Murder to Go Page 5

  Millions of Americans stiffened. Who had been assassinated this time?

  “. . . the Public Health Service has just announced that seventy-two persons in six states along the Eastern seaboard have been hospitalized with symptoms of acute food poisoning. According to spokesmen, victims had recently eaten chicken or other poultry. Until the source of the contamination is isolated, the Public Health Service is issuing a provisional warning to the public to avoid chicken and chicken products. Emergency investigations are under way and all possible personnel . . .”

  Jeremy still wanted a new daddy, but from Maine to Maryland household attention was elsewhere.

  “Thank God we had meat loaf tonight,” said a housewife in Nashua, New Hampshire. “I was thinking of chicken.”

  In Olean, New York, no thanks were being offered:

  “I knew it! I knew something was wrong! I’ve been feeling lousy since we got up from the table. No, Doris, an Alka-Seltzer isn’t going to help! Didn’t you hear what he said? I’m going right down to the hospital! God, I’m feeling worse by the minute.”

  It was a long hard evening in every emergency ward on the Atlantic.

  The morning newspapers had the grisly details. The outbreak had felled people in Elmira, New York, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in Hackensack, New Jersey, and in Darien, Connecticut. The toll was stil mounting, and many of the stricken were in critical condition. As for symptoms—well, close reading of The New York Times alone caused severe nausea to several unusually sensitive commuters.

  “There has not been an incidence of food poisoning on this scale in decades,” said a U.S. Public Health official grimly. “Several hundred people are involved, at least. Nor can we pinpoint the source of the tainted chicken. We are pursuing every possible avenue and investigating warehouses, interstate shipments . . .”

  In a word, the Public Health was leaving no chicken unturned. There was, however, a snag.

  “At this time of the year,” continued Dr. Mosby disapprovingly, “with colleges opening and summer vacations ending, many people are traveling. This has complicated the entire situation. Many of the patients admitted to the hospitals have been in transit. And, I regret to say, some of them still cannot tell us where they ate their last meal. At the moment, the extreme points of the affected area are Cleveland, Ohio, and Greenfield, Massachusetts. But it is quite possible . . .”

  Clearly, Dr. Mosby himself would not touch chicken anywhere in the continental United States. He ended his statement by urging the public to see a doctor immediately should certain symptoms develop.

  “It is nothing,” said Dr. Mosby severely, “to fool around with.”

  In several large cities, local health authorities inserted bold-face advertisements in the major newspapers. The unappetizing text instructed the public, with trenchant candor, on how to void the digestive tract. In New York, experienced city officials did not rely on the written word. The live demonstration on television was presented six times in one day. This effectively squelched whatever appetite for chicken lingered in the metropolitan area.

  By the next day, the immediate health emergency was over. Hospital admissions fell to the vanishing point.

  So did the consumption of chicken. Supermarkets were the first to reel under the impact. Morning shoppers stocked up on meat, fish, eggs and anything else. By lunchtime, restaurants ranging in caste from the ninety-nine-cent blue-plate special to Cordon Bleu specialties were adjusting to the new facts of life. Charlie Trinkam reported on this facet of the situation when he returned to the Sloan and stopped in John Thatcher’s office.

  “This is a honeyfall for the printers,” he announced, perching on a corner of the desk. “I understand every restaurant in town has put out a rush order for new menus. Crossing things out isn’t good enough. They don’t want the word chicken mentioned on the premises.”

  “You can’t blame them,” Thatcher replied. He was idly leafing through a report that Everett Gabler, a senior trust officer, had just delivered. “They poison enough customers without external assistance.”

  “Of course,” Charlie continued, “the Chinese restaurants won’t have any trouble at all. They’ll just give their dishes new names and no one will ever know the difference.”

  Everett Gabler, a long-time devotee of health foods, took exception to this remark. Carefully he explained that Oriental diets, high on unbleached rice and vegetables, were nutritionally superior to their Western counterparts.

  Wholesome asceticism had no appeal for Charlie. “Almost anything would be nutritionally superior to deadly poison, Everett,” he said lightheartedly.

