Sweet and Low_An Emma Lathen Best Seller Page 4

  When they were ushered into the presidential suite ten minutes later, Howard Vandevanter was not there. The solitary occupant of the room was a tall bony man with thinning gray hair combed back from a high-domed forehead. He had a briefcase on his lap and was studying some documents.

  “Hello, Amory,” Yeoman greeted him. “Is Howard late again?”

  Amory Shaw pulled an old-fashioned watch from an old-fashioned vest pocket. “You’re early,” he announced. “Howard had to take care of something. He’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Yeoman tried to improve on the idle moment. “You didn’t miss much last night,” he announced. “But I’m sorry we didn’t have a chance to get together before this meeting.”

  Shaw was unresponsive. “I had to keep an eye on things in New York,” he said.

  Shaw might be repulsing Yeoman’s overtures. Or he might simply be a man of few words. Thatcher could not tell.

  In either case, Yeoman was undeterred. “I suppose you flew up first thing this morning.”

  “I got here late last night,” Shaw corrected him.

  Yeoman was overly casual as he said: “By the way, did Frohlich ever get in touch with you? There seems to be something happening down in New York—”

  Shaw’s voice was glacial. “No.”

  Curtis Yeoman was searching for a new gambit when the president of Dreyer finally arrived. Howard Vandevanter should have been a welcome relief, but he was not.

  “This is terrible,” he said without preamble. “Nothing like this has ever happened here before.”

  The blank incomprehension he saw made him swing toward Shaw.

  “Didn’t you tell them, Amory?”

  Shaw was expressionless. “I thought you should break the bad news yourself.”

  “What bad news?” Yeoman asked sharply.

  Vandevanter ran a hand through his bright hair. “Dick Frohlich is dead. He had an accident at the motel last night.”

  “At the motel?” Yeoman echoed. Then, as the implications began sinking in, he turned to stare speechlessly at Thatcher.

  “Yes,” Vandevanter continued. “That’s why I thought you must already know. I’ve just been talking to the manager. He sounds as if they’re all upset there.”

  “They’re trying to keep it from the guests,” Thatcher explained.

  Doggedly Vandevanter continued with the details “It seems Frohlich went to a wild party in one of the motel units. He must have gotten blind drunk, because on his way back to his own room, he fell into the pool. They found him early this morning—drowned.”

  This bald recital sparked a cross-examination.

  “How could he fall into the pool?” Yeoman demanded. “It’s lit at night—”

  Vandevanter shrugged. “Well, that’s what he did. He must have tried to go straight across the courtyard.”

  “You say he was drunk?” Shaw asked dubiously “That doesn’t sound like him.”

  “I’ve asked Reardon and Bousquet to come up here and explain,” Vandevanter retorted. “They were there, too. But my God, the facts speak for themselves. Frohlich must have been stoned.”

  His reading was contested within 15 minutes.

  “Dick was not drunk,” Bob Reardon insisted. He was haggard with shock.

  “And we weren’t having a brawl,” Bousquet added abrasively. “We were playing poker.”

  Vandevanter waved this off. “It doesn’t make much difference what you call it. You let Frohlich drink enough so he could kill himself. I can only thank God that he wasn’t married.”

  But he did not get the cooperation he expected.

  “Take a good look at us,” Bousquet snapped back. “We’re not feeling any too good. But only a damn fool would claim that we’re hung over—”

  Reardon was just as adamant. “For that matter, you can check with room service. We didn’t have any hard liquor at all. Hell, we didn’t leave the banquet until ten or ten-thirty. We played our last hand around one. In that time Dick had two or three beers. And everybody can tell you he was all right up at the hotel.”

  Thatcher felt bound to present his own evidence. “He was sober as a judge when he spoke with us, wouldn’t you say, Yeoman?”

  Support did not make Bousquet any less belligerent. “I wish to God I knew what did happen,” he growled. “But I don’t buy the drink story. And if you don’t believe us, ask those two guys from Topeka. They’ll bear us out.”

  The record was not going to show a drunken brawl, no matter what the president of Dreyer wanted.

