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Executive Suite
A Novel
By Cameron Hawley OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1952 Cameron Hawley
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2571-3
CHAPTER 1
NEW YORK CITY
2.30 P.M. EDT
A minute or two before or after two-thirty on the afternoon of the twenty-second of June, Avery Bullard suffered what was subsequently diagnosed as a cerebral hemorrhage. After fifty-six years, somewhere deep within the convoluted recesses of his brain, a tiny artery finally yielded to the insistent pounding of his hard-driven bloodstream. In the instant of that infinitesimal failure, the form and pattern of a world within a world was changed. An industrial empire was suddenly without an emperor. The president of the Tredway Corporation was dead — and no vice-president had been designated for succession.
It was not a coincidence that Avery Bullard had been thinking, in the minutes immediately preceding his death, about who his new executive vice-president might be. It was a question that had been in his mind many times during these three months since John Fitzgerald had died. Today, he had thought of almost nothing else. This morning George Caswell had warned him again that the investment fund executives were asking why a second-in-command of the Tredway Corporation had not been designated. "You can't blame them," Caswell had said. "Continuity of management is an important consideration to anyone holding large blocks of an industrial security."
Caswell had been right, of course. Avery Bullard had willingly admitted that. If they were to float a debenture issue in the fall, they would need the support of the investment trusts. Those crew-cut boys who analyzed securities for them liked to see everything done just as their textbooks at Harvard Business had said it should be done. A big corporation was supposed to have an executive vice-president. The chart didn't look right if you didn't have one. All right, Bullard had told Caswell, there would be no more delay. An executive vice-president would be elected at the board meeting on Tuesday. Before midnight tonight he would decide who the man would be. The only reason he had delayed as long as he had was to give himself a chance to check some top prospects outside the corporation. He had wanted to be sure that there was no better man available than one of his own vice-presidents. He was down to the last name on the list — Bruce Pilcher. All the others had been crossed off. He was having lunch with Pilcher at noon. Caswell had agreed that Pilcher was worthy of some consideration. "Most people seem to think he's done quite a job since he stepped in as president of Odessa," Caswell had said. "Apparently he's a very clever operator."
Five minutes before his death, Avery Bullard had left the small private dining room on the fifth floor of the Chippendale Building where he had lunched with Pilcher and old Julius Steigel, chairman of the board of the Odessa Stores Corporation. Waiting for the elevator, he had had no premonitory hint of the disaster that lay ahead of him. He felt unusually well. The luncheon had been an unqualified success. He had proved that Bruce Pilcher was not the man for the job and, to his secret amusement, he had done it without giving either Pilcher or Steigel the slightest suspicion of the true motive behind his visit.
In the sheltering privacy of the deserted corridor, Avery Bullard permitted himself a guarded smile as he recalled what Caswell had said about Pilcher. A very clever operator? It had taken less than two minutes for Mr. Pilcher to trap himself. He had asked Pilcher a casual question about the net worth of the holding company that owned the twenty-six Odessa furniture stores. That was all it had taken to bait the trap. Pilcher had leaped like a starved wolf. You could almost see his mind working behind his cold gray eyes ... the money-man who had caught the blood scent of a multimillion-dollar deal.
The elevator door started to slide and Avery Bullard plunged through the opening. He was a big man, six-four and heavy-muscled, but he moved so quickly that he had turned and was facing the door before it was fully open.
Yes, Pilcher was a money-man. They were a type. It was easy to spot them. You could always tell one by that cold fire in his eyes. It was not the hot fire of the man who would never interrupt a dream to calculate the risk, but the cold fire of the man whose mind was geared to the rules of the money game. It was a game that was played with numbers on pieces of paper ... common into preferred, preferred into debentures, debentures into dollars, dollars into long-term capital gains. It was the net dollars after tax that were important. They were the numbers on the scoreboard, the runs that crossed the plate, the touchdowns, the goals. Net dollars were the score markers of the money-man's game. Nothing else mattered. A factory wasn't a living, breathing organism. It was only a dollar sign and a row of numbers after the Plant & Equipment item on the balance sheet. Their guts didn't tighten when they heard a big Number Nine bandsaw sink its whining teeth into hard maple. Their nostrils didn't widen to the rich musk of walnut or the sharply pungent blast from the finishing room. When they saw a production line they looked with blind eyes, not feeling the counterpoint beat of their hearts or the pulsing flow of hot blood or the trigger-set tenseness of lungs that were poised to miss a breath with every lost beat on the line.
No, Pilcher wasn't the man ... and Pilcher was the last name on the list. None of them had been right ... not Clark, or Rutledge, or that fellow over at United, or any of the rest. There had been something wrong with all of them.
