John D MacDonald Read online

  He turned to look up at me over her shoulder. "Very touching," she said, but her eyes were still shiny with tears.

  "I don’t think you ought to go."

  "It’s all arranged."

  I could see all of our planning shot to hell. I could see Al Dolson throwing in the sponge. When Thomas McGann died, Al had been vice-president, and I had been his assistant. He was a mild man in his late fifties. Maybe once upon a time he had some push; but too many years of McGann had driven him back into a polite shell. When the Board, with Walt Burgeson as chairman, had made Al Dolson president, they had made me vice-president. Some of the other men felt that I had been jumped over their heads, that I was too young, and my ideas were too wild; but I had been able to kill off the resentment and get them all pulling together.

  I felt as if I were propping Al Dolson up. He was too hesitant about using the authority he held. When we, first learned that Mike Dean was snapping at our heels, Al was all set to give up. But I had managed to get him back on the rails. Right after McGann had died we had been in a tunnel where we couldn’t see light ahead. But in the last year we had rounded a bend and you could begin to see a far-off glimmer. There was a new bounce and confidence to management. I managed to get Al feeling as I did: that even if Dean did place some people on the Board of Directors, we’d still have enough backing to go ahead in our own way.

  But if he felt that the McGann kids were going to sell us out to Dean, thus giving him control of close to seventy per cent of the voting shares, Dolson would fold in on himself like a tissue paper tent. I felt that in a few years he would be all right. He’s bright enough, and he’s gaining confidence. But this was happening too soon.

  I knew that Louise had enough of the McGann stubbornness in her so that I couldn’t get her to change her mink. And perhaps she felt it would help her marriage to get away for a while with her husband. I had heard that Warren Dodge did more than his share of tomcatting since they’d moved back to Portston. It’s too small a city for much of that.

  I could think of only one answer. I checked over what I had lined up to do in the next week. By working like hell the rest of today and all of tomorrow I could get it fairly well cleaned up.

  "Okay, so you’re going, Louise. But let’s say you ought to have somebody around in case you have to ask some questions. Would you object if I went along, too?"

  She stood up and she looked agitated. "No, but . . . but you’re not invited."

  "You could fix that with a phone call, I think. Call the man. Bowden?"

  "Bowman. Fletcher Bowman. I have his New York number, yes. But . . ."

  "Louise, this is not a social occasion. I am not crashing a party. If you suggest I come along they’re going to have to say yes, because they can’t afford the impression they’d make by saying no."

  Though I wanted to ask to listen on an extension, I waited in the garden. I picked up the book she had been reading and glanced at some of the pages in the middle. A Faulkner novel covering the further adventures of the Snopes family. I wished for more time to read, more time to be by myself, The last two and a half years had been full of furious activity that, at times, had seemed meaningless. The past week I had spent two days out on the coast with Gene Budler--our sales manager--and Cary Murchison of engineering. Gene and I had to explain the new distribution setup to the western wholesalers. We planned to use it as a test area. They were enthusiastic about it. And then Cary Murchison and I spent the rest of the time poking around in some warehouses full of machine tools recently declared surplus by Army Ordnance. We found a lot of stuff we could use, had public stenographer type our bids and left them with the military along with a certified check for two hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars.

  Every week had been patch and pray, trying to remedy the neglect of two decades and at the same time build soundly for the future. The two most pressing problems coming up were to’ get some aggressive styling for the new lines, and do battle with the union about work standards.

  Louise came back out into the garden. "He acted as if he didn’t quite know how to take it at first, and then he got very jolly and said, ‘Of course, of course. Do bring Mr. Glidden along.’"

  "Those boys don’t move until they’ve checked every angle. They’ll have a complete file on me. Now they’ll be planning how to handle me."

  "You make them sound so conspiratorial, Sam."

  "That’s what they are. I’ve got a lot to do before Wednesday morning. What time?"

  "Be at the airport at nine-thirty. Mr. Bowman said it will be hot in the Bahamas, and to bring swim clothes and sun clothes. Nothing very formal."

  We went through the gate in the garden wall and around to my car in the driveway. "Are you sorry I invited myself aboard?" I asked her.

  She looked up, at me gravely. She shook her head. "No, Sam. I’m not sorry. I think I feel a little better about everything. I think I snapped at you because I was feeling a little bit guilty. I don’t know . . . just what I want to do." She smiled in an apologetic way. "I guess I must be a little mixed up these days."

  I swung the car around in front of the garages and headed back down the drive to Walnut Street. I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw her standing in the morning sun in the middle of the wide graveled place, looking small and alone, but standing very straight in her little white shorts and her little red halter, standing with a kind of indelible pride.

  As I drove away I felt a bit hot-faced about trying to load her up with the corn-fed speech about the Gurrreat American Way. But, hell, I meant more than half of it. And I had thought there might be a chance she had inherited just a little of her old man’s feeling of responsibility not only to the company but to all of Portston.

