Амброз Бирс - Flight or Fright - 17 Turbulent Tales

“Just seeking some background.”

“What happened?” Tilley went on. “I presume that he had some sort of heart attack?”

“Did he have a heart condition then?”

“Not so far as I know. He was overweight and ate like a pig. With all the stress he carried about with him, it wouldn’t surprise me to know that that was the cause.”

“Was this journey a particularly stressful one?”

“No more than usual. We were on our way to a meeting of the executives of the American subsidiaries.”

“And so far as you noticed, Mr. Gray was behaving in his usual manner?”

Tilley actually giggled. It was an unpleasant noise. “He was his usual belligerent, bullying, and arrogant self. He had half a dozen people to sack and he wanted to do it in a public ritual to give them the maximum embarrassment. It gave him a buzz. And then…” Tilley hesitated and a thoughtful look came into his eyes. “He was going through some documents from his case. One of them seemed to fascinate him, and after a moment or two he started to have one of his attacks—”

“Attacks? I thought you said that he had no health problems?”

“What I actually said was that he was prone to asthma. He did have these stress-related asthma attacks.”

“So you did. So he began to have an asthma attack? Did he take anything for it?”

“He carried one of those inhalers around with him. He was vain and thought that none of us knew about it. The great chairman did not like to confess to a physical weakness. So when he had his attacks, he would disappear to treat himself with the inhaler. It was so obvious. Ironic that he had a favorite quotation from Ecclesiastes, ‘ Vanitas vanitatum, omnis vanitas’ !”

“So are you saying that he went to the toilet to take his inhaler?”

“That is what I am saying. After a considerable time had passed, I did get concerned.”

“Concerned?” Fane smiled thinly. “From what you are telling me, concern about your boss’s well-being was not exactly a priority with you.”

Tilley lips thinned in a sneer. “Personal feelings do not enter into it. I was not like Elgee, who puts his all into the job. I was being paid to do a job, and I did it with integrity and with professionalism. I did not have to like Harry Gray. It was no concern of mine what Harry Gray did or did not do outside of the job he paid me to do. It did not concern me who his lover was nor who his mortal enemies were.”

“Very well. So he went to the toilet and did not come back?”

“As I said, after a while, I called the stewardess and she went to check on him. That was no more nor less the concern of my position as his secretary.”

“Wait there a moment, Mr. Tilley.”

Fane moved to where Sally Beech was standing, still pale and slightly nervous, and said quietly: “Do you think you could go to Mr. Gray’s seat and find his attaché case? I’d like you to bring it here.”

She returned in a short while with a small brown leather case.

Fane took it to show to Frank Tilley. “Do you identify this as Gray’s case?”

The man nodded reluctantly. “I don’t think you should do that,” he protested as Fane snapped open the clasps.

“Why not?”

“Confidential company property.”

“I think an investigation into a possible homicide will override that objection.”

Frank Tilley was surprised. “Homicide?…But that means…murder. No one said anything about murder.”

Fane was too busy shifting through the papers to respond. He pulled out a sheet and showed it to Tilley. “Was this what he was looking at just before he began to have breathing difficulties?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps. It was a piece of paper like it—that’s all I can say.”

The sheet was a tear sheet from a computer printout. It had two short sentences on it:

You will die before this aircraft lands. Memento, “homo,” quia pulvis es et in pulverem revertis.

Fane sat back with a casual smile. He held out the paper to the secretary. “You are a Latin scholar, Mr. Tilley. How would you translate the phrase given here?”

Tilley frowned. “What makes you say that I am a Latin scholar?”

“A few moments ago you trotted out a Latin phrase. I presumed that you knew its meaning.”

“My Latin is almost nonexistent. Mr. Gray was fond of Latin tags and phrases, so I tried to keep up by memorizing some of those he used frequently.”

“I see. So you don’t know what this one means?”

Tilley looked at the printed note. He shook his head. “ Memento means ‘remember,’ doesn’t it?”

“Have you ever heard the phrase memento mori ? That would be a more popular version of what is written here.”

Tilley shook his head. “Remember something, I suppose?”

“Why do you think the Latin word for ‘man’ has quotation marks around it?”

“I don’t know what it means. I do not know Latin.”

“What this says roughly is, ‘Remember, man, that you are dust and to dust you will return.’ It was obviously written on a computer, a word processor. Do you recognize the type?”

Tilley shook his head. “It could be any one of hundreds of company standards. I hope you are not implying that I wrote Mr. Gray a death threat?”

“How would this have made its way into his attaché case?” Fane said, ignoring the comment.

“I presume someone put it there.”

“Who would have such access to it?”

“I suppose that you are still accusing me? I hated him. But not so that I would cut my own throat. He was a bastard, but he was the goose who laid the golden egg. There was no point in being rid of him.”

“Just so,” muttered Fane thoughtfully. His eye caught sight of a notepad in the case, and he flicked through its pages while Frank Tilley sat looking on in discomfort. Fane found a list of initials with the head, “immediate dismissal” and that day’s date.

“A list of half a dozen people that he was about to sack?” Fane observed.

“I told you that he was going to enjoy a public purge of his executives and mentioned some names to me.”

“The list contains only initials and starts with O. T. E.” He glanced at Tilley with a raised eyebrow. “Oscar Elgee?”

“Hardly,” Tilley replied with a patronizing smile. “It means Otis T. Elliott, the general manager of our U.S. database subsidiary.”

“I see. Let’s see if we can identify the others.”

He ran through the other initials to which Tilley added names. The next four were also executives of Gray’s companies. The last initials were written as Ft.

“F. T. is underscored three times with the words ‘no payoff!’ written against it. Who’s F. T.?”

“You know that F. T. are my initials,” Tilley observed quietly. His features were white and suddenly very grave. “I swear that he never said anything to me about sacking me when we discussed those he had on his list. He never mentioned it.”

“Well, was there anyone else in the company that the initials F. T. could apply to?”

Tilley frowned, trying to recall, but finally shook his head and gave a resigned shrug. “No. It could only be me. The bastard! He never told me what he was planning. Some nice little public humiliation, I suppose.”

Hector Ross emerged from the curtained section and motioned Fane to join him. “I think I can tell you how it was done,” he announced with satisfaction.

Fane grinned at his friend. “So can I. Tell me if I am wrong. Gray went into the toilet to use his inhaler to relieve an attack of asthma. He placed the inhaler in his mouth, depressed it in the normal way, and…” He ended with a shrug.

Ross looked shocked. “How did you—?” He glanced over Fane’s shoulder to where Frank Tilley was still sitting, twitching nervously. “Did he confess that he set it up?”