Accounting for Murder Page 2

Allen Hammond, Mason’s Nephew, and grandson of the Founder, as well as the Commercial Division’s Assistant General Manager, learning the ropes to take over some day.

  General Cartwright, the Military’s liaison to National Calculating and their only profitable division due to government purchases.

  Emma Lathen Political Mysteries

  As R. B. Dominic

  31. Murder Sunny Side Up 1968. Agriculture.

  32. Murder in High Place 1969. Overseas Travelers.

  33. There is No Justice 1971. Supreme Court.

  34. Epitaph for a Lobbyist 1974. Lobbyists.

  35. Murder Out of Commission 1976. Nuke Plants.

  36. The Attending Physician 1980. Health Care.

  37. Unexpected Developments 1983. Military.

  Tom Walker Mysteries

  Patricia Highsmith Style

  Deaver Brown, Author

  01. 18. Football & Superbowl.

  02. Abduct. Sexual Misconduct.

  03. Body. Planned Eliminations for Money.

  04. Comfortable. Avoiding Consequences.

  05. Death. Wrong Place at the Wrong Time.

  06. Enthusiast. Opportunity Murder.

  07. Fraud. Taking Your Chances.

  08. Greed. Heirs Who Know Better.

  09. Heat. Heir Arrogance.

  A similarly popular Simply Media mystery series.

  Financial & Other Facts

  Emma Lathen is all about the money not the emotion. In that light:

  1. To provide financial incentives for collectors, Simply Media and others savings on groups of 6 eBooks, and the SuperSku (learning from the Star Wars franchise) “all in” collections.

  2. Trust that we have all enjoyed this. But as Willie Nelson, Oscar Wilde, and others have said, we aren’t above the money. Stay well. And thanks from all of us on the Emma Lathen team.

  Deaver Brown, Publisher & Editor.

  www.simplymedia.com

  Chapter 1

  Come, Begin.

  Wall Street is the hub of the financial universe, and not the least imposing of its mighty institutions is the Sloan Guaranty Trust, the third largest bank in the world, with branches in 24 countries, rumored to be on the point of acquiring the assets of Wheatman’s Mutual. Wheatman’s which is having slight difficulties these days.

  At the Sloan, no place is more important than the sixth floor, home of the Trust Department. Here young people fresh from the Business School coolly phone company presidents to dispute earnings projections; here senior trust officers maintain unencouraging reserve when real estate developers outline million-dollar leasing schemes. At least twice in the past five years, some fairly, clever Texas interests have been surprised to find proxy fights shot from under them, on the sixth floor of the Sloan.

  These complex and momentous operations are directed from behind a door marked: John Putnam Thatcher. Thatcher, senior vice president, who is not only director of the Trust Department but, so the scuttlebutt runs, about to be elevated to the eminence of the Investment Division.

  Not that any of his subordinates would ask him about this. A youthful sixty, Thatcher has a resilient vigor that is far removed from the frozen dignity exhibited by Bradford Withers, the president of the bank. Yet somehow the members of the Trust Department who argue quite heatedly with Thatcher about the Sloan’s holdings of Bravura Chemicals do not venture personal questions.

  In an institution composed of many important executives, he is, in a relaxed fashion. one of the most important. Naturally then, while his subordinates wrote six million-dollar mortgages or acquired controlling interests in small steel mills, John Thatcher was coping with a personnel problem.

  “I tell you, John,” Everett Gabler repeated with fussy self-importance, “I can’t be responsible for a satisfactory monthly statement if I’m going to be kept shorthanded. And I am shorthanded when young Nicolls spends all of his time with Trinkam.”

  “Yes,” Thatcher said wearily. “Yes, I see that.”

  “I didn’t like the arrangement to begin with,” Everett continued in tones of strong censure. “I foresaw the very difficulties we are now encountering.” Everett Gabler, oldest, most trusted, and possibly most infuriating of Thatcher’s section chiefs, always foresaw difficulties. “At best it was an irregular arrangement. But now it develops that Trinkam’s section”—Utilities—“is using Nicolls for more and more work, and it is certainly unreasonable to say that we”—Rails and Industrials—“are getting our fair share of his work although he is still being charged to our budget. Why, some days he doesn’t even get in to pick up his mail!”

