A Century of Great Suspense Stories

Reasons Unknown Stanley Ellin

Every generation produces one writer who stands a given genre on its head. The late Stanley Ellin (1936–1986) certainly did that with crime fiction. There was his style, as pithy and poignant as any literary writer’s; there were his ideas, ever the equal of such great idea men as Roald Dahl and Saki; and there was his world view, which was every bit as complex as some of his darker protagonists. For all this, though, he had a sense of everyday life and everyday people that few in the genre ever came close to matching. Perhaps this was because, early in his life, he was a steelworker, a dairy farmer, and a teacher. While he is primarily thought of as a short-story writer, he wrote a number of excellent novels, among them The Eighth Circle and Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall.

This is what happened, starting that Saturday in October.

That morning Morrison’s wife needed the station wagon for the kids, so Morrison took the interstate bus into downtown Manhattan. At the terminal there, hating to travel by subway, he got into a cab. When the cabbie turned around and asked, “Where to, mister?” Morrison did a double take. “Slade?” he said. “Bill Slade?”

“You better believe it,” said the cabbie. “So it’s Larry Morrison. Well, what do you know.”

Now, what Morrison knew was that up to two or three years ago, Slade had been — as he himself still was — one of the several thousand comfortably fixed bees hiving in the glass-and-aluminum Majestico complex in Greenbush, New Jersey. There were 80,000 Majestico employees around the world, but the Greenbush complex was the flagship of the works, the executive division. And Slade had been there a long, long time, moving up to an assistant managership on the departmental level.

Then the department was wiped out in a reorganizational crunch, and Slade, along with some others in it, had been handed his severance money and his hat. No word had come back from him after he finally sold his house and pulled out of town with his wife and kid to line up, as he put it, something good elsewhere. It was a shock to Morrison to find that the something good elsewhere meant tooling a cab around Manhattan.

He said in distress, “Jeez, I didn’t know, Bill — none of the Hillcrest Road bunch had any idea—”

“That’s what I was hoping for,” said Slade. “It’s all right, man. I always had a feeling I’d sooner or later meet up with one of the old bunch. Now that it happened, I’m just as glad it’s you.” A horn sounding behind the cab prompted Slade to get it moving. “Where to, Larry?”

“Columbus Circle. The Coliseum.”

“Don’t tell me, let me guess. The Majestico Trade Exposition. It’s that time of the year, right?”

“Right,” said Morrison.

“And it’s good politics to show up, right? Maybe one of the brass’ll take notice.”

“You know how it is, Bill.”

“I sure do.” Slade pulled up at a red light and looked around at Morrison. “Say, you’re not in any tearing hurry, are you? You could have time for a cup of coffee?”

There was a day-old stubble on Slade’s face. The cap perched on the back of his graying hair was grimy and sweatstained. Morrison felt unsettled by the sight. Besides, Slade hadn’t been any real friend, just a casual acquaintance living a few blocks farther up Hillcrest Road. One of the crowd on those occasional weekend hunting trips of the Hillcrest Maybe Gun and Rod Club. The “Maybe” had been inserted in jest to cover those bad hunting and fishing weekends when it temporarily became a poker club.

“Well,” Morrison said, “this happens to be one of those heavy Saturdays when—”

“Look, I’ll treat you to the best Danish in town. Believe me, Larry, there’s some things I’d like to get off my chest.”

“Oh, in that case,” said Morrison.

There was a line of driverless cabs in front of a cafeteria on Eighth Avenue. Slade pulled up behind them and led the way into the cafeteria which was obviously a cabbies’ hangout. They had a little wrestling match about the check at the counter, a match Slade won, and, carrying the tray with the coffee and Danish, he picked out a corner table for them.

The coffee was pretty bad, the Danish, as advertised, pretty good. Slade said through a mouthful of it, “And how is Amy?” Amy was Morrison’s wife.

“Fine, fine,” Morrison said heartily. “And how is Gertrude?”

“Gretchen.”

