It had been a rainy autumn evening some months back that McLove’s path crossed hers most violently, linking them with a secret that made them drinking companions if nothing more. He’d been at loose ends that evening, and wandered into a little restaurant over by the East River. Surprisingly enough, Margaret Mason had been there, defending her honor in a back booth against a very drunk escort. McLove had moved in, flattened him with one punch, and they had left him collapsed against a booth.
After that, on different drinking occasions, she had poured out the sort of lonely story he might have expected. And he’d listened and lingered, and sometimes fruitlessly imagined that he might become one of the men in her life. He knew there was no one for a long time after the bar incident, just as he knew now, by her infrequent free evenings, that there was someone again. Their drinking dates were more often being confined to lunch hours, when even two martinis were risky, and she never talked about being lonely or bored.
This day, over the first drink, she said, “It was terrible, really terrible.”
“I know. It’s going to get worse, I’m afraid. He’s going to turn up somewhere.”
“Dead or alive?”
“I wish I knew.”
She lit a cigarette. “Will you be blamed for it?”
“I couldn’t be expected to guard him from himself. Besides, I wasn’t hired as a personal bodyguard. I’m chief of security, and that’s all. I’m not a bodyguard or a detective. I don’t know the first thing about fingerprints or clues. All I know is about people.”
“What do you know about the Jupiter people?”
McLove finished his drink before answering. “Very little, really. Except for you. Hamilton and Knox and Greene and the rest of them are nothing more than names and faces. I’ve never even had a drink with any of them. I sit around at those meetings and, frankly, I’m bored stiff. If anybody tries to blame me for this thing, they’ll be looking for a new security chief.”
Margaret’s glass was empty too, and he signaled the waiter for two more. It was that sort of day. When they came, he noticed that her usually relaxed face was a bit tense, and the familiar sparkle of her blue eyes was no longer in evidence. She’d been through a lot that morning, and even the drinks were failing to relax her.
“Maybe I’ll quit with you,” she said.
“It’s been a long time since we’ve talked. How have things been?”
“All right.” She said it with a little shrug.
“The new boyfriend?”
“Don’t call him that, please.”
“I hope he’s an improvement over the last one.”
“So do I. At my age, you get involved with some strange ones.”
“Do you love him?”
She thought for a moment and then answered, “I guess I do.”
He lit another cigarette. “When Billy Calm passed your desk this morning, did he seem—?” The sentence stopped in the middle, cut short by a sudden scream from the street. McLove stood up and looked toward the door, where a waiter was already running outside to see what had happened.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know, but there seems to be a crowd gathering. Come on!”
Outside, they crossed the busy street and joined the crowd on the sidewalk of the Jupiter Building. “What happened?” Margaret asked somebody.
“Guy jumped, I guess.”
They fought their way through now, and McLove’s heart was pounding with anticipation of what they would see. It was Billy Calm, all right, crushed and dead and looking very small. But there was no doubt it was he.
A policeman arrived from somewhere with a blanket and threw it over the thing on the sidewalk. McLove saw Sam Hamilton fighting his way through the crowd to their side. “Who is it?” Hamilton asked, but he too must have known.
“Billy,” McLove told him. “It’s Billy Calm.”
Hamilton stared at the blanket for a moment and then looked at his watch. “Three hours and forty-five minutes since he jumped. I guess he must have taken the long way down.”
W.T. Knox was pacing the floor like a caged animal, and Shirley Taggert was sobbing silently in a corner chair. It was over. Billy Calm had been found. The reaction was only beginning to set in. The worst, they all realized, was still ahead.
Jason Greene glared at Hamilton as he came into the office. “Well, the market’s closed. Maybe you can stay off that phone for a while now.”
Sam Hamilton didn’t lose his grim smile. “Right now the price of Jupiter stock happens to be something that’s important to all of us. You may be interested to know that it fell fourteen more points before they had to suspend trading in it for the rest of the session. They still don’t have a closing price on it.”
Knox held up both hands. “All right, all right! Let’s everybody calm down and try to think. What do the police say, McLove?”
Feeling as if he were only a messenger boy between the two camps, McLove replied, “Billy was killed by the fall, and he’d been dead only a few minutes when they examined him. Body injuries would indicate that he fell from this height.”
“But where was he for nearly four hours?” Greene wanted to know. “Hanging there, invisible, outside the window?”
Shirley Taggert collected herself enough to join the conversation. “He got out of that room somehow and then came back and jumped later,” she said. “That’s how it must have been.”
But McLove shook his head. “I hate to throw cold water on logical explanations, but that’s how it couldn’t have been. Remember, the windows in this building can’t be opened. No other window has been broken, and the one on this floor is still covered by cardboard.”
“The roof!” Knox suggested.
“No. There still aren’t any footprints on the roof. We checked.”
“Didn’t anybody see him falling?”
“Apparently not till just before he hit.”
“The thing’s impossible,” Knox said.
“No.”
They were all looking at McLove. “Then what happened?” Greene asked.
“I don’t know what happened, except for one thing. Billy Calm didn’t hang in space for four hours. He didn’t fall off the roof, or out of any other window, which means he could only have fallen from the window in the directors’ room.”
“But the cardboard...”
“Somebody replaced it afterwards. And that means...”
“It means Billy was murdered,” Knox breathed. “It means he didn’t commit suicide.”
McLove nodded. “He was murdered, and by somebody on this floor. Probably by somebody in this room.” He glanced around.
Night settled cautiously over the city, with a scarlet sunset to the west that clung inordinately long to its reign over the skies. The police had returned, and the questioning went on, concurrently with the long-distance calls to Pittsburgh and five other cities where Jupiter had mills. There was confusion, somehow more so with the coming of darkness to the outer world. Secretaries and workers from the other floors gradually drifted home, but on 21 life went on.
“All right,” Knox breathed finally as it was nearing eight o’clock. “We’ll call a directors’ meeting for Monday morning, to elect a new president. That should give the market time to settle down, and let us know just how bad things really are. At the same time, we’ll issue a statement about the proposed merger. I gather we’re in agreement that it’s a dead issue for the time being.”