Caswell's voice echoed in his mind. "Do you think it's possible that you've set your standard a little too high? If you're looking for another Avery Bullard I can tell you right now that you'll never find him. He doesn't exist. They made only one and then they broke the mold."
He had denied it then and now he denied it to himself again. He wasn't looking for another Avery Bullard. Why should he? He was only fifty-six. There were nine full years ahead of him before he was sixty-five. They would be the best years of his life. He could move fast now. His hand was sure and steady. There would be none of the fumbling, none of the false starts, none of the mistakes of inexperience that had slowed him down during those first years of building Tredway. He could accomplish as much in the next nine years as he had in the last twenty. A man wasn't old at fifty-six. He was just in the prime of life!
"I hope you find someone who will let you take it a little easier yourself," Caswell had said. "You absorb a lot of punishment, Avery, the way you drive yourself."
Punishment? Avery Bullard smiled. George Caswell didn't understand. It wasn't punishment! It was what a man had to have to stay alive. When you lost it you were dead.
The elevator door opened and Avery Bullard broadshouldered his way through the lobby crowd, driving himself with the self-perpetuating fire of his enormous energy. As he passed, men and women looked up at him, not with recognition but because there was something in his face that commanded attention.
His decision was made. Now he would pick one of his own men as executive vice-president. He would select one of the five. He'd do it tonight. It would be cleared at the board meeting next week. But who would it be ... which one of the five?
His quick-roving eye saw a Western Union sign at the far end of the lobby. An idea flashed. He would get them together tonight for one last look before he made his final decision. Yes, that was the way to do it. He'd put some kind of a proposition before them ... anything ... the possibility of building a new factory in North Carolina. It would hit them cold. No one knew that he had even been thinking about it. Yes, that would be a good test. He would toss out the idea and then sit back ... watching, listening, judging. Then he would pick the man who showed up best. Yes, that's what he had to do ... pick one ... only one. The others would probably be sore as hell ... throw them off their pace for a few days ... but they'd get over it. They were good men ... all of them ... had to be ... wouldn't be his men if they weren't. They'd understand why only one of them could be executive vice-president ... Wall Street wanted it that way. But it wouldn't mean anything ... just a name on a chart. Nothing would really change ... nothing at all ... not for nine years. Nine years was a long time. Anything could happen in nine years. Who would have guessed, even a year ago, that Fitzgerald would die?
The girl lounging behind the counter of the Western Union office moved a pad of message blanks toward him.
"Telegram," he said in brusque command. "Miss Erica Martin, Tredway Tower, Millburgh, Pennsylvania. Taking next train. Call executive committee meeting six o'clock. Sign it Bullard."
The girl looked up, parting her lips for the standard protest that he must write out his own message, but in the same instant she found herself touching pencil to paper. She wrote rapidly, hurried by some unaccountable fear that she might displease him. When she looked up, ready to check the message, he was gone. A crumpled dollar bill lay before her on the counter.
Outside the revolving door there was a blaze of summer sun, suddenly bright against the shadowed lobby, and Avery Bullard glanced down to protect his eyes. He saw the glitter of a small coin and, before he thought, stooped to pick it up. It wasn't a coin, only a bus token, and he felt a moment of self-consciousness as he saw that the street crowd was watching him. He quickly palmed the token into his pocket and, narrowing his eyes protectively, searched the stream of traffic for an empty taxicab. A windshield mirrored the sun and for an instant he was strangely blinded, as if fire had washed over his eyeballs, but it was a sensation that passed almost as quickly as it came.
A cab pulled to the curb, splashing the flood of dirty water that was streaming down the gutter from an open hydrant at the corner. Unflinching at the spatter, Avery Bullard reached out to clamp a possessive hand on the opening door. The woman passenger offered the driver a bill that he rejected with a shrug. Hurriedly, Avery Bullard took out his wallet, made change and, as the woman stepped out, he pushed past her, leaning forward, reaching out with his right hand —
Then it happened. A whiplash of pain exploded behind his eyes. Instantly, a giant force was twisting his head to the right until it seemed that the cords of his neck were being torn from his shoulders, disembodying his brain, washing it through the whirlpool of a crimson flood and then on into the engulfing blackness of a silent cave.
2.32 P.M. EDT
Patrolman Ed Canady, idly watching the two men who were repairing the leaking fire hydrant, saw the quick-gathering crowd around the taxicab in front of the Chippendale Building. He walked toward it, professionally calm, long-arming his way through the rapidly growing semicircle.
The limp figure of a big man sprawled before him, half inside of the cab, face down, legs hanging grotesquely out through the open door.
