occasional dinner when he could make it; he was an extremely busy man. And I’d spend a weekend up at their summer place now and then.”
“You ever do any public relations for Dempster-Torrey?”
“No, and I never made a pitch for that account. I didn’t want anyone accusing Jack of nepotism. And besides, Dempster-Torrey has a very effective in-house PR department. So it was better all around if I stayed away from my brother’s business.”
“Uh-huh,” Cone says. “Well, you promised to cooperate, and you have. Thanks for your time.”
“If there’s anything else I can do to help, don’t hesitate to give me a call.”
“I’ll do that. Nice dog you’ve got there.”
Dempster turns to stare at the picture on the wall.
“Jesus,” Cone says, “that’s tough.”
“I dragged the guy out of his car,” David Dempster goes on, “and kicked the shit out of the bastard.”
Again that bonecrushing handshake, and Cone gets out of there. He goes down to the icy lobby, takes off his jacket, and steps out into the steam bath. The heat is a slap in the face, and he starts slogging back to John Street wondering if he’ll survive in the office where Haldering amp; Co. air conditioners, all antique window units, wheeze and clank, fighting a losing battle against the simmer.
He has an hour to kill before his appointment with Simon Trale, Chief Financial Officer of Dempster-Torrey, and he knows there are things he should be doing: checking with Davenport on the homicide investigation; goosing Sid Apicella to get skinny on the balance sheet of David Dempster Associates, Inc.; gathering evidence to back up his grand theory on who’s responsible for the campaign of sabotage.
He starts by reviewing his recent conversation with David Dempster. Timothy knows very well that he himself is a mess of prejudices. For instance, he’ll never believe a man who wears a pinkie ring, never lend money to anyone who claims to have finished reading
Silly bigotries, he acknowledges, and he’s got a lot of them. And the morning meeting with David Dempster has added a few more. The orotund voice and precise diction. The fanged smile with all the warmth of a wolf snarl. The showy way he loaded his pipe, as if he was filling a chalice with sacramental wine. Wearing a vest on the hottest day of the year and then festooning it with a heavy gold chain from which a Phi Beta Kappa key dangled.
All minor affectations, Cone admits, but revealing. The man comes perilously close to being a poof, or acting like one. Whatever he is, Cone suspects, there is not much to him. Beneath that confident, almost magisterial manner is a guy running scared. Prick him and he’ll deflate like a punctured bladder of hot air.
Except … Except … In David Dempster’s final words, regarding the drunken driver who killed his dog, he said in tones of uncontrolled savagery, “I kicked the shit out of the bastard.” That shocked Cone, not because of the act or the words describing it, but that it was so out of character for someone he had tagged as a wimp, and a pompous wimp at that.
It’s a puzzlement, and Timothy decides to put David Dempster on hold, not that the guy is obviously a wrongo, but only because no one else questioned up to now has given off such confusing vibes. Like all detectives, Cone tends to pigeonhole people. And when he can’t assign them to neat slots, his anxiety quotient rises.
The interview with Simon Trale is held in the offices of Dempster-Torrey on Wall Street. Trale elects to meet Cone in the boardroom, a cavernous chamber with a conference table long enough to sleep Paul Bunyan. It is surrounded by twenty black leather armchairs, precisely spaced. On the table in front of each chair is a water carafe, glass, pad of yellow legal paper, ballpoint pen, and ashtray-all embossed with the corporate insignia.
“I brought you in here,” Trale says in a high-pitched voice, “because it was swept electronically about an hour ago. The debuggers won’t get to my office until this afternoon, so I thought it would be safer if we talked in here.”
“Yeah,” Cone says, “that makes sense.”
He wonders if they’re going to sit at opposite ends of that stretched slab of polished walnut and shout at each other. But Trale pulls out two adjoining chairs along one side, and that’s where they park themselves.
The CFO is a short guy. In fact, Cone figures that if he was a few inches shorter he’d qualify as a midget. Usually a man so diminutive will buy his clothes in the boys’ section of a department store, but Trale’s duds are too well tailored for that. He’s wearing a dark blue pinstripe with unpadded shoulders and side vents. His shirt is sparkling white, and he sports a paisley bow tie. Small gold cuff links. A wide gold wedding band. A gold Rolex. Black tasseled loafers on his tiny feet.
He’s got a full head of snowy white hair neatly trimmed. The white hair is understandable because Timothy guesses that Simon Trale is pushing seventy, if he’s not already on the downslope. But his movements are sure, and that reedy voice has no quaver.
“Mind if I smoke?” Cone asks.
“Go right ahead,” Trale says. “The doc limits me to one cigar a day, but it tastes all the better for that.”
“When do you smoke it-at night after dinner?”
“No,” Trale says, smiling. “First thing in the morning. It gets the juices flowing.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, how old are you?”
“I don’t mind. I’ll be seventy-three next year.”
“I should look as good next year as you do right now,” Cone says admiringly. “No aches or pains?”
“The usual,” the little man says, shrugging. “But I still got my own teeth, thank God. I use reading glasses, but my hearing is A-Okay.”
“How come you’re still working?” Cone asks curiously. “Doesn’t Dempster-Torrey have a mandatory retirement at sixty-five?”
“Sure we do. But Jack Dempster pushed a waiver through the Board of Directors allowing me to stay on. You know why he did that?”
“Because you’re such a hotshot financial officer?”
“No,” Trale says, laughing. “There’s a hundred younger men who could do my job. But my wife died nine years ago, and all my kids have married and moved away. I don’t play golf, and I’ve got no hobbies. Dempster- Torrey has been my whole life. Jack knew that, knew how lost I’d be without an office to come to and problems to solve. So he kept me on, bless him.”
“Very kind of him,” Cone says, looking down at the cigarette in his stained fingers. “But that doesn’t sound like the John J. Dempster I’ve been hearing about.”
“Oh, you’ll hear a lot of bad things about him,” Trale says cheerfully. “And most of them will be true. I’m not going to tell you he was a saint; he wasn’t. But do you know anyone who is?”
“I heard he was ruthless and brutal in his business dealings.”
The CFO frowns. “Ruthless and brutal? Well … maybe. But when you’re wheeling and dealing on the scale that Dempster was, you can’t afford to play pattycake. He was hard when he had to be hard.”
“So he made enemies along the way?”
“Sure he did. The police asked me to make out a list. I told them it wouldn’t be a list, it would be a book!”
He smiles at the recollection. He has the complexion of a healthy baby, and his mild blue eyes look out at the world with wonder and amusement. Small pink ears are set flat to his skull, and his lips are so red they might be rouged. It is a doll’s head, finely molded porcelain, with every detail from black lashes to dimpled chin painted just so.
“How long have you been with Dempster-Torrey, Mr. Trale?”
“From the beginning. I was the bookkeeper with the Torrey Machine Works up in Quincy, Massachusetts, when John Dempster came to work for us as sales manager. Within a year he had doubled our revenues. And a year after that he married Teresa Torrey and was made vice president.”
“Oh-ho,” Cone says, lighting another Camel. “He married the boss’s daughter, did he?”
“He did. But he’d have been made vice president even if he hadn’t. Sanford Torrey knew what a wizard he had in J.J. Also, Sanford and his wife were worried about their daughter. She had plenty of beaux, but they didn’t stay around long. Have you met Teresa?”
