than I did, yet it was even more important that I myself retain control of these shifting circumstances. Only by doing so could I give him the really effective help he so desperately needed, both now, and later on.
But neither of these courses was necessary. Vincent suddenly reached over and depressed the bar of the phone’s cradle, breaking the circuit before the call had been completed. This final gesture of resignation and acquiescence was impulsive and spontaneous, another unthinking caprice, but one that arose from the very depths of Vincent’s troubled nature, an appealing act that placed me under a certain obligation to accept.
I slowly replaced the phone. My partners were weak and corrupt, and for that very reason they needed me. Certainly, Vincent did, and probably Haley. As Charles, too, in his awful crisis, had need of me.
“All right,” I said. “But what do you think we should do, Vincent?” He had nothing to say, visibly harassed, and at the same time relieved, and I gently urged him. “We can’t just forget it, you know. We’ll have to decide on something.”
He gave an exasperated outburst.
“Decide about what? Why can’t we just let it ride, at least until Jay gets back? Then we can talk it over with Jay.”
After a pause I added, softly:
“And Haley.”
Vincent’s head gave a slight, involuntary jerk.
“Why him? What’s he got to do with it? He wasn’t even there.”
I simply looked, and waited, while his own words echoed with an emptiness increasingly clear to him. Then I pointed out:
“Let Haley himself be the judge of that. You’ve already kept him in the dark too long. It seems to me you and Jay have kept a lot of people in the dark too long, it’s getting to be a habit with you. Now you’ve even got me doing it.” I smiled, faintly, acknowledging that this curious suggestion was not wholly absurd. “But you did, after all, think you saw Charley Talcott’s car hit and kill that man in the park. Now, I know Charley, and it seems incredible to me. But you were there, you saw the thing, and you’re positive about it.” I stopped, lighting a cigarette and estimating Vincent, searching for the key that would fit both the locked, complicated affairs of the agency, and Vincent’s own, his personal problems. “Morally, if you’re quite positive, you ought to make a statement about it. You see the trouble you get into, immediately, when you mistakenly decided I needed to be protected, for some reason, and you let Jay and his girl persuade you to keep still, instead.”
Vincent reached for the bottle on the desk, his heavily lined face an intricate balance of changing moods, all in perfectly matched conflict.
“Nobody persuaded me to do anything,” he said, morosely. He poured himself a drink, looked at me over the top of the glass. “It was just a lousy damn headache all round. That’s all I thought.”
I nodded, and said, curtly:
“Of course it was. But the thing is, how to clean it up now, without still more damage. You know, or maybe Jay thought it better not to tell you, Talcott and I had a new account lined up, too big for him to handle alone. He wanted to bring it to us. The Generous Heart, an old, red-tape agency with a big potential—a campaign right now would go up to four or five million. It could mean over three hundred thousand to CC, the first year alone. For the publicity man, a thirty-thousand-dollar bonus, at least.” I stopped to give the figures time to register with Vincent, but did not refer to them again. “Did Jay tell you anything about Generous Heart?”
Vincent reflected a lot of stray ideas.
“No,” he said, absently. “That is, yes, he mentioned they had a function at the hotel last night, and that’s where you both probably were.”
I nodded, frowning, uncertain which of the two different meetings, at separate times and places in the hotel, Jay could have known about. But the reference must be to the official meeting. Probably the Generous Heart directors’ dinner had been listed by the hotel management, and Jay had seen it. My talk with the Griscoms in their private room, and with Charles, would have passed unnoticed. Although Charles and the Griscoms were already listed on the staff of the agency, and there was nothing secret about that for anyone who cared to examine our list of officers, still, it would not have been wise to show them publicly at that time to the rather inexperienced relics on the board of directors, some of them still holding official positions on it.
“We were,” I said. “I looked in for a few minutes, before I went back to the Griscoms. There was a planning conference of the board of Generous Heart, and they have a very strong crowd. Some dead wood, of course, but you can expect that anywhere these days. Even here, God knows.” I suggested this half indulgently, but no more than half, and Vincent understood it. “They see a big new opportunity for work in a relatively untouched field, a long-range program of help for the violent, destructive, self-destructive, cases of latent hysteria, attempted homicide, pyromania, and so on. I’ve seen some pilot examples of what they can do to retrain borderline cases, and they’ve accomplished the impossible. Now they’re going to implement the program on a large scale, and they intend to raise a lot of money. It means, first of all, a big job of interpretation. But now that’s neither here nor there. Talcott’s through everywhere if you’re right about him, regardless of what explanation there is, and he’s certainly washed up with the big names of Generous Heart, right or wrong, when even this rumor about him becomes known.” I stared for a moment of regret out of the high, old-fashioned window that overlooked the peaceful, sunlit street with its intermittent traffic. “And of course, as far as their account is concerned, that goes for Campaign Consultants, too. In fact, CC is bound to lose accounts because of this thing, anyway.” I turned to look again at Vincent, watching me with haunted eyes. He may have been counting too heavily, considering his serious, premature overdraft with the firm, upon some life-saving surplus the books could have shown at the end of the year. “It’s too bad. Most unfortunate for all of us, even for myself. But there it is. A harsh fact we can’t evade.”
