Come to Dust Page 3

  Mrs. Armitage put down the magazine she was using to pass the time until the 11 o’clock news. Her husband, accustomed to thinking aloud, found he had an attentive audience this time. It was understood between them that his activities as a Dartmouth alumnus were properly part of his business rather than social life. Nevertheless, over the years, Joan Armitage had met some of his colleagues. She remembered Patterson.

  “We met yesterday at the Ivy League Club,” her husband continued. “Marsden says that Elliot walked out—and simply disappeared. He didn’t go home. He didn’t turn up at his office this morning.

  Mrs. Armitage clucked disapprovingly. Ralph interpreted this correctly.

  “No Joan. Or at least I don’t think so. Elliot’s the serious type. I handle his policies and I can tell you he keeps up top coverage for that family of his. He’s got three little girls. I think.” Then he added a clincher, “They’ve got a nice place up in Rye.”

  Mrs. Armitage had not read the ladies’ magazines for nothing. “It’s the quiet ones who always break out, Ralph,” she quoted. “And besides, if Elliot’s so quiet what is he up to?”

  Ralph scratched his head, “Good knows.”

  She pressed home her advantage. “And what was Marsden calling about?”

  Ralph made a gesture of distaste.

  “Oh, him,” He said.

  “Well?” She demanded implacably.

  “Oh, he’s afraid—of almost anything. Talk …”

  “Blondes, women, drink!” Joan finished triumphantly. Her own life had been mercifully free of these curses, but she read a lot about them.

  “Not Elliot,” said Ralph. “I’d stake my life on that. Still he could get his hands on a lot of money.”

  With womanly dignity, Joan rose to turn on the TV.

  Suddenly her husband said, “Marsden is a strange duck. He’s afraid that it won’t look good for us if Elliot broke out. Publicity and all that sort of thing. HE jumps to the conclusion that Elliot’s run wild but refuses to believe he could be low class enough to steal.”

  How perfectly terrible this is for Elliot’s wife,” Joan concluded.

  Her sympathy was misplaced as it turned out. Things were not so terrible for Sally Patterson as they were for her guests.

  “And what did Neil want to say to you?” she asked with iron control the minute her visitor put down the phone. The Patterson living room in Rye, like the Armitage living room in East Orange was eloquent of above average income, social respectability, and decorum. Subtle differences existed. Instead of Better Homes & Gardens, good books graced the end tables in Rye. The decor in Rye was uncompromisingly colonial instead of modern. A grand piano in the corner displayed a heavily starred “’Merry Farmer’ on its music rack. On the mantel were the photographs: Sally Patterson blond, sweetly maternal, and draping protective arms over three small blond children much like herself. Staring sightlessly back at his brood was Elliot: gentle eyed, bespectacled, with a thin sensitive mouth, and a general air of piety.

  “I said Jim, why did Marsden want to talk to you?”

  The rising note was not lost on Jim Dunlop, youngest member of the Committee. However, he felt unable to relay fears of scandal and worse, so he lied.

  “Neil wanted to know if there is anything he can do to help,” he said.

  Sally sniffed. “That’s what he said to me, she said, putting her finger unerringly on the weak spot. Fortunately her own concerns overwhelmed her. “Besides, how can he help? Oh dear, what can have happened to Elliot?

  Jim exchanged a sneaky look with the third person present, his wife Lou. She looked as bewildered as he felt. The impulse to comfort a troubled wife had seemed simple enough and, as Lou had pointed out when Sally called, the Pattersons had had the Dunlops to dinner. The obligation to provide comfort was clear.

  But Sally defeated them.

  “This isn’t like Elliot,” she said troubled but thoughtful. “You see at first I thought he was simply out of town on a business trip and I had forgotten about it. Or he had forgotten to mention it. But that’s just silly. I don’t forget and Elliot always tells me when he’s going to miss dinner.”

  Dunlop nodded vigorously. HE had come to regard Elliot as a walking compendium of all the domestic virtues.