  “Come, now, Charlie,” Thatcher corrected him. “No one has actually died.”

  “Not yet,” said Trinkam irrepressibly.

  In Willoughby, New Jersey, the Akers family was not at all lighthearted. When Sue Akers returned from her nursing classes, she hung up her jacket and looked at her parents a moment before speaking. Instead of the usual predinner madhouse in the Chicken Tonight kitchen, there was only silence. The high-school assistants were missing. Her parents were sitting across the desk from each other, an overflowing ashtray the only evidence of their occupation.

  “How are things?” she asked cautiously.

  Dodie Akers did not beat about the bush.

  “Terrible!”

  “One call since we opened.” Vern Akers laughed shortly. “For a tray of corn bread and a side order of sweet tomato relish. I told the kids to take off. I’m not going to have any trouble handling the business alone.”

  Dodie Akers looked at her husband with concern. Then she forced a smile and spoke to her daughter.

  “Vern’s right. We’re not going to need any help. Why don’t you and Bob go out tonight?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t feel like going out. I’ve already called Bob and told him to come over here. You always say we don’t have enough free time to really straighten out the stockroom and polish the pumps. Well, now’s our chance.”

  “What’s the point?” said Vern Akers hopelessly. “We might be closing down this place in another couple of weeks.”

  But he was no match for his womenfolk, who were in silent agreement that he needed activity. Dodie rose decisively. “Then we’ll close down with the best-polished pumps in town! Come on, Sue.”

  Sue paused at the back door to look at her father. “Don’t worry so much, Dad. It’s bound to blow over.”

  Sue Akers was not the only optimist. In the St. Paul offices of a major soup canner early next morning, worried executives scanned a list and suddenly realized that far too many of those red-and-white cans contained chicken or chicken stock.

  “It could be worse,” said one middle-aged and balding Pollyanna, “it could be tomatoes.”

  “God forbid! Well, what do we do?”

  A lengthy conference with expensive market researchers and the firm’s glossy advertising firm, as well as the beloved Millie Malone (“I’m Millie Malone, and I’ve got a wonderful suggestion for those cold-day blues! What about a mushroom soup pick-me-up, with cheese surprises . . .”), produced a high-level forecast: things were bound to blow over.

  Day after day, interested parties in St. Paul and elsewhere studied the economic barometer. Finally, one full week after the chicken catastrophe, light appeared at the end of the tunnel.

  “Hullo? This Chicken Tonight? Listen, I want chicken for eight. . . . What? Oh, four of the Creole and four of the chicken Kiev. And potato salad, and cole slaw . . .”

  Harry Krebs, who ran Chicken Tonight in Pittsburgh, had tears in his eyes.

  “Sure he was drunk, Betty. But it’s a beginning, it’s a beginning.”

  The ladies in charge of the Little League dinner in Utica were not drunk.

  “But how can you feed seventy-five youngsters without creamed chicken on toast? We always have creamed chicken on toast! Besides, this was just another one of those accidents.”

  Then, on Saturday morning, the other shoe fell.

&nbs
p; The U. S. Public Health Service, sounding perilously antagonistic to the entire public as well as its purveyors of chicken, released another terse announcement.

  “Mr. Duane B. Bonfils, a victim of the food poisoning caused by eating tainted chicken from a source still not identified by this agency, died this morning in Elmira Community Hospital.”

  The Public Health then withdrew to its own work, which included investigation of every aspect of chicken production in the country. It left a scene of carnage in its wake.

  There were a few doomed attempts to strike back amidst general demoralization.

  From the Catskills to the Poconos, Jewish caterers and delicatessen owners stared incredulously at a world without chicken soup, chopped liver and chicken fat, and hoarsely reminded their clientele that kosher chickens were subject to purification rituals proven effective by whole millennia of human history. The response to this stirring ethnic cry was negligible.

  The refrigeration industry, with hundreds of federal and local investigators in its warehouses and freight cars, bought time on radio and television to point with pride at the uncontaminated meat and fish it handled. But refrigeration could do only so much. It could not preserve a product that was already tainted.

