It felt as though a wild, roundhouse swing had reached out of the receiver and belted me right where it rested, on the rim of my ear.
“Why should I?”
“It wouldn’t be smart to turn them down, that’s why. Let them have this one campaign.”
“Are you trying to tell me Griscom was making a deliberate bluff, to get that contract?”
An interval of heavy silence held once more. Then:
“Was it a bluff?”
The feeling was strange, cold and immense and still, as I began to weigh and test my own words before I spoke them, preparing, at the same time, to put a double check upon Vincent’s.
“If it wasn’t a bluff, what was it?”
“It could be serious, Jay. Much tougher.”
“His story? Do you imagine anybody would buy it?”
“Wake up, Jay. Nobody has to buy it. All Talcott and Griscom have to do is frighten those bystanders, ring in a few trained witnesses of their own, and It sticks. Enough of it.”
“Maybe,” I said “But it’s thin. There’s bound to be material evidence. There’s a broken headlight, somewhere. A bent bumper, a scratched mudguard.”
Vincent thought this over for a long moment. Somberly, then, he told me:
“Right. And it could be yours. Your broken glass, your dented hood. Today, or tomorrow. Or maybe you fixed it yourself last week, but somehow there’s a station attendant, a stranger driving another car, somebody who happened to notice how banged up it was that very night, and he remembers every tiny detail. Listen, Jay. Those people are professional investigators. Not amateurs. Professionals.”
And Vincent was worried. And frightened. Maybe they had him in a separate clamp. Or they’d bought him. Or both. But how deeply?
“It’s still thin,” I said. “There were three people in that car of mine. Those witnesses may not be sure about that other car, but they saw ours, and saw it stop. None of them, including the cop, questioned that ours was the following car. There were three of us who saw what actually happened, and our stories check. Three of us. I say that makes it final. What about it?”
Vincent waited so long I could almost see him looking at the hurdle, feel him approaching it, undecided whether to take it or to stop, or to make a swift dash around. He was very persuasive, when he finally replied.
“Sure, I don’t say you couldn’t eventually beat the thing in court, you probably could.” You. That one word said too much. “But long before the trial even begins, Campaign Consultants will be through. None of it looks good. I have a hunch they’ll find out we thought we were covering up for somebody, even find out it was our own partner.” He thought some more, and so did I I didn’t tell him Griscom already knew about that, his wild guess was a bull’s-eye. But was it just a wild guess? If he was already in too deep, he could be far ahead of me. “You say this fellow told you Barna was a Generous Heart character, and we’ve already halfway negotiated a contract with them. Barna was afraid somebody might try to get him and now it’s claimed yours is the car that did. Shana was with us. Your relationship with her will be played up. All of it can be circulated and magnified, if that crowd wants to get tough about it. They make a regular business of these things, Jay, can’t you understand that?”
“Sure,” I said. “But who reached you and Stanley? What have they got on a daffy amateur like Stanley? And how did they get to you?”
I hoped this would score, and he was silent for so long it was plain I had. He said, then, in a low, wrenching voice:
“That’s a hell of a thing to say to a friend.” Maybe. But that was no answer, either. He went on gathering heat, “And you’re taking a hell of a highhanded attitude. Since when are you the whole works at CC? You’ve got three associates. How about consulting us, before you make some offhand, casual, dictatorial decision of your own?”
This sounded so unlike Vincent I had the impression it merely bounced off of him like an angle shot originally made by somebody else.
“I’m doing it now,” I said. “Nobody told me about this contract. I just heard about it from a stranger, and this is the first chance I’ve had to consult with you, or anyone.” I waited for this to settle him down. “Well? All things considered, what’s your best advice?”
This time he sounded tired and hesitant. But it was straight Vincent Beechwood.
“Sign, guy.”
“Is that all? Isn’t there some more information I ought to have about this deal?”
He was uncertain, just long enough.
“I know how you feel, Jay. But you’ve got the picture. Let them have us, for this one God damn drive of theirs. After that, they’ll be strictly on their own. Whatever they do next time, it’s no concern of ours. Why run the risk of blowing the whole works, just to avoid one campaign we don’t like? There have been plenty of others we didn’t like, either. You’re working on one of them right now, pulling Newell Gibbs’s clinker out of the fire. For your own sake, Jay, and for the rest of us, don’t ask for still more trouble. Sign that contract.”
He was away off the point and rapidly drifting further, already losing sight of familiar arrows, danger signs, boundaries. Nor would it help to spell out the difference between the cinders that always turned up in every job, and this new proposition that seemed loaded with something else. We had covered that. We had covered everything.
“I’ll think it over, Vincent,” I said.
“Relax, Jay,” he urged. “Talk it over with Haley and Stanley. None of us want a battle inside the firm, God forbid. And the rest of us are for this. After all, Generous Heart has got a good case, you know.”
“I’ll think about it some more,” I repeated, mechanically, a little numb. “See you, Vincent.”
“See you soon, Jay.”