“That’s right. Gretchen. Stupid of me. But it’s been so long, Bill—”

“It has. Almost three years. Anyhow, last I heard of her Gretchen’s doing all right.”

“Last you heard of her?”

“We separated a few months ago. She just couldn’t hack it any more.” Slade shrugged. “My fault mostly. Getting turned down for one worthwhile job after another didn’t sweeten the disposition. And jockeying a cab ten, twelve hours a day doesn’t add sugar to it. So she and the kid have their own little flat out in Queens, and she got herself some kind of cockamamie receptionist job with a doctor there. Helps eke out what I can give her. How’s your pair, by the way? Scott and Morgan, isn’t it? Big fellows now, I’ll bet.”

“Thirteen and ten,” Morrison said. “They’re fine. Fine.”

“Glad to hear it. And the old neighborhood? Any changes?”

“Not really. Well, we did lose a couple of the old-timers. Mike Costanzo and Gordie McKechnie. Remember them?”

“Who could forget Mike, the world’s worst poker player? But McKechnie?”

“That split-level, corner of Hillcrest and Maple. He’s the one got himself so smashed that time in the duck blind that he went overboard.”

“Now I remember. And that fancy shotgun of his, six feet underwater in the mud. Man, that sobered him up fast. What happened to him and Costanzo?”

“Well,” Morrison said uncomfortably, “they were both in Regional Customer Services. Then somebody on the top floor got the idea that Regional and National should be tied together, and some people in both offices had to be let go. I think Mike’s in Frisco now, he’s got a lot of family there. Nobody’s heard from Gordie. I mean—” Morrison cut it short in embarrassment.

“I know what you mean. No reason to get red in the face about it, Larry.” Slade eyed Morrison steadily over his coffee cup. “Wondering what happened to me?”

“Well, to be frank—”

“Nothing like being frank. I put in two years making the rounds, lining up employment agencies, sending out enough résumés to make a ten-foot pile of paper. No dice. Ran out of unemployment insurance, cash, and credit. There it is, short and sweet.”

“But why? With the record you piled up at Majestico—”

“Middle level. Not top echelon. Not decision-making stuff. Middle level, now and forever. Just like everybody else on Hillcrest Road. That’s why we’re on Hillcrest Road. Notice how the ones who make it to the top echelon always wind up on Greenbush Heights? And always after only three or four years? But after you’re middle level fifteen years the way I was—”

Up to now Morrison had been content with his twelve years in Sales Analysis. Admittedly no ball of fire, he had put in some rough years after graduation from college — mostly as salesman on commission for some product or other — until he had landed the job at Majestico. Now he felt disoriented by what Slade was saying. And he wondered irritably why Slade had to wear that cap while he was eating. Trying to prove he was just another one of these cabbies here? He wasn’t. He was a college man, had owned one of the handsomest small properties on Hillcrest Road, had been a respected member of the Majestico executive team.

Morrison said, “I still don’t understand. Are you telling me there’s no company around needs highly qualified people outside decision-making level? Ninety percent of what goes on anyplace is our kind of job, Bill. You know that.”

“I do. But I’m forty-five years old, Larry. And you want to know what I found out? By corporation standards I died five years ago on my fortieth birthday. Died, and didn’t even know it. Believe me, it wasn’t easy to realize that at first. It got a lot easier after a couple of years’ useless job-hunting.”

Morrison was 46 and was liking this less and less. “But the spot you’re in is only temporary, Bill. There’s still—”

“No, no. Don’t do that, Larry. None of that somewhere-over-the-rainbow line. I finally looked my situation square in the eye, I accepted it, I made the adjustment. With luck, what’s in the cards for me is maybe some day owning my own cab. I buy lottery tickets, too, because after all somebody’s got to win that million, right? And the odds there are just as good as my chances of ever getting behind a desk again at the kind of money Majestico was paying me.” Again he was looking steadily at Morrison over his coffee cup. “That was the catch, Larry. That money they were paying me.”