  “All right, all right,” Vandevanter conceded. “Then he must have been sick. After all, he just got back from Ghana day before yesterday. Maybe he was running a fever, maybe he had a dizzy spell. But if he was sober, there must have been something wrong with him.”

  The poker players looked at each other. Reardon, Thatcher could see, was tempted to take the easy way out. But Bousquet’s blood was up.

  “He didn’t look sick to me,” he growled. “And if he was complaining, it wasn’t about feeling lousy.”

  Reardon went further. “Dick was complaining about not being able to reach Mr. Shaw. Something about New York was bugging him.”

  “Do you know what it was?” Vandevanter got his question in seconds before Curtis Yeoman.

  “No,” said Reardon. “All I know is that Dick was steamed up about it. He left a couple of messages for Mr. Shaw . . .”

  Throughout this exchange, Amory Shaw sat unmoved. His reaction when Vandevanter turned to him told Thatcher a good deal about the independence of the New York office.

  “I don’t know what Frohlich wanted to talk to me about,” Shaw said calmly. “I can’t even guess at what it might have been. I have nothing to do with his operations.”

  Vandevanter did not dispute this. “Well, we’ll probably never know now,” he concluded. “Reardon and Bousquet have made things even more puzzling than they were before. It’s all very unsatisfactory.”

  The situation grew even more unsatisfactory an hour later, when the police arrived.

  Amory Shaw had barely begun his report when the chief of police demanded admission.

  “I thought you’d want to know, Mr. Vandevanter.”

  “Of course, we’re anxious to have this unfortunate accident cleared up, Captain Huggins. Frohlich was a valued and—”

  The captain had no time for eulogies. “It wasn’t any accident,” he interrupted, silencing Vandevanter. “The doctor just told us. Frohlich was dead when he went into the pool.”

  “But that means—” Vandevanter broke off and began again. “You’d better tell us what you know, Captain.”

  “Frohlich got cracked over the head. I don’t blame the men who hauled him out of the pool. They noticed it all right, but they assumed it had happened after he fell in. But now the doctor says different.”

  It is human nature to hope against hope.

  “Isn’t there any way it could have happened by accident?” Vandevanter was almost pleading.

  Captain Huggins did not want a major scandal in Dreyer any more than the company did. Regretfully, he shook his head. “No, I didn’t come here right away. My crew has been out at the motel for over an hour. There isn’t any doubt at all. Frohlich was attacked in the shadows, just after he entered the second courtyard. We’ve located the spot where he fell into the bushes—there’s still some blood there. Then the body got dumped into the pool. The killer hoped it would pass as an accident. Maybe he didn’t realize that Frohlich was already dead and was counting on the pool to finish him off.”

  While Vandevanter stared, Governor Yeoman raised another possibility. “What about Frohlich’s wallet? Was it missing?”

  Thatcher could see that Captain Huggins had been over this ground himself. All he said, however, was: “No, we’ve ruled out robbery. It’s early days yet, but we’ve got a couple of facts to go on. First off, it looks as if someone was waiting a while for Frohlich. Second, a couple of motels got calls last night—asking if Frohlich
was registered. That adds up to a murderer tracking Frohlich down, then setting an ambush for him. He wasn’t interested in anybody else.”

  There was nothing to say. The conclusion was inescapable. After waiting for objections, Huggins continued: “There’s just one other thing. Frohlich was here in Dreyer for less than a day. We don’t know much about him, and he was tied up at the banquet for most of the time. But it seems he was trying to get in touch with you—Mr. Shaw.”

  “So I understand,” said Shaw stiffly.

  Captain Huggins consulted mental notes. “He left a message at the office and he left a message at the motel desk. The young lady there says she gave it to you when you arrived at eleven.”

  Unhelpfully, Shaw waited for the direct question.

  “Did you try to get in touch with Frohlich?” Huggins asked.

  “No, I had had a long day and it was late. I decided to see him this morning.”

  The captain prodded further. “Frohlich told the desk it was very important.”