I heard the connection break as I held the phone in my lap, reaching slowly with my other hand to depress the cradle. What had we said? That was less important, now, than some great change that had taken place underneath the words. In fact, he clearly hadn’t wanted to say very much of anything, and very soon, neither had I. That was the difference. Bigger than the words, he was for some reason afraid of me, and I knew that somewhere in that area of silence I distrusted him. Distrusted Vincent? It did not seem entirely rational. But I certainly had glimpsed that he was frightened. And he had warned me, openly, that we were set up for a full treatment of steam, unknowingly warned me that if it came, he would simply not be there. And If not there, where would he be? At the thermostat, perhaps. Helping to raise the heat.
I freed the cradle and made contact with the hotel switchboard. When the girl came on, she said:
“Mr. Ravoc, your office called while the line was still busy. They said there was an urgent call for you there, and to get in touch with them.”
“Which office? Here or New York?”
“Local,” she said.
“All right, thanks. But now please get me another New York number.”
I gave it. Shana’s salon. It took a little while to clear the exchanges, then they had the girl at the salon switchboard. And a moment later, Shana. She spoke in her small, impersonal business voice, which I remembered having overheard, but so rarely that it sounded a little strange.
“Hello, Jay. How are you?”
“Lousy, until now. How much do I miss you, this fine, smoggy morning?”
“I’m sorry if I upset your office, asking them to reach you.”
“Today?”
“Yes, didn’t you know?”
This explained the operator’s message from the local headquarters.
“No, I haven’t gone in yet. Why?”
“Don’t you know?”
This was not her business voice, and not at all the voice that belonged to me. It was neither, one I had never heard before.
“No, lady, I don’t. What have you been trying to reach me for?”
There was a dead instant, no longer than a breath, and then:
“It seemed important at the time. But perha
ps it isn’t What did you want to talk to me about, Jay?”
“A lot of things. Maybe I just wanted to talk to some strange woman I never met before, and I thought of you.”
There was a longer pause, irresolute but impenetrable.
“What about, Jay?”
I already knew there was no ground under my feet, feeling it go in a few swift seconds, and the phone I still held by reflex was a lifeless gadget taken spinning with me through space.
“What’s the matter, Shana? Something happened, and you tried to phone. Now, exactly what was it that seemed so important then, even though it doesn’t now?”
Her voice at last came out of another silence, faint and clear as a falling crystal.
“I received your present. I wanted to thank you.”
“You’re welcome. I never forget you on Tuesdays and Fridays, also days with even-numbered dates. What present?”
The remote, firm tone wavered just a fraction, then steadied.
“It was very thoughtful. Do you plan to send more?”
I still held the phone with the faulty connection to some wrong number, but that was all.
“Lots. What was this present I sent you?”
The tightly wound mechanism in control of her uncoiled at its own rate, evenly, with no reference to me, or my question.
“What are you going to try for next time? My face again?”
“What’s that?”
“Will it be acid? Or a cute little eyebrow pencil with a hidden spring stiletto?”
I heard this without believing it. Then I matched it with an echo, the investigator’s allusion to some charge of attempted disfiguration. It had seemed merely confused, and accidental, with no direct significance. Accusations made in a state of panic. Point by point, she was actually making them. But not hysterically. She was glacial. And positive.
“Hold it, Shana. Just hold it.” My own voice, without my volition, pitched itself to that of the last, hostile warning. “I haven’t sent you any kind of a present. Not since the record album two or three weeks ago. Now, what did somebody send you?”
The moment stayed and held and then another mute moment, and then another, each of them stabbing, probing, twisting deeper into a ravaged wound that nothing would ever heal. Then she said, the words faint, and bitter, and sad:
“Have you signed that contract, Jay?”
I knew, but could not admit that I did.
“What contract?”
“The one your partners want you to sign. With that agency. I forget the name of it.”
“The Generous Heart?”
“Yes.”
“No. Why?”
“Do you intend to?”
“You’re damned right I don’t. Why? How does that concern you, and how does it concern us?”
She was still, but with a different stillness, and I sensed she was fighting against shock.
“Sign It, Jay. I want you to.”
Without warning a stunned, alarmed, enraged, malevolent barbarian brushed aside the ordinary Jay Ravoc and lashed back:
“Who the hell was Stephen Barna? What was he to you, and why did you have to go to that dinner for Inner Light? Why the hell this sudden enthusiasm of yours for Generous Heart?”
“Jay, Jay, listen to me.”
“Why? Can you say something that makes sense?”
In the interval, I knew she had silently started to cry.
“Just this,” she said, forcing a tone of calmness. “Just this. You have nothing to worry about from me. But you do have from those other people, if you act without them. Do you understand? You are free to do just as you like, regardless of me, regardless of the park, the gift, and no matter what your own private plans are for Generous Heart. You have nothing to fear from me.”
“That’s what I would have thought, and taken it for granted. But now I damn well wonder. Shana, I’ll be up there in three hours, and I want to see you.”
“No, Jay. Not after this. Whether you patch things up with your partners, or decide to buck them, I don’t want to see you. Not for a while.”
Everything was drained from her tone, except that now it sounded as though she had a bad attack of nerves.
“Don’t talk like that, as though you were afraid of me, afraid even to see me. Three hours, I expect to see you then. At the salon, is that all right? Shana?”