“They pay well, Bill. Say, is that what happened? You didn’t think you were getting your price and made a fuss about it? So when the department went under you were one of the—”

“Hell, no,” Slade cut in sharply. “You’ve got it backwards, man. They do pay well. But did it ever strike you that maybe they pay too well?”

“Too well?”

“For the kind of nine-to-five paperwork I was doing? The donkey work?”

“You were an assistant head of department, Bill.”

“One of the smarter donkeys, that’s all. Look, what I was delivering to the company had to be worth just so much to them. But when every year — every first week in January — there’s an automatic cost-of-living increase handed me I am slowly and steadily becoming a luxury item. Consider that after fourteen-fifteen years of those jumps every year, I am making more than some of those young hotshot executives in the International Division. I am a very expensive proposition for Majestico, Larry. And replaceable by somebody fifteen years younger who’ll start for a hell of a lot less.”

“Now hold it. Just hold it. With the inflation the way it is, you can’t really object to those cost-of-living raises.”

Slade smiled thinly. “Not while I was getting them, pal. It would have meant a real scramble without them. But suppose I wanted to turn them down just to protect my job? You know that can’t be done. Those raises are right there in the computer for every outfit like Majestico. But nobody in management has to like living with it. And what came to me after I was canned was that they were actually doing something about it.”

“Ah, look,” Morrison said heatedly. “You weren’t terminated because you weren’t earning your keep. There was a departmental reorganization. You were just a victim of it.”

“I was. The way those Incas or Aztecs or whatever used to lay out the living sacrifice and stick the knife into him. Don’t keep shaking your head, Larry. I have thought this out long and hard. There’s always a reorganization going on in one of the divisions. Stick a couple of departments together, change their names, dump a few personnel who don’t fit into the new table of organization.

“But the funny thing, Larry, is that the ones who usually seem to get dumped are the middle-aged, middle-level characters with a lot of seniority. The ones whose take-home pay put them right up there in the high-income brackets. Like me. My secretary lost out in that reorganization too, after eighteen years on the job. No complaints about her work. But she ran into what I did when I told them I’d be glad to take a transfer to any other department. No dice. After all, they could hire two fresh young secretaries for what they were now paying her.”

“And you think this is company policy?” Morrison demanded.

“I think so. I mean, what the hell are they going to do? Come to me and say, ‘Well, Slade, after fifteen years on the job you’ve priced yourself right out of the market, so good-bye, baby?’ But those reorganizations? Beautiful. ‘Too bad, Slade, but under the new structure we’re going to have to lose some good men.’ That’s the way it was told to me, Larry. And that’s what I believed until I woke up to the facts of life.”

The piece of Danish in Morrison’s mouth was suddenly dry and tasteless. He managed to get it down with an effort. “Bill, I don’t want to say it — I hate to say it — but that whole line sounds paranoid.”

“Does it? Then think it over, Larry. You still in Sales Analysis?”

“Yes.”

“I figured. Now just close your eyes and make a head count of your department. Then tell me how many guys forty-five or over are in it.”

Morrison did some unpalatable calculation. “Well, there’s six of us. Including me.”

“Out of how many?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Uh-huh. Funny how the grass manages to stay so green, isn’t it?”

It was funny, come to think of it. No, funny wasn’t the word. Morrison said weakly, “Well, a couple of the guys wanted to move out to the Coast, and you know there’s departmental transfers in and out—”

“Sure there are. But the real weeding comes when there’s one of those little reorganizations. You’ve seen it yourself in your own department more than once. Juggle around some of those room dividers. Move some desks here and there. Change a few descriptions in the company directory. The smokescreen. But behind that smoke there’s some high-priced old faithfuls getting called upstairs to be told that, well, somebody’s got to go, Jack, now that things are all different, and guess whose turn it is.”

Slade’s voice had got loud enough to be an embarrassment. Morrison pleaded: “Can’t we keep it down, Bill? Anyhow, to make villains out of everybody on the top floor—”

Slade lowered his voice, but the intensity was still there. “Who said they were villains? Hell, in their place I’d be doing the same thing. For that matter, if I was head of personnel for any big outfit, I wouldn’t take anybody my age on the payroll either. Not if I wanted to keep my cushy job in personnel, I wouldn’t.” The wind suddenly seemed to go out of him. “Sorry, Larry. I thought I had everything under control, but when I saw you — when I saw it was one of the old Hillcrest bunch — it was too much to keep corked up. But one thing—”

“Yes?”

