Accounting for Murder Read online

  “The final analysis must, of course, await the completion of our investigation. But, with over 40 years of experience in this field, I do not think I have ever felt so confident that the outcome will justify my original suspicions. There is no hope of any intelligent or purposive action from the present management which, in my opinion, is composed entirely of incompetents. With your permission and support I am prepared to work on these problems until we can get effective remedies. Our present position is secure. With sufficient persistence we can amass enough data to persuade the Board to take action or to compel the removal of the Board if they refuse to be goaded into activity. I personally am prepared to spend three years at this if necessary. But the final decision must rest with you.”

  Fortinbras was left in no doubt about the sentiments of the meeting. There was a genteel murmur of approval, joined by the rich young man, who was getting into the spirit of things. Regina Plout rose triumphantly to her feet, assured Fortinbras on behalf of her fellow shareholders of their continued support, and asked for questions from the floor. Thus encouraged, Miriam Dennis, of the envelope-addressing crew, timidly asked Fortinbras if they could look forward to indicting anybody. He very repressively replied that there was no question of instituting criminal proceedings, and the lady resumed her seat, visibly daunted.

  Mrs. Plout covered the awkward hiatus by announcing that now the business was over, pleasure could begin, and coyly produced a tea trolley laden with coffee and cakes. The gathering rearranged itself into congenial groups, and Fortinbras found himself the focal point of the only three persons present to show any signs of intelligence. Edward Lee was the head of a substantial import business in Chinatown and a power in the Chinese Merchants Association. He had obviously been weaned on financial statements. Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Adler found time to attend the stock holder meetings although running a successful wholesale lumber business.

  “You’ve got them all excited, Clarence,” said Adler, nodding toward the agitated quartet in the corner composed of two doctors and two envelope addressers.

  “It’s just as well,” replied Fortinbras, putting his coffee cup down dubiously on a small marble-top table. “I want them to realize that this may be a long job. The first flush of enthusiasm will die down any day.”

  “You can count on Mary and me. We trust your intuition, and you probably will uncover something. But what then? Can we really get any action?”

  “Well, that depends.” Fortinbras rubbed his jaw reflectively. “What I’m afraid is that they’ll make only nominal changes. Mason’s ready to throw anybody to the wolves. He’s quite capable of singling out one division manager and trying to lay the whole mess at his door. But I don’t believe that will get to the root of it. Why, there isn’t a single person there who isn’t ignorant of the simplest principles of cost accounting. No study of break-even points—nothing at all. But we’ll have our troubles getting a complete overhaul of the management, and I don’t think I’ll settle for anything less.”

  Lee looked thoughtful. “That sounds as if things are worse than we originally anticipated.” He looked around to be sure he could not be overheard before continuing. “If they’re that bad, Clarence, do you think that there’s any chance of fraud, after all? I hadn’t considered that possibility.”

  “There hasn’t been any sign of fraud so far, and of course I haven’t been thinking along those lines. But I can assure you of this, Edward. The kind of audit that I’m planning will show up everything. If there is fraud, I will find it.” Fortinbras’s reply was almost a whisper. The ladies were quite excited enough already.

  “Well, if you do find it, you’re really going to stir up a hornet’s nest.” Lee did not seem disturbed by the prospect, but Adler frowned slightly. This was not what he and Mary had bargained for.

  “Oh, it will be a hornet’s nest all right.” Fortinbras’s confidence was unshaken. “But I intend to be the hornet.”

  Chapter 6

  Fortinbras Rampant

  The convulsions caused by Clarence Fortinbras’s activities at National Calculating, together with the publicity—Mrs. Plout had contrived to insert in all the metropolitan papers a snappy little notice of the National Calculating Stockholders’ Protest Committee, together with an appeal to other dissatisfied stockholders—were producing talk, if nothing else.

  At the company, Dr. Morris Richter took one look at the Sidelights Column of The New York Times, “Never Underestimate Power of Woman, Corporation Learns”, and hurried off to alarm Allen Hammond by a low-voiced, conspiratorial discussion with vague hints of a corporate coup to oust the reigning powers in favor of younger, more vigorous, if unnamed, staff members. Jay Rutledge, secure in the refuge of the one division that was consistently profitable, tactfully avoided his afflicted fellow division managers, and sought out an old friend, Mrs. Cobb, nominally the assistant division manager to Richter in Research and Development, actually the guiding intelligence in a division notable for the rapid turnover of its chiefs.

