Executive Suite (28 page)

Walt Dudley was not unaware of what had happened, nor was he surprised. It was a form of flattery to which he had long been accustomed. He liked it. It was worth that oversized tip that he would be honor-bound to bestow. He knew that it would be several minutes before the bags came in off the plane, so he sauntered toward the newsstand. An overheard crowd voice said, “No, that's Eastern time. It's only nine-fifteen here in Chicago.”

Nine-fifteen … the whole evening left … hotel room … alone. No, he would not call Eva Harding! That decision was made. He wasn't even thinking about her. Anyway, the telephone booths were all in use. This time it was different … this time he meant it … this time he wouldn't give in to himself. Why should he? What did it mean? Where could it lead? Nowhere but trouble. No, that wasn't fair to Eva. She'd never cause him any trouble. It wasn't fair to think things like that … made her sound cheap and common. The least he could do was to be fair to her. Eva would never cause trouble … no strings … no demands … nothing. That's why it was so easy to break it off … but that's why it was hard, too! But he had made the right decision … the only decision … never call her again.

The fat woman in the bright blue dress was backing out of the end telephone booth. It was empty … waiting …

He turned away, snapping his head around, and when his eyes focused he saw a girl who had just rushed into a man's arms. Her lithe young body arched inward, reaching, and there was the mind-feeling of the soft crushing of her breasts and the hard backpress of her thighs. He walked quickly away, his eyes on the baggage counter.

The bags hadn't come in yet and he stood in the long low-ceilinged corridor, looking out through the window at the endless yellow, yellow, yellow of the taxicabs sliding past. It was a good thing he had made his decision. It would be so easy … all he had to do was not say, “Palmer House”… say, “Thirty-two forty-four north—”

“Your bags, sir. Cab, sir?”

The dollar bill—“Thank you, sir, thank you very much”—and then another voice saying, “Where to, Mac?”

For a moment, he had a hard time answering “Palmer House.” It always annoyed J. Walter Dudley to be called “Mac.”

All the way down to the Loop he kept telling himself how much easier it was not to think of her than he had imagined it would be.

It was still two minutes before ten when he came into the lobby of the Palmer House … two minutes to eleven in Millburgh. He would get a good night's sleep … store it up. There were two weeks of market ahead. But this market wouldn't be so bad … more sleep. Yes, he'd made the right decision … no more losing sleep … no more of those never-sleeping nights with Eva … no more of …

“Check your mail, sir?” a bellboy said, eager to please.

“Yes, thank you—J. Walter Dudley.”

A sheath of white satin floated up the stairway to the Empire Room and the body within undulated with the steps … that man following her was a fool … wasn't going to get a good night's sleep. Eva had never wanted to come to the Empire Room … “It's silly, darling, to be anywhere else when we can be here.” Silly … yes, silly … silly to be anywhere else when …

“Two telephone messages, sir. Which are your bags, sir?”

He pointed, stripping the little envelopes from the two messages that the bellboy handed him.
CALL MR PEARSON AS SOON AS YOU GET IN
. Pearson was the manager of the Chicago office.
CALL MR SHAW IN MILLBURGH PA IMMEDIATELY

He placed the call to Loren Shaw as soon as he got to his room, without waiting to take off his hat, tipping the bellboy a dollar and acknowledging his salute while the call was going through.

After what seemed like an interminable delay, the operator said, “I'm sorry, sir, we are unable to locate Mr. Shaw. Shall I try again in twenty minutes?”

“Don't wait twenty minutes, keep trying.”

Then he called Pearson, and it was from Larry Pearson that he learned of the death of Avery Bullard.

Less than an hour later a keen-eyed redcap in the Union Station spotted a handsome gentleman getting out of a cab, the kind of a gentleman who was usually good for a folding-money tip.

Sitting in Roomette 5, waiting for the train to start, J. Walter Dudley checked back over the fast moves that he made in the pellmell hour since he had talked to Larry Pearson. The meeting was all set … Pearson could handle it … cancel the appointments for tomorrow afternoon … hold the others until the funeral time was set … shift the Tuesday meeting to Thursday. Pearson would keep on trying to get Shaw … tell him that he was on the train.

