Hit and Run

I

Roger Aitken was the kind of boss who never mixed his home life with his business life. It wasn’t until he fell down the Plaza Grill steps and broke his leg that I went to his home and I met his wife.

It had never bothered me that he hadn’t ever invited me back to his house. To my thinking there is nothing worse than the Big Wheel who looks on his employees as part of his family. I have always regarded the man who invites his employees to his home for a monthly nightmare dinner where no one dares take a drink or raise his voice as a boss to be avoided like a plague.

There was nothing like that about Roger Aitken. He was strictly the feudal type of boss. He picked the men and women who worked for him with searching care, paid them a quarter more than any other advertising agency, and if they didn’t make good in their first week, he’d put his foot under their tails and out they’d go. You weren’t given a second chance with Aitken: it was strictly deliver or out!

Before coming to work for the International and Pacific Agency, the biggest and best agency on the coast and which was managed by Aitken, I had been working for a crummy little outfit that had one foot in the financial grave, and a boss who was later hauled off to a home for incurable alcoholics. This was some two years ago. At the time I remember I was sitting at my desk wrestling with a scheme to promote a new kind of dish-washer that couldn’t even shift the gravy stains off a plate when I had a call from Roger Aitken’s secretary. She said Aitken wanted to talk to me on a personal matter and would I come over around six o’clock?

I knew Aitken, of course, by reputation. I knew he ran the agency for a board of rich business men and had made a wonderful thing out of it. Naturally enough I wondered if he were going to offer me a job. Naturally enough I was pretty excited: a job with the International was the ambition of every ad man on the coast.

At six, dead on the second, I was in his outer office, and at five past six, I was standing before his desk, getting the treatment from a pair of steely blue eyes that went through to the back of my head like the proverbial hot knife through the proverbial pat of butter.

Aitken was a big man, just over six foot two, massively built, with a whisky complexion, a mouth like a gin trap and a high executive’s aggressive jaw. He was around fifty-seven and thick around the middle, but if it was fat, it was hard, solid fat. He looked the kind of man who kept himself in pretty good condition.

He stared at me for maybe ten seconds before he got up and thrust out his hand with a knucklecracking grip.

‘You Chester Scott?’ he demanded in a voice you could hear in the outer office without having your ear to the keyhole.

I don’t know who else he thought I could be since I had had to give my name to at least four minor officials before breaking into his office.

I said I was Chester Scott.

He opened a file on his desk and tapped the contents with a thick finger.

‘This your work?’

The folder contained about two dozen layouts clipped from various newspapers and journals I had been working on over a period of four or five months.

I said they were my work.

He closed the folder and began to prowl around the room.

‘They’re not bad,’ he said. ‘I can use a man like you. What are they paying you?’

I told him.

He paused in his prowling to stare at me as if he wasn’t sure if he had heard aright.

‘Do you know you’re worth more?’

I said I did.

‘Then why haven’t you done something about it?’

I said I had been pretty busy recently and hadn’t had time to get around to it.

‘Work more important to you than money, huh?’

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ I said. ‘It’s just that I’ve been pretty busy.’

He stared at me some more, then went behind his desk and sat down.

‘I’ll give you a hundred a week more than you’re getting now: you can start Monday.’

That’s how I came to work for the International.

And now, two years after this meeting, I was second in charge and only responsible to Aitken himself. I was pulling down a salary that two years ago would have seemed just a pipe dream. I had a Cadillac convertible, a three-bedroom bungalow that faced the sea, a Filipino boy to take care of me, and a respectable balance in the bank.

Don’t imagine I moved into this class by sitting on my seat and smoking cigarettes. When you go to work for Aitken, you go to work. I was at my desk at nine o’clock every morning, including Saturdays, and there were times when I didn’t get away until around midnight. If the International paid well, Aitken took good care he got his pound of flesh. I don’t think I have ever worked so hard, but I enjoyed it, and I had a good team working with me: every one of them was a hand-picked Aitken man or woman, and that meant something. I was sitting right on top of the world. I looked set to go on sitting right on top of the world, but it didn’t work out that way.

