Executive Suite (3 page)

The receiver clattered down in the silence of the room. Steigel was facing him, gray-faced, wetting his thick lips. “You—you think—?”

“When the street finds out in the morning that Avery Bullard is dead, that stock will break ten points.” He glanced at his watch again. “Damn it, only twenty minutes. We'll be lucky to get short of a couple of hundred shares.”

Steigel looked at him, slack-lipped and staring. “There are some ways it don't seem right to make money.”

A lip-twisting smile formed on Bruce Pilcher's face. “If you'd prefer, Julius, I'm quite willing to handle this on my own account.”

Bruce Pilcher watched the door close, beating a fast tattoo on the desktop with the tips of his long-fingered right hand. He felt a tremendous surge of exhilarated pride in the speed and decisiveness with which he had acted. There had been too many times in his life when he had fumbled opportunity, tripped by caution and fear. Poor old Julius was showing his age. The slightest excitement now and the old boy had to go to the toilet.

2.44 P.M. EDT

Alex Oldham, manager of the New York branch office of the Tredway Corporation, was having the kind of an afternoon that he always had when he knew that Mr. Bullard was in the city. He might decide to drop in and he might not … you never knew. All you could do was sit on the griddle and fry, sweating it out, waiting, keeping an eye on the office to be sure no one started any horseplay. If you relaxed for one minute and let some fool thing happen, that was sure to be the very instant old Bullard would come busting in the front door. That's the way he was … you could have one undusted piece in the whole showroom and, by God, he'd walk right up to it!

Oldham poured a glass of water out of the silver carafe on his desk. The water was lukewarm and tasted like dust, gagging him. He spat it back in the glass and felt as if he were about to retch.

“Mr. Oldham, I—oh, I'm sorry.”

It was his secretary, Mary Voskamp, backing embarrassedly through the door she had just opened.

“No, no! Come here!” he commanded. “Miss Voskamp, would you mind making certain that I have fresh water every morning?”

“But you almost never touch it. I—yes, sir. I'm sorry, Mr. Oldham.”

“What is it?”

“Mr. Flannery called and wanted to know if he could bring Mr. Scott over at four-thirty. It's about that finish complaint on those tables. But if you're too busy—”

Oldham worked his lips nervously. “I don't know. Mr. Bullard's in town. He might stop in.”

“Mr. Bullard? Isn't he going back to Millburgh on the three-five?”

“Three-five?”

“We got him a Pullman seat and sent it over to his hotel. He called in just before lunch.”

“You might have told me!” he flared.

“I didn't know that you were—I'm sorry, Mr. Oldham.”

“All right, all right,” he said, straining against collapsing anger. “Not your fault, Miss Voskamp. Just—well, it's been one of those days.”

“I'll tell Mr. Flannery that it would be better to wait until tomorrow. He said that would be all right if you were tied up.”

Oldham nodded gratefully. “Yes, make it tomorrow.”

He waited until he heard the door close and then slipped the palms of his hands over his face like a blanking curtain, shutting in the terror. Something's happened to me … never used to let things get me this way … maybe I'm cracking up … like Wally in Detroit. No! I've got to hang onto myself. If old Bullard ever gets an idea that I'm slipping … if he ever suspects …

“The bastard,” he whispered aloud—and then he said it again. The syllables made burning little puffs of air in the damp palms of his hands. It's the waiting that raises hell with a man … how can you help having an ulcer … all this damned waiting … never knowing?

2.51 P.M. EDT

Anne Finnick opened the door of the women's washroom just wide enough to assure herself that there was no one else inside. Then she slipped through the door, snatched a paper towel, and with three quick steps shut herself inside a toilet compartment.

Swallowing hard, she opened her hand bag and lifted out a soggy, filth-stained man's wallet. Gingerly spreading the wet leather, she saw a thick sandwich of green bills. Her lips trembled through a moment of indecision and then she clutched the money into a crumpled wad and jabbed it inside the front of her blouse, holding herself against flinching as the shock of the wet cold struck the warm valley of her breasts.

