Executive Suite (27 page)

Don Walling caught himself nodding in unconscious agreement.

“It has to be Jesse,” Alderson said. “That's the only chance we have to stop him now.”

“Jesse?”

Alderson flipped open the notebook in front of him, twisting it so that Walling could read. In his copperplate script, Alderson had set down two opposing columns of names:

“That's the way you think the vote would be, Fred?”

“Yes, I'd support Jesse and I'm assuming that you would, too—at least as against Shaw.”

Caution restrained Walling from a complete commitment. “Why do you think Dudley would vote for Shaw?”

“They've been thick as thieves these last few months. Haven't you noticed that? Didn't you see the way Shaw jumped in to take him out to the airport tonight?”

Don Walling nodded an acknowledgment, remembering that he had seen the Shaws in the Dudley's party at the last Federal Club dance.

“And of course George Caswell would vote for Shaw,” Alderson went on.

“Why do you think that?”

“Because Shaw is Caswell's man. He came in here on Caswell's recommendation.”

“But Shaw came in with Parkington-McConnell when they made our management study. It was because of—”

“It was Caswell who talked Mr. Bullard into taking on that outfit. No, Shaw is Caswell's man. Can't count on anything there.”

“What about Julia Tredway Prince?”

“That's what I've been trying to figure out,” Alderson said slowly. “I don't know where to put her.”

Walling looked at the notebook … three votes against three. “The way you have things lined up there, Fred, the deciding vote would be in her hands.”

“I know. That's why—well, I thought I might stop in and see Mrs. Prince on the way home. As a matter of fact, I should do it, anyway. Remember that call I got this afternoon—Miss Martin calling me out of the executive committee meeting?”

“Yes.”

“That was from Mrs. Prince. Somebody called her from New York trying to buy some of her Tredway stock. That's what I started to tell you a few minutes ago about Shaw. I don't know for sure but—”

They were both startled at the sudden opening of the door behind them. It was Shaw.

“Good night, gentlemen,” Shaw said with forced pleasantry. “Presume I'll see you both in the morning?”

“Good night,” Walling heard himself say automatically, and then there was the sound of Alderson's repetition.

The door closed.

Without realizing it, Walling had been holding his breath.

“Do you suppose he was listening?” Alderson whispered after a silence.

“Wouldn't have heard anything if he had. The door was closed.”

Alderson nodded but without assurance. “I suppose we might as well go ourselves. No more we can do now.”

Outside, waiting for the elevator, Don Walling glanced up the staircase. The light was out in Erica Martin's office.

A scrubwoman came shuffling toward them, dragging her mop.

“Afraid we held you up,” Walling said apologetically.

“Coulda been worse,” she said amiably. “Anyway you're the last. I had it later than this a lot of nights with him.” Her gray hand flicked a gesture up the staircase. “I guess anybody can go to the funeral, huh?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“When's it going to be?”

Walling felt his breath catch and then he heard Frederick Alderson say, without hesitation, “Monday at four-thirty. St. Martin's.”

“Ought to be a nice funeral, a big man like him,” she said, shuffling off down the dark corridor, her voice fading with her.

The elevator door opened. Luigi avoided their faces, turning his head so that his eyes were shielded. The door closed and the car plummeted down through the shaft.

As they stepped out Alderson glanced up at the clock. It was nine-ten. He turned back. “Luigi, what happened to the carillon at nine? I was listening for it but I didn't hear it.”

“Mr. Shaw say to turn it off so it don't ring,” Luigi said and closed the door.

Don Walling waited for Alderson's reaction, but none came. They walked together out through the lobby and into the last of the dusk.

“I'd left word for Jesse that I'd be at the office until nine,” Alderson said mildly. “That's why I wanted to be sure of the time.”

