Sweet and Low_An Emma Lathen Best Seller Page 12

  “Say,” somebody was reminded, “didn’t they have another murder over at Dreyer today?”

  “Well, there’s a new twist for you,” Charlie remarked. “I wonder how much it’s costing Dreyer to go on network TV and remind us all that they specialize in murder, as well as chocolate.”

  Chapter 13

  The Recap in the Bar

  In the midst of life, so the scripture runs, there is death. This sober truth provides its own measure of comfort at even the most tragic bereavement. The reverse, equally true, always causes more trouble. At the Cocoa Exchange on Friday morning, they were grappling with the fact that life must continue even after death.

  “All right, all right!” Wayne Glasscock exploded. “Amory Shaw got murdered next door. With the police crawling all over the place, I’m not likely to forget it, am I? But what do you want me to do? Close the goddam Exchange?”

  “Take it easy, Wayne,” urged his companion. But a trader who had just returned to their table after a quick reconnaissance was more hard-nosed.

  “Might not be a bad idea,” he said.

  Today’s midmorning kaffee klatsch in the Exchange’s paneled lunchroom was short on the usual banter about hockey teams, suburban crime, and new secretaries. Even so, Russ Martini, slumped in the corner chair, raised his head to see if Severinson was joking.

  “I wish to God I could,” said Glasscock fervently.

  Severinson, the floor man from Clayton Anderson, laughed hollowly. “Boy, talk about a mark of respect. That would be something, wouldn’t it? Closing the Cocoa Exchange in memory of Amory Shaw!”

  This bit too close to the bone. What had happened to Amory Shaw was overshadowed by what was happening next door, on the floor. It was not far short of disaster.

  “I’d better get back and spell Jim,” Martini said with genuine reluctance. Today, going onto the floor was like climbing onto an anvil. The hammer of crumbling prices was inexorable.

  “I wonder what Dreyer is going to do now?” Severinson asked the glum silence.

  “Sooner or later, they’ve got to buy—”

  For once Severinson was not reverting to that all-important theme, as he hastened to explain: “No, I meant who is Dreyer going to replace Amory with?”

  Like the first fugitive breath of cool air after a heat wave, this relief was revivifying.

  “Good God!” Wayne Glasscock straightened in his chair. “Do you know that in all those hours last night with the police in and out—I never thought of that. And then this morning—”

  By common consent, the subject of what happened in the first two hours of trading was dropped.

  “Orcutt?” said Severinson tentatively.

  His suggestion evoked derisive snorts, a shrug from Glasscock, and an unfortunate observation from the swinger in the lavender double-knit.

  “They wouldn’t touch Orcutt,” he contributed, adding: “Besides, Orcutt’s still in trouble with the police, isn’t he, Russ?”

  Clambering unwillingly to his feet, Martini suppressed a curse. Thanks to a few minutes yesterday in the limelight with Amory Shaw’s body, he was now the local expert on the murder and the murder investigation! Holding on to his patience, he answered: “I understand they gave him a pretty good going over. Apparently he was in and out of a lot of offices, so that he doesn’t have an alibi—”

  Glasscock forgot about tact. “That isn’t enough to explain why the police are concentrating on him,” he said didactically. “If one thing came through yesterday, it was that nobody has an alibi. Vandevanter was in and out of my office—”

  He broke off when Martini’s grimace reminded him that among those without an alibi was Martini himself.

  “So,” said Martini as if there had been no interruption, “they’ve started casting around for motives.”

  “That lets all of us out,” said Severinson devoutly. “If there’s one thing everybody on the Cocoa Exchange would like, it’s Amory Shaw—alive and buying.”

  Martini ignored this too. “Orcutt has been doing a little trading on his own. The cops put that together with the fact that Dick Frohlich was trading for himself—”

  Several voices made it a ragged chorus. “But everybody does.”

  “Don’t tell me,” said Martini. “Tell the cops. Anyway, that’s the story on why the police were giving Orcutt such a hard time. Unless there’s something else I don’t know about.”

  “What if Dreyer does promote him?” Severinson reverted to his original theme. “Say, that could be a motive, couldn’t it?”

  “You know what, Carl,” said Martini with reasonably good nature. “When you sound off like that, you make going back onto the floor a pleasure.”