  She listened calmly while he pointed out that Fortinbras was a nuisance underfoot and a public menace, then returned to her Program Evaluation Study. That it would go out under Dr. Richter’s signature did not trouble her. Neither did Clarence Fortinbras.

  Chip Mason read his morning Times, came upon Mrs. Plout’s message with a distressed grunt, then talked to Mary Sullivan about it for 40 minutes. When Miss Sullivan was recalled to her duties, he felt the need for further solace.

  After some difficulty, he got through to Tom Robichaux.

  So it was that John Putnam Thatcher, lunching at the Bankers Club, found himself once again contemplating the dislocations and disruptions occurring at National Calculating. He listened courteously while Robichaux, stopping by after lunch, described the damage being done to the efficient functioning of the corporation’s business, the disastrous decline of company morale, and the tensions being generated in certain executive offices.

  “They’ll get used to it,” Thatcher said finally. This brutality brought him a look of reproach from Robichaux. “Oh, come on, Tom. They’re bound to. Then things will get better.”

  In point of fact, things got worse, rapidly. The great explosion came not 24 hours later. It began on the fifteenth floor.

  “Who,” demanded Clarence Fortinbras in a voice of barely contained rage, “who has been in here?” His white hair stood in spiky tufts around his face, and his healthy ruddiness was deepened to an unattractive crimson. “Who has been in here?” he repeated, despite the fact that he was completely alone in the hallway into which he had erupted with these peremptory demands. Rigid with indignation, he stood there until Stanley Draper, alerted by the noise, came trotting around the corner, solicitude and deference nicely blended in his approach.

  “Did you say something . . .”

  “I most certainly did say something,” Fortinbras cut him off brutally. “I asked who has been in my office.” Impatiently he waved a sheaf of papers under Stanley’s nose.

  “In here?” Stanley repeated.

  “Yes, in here!” Fortinbras snapped. “Somebody has been rooting around in my office.” He glowered at Stanley, then apparently awoke to the unkindness of rounding on his lone admirer at National. “Look at it!” Stanley obediently followed him, and inspected the cubicle with anxious curiosity.

  Fortinbras had commandeered great piles of National Calculating’s financial reports and records, and they more than filled the small office ungraciously allocated to him. But, as Stanley knew full well, the first duty of the accountant is to seek and maintain order, and Fortinbras had arranged whole cases of papers in meticulous scale of precedence, with brief notes appended to the top copies. “The work, the office, the desk, and the mind are all of a piece,” he had told Stanley. “Orderliness is the first requisite.”

  “You see?” Fortinbras demanded, and Stanley did. Because instead of classic colonnades of ledger heaped on ledger, there was a wild, paper-strewn disorder. Commercial Sales Order Forms
1956-1960, which Fortinbras had made Stanley carefully classify by month, were now jumbled over the table by the window, while Government Contracts Current Vouchers were indiscriminately heaped on some Research and Development Cash Books. Stanley even saw, with a shudder that he concealed by stooping to retrieve them, invoices on the floor.

  Fortinbras surveyed the mess. “Yes, indeed, someone has been in here, my boy, and someone has taken documents. Not to put too fine a point on it, someone has been looting this office . . .”

  “Looting?” Stanley gasped. His allegiance to Fortinbras was unwavering, but a sense of loyalty to National Calculating and his wife’s reminder that his Christmas bonus came from the company sometimes conflicted with his pursuit of truth in accounting. “Surely not, Mr. Fortinbras. Perhaps somebody wanted to borrow some of the current ledgers. Maybe Mr. Young . . .”

  “Stop bleating,” Fortinbras said coldly. “Can’t you see that someone has removed armfuls of material? By heaven, if they think they can flout a court order . . .” He broke off to stare broodingly at an untidy pile of receipts. Stanley watched apprehensively. Finally Fortinbras made a small noise between a snort and a grunt that suggested decision.

  “Well, we’ll see!”

