“Gray?”
“Your brother picked that up too. I was sure because that was what I remembered the best about her. Bug-luminous gray eyes. To make sure I checked with the other people around here, the ones who remember her. They all insist her eyes were gray, not blue as your brother seemed to think. I was curious and he promised he’d call me back and tell me the story, or write me. He never did. That business about the eyes being gray sort of rattled him. You know what I mean? His voice got shaky. What’s up, Mr. Dean?”
“I don’t know yet, Mr. Wilther.”
“You sound as shaky as your brother did.”
“It’s — a shock to me. It isn’t what I was thinking of. I can see how it might have been even more of a shock to my brother.”
“Maybe it’s none of my business, and tell me so if that’s the way you feel about it, but I would like to know what goes on.”
I had a sudden idea and I said quickly, “Mr. Wilther, do you have some sort of an organization there that investigates insurance frauds?”
“In a very small way, Mr. Dean. For bigger stuff we use a national organization. But I don’t see how we could justify doing any work where there’s no insurance interest involved in—”
“Suppose I pay all costs with a bonus for speed.”
“We’re in the insurance business, Mr. Dean.”
“Then could you call it a favor to a potential policyholder?”
“How big a policy?” he asked quickly.
“Say a hundred thousand straight life. You can check up on me very easily.”
“I don’t have to — if you’re one of the Deans. I checked on your brother after that phone call. I shouldn’t do anything, even as a favor to a policyholder, but I’m a man who gets curious about things. Too curious, maybe. What do you want done?”
“Check on that girl who worked for you. The gray-eyed one. Niki Webb. There are second cousins in Cleveland, I believe. Get pictures and fingerprints if you can. Find out what happened when she left Cleveland. The one who calls herself Niki Webb, a blue-eyed one, showed up here the following December. She resigned there a few months earlier, I believe.”
“In September, Mr. Dean.”
“Let me know as soon as you find out anything. You can phone me here at the Hotel Gardland. I’m Gevan Dean.” I gave him the suite number.
“Right. I’ll mail you a bill for services after we’ve finished. It might help if I knew the reason for the impersonation.”
“I wish I knew. It doesn’t make sense yet.”
“I’ll try to give it a priority handling. Are you too busy to go take a physical for that policy?”
“At the moment, yes. Next week sometime.”
I hung up. My hands felt sticky. I washed them. I had found a new way to put myself in Ken’s shoes. Suppose you are married to a lovely woman, and deeply in love with her, and you learn she is not who she pretends to be; you find out she is wearing a mask. By unmasking her, you may lose her. Your marriage is a fiction, yet you can’t face a life without her.
I was going to carry a lot of tension around with me until I heard from Wilther. I wondered if Ken had found out why she was hiding under some other name. Who had she been? What had she been? Why do people change their identity? To escape from something. From the consequence of some criminal act. Or they are running out on some responsibility. Or, as in the traditional con game, there is a mark to be fleeced. I knew the history of the girl whose identity she had assumed. But what of Niki’s own history? I began to imagine strange and terrible things. Yes, oddly, discovering the flaw in identity made Niki, as a person, more believable. From the beginning there had been just too much sophistication, too much poise for a girl who had no more experience of the world than the genuine Niki Webb. I realized it had bothered me four years ago without my putting my finger on the exact reason. It had not been the sly wanton pretending to be a lady. It had been more subtle.
After useless conjecture, I went to the phone and made a call which I knew I should have made right after meeting Stanley Mottling. It took the long-distance operator a half-hour to locate Mort Brice. He had been one of the young assistant deans when I was at the Business School. Since that time he had formed a company in New York that was partly devoted to handling industrial management problems on contract, but was mainly a clearinghouse for executive personnel all over the country and over most of the world, finding the right man available for the right job as soon as it opened up.
I got him on the line and Mort said, “My God, it’s the beachcomber! What in the world are you doing? Going back to work?” His voice changed suddenly and I knew he had remembered Ken’s death. It was the sort of news his office would pick up quickly. “Say, I didn’t mean to sound so flip, Gev. I forgot for a minute about your brother. That was a hell of a thing. Gev. Shocking.”
“A bad thing, Mort. I’m trying to get things straightened out.”
“Hope you’ll keep us in mind if you need a couple of shrewd boys to fill out the roster. Production men are in damn short supply, but I think I could round up a couple for you. I understand you people have a lot of government work. Loaded you down, haven’t they?”
“Pretty heavily. But that isn’t what I called about. I’m being pressured to put a man named Stanley Mottling in as president, now that Ken is gone. I thought you might have an opinion, if you know him.”
“Oh, I know him. But I don’t like to give any opinions.”
“Isn’t that your business?”
“It is when I can stay cool and calm and objective. But that is one gent I don’t like. He’s shrewd, able, maybe brilliant. All the adjectives. But I don’t like him.”
“He’s driven away some of the men I had a lot of confidence in when I was here.”
“Then they needed driving, Gev. One thing I do know about Mottling, his strong point is that he can recognize ability and then delegate authority and responsibility.”
“The hell you say! That’s the last thing he’s done here. And he drove away good men. Hell, you know one of them. He came through your office. Poulson.”
“He resigned for a better offer.”
“No. Mottling drove him out, and drove out other men just as good.”
There was a silence on the line. “Were they undercutting him, maybe?”
“I think you know Poulson better than that.”
I heard an odd sound over the line and then I remembered Mort Brice’s little habit of snapping his front teeth with his thumbnail when he was thinking hard. “It sounds funny,” he said.
“I’m paying a phone bill to have you tell me something I knew already.”
“I can tell you one thing, Gev. If Mottling has done what you say he has done — and I’ll buy that — don’t for one minute think that it was done out of stupidity or carelessness or anything like that. He had a good reason. He’s the type who would have a special reason. So try thinking along these lines: What can he gain by fumbling production? You say he drove production men away. Would it depress market values of your stock so he could buy in somehow? Could he get a whack at ownership and control by driving down dividends to the point where he could pick up shares here and there on the side?”
“Not the way the stock is held, and we’re better than seventy per cent cost plus, so a production fumble wouldn’t change the dividend picture too much.”
“Then that won’t wash. But whether you know it or not, Mottling is pretty heavy in the pocket. His father was one hell of a smart engineer. His father built steel and tractor plants and even got into hydroelectric stuff for the Russians during the twenties. He got them started on air frame production in the Ural area, too. They paid him very well, very damn well, for services rendered. There was some sort of tax dodge, so that Internal Revenue got no slice of what Mottling Senior was paid. He was over there quite a while, and then his wife got involved with some colonel-general or something, and got one of those fast divorces they had in those days. Mottling Senior brought Stanley home. The boy might have been about fourteen then. He got his training at Cal Tech and later at the Stanford Business.”