by Edward D. Hoch
“One of Ed’s finest stories,” says Douglas Greene of Crippen and Landru, the publisher of several Hoch collections, “is ‘A Long Way Down,’ an impossible crime tale — man jumps out of skyscraper window but dis-appears on the way down.” The story first appeared in AHMM in February 1965, three years after the author’s first sale to EQMM but eight years prior to his beginning his 36-year streak of unbroken EQMM publication. It’s been reprinted several times, but never before in this magazine.
Many men have disappeared under unusual circumstances, but perhaps none more unusual than those which befell Billy Calm.
The day began in a routine way for McLove. He left his apartment in midtown Manhattan and walked through the foggy March morning just as he did on every working day of the year. When he was still several blocks away, he could make out the bottom floors of the great glass slab that was the home office of the Jupiter Steel & Brass Corporation. But above the tenth floor the fog had taken over, shrouding everything in a dense coat of moisture that could have been the roof of the world.
Underfoot, the going was slushy. The same warm air mass that had caused the fog was making short work of the previous day’s two-inch snowfall. McLove, who didn’t really mind Manhattan winters, was thankful that spring was only days away. Finally he turned into the massive marble lobby of the Jupiter Steel Building, thinking for the hundredth time that only the garish little newsstand in one corner kept it from being an exact replica of the interior of an Egyptian tomb. Anyway, it was dry inside, without slush underfoot.
McLove’s office on the twenty-first floor had been a point of creeping controversy from the very beginning. It was the executive floor, bulging with the vice-presidents and others who formed the inner core of Billy Calm’s little family. The very idea of sharing this exclusive office space with the firm’s security chief had repelled many of them, but when Billy Calm spoke, there were few who openly dared challenge his mandates.
McLove had moved to the executive floor soon after the forty-year-old boy genius of Wall Street had seized control of Jupiter Steel in a proxy battle that had split stockholders into armed camps. On the day Billy Calm first walked through the marble lobby to take command of his newest acquisition, a disgruntled shareholder named Raimey had shot his hat off, and actually managed to get a second shot before being overpowered. From that day on, Billy Calm used the private elevator at the rear of the building, and McLove supervised security from the twenty-first floor.
It was a thankless task that amounted to little more than being a sometime bodyguard for Calm. His duties, in the main, consisted of keeping Calm’s private elevator in working order, attending directors’ meetings with the air of a reluctant outsider, supervising the security forces at the far-flung Jupiter mills, and helping with arrangements for Calm’s numerous public appearances. For this he was paid fifteen thousand dollars a year, which was the principal reason he did it.
On the twenty-first floor, this morning, Margaret Mason was already at her desk outside the directors’ room. She looked up as McLove stepped into the office and flashed him their private smile. “How are you, McLove?”
“Morning, Margaret. Billy in yet?”
“Mr. Calm? Not yet. He’s flying in from Pittsburgh. Should be here anytime now.”
McLove glanced at his watch. He knew the directors’ meeting was scheduled for ten, and that was only twenty minutes away. “Heard anything?” he asked, knowing that Margaret Mason was the best source of information on the entire floor. She knew everything and would tell you most of it, provided it didn’t concern herself.
Now she nodded, and bent forward a bit across the desk. “Mr. Calm phoned from his plane and talked with Jason Greene. The merger is going through. He’ll announce it officially at the meeting this morning.”
“That’ll make some people around here mighty sad.” McLove was thinking of W.T. Knox and Sam Hamilton, two directors who had opposed the merger from the very beginning. Only twenty-four hours earlier, before Billy Calm’s rush flight to Pittsburgh in his private plane, it had appeared that their efforts would be successful.
“They should know better than to buck Mr. Calm,” Margaret said.
“I suppose so.” McLove glanced at his watch again. For some reason, he was getting nervous. “Say, how about lunch, if we get out of the meeting in time?”
“Fine.” She gave him the small smile again. “You’re the only one I feel safe drinking with at noon.”
“Be back in a few minutes.”
“I’ll buzz you if Mr. Calm gets in.”
He glanced at the closed doors of the private elevator and nodded. Then he walked down the hall to his own office once more. He got a pack of cigarettes from his desk and went across the hall to W.T. Knox’s office.
“Morning, W.T. What’s new?”
The tall man looked up from a file folder he’d been studying. Thirty-seven, a man who had retained most of his youthful good looks and all of his charm, Knox was popular with the girls on 21. He’d probably have been more popular if he hadn’t had a pregnant wife and five children of varying ages.
“McLove, look at this weather!” He gestured toward the window, where a curtain of fog still hung. “Every winter I say I’ll move to Florida, and every winter the wife talks me into staying.”
Jason Greene, balding and ultra-efficient, joined them with a sheaf of reports. “Billy should be in at any moment. He phoned me to say the merger had gone through.”
Knox dropped his eyes. “I heard.”
“When the word gets out, Jupiter stock will jump another ten points.”
McLove could almost feel the tension between the two men; one gloating, and the other bitter. He walked to the window and stared out at the fog, trying to see the invisible building across the street. Below, he could not even make out the setback of their own building, though it was only two floors lower. Fog... well, at least it meant that spring was on the way.
Then there was a third voice behind him, and he knew without turning that it belonged to Shirley Taggert, the president’s personal secretary. “It’s almost time for the board meeting,” she said, with that hint of a Southern drawl that either attracted or repelled but left no middle ground. “You people ready?”
Shirley was grim-faced but far from ugly. She was a bit younger than Margaret Mason’s mid thirties, a bit sharper of dress and mind. But she paid the penalty for being Billy Calm’s secretary every time she walked down the halls. Conversations ceased, suspicious glances followed her, and there was always a half-hidden air of tension at her arrival. She ate lunch alone, and one or two fellows who had been brave enough to ask her for a date hadn’t bothered to ask a second time.
“We’re ready,” Jason Greene told her. “Is he here yet?”
She shook her head and glanced at the clock. “He should be in any minute.”
McLove left them grouped around Knox’s desk and walked back down the hall. Sam Hamilton, the joker, passed him on the way and stopped to tell him a quick gag. He, at least, didn’t seem awfully upset about the impending merger, although he had opposed it. McLove liked Sam better than any of the other directors, probably because at the age of fifty he was still a big kid at heart. You could meet him on even ground and, at times, feel like he was letting you outdo him.
“Anything yet?” McLove asked Margaret, returning to her desk outside the director’s room.
“No sign of Mr. Calm, but he shouldn’t be long now. It’s just about ten.”
McLove glanced at the closed door of Billy Calm’s office, next to the directors’ room, and entered the latter. The room was quite plain, with only one door through which he had entered, and unbroken walls of dull oak paneling on either wall. The far end of the room, with two wide windows looking out at the fog, was only twenty feet away, and the conference table that was the room’s only piece of furniture had just the eight necessary chairs grouped around it. Some had been heard to complain that the room lacked the stature of Jupiter Steel, but Billy Calm contended he liked the forced intimacy of it.