Killy

by Donald E. Westlake

  KILLY

  Donald E Westlake

  First published by

  Random House

  1963

  Walter Killy was a tough trade union official who could smell a sewed-up town in one sniff…

  Paul Standish was a college boy idealist who thought there was only one kind of Truth…

  Together they went to Wittburg and walked slap into a frame-up for murder…

  To DaveandSandy and Nedra

  One

  I first met Walter Killy in Washington, D.C., on a very hot sunny day in late June. The city was as muggy as a swamp that day, as though the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay had both evaporated off into the breezeless air, but Walter Killy’s office in the AAMST Building was air-conditioned, and when the slim blonde secretary showed me in I could feel the chill of drying perspiration on the back of my neck.

  Walter came bounding around the desk to greet me, his big clean hand outstretched. ‘I’m Walter Killy,’ he told me, ‘and I wish I could tell you to call me Wally, but Wally Killy sounds like a suburb of Baltimore.’ He grabbed my hand and pumped it.

  He was a big man, with yellow hair cut very short in a crew-cut us stiff as a military brush. Dr Reedman, in the placement office back at school, had told me Walter was thirty-eight, but he looked no more than a boyish thirty. And though I was twenty-four, he made me feel more like seventeen.

  He let go of my hand and clapped my shoulder. ‘And how’s the old Alma Mater, Paul? It’s Paul, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. That’s right, Paul. Paul Standish.’

  ‘Glad to know you, Paul. And how’s good old Monequois U?’

  ‘Still there,’ I said. Walter had overpowered me; it was the best I could think of to say.

  ‘That damn place will go on for ever,’ he said, grinning at me. His teeth were even and white. ‘Just so long as there’s an alumni to gouge. Sit down, Paul, take a load off. What do you think of this weather, huh?’

  ‘A little damp,’ I said. There was a modernistic chair, mainly of dark blue leather but with discreet glimpses of chrome, positioned in front of the steel and formica desk. I settled into it, glad of the chance to sit down after having walked from the bus depot through the outside heat, and while Walter leaped back behind the desk I looked around at the office.

  Walter Killy, in the hierarchy of the union, the American Alliance of Machinists and Skilled Trades, was actually little above junior-executive level, so his office was no more than ten feet square and boasted only the one window. But there was such a determined modernity to the room—the chair I sat in, the hard sweep of the pale blue desk, the bareness of the dull powder-blue walls, the air-conditioner hunching in the window like the control panel of a jet bomber, the colourless grey carpet, the functional frameless casement-type window, the lack of mouldings—that it all exuded a kind of opulent austerity, as though no expense had been spared in making this office look clean and simple.

  The one single touch of Grand Rapids in the room was the mahogany trophy case against the right-hand wall, with the gold-plated cups and frozen figures visible behind the glass. Walter Killy, in his four years at Monequois, had been a star athlete in football and basketball and baseball and gymnastics, and the record of it all was in that trophy case. After college, he had spent three years playing professional football in the Midwest before coming to work for the Machinists, and the record of those years was in the trophy case, too.

  ‘Well, now,’ said Walter suddenly, and I realized I’d been gawping around like Cousin Elmer in Bigtown. I gave my attention back to Walter, and saw him now sitting at the desk, poised on his noiseless swivel chair, elbows on the desk and fingertips together to make a church steeple, over the top of which he studied me. Behind him, the air-conditioner hummed quietly to itself. Because the window was closed, the traffic sounds from the street were muted to near-silence, to the barest threshold of audibility.

  There are many natural businessman types who can turn charm on and off at will, but Walter was the only man I’ve ever met or heard of who was naturally charming and could turn business-like brevity and dispassion on and off at will. I saw it happen for the first time when I looked across the desk at him, saw the milling mouth now a straight impersonal line, saw the laugh crinkles gone from around his eyes, saw the stiffness that had come into his spine and shoulders.

