Right on the Money Read online

  “God, I’m sorry about this, Mr. Laverdiere. Everything was all right when I punched in there at two-thirty. But at four I was way over at Cummings & Tarboy. I didn’t know anything was wrong until I heard the sirens.”

  This area of industrial Bridgeport was not a prime target for criminal activity, and Gus’s duties covered a quarter-mile area.

  Now that the human element was standing before him, Bob said the right thing.

  “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

  But Gus, conscientious to a fault, continued to justify himself. “There weren’t any cigarettes or pipes smoldering when I was in there. I always check for that. And everybody had been gone a long time.”

  “Don’t worry about it. There’s just so much you can do.”

  “But how could it have happened?”

  That was what Conrad Ecker wanted to know. As he was a notorious early riser, by six o’clock Tina had abandoned her qualms about descending on his household with the bad news.

  “You’ll have to ask Bob,” she said wearily, cradling a mug of coffee to encourage the warmth seeping through her frozen fingers. “He’s the one who talked to the fire people.”

  Bob was in the hall, calling Alan Frayne.

  “It sounds as if it could have been a lot worse,” Conrad muttered.

  “I suppose so,” she agreed, raising her hands to slick back her sodden hair. Relieved of that dramatic black frame, her stark features became almost nunlike over the high rolled collar of her fisherman’s sweater. “Only the boiler house was involved. Bob says there won’t be any shipping or production delays. It’s the records that are a shambles.”

  That sounded almost too good to be true.

  “How’s he going to ship without purchase orders?”

  “He has duplicates over at his end.” Tina shrugged, impatient with nonproblem areas. “I’m worried about the financial data. Oh, I’m not saying we can’t reconstitute the files. But it’s going to be a monster job.”

  Conrad had never been one to cry over spilled milk.

  “Can’t be helped,” he said before turning to the door. “Did you get Alan?”

  “Yeah, he’s coming right over,” said Bob Laverdiere, sinking into a chair and wordlessly accepting a cup of coffee.

  Conrad was considerate enough to delay his next question until Bob had taken several sips.

  “What are they saying about the cause of the fire?”

  “They can’t tell yet. As soon as things cool down, they’ll be looking into it. The sprinklers never went on, and the captain did ask me about our electrical wiring.”

  “We had a lot of rewiring done when I moved my computer operation there,” Tina recalled. “I don’t remember off the top of my head exactly how much we had done, but I can look it up . . . damn, I can’t. Not now. But the Markham outfit did the job.”

  Conrad was shaking his head.

  “There’s no need for you to work on it. The insurance company should be getting back to me in a couple of hours. They’ll be sending their own man for the appraisal. I guess we can leave the question of how it happened to the experts.”

  They were still debating how soon they could start the clean-up when Alan Frayne pulled into the driveway and thrust open the door from the screened porch. In suit and tie, he was a sharp contrast to those waiting for him.

  Tina might at least have looked modish except for the grimy patches staining her clothes and the wild disarray of her hair. Bob’s bespectacled pale face rose incongruously above a ski sweater in vivid colors intended to accent a glowing tan. Conrad had yet to get dressed. Unshaven, in an ancient bathrobe and scuffed slippers, he looked every inch his age. His wife had somehow found time to don slacks and a flannel shirt, but an old-fashioned hair net still confined the waves of her permanent.

  The occupants were the only discordant elements in the kitchen. Everything else was clean and bright and orderly. Being the woman she was, Alice Ecker had met the emergency by not only filling the coffeepot, but by plucking from the freezer a tray already filled with the dough of cranberry muffins. Now the air was pervaded by the aroma of home-baking while a bowl of beaten eggs rested on the counter.

  “Sit down, Alan. Breakfast will be ready in a minute,” she invited, plunking a skillet on the stove.

  Frayne barely heard her. “I drove past the plant,” he said in a worried voice. “It looks like a disaster area.”