“I don’t want anybody else back there in on this. Know what I mean?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Don’t just toss off the ‘oh, sure’ like that. This is the biggest favor you could do me — not to let anybody else in the old crowd hear about me, not even Amy. No post-mortems up and down Hillcrest for good old Bill Slade. One reason I let myself cut loose right now was because you always were a guy who liked to keep his mouth tight shut. I’m counting on you to do that for me, Larry. I want your solemn word on it.”

“You’ve got it, Bill. You know that.”

“I do. And what the hell” — Slade reached across the table and punched Morrison on the upper arm — “any time they call you in to tell you there’s a reorganization of Sales Analysis coming, it could turn out you’re the guy elected to be department head of the new layout. Right?”

Morrison tried to smile. “No chance of that, Bill.”

“Well, always look on the bright side, Larry. As long as there is one.”

Outside the Coliseum there was another of those little wrestling matches about paying the tab — Slade refusing to take anything at all for the ride, Morrison wondering, as he eyed the meter, whether sensitivity here called for a standard tip, a huge tip, or none at all — and again Slade won.

Morrison was relieved to get away from him, but, as he soon found, the relief was only temporary. It was a fine Indian summer day, but somehow the weather now seemed bleak and threatening. And doing the Majestico show, looking over the displays, passing the time of day with recognizable co-workers turned out to be a strain. It struck him that it hadn’t been that atrocious cap on Slade’s head that had thrown him, it had been the gray hair showing under the cap. And there was very little gray hair to be seen on those recognizable ones here at the Majestico show.

Morrison took a long time at the full-length mirror in the men’s room, trying to get an objective view of himself against the background of the others thronging the place. The view he got was depressing. As far as he could see, in this company he looked every minute of his 46 years.

Back home he stuck to his word and told Amy nothing about his encounter with Slade. Any temptation to was readily suppressed by his feeling that once he told her that much he’d also find himself exposing his morbid reaction to Slade’s line of thinking. And that would only lead to her being terribly understanding and sympathetic while, at the same time, she’d be moved to some heavy humor about his being such a born worrier. He was a born worrier, he was the first to acknowledge it, but he always chafed under that combination of sympathy and teasing she offered him when he confided his worries to her. They really made quite a list, renewable each morning on rising. The family’s health, the condition of the house, the car, the lawn, the bank balance — the list started there and seemed to extend to infinity.

Yet, as he was also the first to acknowledge, this was largely a quirk of personality — he was, as his father had been, somewhat sobersided and humorless — and, quirks aside, life was a generally all-right proposition. As it should be when a man can lay claim to a pretty and affectionate wife, and a couple of healthy young sons, and a sound home in a well-tended neighborhood. And a good steady job to provide the wherewithal.

At least, up to now.

Morrison took a long time falling asleep that night, and at three in the morning came bolt awake with a sense of foreboding. The more he lay there trying to get back to sleep, the more oppressive grew the foreboding. At four o’clock he padded into his den and sat down at his desk to work out a precise statement of the family’s balance sheet.

No surprises there, just confirmation of the foreboding. For a long time now, he and Amy had been living about one month ahead of income which, he suspected, was true of most families along Hillcrest Road. The few it wasn’t true of were most likely at least a year ahead of income and sweating out the kind of indebtedness he had always carefully avoided.

But considering that his assets consisted of a home with ten years of mortgage payments yet due on it and a car with two years of payments still due, everything depended on income. The family savings account was, of course, a joke. And the other two savings accounts — one in trust for each boy to cover the necessary college educations — had become a joke as college tuition skyrocketed. And, unfortunately, neither boy showed any signs of being scholarship material.

