Right on the Money Read online

  “I don’t know. He was still in the bar when I left. Maybe he was meeting someone else.”

  Ignoring this side issue, Bob rolled on. “And he’s got a humdinger about the lab, too. Not enough is coming out to justify what’s going in. I tell you, nothing’s beyond him. Hunnicut wasn’t at our display for ten minutes, and by the end of that time we’re a bunch of morons, Phil Pepitone has got something going on the side, lab developments are being sold on the outside market, and there’s a firebug running loose. I tell you—”

  “You mean all this was going on at our booth?” Frayne cried incredulously. “Where anyone could hear it?”

  “That’s right,” Bob rejoined. “In fact, it was some big shot from ASI who broke it up. For all I know, he got an earful.”

  Territorial considerations had never occurred to Ken as factors likely to heighten this audience’s reaction. But as he saw Conrad Ecker’s neck engulfed by a rising tide of purple, he remembered the pride that everyone at Ecker took in their display, the weeks of work that went into its creation, the crowd of important prospects that it attracted. Cudgeling his brains, Ken could dimly remember several figures in the background as Hunnicut and Laverdiere exchanged salvos. One of them had probably been Sam Bradley. If the others represented major Ecker accounts, there was justification for the muted bellow that caused surrounding heads to swivel.

  “We’ll settle this right now,” Conrad Ecker roared, rolling up his sleeves for combat. “I’m going over there and lay down the law.”

  When Laverdiere moved forward, too, Frayne held out a detaining hand.

  “Not you, Bob,” he urged. “From what you say, we’ve had enough publicity. We don’t want to turn this thing into a donnybrook. I’ll go with Conrad.”

  He ended by casting a plea for support at Ken, who immediately obliged.

  “You know I think he’s right, Bob,” he said. “About having any more fights in public, I mean.”

  “And you can see for yourself that Conrad’s steaming. He’ll settle their hash,” Frayne pointed out. “I just hope he doesn’t overdo. What we need over there is someone who’ll calm things down, not get everybody worked up.”

  But Laverdiere, still seething, was not easy to dissuade. Like many men rarely stirred to belligerence, he persisted in hugging his grievances. So Alan Frayne, obviously champing at the bit, stayed put. In the end, however, it was a lucky reference by Ken as to Conrad’s probable quarry that did the trick.

  “Who the hell cares about Pepitone and Gardner Ives? It’s Hunnicut who has to be settled,” Bob snarled. “Oh, all right, all right. You go, Alan. I’ll stay away.”

  Then, shaking himself free from Frayne’s grasp, he stood there glowering.

  By the time Conrad Ecker, magnificent in his wrath, stormed up to the ASI stalls, the only senior representative present was Gardner Ives. Sam Bradley had already done his work and done it with a skill that Victor Hunnicut might well have emulated.

  Ten minutes earlier Bradley had plucked at Phil Pepitone’s elbow, saying quietly, “We’ve got to talk, Phil.”

  Pepitone had made no rejoinder, simply allowing himself to be drawn aside.

  “You’ve probably heard the talk that’s going around about me,” Bradley began.

  Pepitone nodded, committing himself to absolutely nothing.

  “I thought you probably had, and it’s just as well. It makes the next part easier. Do you know that there’s talk about you, too?”

  This time the half-hooded eyes detached themselves from the water heater on which they were fixed to slide sideways toward Bradley.

  “Yes.”

  The single monosyllable was devoid of inflection.

  Patiently Bradley continued. He had not expected to be welcomed with open arms when he raised this subject.

  “I figured I’d better find out how this all got started.”

  “We’ve both got enemies,” Pepitone said evenly. “We both know who’s out to get us.”

  “Sure we do, Phil. But we’ve had those enemies a long time. And they’ve never been slow to say that we’re doing a bum job. But have you ever before heard anything like this?” Bradley was still not sure how much Phil Pepitone really had heard. Shrewdly, he began with the charges against himself. “When have they ever claimed that I was stealing from ASI, that I was taking R and D’s best work to sell on my own? When have they claimed you were taking payments under the table?”