  “Nothing’s affected but the boiler house,” Laverdiere reassured him. “The line will be able to come in and get to work just as usual.”

  “That’s a relief,” Frayne breathed, finally acknowledging Alice’s coffee. “From the car I couldn’t get close enough to tell whether my test lab had gone up. I’m sorry about your operation, Tina.”

  Tina, usually a tigress when it came to protecting her domain, was making a determined effort to look on the bright side.

  “It doesn’t seem like the right time to complain,” she replied with a wan smile. “Not with the plant, the warehouse and the lab all in go-condition. That means everything can run normally while I get my end straightened out.”

  Frayne was sympathetic.

  “Is it a total loss over there?”

  “It’s too early to tell.”

  Bob had now imbibed enough coffee to show signs of life. “They wouldn’t let Tina go any farther than the doorway,” he volunteered. “She just got to peek inside.”

  Alice Ecker, now distributing laden plates, joined the conversation.

  “Remember that fire at the Jardines, Conrad?” she said, referring to neighbors of the distant past. “They said it would have been easier to rebuild from scratch than to go through all that remodeling. Maybe you’ll get a brand-new building out of this, Tina.”

  “I wouldn’t object,” Tina admitted, “but I’d rather have my records. And, Alan, it looked as if the files from the test lab went up in smoke, too. Is that going to be a problem?”

  But Alan, large and genial, remained placid. Reaching for a second muffin, he said, “Don’t worry. We’ve got the lab books for everything we’re working on now. The stuff over in your building was historical. I would have liked to have it available, but it won’t kill me to do without.”

  “There, now,” said Alice comfortably. “Nobody likes a fire, but you all seem to be coming out of this one pretty well. No one was hurt, which is the main thing, and you can go on operating. You should be counting your blessings.”

  Frayne grinned at her. “Things aren’t bad enough for that, Alice. Still, I agree that we’ve plenty to be thankful for. Poor Tina’s the only one struck with a major headache. That is, always assuming our insurance is up-to-date.”

  Some aspects of business did engage Conrad Ecker.

  “It sure is,” he barked. “Doug insisted we upgrade at the last renewal.”

  Bob Laverdiere was rueful. “And I said you were overdoing.”

  “You said we were God’s gift to the insurance company,” Conrad riposted.

  Swiftly Tina introduced another wrinkle: “I know we’re all right about building damage, but what about the costs due to document destruction?”

  “That’s covered, too. You’re going to be able to get yourself a team of temporary accountants and shell out for a pack of overtime,” Conrad informed her, then added: “No thanks to your husband.”

  This time it was Alan Frayne deflecting them.

  “Say, I spoke too soon when I said it was back to normal for everybody except Tina. What about your meeting with ASI, Conrad? Now that our financials are a pile of ashes, are you going to have to postpone?”

  Scrambled eggs and cranberry muffins had restored Tina to her usual crisp dispatch.

  “Absolutely,” she said. “It will take more than a month to put together what we’ve lost, even with all the extra help Conrad says I can lay on.”

  “A month?” Conrad was dismayed. “That’s too long.”

  “I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do about it.”

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p; He was not prepared to accept this.

  “The whole deal will be off the burner in a month. I don’t say we’re going to want it, but I sure as hell intend to find out.”

  Tina sighed. “Look, Conrad,” she said, pushing aside her plate and leaning forward to explain. “This will be a complicated process of fitting together snippets of information from old invoices and tax returns and sales orders. It can’t be done overnight.”

  She reduced him to silence, but not to acquiescence. For several moments Conrad brooded over his coffee. Then he looked up.

  “I’m not talking about all that detail. It isn’t as if we don’t have other sources available. Hell, the outside auditors were in here two months ago for the quarterly report. And Bob’s got sales summaries at the plant. ASI doesn’t care that we shipped three hundred and fifty coffeepots to a buyer in Chicago on November eleventh. What we’ll do is put together the major stuff, enough to go on with. You get busy on that and I’ll postpone ASI for forty-eight hours.”

