Donald Westlake - Two Much!

He grasped the situation at once, as I’d known he would, and made a penetrating and brilliant remark. “Yes, sir,” he said.

Gordon Alworthy was five feet two inches tall and as thin as the ice I was skating on. He had blond hair and blond eyebrows and an open boyish smile and a soft amiable manner of speech and a mind like an Arab oil minister. The airline’s attorneys tended to chuckle when they first met him, and to be frowning later when they left his presence. I trusted him as far as I could pay him.

We spent four days in San Juan together, with frequent conference calls to other legal minds back in the New York office of Leek, Conchell & McPoo, and at the end of it I knew I never would have been able to do it on my own. And yet how easy it had been, with Alworthy.

Which was another fact I’d never before entirely understood about money; it buys brains and expertise to supplement your own. I’d gone pretty far with nothing but my own native wit and talent for scrambling to sustain me, farther in fact than I’d ever dreamed of going, and now I was at a plateau where I didn’t have to do much of anything any more. If a drink was required, I could push a button and a drink would be brought to me. If conniving was called for, I could hire a fella who’d been taught conniving at Harvard Law School.

How much Gordon Alworthy knew or suspected I didn’t know, nor did I care. Even assuming the worst, that he had read those damaging documents before sending them to Liz, what did it matter? If he turned me in it would cost him his job. The Kerner estate would be thrown into a chaos of cousins and uncles, and Gordon Alworthy would be thrown back into the faceless mélange of young assistant attorneys at Leek, Conchell & McPoo. Would he turn me in? Would you ?

Neither did Gordon Alworthy.

The airline paid off, of course. If I’d been a poor man, an insurance salesman grabbing a week in the sun with his bride, it would have cost the airline five or ten thousand, no more. If I’d been moderately well off, it might have cost them a hundred thousand. But I was rich now, I had so many lumber mills behind me I looked like an exercise in perspective, so what I cost the airline was a feeder route between two Canadian cities.

The Kerners already had a Canadian airline — Laurentian Interior Air Service — but prior to this it had been strictly a small cargo carrier, principally of goods manufactured by other Kerner holdings. I was happy that my first act as head of the Kerner business empire was to diversify into yet another area of commerce. The new passenger division of our airline I dubbed Laurentian Interior Zealandia; we did not actually service Zealandia, a a town of two hundred souls in Saskatchewan, but that way the company’s initials could be LIZ. She had, after all, made it possible; it was the least I could do.

Carlos was grumpy at being fired, but there was no point keeping him on. I would drive the Alfa myself mostly, or at times I might take the wheel of the Thunderbird I’d inherited from my brother, but the Lincoln I would sell, replacing it with a limousine service on an annual contract for those rare occasions when a chauffeured vehicle was needed. The car would come only when called for, and the driver need not be housed or fed. It was more economical, and more sensible as well.

I took care of all that on Saturday, the fifteenth of September, the day after returning with Gordon from San Juan. Nikki I moved into Betty’s bedroom, but I myself stayed in the room I’d shared with Liz; thus I had access without too much familiarity. Blondell stayed on exactly as before.

New York, by and large, had remained unaware of the latest tragedy in the Kerner family. When a major airline wants to avoid publicity, it avoids publicity. A small item had appeared in the city papers, saying that a local woman, Mrs. Arthur Dodge, had been involved in a freak fatal accident aboard a plane bound for Puerto Rico, but no connections had been drawn with the Elisabeth Kerner Dodge who had been gruesomely murdered with her husband Robert on Fire Island the week before. Given no coincidence to worry their heads about, people did not worry their heads. And to the few Kerner relations and friends whose recent phone calls had to be returned, I simply said that Liz had died “in an airplane accident,” permitting them to place their own incorrect interpretation on the phrase. No one — not the airline, the San Juan police, the attorneys, no one — ever suggested for a second that Liz’s death had been anything other than an accident.

As to the fugitive, Volpinex, Alworthy sent me a clipping from Newsday , the Long Island newspaper, saying that the death of the late Mrs. Volpinex in Maine a few years ago was under renewed investigation, and that the original judgment of accidental death was likely to be revised. “The circumstances were very suspicious,” a Maine sheriff was quoted as saying. If any confirmation of Volpinex’s guilt in the Fire Island murders were needed, that was it. (The item, so far as I know, didn’t make the New York City papers at all.)

I only had one bad moment that weekend: on Sunday afternoon, when I belatedly unpacked the two Air France bags. Unzipping one of them, I found myself looking yet again at that envelope, that same envelope, would it never leave me alone? Would nothing ever—

It was the other envelope. Laughing at myself, albeit shakily, I took it from the bag and it was indeed from Linda Ann Margolies, containing her thesis on humor. What with one thing and another, I’d never had a chance to read it.

So I read it now. Or tried to, I should say. From the first paragraph, the whole piece seemed to me sophomoric in the extreme. I got through two pages before I tossed it in the wastebasket.

On Monday I met with three of the senior members of Leek, Conchell & McPoo. At first they urged me to transfer Gordon’s duties to some older and more experienced member of the firm, but I expressed myself as perfectly satisfied with Gordon’s performance in San Juan and totally confident in his abilities for the future, so they gave up on that point and called him in for the rest of the discussion, which centered on our handling of the dissident Kerner cousins. Among them they owned no more than eleven percent of the family holdings, but unfortunately their combined strength lay in a few key areas: a major lumber mill, the television station in Indiana, one or two others. It was decided to buy them off individually, refuse to deal with them en bloc, and drive wedges between them wherever and whenever possible. Our goal was full consolidation within thirty-six months. The attorneys were pleased with my decisiveness after nearly a year of bickering between the Kerner girls, and I was pleased with their grasp of the company problems and potentials. We shook hands all around — Gordon displayed his gratitude with a manlier-than-ever grip — and I left.

I still had some remnants of my former life to deal with, so off I went to that scruffy office in the garment district. Gloria was typing a letter to her mother when I walked in, and she looked up in surprise, saying, “By God, I remember you.”

“Of course you do,” I said. I didn’t have time for nonsense. “Did we get a response on the sale offer?”

“My, we’re in a hurry.” In leisurely fashion she went to the filing cabinet and got me the folder. The attorney, some hole-in-the-wall grub named Mandel, had replied to Gloria’s call with the expected unacceptable offer. My prepared response had gone out, and in today’s mail another offer had arrived which came closer to making sense. “Good,” I said. I gave Gloria the LC&McP number and said, “I’ll want to speak to Gordon Alworthy.” Then I carried the folder on into my office.