  Nobody was in any danger of taking these words at face value.

  * * *

  Concerning death as well as life, women are tougher than men, as Helen Nagle was demonstrating.

  “If you don’t call him, I will,” she said, underscoring the ultimatum by folding her arms virago-fashion.

  Fred cast around for support. A passing dolly, loaded to the gills with White Owls destined for Baltimore, gave none. He fell back on the logic that had been so fruitless during the preceding half-hour.

  “Look, Helen, we went over it all last night,” he said doggedly. “In the first place, I don’t think there’s anything I can do. And you remember how uptight Vandevanter was in Princeton. Now they’ve had two murders—”

  “Exactly,” said Helen distinctly. “I don’t care if they’ve got a hundred murders at Dreyer. If you don’t get on the phone to tell Vandevanter to call off this advertising campaign, I will. And don’t tell me it’s none of our business—” she gestured toward the utility shelving of Arrow Jobbers, Inc., piled high with carton after carton labeled Old Glory, took a deep breath, and continued—“and, so long as we’re splitting the local promo costs, we’ve got plenty to say! Either you say it, or I do.”

  “Now, Helen—”

  “Don’t Now Helen me!” she shouted unfairly, since despite his protest Fred was heading for the telephone. For once, Helen was too heated to be generous in triumph. “Doesn’t Dreyer have any sense at all?”

  Last night had been bad enough. The six-thirty news barely summarized the latest Middle-East incident before the first commercial. A carefree band of beautiful young people frolicked in smog-free sunshine on a pristine beach. Leapfrogging each other, turning cartwheels, they simultaneously flourished their bars and yodeled: For a Glorious Taste, Taste Dreyer’s Old Glory. Immediately thereafter, CBS, NBC, and ABC informed the nation that Amory Shaw, a vice-president of the Dreyer Chocolate Company, had been brutally murdered on the floor of the New York Cocoa Exchange.

  By eleven o’clock, the hot medium had not only caught up with Bridges, Gray & Kanelos, it had overtaken them. First the public saw happy Princeton families, trekking into the Corner Newspaper Store to buy Dreyer’s delicious Old Glory. The cutaway was to a stretcher being carted out of the Cocoa Exchange.

  When they retired Thursday night, Fred and Helen Nagle were in their usual harmony. The murder of Amory Shaw was admittedly a terrible thing. But they had not known him, and the tragedy soon became commingled with uneasy speculations about the Dreyer Chocolate Company.

  The parting of their ways came Friday morning, with the Today Show. Bridges, Gray & Kanelos had surpassed itself. Old Glory, they said, came from the patroon country of upstate New York. Its goodness came to fruition in the rich meadows and lush grasses of the Mohawk Valley. The original settlers had brought with them the Old World secrets of their milk chocolate. This commercial featured rosy-cheeked lasses in Dutch national costume, pausing in a country dance with their swains to pick up wooden buckets and swish to the side of gently chomping cattle. With a song on their lips, they set to work, milking the noble beasts. It was bucolic, it was peaceful, it was uplifting. It was also, as Fred did point out, totally unlike modern dairy practices anywhere—including the Netherlands.

  However, what the scene la
cked in accuracy, it made up in relevance to the opening news item.

  “Police today revealed that Amory Shaw is the second Dreyer executive to be killed within the last two weeks. On September twelfth in Dreyer, New York, Richard Frohlich was found murdered. Frohlich worked in the New York City offices of Dreyer, close to Amory Shaw, yesterday’s victim. We switch you now to Dreyer . . .”

  This time there were no dirndls—only the chief of police explaining how closely Dreyer and New York officials were cooperating. There followed shots of a motel, an industrial compound, and, irony of ironies, the dairies of the Dreyer Chocolate Company, complete with milking machines, conveyer belts, and union representatives.

  “You know, Fred,” said Helen, switching off the portable TV, “if they had any brains at Dreyer, they’d postpone the advertising push until these murders aren’t such hot news.”

  Fred, a peaceable man, spoke about commitments, contracts, and time slots, then departed for the Arrow Jobbers warehouse. This left Helen to her thoughts—and morning TV.