  “Then when he didn’t come last night I was really at a loss,” Sally said, who had the trick of overemphasizing some words. She did not sound at a loss.

  Once again the Dunlops exchanged troubled looks. They had arrived with laudable intentions to say “there-there”, to offer tissues for tears, to make helpful suggestions about going to bed, calling relatives, and hoping for the best. All of this self-possession baffled them.

  “So I called my brother-in-law,” the recital continued. “He said …”

  The Dunlops already knew what the brother-in-law had said and what Mrs. Patterson had done. First she had called Target, ascertained that her husband was not at his desk this morning and left a message asking him to call her when he got in.

  “But at noon, Marian Knightley called,” she continued. “Elliot wasn’t in by then, so they wondered. I’ve always thought Marian was not really sympathetic, but she could tell that I was worried. I simply had to tell her that Elliot hadn’t come home. It turned out that Target didn’t know where Elliot was either.”

  In short, at the time Gabe was first approaching the Sloan with delicate inquiries, Sally had begun her own. An engagement pad revealed that Elliot’s last appointment had been a Monday afternoon meeting with the Committee at 4:30 PM.

  Sally turned calm eyes on young Dunlop.

  “Well he was there all right,” he said, flushing slightly from a general sense of discomfort. “He was perfectly fine, I mean, as far as I could see. In fact, he was feeling pretty pleased about getting Mrs. Curtis to contribute $50,000.”

  “Of yes,” Sally said intelligently. “Elliot is so pleased about that! Mrs. Curtis was a challenge to him. It took him days to convince her that her husband should be honored by that new reading room. But of course Elliot is so sincere. Even people like Mrs. Curtis recognize that.”

  Jim Dunlop did not think that this was the time to discuss Elliot’s excellences. His experience was severely limited but he saw his duty. With an assumption of male authority that he was far from feeling in Mrs. Patterson’s presence he said, “Yes, we sat around discussing Mrs. Curtis for a few minutes then we went out and looked over those kids who are applying to Dartmouth. Then Elliot stayed behind to talk to one of them and that’s the last we’ve seen of him. Now, Sally, the thing to do is call the police. Elliot might have been hurt.”

  Lou leaned forward. “He might have amnesia,” she thrillingly. She had been a psychology major at Bennington.

  Sally Patterson looked kindly at her comforters. “I don’t know,” she said without any indecision. She did not need to add that the Patterson life, neatly ticketed, held room for the League of Women Voters, the Citizens Committee to Preserve the Elms, Sunday School, The New York Book Review, but not for the police. “I don’t know,” she repeated.

  Pure cowardice led Dunlop to waver. “Well maybe you should give Elliot another day or so.”

  Sally insisted on giving them a cup of coffee before they set off for the city.

  “Jim,” said Lou in a small voice as they sped back to their tiny apartment near Sutton Place. “Didn’t it seem that Sally wasn’t really, I mean, she seemed awfully calm about things, didn’t she?”

  “Mm,” said Dunlop. Calm and excitement are relative; the Dunlops were still newly married enough so that a burned piece of toast could ignite dramatic emotional scenes, followed by dramatic emotional reconciliations.

  “I mean, if you were missing, I’d go crazy!” Lou said. I’d scream to the police, to anybody who would listen.”

  Dunlop pointed out that Sally had been troubled enough to call her husband’s employer, his friends, and his colleagues.

  Lou was not impressed. “Of course, they’ve been married for ages hav
en’t they?”

  “Ten years at least,” said her lord and master. This was agreement.

  “And they’ve got three children haven’t they?” Lou persisted. She was still trying to fill in the gaps left by that psychology major.

  Dunlop said that they did.

  “I suppose it is possible that after all these years they still haven’t learned to communicate,” she mused. “You’d think they would have found that out a long time ago.”

  “Yes,” Dunlop agreed, obscurely disturbed. Himself a sociology major until graduation from Dartmouth one year ago, he was inclined to listen to Lou’s technical pronouncements with respect. But 12 months as a worker in Manhattan were beginning to leave their mark. For the first time in his life he was moving in a circle that was not composed exclusively of his age peers. The facile judgments of the Delta Kappa house at Dartmouth seemed almost irrelevant when brought to bear on other generations. He had a dim sense that considerations of communication and identity might not be the best tools with which to embark on a thorough analysis of relations between the Pattersons.