Breathing heavily she sat down on the toilet, looking furtively about the narrow enclosure, trying to decide what to do with the wallet. It was full of little cards. She began peeling them off the wet pack that they made, reading the type and the water-blurred signatures. They were membership cards in clubs, credit cards for hotels, insurance identification … Avery Bullard … Avery Bullard, Millburgh, Pennsylvania … Avery Bullard, President, Tredway Corporation.

“No guy like that needs it like I do,” she whispered silently, standing. One by one, she tore the cards into little bits. They made a swirl of multicolored confetti in the water of the toilet bowl, spinning like a kaleidoscope when she pulled the flush lever.

It was a shame to throw away the wallet. Those initial dinguses might be real gold. Maybe it would be all right when it was dried out and she could give it to somebody. But not to Eddie! She wasn't ever giving Eddie anything again … a cheap guy that would let a girl worry herself sick, saying every day that he was going to get the money for that doctor. Now she had the money herself. Eddie could go to hell!

Her eyes blinked back tears and she began to tremble violently. It almost hadn't happened. It had been so close to not happening. Today was the first time she'd gone out for a chocolate malted in a whole week. If she hadn't gone just when she did, she'd never have seen the wallet lying there in that muddy mess at the curb in front of the Chippendale Building. It almost made a person believe in something.

Someone was coming in the washroom.

Anne Finnick flushed the toilet again. The sound was a protection against the terror of silence.

“I'm not stealing it,” she said to herself. “Sometime, when I get it, I'll pay it back. I won't forget his name—Avery Bullard.” She looked at the gold initials … they would help her remember … A.B. for Avery Bullard.

2

MILLBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

2.54 P.M. EDT

The telegram that Avery Bullard sent from the Chippendale Building in New York was received at the Western Union office in Millburgh, Pennsylvania at 2.54
P.M.
As the words
TREDWAY TOWER
spattered down on the uncoiling yellow tape, Mary Herr immediately swiveled her chair to face the keyboard on which she would retransmit the message to one of the battery of teletype printers in the Tredway Tower. As she turned she flicked her eyes toward the window through which she could see the sky-thrusting shaft of the Tower, dazzlingly white against the heat-faded blue of the sky.

Mary Herr's quick glance at the Tredway Tower had no direct relationship to the handling of the message. It was something that she, in common with almost everyone else in Millburgh, did a hundred times a day. There was no part of the city from which the Tower could not be seen, and there was no man or woman whose eyes could long escape its attraction. Most often they looked without seeing, as a sailor involuntarily glances at the sky, or an office worker at the clock, but there were other times when they stared in conscious awe. Early-rising men, on their way to work, frequently marveled at the way the warm sun would strike the top of the Tower while they still walked in the predawn chill. In the evening, after the sun had set for the rest of the city, they would sometimes see the upper reaches of the Tower still bathed in an unworldly glow of flame-colored light. On days when clouds came scudding in through the Alleghany passes and filled the whole river valley with gray mist, the top of the Tower would occasionally be lost in the sky. It was then that they looked upward most often, staring and uneasy, as if their minds were incapable of coping with their imaginations, as if some needed thing had been unfairly snatched away.

If the Tredway Tower had been built on the island of Manhattan, it would have been only a tree in a forest, possessing neither distinction nor magnificence. In Millburgh, it is the wonder of wonders. No other building is taller than six stories. The Tower rises an incredible twenty-four. Almost as impressive as its size is its whiteness, a white so startlingly clean that it almost seems as if some supernatural intervention protects it from the film of soot that smudges the low-lying clutter of old buildings that make up most of the downtown area.

There are only a very few people in Millburgh who do not regard the Tredway Tower as a thing of great beauty. W. Harrington Dodds is one of the few. Although two decades have passed since it was built, Mr. Dodds' criticism of its design has grown no less bitter. He still calls it “an architectural monstrosity inspired by an Italian wedding cake and designed by a pseudo architect who should have been a pastry cook.” Such remarks by Mr. Dodds are usually accepted as the acid result of a bad case of sour grapes. At the time the Tower was built he had been the leading architect of Millburgh and a man of some standing in his profession, the former vice-president of the state chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Nevertheless, old Orrin Tredway had completely passed him by and had given the architectural commission to a New York firm. He had not even tossed W. Harrington Dodds the face-saving designation as “consulting architect.”

