He came back to me again. He nodded at the phone.
“The Old Man?” he asked.
I said it had been. “He wants to ask me all about it, I suppose. Another third degree.”
It was a way the Old Man had. Not that he didn’t trust us. Not that he thought we were goofing off or holding back on anything or distorting anything. It was the newspaperman in him, I’d guess—the screaming need for detail, hoping that by talking with us he might discover some angle we had missed, a raking over of the gravel of raw facts in a maddening look for gold. I suppose it made him feel he was keeping his hand in.
“It’s a terrible blow,” said Gavin. “There goes a fat contract. The boy down in advertising who was handling the account probably is off in some dark corner cutting his throat.”
“Not only tough for us,” I said. “Tough for the entire town.”
For Franklin’s was not a shopping center only; it was likewise an unofficial social center. Old ladies, with their neatly tailored suits and their prim and careful coiffures, made a quiet and regular celebration in the tearoom on the seventh floor. Housewives out for a day of shopping invariably would meet old friends at Franklin’s—likewise on a shopping mission and would block the aisles with impromptu reunions. People were always meeting other people there by prearranged appointment. And there were the art shows and the uplift lectures and all the other trappings that are the hallmark of genteel America. Franklin’s was a marketplace and a rendezvous and a sort of club for the people of all classes and all walks of life.
I got up from my desk and went down the corridor to the boss’s office.
His name is William Woodruff Maynard and he is not a bad guy. Not nearly so bad as the name would make you think.
Charlie Gunderson, who headed up retail advertising, was in the office with him, and the both of them looked worried.
The Old Man offered me a cigar out of the big box that stood on the corner of his desk, but I refused it and sat down in a chair alongside Charlie, facing the Old Man, who sat behind the desk.
“I phoned Bruce,” the Old Man said, “and he was noncommittal. I might even say evasive. He doesn’t want to talk.”
“I don’t imagine that he does,” I said. “I think it was as great a shock to him as to the rest of us.”
“I don’t understand you, Parker. Why should it be a shock? He must have been the one who negotiated and arranged the sale.”
“The closing of the store,” I explained. “That’s what we are talking about, I take it. I don’t think Bruce knew the new owner planned to close the store. I think if he’d suspected that, there would have been no sale.”
“What makes you think that, Parker?”
“The look on Bruce’s face,” I told him. “When Bennett said they’d close down the store. Surprised and shocked and angry and, perhaps, a little sick. Like a man whose four kings bump up against four aces.”
“But he said nothing.”
“What was there for him to say? He had closed the deal and the store was sold. I don’t imagine it ever crossed his mind that someone would buy a prosperous business and then simply close it down.”
“No,” said the Old Man thoughtfully, “it doesn’t make much sense.”
“It might be just a publicity gag,” said Charlie Gunderson. “Just a public come-on. You’ll have to admit that never in its history has Franklin’s ever gotten the publicity it is getting now.”
“Franklin’s,” said the Old Man stiffly, “never sought publicity. They didn’t need publicity.”
“In just a day or two,” persisted Charlie, “there’ll be a big announcement the store is opening up again. The new management will say they’re giving in to the public clamor that Franklin’s should go on.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, and realized immediately that I should have kept my mouth shut. For I didn’t have a thing to go on, just a sort of hunch. The whole deal smelled. There was more to it, I could have sworn, than just a gag some publicity man had thought up in an idle moment.
But they didn’t ask me, either one of them, why I thought it was no gag.
“Parker,” said the Old Man, “you have no inkling at all as to who’s behind this deal?”
I shook my head. “Bennett wasn’t saying. The store had been purchased—building, stock, goodwill, everything—by the man, or men, he was representing, and it is being closed. No reason for its being closed. No plans to use the building for something else.”
“I imagine he was questioned rather closely.”
I nodded.
“And he wasn’t talking?”
“Not a word,” I said.
“Strange,” the Old Man said. “It’s most devilish strange.”
“This Bennett?” asked Charlie. “What do you know about him?”
“Nothing. He refused to identify himself except as the agent of the buyer.”
“You tried, of course,” the Old Man said.
“Not me. I had to write the story to catch the first edition and there was only twenty minutes. Gavin has a couple of people checking the hotels.”
“I’ll lay you twenty dollars,” the Old Man offered, “they’ll find no trace of him.”
I suppose I looked surprised.
“It’s a funny business,” the Old Man said, “from the first to last. A negotiation such as this is most difficult to keep entirely under cover. And yet there was no leak, no rumor, not a breath of it.”
“If there had been,” I pointed out. “Dow would have known about it. And if he’d known about it, he’d been working on it, instead of going to the airport. . . .”
“I quite agree with you,” the Old Man said. “Dow knows the most of everything that’s going on downtown.”
“Was there anything about this Bennett,” Charlie asked me, “that might give you a clue—any kind of clue?”
I shook my head. All I could remember of him was the total baldness of his head and the fly crawling on that baldness and his paying no attention to it.
“Well, thank you, Parker,” said the Old Man. “I would imagine you did your usual job. Highly competent. With men like you and Dow and Gavin out there in the city room we don’t have any worries.”
I got out of there before he broke down to the point where he might have tried to raise my salary. That would have been an awful thing.
I went back to the newsroom.
The papers had just come up from the pressroom and there on the front page was my story with a twelve-point by-line and the headline spread across eight columns.
Also on the front page was a picture of Joy holding a skunk and seeming charmed about it. Underneath the picture was the story she had written, and one of the jokers on the copydesk had achieved one of the standard sappy headlines on it.
I went over to the city desk and stood alongside Gavin.
“Any luck,” I asked him, “in your hunt for Bennett?”
“No luck at all,” he told me wrathfully. “I don’t think there was ever such a man. I think you made him up.”
“Maybe Bruce—”
“I called Bruce. Bruce says he figured Bennett was staying at one of the hotels. Said the man never talked anything but business. Never once mentioned personalities.”
“The hotels?”
“No, and he never has been. None of them has had a Bennett for the last three weeks. We’re working on the motels now, but I tell you, Parker, it’s a waste of time. There isn’t such a man.”
“Maybe he’s registered under a different name. Check on bald men. . .”
“That’s a hot one,” snarled Gavin. “Have you any idea how many bald men register in our hotels each day?”
“No,” I said, “I haven’t.”
Gavin was in his usual home-edition lather, and there wasn’t any use in talking further with him. I walked away and started across the room to have a word with Dow. But I saw he wasn’t there, so I stopped off at my desk.
I picked up the paper that was lying there and sat down to look at it. I read through my story and was furious with myself over a couple of paragraphs that read jumbled up and jerky. It always happens that way when you write a story under pressure. You get it down the best way that you can and then, for the next edition, you get it all smoothed out.