KENT COUNTY, MARYLAND

9.14 P.M. EDT

The last lingering loom of the twilight had faded from the sky as Jesse Grimm crested the hill from which he usually caught his first glimpse of Kinfolk Cove. Now he looked off into blackness and his mind rankled at the delay that had robbed him of the daylight. As he stared the night became translucent and he could see the dim masses of land and water. Memory filled in the detail—the thin line of Kinfolk Creek, the widening cove, the locust-fringed bar that ran out to the wharf. There were three pinpoints of light, one red and flashing, two yellow and steady. The red light was on the nun buoy that marked the channel off the shore. The yellow lights were the windows of the kitchen. One of them seemed to blink and he imagined that it was his wife stepping in front of the window to watch for him. Sarah had gone down in the middle of the week and he had gladly endured the days alone for the pleasure of knowing that she had wanted to go. That was the only thing that had ever worried him about moving to the Eastern Shore—whether Sarah would like it—and now she had proved that she did. There had been no way to let her know that he would be late tonight because they were still waiting for the telephone company to run its line down from the highway.

His lateness tempted Jesse Grimm to turn off without stopping at Teel's Store, but he decided that it was worth the minute or two that it would take. Anyway, Sarah might have left word about something that she wanted him to bring down. She did that sometimes. She knew that he always stopped.

Teel's Store was one of the unrecognized reasons that had made Jesse Grimm decide on Kinfolk Cove. He had found, in the nightly gatherings at the back of the store, an easy camaraderie that he had not known since his young machinist days in Pittsburgh, something that he had never found at the Federal Club.

When Jesse Grimm had first started coming to Kinfolk Cove, the Teel-store regulars had fallen silent when he came in, the traditional treatment accorded any stranger, but with the special reticence reserved for visitors who were reputed to have “city money.” The change in Jesse Grimm's status from a stranger to an accepted Teel-store regular had come about—although he did not know it—from Jim Bishop's spreading the word that “this Grimm fellow” had fixed the magneto on Tim Culler's boat engine. Anybody could tinker a boat engine, but fixing a magneto was something else again. A magneto's going bad had always meant taking the thing off and sending it to Chestertown, losing a couple or three days of crabbing. It was after Jim Bishop told the story about Jesse Grimm fixing Tim Culler's magneto in no time at all that they started offering Jesse Grimm a coke case to sit on when he came into Teel's Store. Then one night when Matt Teel had been fussing about all the ice cream that had melted because something had gone wrong with the freezing machine on his ice cream cabinet, Jesse had fixed that, too. After the ice cream had started getting hard again Matt had said, “Captain Jesse, it's a mighty good thing you decided to come here.” After that everybody had started calling him “Captain Jesse.” Being an Eastern Shore “captain” was something like being a Kentucky “colonel,” only it meant more. The governor of Maryland couldn't write up any kind of a paper that made the Teel-store regulars call a man “Captain Jesse.”

Jesse Grimm stopped his car back of the gas pumps, so Matt Teel wouldn't come running out, and walked up the path. The gritty crunch of the oyster shells under his feet made a good sound in his ears. His nostrils tingled with the spicy scent of salt water and marsh grass that filled the soft sundown breeze.

“Well if it ain't Captain Jesse!” Matt greeted him as soon as he stepped through the door. “Just talking about you—wondering if you were a-coming or if you weren't a-coming.”

A voice out of the shadows called, “I knowed he was coming or I'da been fishing all week,” and a gale of appreciative laughter went up from the regulars. They had been joking about how Abe had better keep carpentering on Captain Jesse's new shop if he ever wanted to get his wife's washing machine running again.

“Don't tell me that wife of yours has kept you working all week,” Jesse said.

Again the laughter rolled. Abe's wife was one of the redheaded Connor girls and everybody knew she could do a lot of hell-raising when her washing machine wasn't working.

“If I hadn'ta done it, she'da made me sleep down to the crab house—sweet as she is on Captain Jesse there,” Abe said. You couldn't get ahead of Abe. He could give it back as good as it came.

Jesse's laughter rang out with the rest—and it was laughter that no one in Millburgh had ever heard. Someone shoved a box toward him.