  Tina had her mouth open to protest but Conrad swept on authoritatively: “Right, Tina?”

  “Right, Conrad,” she echoed with reluctance.

  It was Alice, curiously enough, who produced the next item to be addressed.

  “And while all this is going on, Conrad, don’t forget about finding out how this started. And see that it never happens again. Somebody could have been hurt.”

  There were some priorities Conrad did not argue with.

  “Don’t worry, honey, the insurance investigator will be telling me about that.”

  But the first person the insurance investigator spoke with was the fire marshal.

  The marshal had learned that it paid to know the financial background before setting foot on burned-out business premises.

  “No,” the investigator reported. “The Ecker Company isn’t in trouble. In fact, the opposite. They’re coining money.”

  “I always ask when the sprinkler system doesn’t work, but I didn’t think that could be it,” the marshal confessed. “Not with the kind of fire they had. If they’d needed cash, they would have burned down the plant.”

  The investigator nodded. “From what you tell me, they’re not even going to be able to put in a claim for production stoppage.”

  “And the boys on the truck didn’t see anything suspicious while they were in there. Of course, with a low-grade fire like this one, there wouldn’t have to be anything out of the way. It could have been done with a kitchen match.”

  “Sure, but you need motive as well as means. If this boils down to simple document damage and minor reconstruction, the Ecker Company will just be left with a first-class pain in the ass.”

  The marshal had slumped down in his chair and was scrutinizing the ceiling. “The trouble is, you insurance companies only look at it from one angle.”

  “You mean our payout is affected only if the Eckers torched the place, while you’ve got to worry about the other possibilities? But we like to discourage this sort of thing, no matter who does it. Disgruntled employees, competitors, personal enemies . . .”

  “. . . hostile neighbors, ex-boyfriends,” the marshal joined the chant. “God, the list goes on forever.”

  In spite of the extent of their combined experiences in the sordid world of arson, neither of them thought to include potential merger partners in their catalog.

  Not yet.

  Chapter 7

  TRADING FLOORS

  News of a delay in the summit meeting between ASI and Ecker was received by most of the participants with hardened resignation. In a world filled with grounded planes, twenty-four-hour viruses, and emergency root-canal work, everybody expects quirks in the timetable.

  The only player seriously perturbed was Tom Robichaux, and when he and Thatcher finally embarked for their rescheduled trip to New Jersey, he whiled away the drive by sharing his misgivings.

  “I don’t like it,” he grumbled. “This is no time to be losing momentum.”

  “They’re not at a critical juncture,” Thatcher pointed out. “This is just a preliminary get-together.”

  Robichaux shook his head. “It gives people time to think.”

  Thatcher fully appreciated that this was a process Tom had always viewed with suspicion.

  “But it does tend to happen when companies are talking acquisition,” he ventured on an apologetic note.

  “You never know what they’ll come up with,” Robichaux said darkly. “The next thing we know, ASI could get edgy about this fire. Say it’s too coincidental or something.”

  When Tom was well launched into the doomsday theme, there was only one practical expedient. Simply overleap him into even bleaker prophecy.

  “You mean ASI will decide Ecker has deliberately burned down its record office?”

  “Good God, no! Where would be the sense in that? ASI won’t have any trouble finding out how profitable Ecker is.”

  “Then there’s nothing to worry about.”

  But he was going too far.

  “There’s plenty to worry about,” Tom retorted with a return to petulance. “You can always find objections to this kind of deal if you look hard enough. I say the thing to do is, get it over with and handle any problems later.”

  What he meant was, of course, get it over with and pay Robichaux & Devane their very hefty fees. Still, there was an echo of the old-fashioned matchmaker’s contention that there was plenty of time after the wedding to discover any incompatibility. After all, this had been the guiding principle of Tom’s hectic marital career. Thatcher did not presume to advise people about marriage but, as a banker, he held fast to the notion that would-be partners should acquire beforehand as much information as possible.

