Buyer beware

20

Alison's room at the Clairbank was large and comfortable. It lacked the careful color and style coordination of chain hotel rooms. The long triple dresser didn't quite match the smaller dresser on the opposite wall, two overstuffed wing chairs looked more like they belonged in an English men's club than a hotel room, and the flowered spread on the double bed matched neither beige carpet nor heavy drapes. The overall effect was one almost of hominess.

I could see a gleam in Alison's shrewd eyes as I told her what Craig Blount's name has evoked from Elizabeth Manners. Alison began to realize then, I think, that I was holding back a great deal from her.

"You're right about Gratuity Insurance," she said. "No such company is listed with-"

"I know," I told her, "it's been checked and double-checked."

She was wearing a tailored pinstriped outfit that couldn't subdue the curves of her lean body, and I found myself wondering if she would approach sex with her usual brisk and cool efficiency. The feline something in her eyes and the generous arc of her lower lip told me that wasn't likely.

"Where did you get the name of a fictitious insurance company?" she asked, pausing before the window in fetching silhouette.

"It's cropped up throughout my investigation. Now it's a link between Manners and Blount, two men who don't seem to be linked in any other way."

"Nudger," she said, "could you tell me what, precisely, you're investigating?"

I smiled and shook my head. "We agreed from the beginning there'd be some things I wouldn't tell you."

She narrowed an eye but didn't argue. "What do we do now?" she asked.

I was glad she said "we," because right now I needed her. "Can you draw up a list of the business establishment's top executives, nationwide?"

The suggestion didn't throw her. "How many names?"

"How about the top fifty? Not the obvious multimillionaires-the corporation men."

Alison walked to the writing desk, drummed long-nailed fingers on smooth polished wood. "What do you intend to do with the list?"

"I want you to use your professional status to contact the secretaries or other satellite personalities who surround these men. Let them know that you want to be notified immediately if they hear of a Gratuity Insurance appointment. Can you do it?"

"Not as easily as you make it sound." She caressed her chin in thought. "How about my drawing up a list of the top people with whom I have connections, or with whose satellite personalities I have connections? I can't guarantee they'll be in the top fifty, but I feel safe to say they could all make the top hundred or two."

"That should help."

"And I can talk to the heads of some secretarial organizations," Alison said, picking up enthusiasm. They can get the word out to their members to phone if they hear anything about Gratuity."

That was something I hadn't thought of, and it put the plan well into the realm of workability. "That's good," I told her. "The list doesn't have to read like a who's who. I want the names of executives in the same league as the men who died."

"Big league, but not the superstars," Alison said. She took a well-worn portable electric typewriter from the closet and set it on the desk. Then she dug through her luggage and came out with an expandable card- board file and several flat leather-bound books. "This is going to take a long time," she said.

"Most everything worthwhile does," I told her sagely, myself doubting the wisdom of that pronouncement. "I'll look in on you later."

"Where are you going?"

"To see about some stocks."

As I closed the door behind me, I heard the ratchety sound of paper being rolled into the typewriter.

At the Gilford and Hollis brokerage firm, I talked to a broker's representative and got a prospectus on each of the five companies that had employed the dead executives whose names had been given to me by Alison, plus a prospectus on Widow Cable.

I sat in a chair behind a low wooden railing, among several stricken-looking gentlemen who stared at the constantly sideways-traveling ribbon of the big board's lighted numerals, those numerals depicting the rise and fall of stock prices and men's fortunes in eighths of dollars. Now and then one of the men would seem to break the mesmeric spell of the lighted board, get up and walk over to check a teletype or speak in soft tones to one of the busy representatives at a row of desks beyond the railing. I was sure no one would disturb me as I settled back to examine the first prospectus, telling me in accountant's language all about a company called Avec-Stern.

A great deal of time, concentration and occasional help from one of the broker's representatives revealed no common denominator among the six companies for which the dead men had toiled. The main businesses of the companies were diverse: industrial cable, shoe manufacturing, heavy drilling equipment, bottling, trucking, and importing. Except for the bottling firm and heavy drilling equipment manufacturer, business was down the past several quarters for each company-at least on paper. And there had been no recent dramatic movement in the prices of their stocks. The broker's rep advised against my buying into any of them-except, possibly, the bottling firm.

Using a pay phone, I called Brian Cheevers and asked him if Witlow Cable had ever done business with any of the other companies. He promised to check, but his answer was a tentative no.

