Timothy's Game (23 page)

Again that bonecrushing handshake, and Cone gets out of there. He goes down to the icy lobby, takes off his jacket, and steps out into the steam bath. The heat is a slap in the face, and he starts slogging back to John Street wondering if he’ll survive in the office where Haldering & Co. air conditioners, all antique window units, wheeze and clank, fighting a losing battle against the simmer.

He has an hour to kill before his appointment with Simon Trale, Chief Financial Officer of Dempster-Torrey, and he knows there are things he should be doing: checking with Davenport on the homicide investigation; goosing Sid Apicella to get skinny on the balance sheet of David Dempster Associates, Inc.; gathering evidence to back up his grand theory on who’s responsible for the campaign of sabotage.

He starts by reviewing his recent conversation with David Dempster. Timothy knows very well that he himself is a mess of prejudices. For instance, he’ll never believe a man who wears a pinkie ring, never lend money to anyone who claims to have finished reading
Silas Marner,
never letch after a woman who, on a bright day, wears sunglasses pushed up in her hair.

Silly bigotries, he acknowledges, and he’s got a lot of them. And the morning meeting with David Dempster has added a few more. The orotund voice and precise diction. The fanged smile with all the warmth of a wolf snarl. The showy way he loaded his pipe, as if he was filling a chalice with sacramental wine. Wearing a vest on the hottest day of the year and then festooning it with a heavy gold chain from which a Phi Beta Kappa key dangled.

All minor affectations, Cone admits, but revealing. The man comes perilously close to being a poof, or acting like one. Whatever he is, Cone suspects, there is not much to him. Beneath that confident, almost magisterial manner is a guy running scared. Prick him and he’ll deflate like a punctured bladder of hot air.

Except … Except … In David Dempster’s final words, regarding the drunken driver who killed his dog, he said in tones of uncontrolled savagery, “I kicked the shit out of the bastard.” That shocked Cone, not because of the act or the words describing it, but that it was so out of character for someone he had tagged as a wimp, and a pompous wimp at that.

It’s a puzzlement, and Timothy decides to put David Dempster on hold, not that the guy is obviously a wrongo, but only because no one else questioned up to now has given off such confusing vibes. Like all detectives, Cone tends to pigeonhole people. And when he can’t assign them to neat slots, his anxiety quotient rises.

The interview with Simon Trale is held in the offices of Dempster-Torrey on Wall Street. Trale elects to meet Cone in the boardroom, a cavernous chamber with a conference table long enough to sleep Paul Bunyan. It is surrounded by twenty black leather armchairs, precisely spaced. On the table in front of each chair is a water carafe, glass, pad of yellow legal paper, ballpoint pen, and ashtray—all embossed with the corporate insignia.

“I brought you in here,” Trale says in a high-pitched voice, “because it was swept electronically about an hour ago. The debuggers won’t get to my office until this afternoon, so I thought it would be safer if we talked in here.”

“Yeah,” Cone says, “that makes sense.”

He wonders if they’re going to sit at opposite ends of that stretched slab of polished walnut and shout at each other. But Trale pulls out two adjoining chairs along one side, and that’s where they park themselves.

The CFO is a short guy. In fact, Cone figures that if he was a few inches shorter he’d qualify as a midget. Usually a man so diminutive will buy his clothes in the boys’ section of a department store, but Trale’s duds are too well tailored for that. He’s wearing a dark blue pinstripe with unpadded shoulders and side vents. His shirt is sparkling white, and he sports a paisley bow tie. Small gold cuff links. A wide gold wedding band. A gold Rolex. Black tasseled loafers on his tiny feet.

He’s got a full head of snowy white hair neatly trimmed. The white hair is understandable because Timothy guesses that Simon Trale is pushing seventy, if he’s not already on the downslope. But his movements are sure, and that reedy voice has no quaver.

“Mind if I smoke?” Cone asks.

“Go right ahead,” Trale says. “The doc limits me to one cigar a day, but it tastes all the better for that.”

“When do you smoke it—at night after dinner?”

“No,” Trale says, smiling. “First thing in the morning. It gets the juices flowing.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, how old are you?”

“I don’t mind. I’ll be seventy-three next year.”

“I should look as good next year as you do right now,” Cone says admiringly. “No aches or pains?”