  Dreyer’s Kiddy Magic Show (“Send us two Old Glory wrappers and we’ll send you a Dreyer Wonder Wand!”) led to several station break spots: “Salute Old Glory!” “Old Glory packs a chocolaty punch!” This, in turn, was followed by the noon news, where a sex kitten impersonating Hamlet’s mother intoned the latest headlines: “. . . still investigating the second murder. Employees in New York and Dreyer are being questioned. Meanwhile, in Washington, aides to the president . . .”

  This sent Helen hightailing out to New Jersey for one of her rare descents on Arrow Jobbers.

  “And don’t let him tell you that any publicity is good publicity,” she said, settling on the corner of Fred’s desk.

  “All right, all right,” he grumbled, eying the phone warily.

  “Go on!”

  You can lead a horse to water; you may be able to make him drink; you sure as hell cannot expect the horse to thank you.

  “I was just trying to figure out where Vandevanter might be,” Fred stalled. “We know he was in the city yesterday. But maybe he went back to Dreyer . . .”

  It did not matter. The metallic voices in both New York and Dreyer had one programmed response. Mr. Vandevanter was not available. If Mr. Nagle cared to leave a message . . .

  Shamefacedly trying to mask his relief, Fred was ready to join Helen in denouncing this runaround when she jolted him by saying: “Well, then! Call Kanelos!”

  For a split second, he goggled at her. Then, Fred Nagle came down heavily for being a man, not a mouse. “The hell I will!”

  Before either of them could see where this would lead, the phone jangled into life. Fred fell on it gratefully. “Nagle . . . yes, George . . . What? Wait a minute until I get a pencil . . . now, that’s two dozen gross? . . . Sure . . . on the morning truck . . . fine . . . fine . . .”

  He replaced the receiver, jotted a few notes, then said: “How do you like that? George Savard. He wants two dozen gross of Old Glory. Apparently people have been asking for it all morning . . .”

  This brought Helen back to earth with a thump. Decisively, she changed course. “Then the last person you want to talk to is Ted Kanelos.”

  “‘Or Howard Vandevanter,” said Fred, pressing his advantage. “Say what you will, Old Glory is a lot more important to the Dreyer Chocolate Company than Amory Shaw ever was.”

  Somehow or other it was a chilling thought, even at Arrow Jobbers.

  Friday was a long, hard day at the Cocoa Exchange and at Arrow Jobbers. They were feeling the pressure in the stark bastion of new police headquarters, too. Official spokesmen, alerted by the mayor’s office and a lot of high-priced lawyers, had scheduled a progress report to press, radio, and TV at three o’clock.

  “That’s a laugh,” said Captain Jacobsen, summing up the mood of his colleagues. Hours of digging were paying off with a tantalizing hodgepodge of information, but nobody was ready to call this progress yet. By now, Detective Al Marziello had the support of a massive scientific establishment as he restated the fundamental problem.

  “Somebody sticks an ordinary knife in Shaw’s back. Somehow or other—and Doc Lolich says it happens more often than you think—Shaw doesn’t drop dead. He gets down to the lobby, heads for the floor—”

  “And no one except that kid, Sam, notices a thing,” Jacobsen interjected. “Until Shaw collapses.”

  “And Sam,” Marziello said phlegmatically, “is none too bright. He trails along with his mouth open . . .”

  A collective sigh went around the table. They all knew what came next.

  “Before this, we’ve got people saying Shaw stopped by the president’s office, that broker’s, and even Frohlich’s office. But nobody is exactly sure about the times. In other words, it was a perfectly normal day.”

  “Except that everybody was looking for him,” Jacobsen said. “Granted, the Cocoa Exchange is an easy place to miss connections in . . .”

  “Or claim that you’ve missed connections,” Marziello corrected.

  Detective Udall cleared his throat. “And it wasn’t a really normal day,” he said with the quiet confidence of an expert in financial manipulation. “The cocoa market was in shambles. Everybody over there was down on their knees, praying for Amory Shaw to start buying.”

  Marziello had already scowled his way through Udall’s explanation of Amory Shaw’s role in cocoa. Now, almost humbly, he said: “It’s all too deep for me. But Dennis, could somebody have knocked Shaw off to keep him from buying? People make money that way, too, don’t they?”

  Udall looked tired. “It’s a possibility,” he said. “In which case, we’re never going to find out who killed Shaw. Anybody could have walked in off the street, slipped the knife in, then walked right out again. But, in the meantime, we’re checking the trading of the people most closely involved . . .”

