Buyer beware

24

Alison's apartment wasn't the worst place to hide. It was on the seventh floor, and large, filled with modern furniture that somehow managed to appear comfortable. The pale walls were graced with multicolored inkblot paintings that seemed to be there more for the brown and yellow color scheme than for art. Two wide glass doors led to a garden balcony, the ledges of which were lined with narrow planters of tangled green vines.

Alison looked around, glanced at me as if surprised not to see Joan Clark in the apartment. Then she walked to a closed door and knocked on it.

"Joan? It's me, Alison. You can come out."

Alison was about to knock again when the door opened slowly and Joan Clark stepped out.

When she saw me, her slender body gave a slight backward jerk, and her large dark eyes darted sideways to question Alison mutely. She was wearing a wrinkled gray pants suit that distorted her slender curves, and her hand raised as if by helium and clutched her jacket closed in woman's universal reaction to distress.

"This is Alo Nudger, Joan," Alison said gently.

Joan stared at me, without surprise now. She looked worse than her photograph. The upturned nose lent her a wary, haunted expression that matched the hollowness of her eyes. Her hair was much lighter than in her snapshots, cut short and carelessly tousled.

"Alison's told me about you," she said in a calm voice. She was about to say something else, then caught herself and stared at me with cautious appraisal.

"You don't have to worry now about Congram or Gratuity Insirance," I said.

Something flared in her eyes for a second, something I couldn't decipher. "You know about them?"

"Just enough," I said. "I'd like for you to tell me the rest. It's the only way now, the best way."

She seemed to withdraw to someplace beyond me to consider that, walking absently to a chocolate-colored sofa and sitting lightly.

"You're working for my father," she said, as if it were an accusation.

"And for you, Joan. At this point your interests are the same."

Alison sat next to her, rested a soft hand on her arm. "He's right, Joan. You should see your only way out of it now. Do what he asks."

Joan laughed, almost a bitter sort of cough, and looked up at me. "You're not going to tell me my father's concerned with my safety?"

I shook my head. "I'm not going to pass judgment on your father. All I said was that your interests coincide."

"I don't have to go back."

"No, and if you do go, you don't have to stay."

Joan leaned back on the sofa, breathed out her uncertainty and tension in a long sigh. She'd reached a decision; for everybody's sake, I hoped the right one.

"All right," she said, "what do you want me to do?"

I sat opposite her in an armless chair. "From the beginning, tell me about Victor Talbert and Gratuity Insurance."

She didn't move; her dark eyes locked on something low and invisible on the other side of the room. "I loved Vic… We loved each other. And things were beautiful until he lost his job." Now she did look at me, frowning and haggard despite her youth. "You have to understand what losing the job meant to Vic, what a crushing thing it was to him. He was ambitious, hard working and dedicated-not just to his job but to everything he did. The idea that he might fail never entered his mind, because he wouldn't let it. Nobody wanted success more, or feared failure as much."

I waited for her to continue and didn't say I could have introduced her to more than a few Victor Talberts.

"Vic tried to get another job," Joan continued, "and he could have had several with starting salaries and responsibilities below what he considered his level. He refused them, out of personal and professional pride. Then he decided to go into business for himself, and he went all over trying to get financing, but no one would give him a loan. That's when he began to get sour on himself, really depressed, and that's when Jerry Congram came along."

"Had he known Talbert before?"

"No, Congram said his 'research and recruiting department" had recommended Vic to him. Vic was impressed with Jerry. So was I and so was everybody. Jerry can tell you things, make you believe in yourself, make you believe almost anything. When he was gone, sometimes you'd begin to wonder… But then he'd be back, with all his fire and all his belief. I'll admit, Vic and I were dazzled, and Vic had hope again, and something to suit his abilities."

"A position with Gratuity Insurance?"

Joan nodded her head, kept it bowed.

"Joan, I need to know how Gratuity Insurance works, how many people are involved."

She didn't hesitate. "There were fifteen, including Vic. I wasn't actually an employee, but I was going to be and Congram trusted me. Congram recruited junior executives and other strongly business-oriented people to work for him. He was very careful; he'd learn everything about someone before even considering approaching them for recruitment. Everyone has to be loyal to him, ambitious, aggressive, and believe in the system."

"What system?"

She looked at me curiously and moved an arm in an encompassing wave. "Why, everything… the way things work. Only without the hindrance of self-doubt. Jerry believes in realism without rationalization, self-honesty and the decisiveness to act on fact and not fancy…" She seemed to realize that she was parroting someone else's words and thoughts, and her voice faded. Her jaw muscles flexed and she swallowed before continuing.

"Every Gratuity employee is extensively trained," she said, "before actually being used in the field. A trained agent will gain audience with a carefully chosen top executive on whatever pretense will work best. Then, in private, the agent implies that one of the few in the business hierarchy above the chosen executive has sent him, and if Gratuity's instructions are followed, certain obstacles to advancement will be removed."

She was parroting again, but telling me what I wanted to know.

"If the executive doesn't follow Gratuity's instructions, he'll suffer the consequences. Sometimes that would be an arranged accident, or even a false suicide complete with a note the victim was forced to sign. The agent instructs the executive to bring about some minor policy changes that will in some obscure way benefit one or more of his superiors. All this is used for is a convincer. Then the executive is assured that what is happening to him is now common practice, and surely he must understand, as did his superiors, that if he goes to the police or in any way fails to comply, not only will he destroy his career, but he must be killed as a matter of minimizing projected risk factors. The names of other Gratuity subjects like himself are mentioned to him and he's warned not to contact them. These are names of subjects who are classified as risks. When some of these names appear in the obituary columns, it serves as the clincher on the deal. At that point the executive is instructed to send large sums of company money to an anonymous address, which is how Gratuity Insurance derives its income. When a predetermined sum, which only Jerry knows, is reached, the company will be liquidated."