The porter passed the open door.

“Porter?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Do we make any stops during the night that would give me time enough to make a telephone call?”

“No, sir. No stops that long, sir.”

It was all right. Even if he hadn't talked to Shaw there was no question that getting back to Millburgh was the right thing to do. Too bad there wasn't a plane tonight … but getting in at nine-forty-five in the morning wouldn't be too bad. Everything was under control in Chicago … Pearson could handle it … and Eva would understand why he hadn't called when she read about Avery Bullard's death. She would be sure to see it in the morning paper.

MILLBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

11.40 P.M. EDT

Mary Walling lay waiting in the darkness, holding her own breath so that she could hear the sound of her husband's breathing. It was soft and even-spaced and she decided that he must be asleep. She was alone now and free to think the thoughts that she had been afraid to think before because of the fear that he might read them in her face.

This had been one of those difficult evenings—the most difficult of all—when she had been forced to balance on the knife edge that separated hindrance from help. One moment Don would ask her opinion, but the next moment he would seem to resent her offering it.

There were times when Mary Walling found her husband a frighteningly mysterious man, when the strange processes by which his mind worked were completely beyond her understanding, yet the fear and the mystery and the lack of understanding in no way diminished her love. They only increased her desire to help him, to be more a part of him, to share his life more completely. That was why, again tonight, she lay awake in the darkness.

At the root of her difficulty was the fact that Don's mind worked in such a different way from her own that she could never reconstruct the pattern of his thinking. Actually, as she often told herself, Don did not
think
—at least not in the sense that she thought of
thinking
. He disliked the orderly setting down of fact against fact, and seemed to instinctively side-step any answer that was dictated by pure logic and reason. He never seemed to study a problem with the intense concentration that she would have applied. Instead, he appeared to skitter about over its surface, snatching up disconnected facts here and there, jumbling them together in a mental tangle that lacked all semblance of order. Yet—and of this fact her intelligence had by now made Mary Walling acutely aware—the end result was often a brilliant flash of pure creative imagination of which her own mind could never have been capable. She had learned that lesson a hundred times. The last time it had been their house.

For years she had clipped house plans and details. They jammed two carefully indexed file drawers. A notebook bulged with meticulously made checklists, corrected and recorrected with every new idea that she had uncovered in her reading. Yet, when they had finally decided to build, it had been almost impossible for her to hold Don's attention long enough to get him to study what she had done. He shuffled clippings so rapidly that she was sure he couldn't have seen them. He turned the pages of her notebook so fast that reading would have been impossible. When he finally settled down to the drawing board, her files were neglected and the notebook was unopened. The fast sketches that he tossed off, one after another, drove her to almost unendurable exasperation. Any sketch that pleased her, any sketch that bore even a faint resemblance to something that she had liked and put in the clipping file, he perversely tore up. The sketches that he saved evidenced neither reason nor logic. She had almost, but not quite, driven herself to the ultimate extremity of suggesting that they retain an architect, when Don had sat down and, in an astoundingly short time, without a single false move, had designed a house totally unlike any house pictured in the clipping file, unlike any house that she had ever seen, and yet by some strange miracle it was exactly the home she had always wanted. When it was built all of those things in her unread notebook were there.