  The calm with which Pepitone listened told its own story. He was not reacting to something new. Instead he was examining Bradley thoughtfully.

  “Get to the point, Sam,” he suggested.

  Over the years, whenever they had taken each other’s measure, each had recognized a fellow survivor. They had never become friends but their interests did not conflict.

  “You’re not going to believe this, but the troublemaker is Victor Hunnicut, that little punk from purifiers.”

  Pepitone was openly skeptical.

  “An assistant division manager? Are you sure?”

  “I just heard him at work myself. The way I figure it, the twerp wants to pour cold water on the whole Ecker idea. There’s no way it’s going to do him any good. So he got the bright idea of claiming that there’s something fishy going on. By the time he’d run that past the right people, some of our friends were only too happy to take the bit in their teeth.”

  Sam Bradley had no difficulty interpreting the expressions that chased across Pepitone’s face. A major recalculation was in process. If each of the two men had been under separate siege, an alliance was out of the question. In their world, you did not clutch a man going down for the third time. But an attack by a conniving assistant manager was an entirely different matter. There was no danger of adding to one’s enemies or upsetting the balance between factions. With the two of them acting in concert, the outcome was foreordained.

  “My God, it’s just possible, it could be the way you say. For Chrissake, I let him muscle his way up to Bridgeport,” Pepitone muttered.

  As Pepitone became convinced, Bradley could afford to relax.

  “Kind of like taking a shotgun to a mosquito in the living room, isn’t it?” he asked lightly. “And blowing out all the windows in the process.”

  If he saw the incongruous results of Victor Hunnicut’s efforts, Phil Pepitone fastened on the element of presumption.

  “That little slimeball. He’s got some nerve, when he wasn’t even aiming at us.”

  “How could he? He doesn’t know anything about us.”

  “There isn’t anything to know,” Pepitone said emphatically.

  “Of course not.”

  Their eyes met briefly in perfect communication.

  “I’ll have his hide for this,” Pepitone promised.

  Bradley’s sober tone gave no hint to his satisfaction. “Well, don’t be surprised if he plays dumb. I just heard Wiley Quinn explain little Victor’s tactics. He doesn’t say anything outright. He just says things like: ‘Isn’t it surprising that Phil turned down all the better prospects in favor of Ecker? Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?’ He had the gall to tell Quinn he never went beyond the truth.”

  This had been a deliberate gamble and it paid off.

  “He won’t try that with me, he won’t get the chance.”

  Pepitone’s chunky figure and incipient embonpoint normally suggested the middle-aged flab of the desk-bound executive. But now, without changing dimensions, that entire body had tightened into a menacing hulk.

  “Well, you can’t tackle him now,” said Bradley, his height allowing him to glance over intervening heads toward the purifier stall. “He’s not at his station.”

  “Then I’ll track him down,” said Pepitone, preparing to leave. “As far as I’m concerned, Javits has just become a boxing ring. Hunnicut can run, but he can’t hide.”

  Arriving late, Alan Frayne missed the brisk one-two punch with which Conrad Ecker had scored a victory.

  “I quite agree with you, Conrad,” Ga
rdner Ives was saying. “It should certainly not have happened.”

  He sounded as if he had been saying it for some time.

  “And either you control your people, or you keep them away from mine,” Ecker sailed on, unappeased.

  “Of course, and I’ll send Hunnicut over to apologize as soon as he turns up.”

  Conrad Ecker instinctively recognized a good curtain line.

  “See that you do!” he barked, turning on his heel to march off into the crowd.

  Alan Frayne took a deep breath. From his point of View, the situation was unsatisfactory. Establishing dominance was all very well and good, but had Conrad addressed any of the real problems? Was Hunnicut going to play a substantial role in Bridgeport if the merger became a fait accompli? Was he speaking for a significant party at ASI? What future was planned for Ecker’s current management? Bob Laverdiere would certainly demand an answer to every one of these questions.

