Executive Suite (17 page)

“I didn't think they rang the bell when Mr. Bullard was there,” Lundeen said.

He didn't answer. There wasn't anything he could say without saying more than he should.

A weirdly mongrelized dog, fat as an inflated balloon, waddled slowly across the street in front of them, stopping both streams of traffic, and Don Walling chuckled at the dog's ludicrous nonchalance.

Apparently Bill Lundeen had been waiting for a break in the tension, and he quickly took advantage of it. “If you don't mind, sir, Jim and I have an idea that I'd like to talk to you about.”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“Well, running these tests in the factory the way we're doing wastes an awful lot of time. It'll be two or three weeks now before the production department can give us another break in the schedule.”

“I know.”

Any agreement was encouragement and Lundeen plunged ahead, his excitement overriding the professional scientist's calm that he usually tried so hard to assume. “Well, Jim and I were rooting around over at Water Street the other day—you know, in that shed behind the dry kiln—and we found an old steam-heated core press that isn't being used. We'd have to reinforce the frame and rig up new controls, but if we'd do it, sir, we could set up a little pilot-plant operation of our own. Then we could run one test after another as fast as we wanted to.”

“Sounds like it might work,” Don said, evasive, not wanting to take the heart out of the boy by telling him that, a month ago, he had sent a special budget request to the president's office asking for an appropriation to cover the rebuilding of that same press and its installation at Pike Street. For three weeks he had heard nothing. Last week, he had asked Bullard about it and been told that a new system had been set up under which all appropriation requests had to be cleared with Shaw before they could be approved. “This is getting to be a damned big company,” Avery Bullard had said. “Can't handle all of these things myself any more—have to delegate responsibility.” There had been no possible answering argument … Tredway
was
a big corporation and its president did have to delegate authority … but couldn't Avery Bullard see what he was doing? Authority wasn't being delegated to the men who should have exercised it. It was simply being transferred to Shaw who was using it to weave a noose of red tape that was choking off the company's growth. That was wrong. Of all men, Avery Bullard should know it. He hadn't built the Tredway Corporation with his hands tied with red tape and a comptroller tripping him at every step … why should he now deny to other men the freedom of action that had permitted his own success? Why was he letting Shaw influence him so much? Why had he ever hired Shaw in the first place?

Don Walling's mind suggested an answer, the old memory of Karl Eric Kassel saying, “The bigger a brass hat gets, the more of a sucker he is for some guy that comes along and calls himself an expert. You know why? Because he starts getting scared. The bigger he gets, the more scared he is. When he's on the way up, he's so busy tearing the hell out of things that he never stops to worry about being wrong. Sometimes he gets knocked on his can. Does it bother him? No. He bounces back like a fighting bull. Then what happens? He gets to be a success. Why? Because that's what it takes to be a success. Then what? The first thing you know he's a tin-plated god sitting on a big throne. Now he doesn't like getting knocked on his can. It's not dignified. The stockholders wouldn't like it. He begins to get scared. So what does he do? He turns into a sucker and starts hiring experts. Why? Because they tell him they can keep him from being knocked on his royal can. It's as simple as that.”

The answer, for all its aptness, could not be accepted. Don Walling could never believe that Avery Bullard was afraid. To believe that would have meant the destruction of the very foundation upon which he had built his life. He, like all strong men, could submit to a leadership that demanded fear, yet never to a leader that reflected it.

“—and that wouldn't be too expensive,” he heard Lundeen say after something that he had missed hearing. “The best estimate Jim and I can make is that the whole thing shouldn't cost more than five or six thousand—providing, of course, that we can get space over at Pike Street so we can tie in with their regular supply lines and save the cost of any supplementary equipment.”

“You might put the whole thing in a memo, Bill,” he said cautiously. “Don't know what can be worked out but I'll give it some study.”

“That's swell, sir—all Jim and I want—just a chance to have you consider it. Maybe it's cockeyed but you can decide that better than we can.”