  “See?” Stanley asked. “See what, Mr. Fortinbras?”

  “I’m going to talk to Mason,” Fortinbras told him grimly.

  “Oh, Mr. Fortinbras!” Stanley was appalled.

  “I am not going to tolerate this sort of thing,” he replied, in an increasingly determined voice. “I have put up with a good deal of willful obstructionism, but this is altogether too much.”

  He suddenly plunged out into the hall again, followed by Stanley, who was aghast at the turn of events.

  “Mr. Fortinbras!” he called after him. “Your suit jacket . . .”

  Magnificent in his boots, his choleric hue alarmingly heightened by a dazzling white shirt, Fortinbras strode down the hall unmindful of the frivolities that exercised smaller minds. The intrusion into his office and the disturbance of his ordered materials was like a personal insult to him. Disdaining the elevator, he mounted the stairs to the sixteenth floor with brisk, decided steps, startling two typists who were precariously balancing milk cartons. They stared at him as he pounded along, the hapless Stanley in his wake.

  “Trouble,” said Millie laconically.

  “Sure thing,” said Gloria with no interest.

  They were right.

  Fortinbras, hitting a pace that winded Stanley, rounded the corner to the president’s waiting room, with the light of battle in his eye. Stanley not only felt it was his duty to try to avert a scene, he was afraid he might be held responsible for it.

  “Perhaps,” he cried, “Perhaps it you just asked . . . Mr. Fortinbras! Mr. Fortinbras!”

  Mary Sullivan was settling herself at her desk after a thoroughly unsatisfactory luncheon foray to Saks when she heard these trumpetings just as the door to her office was flung open with uncorporate vigor.

  “I want to see Mr. Mason!” Fortinbras told her in stentorian tones.

  “He has a meeting in twenty minutes,” said Mary, startled into a barefaced declaration of the truth.

  “Now listen, Mary,” he said vehemently, “I want to see Mason, and I don’t care if he’s got a meeting now!”

  Mary liked Fortinbras, who usually treated her with an old-fashioned courtesy that she found charming, if out of place, but she recognized trouble when it stood at her desk; dutifully she tried to pour oil on troubled waters.

  “I’ll tell him you called, Mr. Fortinbras,” she said with a pleasant smile and a look of inquiry at the anguished Stanley, who was grimacing wildly over Fortinbras’s shoulder.

  “Get me Mason!” bellowed Fortinbras, abandoning old-fashioned manners for simple directness.

  “Mr. Fortinbras!”

  “Mr. Fortinbras, please . . .”

  “What is all this?” The president, sandwich in hand, was drawn from the sanctuary of his office by the unusual uproar; Chip Mason favored plushy quiet. “Oh, Fortinbras,” he said unenthusiastically as he incautiously advanced toward Mary Sullivan’s desk.

  “Yes, Fortinbras,” the older man said ferociously. Mason’s pink and foolish face goaded him to new heights of fury. “And let me tell you that if you think that you can steal your way out of trouble, you’re mistaken . . .”

  “Steal?” Mason said confusedly. “Steal? What are you talking about? What’s he talking about, Miss Sullivan?”

  Mary saw that her employer’s manner was not calculated to soothe Fortinbras, whatever might be bothering him, and she hastily tried to fling herself into the widening breach.

  “I was just trying to find out,” she said brightly, but Fortinbras waved her to a halt.

  “I’ll tell you what this is all about,” he shouted. “Someone around here is a thief. He’s stolen the records . . .”

  These words penetrated Mason’s formidable defenses. “Oh, look here, Fortinbras,” he said stiffly, “I’m sorry to have to tell you that you’re going just a little too far . . .”

  “Try not to be a bigger fool than God made you,” Fortinbras said nastily. “Somebody has been looting my office—Stanley here can tell you that—and I want to know what you propose to do.”

  “Draper,” Mason grasped the familiar in a sea of confusion. The younger man jumped slightly.

  “S-sir?”

  “Just what is this all about? Have you seen anybody in Mr. Fortinbras office?” He spoke in the kindly avuncular tone appropriate for junior staff.

  “I didn’t see anything,” Stanley said unhappily, with a worried glance at Fortinbras who was rising onto his toes as he prepared for combat. “That is, I was working in my office . . .”