  “And of course if Elliot hasn’t been able to establish a sense of identity, he wouldn’t feel any commitment to his family,” Lou concluded.

  Jim came to a startling conclusion. There were murky waters and there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in Psychology 2012. In a word, Lou was talking nonsense about a situation she couldn’t begin to understand.

  But being an affectionate young man whose instincts were naturally kindly, he said, “I guess so Lou,” and resolutely tuned out her chatter.

  The Dunlops had just passed a milestone, though neither of them realized it. The honeymoon was over and the marriage had begun.

  Chapter 3

  No Credit

  Despite their excesses of the previous night, Thatcher and Lancer spent a decorous Wednesday with the Loan Policy Committee, mulling over the changes in the Sloan’s prime rate. The calm dialogue that had characterized their deliberations of the day before now gave way to a new script, accommodating a larger cast of characters and more colorful exchanges.

  “I’ll tell you who won’t go along,” announced Walter Bowman, the Sloan’s Chief of Research, most conscientious intelligence gatherer, and one of Nature’s true warriors. “Citibank for one. A quarter of a point, if that …”

  “Now hold it Walter,” said an adversary from International. “I happen to know…”

  Walter shot back, “What about US Bakeries? Where can they take their business? Hmm?”

  The dispute swirled on. Lancer, as usual, remained silent, maintaining the fiction that as Chairman his was a nonoperating role. Thatcher remained silent because he had long since heard all the details of the opposing arguments and was not, at this stage of the game, going to be caught trying to reconcile the irreconcilable.

  An incautious reference to the Federal Reserve Board forced an adjournment for lunch. As Lancer had obligations to a visiting crew from the Banking and Currency Committee, Thatcher adjourned to Massoletti’s with Bowman. As usual Bowman fueled the inner man with Falstaffian portions necessary to sustain his considerable bulk and entertained Thatcher with a series of pungent anecdotes about a Wall Street researcher grown so inflated by his press coverage that he had plotted a coup d’état in his own firm.

  “And what happens to Jacques now?” Thatcher inquired.

  “Bounced,” announced Walter with satisfaction. What did you expect? Just because Fortune wrote him up, he went haywire. I expect he’ll have to go to Boston.”

  It could have been Siberia.

  Bowman rattled on. Not until dessert did suspicion darken Thatcher’s mind.

  “Walter!” he said suddenly, looking across the table at his companion, now bathed in unconvincing innocence. “Your job is to root out information and transmit it to me, not to try to fish news from me.”

  Bowman remained unrepentant. “Habit,” he explained airily.

  Although quite right, Thatcher knew, he still eyed Walter with severity. It would be interesting to learn precisely how he had learned of Gabe’s request for a check on Patterson’s bank account. It was certainly not from Donald Benson who was charged with the task by Lancer. But Thatcher, a realist at core, knew he would never learn.

  Bowman started up again, “Then I ran into Gabe himself last night.”

  “Worried was he?”

  “Hell no. Full of bounce. Cheerful. Everything’s coming up roses. Naturally the whole thing made me suspicions. You know what a sharp cookie Gabe is. He was too damned hearty. What’s up? Did this Patterson run off with the petty cash?

  Temperately Thatcher replied that one of Gabe’s employees seemed to be out of touch with his office and turned the subject. But this did not satisfy Bowman but he was too experienced to argue with Thatcher at this point. There were other sources that would be tapped. And although Walter was the best intelligence agent on Wall Street, he was not the only one. Clearly the tenuous web of communication that spun up and down the Street was beginning to quiver.

  As Gabe could have testified. He had spent a miserable morning on the phone turning away casual and no so casual inquiries. Now he put the receiver down once again and glared at it. A small round faced man with guileless blue eyes; he was Dickensian in character and build. Nature might have designed him to be a professional fund raiser. At the moment, however, his customary cheerfulness was at a low ebb.