“I don’t follow you,” said Vincent. His uneasiness showed me this was not strictly true. He did follow me, part of the way, and did not wish to follow the rest. “How is it so unfortunate for the agency? Why should we lose anything at all? We thought we had a bad break
there, for a while, but now we’re in the clear.” His uneasiness grew as I did not reply, watching him, waiting for his own common sense to tell him better, expecting or at any rate hoping some finer strata buried within his nature would re-assert itself. “Well, we are in the clear, aren’t we? What have we got to worry about now?”
He had to look away from me, even as he said it.
“I think you already know the answer to that, Vincent. Be honest with yourself. How do you think it will appear, especially in our field, when it’s known two members of this firm deliberately shielded a person they believed to be guilty of one of the most loathsome acts there can be, a hit-and-run lolling? And for a reason that looks almost as evil The distrust, the doubt, the suspicion of still another member of the same outfit. What a corrupt, shocking, graceless picture that presents, as though we were some gang of common ruffians.”
Vincent’s face knotted with the baffled rage of a spoiled child on the verge of a tantrum.
“Well, who the hell knows about it?”
“We do. You, and Jay, and Shana, and myself.”
For the fraction of a second he showed relief.
“All right, then. It’s all in the family, and we’ll keep it there.”
With the gesture of an automaton he reached for the brandy. My voice halted his arm.
“But we can’t keep it from ourselves. We will always know that we came face to face with a tremendous crisis of the spirit, and that we failed. We will know that we failed each other, and failed to measure up to our true selves. Can you bear to live with that thought, Vincent?”
His blank, bewildered expression showed he could scarcely begin to reason along such lines, at all.
“I thought you said this friend of yours couldn’t have done such a thing,” he argued, hotly. “Didn’t you?”
I frowned down at my fingertips, touched and troubled. The truth, here, lay somewhere back along a far, winding, misty path even I could not easily trace. I said, speaking with soft emphasis:
“It is simply not in Charley Talcott’s character to do such a thing. He would have stopped.” This was the literal truth. The poignant fact, in a cold, common, police-court sense. He did in fact want to stop. He had actually put on the brakes and swerved, first away and then toward the curb, automatically slowing for a brief moment to make a stop. But the man had been struck. It was over. And a decision had to be made, a balance reached between converging factors, the heavy moral burden I had undertaken to broaden the scope of both CC and Generous Heart, the tenuous grip Charles was daily strengthening upon his own infirm character, weighed against his buried official record, which, brought out by normal police routine, would have destroyed everything. An instant decision had to be made, and I had not hesitated to make it. But the truth about even this lay somewhere else. There was a majestic irony in this, that the sanctions imposed by the Generous Heart, by all such redeeming ministries, had within them barbaric urgencies that over-rode the private sanctions demanded of anyone, whether of Talcott, or Vincent, or myself. But I could never hope to make this clear to Vincent. I gave him, instead, a superficial briefing, in the firm statement, “Charley is one of the most fundamentally wholesome people I know. All his reactions are simple and direct. I don’t believe it possible he was in control of that car.”
“Then what are you waiting for?” asked Vincent, urgently. “Get in touch with the guy. Call him up and find out. If he’s in the clear, all our worries are over, and maybe we’ve hit the jackpot, besides.”
He was so ridiculously pliable, anyone less understanding would have laughed. No wonder Jay made all the decisions for the firm, had done so as a matter of course since my father’s stroke, but in all likelihood his influence extended much farther back than that. For many years, I began to believe.
It would have made matters simple to follow Vincent’s suggestion that I phone Talcott and ask him point-blank, here and now, whether he had or had not driven the fatal car. But it would not have been entirely honest with either Vincent, Charley, or myself.
I said, with cold candor:
“But what if I am mistaken? You seemed so positive.”
“For God’s sake, Stanley, what’s eating you? I’m not sure of anything. Why don’t you just forget about Talcott, and the accident? If it was him, the cops are sure to trace the car and get him, and that’ll be too bad. For him, I mean. But you weren’t there, you didn’t even know about it. And if he wasn’t there, we were just mistaken about the whole thing, and I guess we owe you an apology for something, damned If I know what, but there it is. Is that what you want? Or what do you want?”