  “There you are,” Mason said turning to Fortinbras with a satisfied smile. “Young Draper here didn’t see anybody—damn it, man, there wasn’t anybody. Everybody was at lunch . . .”

  “Listen to me,” Fortinbras said savagely. “Are you capable of understanding even very simple statements? Somebody has entered my office and removed several important papers. I demand . . .”

  “Now look here, Fortinbras,” said Mason, not without dignity. “You heard Draper. And, I need hardly remind you, we are not thieves at National Calculating . . .”

  “Oh, no?” said Fortinbras unpleasantly. “Do you suppose that those papers disappeared by themselves?”

  “You probably misplaced them,” Mason was stung into retorting unwisely. “You have half the corporate files in there . . .”

  “Misplaced them!” Fortinbras repeated, genuinely shocked by the suggestion. “Are you mad? I don’t misplace papers!” In his rage he gave a curious little hopping motion vaguely suggestive of a native war dance.

  “What is all this?” demanded Harry Blaney, shrugging on his overcoat. He emerged from his office at the end of the hallway and approached the group, eying Fortinbras’s gesticulations with incomprehension. “Having a little excitement here?” he asked with automatic geniality before he got down to his business. “Mary, I’m going to lunch now. Tell Janice that I’ll be back in about an hour and a half . . .”

  “Ah-hah!” Fortinbras said, pointing a finger at him. “There you are. Mr. Blaney!”—and there was some sarcasm in the title—“Mr. Blaney was in the building. And now that I come to think of it, I saw you downstairs, didn’t I, Mr. Blaney?”

  Blaney looked blankly at him. “Went down to see the accountants about some expense account trouble,” he said vaguely. “Ask Janice to get that memorandum done this afternoon, will you, Mary?” Finally he was struck by the quality of the silence that surrounded him. “Say,” he said looked up again, “what is this?”

  “Mr. Fortinbras,” said Mason, choking slightly on the name, “Mr. Fortinbras thinks that someone has stolen papers from his room.”

  “Mr. Fortinbras knows that someone has stolen papers,” Fortinbras corrected him.

  “Oh, sure,” Blaney said, with a knowing look at Mason. “Wel
l, that’s the way things go, Fortinbras.” He glanced at his watch. “Sorry I can’t stay to join the clambake, but I’ve got an important meeting.”

  “Harry!” called Mason, who felt the need for support.

  “Come back here!” Fortinbras cried.

  But Blaney was halfway down the hall. They looked after him with expressions that nearly brought a smile to Mary Sullivan’s face.

  “I can well understand the chaos in your corporate finances and your business outlook,” Fortinbras said in a lowered but still unfriendly voice, “if that is a sample of the best upper-level executive you can get.”

  Mason was inclined to agree, but he was not going to let Fortinbras call the tune. “I see no reason for Mr. Blaney to waste his time,” he retorted icily, “to waste time, I repeat, dealing with these irresponsible and childish accusations . . .”

  “Irresponsible?” squeaked Fortinbras, pounding his fist on Mary’s desk. “Irresponsible? I am going to get to the bottom of this mess—I repeat, mess. And you are not going to stop me. If I have to padlock my office, I will. If you people—you and Blaney—think that you can abscond . . .”

  “Now stop right there,” Mason interrupted, thoughtlessly jamming the sandwich he had been clutching onto a folder on Mary’s desk. “I have tried to be as courteous and helpful as possible in the circumstances, but I am not going to put up with cheap sneers and . . .”

  “Oh, you’re not!”

  “No, I’m not! And if you want to bandy accusations . . .”

  “. . . completely incompetent . . .”

  “. . . crank and troublemaker . . .”

  Battle was now joined, and while Mary and Stanley looked on helplessly, Mason and Fortinbras went at it hammer and tongs “Mr. Mason,” Mary pleaded “Please, Mr. Mason.” But it was to no avail. The accumulated aggravations of the last week had seethed to the surface; both men were beside themselves. “Oh, Mr. Fortinbras,” cried Stanley, ineffectually wringing his hands; he could not delude himself that his part in the fracas was likely to lead to advancement. “Mr. Fortinbras!”