  Thatcher tapped a pencil on his desk. Not a line and staff man himself, he was prepared to let his senior officers work out their own arrangements for getting work done. But to Everett Gabler, haphazard allocation of salary charges, like the borrowing of secretaries, represented a threat to competent administration. He was in his early fifties but he was a little old lady—that is, a little old lady who knew a great deal about Rails and Industrials.

  “. . . if it goes on, and you know that our budget is already being stretched almost beyond what could be expected, I don’t see how we can plan our Industrial Survey . . .”

  “Eh? What did you say, Everett?” Thatcher roused himself to ask.

  “I said that if this goes on, we’re going to need another man in Rails and Industrials.”

  Thatcher considered this. The empire-building propensities of his section chiefs, their insatiable hunger for new men, was a failing from which not even Gabler was immune.

  “We’d have to think that over,” he temporized, watching Gabler pull off his glasses and polish them while his myopic eyes assumed a cunning squint that indicated several good arguments in favor of immediate recruiting.

  In fact, he had opened his mouth to begin his catalog when the desk buzzer rang.

  “Sorry,” Thatcher murmured gratefully. “Yes, Miss Corsa?”

  “Mr. Robichaux on the line,” his secretary announced.

  “Put him on . . . Hello, Tom? Good to hear from you!” he said with uncharacteristic heartiness. Gabler frequently had this effect on him. He watched his section chief close his mouth, adjust his glasses precisely on the bridge of a rather long nose, and lean back. Tenacious if nothing else was old Everett, now folding his arms to signify determination to sit out the interruption.

  “John!” brayed Robichaux, senior partner of Robichaux and Devane, the investment bankers, and one of the world’s boomers. “Glad to have caught you in. Been a long time since we got together, isn’t it? What have you been doing with yourself?”

  “Nothing much,” Thatcher replied, moving the receiver several inches from his ear. “How are you, Tom? And”—he cast about for the name of the current Mrs. Robichaux—“and Dorothy?”

  There was a moment of silence on the line, then Robichaux repeated the name—“Dorothy?”—before recognition came: “Oh! Dorothy! Dorothy and I aren’t together these days. Thought you knew,” he said with no audible regret. Then, possibly feeling he had been abrupt, he expanded. “To tell you the truth, John, I’m having one hell of a time.”

  Rightly taking this elliptical sentence to refer to the legal and financial difficulties rather than the emotional turmoil connected with Dorothy’s departure, Thatcher said something meaningless and vaguely sympathetic while he suppressed a smile at the look of moral indignation assumed by Everett, who could hear every explosive word that Robichaux uttered.

  Rails and Industrials would not have tolerated such peccadilloes for one moment. But on the other hand, Robichaux and Devane would have condoned them in no one but a Robichaux. The Devanes were Quakers.

  “. . . so it’s touch and go,” shouted Tom cheerfully. It was strange that a man who owned his own yacht was incapable of grasping the fact that the telephone accomplished the transmission. “That’s not what I called about, John. I’ve uncovered an interesting little problem that I thought you might care to look over.”

  He paused a
nd, when this bait failed, continued in a burst of candor, “The fact is, John, I’m hoping that you’ll do me a little favor.”

  Thatcher braced himself. Since their undergraduate days in Harvard Yard he had convinced himself that it was a mistake to underestimate Robichaux; he might look like a cruise director and behave like an Edwardian buck, but he was, as many an operator in the Street had discovered, a shrewd businessman who had scored several coups solely on the basis of this aggressively simple manner.

  “Yes,” he replied cautiously, while Gabler, openly listening, narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “Well, Tom, anything I can do for you,” he said with slight emphasis on the verb.

  Robichaux chuckled. “Mighty careful, aren’t you?” he said genially. “I know you’ll help, John. Now listen, have you ever heard of a man named Clarence Fortinbras?”

  Thatcher searched his memory and found no Fortinbras—outside of Hamlet—at all.

  “No.”