One hot July evening, the whole set-up suddenly exploded in my face. I was working late at the office. The time was just after nine o’clock. Only Pat Henessey, my secretary, and Joe Fellowes, my layout artist, were with me. The rest of the staff had gone home. We were working on a promotion scheme to put over a new toilet soap. It was a big job, with a TV hook-up and a two-million-dollar allocation.

Fellowes was showing me some pulls of the ad he intended to run in the weeklies: good stuff, and Pat and I were chewing the rag about it when the telephone bell on Pat’s desk came alive.

She went over and lifted the receiver.

Pat was a lovely looking girl: tall and long-legged with honey-colour hair, big blue eyes and a complexion that looked too good to be real, but was. She was around twenty-six and as sharp as a razor. She and I worked as a team. Without her to nudge my memory I would have been hard pressed to keep pace with the stuff Aitken kept piling into my lap.

I didn’t pay any attention to what she was saying on the telephone. Joe and I were altering one of his layouts. I wasn’t too satisfied with the girl he was using as a model.

‘Look, Joe, if a girl had a bosom like this in real life,’ I said, ‘she’d get it caught in the first revolving door she tried to go through.’

‘That’s the idea,’ Joe said with his direct simplicity. ‘That’s exactly what I want to convey. I want the fellas, as soon as they see this ad, to ask themselves what a dame like this one does when she gets to a revolving door. It’s a psychological drawing.’

I threw the layout at him, but that didn’t stop me from laughing, then Pat hung up and said in her quiet calm voice, ‘Mr. Aitken has broken his leg.’

‘Now if you had said he had broken his neck…’ Joe began, then broke off to gape. ‘You kidding?’

Pat looked at me.

‘That was Mr. Aitken’s housekeeper,’ she said. ‘Mr. Aitken slipped on the steps of the Plaza Grill. He has broken his leg.’

‘That’s just like R.A.,’ Joe said unfeelingly. ‘Trust him to break his leg somewhere high-toned. Did she say which leg?’

‘Will you shut up, Joe?’ I said. To Pat: ‘Where is he? In hospital?’

‘They took him home. He wants you. The housekeeper said for you to go right on over.’

It was then I realized I didn’t even know where Aitken lived.

‘Where do I find him?’ I asked, getting to my feet.

‘He has a little shack out on Palm Boulevard,’ Joe said with a cynical smile. ‘A twenty-fourbedroom job with a lounge big enough to serve as a bus garage; just a throw away: a weekend cabin.’

I ignored him, looking at Pat.

‘The Gables, Palm Boulevard,’ she said briskly. ‘Third house up on the right.’

She began to open drawers and files, taking out papers and dumping them in a folder.

‘What are you up to?’ I asked, staring at her.

‘You may need these. I can’t imagine R.A. wants to see you so you can hold his hand. There’s a board meeting tomorrow. You’ll have to handle it. He’ll want to see all the papers, and here they are,’ and she thrust the folder at me.

‘But he’s broken his leg! He won’t want to talk business.

‘He’ll be in pain. Maybe they’ll have given him a shot by now.’

‘I’d take them, Ches,’ Pat said seriously. ‘You could need them.’

And as it turned out, she was right. I did need them.

The Gables was a vast house standing in a two-acre garden with a view over the sea and the distant hills. I wouldn’t have said it had twenty-four bedrooms, but it had at least ten. It was a nice house: the kind of house I would have liked to have owned. The kind of house your friends would have to admire even if they secretly hated you.

There was a fair-sized swimming-pool to the left of the house and a four-car garage which housed R.A.’s Bentley, a Cadillac tourer, a Buick estate wagon and T.R.2 runabout.

The garden, a mass of rose trees, begonias, petunias and such like, was floodlit. The swimmingpool was floodlit too, and looked lonely as I drove up the sanded drive: it was the kind of pool that would only look its best when dressed with bikini-clad beauties.

I was slightly stunned by this affluence. I knew R.A. was a Big Wheel, but I had no idea his earnings could run to a show this big and this lavish.