“The usual,” the little man says, shrugging. “But I still got my own teeth, thank God. I use reading glasses, but my hearing is A-Okay.”

“How come you’re still working?” Cone asks curiously. “Doesn’t Dempster-Torrey have a mandatory retirement at sixty-five?”

“Sure we do. But Jack Dempster pushed a waiver through the Board of Directors allowing me to stay on. You know why he did that?”

“Because you’re such a hotshot financial officer?”

“No,” Trale says, laughing. “There’s a hundred younger men who could do my job. But my wife died nine years ago, and all my kids have married and moved away. I don’t play golf, and I’ve got no hobbies. Dempster-Torrey has been my whole life. Jack knew that, knew how lost I’d be without an office to come to and problems to solve. So he kept me on, bless him.”

“Very kind of him,” Cone says, looking down at the cigarette in his stained fingers. “But that doesn’t sound like the John J. Dempster I’ve been hearing about.”

“Oh, you’ll hear a lot of bad things about him,” Trale says cheerfully. “And most of them will be true. I’m not going to tell you he was a saint; he wasn’t. But do you know anyone who is?”

“I heard he was ruthless and brutal in his business dealings.”

The CFO frowns. “Ruthless and brutal? Well … maybe. But when you’re wheeling and dealing on the scale that Dempster was, you can’t afford to play pattycake. He was hard when he had to be hard.”

“So he made enemies along the way?”

“Sure he did. The police asked me to make out a list. I told them it wouldn’t be a list, it would be a book!”

He smiles at the recollection. He has the complexion of a healthy baby, and his mild blue eyes look out at the world with wonder and amusement. Small pink ears are set flat to his skull, and his lips are so red they might be rouged. It is a doll’s head, finely molded porcelain, with every detail from black lashes to dimpled chin painted just so.

“How long have you been with Dempster-Torrey, Mr. Trale?”

“From the beginning. I was the bookkeeper with the Torrey Machine Works up in Quincy, Massachusetts, when John Dempster came to work for us as sales manager. Within a year he had doubled our revenues. And a year after that he married Teresa Torrey and was made vice president.”

“Oh-ho,” Cone says, lighting another Camel. “He married the boss’s daughter, did he?”

“He did. But he’d have been made vice president even if he hadn’t. Sanford Torrey knew what a wizard he had in J.J. Also, Sanford and his wife were worried about their daughter. She had plenty of beaux, but they didn’t stay around long. Have you met Teresa?”

“Yeah, I met her.”

“And what do you think?”

“Off the wall.”

“Yes,” Trale says sorrowfully, “that’s what other young men thought—but John Dempster saw something in her. She’s really a dear, loving woman, Mr. Cone. When my wife was ill, she couldn’t do enough for us. I’ll be eternally grateful. John saw that side of her—the warm affection, the innocent openness. Yes, he married the boss’s daughter, but there was more to it than that. I may be a foolish old romantic, but I’ve always thought that he loved her and married her for the qualities he knew he himself lacked: sympathy, sweet naiveté, absolute honesty.”

“But it was also a financial leg up for him.”

“Of course. A year after the marriage, the company became Dempster-Torrey—notice that his name came first!—and he started his campaign of acquisitions and mergers, diversifying into areas that had nothing to do with our original business. I went along for the ride, and what a ride it turned out to be!”

“How did this Sanford Torrey like what Dempster was doing?”

“He and his wife were killed in a plane crash a few years after John Dempster began putting the conglomerate together. It turned out that Sanford had left everything he owned, including a majority interest in Dempster-Torrey, to Teresa. But I guess he had some reservations about John Dempster, because he tied up his daughter’s inheritance in a trust fund that J.J. couldn’t touch. But he didn’t have to be afraid of Teresa being left destitute. John took the company public, and it tripled the value of the trust. Provision has been made for the three sons, but she is still a very, very wealthy woman.”

Cone stirs restlessly. “This is all interesting, Mr. Trale. Good background stuff. But it really doesn’t cut any mustard with what I’m supposed to be doing—finding out who’s behind the eighteen cases of industrial sabotage to Dempster-Torrey plants and equipment.”

Unexpectedly, Trale smiles. “Those accidents,” he says, “they infuriated J.J., but I never could see that they were such a big deal. Every large corporation suffers the same outrages occasionally. But John thought there was a plot against us.”