  This time Shaw was more forthcoming. “It may have been important to him, but it wasn’t important to me. If I could have helped with his problem, I would have—but not in the middle of the night.”

  Vandevanter was frowning. “I didn’t know you got into town last night, Amory.”

  “I don’t know why you should have,” said Amory, coolly. “I took the last plane to Albany, arriving at about ten. I rented a car and drove here. Then I checked in and”—his gesture was indefinably contemptuous—“and I went to my room, which was off the second courtyard of the Royal Dutch Motel.”

  “Yes, yes, Amory,” Vandevanter said. “I didn’t mean anything—”

  But Shaw continued unhurriedly. “And I have no idea what Frohlich wanted to consult me about.”

  Captain Huggins had been content to let the president of Dreyer do his dirty work for him, but there were still questions to be put.

  “Mr. Shaw,” he said, “on that late plane last night, did you see anybody you knew? Anybody from Dreyer, I mean?”

  Nobody liked the sound of this, least of all Amory Shaw. “I do not remember anyone,” he said crisply. “The plane was unusually crowded.”

  They had strayed into Yeoman’s political expertise. “The state legislature is in special session,” he said knowledgeably. “All the planes to Albany must have been jammed. Anyway, are you thinking that somebody might have flown here—”

  With more resignation than disappointment, Huggins said: “I forgot about the special session. You know, I’m beginning to wonder just how much we can do—up here in Dreyer.”

  He looked around, then deliberately and unmistakably spelled it all out: “Frohlich comes up from New York—and maybe his murderer does too. Frohlich is so worried that people can only remember one thing—he wanted to talk to Mr. Shaw. Well, whatever he was worried about happened in New York, didn’t it? That’s what we should be investigating, but it’s outside my jurisdiction. Oh, we’ll keep working here. With luck, we’ll make some progress on the weapon and the getaway. But motive . . .” His voice died away and he shook his head ponderously. “If you ask me, that’s down in New York.”

  Even allowing for a desire to pass the buck, this made sense. Thatcher was taken aback when Vandevanter implied that there might be protest from some quarters.

  “Well, Amory,” he said, neatly avoiding specifics, “you’re in charge of Dreyer New York. In a way, you could say that it’s really up to you.”

  Thatcher doubted whether Captain Huggins agreed. But the question was rendered moot.

  Amory Shaw gave Vandevanter a humorless smile. “Yes,” he said. “I quite agree. New York is the place to look.”

  Chapter 4

  Detective at the Cocoa Exchange

  In Dreyer, this was easy enough to say. But what about the other end? Thatcher could foresee strong, negative reactions from the personnel in Dreyer’s New York office, let alone the overworked police force of that city.

  But, since human nature is notoriously irrational, he was quite wrong. On the following Monday morning, two men were sitting in Dick Frohlich’s office at Dreyer’s Purchasing Division, on the fifth floor of the Cocoa Exchange. Neither of them was aggrieved. Overworked or not, Detective Dennis Udall was always curious about new worlds, and welcomed any opportunity to observe professionals pursuing strange occupations. His companion was more than eager to cooperate.

  “Yes, that’s right, I’m Stratton. I worked with Dick. God, of all the terrible things to happen—”s

  He broke off to shake his head. “Dick was a helluva nice guy. I hope you catch the bastard.”

  “You understand this is just a routine check. The people in Dreyer thought you could help fill in Frohlich’s timetable last Thursday.”

  “Sure!” Stratton said mockingly. “It’s so routine that the front office shot in two internal auditors last Friday. They put this place through a fine sieve over the weekend.”

  This was news to Udall. He tried to phrase his question tactfully. “And are they done?”

  “Yes.” Stratton smiled broadly. “We’re clean as a whistle. Anybody who knew Dick could have told them that. He wouldn’t have stood for any hanky-panky in this operation.” Almost as an afterthought, he added: “Neither would I, as a matter of fact.”

  “And just for background, what is your operation here?”