  When he spoke, it was as though he were reading a clipped and abbreviated report. ‘As you know, Paul,’ he said, making my name simply another word in the sentence, ‘this is the first time the Machinists has taken on a student-trainee under the Monequois system. Or any other system, for that matter.’ He smiled, briefly and falsely. ‘So all of this is as new to us as it is to you.’

  It was fantastic to watch him. When he wore the businessman’s mask, even the charm was false, the smile too mechanical and the first-name basis too obvious a stratagem. I think that’s what made it possible for me to like Walter so much. The brawny crew-cut football-hero club-car ideal usually grates on me, but in Walter’s case it wasn’t a pose. Walter couldn’t be a successful phoney, and when he tried he was irresistibly likeable simply because of his failure.

  Breaking the church steeple, Walter reached out and pulled a pale manila folder toward him. ‘Dr Reedman sent me your record,’ he said, opening the folder, ‘and it’s a good one. Economics major, junior year, over-all B minus average. You worked for Hamsbro Surveys last year, didn’t you?’

  I nodded. ‘I rang doorbells for six months. I never knew what any of the surveys were about, really, so I don’t think I learned much about economics.’

  ‘You’ll learn with us,’ he promised me. ‘It may not be economics, but you’ll learn.’ He closed the folder and made the church steeple again. ‘The Monequois system is a good one,’ he said. ‘I’m a product of it myself, you know, and I couldn’t be more grateful. Six months in a class room, six months working in the field in a job connected with your major.’ The false businessman’s smile flickered on his face again. ‘More or less connected,’ he amended.

  I smiled back, because it was expected.

  ‘Your job with us,’ he went on, ‘will mainly be to tag along and keep me out of trouble.’ The smile came and went. ‘In other words, you’ll be my assistant for the next six months. That being the case, it’ll be easier to tell you what I do than what you’ll do.’

  He paused to take a pack of Newports from the handkerchief pocket of his grey suit jacket. He made a flipping motion with his wrist, and a single cigarette popped halfway out of the pack, a trick I’ve never been able to figure out. Extending the pack towards me, he said, ‘Do you smoke, Paul?’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘I’ll stick to Luckies.’ I got my own pack of cigarettes from my shirt pocket, and fumbled one out the old way. Then Walter was half-standing, leaning across the desk, a gas lighter hissing flame in his outstretched hand. I took the light, thanked him, and he settled back to get the cigarette started.

  Once the lighter was put away, he said, ‘My job here is organizer. Now, in the bad old days, a union organizer was a fellow who came into town and gave all the workers baseball bats to hit the scabs and deputies with. Happily, that isn’t the way we work it any more. These days we use speeches, throwaways, parlour diplomacy with the spokesmen for management and the local working force, plant surveys, and the ultimate decision is usually made by the local workers all getting together and voting whether to stick with their company union or local independent or whatnot, or come in with the national union. The organizer these days is the man in the field, the representative of the national union on the spot to answer questions and get the ball rolling.’

  He paused, as though for question or comment, but I had nothing to say, so I just nodded. He took the nod to mean somethi
ng or other, and went on. ‘Another difference,’ he said, ‘is that these days we make sure we’re not barging in where we’re not wanted. We keep a steady flow of propaganda going through the mail to workers’ groups eligible to join the national organization, but an organizer doesn’t actually go into the field unless he’s asked for.’ The business smile flickered on his face. ‘Which means,’ he said, ‘that we spend most of our time sitting on our duffs here in Washington, answering correspondence.’ He motioned the cigarette at his full in-basket. The out-basket beneath it was about half as full.

  ‘Is that what my job’s going to be?’ I asked him. ‘Answering correspondence?’

  ‘Not yet. To tell you the truth, I had a sort of training campaign more or less mapped out in my mind, what you’d be doing the first few weeks here.’ He tapped a small bundle of printed matter on the coiner of his desk. ‘I was going to have you read all this stuff first,’ he said. ‘Every blessed pamphlet and brochure and throwaway we throw away. I wanted you to know the union, where and how and why it started, and what it’s done since, and what it’s doing now, and what it plans to do in the future, as told by its own advertising.’