  I had planned to go back to the plant, but decided it could do no harm to advise Tommy McGann of my self-invitation to join the party. That would give me a chance to sound him out about his reaction to Mike Dean. I phoned from a drugstore and their house man said that Mr. and Mrs. McGann were home and when he came back on the phone he told me to come right out.

  Their rangy fieldstone house was in the hills west of town, the only private home in the area with a private airstrip. It was the result of the Texas approach of Tommy’s wife, Puss, and at present it accommodated their latest, a sleek and nimble Piper Apache with twin Continentals, retractable tricycle

  gear. Their house man told me they were out in back.

  I walked around the house. Tommy was in torn and faded khaki shorts and Puss was in a green swim suit and they were playing some kind of a game with great energy. There was a tall pole set in the lawn with a ball fastened to a long cord tethered to the top of it. They were armed with wooden paddles and the object seemed to be to whale the ball past your opponent so that the cord wound itself around the pole.

  Tommy noticed me first and yelled, "Grab a chair Sam. Be with you in a couple of minutes, soon as I whup this creature."

  I swung one of the chairs by the pool around so that I could watch them. Tommy is thirty-five, eight years older than Louise. They are the same physical type, dark, fine-boned, almost delicate looking. Tommy has Louise’s long heavy black lashes, the fine lean hands. But there is nothing at all effeminate about

  When he was seventeen in 1939, he ran away to Canada and lied his way into the RCAF. He flew an incredible number of missions with the RCAF and the RAF. He bailed out twice, once with burns that kept him three months in the hospital. He transferred over to the American Air Corps in forty-three and flew fifty missions of fighter cover with the Eighth Air Force. Then, over his protests, he was sent back to the states as an instructor. At Randolph Field in Texas, during gunnery practice, a student shot him out of the air. One slug tore away half his jaw. The chute popped open so low that Tommy landed with an impact that gave him, by count, twenty-one fractures when he hit the baked hide of Texas.

  Two years later when he hobbled out of the hospital, he was a twenty-four-year-old retired Lieutenant Colonel with an eighty per cent dis
ability pension, with extensive and not entirely successful cosmetic surgery, and with an eighteen-year-old Texas bride called Puss, youngest daughter of an oil and cattle family which gave them, as a wedding present, a few little ole producing wells. He had met her when she had come to the hospital to cheer up the injured.

  Tommy refused to spend the rest of his life hobbling about as predicted. Three years later he told the V.A. to cancel the pension. Thomas McGann had tried to get his only son to come into the firm, but Tommy amiably and firmly stated that he had no intention of doing anything constructive. He kept himself busy with his golf, his skin diving, his airplanes and his sports car racing. His only concession to his father was to make Portston his home.

  It was very difficult to dislike Tommy and Puss. Their goal seemed to be to be amused, and amusing. At twenty-nine Puss had a sleek and lovely greyhound figure. She had gingery red hair, a cute-ugly face, a nose that was always peeling or ready to peel, a freckled body, a vast capacity for brandy on the rocks, and an attention span as long as a six-year-old’s. She had that miraculous physical co-ordination that enabled her to swim, ride, dive, ski, play tennis, golf, badminton, and table tennis with the experts. She had a sprawling, lounging, boyish lack of body consciousness, and no sense of style. Her lipstick and clothes were always the wrong shade. She moved in a welter of broken straps, scuffed shoes, missing buttons, jammed zippers and smudges. She was everyman’s tomboy sister--and no woman resented her. You could sense the closeness between Tommy and Puss. It seemed a shame they had no children. They wanted them and would have been good with them.

  I sat by the pool and watched them on the green lawn, yelping and panting and beating the bejaysus out of that silly tethered ball. Children at play, lithe and graceful and unselfconscious. In spite of Tommy’s frantic lunges, she belted the ball by him and it wound around the post.

  He threw the paddle into the air, rumpled her red hair, and they walked toward me, hand in hand, breathing heavily. "Hi, Sam," she said, and went with three running steps toward the pool and in with the oiled perfection of a leaping porpoise.

  Tommy dropped into the chair beside mine and shook his head and said, "One day, dammit, I’ll find a game I can beat her at. What’s on your mind, Sam?"

  "I’m going along on the little excursion to the Bahamas."

  "Hey, that’s wonderful. We’ll have a ball. Come on, I want to show you something." I followed him to the garage and up the stairs. With tender loving care he opened a long box, took out a gleaming gizmo, handed it to me and said proudly, "How do you like that?"

  I held it and looked at it and said, "I like it fine, but what is it?"

  "New spear gun. Just came yesterday. And the Bahamas is one of the world’s best places for skin diving. How’s that for timing?"

  "That’s just fine, too. Tommy, I just came from Louise’s house. We had a talk about this Mike Dean and what this might mean to the company."