  Stratton was not the kind of expert who submerges any chance listener with a torrent of detail. “Couldn’t be simpler. All we do is buy the cocoa beans that chocolate is made from. We go to the places where cocoa is grown, like Nigeria and Ghana. There are six of us in this office and together we buy over one hundred thousand tons of beans every year. You know Dick had just gotten back from Accra?”

  “No. Does it make a difference?”

  “It changes the routine a little. And, incidentally, it’s another reason I was sure the auditors wouldn’t find anything wrong. Dick had been away for over three weeks and he just hadn’t been back long enough to stumble on anything. He landed at Kennedy on Wednesday evening.”

  “Did he check in here?”

  “God, no, he would have been pooped. What with the jet trip and the time lag, you put in a 20 hour day before you get to New York.”

  “So he probably went straight to bed?”

  “You can bank on it. That’s what we all do when we get back from Africa. He didn’t get into the office until about ten-thirty on Thursday and that’s normal, too.”

  Udall was frowning thoughtfully. “Did you see Frohlich when he arrived on Thursday? What was he like?”

  “I saw him actually come in the door,” Stratton announced triumphantly, “and he was exactly the same as always. We yakked a little about his trip, but not much. Dick was awfully well organized. He made a habit of using the flight to get his notes in order. First thing, whenever he got back from a field trip, he sat down with a secretary and dictated his report so it could go straight up to Dreyer. That must have taken him about an hour and a half. The next bit was routine, too. Whenever any of us gets back from a cocoa field we drop in on Amory Shaw to tell him how things look.”

  “Wait a minute.” Udall had been biding his time. “When I was down in the lobby I saw there were two Dreyer offices on the directory. There’s this one on the fifth floor and one on the seventh. When I asked the elevator starter if the seventh floor was Mr. Frohlich’s office, he acted as if I’d committed sacrilege and managed to say that the seventh floor was Mr. Amory Shaw. What gives?”

  Stratton grinned. “For all practical purposes, you were spitting in church. We’re ordinary mortals down here. But God lives on the seventh floor.”

  “You mean he’s your boss?”

  “We’re not even that close to him. We’re purchasing agents and we report to the vice-president in charge of production upstate. Our boss has thousands of people working for him and they all do something comprehensible. They take cocoa and sugar and milk and make it into chocolate. Amory Shaw is also a vice
-president. He has one secretary, one assistant, and he spends his time buying and selling millions of dollars’ worth of cocoa that doesn’t exist.”

  But Stratton was playing games with the wrong man. The New York City Police Department had handpicked their emissary.

  “You mean Shaw trades in futures on the Cocoa Exchange?” Udall asked politely.

  “I prefer to think of it as black magic. Anyway, he’s supposed to do it better than anyone else in the world. And one of the inputs he likes is our estimate about the upcoming cocoa crop. Dick went upstairs to see him about noon or so.”

  “And Frohlich would just give him agricultural information?”

  “Not entirely. Basically we’re experts on crop diseases, growing conditions, things like that. But Africa is Africa. We keep an ear to the ground for political trouble, too. After all, a revolution can do as much damage as an epidemic of black pod.”

  Detective Udall made some notes.

  “So Frohlich went up to see Shaw. Do you have any idea what he did after that?”

  “I can only guess. He was due upstate for the annual clambake, of course. They always have the buyer who’s just come in from the field. If he was like me, he took his pay check to the bank. But I never saw him after noon on Thursday. I slipped out to a place across the street to watch TV. By the time I got back Dick had already left.”

  Udall knew what had been on TV last Thursday.

  “The docking?” he asked.

  “Yes. Wasn’t it great? At first I thought they were going to blow it again. But when they finally linked up . . .”

  Udall decided to leave. He had been the victim of too many space nuts down at headquarters not to recognize a man prepared to relive every glorious moment.

  The seventh floor suite was much as Stratton had described it. Tucked into the end of a corridor, it could not have contained more than three rooms. In the outer office a shirt-sleeved young man was standing hunched over the typist.

  “Look, Shirley, how many times do I have to tell you? These columns should be in a line. They look like hell the way you set them up . . . Yes, what is it?”