McGarron stared at him. “Behind me? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Don’t you know about P. J.?” Tom asked with bland surprise.
I saw McGarron’s hands tighten on the porch railing. “What about P. J.?”
“Poor health. He’s retiring at the end of the month.”
McGarron laughed, but his heart wasn’t in it. “Why, that old coot is as tough as saddle leather!”
“Bad heart, they say. Dolmer is taking over.” Tom shrugged his shoulders sadly. “As long as you as much as told us, McGarron, that we’re hired, I think I can speak frankly. I’ve heard Dolmer cussing you out. Harkness told me once that Dolmer told him that if he ever took over the firm, his first act was going to be to fire you and make damn well sure that you didn’t wangle any pension out of the Board. So when you tell Allan here you can’t use him, I wonder if maybe you’re letting your own ammunition get damp.”
“Why, old P. J. wouldn’t let Dolmer or anybody else can me! By God, I’ve been with the firm for thirty years and I know more about...”
“How did Dolmer sound when you and he were going around and around last winter? The way I hear it, he doesn’t think you’re indispensable, McGarron.”
Jake came in nicely, right on cue. He snapped his fingers. “Say, now I get it! Is Dolmer a little fat guy with a starched collar? Sure, then. The other day when I met him in the hall he asked me how I was getting along with Mr. McGarron. I said okay, I guessed. Then he told me not to worry, that McGarron wouldn’t be bothering me once I got out in the field. That didn’t make much sense at the time, but now I get it.”
Jake had given the last little shove necessary. A hell of a lot of bluster went out of McGarron in seconds. His face looked as though something behind it, some structural members, had suddenly collapsed.
He said, in a low voice, “What the hell would I do? I’ve got some money, but... Just what the hell will I do?”
“Can’t you put the pressure on Dolmer?” Tom asked.
McGarron looked through us. He said, very softly, “It had to be Dolmer, didn’t it? It couldn’t have been anybody else. You do what you have to do to run your job and then...”
He got up suddenly and left us there, sitting on the porch. When he was out of hearing distance, Tom said. “I almost feel sorry for the old foop. Want to let him off the hook?”
“Let him squirm,” Jake said. “I love it.”
“What’s going on?” Allan asked. We told him. He didn’t look either approving or disapproving.
About an hour later McGarron told Archer that he was going to “give him a chance to prove himself.” Allan thanked him politely. Tom and Jake and I shook hands and told Allan he was going to have to give us the usual employment agency fee.
At three in the afternoon McGarron started getting drunk. Not drunk like the night before. This was a morose, brooding drunkenness. He sat in a chair with a bottle between his feet and looked at distant ghosts. I got sick of watching him and went down to the lake shore. Tom joined me a while later.
“I tried to water down that rumor to take him off the hook, Ralph, but now he’s convinced himself. Now he thinks they’ve been looking at him in a funny way for the last few weeks. Damn it, I wish we hadn’t done it.”
“Why not? Give the guy a taste of his own medicine.”
“They never had any kids and his wife died about five years ago. He works fifteen hours a day because he just hasn’t got any other interests.”
“Well, maybe he’ll remember how it felt and take it easier on the next guys he trains. We’re doing a public service.”
At dusk McGarron fell off the chair, out like a light. We hoisted his bulk into a bunk and played some listless bridge until it was time to turn in. When I woke up in the morning he was back at the table with another bottle in front of him. He looked at me and through me.
“Thir’y years,” he said thickly. “Thir’y years an’ sall a gra’tude a man gets.”
“Cheer up,” I said. “It isn’t the end of the world.”
“Thir’y years,” he said. And he looked as though he’d aged 30 years.
“When are we going back?” I asked him. I had to ask it three times before it got through to him.
He flapped a big hand. “Go anytime.”
We had a conference in front of him. He didn’t hear a word. We decided to load him into the car and drive back. It had worked too good. Too damn good. And he was making us nervous. Like little kids who tried smoking and burned down the barn.
He lurched out heavily while we were packing. “Let him go,” Jake said. “We’ll round him up when we’re ready to start.”
It was Allan who saw him through the window. Allan made a funny sound and raced for the door, but before he could reach it, we heard the shot, turned and saw what he had seen.
McGarron had held the muzzle in his mouth with both hands and pulled the trigger on a nail sticking out of one of the porch posts. It was very messy. We knew enough not to touch him. The body smashed one of the porch chairs as it fell and the Winchester miraculously still hung from the big nail. As in most suicide cases, there had been a loss of control of bodily functions in the split second of death.
Archer and Jake stayed with the body after we had decided on a story. Tom was all for telling the complete truth. We told him that nothing would be gained thereby. We told him that it proved that McGarron was mentally unbalanced, anyway.
None of us believed it, but we said it with conviction. And we all wanted those sales jobs. Dillon wasn’t going to give any sales jobs to people who talked his sales manager into killing himself.
We brought Tom around to where he agreed to stick to the story that McGarron had been depressed and drinking and we didn’t know why he’d done it.
It was funny the way we avoided looking at each other’s eyes.
Tom and I found a phone and got in touch with the state police and gave them directions. They arrived back at the camp ten minutes after we did, bringing the county coroner with them. We answered all the questions and got permission to take the Cadillac back to the city.
Sunday night I told Peg the whole story. I sat in the hotel room and looked at the floor and told her everything. I wanted to be punished the way a kid sometimes wants to be punished, hoping it will take away the knowledge of having done wrong. But I knew that there was no one to administer the punishment.
Peg asked me if I wanted to go back with Kimball and Stroud, if that would help at all. We decided it wouldn’t. Jobs like this one don’t grow on trees.
So the new sales manager came in from the regional office where he’d been in charge, and he assigned me to the New Orleans District and I was glad that I was sent there alone so that I wouldn’t have Jake and Tom and Allan around to remind me of what we had done.
The whole incident made me think, somehow, of a package tied up, but with the dangling strings uncut. During the first few months on the new job I felt as though I were waiting for something. You wish, sometimes, for an impartial fate to come along and cut the strings off close to the knot.
In April, P. J. Dillon died of a heart attack and Dolmer took over. That seemed to help a little.
But a month later Allan Archer got the bounce because, according to rumor, he didn’t have the personality for the job. And that didn’t help a bit.