  “I see,” Robichaux said slowly, pausing for thought before he went on in a slightly lowered voice,

  “I’m having lunch with him today, and I’d appreciate it very much if you’d join us.”

  Thatcher would have found no difficulty in ignoring the significant, slightly sinister tone with which this was said knowing as he did that it was one of Tom’s most successful weapons with women and customers, except for a glance at Gabler. It was now eleven-thirty; a luncheon appointment with Robichaux would not only terminate this conference on Rails and Industrials, it would protect him from a luncheon session that centered on its problem. Gabler was also a vegetarian while Thatcher was strictly a steak and potatoes man.

  “Certainly I’ll join you,” he told Robichaux. “What is it . . .”

  “The thing is,” Robichaux interposed in clumsily conspiratorial tones, “we’re talking business, and I’d like to fill you in before we meet. What about meeting me at Fraunces Tavern at about twelve-thirty? Fortinbras is coming at one o’clock.”

  “Fine,” Thatcher replied.

  “I knew I could count on you,” Robichaux said ringing off.

  Thatcher, amused by the eternal small boy in Tom, again faced Gabler.

  “Have you ever heard of Clarence Fortinbras?”

  Gabler flicked through a filing cabinet mind. “Fortinbras on Accounts Receivable,” he declared.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The standard text on accounts receivable,” explained Gabler sternly. “I seem to remember that Fortinbras is Clarence.”

  And if Everett Gabler seemed to remember that Fortinbras of Fortinbras on Accounts Receivable was Clarence, then Clarence he was.

  What was that old reprobate Robichaux doing with a noted accountant?

  “. . . and so, John, I think you’ll agree with me that we’re very short-handed as it is. And with this new account,” Gabler was saying with measured disapproval.

  John Thatcher again shouldered the burden of high office.

  “Well, I’m broadminded to a fault,” Tom said, gesturing the waiter for another round of drinks, “But when I caught her with the kennelman, I decided that enough was enough.” He glanced around the small dining room of Fraunces Tavern seeking enemy ears, then he leaned forward across the table to hiss: “It’s going to be touch and go, you know. There are . . . there are complications.”

  “I see that there might be,” Thatcher replied truthfully. In all the years he had known him, Tom had been involved in complications; it was only during divorce proceedings that they assumed any importance. Thatcher watched him assume an expression of extreme virtue.

  “Old Barnwell says I’ll have to watch my step, but he thinks we may get through it without losing too much,” Robichaux said. Barnwell of Barnwell and McBridge had probably not put it so tactfully, Thatcher reflected, but again he nodded comprehendingly. He wondered how much Tom’s various settlements cost him.

  “Women are the devil,” said the bon vivant, brooding into his Martini. Then he brightened, “Still . . .”

  “What do you have to do with Fortinbras on Accounts Receivable?” Thatcher asked hastily. A widower himself, he was prepared to sympathize with Tom’s difficulties, but his interest in the more active aspects of his social life was not unlimited.

  “Accounts receivable?” Robichaux repeated blankly. “What are you talking about?”

  “Tell me why I’m having lunch with you and with this Clarence Fortinbras,” Thatcher directed him. Tom was perfectly capable of starting at the beginning and going to the end with reasonable competence; his mind, however, was not the sort to permit shortcuts.

  “Yes,” he said. “Well, you know that Robichaux and Devane have a big interest in National Calculating, don’t you?”

  Thatcher nodded. “A big interest” meant that Tom’s firm held large amounts of National stock on their own account, and occasionally used their inventory to firm the market, as the euphemism went. They also acted as agent for customers who wanted to buy or sell National Calculating stock, and the dividing line between their functions was, at best, in an ethical no-man’s-land. Some brokerage houses sailed perilously close to the wind when they held a substantial “interest,” and Thatcher had always felt that touting a house-held stock to customers smacked of the trickster.

  Robichaux and Devane was rightly proud of its unassailable rectitude in this precarious area.

  “We haven’t been able to sell any common stock to the Sloan,” Robichaux said, diverted by a side grievance.

  “It hasn’t been doing very well lately, has it?” said Thatcher, trying to recall what he knew about National Calculating.

