Executive Suite (26 page)

“Not exactly.”

Shaw evidenced concern. “In what particular don't you agree? Frankly, I saw no alternative to any of the decisions I made. The newspaper releases were obviously necessary and speed was of the essence. Right?”

Walling hesitated. Agreement was strangely disagreeable but disagreement was impossible.

“The time of the funeral and the holiday policy were both dictated by circumstances,” Shaw went on. “It's conceivable, of course, that I may have overlooked some pertinent fact. If I have, I'd consider it a great personal favor if you'd call it to my attention. Have I?”

“I'm not arguing with you,” Walling heard himself say.

“But I don't have your wholehearted support, do I? That's something I'd hoped I could count on, Don—your support.”

It was a bold plea and Shaw, by the barest of margins, overdid it. Up to that point Walling had been battering back his instinctive dislike with the argument that Shaw had been right on every detail, that there was no possible ground on which he could be criticized for any action that he had taken or any statement that he had made. But now, suddenly, he saw what had been going on. The whole scene had been played by Shaw for his benefit. In the beginning he had suspected, but later overlooked, an attempt on Shaw's part to split him away from Alderson. Every part of Shaw's act—the pleasant mask, the resistance to anger, the whip-cracker questions, the invincible logic—all of it had been a calculated attack to show up Alderson in the worst possible light. The empty well from which Don Walling's respect for Alderson had been drained, suddenly filled with sympathy for the old man.

“No suggestions?” Shaw asked. “No criticism?”

Walling paused, arguing with himself that there was neither point nor purpose in saying anything. It wasn't his fight. The battle was between Shaw and Alderson. He was only a bystander. But the compulsion of inner honesty forced him. “Well, since you've asked me, I did have the impression that you were being a little rough on Fred.”

“Rough? I can't imagine what made you think that.”

“You knew that he was closer to Avery Bullard, personally, than any of the rest of us. It's only natural that he'd be hit a little harder—thrown off balance for a while. You may not appreciate what I'm trying to say, but—”

“Of course I appreciate it,” Shaw said hurriedly. “And I did my best to take that into account. I thought that would be evident to you. Surely you saw there was every reason why I might well have been annoyed by Fred's obviously unfriendly attitude toward me—yet I did my best not to show it.”

“All right—skip it.”

“Wait, Don.” Shaw's hand held his arm as he turned to the door. “I wish you wouldn't feel that way—you particularly.”

“Why me particularly?”

“Because—well, Don, I've always felt that you and I shared a certain community of interest—unexplored, perhaps, but still something in common. I've been hoping that we might have an opportunity to work more closely together. Perhaps now we shall.”

“Perhaps.”

“Good.”

Shaw seemed overpleased and Walling felt the need to put a sharp limitation on whatever agreement Shaw might think he had been given. “As far as a community of interest is concerned,” he said slowly, “—the only interest I share with anyone is the best interest of the company.”

“Then we do have that in common. Oh, by the way, I wonder if you'd be good enough to give me a hand with a couple of things here tonight. There are still a number of people waiting to see me and—”

“So I noticed,” Walling broke in, making the tone of his voice add a question mark.

“It occurred to me that there were probably a number of matters waiting for Mr. Bullard's early decision,” Shaw explained. “Handling them through the executive committee will necessarily slow down action so I thought it might be of some advantage to all of us if I made a fast survey of the situation tonight. That will give us the weekend to get squared away. Then we'll have decks cleared for action on Monday.”

Shaw hesitated and then, as if he recognized the need for further justification, went on. “I'm turning up some rather critical situations. Were you aware that our shipments of gumwood from the southern mills are almost four weeks behind schedule? Schaeffer from Purchasing just informed me that Water Street will be out of gum in less than three weeks. Unless something is done immediately, we'll be facing a shutdown. Did you know that?”