  “Orcutt?” Marziello asked quickly.

  “Him, as well as others,” said Udall. “But, none of them stands to make a killing.”

  Jacobsen had a different approach. “Shaw and Frohlich,” he said ponderously. “And throw in Mr. Howard Vandevanter and Governor Curtis Yeoman—and what’ve you got?”

  Despite the sarcastic honorifics, they all knew. “You’ve got the Dreyer Chocolate Company—no matter what anybody says, including our pal up in Dreyer.”

  Supercareful responses by Vandevanter and Yeoman were only what the New York Police Department expected. But Captain Huggins of the Dreyer force was a continuing irritant. By telephone and teletype that cooperation vaunted on national TV had been forthcoming.

  “But he’s too damned respectful about the Dreyer Chocolate Company!” Jacobsen complained.

  “He’s not the only one,” said Detective Udall. “They’re all playing it pretty cozy at the Exchange, too. Nobody wants to say too much. I’ve picked up a couple of rumors about a big fight between Amory Shaw and Vandevanter.”

  “Like the fight between Frohlich and Orcutt,” said Marziello. “Maybe the best move is to get back to Vandevanter—”

  Unceremoniously, Jacobsen dismissed this. “We’ll get back to him, but Vandevanter’s not giving anything away. He says there were no company problems—just the ordinary disagreements you find where executives have different jurisdictions. Everybody deferred to Amory Shaw when it came to cocoa futures . . .”

  “I wonder what they’ll do now,” murmured Udall when Jacobsen trailed off in disgust.

  “Whatever it is, we’ll have to wait and see,” said Jacobsen. “Because all we’ll get out of Mr. Howard Vandevanter is a lot of BS.”

  The outlook for this afternoon’s progress report, and any subsequent ones, was bleak.

  Then, Udall had an idea.

  “Talking to Vandevanter again will probably be a waste of time—”

  “That goes for that gas bag Yeoman, too,” Marziello added.

  “—but I know someone we let off pretty lightly yesterday.” John Putnam Thatcher should have seen this one coming.

&nb
sp; Chapter 14

  Everyone Suing

  Thatcher had not expected Friday to be any picnic. When Krakatau exploded, skies around the globe darkened with matter belched from the bowels of the earth. With the murder of Amory Shaw and bedlam in the cocoa market, not to speak of Union Funding, only a fool would have looked forward to sunshine and light on Wall Street.

  What rained down on his defenseless head, however, was unexpected.

  “Thank God, it’s Friday,” said Tom Robichaux. A complete and refreshing lack of originality had been one of his enduring characteristics since their student days in Harvard Yard.

  “It’s been quite a week,” Thatcher agreed, reflecting that he too was beginning to repeat himself. Still, stock replies were the safest, whether it came to Union Funding or Amory Shaw.

  “I’ve always thanked God that Robichaux & Devane doesn’t have anything to do with commodities,” said the senior partner with his own idiosyncratic perspective. “Bad as things are, we’re not sticking knives in people’s backs.”

  “Not yet,” said Thatcher uncompromisingly. Things were not simply bad over at Tom’s shop; they were terrible. Robichaux & Devane was up to its neck in litigation with all comers, including two Swiss banks and the Dartmouth Endowment Fund, concerning delivery of and payment for Union Funding common.

  Robichaux did not scout the suggestion. Instead, following a train of thought that eluded Thatcher, he said: “Jennifer and I are getting a divorce.”

  “Good God,” said Thatcher, for once rising to the occasion.

  “I knew you’d be surprised to hear it,” said Tom, tucking into Luchow’s sauerbraten with lugubrious satisfaction.

  The law of diminishing returns made this highly unlikely, although Tom’s latest matrimonial debacle was not totally without interest.

  “. . . since she isn’t Jewish, I began wondering why Jennifer kept running back and forth to Israel. Of course, I know travel is broadening. Did you know that sabra has something to do with pears . . .?”

  Long ago, Thatcher had suspended judgment on how deeply Robichaux felt these nonstop conjugal dislocations of his. It was unworthy to wonder if Jennifer and her tour leader, they seemed to have taken long, long hikes in the Negev, did not make a nice change from Union Funding.