In a nutshell, everything depended on income. This month’s income. Going by Slade’s experience in the job market — and Slade had been the kind of competent, hardworking nine-to-five man any company should have been glad to take on — this meant that everything depended on the job with Majestico. Everything. Morrison had always felt that landing the job in the first place was the best break of his life. Whatever vague ambitions he had in his youth were dissolved very soon after he finished college and learned that out here in the real world he rated just about average in all departments, and that his self-effacing, dogged application to his daily work was not going to have him climbing any ladders to glory.

Sitting there with those pages of arithmetic scattered around the desk, Morrison, his stomach churning, struggled with the idea that the job with Majestico was suddenly no longer a comfortable, predictable way of life but for someone his age, and with his makeup and qualifications, a dire necessity. At five o’clock, exhausted but more wide-awake than ever, he went down to the kitchen for a bottle of beer. Pills were not for him. He had always refused to take even an aspirin tablet except under extreme duress, but beer did make him sleepy, and a bottle of it on an empty stomach, he estimated, was the prescription called for in this case. It turned out that he was right about it.

In the days and weeks that followed, this became a ritual: the abrupt waking in the darkest hours of the morning, the time at his desk auditing his accounts and coming up with the same dismal results, and the bottle of beer which, more often than not, allowed for another couple of hours of troubled sleep before the alarm clock went off.

Amy, the soundest of sleepers, took no notice of this, so that was all right. And by exercising a rigid self-control he managed to keep her unaware of those ragged nerves through the daylight hours as well, although it was sometimes unbearably hard not to confide in her. Out of a strange sense of pity, he found himself more sensitive and affectionate to her than ever. High-spirited, a little scatterbrained, leading a full life of her own what with the boys, the Parent-Teachers Club, and half a dozen community activities, she took this as no less than her due.

Along the way, as an added problem, Morrison developed some physical tics which would show up when least expected. A sudden tremor of the hands, a fluttering of one eyelid which he had to learn to quickly cover up. The most grotesque tic of all, however — it really unnerved him the few times he experienced it — was a violent, uncontrollable chattering of the teeth when he had sunk to a certain point of absolute depression. This only struck him when he was at his desk during the sleepless times considering the future. At such times he had a feeling that those teeth were diabolically possessed by a will of their own, chattering away furiously as if he had just been plunged into icy water.

In the office he took refuge in the lowest of low profiles. Here the temptation was to check on what had become of various colleagues who had over the years departed from the company, but this, Morrison knew, might raise the question of why he had, out of a clear sky, brought up the subject. The subject was not a usual part of the day’s conversational currency in the department. The trouble was that Greenbush was, of course, a company town, although in the most modern and pleasant way. Majestico had moved there from New York 20 years before; the town had grown around the company complex. And isolated as it was in the green heartland of New Jersey, it had only Majestico to offer. Anyone leaving the company would therefore have to sell his home, like it or not, and relocate far away. Too far, at least, to maintain old ties. It might have been a comfort, Morrison thought, to drop in on someone in his category who had been terminated by Majestico and who could give him a line on what had followed. Someone other than Slade. But there was no one like this in his book.

The one time he came near bringing his desperation to the surface was at the Thanksgiving entertainment given by the student body of the school his sons attended. The entertainment was a well-deserved success, and after it, at the buffet in the school gym, Morrison was driven to corner Frank Lassman, assistant principal of the school and master of ceremonies at the entertainment, and to come out with a thought that had been encouragingly flickering through his mind during the last few insomniac sessions.

“Great show,” he told Lassman. “Fine school altogether. It showed tonight. It must be gratifying doing your kind of work.”

“At times like this it is,” Lassman said cheerfully. “But there are times—”

“Even so. You know, I once had ideas about going into teaching.”

“Financially,” said Lassman, “I suspect you did better by not going into it. It has its rewards, but the big money isn’t one of them.”

“Well,” Morrison said very carefully, “suppose I was prepared to settle for the rewards it did offer? A man my age, say. Would there be any possibilities of getting into the school system?”

“What’s your particular line? Your subject?”