  Then, decisively, he jumped up and hurried to his Secretary’s desk. “I’ll be with Mrs. Knightley if any calls come, Doris.”

  He strode down the corridor. Target Associates was not the kind of institutionalized establishment where the Head of the firm summons assistants to stately conferences. Give and take was the order of the day at Target. Gabe often dropped in on his subordinates. Quite at home anywhere in the offices, he would prop his legs against the nearest piece of furniture and transact business. Today he was trying to show the staff that he was his usual insouciant self. But the minute he got to Marian Knightley’s office, he shut the door behind him and said, “Marian, I think we’ve got trouble on our hands.”

  Marian Knightley looked up from the folder she was studying. Gabe was not prone to cry wolf she knew. Indeed, she thought, if he had a fault it was his tendency to assume that the wolf all too visible on the horizon was somebody else’s well trained pet. It was not like him to admit trouble. She ran through a mental list of possibilities.

  “Has something come up about Elliot?” she asked calmly.

  Gabe shook his head and hooked himself on the corner of her desk.

  “No, still no word. Good knows what …” As he interrupted himself. “No I was just talking to Sally. Marian, she’s thinking about going to the police.”

  Marian was torn between amusement and irritation. “Of course she is. After all her husband has disappeared —”

  Gabe interrupted impetuously. “I don’t like it,” he said with a rush. “It won’t do any good, Marian. People are already asking questions. What if Elliot gets picked up drunk? Maybe he was in a gambling raid. He may be hiding under a false name. My God, if it comes out — well, you know what scandal would do to us.”

  The frown on her brow did not follow a well etched path. She was in her early 40s and looked 10 years younger. Obviously she did not do much frowning. “I know,” she said thoughtfully. “But if Elliot had been picked up, he would have contacted one of us, to raise bail if nothing else.” She did not add that she had been half expecting a cry for help from Elliot. It would not have been the first time he had come to her. “But Gabe, Elliott isn’t much of a drinking man. And as for gambling … well that’s absurd.”

  Gabe brightened and took heart. “Of course it is,” he said. “Elliot was the quiet kind. He’s not the type for the bright lights is he? Why just the other day Senator Verender told me we were lucky to have him. And after all, the Sloan says his bank account is absolutely normal,” he want up with a burst of conviction.

&nbs
p; Marian looked at him and remained silent. Under her gaze, Gabe’s conviction oozed away. Marian was always the most helpful of colleagues, but you had to play by her rules. And her most stringent rule was that she would not voice suspicions for you. When Gabe first began to fear that one of his employees was getting lazy to the point of irresponsibility, or taking to drink in a big way, he could always rely on Marian’s sound advice. But it never came in a form he could like: something to let him believe that she had first raised the whole unfortunate matter. Their battle of will had been fought out many years ago. Gabe recognized this by capitulating immediately and falling back into uncongenial anxiety.

  “Now of course it’s absurd to think that Elliot could be any kind of crook,” he said slowly edging into his subject. “After all you and I have worked with him for years. But people who don’t know Elliot — why they might wonder if he hasn’t skipped.”

  “They might,” Marian admitted.

  “Our answer to that would be: Look at his bank account. He did not empty it out. That’s not the action of a cheap thief.”

  Marian looked at him for a long moment. Then said, “We gave him those independent accounts last June, Gabe. They’re what I’m a little worried about. And you are too.”

  Gabe winced, thinking that’s exactly what I am worried about and said, “He been at Target 10 years,” he pleaded.

  “Election accounts,” she continued ruthlessly.

  Gage groaned, “I knew those darn things were going to spell trouble.”

  Target was a pioneer in the field of nonpartisan management of campaign contributions. The move, like most of Gabe’s, had been financially successful from the beginning, but it introduced donors fighting for anonymity, erratic cash flows, and books in hopeless confusion until November’s elections were past — in other words, an embezzler’s dream world. Gabe and Elliot had been enthusiastic about it; Marian had not.