James Chase - Hit and Run

Roger Aitken was the kind of boss who never mixed his home life with his business life. It wasn’t until he fell down the Plaza Grill steps and broke his leg that I went to his home and I met his wife.

It had never bothered me that he hadn’t ever invited me back to his house. To my thinking there is nothing worse than the Big Wheel who looks on his employees as part of his family. I have always regarded the man who invites his employees to his home for a monthly nightmare dinner where no one dares take a drink or raise his voice as a boss to be avoided like a plague.

There was nothing like that about Roger Aitken. He was strictly the feudal type of boss. He picked the men and women who worked for him with searching care, paid them a quarter more than any other advertising agency, and if they didn’t make good in their first week, he’d put his foot under their tails and out they’d go. You weren’t given a second chance with Aitken: it was strictly deliver or out!

Before coming to work for the International and Pacific Agency, the biggest and best agency on the coast and which was managed by Aitken, I had been working for a crummy little outfit that had one foot in the financial grave, and a boss who was later hauled off to a home for incurable alcoholics. This was some two years ago. At the time I remember I was sitting at my desk wrestling with a scheme to promote a new kind of dish-washer that couldn’t even shift the gravy stains off a plate when I had a call from Roger Aitken’s secretary. She said Aitken wanted to talk to me on a personal matter and would I come over around six o’clock?

I knew Aitken, of course, by reputation. I knew he ran the agency for a board of rich business men and had made a wonderful thing out of it. Naturally enough I wondered if he were going to offer me a job. Naturally enough I was pretty excited: a job with the International was the ambition of every ad man on the coast.

At six, dead on the second, I was in his outer office, and at five past six, I was standing before his desk, getting the treatment from a pair of steely blue eyes that went through to the back of my head like the proverbial hot knife through the proverbial pat of butter.

Aitken was a big man, just over six foot two, massively built, with a whisky complexion, a mouth like a gin trap and a high executive’s aggressive jaw. He was around fifty-seven and thick around the middle, but if it was fat, it was hard, solid fat. He looked the kind of man who kept himself in pretty good condition.

He stared at me for maybe ten seconds before he got up and thrust out his hand with a knucklecracking grip.

‘You Chester Scott?’ he demanded in a voice you could hear in the outer office without having your ear to the keyhole.

I don’t know who else he thought I could be since I had had to give my name to at least four minor officials before breaking into his office.

I said I was Chester Scott.

He opened a file on his desk and tapped the contents with a thick finger.

‘This your work?’

The folder contained about two dozen layouts clipped from various newspapers and journals I had been working on over a period of four or five months.

I said they were my work.

He closed the folder and began to prowl around the room.

‘They’re not bad,’ he said. ‘I can use a man like you. What are they paying you?’

I told him.

He paused in his prowling to stare at me as if he wasn’t sure if he had heard aright.

‘Do you know you’re worth more?’

I said I did.

‘Then why haven’t you done something about it?’

I said I had been pretty busy recently and hadn’t had time to get around to it.

‘Work more important to you than money, huh?’

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ I said. ‘It’s just that I’ve been pretty busy.’

He stared at me some more, then went behind his desk and sat down.

‘I’ll give you a hundred a week more than you’re getting now: you can start Monday.’

That’s how I came to work for the International.

And now, two years after this meeting, I was second in charge and only responsible to Aitken himself. I was pulling down a salary that two years ago would have seemed just a pipe dream. I had a Cadillac convertible, a three-bedroom bungalow that faced the sea, a Filipino boy to take care of me, and a respectable balance in the bank.

Don’t imagine I moved into this class by sitting on my seat and smoking cigarettes. When you go to work for Aitken, you go to work. I was at my desk at nine o’clock every morning, including Saturdays, and there were times when I didn’t get away until around midnight. If the International paid well, Aitken took good care he got his pound of flesh. I don’t think I have ever worked so hard, but I enjoyed it, and I had a good team working with me: every one of them was a hand-picked Aitken man or woman, and that meant something. I was sitting right on top of the world. I looked set to go on sitting right on top of the world, but it didn’t work out that way.

One hot July evening, the whole set-up suddenly exploded in my face. I was working late at the office. The time was just after nine o’clock. Only Pat Henessey, my secretary, and Joe Fellowes, my layout artist, were with me. The rest of the staff had gone home. We were working on a promotion scheme to put over a new toilet soap. It was a big job, with a TV hook-up and a two-million-dollar allocation.

Fellowes was showing me some pulls of the ad he intended to run in the weeklies: good stuff, and Pat and I were chewing the rag about it when the telephone bell on Pat’s desk came alive.

She went over and lifted the receiver.

Pat was a lovely looking girl: tall and long-legged with honey-colour hair, big blue eyes and a complexion that looked too good to be real, but was. She was around twenty-six and as sharp as a razor. She and I worked as a team. Without her to nudge my memory I would have been hard pressed to keep pace with the stuff Aitken kept piling into my lap.

I didn’t pay any attention to what she was saying on the telephone. Joe and I were altering one of his layouts. I wasn’t too satisfied with the girl he was using as a model.

‘Look, Joe, if a girl had a bosom like this in real life,’ I said, ‘she’d get it caught in the first revolving door she tried to go through.’

‘That’s the idea,’ Joe said with his direct simplicity. ‘That’s exactly what I want to convey. I want the fellas, as soon as they see this ad, to ask themselves what a dame like this one does when she gets to a revolving door. It’s a psychological drawing.’

I threw the layout at him, but that didn’t stop me from laughing, then Pat hung up and said in her quiet calm voice, ‘Mr. Aitken has broken his leg.’

‘Now if you had said he had broken his neck…’ Joe began, then broke off to gape. ‘You kidding?’

Pat looked at me.

‘That was Mr. Aitken’s housekeeper,’ she said. ‘Mr. Aitken slipped on the steps of the Plaza Grill. He has broken his leg.’

‘That’s just like R.A.,’ Joe said unfeelingly. ‘Trust him to break his leg somewhere high-toned. Did she say which leg?’

‘Will you shut up, Joe?’ I said. To Pat: ‘Where is he? In hospital?’

‘They took him home. He wants you. The housekeeper said for you to go right on over.’

It was then I realized I didn’t even know where Aitken lived.

‘Where do I find him?’ I asked, getting to my feet.

‘He has a little shack out on Palm Boulevard,’ Joe said with a cynical smile. ‘A twenty-fourbedroom job with a lounge big enough to serve as a bus garage; just a throw away: a weekend cabin.’