“No, can't stay,” Jesse said. “Have to get down home or Sarah'll have me sleeping in the crab house, too. Kind of late tonight. Got held up.”

“That's what we figured,” somebody said.

There was a lull in the laughter and Matt Teel came up to him with a torn scrap of brown paper. “Telephone call came for you, Captain Jesse. You're to call this man. Said up to nine he'd be at his office. After that you was to call him to home.”

The name on the paper was “Fredrik Allerton.”

Matt wasn't much on spelling but he ran a good store. There wasn't anything from roofing cement to dill pickles that you couldn't buy at Teel's Store.

Matt was looking at his watch. “Twenty after nine. Guess that means you're to call to his home.”

Jesse started for the telephone. He had to pass Abe on the way. “You really been working, Abe?”

“Sure have, Captain Jesse. Got all them windows in, every last one.”

“Got the doors hung?”

Abe slapped his bony knee. “I told your wife that's what you'd ask, but she said she was going to have them closet shelves of hers first or you and me was both going to get scalped—so I figured it better be closet shelves.”

Jesse led the laughter, pushing past Abe to get to the telephone.

Everyone sat in respectful silence while the operator tried to put the call through but there was no answer at Frederick Alderson's residence in Millburgh.

“Guess it isn't anything that can't wait until morning,” Jesse said. “Got to get down home.”

Herb Tilligas followed him to the door. “Captain Jesse, you folks like a mess of soft crabs?”

“Sure would, Captain Herb.”

“I'll be bringing 'em tomorrow.”

Jesse Grimm went out chuckling to himself … water pump on Herb's boat must be acting up again.

MILLBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

9.21 P.M. EDT

Driving out North Front Street, Frederick Alderson had been telling Don Walling about his call from Julia Tredway Prince.

“You say that it was this man Pilcher who was trying to get the stock,” Don asked, “and that he's a friend of Shaw's?”

“Don't you remember Shaw talking about him—the time we were discussing that price protection contract for Odessa Stores?”

Don nodded vaguely. “I still don't get the point, Fred.”

“Can't you see, Don—Shaw was trying to get his hands on more stock so that he'd have some extra pressure on Avery Bullard?”

“Because he thought he could force himself in as executive vice-president?”

“Of course. It wouldn't have worked—not with Avery Bullard—but Shaw's too much of a fool to realize that.”

“But why was he working through Pilcher?”

“That's plain enough—to keep Julia from finding out what was going on. Shaw knows that she's close to Avery Bullard—that she'd never do anything he didn't want her to do. They
were
pretty close, you know—closer than a lot of people realize. I mean—well, I've just been thinking about that—wondering whether I really ought to try and talk to her tonight—so soon. Unless I miss my guess, she's going to be pretty much broken up.”

Alderson leaned down to look at his watch in a stray beam of light that fell from the instrument panel. “Sort of late, too—maybe I'd better wait until morning to see her.”

They rode for a moment in silence and then Don Walling felt himself impelled to ask. “Do you think there is any chance, Fred, that Mrs. Prince might change her attitude toward the company now that Avery Bullard is dead—that she might sell her stock?”

Alderson hesitated. “I was thinking about the same thing. Yes, I'd better see her tonight. She'll probably appreciate my stopping, anyway. It's right up here in the next block, Don. Just drop me off. I can walk home afterward.”

They were already at the corner and Don Walling touched the brakes, pulling in toward the long white wall that guarded the old Tredway home from the street, stopping where the wall opened for the driveway.

Alderson started to get out and then, suddenly he was frozen into immobility.

Walling turned in quick alarm. “Fred, what's the—”

Then he saw it. Loren Shaw's car was already parked in the drive.

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

9.09 P.M. CDT

The trained eyes of the airport porters watched the passengers coming in through Gate 9, expertly calculating their potentialities. Three made an almost simultaneous lunge for the handsome, prematurely gray man who was obviously the pick of the lot. The quickest-footed won and J. Walter Dudley handed over his checks.