Canady took a deep breath and leaned in over the body, half expecting the reek of liquor. There was no odor of alcohol.
"For crissake, why's everything gotta happen to me?" a voice whined and Canady looked up. The taxi driver, slack-lipped and morose, was staring myopically over the back of the seat.
Canady froze his face. "What happened, Mac?"
"Nothing, I'm telling you. Crissake, I don't know nothing. I'm counting the change on a fare, see? Then I hears something go bump and a dame on the sidewalk yells and this is it."
Canady cut him off with a grunt, backing, twisting his shoulders out through the door.
A radio patrol car had stopped across the street and Canady cupped his hand and soft-shouted, "Ambulance."
The sergeant in the patrol car nodded and Canady turned, making a routine but futile effort to force back the close-pressing crowd. Then he leaned inside the cab again, bending over the body, his fingertips searching for the tell-tale bulge of a wallet that might help him establish identification. There was nothing in any of the pockets that could be reached without moving the body.
Canady looked up at the driver who was still staring sullenly over the back of the seat. "He give you an address?"
"Crissake, didn't I tell you? The guy don't even open his peeper. Before I know nothing he takes a dive."
The policeman's lips tightened and he reached for his notebook, flipping pages until he found a blank. With a stub pencil he wrote, "2.35 P.M. Unidentified man collapsed on street front of Chippendale Building."
His glance slipped past the edge of the notebook. For the first time he noticed that the right foot of the prostrate body was dangling in the swirl of dirty water that was flooding down the gutter. He reached down, cupping his hand under the ankle, starting to lift the leg, but his sense of touch transmitted the feeling of sodden resistance. He loosened his hold and let the foot drop back again. The water flooded and twisted around the shoe, wrapping a streamer of wet paper over the instep, and then another and another until the jam of debris had completely hidden the highly polished leather.
2.36 P.M. EDT
Bruce Pilcher leaned against the ornamentally carved window casing on the Madison Avenue side of Julius Steigel's private office, smoking a cigarette as if he were practicing an art of which he was a confident master.
"It is my professional opinion," he said slowly, stylizing his voice in an attempt at humor, "that we have just entertained a damned clever horse trader."
Steigel grinned, puffing his cheeks. He was a round little elf of a man with a pleasantly patriarchal face. "Don't I tell you? With a man like Mr. Avery Bullard it is a pleasure to do business. You make a good deal with Mr. Avery Bullard, you are not taking candy from a baby."
Pilcher bowed theatrically. "Of course, my dear Mr. Steigel, precisely the same thing could be said of yourself."
The old man smiled, pleased but modest. He had begun life as an itinerant peddler of tinware along the backroads of eastern Pennsylvania. Now, at seventy, he was a multimillionaire, a financial status that he had achieved with remarkably little change in the exterior manifestations of character. He remained an openly simple man with the same incipient twinkle that had once charmed tight-pursed Pennsylvania Dutch housewives into buying his angel food cake tins at ten cents above the town price.
Pilcher's eyes followed a lazy drift of cigarette smoke. "You're quite sure that Bullard is interested?"
The old man nodded. "Naturally he don't say so. Mr. Avery Bullard is a very smart man. He don't say he's anxious to buy my stores like I don't say I'm anxious to sell. But the napkin tells. You see the napkin? When we are through eating he puts it on the table and it is all twisted like a rope."
Pilcher bowed again. "My compliments on your powers of observation."
"Some things, my boy, you learn when you are a peddler. The lady is twisting her apron, pretty soon she is handing you the money — just the way Mr. Avery Bullard is pretty soon handing us five million dollars — maybe six."
Bruce Pilcher rearranged his long legs, straightening his trouser seams with his thin fingers. "You're not thinking of cash are you, Julius?"
Steigel rolled his head. "Cash? Yes, cash. What else?"
Words waited behind Bruce Pilcher's lips until the split second when he felt the timing was right. "You may have forgotten my mentioning it when I originally suggested the possibility of this deal, but there are ten thousand shares of unissued common stock in the Tredway treasury."
"The cash is better," Steigel said uneasily.
"I wonder." There was an overtone of cunning in Pilcher's voice. "Tredway stock is widely scattered. There are no big holdings. With a solid block of ten thousand shares you'd have representation on the board of directors — not too far from a practical working control of the company. You'd have Avery Bullard right under your thumb."
Steigel spread his hands, smiling. "Why do I want him under my thumb? My thumb is too old. This year I am seventy."
"It wouldn't be necessary to carry the load yourself," Pilcher said, elaborately casual. "I'd be quite willing to take over for you — sit on the board — represent your interests."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Executive Suite by Cameron Hawley. Copyright © 1952 Cameron Hawley. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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