“Oh, numbers. Call it arithmetic and math.”

Lassman shook his head in mock reproach. “And where were you when we really needed you? Four or five years ago we were sending out search parties for anyone who could get math across to these kids. The last couple of years, what with the falling school population, we’re firing, not hiring. It’s the same everywhere, not that I ever thought I’d live to see the day. Empty school buildings all over the country.”

“I see,” said Morrison.

So the insomnia, tensions, and tics continued to worsen until suddenly one day — as if having hit bottom, there was no place for him to go but up — Morrison realized that he was coming back to normal. He began to sleep through the night, was increasingly at ease during the day, found himself cautiously looking on the bright side. He still had his job and all that went with it, that was the objective fact. He could only marvel that he had been thrown so far off balance by that chance meeting with Slade.

He had been giving himself his own bad time, letting his imagination take over as it had. The one thing he could be proud of was that where someone else might have broken down under the strain, he had battled it out all by himself and had won. He was not a man to hand himself trophies, but in this case he felt he had certainly earned one.

A few minutes before five on the first Monday in December, just when he was getting ready to pack it in for the day, Pettengill, departmental head of Sales Analysis, stopped at his desk. Pettengill, a transfer from the Cleveland office a couple of years before, was rated as a comer, slated sooner or later for the top floor. A pleasant-mannered, somewhat humorless man, he and Morrison had always got along well.

“Just had a session with the brass upstairs,” he confided. “A round table with Cobb presiding.” Cobb was the executive vice president in charge of Planning and Structure for the Greenbush complex. “Looks like our department faces a little reorganization. We tie in with Service Analysis and that’ll make it Sales and Service Evaluation. What’s the matter? Don’t you feel well?”

“No, I’m all right,” said Morrison.

“Looks like you could stand some fresh air. Anyhow, probably because you’re senior man here, Cobb wants to see you in his office first thing tomorrow morning. Nine sharp. You know how he is about punctuality, Larry. Make sure you’re on time.”

“Yes,” said Morrison.

He didn’t sleep at all that night. The next morning, a few minutes before nine, still wearing his overcoat and with dark glasses concealing his reddened and swollen eyes, he took the elevator directly to the top floor. There, out of sight on the landing of the emergency staircase, he drew the barrel and stock of his shotgun from beneath the overcoat and assembled the gun. His pockets bulged with 12-gauge shells. He loaded one into each of the gun’s twin barrels. Then concealing the assembled gun beneath the coat as well as he could, he walked across the hall into Cobb’s office.

Miss Bernstein, Cobb’s private secretary, acted out of sheer blind, unthinking instinct when she caught sight of the gun. She half-rose from her desk as if to bar the way to the inner office. She took the first charge square in the chest. Cobb, at his desk, caught the next in the face. Reloading, Morrison exited through the door to the executive suite where Cobb’s assistants had been getting ready for the morning’s work and were now in a panic at the sound of the shots.

Morrison fired both barrels one after another, hitting one man in the throat and jaw, grazing another. Reloading again, he moved like an automaton out into the corridor where a couple of security men, pistols at the ready, were coming from the staircase on the run. Morrison cut down the first one, but the other, firing wildly, managed to plant one bullet in his forehead. Morrison must have been dead, the medical examiner later reported, before he even hit the floor.

The police, faced with five dead and one wounded, put in two months on the case and could come up with absolutely no answers, no explanations at all. The best they could do in their final report was record that “the perpetrator, for reasons unknown, etc., etc.”

Management, however, could and did take action. They learned that the Personnel Department psychologist who had put Morrison through the battery of personality-evaluation tests given every applicant for a job was still there with the company. Since he had transparently failed in those tests to sound out the potentially aberrant behavior of the subject, he was, despite sixteen years of otherwise acceptable service, terminated immediately.

Two weeks later, his place in Personnel was filled by a young fellow named McIntyre who, although the starting pay was a bit low, liked the looks of Greenbush and, with his wife in complete agreement, saw it as just the kind of quiet, pleasant community in which to settle down permanently.