“You don’t think so?”

“It’s possible, but I doubt it. Insurance covered most of our losses, and they never affected our basic financial structure.”

“Did your common stock drop after each of the incidents?”

“Oh, sure. But it came right back up again.”

“And what’s happened to the stock since Dempster’s murder?”

The little man pulls a face. “Not good,” he says. “I estimate the total value of our common stock has dropped about thirty percent since his death.”

“Still falling?”

“It seems to have stabilized the last few days. Wall Street is waiting to see who’ll be named the new CEO.”

Timothy punches out his cigarette and takes a deep breath. “Mr. Trale, I’m going to throw a wild idea at you. It’s something I’ve been kicking around ever since I was handed this file. I gotta tell you, I haven’t got any hard evidence. But you have a helluva lot more business savvy than I do, so I’d like to get your reaction.”

“All right,” the CFO says mildly, “let’s hear your idea.”

“Suppose, just suppose, some corporate raider wants to make a move on Dempster-Torrey. He’s got to—”

“Whoa!” Trale protests, putting up a white palm. “Hold your horses. You’re talking about a takeover of almost three billion dollars. That’s
billion,
with a capital B.”

“I know that,” Cone says patiently. “And I could name you a dozen pirates—American, English, Australian—who could raise that kind of loot. What if some takeover bandit gets the bright idea that he can force down the price of Dempster-Torrey stock and cut the cost of the raid? So before he starts buying, he engineers a program of industrial sabotage, figuring that he’s saving money every time Dempster-Torrey stock dips even a point.”

“Assuming what you say is true, it didn’t work. As I told you, Mr. Cone, the price of the stock didn’t decline that much following the incidents, and it came right back up again.”

The Wall Street dick stares at him.

Simon Trale returns the stare, then begins biting at his thumbnail. “I see what you’re getting at,” he says, his voice suddenly bleak. “The acts of sabotage didn’t have the desired effect, so the corporate raider, if he exists, murdered John J. Dempster.”

“Had
him murdered. I know a little about violent crime, Mr. Trale, and Dempster’s death had all the earmarks of a contract kill. Two wackos on a motorcycle with a submachine gun. They were hired hands. And it worked. You just told me the total value of Dempster-Torrey common stock has dropped about thirty percent. What a bonanza for some bandido who’s after your company.”

“Wait a minute,” Trale says, visibly upset. “First of all, about two years ago we restructured the corporation to make a takeover extremely difficult and expensive. Since then I’ve heard absolutely nothing about anyone making a move on us.”

“The wife is always the last to know,” Cone says, but the other man ignores that.

“Second, if anyone has accumulated even five percent of Dempster-Torrey stock, he’d have to file with the SEC informing them of the purchase and stating his intentions.”

Cone pauses to light another cigarette. “Come on, Mr. Trale,” he says, “you know better than that. Let’s say four rich outlaws are sitting around a ginmill somewhere, having a few snorts, and one of them says, ‘Hey, what say we put the XYZ Corporation into play.’ So they all agree to have a fling. Each man will pick up four percent of XYZ’s stock, so no SEC statement has to be filed—correct? But between them they’ll be holding sixteen percent. In addition to that, they’ll tip off some friendly arbitrageurs to start buying XYZ. And all this time they’re trading as individuals. There’s nothing on paper to show they’re working in cahoots. That’ll come later when they figure they’ve got the muscle to make their move. Then it’s goodbye XYZ.”

“A very imaginative scenario, Mr. Cone,” the CFO says worriedly.

“But possible—isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s possible.”

“Damned right. It’s been done before and it’ll be done again.”

“And you think that is what’s happening to Dempster-Torrey?”

“I don’t know,” Cone says. “I told you it’s just a theory. But I can’t spot any holes in it—can you?”

“I just can’t believe that any corporate raider would murder Dempster just to inflate his profits.”

“You can’t believe it because you’re a moral man with no more than a normal share of greed. But believe me, there are guys on the Street who’ll run a bulldozer over their grandma to make a buck.”

Trale is silent. Suddenly he looks even smaller, shrunken and defeated. “Maybe I should retire,” he says in a low voice. “Jack Dempster played rough, and I went along with him. That was
business.
But murder? Never! I get the feeling that the world has passed me by. I don’t recognize it anymore. I’ve become obsolete.”