“This your street?”

“Gosh, yes. Got talking so hard I didn't notice.” Lundeen got out of the car, awkwardly long-legged. “Good night, sir. Sorry about the way things went.”

“That's all right, Bill. Not your fault. Good night.”

No, it wasn't Bill's fault … and it wasn't his fault either. The fault lay with just one man … and that man was Loren Shaw.

He turned at the next corner, not noticing the street sign, surprised a few blocks later when he suddenly realized that he was about to pass the house where he and Mary had lived that first year in Millburgh. It was an old graystone mansion that had been cut up into apartments. Mr. Prescott, the owner, was on his knees in the front yard rose beds and Don Walling slowed as he passed, sounding his horn and waving. The old man stood up, stiff-legged and bent-backed, and his pleasure at the greeting was plainly evident.

The Prescotts were a wonderful couple, Don thought, and then grinned at himself for having fallen an absent-minded victim of the chiché that had been a running joke with Mary all that year. She had said so often that the Prescotts were “wonderful people” that the phrase had become, for some obscure reason, something that made both of them laugh.

The thought of Mary—the first thought of her in several hours—was a key that locked one door and opened another. The opening door flooded his mind with the consciousness that she was waiting for him, and the locked door shut away all the things that had seemed so unforgettable only a moment before.

Don Walling's mind could do that. It was compartmented into noncommunicating chambers and, with the opening and closing of mental doors, he could shift almost instantly from intense concentration on one subject to equally intense concentration on another. He had created that kind of a mind—and acquired the skill to use it—in the earliest years of his life when he had found that the only way he could do what he wanted to do was to drive himself with a single-minded unity of endeavor that was so intense as to preclude the possibility of any interrupting thoughts. He had discovered at Rubble Hill that he could not lead his class if he allowed himself to break the concentration of his study periods with any thought of his personal plight as an unwanted and deserted child. The same lesson had been relearned at Tech and later with Karl Eric Kassel. By then his ability to compartment his mind and concentrate his thinking had become so effective that he had done some of his best designing for Kassel during periods when, if he had permitted his personal feelings to influence his work, he would have hurled away his pencils and ripped up the paper.

Don Walling was not consciously aware of the mental mechanics involved in the functioning of his mind, but he did realize that it was responsible for the one small deception that he was forced to practice upon his wife. Mary would ask, “Did you think of me today?” and he always had to say, “Yes, of course,” but that was usually untrue. Understanding as she was, he knew that he could not make Mary realize that it was only because there were hours when she was not allowed to enter his mind that there were other hours when his mind was hers alone, filled completely with thoughts of her, almost to the exclusion of everything else.

It was of Mary and Mary alone that he thought as he made the turn onto Ridge Road and began the climb that lifted him above the flat lowland of the old city.

In these years since the war, Millburgh had broken through its ancient city limits. All of the new residential developments were on the high lands above the city. Ridge Road, following the cliff edge, was the main artery of the newer Millburgh. Laurel Heights had become for a new generation what North Front had been for past generations. In the same way that the social value of a North Front Street home had once been measured by its distance from Piccadilly Park, a lot in Laurel Heights was assayed by its distance from the Millburgh Country Club. The house that Loren Shaw had bought—a rambling hybrid of “California Ranchhouse” and “Pennsylvania Farmhouse”—was so close to the club that sliced drives from the second tee frequently landed in his front yard. A few blocks away, safely out of range but with the clubhouse still visible through the trees, stood the Walter Dudley home. It was “Colonial,” white-painted brick, green-and-white awnings, and a big flagstone terrace bordered by enormous pots of salmon-pink geraniums supplied by Fowlers, “Millburgh's leading florists for over a century.”