  He took the spear gun from me. "This thing is really built. It’s a pilot model, made in West Germany.*

  "Mike Dean will try to swing you and Louise around to his way of thinking, and everything we’ve been working for will go to hell."

  "There isn’t anything on it to corrode. And the balance is perfect. Works on compressed air."

  "I’m going along to make sure Mike Dean’s team doesn’t do a complete snow job on you and Louise."

  "Look at the way they’ve designed this reel attachment, Sam."

  "Tommy! Damn it!"

  He gave me a quizzical look. "What’s the trouble?"

  "I think it’s a mistake for you and Louise to accept his invitation."

  Something seemed to move behind his eyes, something that, for a moment, belied the usual impression of general uselessness. "What’s the harm in it, Sam? I don’t know why Louise is going. I don’t know why you’re going. But I’m going for the skin diving. Okay?"

  And I couldn’t get one inch farther. Back by the pool I refused the offer of a drink and the offer of a swim. I looked back as I left They were swimming the length of the pool, side by side, in perfect rhythm, and the two fat boxer pups, named Meanie and Moe, were on the pool apron barking their fool heads off.

  TWO

  WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE PLANT I went directly to Al Dolson’s office. Molly, his secretary, said he had gone over to C Building so I asked her to let me know when he got back.

  My secretary for the past three years has been Alice Rice, a six-foot, gaunted redhead of forty something years, loyal, efficient, outspoken and pessimistic. I motioned to her as I went through the outer office and she followed me in, book in hand. She sat at the comer of my desk and told me who had called and when and why and jotted down the order in which I wanted her to get them back on the line for me.

  "Ready for some overtime, Alice?"

  "Oh, Gawd, what now? Just so long as it isn’t one of those evening conferences. I despise them."

  "By tomorrow night I’ve got to clean off the whole slate. It shouldn’t be too bad. I can dump a lot of stuff on Harry and Andy but I’ll have to leave them some poop on progress up to now."

  "Even the union thing?"

  "That’s the only thing we’ll shelve until I get back."

  "You were going to stay put this week. You had to stay put this week. You said so."

  "I know. But I’m going to the Bahamas." She goggled at me. I couldn’t resist saying in a whisper, "As a guest of Mike Dean."

  It was interesting to watch her changes of expression. Doubt, alarm, suspicion that she was being kidded, and then resignation.

  "Don’t take it so hard, Alice."

  "If I thought you’d sell horses in midstream, Sam Glidden . . ."

  I repented and told her why I felt it would be smart to go.

  She caught on immediately, and said, "Don’t expect to outsmart anybody down there. In that league you’re a country boy, too."

  "I should take you along."

  She ignored that. "How is the prez taking this?" she asked.

  "He doesn’t know yet. I’ll get a call as soon as he gets back to his office. Let’s see how many of those phone calls we can get out of the way before he gets back?

  I had completed one and was in the middle of the second when Al Dolson came into my office and sat down. Al has the look and bearing of thirty years of commanding combat troops. But he hasn’t the assurance to go with it. I hung up and gave it to him between the eyes.

  "Mr. and Mrs. Warren Dodge and Mr. and Mrs. Tommy McGann leave Wednesday morning on a private plane to be house guests of Mike Dean in his Bahama hideaway, Al."

  It took him a full ten seconds to take it in. He licked his lips and his forehead started to sweat "But . . . Good God, we were all set. Burgeson has their proxies."

  "Which won’t be worth a damn if they sign new ones."

  "They can’t do that to us. They’ve got to be stopped!" His voice was getting shrill.

  "Listen, Al. We. can’t stop them. I’ve talked to Louise. They’re going."

  He looked ashen and I saw the signs of his starting to crumble, so I added quickly, "But I’m going along with them. By self-invitation. Dean couldn’t refuse because he knows how fishy that would look. I think I can spoil the party."

  "Do you really think so?"

  "I talked to Louise for over an hour this morning. She’s ready to jump either way. Whichever way she jumps, Tommy will jump. I think when the chips are down, she’s still on our side."

  I didn’t feel as confident as I sounded. "How . . . how long will you be gone?" he asked.

  "I don’t know. Four or five days, I’d guess."

  "I thought we’d fought him to a standstill, Sam."

  "Nothing has changed yet."

  He took a deep breath and let it out. "Tommy doesn’t need it, of course; but having no dividends coming in pinches Louise. Tom used to make such a ceremony of giving them the checks himself. Sam, maybe at the June first meeting we could . . . plan to vote say fifty cents a share. You could le
t her know we plan to do that."

  "Al, I think it would be dead wrong to try to buy her. She’d get twenty-five thousand and it would cost us two hundred and twenty thousand we can’t spare. If we can’t sell our planning on its merits, then it’s no damn good. And that two hundred and twenty thousand might be the difference between eventually getting healthy and never quite making it."

  He sighed again. "You’re right. I know you’re right." He looked at me with a savage expression. "That man is a devil, Sam. And he always gets just what he wants."