I left my car, toiled up twenty marble steps that led to the front door and rang the bell.

There was the usual short delay before the door opened and a tall, fat man wearing an English butler’s outfit raised white eyebrows at me. I learned later his name was Watkins, and he had been imported from England at a considerable cost.

‘I’m Chester Scott,’ I said. ‘Mr. Aitken is expecting me.’

‘Yes, sir. Will you step this way?’

I followed him through a large hall, down some stairs and into a room R.A. obviously used as his workroom. There was a desk, a dictaphone, four lounging chairs, a radio and about two thousand books lining the walls.

‘How is he?’ I asked as Watkins turned on the lights and made ready to fold his tent and steal away into the distant spaces of the house.

‘As comfortable as can be expected, sir,’ he told me in a voice a mortician would have envied. ‘If you will wait a few minutes, I will tell him you have arrived.’

He went away, and I took a turn around the room, staring at the book titles.

After a while Watkins came back.

‘Mr. Aitken will see you now.’

Clutching the bulky folder Pat had forced on to me, I followed him along a passage and into an elevator that hauled us up two storeys. We walked across a fair-sized landing to a door, Watkins rapped, turned the handle and stood aside.

‘Mr. Scott, sir.’

Aitken was lying in a single divan type of bed. The room was large and one hundred per cent masculine. The drapes were drawn back from the big window that looked on to the moon-lit sea.

Aitken looked as he always looked, except it seemed odd to find him lying down instead of standing up. He had a cigar between his teeth, and there were papers strewn over the bedspread. A bedside lamp made a pool of light around him, the rest of the room was in shadows.

‘Come in, Scott,’ he said, and I could tell by the rasp in his voice that he was pretty testy. This is something, isn’t it? Pull up a chair. I’m going to make some fool pay for this! I’ve sent my attorney down to take a look at those steps: they’re a damn death trap. I’m going to sue the ears off them for this, but that doesn’t mend my leg.’

I pulled up a chair near him and sat down. I started to express my sympathy, but he brushed that aside.

‘Save it,’ he said irritably. Talking about it won’t do any good. I’m going to be out of action for at least four weeks if I can believe that fool of a doctor. When you get to my age and weight a broken leg can be tricky. If I don’t watch out, I’ll be lame, and that’s one thing I’m not going to be. So I’ll have to stick here. There’s that board meeting tomorrow. You’ll have to handle it.’ He stared at me. ‘Think you can do it?’

This was no time to be modest.

‘You tell me how you want it handled,’ I said, ‘and I’ll handle it.’

‘Got the papers with you?’

That’s when I blessed Pat. I would have looked four kinds of a dumb cluck if I hadn’t listened to her. I took the papers from the folder and offered them to him.

He looked at me for a long ten seconds, then his hard face creased into the resemblance of a smile.

‘You know, Scott,’ he said as he took the papers, ‘you’re a pretty smart fella. What made you bring these? What made you imagine I wouldn’t be laid low and unable to work?’

‘I couldn’t imagine you being laid low, Mr. Aitken,’ I said. ‘You’re a man who isn’t laid low easily.’

‘That’s a fact.’ I could see I had said absolutely the right thing. He put the papers down and reached forward to knock ash off his cigar into the ash-tray on the bedside table.

‘Tell me something, Scott: have you got any money?’

This unexpected question startled me, and for a moment I stared at him.

‘I have just over twenty thousand dollars,’ I said.

It was his turn to look surprised.

‘Twenty thousand, eh? As much as that?’ Then he chuckled. This was the first time since I had known him I had ever seen him look jovial. ‘I guess I haven’t given you much time to spend your money, huh?’

‘It’s not that bad,’ I said. ‘Most of it came to me in a legacy.’