  “You’ll have to excuse Conrad for being so brusque, but you have to understand the provocation,” he began, hitting a nice balance between conciliation and justification. “I’m sure he’ll regret speaking with so much heat once he’s had time to cool off.”

  “Naturally he was angry. Hunnicut had no right to upset your people.”

  “I wasn’t there, but he certainly got Bob Laverdiere going.”

  Ives wagged his head regretfully. “I noticed that Hunnicut and Mrs. Laverdiere didn’t seem to hit it off when she came to Princeton.”

  If that was all that Ives had noticed, someone would have to straighten him out.

  “Conrad doesn’t blow up like this because of a simple personality conflict. Hunnicut put the fat in the fire with what he was saying—”

  “And where he said it,” Ives added grimly. “It’s outrageous that he should go over to your place and create a scene.”

  Now it was Alan Frayne’s turn to be surprised at the insistence on territorial violation. But Ives was speaking as a fellow sufferer. ASI was also proud of its first-time-ever display, and Conrad Ecker’s fury had been voiced without regard to bystanders.

  “It’s a shame we had this incident,” Frayne said before they could again be sidetracked. “But all you have to do is explain things to Conrad. He’ll always listen to reason when he’s himself.”

  “The first thing he’ll listen to is an apology. Hunnicut will get down on his knees if that’s what it takes.”

  Once more Frayne tried to take them beyond gestures and on to substance. “That’s fine, and Conrad will appreciate it. Then, perhaps, we could—”

  But even though Alan’s voice was decently lowered, Ives was still sensitive to the possibility of an audience. Casting an agonized glance around the ASI area, he spied a means of escape.

  “Ha! There’s Hunnicut back in his booth. I’ll read him the riot act right now.”

  He bustled off with the air of a man about to resolve all difficulties, leaving Alan Frayne plunged in thought. It could scarcely be an accident that Ives had avoided answering a single one of Bob Laverdiere’s questions.

  Ken Nicolls had already given the trade show more time than it deserved and, in the process, considerably delayed his lunch hour. Encountering a colleague from the Chase in the same plight, he welcomed the suggestion of departure.

  “I just have one thing to tidy up and it won’t take a minute,” he said as he spotted Conrad Ecker leaving a refreshment stand.

  Ken knew that John Thatcher would wish to hear the result of the Ecker-Ives confrontation.

  “Oh, it went all right,” Conrad said moodily. “Ives is making that kid apologize.”

  Now that the heat of battle was over, Ecker seemed to have lost interest.

  “And you’ll be going on with the talks?”

  Ecker shrugged. “Why not?”

  That was all Ken needed. Happy at his release, he joined his friend.

  “Not that way,” said Ken’s companion, redirecting their path to turn a corner. “One of our clients let me park my car with his trucks, so we take the freight elevator.”

  He then wiled away their passage by describing that client’s latest breakthrough. It was a cooking top presenting an unbroken surface with the surrounding counter space.

  By now Ken was openly hostile to space-age technology in the home. Punching the button, he said, “It sounds like a rotten idea to me. How do you know where to put a pot?”

  The elevator doors opened and the question was never answered. There, exposed to full view, was a human body, its knees drawn up and its arms flung wide.

  Stunned, they stood motionless as a woman passing behind them began to scream . . . and scream . . . and scream. With her eldritch screeches ringing in his ears, Ken dazedly realized that it was Victor Hunnicut lying in that pool of blood, his features distorted and his eyes sightless.

  And, as a final macabre note, protruding from his chest was a common kitchen skewer.

  Chapter 12

  QUALIFIED OPINIONS

  For Ken Nicolls, the nightmare was just beginning. The security guards acted with speed and discretion. Within moments the hysterical woman was swept off to the first aid station. The immediate area was closed to traffic and rumors of an accident were circulating.

  “You two will have to wait for the cops,” a guard said, hustling Ken and his companion into a small office. “It may take a while. They’ll want to identify the body first.”

  Still stupid with shock, Ken replied like an automaton. “His name was Victor Hunnicut.”

  The older guard paused at the door. “You knew him?”

