“Is Mary around?”
“Didn’t you hear? Aunt Myrna is spinning. Little Mary didn’t come home at all last night. She and Uncle Willy are down in town heckling the police.”
“I heard about that. The police came to see me this morning because I was out with her last night. I figured she’d be here by now.”
“She’ll turn up. She always has. But Aunt Myrna always worries. Mary’s no child, she’s twenty-six. I’m no child either, but try and convince Aunt Myrna.” Before I was out of the room he was back in his special two-dimensional world, engrossed in the cruel slant of the bishops, the hungry eccentric leap of the knights.
I walked on down to the beach, to the stretch of sand between the two boat houses. There were a lot of people there, most of them familiar to me. I waved to a few, went to the men’s bunk room and changed. Then I started circulating on the beach, sitting on my heels to talk to various groups. They were casually interested in the fact that Mary was missing. It was a mild game to try to guess what had happened to her — what she had taken it into her head to do.
I saw that the three girl children of Willy and Myrna Pryor were there. They were, of course, Mary’s first cousins. They are aged fifteen, sixteen and seventeen. They are brown and husky and pretty, with crisp brown hair. Due to Willy’s absence in town, they were considerably more relaxed with their three male guests than I had seen them on other occasions. Their swim suits were of the ultra-conservative cut (Willy’s idea, probably), but one of them was using the small of her boyfriend’s back as a pillow. Another girl provided a pillow for her escort in the form of a round brown thigh. The third pair had their heads together, whispering. The girls are called Jigger, Dusty and Skeeter — but I do not know which is which. They make me feel very very old.
I had seen some of the other guests at the club last night and they knew I had been out with Mary, so I had to tell my story several times, always careful not to deviate from the one I had given the two officers who woke me up. I kept thinking of the silent body I had left in the woods.
I took a short swim and came back to the beach. Somebody gave me a can of cold beer. I was talking to a dainty blonde who seemed to be making a sun-dazed pass at me when I saw Dodd walking toward the beach, obviously looking for someone. He saw me and headed for me, smiling and waving at friends as he passed them.
He is my boss. He’s as tall as I am, but thirty pounds heavier. The extra weight is not concentrated in any one place — it is all over him in an even layer, blurring his outline. His brown-blond hair is wavy, worn just a shade too long. Except for his mouth, his features are good, and his color is high. His mouth is a bit small, so that in anger his expression becomes a bit pinched and womanish. He has friendly, hearty mannerisms. He is almost a nice guy. That was what made it so rough when he reported — to find out he was almost a nice guy.
His predecessor, my previous boss, had been the best there is.
Chapter 3
I have been with Consolidated Pneumatic Products, Incorporated, for five years. It is one of the big ones. You hear more about G.E. and General Motors because they have consumer lines and keep the name in front of the public. C.P.P. sells strictly to industry. You find the two page ads in the technical journals. There are sixteen plants, of which the Warren Tube and Cylinder Division is one of the smaller ones.
I started out in Fall River, was moved next to Buffalo, and then out to Warren a year ago. C.P.P. believes in keeping all managerial talent on the jump. Three years in any one place is about as long as you can expect. It is smart policy. It makes your executive talent in all echelons interchangeable and broadens your men. It facilitates standard management methods and procedures. And when a boy graduates from the gypsies to top management he will know quite a few of the plants intimately, and know personally a great many men in the field.
So many of the big corporations have adopted this plan that it has developed a whole new class of people in this country, people without roots. Or, perhaps, people with a different kind of roots. There are thousands upon thousands of us — the married couples filling up places like Park Forest, Illinois, like the two Levittowns, like Parkmerced in San Francisco, and Drexelbrook in Philadelphia. And, of course, like Warren’s smaller version, Brookways. It is the new management caste, and what it will eventually turn into, nobody knows. Joe Engineer and his wife move out of Parkmerced and into Park Forest two thousand miles away. The first day they are there they can start playing do-you-know with their neighbors. Get the latest word. Wilsie quit and went with Reynolds Metals. Dupont sent Kingley back to the business school. The Bowens have three kids now. They live in the big developments, work on community committees, set up sitter banks and draw on each other’s time; live with a minimum of privacy and a maximum of borrowing of gadgets, party glasses and utensils.
As a bachelor, I have not yet gotten into the community living aspects of this gypsy existence. Doubtless it will happen to me one day. A married man seems to have better promotion chances with top management.
I reported to the Warren plant, to Harvey Wills, the plant manager, on a rainy April day thirteen months ago, as the new assistant production manager. I was flushed with brand new promotion and raise, though apprehensive about the personnel, even though Tory Wylan, my personal spy and friend in the home offices in New York had told me it was a good group.
It turned out to be fine. Ray Walt was a sweetheart. He gave me my head and we worked well together. Ray was transferred in January, and Dodd Raymond came in. Before Ray left he told me he’d tried to get me promoted to his job, but the home office and Harvey Wills both thought I was a little too green for it. He told me, though he didn’t have to, to keep my guard high with Dodd Raymond. He said Raymond was smart and ambitious, and had the reputation of always having a fall guy handy when something went sour. I thanked him.
Harvey Wills called me up to his office the day Dodd arrived, both to meet him and to give him the guided tour. Dodd shook hands the right way, said the right things, dressed the right way, and let me call him Mr. Raymond just one time. I wondered if Ray had been wrong.
But a week after Dodd reported I had a personal letter from Tory Wylan. He confirmed what Ray had told me. He filled in the details of some raw situations Dodd had been mixed up in. He’d trampled some good men and he’d come out on top. Tory wrote that Dodd had some of the top management fooled. The proof was in the fact that Dodd had been able to get a transfer to his own home town — a thing that was strictly against C.P.P. policy.
So, had I not been forewarned, maybe I would have thought Dodd a nice guy. He knew the business and stayed out of my hair. I protected myself by starting a work journal, dictating into it all orders he gave me.
After he and his wife got settled he had me to their place for drinks and dinner, with his wife and his mother. That was the beginning. That’s how I started to get mixed up in the lives of Dodd and Nancy Raymond. Were it not for Dodd, and his being a home town boy with a considerable social pedigree, I would never have gotten to meet Mary Olan, much less endure the motel fiasco and later find her body in my closet. Dodd threw me and Mary Olan together, because he needed a cat’s paw.
He had spotted me on the beach and he came on over. In grey suit and necktie he looked far too dressed up for Smith Lake.
“Hello, Marilyn, Clint. Certainly is a beautiful day up here. Getting hot as hell in town. Clint, can I talk to you a minute?”