Despite the circumstantial evidence against the validity of Mr. Dodds' criticism, there is more than a little justification for some of his caustic oberservations. The Tredway Tower does bear more than a little resemblance to an enormous wedding cake. The first twelve stories are a frosted white block, fitted as squarely to the four streets as if they were the edges of the pan in which it had been baked.

On the foundation of the twelve-story block, off center, rises the constantly narrowing tower of the building. The higher it rises the more elaborate its ornamentation becomes. Around the setbacks at the sixteenth and twentieth stories there are garlands of intricately worked white-glazed terra cotta which, as Mr. Dodds is fond of saying, would be “highly appropriate for a Gothic Christmas cookie.” They are reputed to be the finest work of a great sculptor, but their artistic merit can only be judged by an occasional high-flying pigeon, for they are completely invisible to the earth-bound observer.

The final thrust of the Tower, the lance of the shaft, is so highly embellished with a bristle of minarets that it appears from the street to be an area completely separate and distinct from the rest of the building. It is. Orrin Tredway had wanted it that way. He had planned it himself and the architects had not argued. On the twenty-third floor he had placed the offices of his vice-presidents. To the twenty-fourth he had transplanted three rooms that he had torn out by the roots from a sixteenth-century manor house that he had bought in England. The oak paneling had been dissembled by museum workers, marked piece by piece for re-erection, and the twenty-fourth floor of the Tower had been designed with no other consideration than to form a shell for the transplantation. What once had been a library for nine generations of the English peerage became the office of Orrin Tredway. The adjoining study, where at least three Prime Ministers had sat in conference, became the office for Orrin Tredway's secretary. The old main hall had become the directors' room and Orrin Tredway sat at the head of the same table, and in the same chair, that had been used by six lords of England. There were no other offices on the twenty-fourth floor. Orrin Tredway had wanted no other man to touch his feet to its hallowed parquetry without his personal invitation.

Eight months after he moved into his office, Orrin Tredway was dead. One night in January, Luigi, Cassoni, the operator of the private elevator that served the Executive Suite, heard what was unmistakably a shot. When he finally got up enough nerve to break the rule that Mr. Tredway was never to be disturbed by opening the door of his office, he found that Mr. Tredway was beyond being disturbed.

The coroner obligingly reported that Orrin Tredway had been killed by the accidental discharge of a pistol that he had been cleaning. No one was fooled. Everyone suspected suicide. A month later they knew for sure. By then the motive for self-murder was clearly evident. Orrin Tredway was bankrupt. He had squandered his entire personal fortune and all but ruined the Tredway Furniture Company in order to build the Tower. It had been a colossal financial blunder, the senile floundering of an old man who, in the last years of his life, was trying desperately to fulfill the promise of his ancestry. There had been great men in his lineage, men who had left their mark on Pennsylvania since the days of William Penn, but the strong blood was gone before it came to Orrin Tredway's veins. He was the last of the line. There was no Tredway to succeed him as president of the company.

The people of Millburgh had bowed to the anticipated loss of the Tredway Furniture Company as another inevitable downward step in the slow disintegration of the city's industry. It had been going on for a long time. The days of Millburgh's greatest glory lay so far back in its history that there was no man still alive whose memory could span the years. There were those who could recite the facts, but their recitations came from legends preserved in the mice-smelling rooms behind the public library that served as the headquarters of the Millburgh Historical Society.

There were even people living in Millburgh—as horror-stricken members of the Historical Society were occasionally made to realize by papers at its first-Friday-after-the-first-Thursday meetings—who did not know that Millburgh had not been named for the mills that once lined the Susquehanna, but for John Mills of Liverpool, England, who had established the riverside settlement that eventually became Millburgh.