  The National Poultry Institute, already harassed, took instant umbrage and threatened a libel suit.

  Two major supermarket chains announced that they would no longer handle any liver sausage containing the slightest trace of chicken livers.

  The American Kennel Club urged all dog owners to boycott canned dog foods listing chicken by-products as an ingredient.

  “In fact,” said Walter Bowman, chief of the Sloan’s research department, as he summarized these developments, “everybody’s going ape.”

  After a lifetime at the hub of the American financial community, John Thatcher was not surprised. “They always do, Walter. Now, what about the stock market?”

  Bowman reported that every listed stock remotely connected with poultry was sagging. “That’s all the big food processors, of course. Everybody who puts out TV dinners and frozen chicken pies, or any of the canned chicken products. But the stocks that are really nose-diving are the franchises. Hell, there are at least fourteen franchise systems that rely on chicken.”

  “How badly are we hit?”

  Walter Bowman let a disingenuous smile crease his face. “Not badly at all,” he said modestly. “I thought the hamburger franchises were a better buy.”

  Not for the first time, Thatcher marveled at Walter Bowman’s ability to sidestep disaster, whether predicted or not. Now he smiled.

  “And, of course, you’ve never been enthusiastic about franchises, anyway.”

  “They’re all right for a quick killing. But in the long run the help problem will get them. The only one really getting anywhere was Hedstrom.”

  “I thought we’d come to him.”

  “Twelve million,” said Bowman sadly. “That’s a lot of credit for a business that’s selling poison.”

  “I don’t think we have to worry about that, Walter,” Thatcher said dryly. “Chicken Tonight may be selling it, but I doubt if anybody’s buying.”

  “No. Boy, you wouldn’t believe everyone could stop buying anything so fast. Have I told you the latest? Now the egg boys are worried it may spread to them. They think the next step will be for people to stop eating eggs.”

  Thatcher was quick to reassure him. Most Americans, he said authoritatively, had left the farm so far behind that the chicken-egg relationship was lost on them.

  “You may be right,” Walter said, rising to leave. “All this excitement will die down once the Public Health people find the sleeper.”

  He was wrong.

  The search for that sleeper had been quietly but painstakingly pursued. Patients groggily struggling to their feet after four days in a coma found that young men from the Food and Drug Administration were their first visitors. Relatives waiting in hospital corridors were cross-examined. Motel proprietors and roommates were asked to sign formal statements. All the questions were to the point. When did the patient last eat? What did he eat? Where did it come from?

  When the answers came in, Dr. Mosby called his second press conference.

  “There is no doubt about it,” he declared militantly.

  Reporters waited. Dr. Mosby glared at them. “Each and every victim ordered and ate a precooked chicken dinner from a nationwide franchise chain.”

  Dr. Mosby raised a hand to quell the uproar. He was going to make this announcement in his own way. Like a hanging judge he passed sentence.

  “By virtue of the authority vested in my agency I hereby declare that every franchise operating under license from the Chicken Tonight Corporation in all states east of the Mississippi River is closed until further notice.”

  CHAPTER 5

  STUFF AND TRUSS

  DR. MOSBY’S blitzkrieg tactics would have flattened most front offices. But not Chicken Tonight’s. Characteristically, Frank Hedstrom and Ted Young fought back in different ways.

  Young was in favor of counterattack.

  “You can’t do it!” he yelled. He was standing behind a chair, hands digging into its back, his weight thrust forward. Across from him in Frank Hedstrom’s office was a representative of the Food and Drug Administration, stubbornly silent.

  “You can’t do it! We’ll get a restraining order! We’ll get an injunction!” Young shouted, looking furiously at Chicken Tonight’s own lawyers. “What are you two sitting there for? Tell him they can’t shut us down.”

  One of the lawyers closed his eyes wearily. “But they can,” he repeated for the third time.

  “I’m sorry,” said the FDA man, looking both tired and embarrassed.

  “Sorry!” Young mocked savagely. “You kill Chicken Tonight, and you say you’re sorry! Sweet Jesus!”