  “Breaking up can be hard to do,” he murmured. “I doubt if ASI wants to be quite that insouciant.”

  “Let me tell you, everything was going fine until now.”

  “No personality problems when they met face-to-face?” Thatcher asked, curious about the encounter that Ken Nicolls had missed.

  “Oh, Pepitone and Ecker seemed to hit it off fine,” Robichaux said perfunctorily.

  In spite of the fact that Tom was one of the least perceptive men in the world, Thatcher listened with respect. As long as those precious fees hung in the balance, Robichaux would be alert to any potential threat.

  And, undeniably, very few social lubricants rival the hope of mutual profit. It is this truth that makes international trade possible. With enough money at stake, business associates simply do not care about cultural differences. Which was just as well, because Thatcher suspected the chasm separating ASI and the Ecker clan might be wider than anything produced by a foreign language.

  In the meantime, Robichaux’s aberrant mind had switched to another grievance.

  “And they call this Princeton!” he snorted as the limousine pulled into the last of a long row of industrial parks.

  Technically his objection might have been at fault, but not spiritually. Apart from its mailing address, nothing at ASI suggested ivied halls or the storied past. The buildings were aggressively modern; the landscaping consisted of pachysandra and wood bark. But when Gardner Ives appeared to greet them, it was easy to visualize him residing on several gracious Princeton acres, complete with horses. He hailed Thatcher’s presence as a sign of Ecker’s seriousness of purpose.

  “Delighted you could come,” he began. “And once you send your people in, we’ll cooperate with them completely.”

  If Ives embodied one familiar strain in corporate America, his executive vice-president represented another. Phil Pepitone had clearly risen from the bottom and was proud of it.

  “It may not work out, Gardner,” he cautioned. “Ecker’s just coming to test the water.”

  Turning to Thatcher, Ives expanded, “Phil’s the one who came up with Ecker. They never would have occurred to me, but the idea looks like a winner so far.”

  Pepitone produced a grin, but all he said was, “There’s a long way to go.”
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  Gardner Ives, however, continued to sing the praises of their choice. “I confess I was a little leery of Conrad Ecker at first. I’d heard so much about his being eccentric and all that. But I was very pleased with the way he sounded on the phone. He doesn’t pretend to be much of a businessman. He says his son handled all that. He has, however, a very shrewd appreciation of the fundamentals. But then I don’t have to tell you that. He’s your client.”

  Any minute now, Ives would be describing Conrad Ecker as refreshingly down-to-earth.

  “He’s a client of the Sloan,” Thatcher acknowledged. “But I only met him once several years ago. Of course a number of our people are familiar with him.”

  Thatcher did not feel it necessary to mention the intensive briefing from Milo Thompson.

  “Well, they should be here any minute,” Ives announced.

  “They?” Thatcher wondered if the Ecker tribe moved en masse.

  Pepitone explained that Mrs. Laverdiere was coming along. “She’ll be huddling with some of our accountants.”

  “They tell me she’s a very able person,” Ives said ponderously.

  “Yeah, she seems really on top of her job,” Pepitone chimed in. “And a damn good thing, with this fire of theirs fouling things up.”

  Thatcher’s ears were pricking. Was it simply imagination, or was the ASI contingent heaping praise on the wife to avoid talking about the husband? For that matter, was Ecker’s choice of adjutant meaningful?

  Apparently not, Thatcher soon learned. Conrad Ecker felt it necessary to explain why he needed any entourage at all.

  “Don’t see why we have to get a whole mob of people involved at this stage,” he said, tactlessly ignoring the support personnel following Ives into the conference room. “But with this fire, Tina’s the one who can tell your accountants what we’ve got right now, when the rest will be available, and what it will be.”

  According to a courtly Ives, Mrs. Laverdiere was more than welcome.

  “And anybody else you’d like to have at our sessions.”

  “Sure,” Ecker grunted, making it clear that went without saying.