  ‘That ought to be interesting,’ I said politely.

  He grinned again, more naturally this time. The businessman was gradually fading away, and Walter’s own personality was coming to the surface again. He could never keep the facade up for very long. ‘A lot more interesting than you’d think,’ he said. ‘The history of this union makes pretty exciting reading sometimes. Anyway, after that I was going to give you a selected tour of the files, correspondence that’s come in in the past and what we did with it and what happened next, and so on.’ He leaned back in the swivel chair, smiling. ‘I had it all worked out,’ he said. ‘Within a month, you’d have taken over my job completely, and I could spend my days loafing at the beach.’

  I returned his smile, wondering what had made this plan of his conditional. He answered the question without my asking it, by picking up another manila folder and holding it out to me across the desk. ‘I got this deal tossed in my lap yesterday,’ he said.

  I took the folder and opened it. Inside, stapled together at the upper left-hand corner, were three sheets of paper. The first and third were cheap white stationery, medium-size, written on both sides in ink in a sprawling hand that made huge loops in the 1’s and d’s and b’s. The second was business-letter-size, flimsy white onion skin, with the carbon of a typed letter on it. I read the three sheets in order:

  25th May

  Dear Sirs,

  I am writing to you in reference to a little booklet of yours which I saw from a friend of mine. This was a booklet about joining the American Alliance of Machinists and Skilled Trades, and how dissatisfied workers which are saddled with company unions or such could write to you a letter and you would send a representative to help the workers form a Local of your union.

  Well, I want to tell you that this is exactly the sort of situation there is here in Wittburg. There is a growing number of us workers at the Mclntyre Shoe Co. plant which are dissatisfied with conditions here and know we are not going to have anything better unless we become a Local of a national union such as yours. If you keep a record of things like that, you will see that nine years ago there was an attempt made to organize this plant in favour of your union and that it failed when the workers at the election decided to stick with the company union. I was working at the Co. at that time, having been an employee here for the last fourteen years, and I voted against joining the national union then just like anybody else, but times have changed a lot around here since that time. In the first place, old William ‘Bill’ Mclntyre is dead now, and a lot of nephews and nieces own the Co. and are leaving it in the hands of managers that don’t care about the workers. In Bill McIntyre’s time, any worker with a grievance could go up to his office on Friday afternoon any Friday, because that was the day his door was always open, and you wouldn’t get fired, you’d get listened to. And he was the one built the hospital, and the stadium, and the low-in-cost houses for the workers such as the one I bought and financed through the Co. and am living in right now.

  But ever since the old man died four years ago things have been going to Hell around here, with managers that don’t care anything about the workers, and the Co. owned by nephews and nieces that aren’t even living in this town but are off somewhere living off the sweat of our brows. You don’t catch any office door open on Friday afternoon, and the Co. union is now in the pocket of the manager, whose name is Fleisch. If you were going to send a representative up here today to make another try at getting started with that Local, you’d find it was a different story. I would vote all in favour of it now, and just about everybody I know says the same thing. So that’s why I’m writing to you, such as you suggested in that booklet which I mentioned, which was called, Why A National Union?

  Very sincerely yours,

  Charles R. Hamilton

  426 4th Street

  Wittburg, N.Y.

  Charles R. Hamilton

  426 4th Street

  Wittburg, N.Y.

  June 4, 1962

  Dear Mr Hamilton:

  Your letter of May 25th has been received, and we thank you for your interest in AAMST. I’ve looked it up in our records, and I see that we did attempt to organize a local in the Mclntyre Shoe Company nine years ago, and that we wound up with seventeen per cent of the vote, while eighty-three per cent of the workers voted to stay with the company union. To be perfectly frank, Mr Hamilton, I hadn’t known we’d ever lost an election by that wide a margin. ‘Bill’ Mclntyre must have been quite a man, to get that much loyalty from his workers.

