The Longer the Thread Read online

  “What was so special about today?” Vallejo asked.

  Benito himself had made it special, they replied. He had started the morning with the boast that the front office was on its knees. He was being invited to a special conference. The bosses, terrified by the damage they were sustaining, were about to plead with Domínguez, bargain with him, recognize him as the people’s tribune.

  Captain Vallejo pounced. “What do you mean by ‘the bosses’? Which man was Domínguez going to meet?”

  But the answer was a series of regretful shrugs.

  Benito Domínguez had been more interested in striking heroic poses than in revealing information, another foreman said acidly.

  “We were used to him,” he went on. “Benito was strutting around like a gamecock, talking about the conditions he would impose. Naturally I, a man of sense, did not take this seriously. If he had, in truth, been summoned, it was because they were going to throw him out! So we were all waiting with some eagerness. To see Benito deflated once and for all was worth a little wait. You understand, it did not occur to me at the time that instead of throwing him out they would murder him.”

  Captain Vallejo understood the human desire to saddle someone else with the crime. “It did not occur to you this morning, but now it seems reasonable to you?” he asked severely.

  “Since this morning,” the foreman said, “things have changed.”

  “You think Domínguez was killed because he was responsible for the industrial sabotage here. Then you yourself have no doubts that he was behind it?”

  “Not now. Before, I did. It would have been like him to seize on the event, to produce mysterious half-smiles, to drop hints. Just to seem like a bigger man than he was.” The foreman shrugged fatalistically. “Benito, you understand, was the kind of man who needs an audience. He did not brag, so I assumed he did not do it. But the Radical Independent card changes all that.”

  “You mean he must have been a different kind of man than you thought?”

  The foreman made an impolite noise. “What kind of man chooses to associate with adolescents? No! I mean that he was doing his boasting elsewhere. Also, Benito was only taking orders. He was merely a tool. It is not surprising. That was the kind of man he was.”

  Captain Vallejo wanted character assessments of the suspects as well as the victim. But they were harder to come by. The foreman, when asked, appealed to others.

  “Señor Marten laid hands on Benito,” said an elderly cutter disapprovingly. “He forced him out of the office. We could see it all from the floor.”

  A younger man disagreed. “That was because Señor Lippert was about to attack Benito. I was watching closely. Señor Marten intervened to prevent violence.”

  “It is possible. I can believe that you were watching closely.” The voice was sarcastic. “It is rare indeed that you are watching your work.”

  A woman was impatient with these fine distinctions. “Señor Lippert and Señor Marten are always losing their tempers. They have not been well educated. It is only Señor Romero who is always polite.”

  “Ah!” breathed someone softly. “It is the quiet ones who are dangerous.”

  The foreman favored them all with a malevolent glance. “It is also well known that where you have women, there you have trouble.”

  Captain Vallejo was not certain whether this contribution was a broadside at women workers or a reminder that Norma Lippert was, at least theoretically, as suspect as her husband. He was not given the opportunity to probe further. His next question was interrupted by cries of alarm and sounds of tumult from the cutting room. It was here that the few superior male workers carried out their demanding craft.

  “Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!” someone was shouting with monotonous blasphemy.

  “Get to the emergency switch!” someone else was yelling.

  “Get the police!”

  “Get Señor Romero!”

  Vallejo shouldered his way through the rapidly growing mob to the scene of the disturbance. He was not much wiser once he got there. At the very core of the confusion several men were standing motionless, staring at a machine that was now lazily spinning to a halt. Several bolts of chewed-up fabric dragged lifelessly down to the floor. But a spectacle that merely bewildered Captain Vallejo was charged with sufficient drama to draw a bloodcurdling screech from the foreman, who had followed him.

  “How did this happen?” he finally stuttered, shaking the fabric under the noses of the cutters.

  This produced a group wail. “We don’t know! It just started to go crazy!”

  The foreman’s voice deepened to a threatening hiss. “Fools! Blockheads! This means the bearings have gone. They must have been going for days. Don’t you even look at your own work?”

  Several backs stiffened alarmingly. The senior cutter fought back. “Our work is inspected. Every day, every hour. There was nothing wrong.”

  “How can you say there’s nothing wrong?” Faced with the unexplainable, the foreman was near apoplexy. “Do you call this nothing wrong?” More shaking of fabric.

  The charges and countercharges might have continued apace for some time, but a calm voice sounded from behind Vallejo.

  “What is the meaning of this, please?”

  As if by magic, the scene dissolved. Workers who did not belong in the cutting room vanished. Junior cutters retired to the rear. Cesar Romero was left confronting Captain Vallejo.

  “There is something wrong, Captain?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Vallejo barked, conscious of his ignorance. “Everyone has gone insane simply because one of your machines isn’t working properly.”

  “Simply!” raged the foreman. “Señor Romero, look!”

  With a gesture worthy of the stage, he stepped aside and revealed the machine. When the full enormity of the circumstances had been given time to penetrate, he went on bitterly. “And these so-called cutters noticed nothing. Everything, they say, was all right until now. Do bearings magically melt, then?”

  But he had not held his listener. Impatiently Romero waved him into silence, then stood frowning massively.