Lumber supply was far removed from Don Walling's normal responsibility, but it happened that Jesse Grimm had mentioned the situation at lunch a few days before and now, as a counteraction of Shaw's annoyingly smug voice-of-doom prediction, he got a mild pleasure out of being able to say, “I think you'll find that Jesse has everything set for a switch to beech and birch. A contract has been placed for about a quarter of a million board feet with some of the northeastern mills.”

“That's what I thought, too,” Shaw said with a sigh that offered a sharing of his own disillusionment. “Unfortunately, the orders were never placed. We have an option—that's true—but the option hasn't been exercised. It was held up by Purchasing, waiting for Jesse Grimm to get Mr. Bullard's approval.”

Don Walling felt himself slump.

“Bit more serious than you thought?” Shaw asked with a faint smile. “Fortunately we have until Monday noon on the option so there's still a chance to squirm out. I should talk to Jesse though. I understand he's out of town.”

“Yes, down in Maryland,” Walling heard himself say, his voice sounding faraway and detached, his mind occupied with the contradiction of Loren Shaw … the more you disliked the man, the more right he proved himself to be!

“Would you know, by any chance, how to get in touch with Jesse?”

“I think Fred left a call for him with a message to call back.”

A smile rolled Shaw's underlip. “If our good friend Mr. Alderson doesn't object too strenuously, would you mind suggesting that Mr. Grimm talk to me as well?”

“I'll tell him.”

It was a natural exit line and he stepped through the door.

“Oh, Don?” Shaw's voice reached after him. “If you do have a few minutes to spare—?”

“Sorry. I'd forgotten. What needs doing?”

“If you wouldn't mind, hop up and see how Miss Martin is coming along. I've started her sending telegrams to the out-of-town factories and branches. Just look things over, see how it's going. All right, Morrison, come in.”

Morrison was one of the men waiting on the bench and Don Walling saw the look of eager subservience on the office manager's face as he bounded to his feet and followed Shaw into his office. The king is dead, long live the king, Walling said to himself, and his mind reacted as if his mouth had been swilled with oil.

He was halfway up the stairs when a twinge of conscience reminded him that Alderson might be waiting for him in his office. Looking back he saw a path of yellow light falling out across the floor from the frosted-glass panel of Alderson's closed door. Sympathy surmounted disappointment and he started down again, but with the first step he heard a sound above his head and looked up. Erica Martin was standing at the head of the staircase. The only light was the side light that came from the open door of her office and, her face and figure etched out of the darkness, made her seem a lost soul standing at the brink of a black abyss.

Quickly, doubling the steps, he was in front of her and, standing a step lower, was looking at her face. She stared past him, her eyes fixed on the door of Shaw's office.

“Are you all right, Miss Martin?”

She reacted as if the sound of his voice had been the first warning of his presence. The flinch of her body started a flashing turn that carried her back into her office.

In the time of the half-dozen steps that it took him to follow her, she regained the veneer of composure and when she turned to face him her eyes were as clear-seeing as the stain of lost tears would let them be.

“Everything's all right,” she said, glancing down at her desk to transfer the meaning from herself to the work she had done.

He saw the fan of carbon copies and, quickly reading the top one, realized how many times in these last few minutes she had been forced to repeat, over and over again, the mind-pounding acknowledgment of Avery Bullard's death. His feeling was only the sympathy of transposition, unconsciously putting himself in her place, because there was no prior background of warmth between them, yet what he felt now was strong enough to make him reach out impulsively and place his arm across her shoulder.

Instantly, so fast that her act could only have been as completely impulsive as his own, she threw her body hard against his and her bent head drove itself into the saddle of his shoulder. Then, so close to him that it might have come from his own throat, he heard a shaking sob and a trembling cry of muffled anguish. His arm tightened and his mind flashed the memory of Mary on the night her father had died.

She broke away so quickly that there was only an instant between the beginning and the end, but it was long enough to transmute her blind grief into a frightened awareness of what she had unconsciously done.