  If it hadn’t been for that previous unsuccessful attempt, there would be no question of our sending a representative to Wittburg in response to your letter, Mr Hamilton. But you’ll have to admit that our showing was just a bit disheartening that first time out. Therefore, I’d appreciate it if you could give me some sort of concrete suggestion as to the strength of the desire for a national union among your fellow workers at the present time. A letter signed by a group of your co-workers, for instance, or local newspaper clippings of recent labour disturbances in the shoe company plant, would help to give us more solid footing for constructive planning.

  Hoping to hear from you soon again, and thanking you once again for your interest,

  I remain Sincerely,

  Everett Freeman

  Executive Assistant

  EF:jl

  Enc.

  June 12th

  Dear Mr Freeman,

  I guess I can understand why you people don’t want to come running in where you got your nose broken for you once before, and I appreciate your answering my letter as quick and pleasant as you did, and sending along that other literature about your union. I showed your letter and the literature around to friends of mine and people I know at the Co., and a bunch of them agreed to sign a letter to you, as there hasn’t been any kind of labour disturbance here of the kind that would get into the newspapers. They are all going to sign on the back of this letter, and if there is anything else you want me to do I’ll do it. Thank you very much for your interest in our problems here.

  Very sincerely yours,

  Charles R. Hamilton

  After I finished reading the third letter, I turned it over and looked on the back at the signatures. Most of them were in pen, but a few were in pencil. I counted them, and there were twenty-five.

  ‘Doesn’t seem like many, does it?’ Walter asked me. ‘Twenty-five signatures, and that plant employs thirty-five hundred people.’ He was leaning back in the chair, one hand resting casually palm-down on the desk. ‘They used to have a rule of thumb round here,’ he said. ‘Before my time, before the war. For every man who says he’s with you and is willing to sign his name on the dotted line, there are five more that are with you but afraid to sign their name to anything. What with one thing and another, that ratio’s gone up since the war. Today it�
�s closer to fifteen-to-one.’ He pointed to the folder in my hand. ‘Those twenty-five signatures stand for closer to four hundred workers who are with us, ready and willing, if the statistics are right. Which would give us a percentage even lower than the seventeen per cent we had nine years ago.’

  He leaned forward over the desk suddenly, and said, ‘But this is one of the times when the statistics are wrong. Did this fellow Hamilton talk to everybody in the plant? No. He talked to a bunch of his friends and co-workers. If you follow the statistics, he had to talk to three hundred and seventy-five people who were on our side before he could find twenty-five willing to sign. But he didn’t talk to any three hundred and seventy-five people. He more likely talked to fifty, and even that’s probably too big a number. But if he talked to as many as fifty people, and half of them felt so strongly that they were willing to sign that letter, we’ve got a situation to drive the statistics crazy. We’ll walk into that town and the workers will strew roses at our feet.’

  ‘We’re going there? What about this Mr Freeman?’

  ‘He started his vacation last week. Ordinarily, the job would have waited for him, but I knew about it and asked for it. Because of you, Paul. You’ve got a golden opportunity here to see union organizing at its best and sweetest, and it’ll be your very first job with us. I told the boss I wanted this one, to take you along and show you the ropes in an ideal situation, and he said fine.’

  ‘So do I.’ I smiled, feeling an excitement for this job totally unlike anything I’d felt for my other in-the-field semesters. ‘When do we start?’

  ‘Tomorrow. You haven’t got yourself a place yet, have you?’

  ‘No, I just came in on the bus, I left my stuff in a locker. I figured I’d come here first, and then, you know, look around after that.’

  ‘Good. There’s no sense looking for an apartment yet, we might be up in this town a month or more. I’d be glad to have you stay over with us, but it’s just my wife and I, we’ve got one of these efficiency apartments, and there really isn’t any room.’ He chuckled in embarrassment. ‘There’s isn’t even enough room for us,’ he said.