  Despite himself, Vallejo was caught by the tension. Like everyone else, he waited silently.

  Finally Romero looked up.

  “I know you must be impatient, Captain, but if you will give me a moment, I think I may be able to explain something that has been puzzling you.”

  Brusquely Vallejo nodded.

  Romero advanced and scrutinized the cloth carefully. He asked a few simple questions about the inspections. Then suddenly he seemed to make up his mind.

  “The lubricating oil, where is it?” he demanded.

  A large nozzled can was produced.

  Deliberately Romero squirted several gouts of the black viscous mess onto his palm. Then he rubbed his fingers together and nodded, as if his deepest fears had been confirmed.

  “That’s it, Captain,” he said sharply. “That’s what Domínguez wanted the sand for. He doctored the lubricating oil with it. Do you realize what this means? Already the bearings on one machine are ruined. But it’s far, far worse than that. We will have to stop production completely and examine every machine on the premises. God knows how much damage he managed to do.”

  Now that he again knew where he stood, Vallejo was in full control. “Compose yourself, señor,” he advised. “You seem to forget that somebody has already done substantial damage to Domínguez himself.”

  When he wrote his interim report that evening, Captain Vallejo contented himself with telling his superiors that there were four suspects, with no evidence favoring one more than another. He added that, in the interests of civic peace, he had made no reference to the Radical Independent connection in his remarks to the press.

  The last sentence of Captain Vallejo’s report was self-serving. He knew perfectly well that someone at Slax, probably before his own departure, would have called the newspapers. Two days later this suspicion was confirmed in banner headlines.
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br />   “INDEPENDENCE WORKER SLAIN AT AMERICAN FACTORY,” proclaimed the pro-independence weekly.

  “INDUSTRIAL SABOTAGE TIED TO RADICAL INDEPENDENTS,” charged the pro-commonwealth daily.

  Both papers were lying on David Lippert’s desk.

  “I don’t see why you think it’s so important, Cesar,” he was saying impatiently. “We knew all about it before the papers printed this story. After all, the police showed us Domínguez’ membership card.”

  Romero sounded discouraged. “It was of no consequence if we knew about it, so long as it wasn’t made public. But now it will be a windfall for the Radical Independents. They will use it for propaganda.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting the other side of the coin?” Lippert was growing angry.

  “It doesn’t make any difference what commonwealth supporters say,” Romero continued doggedly. “They’re in favor of American industry on the island no matter what happens.”

  David Lippert’s voice rose with exasperation. “For Christ’s sake! The Radical Independents are against American industry no matter what happens. I don’t see where the big advantage in propaganda value is.”

  Romero’s silence convinced Lippert he had scored a point. He turned to Eric Marten. “Do you go along with Cesar on this, Eric?” he demanded.

  The Scandinavian spread his hands in a huge pantomime of helplessness before replying. “You’re damned right I do! Look, Dave, I’ll put it into words if Cesar won’t. The only charge against the Radical Independents is that one of their people was responsible for some sabotage. They don’t mind that. Hell, they’re probably proud of it! But the propaganda against us is going to be dynamite. They’re going to accuse us—I mean somebody in this room—of murdering Domínguez!”

  “You really mean that they’re going to accuse me, don’t you? I’m the general manager of Slax, I’m the one they’ll go for.”

  “It does not really matter which one of us they single out.” There was a hint of reproof in Cesar Romero’s voice. “They’ll do an enormous amount of damage.”

  David Lippert pushed aside the papers savagely. “We’ve got more important things to worry about. The police are working on the theory that we were the only ones in the front office with Domínguez. Vallejo is the one we should be worrying about!”

  The hush that followed these words was broken by Norma Lippert. She was curled up in a corner of the small sofa against the wall, slightly removed from the three men.

  “I think you’re all getting much too excited,” she offered now. “We should be looking on the bright side.”

  A harsh crack of laughter broke from Marten. “Which bright side, Norma? Point it out to us and we’ll look at it.”

  “All three of you are being distracted by side issues.” She put down her coffee cup with gentle finality. “Have you noticed that production is up again?”

  Romero was taken aback. It was a moment before he replied. “Yes, of course we know that, Norma. But is that so important right now?”

  “Harry thinks it is.”

  “Harry is safe in New York,” David Lippert commented bitterly.

  “There isn’t anything for him to do here. We don’t have a real problem,” Norma continued serenely. “It was only a week ago that we were all desperate because of what was going on here at Slax. We’d lost thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise, and our good will was going down the drain. We didn’t know what would happen next. Now that’s all over. Harry’s taking care of things in New York, production is running smoothly and, thank God, no real damage was done to the machines. And what you all seem to forget, we don’t have to worry about where the next thunderbolt will hit.”

  “So everything’s roses,” Eric Marten growled derisively. “We shouldn’t bother about little things like a murder investigation or a political mess.”

  “What does it all amount to? So Captain Vallejo doesn’t think an outsider came into the executive suite the morning of the murder. That doesn’t help him much,” Norma pointed out. “He can’t prove that no one else was here. And he certainly can’t narrow down to a single suspect. Of course it’s unpleasant. But it will blow over. You’ll see.”

