Carlon also agreed that the answers to some of our questions were in Los Angeles and that I should travel there immediately. He would spare no expense to find his daughter. He would spare no one.
16
The weather wasn't good in Los Angeles. The city was in the midst of a heat wave combined with a thick layer of smog.
By one o'clock, when I arrived at Widow Cable in downtown L.A. for the appointment Carlon had set up for me, the sun had burned away most of the smog, but the heat remained. Witlow Cable's headquarters were frigidly air-conditioned, though, and I was only inside the building for about five minutes before I found myself almost longing to be back out on the street.
A pertly sweet secretary informed me that I could see Mr. Brian Cheevers, and she ushered me into an office that was nothing if not sumptuous. A royal-blue carpet I found myself wading in stretched to mirrored walls and thick, paler blue ceiling-to-floor drapes. A white sofa with blue throw pillows sat against the wall on my right, and there were matching white chairs before an enormous desk of bleached wood trimmed in blue.
Behind the desk Mr. Brian Cheevers, a squat, swarthy man with a lumpy face and hungry eyes, stood to shake my hand. His appearance was civilized somewhat by the elegant suit disguising the powerful bulk of his shoulders.
He motioned me into one of the exquisite, soft white chairs in front of his desk, and I sat with the feeling that I was deflowering a virgin.
"You want to talk about Bob Manners," he said, as if planting the thought in my mind.
"I won't take much of your time, Mr. Cheevers. I want to know primarily about the time leading up to Manners' death."
"I notice you didn't say suicide."
"I try to keep an open mind. Do you have any opinion on whether or not it was suicide?"
"No, I don't worry about it. It's passed. Manners is dead. I leave that sort of speculation to the proper authorities."
The no-nonsense mind in action, I thought. Too busy to be curious about the death of an associate. On the other hand, Cheevers might have an hour each day scheduled for curiosity. I cautioned myself against judging too harshly.
"Did you know Manners well?" I asked.
"He was my immediate superior for five years," Cheevers said with vaguely military overtones.
"According to the newspapers, fellow employees said that business pressures had upset Manners for several weeks before his death. Can you tell me what sort of pressures?"
Cheevers picked up a gold pen and held it gently, as if it were a royal scepter. "There are always great pressures being brought to bear in this job, Mr. Nudger, as there were in the period immediately preceding Bob Manners' death. I will say he seemed unusually tense at the time, but if that tenseness was the result of business pressure, it had to have been accumulative."
"What about pressures from his home life?"
Cheevers' lumpy face twisted into a slight grin. "Not with that wife of his. Elizabeth is the perfectly trained executive's wife. I don't think I'm maligning the man by saying that Manners would never have attained his position without her."
"Didn't Manners ever talk to you… on a personal basis?"
"Not often. He never gave me any idea what was causing his apprehension, and I didn't consider it my business."
"Was there anyone here he might have confided in?"
"I doubt it. Bob Manners was all business. He didn't believe in confiding his personal problems to his subordinates, and everyone here was a subordinate."
"Do you know of anyone else, outside the business, he might have talked to about his problems?"
Cheevers shook his head. "Manners' career was his life. On this level, that's the way it has to be." He pretended to sneak a glance at his watch.
I hung on. "Has Witlow Cable ever done business with Gratuity Insurance?"
"No." Cheevers' answer was immediate and confident.
"What about when Manners was in charge?"
"I'd have known about it." Cheevers' manner was as cool and unruffled as the office decor. Behind him the sun beat futilely on the tall window. "I'm a bit pressed for time, Mr. Nudger. Is there anything else?"
"Yes, I'd like to talk to Manners' secretary."
He seemed to consider the reasonableness of that for a moment. "All right," he said. "Her name's Alice Kramer. She's in accounting now." He picked up the white receiver from the phone on his desk and punched one of a row of buttons. "Bernie, Cheevers. A man named Nudger is coming down to talk to Alice about Bob Manners. Tell her to cooperate." Cheevers hung up the phone, apparently without waiting for a reply.
I stood and shook hands with him again and slow-bounded over the deep carpet toward the door.
"By the way," I said as I was going out, "what exactly does Witlow Cable produce "
"Industrial cable, petroleum storage tanks and carpet," he said. I shouldn't have been surprised.
The secretary who had ushered me into Cheevers' office gave me directions to accounting, on the second floor. I took an elevator down and followed a long hall to a wooden door with ACCOUNTING lettered on it in neat black print. The door was locked. I turned left with the hall, glanced into a large empty employee's cafeteria, then came to another door, open. I stepped inside to see a small gray-haired woman savagely putting an electric typewriter through its paces.
"Accounting?" I asked.
She nodded without breaking rhythm.
"Alice Kramer?"
"She's waiting for you in there," the mad typist said, jerking her head toward a door on her left as the typewriter's margin bell chimed.
I walked through the door and was in a small green-walled room with two chairs and a low table with a lamp on it. It was the sort of room used only for heart-to-hearts, and I could sense that it was haunted by many a departed accountant. In one of the chairs sat a neatly dressed, attractive woman in her mid-forties. Her dark brown hair was short and disciplined; her smile was pleasant but harried. After introductions, we got to the subject of her ex-boss.
"I've been told Manners was the all-business type," I said to her, slipping into the other chair, "so as his secretary you were probably closer to him than anyone else in the company."
She nodded briskly, conceding the truth in that.
"Did you notice any tenseness, any apprehension in him before his death?"
"Everyone did," she said in a carefully modulated but warm voice. "Not that he behaved in such a way that it would sound extravagant, or even unusual, if described; but it was the contrast. Before that time Mr. Manners was one of the most even-tempered men you could meet, always considerate and genuinely concerned with other people. Then suddenly he became… grim, constantly drawn into himself."
"And he never told you why?"
"No. You were right in assuming Mr. Manners put more trust in me than in anyone else here, but our relationship was still one of employer to employee. He kept his personal problems to himself."
"How long before his death did you first notice the change in him?"
She crossed her long legs primly, folded her arms. "I'm sure I was the one who first noticed a change, about two months… before. Then other people began to notice that he always seemed preoccupied, which wasn't at all like Mr. Manners. Approximately a week before… it happened he became increasingly agitated, depressed." Her eyes took on the sheen of suppressed tears. "I asked him what was bothering him, if I could help, but he said not to worry about him, that things would work out."
I didn't like wringing her, but I had to. I was getting a lump in my own throat. "Were you here at work when he died?"