The line was dead. She had disconnected, and even the simple savage had gone away, leaving me to stare, alone, at the detached instrument in my hand. I was Jay Ravoc once more. But with a difference. I had become the bull’s-eye of a hot target. With the man I thought was a friend, the lady I thought was mine, among those, God knew how many others, doing their best to make a high score.
The switchboard girl was talking away, and I finally thought long enough to have her connect me with Dave Merriman at drive headquarters. He was in charge for the day, maybe permanently. After that I walked across the street to the garage where I parked the car. It was already gassed and oiled, and I started to get in, to take it out for the drive up to the city. But I stopped for a moment and went around to the front, expecting to see anything, and at the same time, not greatly interested. Just numb, and curious.
There was nothing. Yet. But Griscom, Vincent, and for that matter, Shana, all took it for granted that the firm was about to run a campaign for Generous Heart, and if I balked, there was no limit to the methods that would be used to force one through anyway, either with or without me.
Chapter IX
Shana Hepworth
One unspoken question overshadowed our talk from the very beginning. Why had he chosen to call just when he did, at this unusual hour, unaware of my own efforts to reach him? He had given no reason, nor in fact any reason for having called at all. The coincidence, now surrounded by too many smaller ones, wove in and out of everything we said. It was still there when I reached out, and my hand rested for a long moment beside the telephone standing on the desk. He had known delivery of the package would be this morning, he must have known, and his reason was as simple as that, some grisly curiosity, perhaps even a planned move in some further design of his own. A decision forced itself upon me through a wretched welter of doubts, and certainties, and still more doubts.
“No, Jay, not after this,” I said. “Whether you patch things up with your partners, or decide to buck them, I don’t want to see you. Not for a while.”
I could hear his voice, but the words carried no weight.
“Don’t talk like that, as though you were afraid of me, afraid even to see me. Three hours. I expect to see you then, at the salon.”
There was more, but I softly depressed the contact bar. The line went dead, tangled and cut in the havoc of a distant storm it was too soon to know about in full.
What did it matter what he said? The fury with which he blazed out at any point touching the transactions of his firm, at even my assurance I would not intervene regardless of which course he took, then his open hint that I knew the dead stranger and had some hidden purpose in attending the hotel affair for blemished people, all of this matched with the views the Griscom woman had taken for granted, seeming to think I did, too. And it matched especially with her fright when I urged her to touch and try the gift sent by Jay.
But he had been clear and blunt on that single point, he had not sent any gift at all. And always previously, one came with a brief personal note, saturated with what Jay thought was wit. This time, nothing. Only his printed name on the label. And why should I have questioned that, though he was out of town he had sent me a present? Naturally I hadn’t. At first.
And still I saw that if he had sent it, there couldn’t be anything personal and identifiable sent with It. That would be tangible proof of his connection with the gift, too final and too dangerous.
But even without the note it could be final and dangerous. The package could still be traced, and easily, back to the shop, the sender. Dr. Dwight had suggested it. Anyone would think of that.
J
ay would think of it. He had thought of it. He could not have missed. And what had he done, how had he arranged it, to protect himself?
That was too easy. He knew me. He knew what I would do. Nothing. He did not have to protect himself against anything.
But if he knew that, then the whole deranged act had no point. If he had, in fact, been the one behind it. And if not Jay, who? I had no enemies as virulent as that. Neither had Jay. Or had he? He was not the kind to attract that devious, bitter type of grudge.
And none of this was. like him at all. None of it. Nor was this like me.
Why didn’t I have the nerve to trace that package back, myself, before I went spinning in still wilder circles of this fear and doubt, followed by sudden confidence, and then by added shocks of dread and fury dragged deeper into the vortex of panic? It would be simple to have that package traced. If necessary, I could easily trace it through, personally.
Then why didn’t I?
Because I would not like what I would find. That was certain, and I knew it, no matter what I found.
I might find that Griscom bitch. In fact, she could be taken for granted. That was so certain she could be checked off right now, though it took the mind of a zoo-keeper to imagine Jay ever having an affair with the Special De Luxe Personally Stylized Griscom at any time, no matter how far back, let alone in the present. But regardless of who he is now, a man has always tripped over a couple of those things, away back in his past, episodes he never does see in a clear light, ever. I ought to know. I see dozens of those hallucinations put together every day. I draw up the instructions myself, see them put together right here. And then it turns out, always to my surprise, that they actually work.
She sent that facial time bomb herself. Of course. That interview was a plain fake, and it coincided, like Jay’s phone call, with its delivery. She planned and carried through the whole crazy gesture, in a crisis Jay knew about but did not fully understand. It worried him, without exactly knowing why or what she had done, but knowing she had done something, at the same time unwilling to admit her existence. And that explained the whole story. Her garbled version of Jay’s business affairs, her insistence that he go along with his partners in this new campaign, all that stood out clearly enough, seen in the floodlight of her jealousy, flaming beyond control. It explained the act itself. It explained her sudden fright. No wonder she was terrified, invited to sample her own work. She had misjudged the timing, perhaps, but that was all. The whole attack upon me had been hers, and hers alone.
The Generous Heart Page 13