In the earlier years of her married life, Mary Walling had tried to explain the unexplainable by telling herself that Don was the “artistic” type, a conclusion that was supported not only by his art training and obvious ability as a designer, but also by her memory of her psychology courses in which she had been taught that the truly creative mind seldom indulged in purely deductive thinking. Unfortunately, there still remained the unexplainable corollary, recited in the same textbook, that the artistic creative mind was at the opposite pole from the type of mind that could fulfill the requirements demanded of the modern business executive. Don was most certainly successful in business, not only as a designer and inventor—which was explainable in terms of his creative ability—but also in other ways for which there was no ready explanation. Her own judgment of her husband's oddly disparate abilities was admittedly subject to prejudice, but it had been confirmed time after time, most recently and vividly by the suit over the patents on a method of extruding a plastic coating on the steel tubing used for metal furniture. Prior to the suit, she was quite certain that Don had little if any knowledge of patent law. He had dragged home an armful of books and, anxious to assist him, she had volunteered to search out and index pertinent references. He had side-stepped the offer and, much to her concern, had idly leafed through the pages, not making a single note. Yet at the cocktail party at the Federal Club where the court victory had been celebrated, the senior partner of the Wilmington law firm that had handled the case for Tredway had cornered her and said, “Mrs. Walling, that husband of yours missed his calling. He has one of the best legal minds that I've ever encountered in a layman—superior, I might even say, to those of many of my own colleagues at the bar.” She had known that it couldn't be completely true—the predominant characteristic of the “legal mind” was its capacity for the exercise of pure logic—yet there was enough truth to deepen the eternal mystery of what actually went on inside her husband's brain.

Tonight, she had expected Don to return home in an extension of the mood in which he had left, fog-minded by the shocking impact of Avery Bullard's death. Awaiting his arrival, she had stocked her mind with the things that she might say to assuage his grief. None of those things had been said. They had talked for over an hour and Avery Bullard's death had not been directly mentioned. She knew that Don's grief was still there but it seemed so deep-buried now that it could not be raised. She was not surprised—there had been other cases before where the same thing had happened—but acceptance did not supply understanding. When something important dropped into the clear quiet pool of her own mind, the surface was rippled for days. When that same heavy stone dropped into Don's mind there was only the quick first splash that a falling rock made in stormy water and then the waves erased the splash. But she knew that the stone still lay heavy on the bottom of the pool.

They had talked tonight about who would be the new president of the Tredway Corporation, not in the orderly and coherent way that she wanted to talk, but in the disconnected way that was demanded by the oddly assorted scraps of his conversation. Pieced together, she had made out that Alderson was out of the race and that Grimm was to be elected, not because of any special qualifications that he possessed, but because he was the one candidate who could defeat Shaw. The votes for Grimm would be votes against Shaw.

How different all of this was, she thought, from the world of big business that she had pictured when she had studied business administration back at the university. In her student days she had thought of the large corporation as a highly organized functioning of economic law, administered by a race of supermen endowed with a combination of the characteristics of the Dean of the School of Business Administration, the Professor of Economics, and the Associate Professor of Statistical Analysis. She could still vividly recall, during the early years of her marriage, the difficulty she had experienced in trying to make what Don told her about the Tredway Corporation fit the pattern that her textbooks had laid out. The bits of evidence that she gleaned from his offhand remarks made the company appear to be a disorganized, fumbling, and decidedly inefficient enterprise. The major executives seemed to be a quite ordinary group of men, disconcertingly human in their limited capacity for high-order thinking and far too given to the man-on-the-street practice of basing decisions on hunch and intuition rather than upon scientifically established fact.

The confusing end point of all that she learned was the seemingly contradictory fact that the Tredway Corporation was undeniably successful. Furthermore, the executives of other corporations, whom she met occasionally, seemed in no way superior to the Tredway officers. Nevertheless, she had felt a certain justification of her opinion when Don had told her one night that Avery Bullard had retained a firm of management consultants to make a study of the corporation's organization structure and management methods. Her vindication had seemed even stronger some months later when Loren Shaw, who had supervised the study, was employed by the company and made a vice-president. The circumstances had given her a predilection for liking Mr. Shaw and, in addition, she found him an interesting man. He was widely informed, had a keen mind, and a marked ability to think in a clear and logical manner. Despite the fact that she had no particular liking for Shaw's wife, Evelyn, she had begun to think of the Shaws as potentially close friends when, to her surprise, she had suddenly been faced with the fact that Don disliked Loren Shaw intensely. She had thought at first that it might be because he disagreed with some of the recommendations that Shaw had made in the management consultant's report, but that had not proved to be the case. Don had been in substantial agreement with most of the suggested changes. His dislike of Shaw was something else, another of those inexplicable things that happened inside that strangely unfathomable mind.