‘I’ll tell you why I asked,’ he said. ‘I’m getting tired of working for a bunch of egg-heads. I’m planning to set up on my own in New York. For the next four weeks you’re going to run the International. I’ll tell you what to do, but you’ll have to do it, and there will be times when you will have to make a snap decision without consulting me. I don’t expect you to keep calling me up and asking me this and that. I’ll give you the broad policy to work on, but you will have to implement it. If you make a success of it, and when I get back, I’ll give you a chance every man in this racket would give his ears to have. I’ll make you my partner in New York if you are willing to put your money into the business. It’ll mean you’ll run the place up there while I keep die International going. That way both of us will make a lot of money, Scott. What do you think?’

‘Why, sure.’ I sat forward, my heart thumping. ‘You can count on me, Mr. Aitken.’

‘Okay, we’ll see. You run the International without a mistake and you’re in. Slip up and you’re out. Understand?’

I hadn’t any time to think what this chance would mean, for we got right down then to the board meeting, but later, when I had the time to think about it, I realized how big this chance could be. It could easily give me the opportunity to break into Aitken’s class, and sooner or later set up on my own. With a twenty-thousand-dollar stake, with the opportunities New York can offer to a go-ahead advertising man and with Aitken’s backing, I really had a chance, as he had said, that any man in the racket would give his ears to have.

I was with Aitken for two and a half hours: going through the board meeting minutes, and then on to policy matters that he would have had to tackle himself during the coming week. Pat had given me every paper we needed. She hadn’t missed out on one, and that made a big impression on Aitken. Finally, around eleven-thirty, a tall, thin woman in a black silk dress, who I afterwards learned was Mrs. Hepple, his housekeeper, came in and broke it up.

‘It’s time you had a little sleep now, Mr. Roger,’ she said with a I’m-standing-no-nonsense-fromyou expression in her eyes. ‘Dr. Schulberg said you had to be asleep by eleven, and it’s gone half past.’

I expected R.A. to tell her to go to hell, but he didn’t.

‘That damned quack,’ he grumbled, not looking at her as he pushed the collection of papers towards me. ‘Well, all right. Take this junk, will you, Scott?’

As I put the papers in the folder, he went on: ‘This is what I’ll have to put up with for the next four weeks. Give me a call as soon as the board meeting is over. Watch out for Templeman. He’s the trouble maker. Come and see me tomorrow night. I want to know how you’re handling the Wasserman account. That and Beauty Soap have got to be watched every second or we’ll lose them.’

I said I would take care of everything, hoped he would get a good sleep and eased myself out of the room.

I crossed to the elevator, pushed the call button, but nothing happened. Someone who had used the elevator must have left the grille gate open, I decided, and I moved along the corridor to the stairs.

Half-way down, I saw below me a landing with several doors opening on to it. One of the doors stood wide open, and a light came out and made a bright rectangular pattern on the green-and-white carpet.

The carpet on the stairs was thick and muffled my footfalls. I guess that was why she hadn’t heard me coming down.

She was standing before a full-length mirror, looking at herself, her hands lifting her long, chestnut-coloured hair off her shoulders, her head a little on one side. She had on one of those fancy things called shorties that reached only to within four inches of her knees. Her legs and feet were bare.

She was the loveliest thing I have ever seen in my life. Maybe she was twenty-two, but I doubted it, twenty would be nearer it. She was young and beautiful and fresh, and everything about her was exciting from her thick, long glossy hair to her small bare feet.

The sight of her touched off a spark inside me that had been waiting to be touched off ever since I had become what is technically known as a man, and which no woman had up to now succeeded in touching off.

The spark ignited with a flash that knocked me mentally backwards and sent a flame through me that dried my mouth, made my heart pound and left me breathless.

I stood motionless in the semi-darkness looking at her, aware that my blood was racing, my heart was thumping and aware that I had never seen a woman I wanted so badly as this one.

Maybe she had an instinctive feeling that she was being watched or maybe she had finished admiring herself in the mirror; anyway, she suddenly stepped back out of my sight, and the door was pushed to.

For perhaps ten seconds I stood motionless, staring at the half-closed door, then I went on down the stairs, down the next flight to the hall. It was only when I reached the hall that I paused to take out my handkerchief and wipe my sweating face.

Watkins came out of the lounge.