"It boils down to simple extortion," I said.

Joan's eyes were vague and dark, somehow innocent. "It's simply business, Mr. Nudger, business without hypocrisy." She seemed to realize what she'd said and looked away. But there was nothing to look at but extortion and murder, and her own fear.

"How many 'projected risk factors' were actually killed?" I asked.

"I don't know… A small percentage, according to Jerry. After the initial contact, the subject is watched closely for a while. Sometimes, if he does anything suspicious, Gratuity breaks off all contact with him rather than eliminate him and use him as an example. And if a subject goes to the police, he won't be killed. Too much danger to the operation."

"The operation, the company, was everything, wasn't it?"

"It was more important than any one of us," Joan said with fervor, despite the past tense. "Jerry held meetings as often as possible, and each meeting began with a short oath of allegiance to the company. There was no way not to be caught up in the zealousness and the feeling of purpose."

"What made Victor Talbert want out?"

"Jerry was away for more than a week, long enough for his personality and his ideas to lose some of their effect on us. And Vic got his loan. It was too late then- Jerry would never let him go. But Vic knew he could have made it without Congram and Gratuity, and that seemed to change him. We decided to run."

"From the apartment on Oakner?"

She seemed surprised as she nodded, raking her fingers through her mussed hair in an oddly careless gesture.

"Why did you choose Layton, feeling as you do about your father?"

"Vic and I knew what would happen if Gratuity found us. We thought that by giving the impression we were under my father's protection, even if we really weren't, it might stop them or at least give us time. So we moved to a little house in Layton, calling ourselves David and Joan Branly, and kept it a secret from everyone."

"How did you sell that idea to Melissa?"

"We let her continue to call herself Melissa Clark, and we told some of the neighbors I was divorced and she'd kept her father's name."

"But Congram found you," I said.

"Yes, and he tried to talk us into rejoining Gratuity. Jerry promised Vic everything-money, position… He was convincing. But Vic refused and I chose to stay with him. We swore to Jerry we'd keep our former affiliation with Gratuity a secret, and he pretended to believe us on the basis that we'd be incriminating ourselves if we talked. But he showed us a newspaper with a story about a Gratuity-arranged death, and he had the back of the house sprayed with bullets that night to demonstrate how easily he could deal with us if we did talk. I think he really did all that just to convince us that he thought we were scared enough to remain silent, and to make us think he was sincere about leaving us alone. But all he was doing was trying to figure out the best way to get rid of us without suspicion. Vic and I didn't believe him, and we decided to move again. Then Vic…"

"I know," I said, thinking of the photos of the young man in the blood-spattered jacket.

Joan clenched her fists hard enough to whiten the flesh. "I didn't know what to do… I was terrified, for myself and for Melissa. I packed what I could. I didn't dare take Melissa; I was afraid she might be killed along with me. So I left her with the next-door neighbor and took a bus to Orlando."

Probably that was what Congram wanted, I thought, to get her away from Layton to where she could be killed without an intensive investigation, just another unidentifiable corpse in the bowels of some large city.

"I didn't know what to do," Joan said, "where to go. I left Orlando. Then I stayed in New Orleans for a while, but I never felt safe, and I was running out of money and hope. Finally I thought of Alison, the things she'd done for me, how she'd told me to come to her if I ever needed help. And I remembered what she did for a living."

And wound up here with very little hope, 1 thought. I felt sorrow for Joan Clark, for whom a lot of things had ended, if not her life.

"You have to understand, Mr. Nudger, Gratuity employees don't see themselves as criminals. We-they are ambitious and aggressive business people, in a close-knit enterprise, who simply are carrying the precepts of business to ultimate reaches, where they're headed anyway." The autonomous voice had taken over again, the rote excuses for exploitation and murder. "Visionaries ahead of their time," she added, "no more criminals than the manufacturers of unsafe but profitable products that endanger life, no more extortionists than the lobbyists who twist the appropriate arms with personal knowledge to gain favorable treatment. Vic wasn't evil. He became what Congram told him he was-a genuinely honest businessman, a pragmatist without rationalization or apology."

"Do you believe that, Joan?"

Her body was trembling. "I did… and some of it I still do."

I understood her lingering belief. Gratuity's success depended upon its victims' believing that someone above them in their organization would employ polished potential killers in the course of business. And with relatively few exceptions, like Manners and Blount, the victims believed-and paid.

I couldn't blame them. I'd have paid. Manners and Blount and Tad Osborne should have paid.

"Melissa is with Gordon," I told Joan.

"I know. Alison found out for me. I was afraid to try to see her."

"You'll see her shortly," I said. "Then I'd like you to see your father."

"Is it safe? Is it over?"

"Almost. The dangerous part."

I could see that something in her mind rejected what I'd said while every other part of her wanted to accept it. Her thin body squirmed on the sofa, and she began to cry away the part that rejected.

Alison hugged her, appeared close to crying herself. Wouldn't that have been something to see? I got up, paced, and casually brushed the moisture that threatened my own right eye.

I used Alison's phone to call Dale Carlon. After explaining the situation to him and accepting his thanks, I let him talk to Joan.

Whatever his reasons, Carlon must have expressed heartfelt relief to Joan at finding her safe, because by the time she'd hung up the phone I could tell that things were at least bearable between father and daughter.

"What now?" Alison asked.

"Now you stay here with Joan," I said. "For the time being, this is still the safest place for her."

"Where are you going?"

"Where you wanted me to go in the first place. The police."

I told Joan and Alison that I'd be back and left the apartment, thinking of my soon-to-be fifty-thousand-dollar bank account. The drop in the elevator was somehow soothing, like a dropping away from my problems.

It's that way sometimes after you've punched the down button.