Executive Suite (39 page)

Frederick Alderson felt a pleasant strengthening of his assurance. Everything was going according to the pattern, almost word for word. The worst was over. The storm was about to blow itself out.

Walling exhaled in a full-chested blast that seemed to collapse his ribs. “Fred, I need your help. If you can get Dudley squared away, and I can line up Julia Tredway Prince, then we can wrap up this whole thing in a hurry and get going.”

There was a temptation to ask Walling how he proposed to get Julia Tredway Prince's vote, but Frederick Alderson knew better than to make that mistake. He had long since learned that he must always clean his own hands before he picked up a new subject. “I'm sorry you don't feel that I handled Dudley in the right way, but I can't see—” Alderson paused in a skillfully executed invitation to interrupt.

Walling came in on the beat. “I didn't say you hadn't handled him in the right way, Fred. All I meant was—well, forget it—just get out there and find some way to line him up. I'm counting on you, Fred. I need your help.”

“Well, perhaps I can manage it,” Alderson said, saying the thing that always proved to be the right thing to say at this stage. But now he was baffled as to what his next move should be. He knew that he couldn't mention the difficulty of his assignment without launching another full-scale storm, yet it was obvious that there had to be some inducement to draw Dudley from Shaw's camp. What about offering him the executive vice-presidency? At least that would match what Shaw would do for him. Yes, that was an idea … but, as always, it would be a better idea if it weren't his own. “Well, let's see, now—if Shaw were to be president, he'd probably offer Dudley—”

“Shaw isn't going to be president! Can't you understand that?”

“No, no, of course not,” Alderson said quickly, backtracking. He shouldn't have given him that opening. “I was only thinking that if we could offer Walt something tangible—”

“Why do we have to offer him anything?” Walling demanded belligerently.

“Well—”

“All right, do whatever you have to do,” Walling said with sudden impatience. “I don't have time to argue. I have to see Mrs. Prince.”

Walling had been standing all through the conversation and the start of his exit meant only a turn and a step. The performance of duty forced Frederick Alderson to stop him and a quick command made Walling's head snap around impatiently.

“What?”

Frederick Alderson dampened his lips. This was the turning point, the crucial moment when he had to force the acknowledgment of his helpfulness.

“How well do you know Mrs. Prince?” he asked quietly, carefully voicing the question so that it was also an unmistakable warning.

“What do you mean?”

He saw that he had won. “Sit down a minute. If you're going to talk to Julia Tredway Prince there are some things you ought to know about her.”

Walling half obeyed, sitting on the edge of the desk. “What about her?”

“Well, as you realize, I was quite close to Mr. Bullard—close enough to know a lot of things—” The words stopped as he raised his head. Behind Walling, over his shoulder, he saw that Avery Bullard was watching him through the picture frame with cold unblinking eyes.

“Well?” Walling demanded.

Alderson moved, shifting his position, trying to escape the eyes, but they seemed to follow him, enforcing a prohibition against saying anything about the personal relationship that there had been between Avery Bullard and Julia Tredway Prince. “She—well, everything she has she owes to Mr. Bullard. If it hadn't been for what he did for her—well, she wouldn't have anything—the stock she inherited from her father wouldn't be worth a penny.”

“She knows that, doesn't she?” Walling demanded impatiently.

“Yes, I suppose she does—in a way. But she's like a lot of people with money. After they have it, they forget where it came from. They think it gives them a right to—well, what I'm trying to say is that she doesn't have the same attitude toward the company that the rest of us have—that you and I have. The only thing that matters to her is her dividends. There've been times when she—well, times when she caused Mr. Bullard a great deal of difficulty.”

Walling's face told him that he was losing ground, fumbling, making a bad job of it, and the undertone of impatient annoyance in his voice confirmed it as he said, “What's the matter—isn't she satisfied with a two-dollar dividend?”

“No—no, it hasn't been so bad these last few years—not since we raised the dividend,” Alderson said weakly, feeling his hold slipping.