“I—I'm terribly sorry, Mr. Walling, I—”

His hand, slipping across her back, found her forearm and he gripped it hard. “Don't be—don't be—I know how you feel—believe me, I do.” He felt himself fumbling, feeling that nothing that he could say would have any meaning. Yet there must have been a meaning for her. She looked up at him and he saw gratitude that he had never seen matched in any face other than Mary's. Instinct told him that it was the moment to leave her alone and he did, closing the door softly behind him.

Standing at the head of the staircase he thought again, as he had thought so many times before, how strange it was that most people were so very different from what they seemed … and, stranger yet, that the qualities they tried so hard to hide were often more appealing than those they insisted on showing to the world at large.

The yellow path still slanted out from Alderson's door and he hurried down, his mind conditioned to sympathy. His quick excuse to Shaw that Alderson was badly shaken by Avery Bullard's death had gained validity in this last minute, but now it was a sympathy so close to pity that the last spark of hope was quenched. Fred Alderson could never be the president of the Tredway Corporation. That was clearly impossible.

But did Fred realize it … or was he still committed to the blind and hopeless course that he had insisted upon following in Shaw's office?

The moment Don Walling opened the door, he knew that Alderson had accepted his defeat. The old man sat at his desk, slumped and starchless. Tension and anger had drained from his face and there was, instead, an expression of apologetic penitence.

“I'm sorry, Don. Made an awful mess of it, didn't I?”

“I wouldn't say that, Fred. You were—”

Alderson cut him off with a raised hand and the hand was trembling. “No, no—you were disappointed in me. Couldn't help but be. I was disappointed in myself. Thought I could do it, but I couldn't.”

It was an abject confession and Don Walling squirmed as he always did when he was confronted with weakness. “Fred, I know how you feel about Shaw and—”

“No, it wasn't Shaw—it wasn't Shaw at all. Don't you see that, Don? I was ready for Shaw. I could have handled him. That wasn't it. That's where I made my mistake, thinking I was fighting Shaw. No, that's not who I was fighting. I didn't think you knew.”

“Fred, I—”

“No, don't try to stop me. I want you to know. You
have
to know. You can't help me if you don't know. It was Avery Bullard I was fighting. I knew that when we came in downstairs—all the way up in the elevator. That's why I went into my office—trying to convince myself that I could go through with it—but I couldn't. You thought I was afraid of Shaw, didn't you? No, that wasn't it. That would have been easy—it's easy to fight someone you hate. That's the whole trouble—I couldn't fight Avery Bullard. I never could.”

It sounded like the emotional gibberish of a second childhood and Don Walling had given up the attempt to find a serious meaning in it when Alderson suddenly went on. “This is what you have to know, Don—Avery Bullard doesn't want me to be president. He doesn't want me to be anything but what I am right now. No, wait—it's true! If it weren't true he would have made me executive vice-president—not just this last time, but the time before—when he gave it to Fitzgerald.”

Sympathy demanded a rebuttal. “But that was a part of the merger deal, Fred. Fitzgerald came in because—”

“No, Don, no—it's true. Avery Bullard didn't want me. I've worried about it—no, not because of myself—because he was holding off picking someone else. You see, he didn't want to hurt my feelings, Don—passing me over twice. I was going to talk to him—to tell him that I didn't really care—to go ahead and appoint someone else.”

A question forced itself to the front of Don Walling's mind and, despite reluctance, he could not keep himself from asking it. “Fred, if Avery Bullard had appointed some one, who would it have been?”

Alderson clenched his hands. “That's what I was afraid of—why I didn't do it—why I never talked to him.”

“Would it have been Shaw?”

Don Walling felt the cruelty of the question yet, once asked, he sensed that it had been the right thing to do.

Alderson, like a child slapped out of an emotional tantrum, stared at him for a moment and then, slowly, his eyes seemed to clear. When he spoke, the overtone of delirium was gone from his voice. “Yes, it might have been—but not if I'd had a chance to tell Avery Bullard what I found out this afternoon.” He hesitated as if he were debating an explanation and then, apparently deciding against it, went on. “No matter what, Don, it can't be Shaw. We mustn't let that happen.”