There were so many replies possible to that, all different, and all true at concentric layers around the inmost core, I could only smile and shake my head at the thought of revealing them all in a single phrase. It was much more important, now, to make the vital, the telling, the fateful move.
“Just this,” I said, choosing simple words, and with great care. “You don’t realize it, yourself, but you are too much under the influence of Jay. None of these questions would have come up at all, except for Jay. None of them. And the reason they arose, the real reason Jay will always raise similar worries and uncertainties, although Jay himself doesn’t know it, never can know it, is that he doesn’t want to bring any new accounts into this firm.”
I stopped to study the effect of this, seeing Vincent’s blank wonder and disbelief. I laughed, not at him, but with him, in encouragement.
“That’s crazy, Stanley. What makes you think so? Why wouldn’t he?”
“He’s afraid to take the responsibility,” I said. “He’s really unsure of himself, especially since the last stroke my father had. But even before that, when he was called upon to make more and more of the decisions, he was timid about making important ones. He simply cannot make a new move. What he really wants is to stand still. Wait, I’ll show you.” I held up my hand, seeing Vincent bursting with a variety of contrary opinions. “You have just prepared a news release for an agency that just started, Restitution.”
Vincent’s eyes traveled to the corner of his desk, heavily cluttered with papers, books, pictures, brochures.
“I haven’t done it yet,” he said. “Jay mentioned it only yesterday. Hell, you were supposed to do that, yourself. Anyway, there’s no rush about it. It’s not even an account.”
“That’s right, it isn’t. It isn’t, because Jay turned it down.”
“They haven’t our kind of a case, Jay says.”
I gave him a few seconds in which to hear his own words, before I pointed out:
“But it’s good enough to start them off with a job of interpretation, donated by you and this agency, isn’t it?” He was silent, and I continued, “Jay will always find that an aggressive outfit with a big potential is not our kind of a case. That is why he has refused, so far, to sign with something even bigger, Generous Heart.”
“He hasn’t refused. It was just discussed informally, as I understand it, with the feeling it was too vague, and anyway, they don’t want a contract for a drive or anything. They’re so heavily endowed, from away back, they don’t know what to do with the cash they already have.”
“Is that the impression Jay gave you?”
“It’s the impression all of us had, except you.”
“Well, you’re wrong.” I pulled an envelope from the inside pocket of my coat, withdrew the contract that had been drawn nearly two months ago, and that I had carried with me for this right moment that I knew must come. “They want to get out of the drop-in-the-bucket, pet-charity stage and go to work on a big scale.
Their income from endowments is not nearly enough for what they have in mind. Here is the contract they have already signed. Look at those terms.”
I slid the form across the desk to Vincent. He went through it rapidly, familiar with the clauses and the meaning behind the schedule of figures, the amount for each higher goal and their correspondingly larger fee to us, based upon the expenses we would
bear for a lengthening campaign, should one be justified. The amounts were as I had already outlined to Vincent, terms I was sure he had all along been revolving in his mind.
But the key to the situation was not in the body of the contract. It lay, now, in the signatures.
He found them presently, and looked up in mild surprise. Three people had signed for Generous Heart, there were four blank lines for Campaign Consultants.
“I know two of these names,” he said. “As names, that is. Crimmins and Quintard. They’re the same as a couple of dead presidents. But is this Charles Talcott here? One of their officers?” I nodded. “On the clients’ board?”
“That’s right.”
I didn’t help him, as he looked at me uncertainly, then ventured to say:
“That’s a little unusual, isn’t it?”
“Why so?”
He floundered again.
“Well, I thought he was in the business, that’s all. On the same side of the fence we are, I mean.”
“He has been. But the work this agency does is more than business with Charley. He knows the field. It means something to him, in a personal sense. That’s why I’m so positive about the man’s whole character.”
Vincent absently looked again at the contract, the signatures, not seeing them, but reviewing them.
“I see. What’s his position on the board, by the way? Anything special?”
“Treasurer,” I said.
I met Vincent’s gaze, when he quickly looked up, with an even, disinterested stare. If he still had any misgivings, he would have to resolve them for himself, and know that he did. Know it now, and for the future.
“Has Jay seen this? Does he know about it?”
His dependence on Jay was almost pathological.
“I’ve told him about it. But I haven’t shown him the actual contract. What was the use? He would never sign, if it were left up to him. That’s too big a drive, he’d be afraid of it.”
The Generous Heart Page 6