Walling moved toward the door. “You'll go out and see Walt right away, won't you?”

“Anything you want me to do,” he promised hurriedly, forcing his voice in a last desperate demand for understanding.

It came in the last instant of hope—Walling's hand reaching back to touch his shoulder, the quick grin, the strong voice. “Thanks, Fred. I won't forget this. Don't know what I'd do without you.”

And then he was gone. But his voice remained—urgent—commanding—the sound of life.

“Fred, where are you going?”

It was Edith's voice. Somehow, without knowing it, he had found his hat and the front door had already opened to his hand.

“Something I have to do for Mr. Walling.”

Whatever it was that she called after him was lost, fading away as he hurried down the steps.

11.40 A.M. EDT

As he approached the white wall that surrounded the old Tredway mansion, Don Walling found himself unable to throw off the warning about Julia Tredway Prince that Alderson had voiced. Actually, he had said nothing definite—his ambiguity had been more of a warning than his words—but it had stirred up vague memories and odd bits of circumstantial evidence that supported the need for caution.

He had heard, long ago, some behind-the-hand gossip about Avery Bullard and Julia Tredway Prince, but now the memory was only of the hearing and not of the content. What had not been washed away by disbelief had long since been faded by the passage of time.

There were other more recent memories, however, and one of them was seemingly more pertinent because of its linkage to Alderson. It was of an evening when he had given Alderson a ride home. Passing the Tredway mansion they had seen Bullard's car parked in the driveway and Alderson had said, “Nobody appreciates what a man has to go through these days to be the president of a big company.”

In the recreation of the mental picture of Bullard's car standing in Julia Tredway Prince's drive, Don Walling found a delayed explanation of the shock he had felt last night when he had seen Shaw's car in the same place—but the realization was quickly passed over. The only thing that mattered now was the urgent necessity of solving the mystery of what he would have to do to take over where Avery Bullard had left off in his relationship with Julia Tredway Prince.

His difficulty—as he was now acutely aware—was that he had never taken an interest in Julia Tredway Prince as a person, nor had he ever thought of her as having any important connection with the company's operations. He had accepted her as a strangely living holdover from the past, paying no more attention to the cocktail party gossip about her than he had to the too-often-repeated tales of her father's eccentricities. He knew, from the occasions when he had seen her across the room at some large party, and the even rarer times when she had spoken to him, that she was actually a living person, but his impressions of her had been filed in the same subterranean chamber of his consciousness that held an image of Orrin Tredway as a bronze bust in the lobby of the Tower, and of Oliver Tredway as an oil-painted face that scowled down upon every meeting in the directors' room. Now he wished that he had given Alderson more encouragement to tell him all that needed to be known about Julia Tredway Prince.

He was a half-dozen strides away from the car before he remembered the black box and went back to get it.

As he rang the doorbell, he was startled at the matching memory of pressing the elevator button in New York that first time he had gone to see Karl Eric Kassel, startled because it was so rarely that his mind ever dredged up a memory as old as that … particularly such a meaningless one.

He was startled again when the door opened. He had expected a servant, a maid or even a butler, but the man who stood in front of him was unmistakably Dwight Prince. He had seen him so rarely, and now not for so long, that his face was hardly familiar but his clothes made the identification positive. There was no one else in Millburgh who would have worn that sport coat.

He knew that it should not have been unexpected that Dwight Prince would fail to recognize him, but he found the necessity of introducing himself unpleasant.

“Oh—Walling? Yes, you're one of the men at the office, aren't you?” Dwight Prince said in vague confirmation, gesturing him through the door but not offering his hand.

“I've brought something for Mrs. Prince.”

The black box was under his arm—he thought inconspicuously—but Dwight Prince's eyes found it and a look of faint amusement flickered on and off his soft face.

“Is Mrs. Prince at home?” Walling demanded, trying to block the possibility of Dwight Prince taking the box himself.

Prince looked at him as if he were debating a decision.

“I believe she's dressing. If you'd care to—”

“I'll wait.”