The southern boundary of Laurel Heights was Grayrock Road. The north side of the road was “in,” the south side was “out.” If your home faced Grayrock Road from the south, you could not claim the distinction of living in Laurel Heights. Mary had said, quickly and unequivocably, that the distinction was not worth the two thousand dollars that they saved on the lot. Don's agreement had been equally fast and certain. In addition, the lot they found on the south side was, without argument or consultation, exactly what they both wanted. It was a few perches over two acres, a perfect setting for the house that Don had already sketched—a sweep of lawn that rose gently to the sudden interruption of spectacular outcroppings of quartz-spangled rock, backed by a grove of old oak trees under which the laurel and rhododendron all but covered the ground.

The house had been built of stone quarried just over the hill so that it was a perfect match for the outcroppings and, even in its first-year newness, it had settled into the landscape with a rightness of place that pleased the architect in Don Walling in the same way that it satisfied his lifetime longing for a home.

Swinging wide at the country club entrance to avoid an outgoing golfer's convertible, Don Walling began to look left, waiting for that moment at the crest of the hill where he would catch his first glimpse of the house. He saw it—and then, as a distant pinpoint of fluttering white, he thought he saw Mary standing at the end of the drive. He couldn't be sure, a screen of poplars cut him off, and his impatient desire drove his foot hard on the accelerator. The tires whistled in protest at the sharp turn into Grayrock Road and then he saw that it was Mary. She was waiting beside the mail box, watching for him, and his whole body warmed with anticipation.

Suddenly, more from instinct than definable thought, he sensed her tense alarm. The way she ran toward the stopping car heightened his apprehension. His mind flashed with the terror that something had happened to little Steve.

She was out of breath and the gulp before she spoke was an eternity. Then she said it, the words all together, “Mr. Bullard's dead!”

His alarm for the safety of his son vanished and his mind was left open for the ripping slash of her words. Then—as there is always a moment between the infliction of a terrible wound and the sensation of pain that it causes—he stared at his wife in stunned silence.

“I called Pike Street,” she said breathlessly, “but they told me you'd just left. I've tried to reach the others—that's what Mr. Oldham asked me to do—but I haven't been able to locate anyone. I did leave a message with the Shaw's maid but no one answered the phone anywhere else.”

“Oldham?” he said blankly, groping.

“Yes. He called from New York. Mr. Bullard collapsed on the street this afternoon and it was only a few minutes ago that he was identified. Mr. Oldham asked that we notify all of the others, so I thought the best thing to do was to—”

A single thought, incongruous and out of context, made him ask, “Did Oldham call us first?”

“He probably tried the others and couldn't reach them either.”

Both the question and its answer were washed away in the torrent of realization that was now beginning to flood through his mind. In the roar of a thousand tumbled thoughts, he remembered the way that he had let his anger deface his loyalty to Avery Bullard, and there seemed to be a terrifying connection between the death and his own defection. It was an accusation that reason could not sustain, but in this first moment of grief there was no handhold for reason in the maelstrom of his mind.

He got out of the car and Mary closed the door behind him.

“Don, do you know where any of the others are? We'll have to locate them as soon as we can.”

“Walt Dudley's on his way to Chicago. Took the seven o'clock plane. Shaw drove him out. He ought to be back soon.”

“Then the maid will tell him. I left the message with her. What about Mr. Alderson and Mr. Grimm?”

“Jesse is on his way down to Maryland. Alderson?” He hesitated, groping for the little memories that were now so deeply buried. “I think Fred said something about going out to dinner tonight. Yes, I'm sure he did.”

“It might be the George Smiths' or the Willoughbys'. Shall I try to find him?”

“I suppose so,” he said dully.

They were walking up the flagged path, Mary a half step behind him, and he knew that she was watching his face. He turned on the porch, bracing himself against the post. “It seems impossible, doesn't it? I—I can't believe it.”

“I know how you feel,” she said very softly and her voice was the cooling hand of sympathy.

He avoided her eyes. He had no right to sympathy … this afternoon he had …

“When did you say he died?” he asked.