  The FDA man looked in silent appeal to the figure behind the desk. Frank Hedstrom finally spoke.

  “Take it easy, Ted,” he said dispassionately. “Don’t let it throw you. There’s no use fighting this one head on.”

  Young wanted to challenge him, but Hedstrom put up a hand and continued. “Start thinking, Ted. Even if they hadn’t shut us down, do you think anybody would be buying from Chicken Tonight? Particularly when every paper in the country has headlines that say we’re selling poison?”

  The second lawyer roused himself. “Mr. Hedstrom, that’s not accurate. There was a zinc adulterant in one mix and only one mix. The Mexicali, I believe you call it.”

  “All right, they’ve proved it was some zinc salt! How do they know it was our Mexicali that did it?” Young asked belligerently. “How do they know?”

  Shaking his head, Hedstrom rose from behind the desk, grimacing as he did. They had spent too many hours listening to the FDA’s painstaking report. One hundred and thirty-three people had eaten Chicken Tonight’s Mexicali; one hundred thirty-three people had collapsed with zinc poisoning.

  “It’s our Mexicali all right,” he said.

  The FDA man rose to leave. “Obviously we had to close you down. At least until we zero in a little more. We have no real alternative.”

  Hedstrom smiled humorlessly. “Of course not.”

  The FDA man was pleased to be leaving Chicken Tonight. Hedstrom escorted him to the door. “You’ll get all the cooperation we can give you.”

  “Good,” said the official.

  Hedstrom glanced back at his own lawyers. “I’ll be in touch with you,” he said pointedly. The lawyers took the hint and collected their belongings.

  When Hedstrom returned to his desk, only two others remained in the room with him. Young was sunk into a black reverie of his own. The stout gray-haired woman in the corner was weeping.

  “Chicken Mexicali!” Miss Collins moaned through her sobs. “Oh, Mr. Hedstrom, it’s impossible! We tested and tested.”

  Tearfully she continued, telling him what he already knew. Mexicali, like every other Chicken Tonight flavor, had been exhaustively
proven in the test kitchens. Chicken Mexicali was absolutely wholesome and fresh. Yet chicken Mexicali, packaged in model kitchens, dispatched to Chicken Tonights where standards of cleanliness were outstanding, had made hundreds of Americans ill and killed one old man in Elmira, New York.

  “It’s impossible, but it happened,” Hedstrom said finally, cutting short Miss Collins’ lament. “Now we don’t have much time, if we’re going to survive all this. We’ve got a major salvage job on our hands.”

  Young looked up. “How the hell can we salvage anything when they’ve shut down every one of our stores? God almighty, do you know what this will do to us when the stock market opens?”

  Impatiently Hedstrom brushed this contribution aside. “Ted, forget about the problems. I know what they are. Our stores are shut, and if they were open we wouldn’t have any customers. Our franchises are losing money every minute. We’re committed to buying thousands of dollars’ worth of broilers, whether we can sell them or not. On top of that, we’ve got a merger on our hands. We’ve got problems enough to last a lifetime. What we don’t have is time.”

  Young was taken aback by this cavalier dismissal of their difficulties. But without pause Hedstrom went on to the strategy for orderly retreat. “Listen, they’re going to let us open someday. We’ve got to be ready for it,” he explained patiently. “Miss Collins, you’re going to have an army of people going over your kitchens. I don’t have to tell you to bend over backward. We’ll get Basil to run down all our outstanding contracts and check our liability to our franchisees. Ted, you’ve got to get in touch with every one of our warehouses and alert them. Then we’ll have to think of some sort of press release.”

  By sheer force of personality, Hedstrom singlehandedly kept Chicken Tonight headquarters functioning. Even though it was Saturday morning, almost all the staff was on the premises. The secretaries alternated weeping bouts in the ladies’ room with savage typing. The marketing division was desperately reviewing cost projections for the forthcoming week. Executives answered phones, snapping curt replies. In its worst hour, Chicken Tonight was still bustling.

  This surprised at least one visitor.