Outside the brokerage house I sat on a bench and tried to piece something together from what I'd learned inside. The weather was clear, and it wasn't so hot today. The sun felt good on my face and shoulders. I leaned back with my eyes half closed, watching through a haze the bright, multicolored stream of traffic, wondering if anything would ever fit together again for me.

Lornee was gone; and the children, gone, not just from me but from the world in which I lived. Life had taken a sudden, unpredictable direction, and now things seemed either too real or unreal, by turns. What was I doing here, on a curbside bench in Los Angeles, the sun on my face and a cold weight in my heart, full of fear and uncertainty as I goaded for greed the possibility of my violent death? What was anybody doing anywhere? I needed a drink.

But I knew better. I stood and moved away from the sun-warmed bench and the debilitating melancholy that I both courted and hated. As the traffic light changed and I crossed the concrete street in the sanctuary between parallel lines, I felt like an unreal man in an unreal city. The L.A. syndrome. This wasn't the place for me.

When I got back to the Clairbank, Alison had just finished telephoning, running up an enormous bill. I told her not to worry about the cost, that it came out of expenses.

"Maybe we can collect on it twice," she said, "me from my magazine and you from your client."

It occurred to me that I might want to sleep with her so I could reform her, but that didn't sound reasonable.

She leaned back from the phone, stiffly flexing the fingers of her right hand. Then she took her half-smoked cigarette from the ashtray, drew on it, and released thick smoke from her mouth sensuously, as if that were some exotic power she alone possessed and the cigarette had nothing to do with it.

"Getting cooperation?" I asked.

Alison laughed. "Of course. They're all afraid I'll write something nasty about their company and they'll lose their jobs."

"Did anyone you talked to know anything about Gratuity?"

"No. I thought they might, too. It would have saved us the trouble of waiting for a call."

"Maybe we won't have to wait long," I said. "Gratuity is pretty active for a nonexistent company." I tried not to show my disappointment at hearing that none of the people Alison had phoned knew anything about Gratuity. Maybe I expected too much. Interlocked and overlapping as the business world was, it was a vast world nonetheless.

Alison's telephone would have to be answerable at all times, so I offered to take a room at the Clairbank to spell her if she wanted to get out of the hotel. But she assured me that wasn't necessary, that she had volumes of work to do and would be glad to stay cooped up in her hotel room to do it while waiting for the phone call that might not come. Television would supply the entertainment; room service, the food.

I took a room at the Clairbank anyway.

During the next few days I got better acquainted with Alison, though not to the degree I had in mind. Maybe there was something to the "opposites attract" theory, because we seemed to hold opposite opinions on almost every subject. Or maybe Alison intrigued me because I didn't know how much of her was an act and how much was genuine. Sometimes she would say things in a certain tone, with a certain unguarded expression, and I would glimpse, beneath her surface, something like the fear that knotted my insides. Her facts and figures and cold logic, then, seemed a device to hold off a world that puzzled and frightened her.

On the third day, Alison's phone rang and I picked up the receiver. The call was from Chicago, and it was for Alison. I handed her the receiver and watched her cool and perfect features as she listened. As she replaced the receiver, she smiled a smile from one of those Italian Renaissance paintings.

"Somebody representing Gratuity Insurance has a nine o'clock appointment tomorrow morning in St. Louis with Tad Osborne, divisional manager of Heath Industries."

"What do you know about Osborne?"

"He's in his late forties, worked his way up through the sales division of Gayton Equipment, left them about five years ago to take over at Heath, an electronics component manufacturer with a lot of government contract work."

"How would you say Osborne ranks in the scheme of things with the six who died? In prestige, income, responsibility?"

Alison twisted a turquoise ring on her finger as she thought. "Generally they're in the same league, VIPs, but not the top men." She stood, looking at me expectantly, wondering, now, how we were going to act on the information we'd come up with.

"We should be able to get a flight to St. Louis today," I said.

"That's no problem," Alison said. "I have the airline schedules. The problem, as I see it, is getting Tad Osborne's cooperation."

"Leave that to me," I told her with some pleasure, watching her cock her head with inquisitive surprise.

Alison's lips parted, and I thought she was going to ask me how I was going to handle Osborne, but she said, "I'll get reservations on the next available flight."

We had two hours until flight time. I left Alison to her packing and went to my room and phoned Dale Carlon.