  Ken hastily rejected the suggestion of intimacy. “I met him once before today. On business.”

  “Then they really will want to talk to you.”

  Under other circumstances this conclusion might have seemed ominous. Now, however, Ken was engulfed by one overwhelming desire. He wanted to eradicate forever the image of what he had seen behind those elevator doors.

  But as the minutes accumulated first into a half hour and then into an hour, different preoccupations emerged. Huddled wretchedly over a cooling cup of coffee and exchanging aimless remarks with his friend from the Chase, Ken began to examine his professional plight. Someone was going to have to tell the police about those top-secret merger talks, about the quarrel at the Ecker booth and, worst of all, about Bob Laverdiere brandishing that skewer with its ridiculous mushroom. But the longer the detectives spent on the floor, the more likely they were to discover these facts from other sources. With luck Ken Nicolls would not be the one who had to rat on a longtime Sloan client.

  Luck had very little to do with it. Detective Inspector Leonard Giorni was skilled at isolating essentials. He inspected the gory scene inside the elevator, listened to the bare recital of a subordinate, and fastened on one feature.

  “You say his wallet and watch weren’t touched?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then I’ll start with the head honcho at ASI.”

  The head honcho, also known as Gardner Ives, reflexively produced organ notes when informed of Victor Hunnicut’s demise. It was a tragedy, he declaimed, such a promising young man cut down in his prime. When Giorni asked about the last encounter with the victim, Ives mistakenly continued in the same vein.

  “It must have been about an hour ago. I regret to say it was necessary to reprimand him for his conduct. Now I wish it had been otherwise, but that’s so often the case after a death, isn’t it?”

  “Reprimand him about what?”

  His eyebrows raised in astonishment, Ives became evasive, but he was no match for the detective. Within short order Giorni was master of the basic situation.

  “But I must impress on you, Inspector, that our preliminary talks were confidential. If any word of this leaks out, I’ll hold you directly responsible.”

  Giorni looked at him pityingly. Didn’t this pompous fool realize that a murder inside Javits was going to raise merry hell? The Mayor’s office was already in convulsions. The Convention B
ureau was demanding that the culprit be drawn and quartered. It was only a matter of time before the press appeared, ready for a carnival.

  “Anybody else from your outfit hear this quarrel over at Ecker?” he demanded.

  By now Gardner Ives was only too happy to direct the inspector to Wiley Quinn and Sam Bradley.

  The stories they told were almost identical. Victor Hunnicut had regarded the proposed acquisition as a disaster. Unaware that he could be overheard by Bob Laverdiere, he had freely accused Ecker personnel of everything from rank incompetence to felonious conduct. He had been particularly nasty about Laverdiere’s wife because a recent fire had destroyed her financial records.

  Sam Bradley, however, added one further observation as he concluded his narrative.

  “You could tell that Laverdiere was damn near out of his mind. Otherwise he never would have stamped across the hall looking that way.”

  “Looking how?”

  “Oh, he’d been giving a demo of their rotisserie. He was wearing one of those silly barbecue aprons and waving a skewer with a mushroom on it.” Catching sight of the inspector’s face, Bradley hesitated. “I guess you had to be there to see how comic it was.”

  “I guess so,” Giorni agreed.

  * * *

  Conrad Ecker did not look like a promising candidate for the role of murderer. Giorni found him sitting in a folding chair, his face lined with the strain of what was turning into a very demanding day. His management was ranged behind him in a protective semicircle, but he took charge immediately.

  “I just found out the stretcher case was Hunnicut from ASI. What happened?”

  “He was stabbed to death,” Giorni said baldly.

  “Christ!”

  Ecker seemed to feel that this stark comment was sufficient. When Giorni asked him to confirm Ives’s account of their exchange, he nodded.

  “That’s right. The kid was supposed to apologize.”

  “Weren’t you surprised when he didn’t show?”

  “Not particularly. Ives was going to send him over when he turned up. Nobody seemed to know when that would be.”

  Giorni transferred his gaze to Alan Frayne. “That how you remember it?”