  “Hell, no!” Robichaux exclaimed. “For the past two years they’ve been marking time. Then last year they skipped a dividend, and between the two of us, they’re going to have to omit another one this year.” He glared at a breadstick while Thatcher patiently waited for him to come to the point. He glanced at his watch: Fortinbras was scheduled to arrive in fifteen minutes, and he still knew nothing about Tom’s reasons for this meeting.

  “Come on, Tom,” he said.

  “They sell cash registers, you know, and those sales have held up pretty well. But during the war they expanded into computers, and that’s where they’re having trouble today. Their Commercial Sales aren’t doing a thing; they sank five million dollars into it a couple of years ago, and it hasn’t paid for itself. If it weren’t for the cash registers and their government defense contracts, they’d be in a real hole.” He looked up, recalled that he was talking to a potential customer, and added hastily, “They’re basically sound . . .”

  “Spare me, and get on with your story.”

  Robichaux assumed a look of exaggerated innocence. “Of course, I keep forgetting that we sold the Sloan some of their debentures a year or so ago . . .”

  “What!” Thatcher exclaimed, genuinely surprised.

  “Didn’t you know that you took part of their bonds last year, John? About five thousand underlying shares . . .”

  “I did not,” Thatcher said crisply. “Just who did you gull?”

  “Why, I think we sold them to Claster,” Robichaux replied, his attention fixed on a portrait hanging over Thatcher’s right shoulder.

  “I see,” Thatcher said grimly. Claster was head of the Investment Division, a doddering idiot, and scheduled to retire within the year.”

  “. . . so I knew that the Sloan has an interest in this affair too,” Robichaux was saying in elaborately reasonable tones.

  Thatcher repressed the comment that rose to his lips.

  “Just give me the facts, Tom,” he said. “Who is this Clarence Fortinbras?”

  “Fortinbras is a stockholder,” said Robichaux. “He’s got a bunch of stockholders together, and he’s raising hell about one thing and another at National. . .”

  “Just a minute. What does that mean?”

  “Chip Mason, he’s the president over there, you know, tells me that Fortinbras and this bunch of stockholders have been bombarding them wi
th letters. You know, whenever a corporation gets into trouble they start getting these crank letters. Well, Mason said they sent back the form letters, but this Fortinbras outfit turned out to be more persistent . . .”

  “If he is Fortinbras on Accounts Receivable,” said Thatcher somewhat acidly, “I don’t think much of sending him a form letter. It might be wiser to listen to what he has to say.” He looked at Robichaux with no affection.

  “At any rate,” Robichaux said, shrugging away the comment, “Mason says they were stunned to get a letter from something called . . . here, wait a minute.” He fished a piece of paper from his pocket, affixed his glasses, and read, “The National Calculating Stockholders’ Protest Committee.” He took off his glasses, carefully put them away. “Mason says that this bunch is all nuts, and that they’ve been driving him crazy . . .”

  “Forget Chip Mason,” Thatcher said brutally. “Tell me why you’re having lunch with Fortinbras if you’re convinced that he’s just a crank.”

  “I don’t say he’s a crank,” protested Robichaux. “I’m just telling you what Chip . . . oh, all right,” he said, as Thatcher glared. “Well, the other day this chap Fortinbras got in touch with Robichaux and Devane. I gather he wants us to join him in demanding some management changes. You know the sort of thing.”

  “It sounds like a good idea to me,” Thatcher said unhelpfully.

  “It puts us in a hell of a position,” Robichaux said seriously. “On the one hand, we can’t go around putting the skids under the boys at National Calculating; after all, we’re their underwriters, and we can’t get associated with dissident groups of cranks. It would give us a bad name. The corporations have to trust Robichaux and Devane.”

  “On the other hand . . .”

  “On the other hand,” he agreed, “we’re none too happy with the earnings statement that National produced last month, and I don’t think we’re going to like next month’s either. We’re stuck with three hundred thousand shares, and we won’t be able to sell them unless things start looking up. I want to hear what Fortinbras has to say. Mason says he’s crazy . . .”