  “I don’t think it will,” her husband grated. “Domínguez made a lot of trouble for us when he was alive. He’s going to make a lot more, dead.”

  Cesar Romero was looking curiously at Norma Lippert. “And even if he doesn’t, it still means we have a murderer at large. Doesn’t that worry you at all, Norma?”

  “Not much.” She remained unruffled. “It worries me a lot less than what was going on before.”

  Chapter 7.

  An Elastic Band

  If Cesar Romero and David Lippert really wanted to keep abreast of Puerto Rican flashpoints, they were reading the wrong newspapers. John Putnam Thatcher, settling down for a nightcap and an hour’s desultory reading in his hotel room, could have told them as much. By some evil mischance, every section of the Sunday edition of the New York Times was a variation on the same theme.

  The letters column of the travel section throbbed with anguished complaints about the low-fare night flights between San Juan and New York. “These cattle cars, unfit for human habitation,” shrilled one correspondent, “are a brazen exploitation of new arrivals even before they set foot in New York.” The magazine section had let itself go with an article of monstrous length and microscopic content about the Young Lords in Spanish Harlem and their painful search for Hispanic identity in the midst of an urban ghetto. The education column in the Review of the Week was less fiery in an analysis of demands by several community school boards for Spanish-speaking teachers. Even the television page, normally guaranteed to miss any sociological problem, had taken another look at the fare provided by commercial networks, dismissed it contemptuously, and turned to a discussion of the sunrise program providing instruction in the English language for Spanish speakers.

  If all this was going on back in New York, thought Thatcher as he dumped the mountainous pile on the floor, almost anything could be brewing here in San Juan. His last thought, as he switched off the light, was for those bewildered children roused at dawn to watch television, then dispatched to classrooms from which English had been effectively banned.

  The next morning, brilliantly sunlit with a balmy breeze, encouraged a more optimistic outlook. Disembarking from his taxi and entering the Sloan building, Thatcher decided that the only person in the world likely to see a connection between yesterday’s issue of the Times and the problems currently bedeviling Slax was the Sloan’s chief of research. Walter Bowman no doubt was already busy photostating and circulating. But once the elevator had wafted Thatcher upstairs to the office and secretary that were now second home, he discovered that the far-flung Sloan family harbored yet another assiduous clipper. Every single article he had read the night before was waiting for him on his desk, in a neat file folder.

  “I thought you might want to look at these Puerto Rican items, Mr. Thatcher,” Mrs. Schroeder said briskly.

  Each day he learned more about Mrs. Schroeder. For instance, he now knew she was originally from Indiana. After eight years in San Juan, she spoke Spanish with complete fluency and an unyielding Hoosier accent. Indeed, several times when she had been speaking to someone else in his presence Thatcher had caught himself straining to understand her, unwilling to believe that those familiar Midwestern intonations could actually be forming foreign sentences. In spirit, he had already decided, she resembled Miss Corsa. In form, however, she was her own woman.

  “Call me Patsy,” she had trumpeted cheerfully only yesterday.

  But just as there was something familiar in her Spanish, so was there something all too familiar in her attitude toward her temporary superior. She was trying to organize him, trying to make decisions for him, trying to make him feel guilty about her wretched clippings.

  “I have already given the Times a very thorough reading, Mrs. Schroeder,” he said austerely. “And I believe I have an appointment w
ith Mr. Humble.”

  “In fifteen minutes.” She was wounded. “Can I get you anything in the meantime, Mr. Thatcher?”

  “Yes, please. I’d like a cup of coffee, if you please—Patsy,” he capitulated.

  Oh, well, he thought philosophically. He knew by now that what a secretary wanted to be called reflected how she thought of herself. Miss Corsa was very definitely Miss Corsa during office hours, whatever she might be otherwise. Mrs. Schroeder at all times and under all circumstances thought of herself as Patsy. It was a different view of self that in no way precluded an identical view of function.

  Fortified by his coffee and his insight into Mrs. Schroeder, Thatcher greeted Pete Olmsted and Humble a quarter of an hour later. He knew the session was not going to be easy, but he intended to bend it to his will.

  “Now, Dudley,” he began before the other two were fairly seated, “I came down here to settle our chain of command on Puerto Rican financing in general. I assure you, that question will be settled. But this murder at the Slax plant is going to force us to concentrate on Zimmerman’s operation first.”

  Dudley Humble was too shrewd not to capitalize on this. “Yes indeed,” he agreed readily. “Murder is something new as a client difficulty here. I can see how it changes the order of priorities.”

  Score one for Dudley, thought Thatcher. He had neatly conveyed the idea that Commercial Credit was responsible for insinuating this innovation into the Sloan’s procedures.

  “Just so,” Thatcher went on. “Perhaps we’d better start by asking Pete how this murder has affected things out at Slax.”

  “All their lines are in full production,” Olmsted announced defensively. Honesty then compelled him to add, “That is, they have been since they got this sand problem licked. You heard about that?”

  Registering two blank looks, Olmsted explained about the sanded lubricating oil and the need for a new cutting machine. “But they got one air-freighted from Georgia. So that’s fixed up now.”