‘A warm night, sir,’ he said and his old shrewd eyes peered at me. ‘You had no hat?’

I put my handkerchief back into my pocket.

‘No.’

‘You have a car, sir?’

‘Yes.’

I made a move to the front door. He opened it for me.

‘Good night, sir.’

I said good night and walked out into the warm, silent darkness. I was glad to get into the car and sit behind the driving wheel.

Although she must have been thirty-five years younger than Aitken, I was sure she wasn’t his daughter nor his mistress. I felt in my bones she was his wife, and that knowledge turned me sick to my stomach.

II

I didn’t sleep much that night.

I had a lot on my mind. There was this business of the New York partnership which I knew was a chance in a lifetime. There was tomorrow’s board meeting that could be tricky.

There were five directors of the International and Pacific Agency. Four of them were bankers and they were co-operative and admirers of Aitken. The fifth member was an attorney, Selwyn Templeman, a know-all and a nuisance and the thought I had to handle him bothered me.

Then there was the Wasserman account. Joe Wasserman was the biggest manufacturer of TV sets on the Pacific coast. He was one of our most important clients and our biggest spender, and he knew it. Every so often he’d threaten to take the account away and give it to some other agency, but so far we had managed to hold on to him. Aitken always dealt direct with him: one of the very few accounts Aitken handled himself. Now I had it in my lap and that bothered me too.

Then there was the thought that from tomorrow for a possible four weeks I would be boss of the International with a hundred and fifteen men and women working under me, and two hundred and three clients who were liable to write or telephone about their problems any hour of the working day and expect me to have the answers at my finger-tips. Up to now this thought hadn’t bothered me because I knew if the going got tough I could always go to R .A. and drop the sticky end into his lap. I could still do that, of course, but if I did, I knew he wouldn’t think much of me. A man with a broken leg doesn’t want to deal with anything except an emergency, so that bothered me too.

As I lay in bed with the moonlight coming through the window and hearing the sound of the sea breaking on the shore, all these problems seemed pretty overpowering until I took a look at them. It was then that I realized the real reason why I was sweating it out in the semi-darkness was because my mind was obsessed with the picture of Roger Aitken’s wife as I had seen her standing before the mirror.

That was the thing that kept me from sleeping: the picture of her lifting her thick, chestnutcoloured hair off her white shoulders, the shape of her breasts under the frilly shortie, the young, fresh beauty of her, and the realization that she was Aitken’s wife and the burning need I felt for her. It was that picture that kept my mind feverish and stopped me from sleeping. Why had Aitken married her: a girl young enough to be his daughter? I kept asking myself. More important still: why had she married him? Surely no young girl could fall in love with a man like R.A.?

Don’t imagine I didn’t try to snap out of this mood. I did my best to stop thinking about her. I told myself she was R.A.’s wife and therefore sacrosanct. She wasn’t for me. She couldn’t possibly be for me. I was crazy to think of her the way I was thinking of her, but it didn’t help. I didn’t sleep much that night. I just couldn’t get her out of my mind.

I got to the office after nine o’clock the following morning. I arrived as Pat was entering the express elevator and I joined her. We were huddled against the wall, surrounded by other workers, and we smiled at each other, but we didn’t speak because there were ears all around us.

It wasn’t until we were in my office that I told her about the New York project.

‘Oh, Ches, how wonderful!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’ve always wondered why he didn’t set up on his own and in New York. To think you’ll be in charge!’

‘It’s not certain. I could make a hash here, and then I’m out.’

‘You won’t make a hash here. You’ll handle it. You mustn’t even think you could make a hash of it.’

‘I’ll want you in New York, Pat. I couldn’t handle the job without you.’

Her eyes sparkled as she said, ‘You couldn’t keep me away from New York. I’ve always wanted to work there.’

It was while I was going through the mail that Joe Fellowes wandered in.

‘Hey, boss,’ he said, grinning at me. ‘How was the old man?’

‘The only difference was he was lying in bed and not pacing up and down,’ I said. ‘Look Joe, I’m busy. I’ve got this board meeting in a few minutes. What do you want?’

