Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 137, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 835 & 836, March/April 2011

“Morning, W.T. What’s new?”

The tall man looked up from a file folder he’d been studying. Thirty-seven, a man who had retained most of his youthful good looks and all of his charm, Knox was popular with the girls on 21. He’d probably have been more popular if he hadn’t had a pregnant wife and five children of varying ages.

“McLove, look at this weather!” He gestured toward the window, where a curtain of fog still hung. “Every winter I say I’ll move to Florida, and every winter the wife talks me into staying.”

Jason Greene, balding and ultra-efficient, joined them with a sheaf of reports. “Billy should be in at any moment. He phoned me to say the merger had gone through.”

Knox dropped his eyes. “I heard.”

“When the word gets out, Jupiter stock will jump another ten points.”

McLove could almost feel the tension between the two men; one gloating, and the other bitter. He walked to the window and stared out at the fog, trying to see the invisible building across the street. Below, he could not even make out the setback of their own building, though it was only two floors lower. Fog... well, at least it meant that spring was on the way.

Then there was a third voice behind him, and he knew without turning that it belonged to Shirley Taggert, the president’s personal secretary. “It’s almost time for the board meeting,” she said, with that hint of a Southern drawl that either attracted or repelled but left no middle ground. “You people ready?”

Shirley was grim-faced but far from ugly. She was a bit younger than Margaret Mason’s mid thirties, a bit sharper of dress and mind. But she paid the penalty for being Billy Calm’s secretary every time she walked down the halls. Conversations ceased, suspicious glances followed her, and there was always a half-hidden air of tension at her arrival. She ate lunch alone, and one or two fellows who had been brave enough to ask her for a date hadn’t bothered to ask a second time.

“We’re ready,” Jason Greene told her. “Is he here yet?”

She shook her head and glanced at the clock. “He should be in any minute.”

McLove left them grouped around Knox’s desk and walked back down the hall. Sam Hamilton, the joker, passed him on the way and stopped to tell him a quick gag. He, at least, didn’t seem awfully upset about the impending merger, although he had opposed it. McLove liked Sam better than any of the other directors, probably because at the age of fifty he was still a big kid at heart. You could meet him on even ground and, at times, feel like he was letting you outdo him.

“Anything yet?” McLove asked Margaret, returning to her desk outside the director’s room.

“No sign of Mr. Calm, but he shouldn’t be long now. It’s just about ten.”

McLove glanced at the closed door of Billy Calm’s office, next to the directors’ room, and entered the latter. The room was quite plain, with only one door through which he had entered, and unbroken walls of dull oak paneling on either wall. The far end of the room, with two wide windows looking out at the fog, was only twenty feet away, and the conference table that was the room’s only piece of furniture had just the eight necessary chairs grouped around it. Some had been heard to complain that the room lacked the stature of Jupiter Steel, but Billy Calm contended he liked the forced intimacy of it.

Now, as McLove stood looking out the windows, the whole place seemed to reflect the cold mechanization of the modern office building. The windows could not be opened. Even their cleaning had to be done from the outside, on a gondola-like platform that climbed up and down the sheer glass walls. There were no window sills, and McLove’s fingers ran unconsciously along the bottom of the window frame as he stood staring out. The fog might be lifting a little, but he couldn’t be certain.

McLove went out to Margaret Mason’s desk, saw that she was gathering together her copy books and pencils for the meeting, and decided to take a glance into Billy Calm’s office. It was the same size as the directors’ room, and almost as plain in its furnishings. Only the desk, cluttered with the trivia of a businessman’s lifetime, gave proof of human occupancy. On the left wall still hung the faded portrait of the firm’s founder, and on the right, a more recent photograph of Israel Black, former president of Jupiter and still a director though he never came to the meetings. This was Billy Calm’s domain. From here he ruled a vast empire of holdings, and a word from him could send men to their financial ruin.

McLove straightened suddenly on hearing a man’s muffled voice at Margaret’s desk outside. He heard her ask, “What’s the matter?” and then heard the door of the directors’ room open. Hurrying back to her desk, he was just in time to see the door closing again.

“Is he finally here?”

Margaret, unaccountably white-faced, opened her mouth to answer, just as there came the tinkling crash of a breaking window from the inner room. They both heard it clearly, and she dropped the cigarette she’d been in the act of lighting. “Billy!” she screamed out. “No, Billy!”

They were at the door together after only an instant’s hesitation, pushing it open before them, hurrying into the directors’ room. “No,” McLove said softly, staring straight ahead at the empty room and the long table and the shattered window in the opposite wall. “He jumped.” Already the fog seemed to be filling the room with its damp mists as they hurried to the window and peered out at nothing.

“Billy jumped,” Margaret said dully, as if unable to comprehend the fact. “He killed himself.”

McLove turned and saw Knox standing in the doorway. Behind him, Greene and Hamilton and Shirley Taggert were coming up fast. “Billy Calm just jumped out of the window,” McLove told them.

“No,” Margaret Mason said, turning from the window. “No, no, no, no...” Then, suddenly overcome with the shock of it, she tumbled to the floor in a dead faint.

“Take care of her,” McLove shouted to the others. “I’ve got to get downstairs.”

Knox bent to lift the girl in his arms, while Sam Hamilton hurried to the telephone. Shirley had settled into one of the padded directors’ chairs, her face devoid of all expression. And Jason Greene, loyal to the end, actually seemed to be crying.

In the hallway, McLove pushed the button of Billy Calm’s private elevator and waited for it to rise from the depths of the building. The little man would have no further use for it now. He rode it down alone, leaning against its padded walls, listening to, but hardly hearing, the dreary hum of its descent. In another two minutes he was on the street, looking for the crowd that would surely be gathered, listening for the sound of rising sirens.

But there was nothing. Nothing but the usual mid-morning traffic. Nothing but hurrying pedestrians and a gang of workmen drilling at the concrete and a policeman dully directing traffic.

There was no body.

McLove hurried over to the police officer. “A man just jumped out of the Jupiter Steel Building,” he said. “What happened to him?”

The policeman wrinkled his brow. “Jumped? From where?”

“Twenty-first floor. Right above us.”

They both gazed upward into the gradually lifting fog. The police officer shrugged his shoulders. “Mister, I been standing in this very spot for more than an hour. Nobody jumped from up there.”

“But...” McLove continued staring into the fog. “But he did jump. I practically saw him do it. And if he’s not down here, where is he?”

Back on 21, McLove found the place in a state somewhere between sheer shock and calm confusion. People were hurrying without purpose in every direction, bent on their own little useless errands. Sam Hamilton was on the phone to his broker, trying to get the latest quotation on Jupiter stock. “The bottom’ll drop out of it when this news hits,” he confided to McLove. “With Billy gone, the merger won’t go through.”