Dwight Prince went slowly up the winding staircase that dominated the great center hall of the house, looking back once with that same flickering grin.

The coldly formal atmosphere of the hall did nothing to dispel the foreboding with which he anticipated the appearance of Julia Tredway Prince. There was a long lapse before there was any sound to break the silence and then it was Dwight Prince's voice, muffled and distant, somewhere in one of the back rooms of the big house, his presence there making it plain that he pointedly used a back staircase to avoid a reappearance.

There had been no confirmation that Julia Tredway Prince would come down to see him and, goaded by impatience that had risen close to anger, his apprehension heightened by Alderson's warning, Don Walling was completely unprepared for the warmth of the low feminine voice that unexpectedly spoke to his back.

Wheeling around, he saw her standing a few steps above the floor, her lithe black-dressed figure blending gracefully into the curve of the winding rail.

“How very nice of you to come, Mr. Walling,” she said fervently, extending her hand as she came down the last steps, all but two, standing now with her eyes on the same level as his. “I had just called Miss Martin, offering to send a car for her, and she told me that you were coming. I'm very pleased and very flattered and so sorry that I was forced to keep you waiting.”

She took the last two steps and he saw that she was smaller than he had expected, almost childlike, less beautiful at close range than he had thought of her as being in that first glimpse on the staircase, but still a pleasant contrast to the person that his apprehensive imagination had set up as its target.

She took the black box from his hands without comment and he noticed that the casual way she left it on a table as she crossed the wide hall confirmed Erica Martin's suspicion that its delivery had been a ruse.

“Let's go in the library,” she said, opening a door, and he knew that he was over the first hurdle. At least there would be no trouble about getting her to talk to him.

The room they entered was not at all the kind of a room that the formal entrance hall forecasted as the Tredway mansion's “library.” For the second time Don Walling was startled by the intrusion of an old memory—the wonderfully pleasant headmaster's office at Rubble Hill. Books over-jammed the ceiling-high shelves, spilling out into floor stacks and a heaped scattering that spread across the wide ledge of the huge bay window that all but filled the far wall. There were enormous chairs, several almost sofa size, upholstered in dark green leather that looked as soft as doeskin, and a surpassingly beautiful desk that demanded his second glance.

“I'm glad you like it,” she said perceptively. “It was my grandfather Oliver's. He made it himself in a shop that he had out in the coach house. This is one of his pieces, too!” She indicated a grandfather clock, the case of which had seemed, as he saw it in the shadowed corner, to be made of some exquisitely grained wood, but as he stepped closer he saw that what he had mistaken for graining was actually a montage of carved figures done in very low relief, a difficult art that required superb craftsmanship.

“I had no idea that your grandfather was the kind of a man who—” He fumbled into an impasse, unable to credit the beautiful workmanship of the clock case to the hands of the stern-visaged man whose portrait could have been used as a stock illustration for the cold-eyed nineteenth-century captain of industry.

Again her perception was evident. “He was a very different man than his pictures make him seem.”

“You knew him?”

“Only through his diary. He died before I was born.”

“He kept a diary?”

“Yes, almost his entire life—from the seventeenth birthday until the year before he died.” She had walked to a small bookcase, separated from the shelves, and he saw that the gesture of her hand was almost a caress as her fingertips ran over a row of oddly assorted volumes.

“His diary must be very interesting,” he said, a remark made only to fill the silence.

“Yes, it is,” she said thoughtfully, “but confusing, too. I know the kind of a man he must have been to do the things he did—strong, powerful, the master of his fate. Yet when you read his diary, you find so many cases where he was so—so lost. He never seemed to know what he would do next. He'd fill a whole page with all the reasons why something couldn't be done—all his doubts and fears—and then when you turn the page you find that he went ahead and did it, anyway. I've always thought of him as a great man—and he
was
a great man—as being someone with an unusual ability to think clearly—to know just what he wanted to do and how he was going to do it—yet the most important things that Oliver Tredway did were things that he could never explain.”