Joe sat on the corner of my desk.

‘Relax, boy. That board meeting isn’t anything. I just want to be told the old man is writhing in pain. I like to think of him suffering. I bet he was screaming the roof off.’

‘He wasn’t. He’s the original stoic. Sorry to disappoint you, Joe, and now if you’ll beat it, I’ll get on with the mail.’

Joe didn’t move. He stared at me, a puzzled expression on his face.

‘You look bothered. What’s biting you?’

I had worked with him now for two years, and I liked him. He was the best layout artist in the racket. He had often said he wished I were his boss, rather than Aitken, and if ever I thought of opening up on my own, he would like to join me.

So I told him about the New York project.

‘That’s wonderful!’ he said when I was through. ‘You, Pat and me could make a world-beating team. If you don’t land this job, Ches, I’ll strangle you.’

‘I’ll do my best if it’s like that,’ I said and grinned at him.

He slid off the desk.

‘Did you see R. A.’s wife when you were at the house?’

I felt myself turn hot. I was collecting some papers together so I didn’t have to look at him otherwise I think I might have given myself away.

‘His wife?’ I tried to make my voice sound casual. ‘No, I didn’t see her.’

‘Then you’ve missed something. Phew! What a dish! I’ve only set eyes on her once, but she’s been haunting my dreams ever since.’

By now I had enough control over myself to look up and meet his eyes.

‘What’s so special about her, then?’

‘Wait until you see her, then you will realize you’ve asked the silliest question of the year. What’s special about her? For one thing she has more sex appeal in her little finger than any other girl I’ve seen. She can’t be more than twenty, and what a beaut! It kills me to think she’s married to that whisky-pickled, flint-hearted old sourpuss.’

‘How do you know she isn’t happy with him?’

‘If you were young and beautiful, would you be happy married to R.A.?’ Joe asked and grinned. ‘It’s the old, old story, of course. The only reason why she could possibly have married him is she was after his cheque book. So now she lives in a twelve-bedroom house. So now she can hang a diamond necklace around her pretty neck. So now she can have R.A. all to herself. But I bet she’s not happy.’

‘You know it’s funny, but I don’t remember hearing he had a wife. Where did she come from?’

‘I wouldn’t know. The front row of some snappy chorus, I’d imagine. He married her about a year before you joined us,’ Joe said. ‘That would make her scarcely seventeen when he hooked her—talk about cradle-snatching. Anyway, you look out for her. She’s really worth seeing.’

‘Suppose you stop gossiping and get out of here?’ I said. ‘I’ve only ten more minutes before the board.’

I hadn’t time then to think about what Joe had said, but later I did think about it. It made me feel pretty bad to think she had thrown herself away for the sake of R.A.’s money. I felt sure Joe was right. There couldn’t be any other reason why she had married him.

Around three o’clock in the afternoon, I called Aitken. I was feeling as if I had been fed through a wringer. The board meeting had been tougher than I had thought possible, and Templeman, finding Aitken wasn’t there to keep him under control, had come out with his ten-inch guns blazing. But I had handled him, and I had handled the rest of the board. I had finally got them to agree to the items R.A. was anxious about, and that in itself was a major triumph.

So I called R.A.’s house without even waiting to get back to my own office, and the ringing tone had scarcely started up, when I heard a click and a girl’s voice said, ‘Hello? Who is that?’

I knew it was her, and the sound of her voice made me short of breath. For a moment I couldn’t speak, and I sat there motionless, with the receiver against my ear, listening to her gentle breathing.

‘Hello? Who is that?’ she asked again.

‘This is Chester Scott,’ managed to get out. ‘Can I speak to Mr. Aitken?’

‘Mr. Scott?’ she said. ‘Why, yes, of course. Will you hold on, please? He is expecting you.’

‘How is he?’ I said because I wanted to go on listening to this soft, exciting voice.

‘He’s getting along very well.’ Was I imagining that her tone lacked enthusiasm? ‘The doctor is very pleased with him,’ then she pulled the plug out, and after a moment or so, R.A. came on the line.