Recipe for Homicide, page 2
Mrs. Gilmore held out her thin hand. ‘"You’ve had a long day, son. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Victoria. Go right to sleep now, or I’ll have to bring you a slug of that terrible bourbon you gave me last Christmas.”
As he closed the door, Gilmore wondered who had been phoning him with such insistence and why. It was probably not Barbara Wall. It might have been Peggy Bayliss—or even Frances Froley.
He went to bed half expecting the phone to ring again, but it didn’t.
II
Maybe it was the weather. Maybe it was the general malaise, macrocosmic and microcosmic, that permeated the steamy August morning. It was hot, all right, and it was tomato time. The Barzac plant had been pretty much of a madhouse anyhow since the new administration took over, and during the two months of the tomato season, it was going to be bedlam in spades. Besides, there was the memory of last night’s contretemps with Chris Froley. Whatever it was, Gilmore did not have his mind on his work.
This was unusual, for Gilmore liked his job. He believed thoroughly that canned soups were a boon not only to harried housewives but to harried husbands whose wives had neither the time nor skills to produce soup as good as Barzac’s experts could create by the million gallons. But he listened with only half an ear as his secretary spoke. He was not even totally attentive to his morning mail.
“Miss Wall phoned,” his secretary was saying. “She’ll call back. Mrs. Froley came by to ask if she could get copies of the pictures that were in the morning papers. I told her we’d get prints for her. Mr. Remington wants you to stop by his office when you have time…”
Gilmore leafed through a stack of letters. They were the same as usual. A woman in Iowa had been sick and felt in the mood for chicken soup. She had opened a can of Barzac’s chicken-with-rice she had been keeping in her pantry for just such an occasion and was upset to find that it was not chicken soup at all. It was brown and had barley and little round pieces of bone in it.… Gilmore penciled the routine notation for a reply: Apologize for mislabeling. Send her three cans of chicken-with-rice and her twenty-cent refund for the can of ox-tail she bought by our error.…
“And Miss Bayliss called several times,” his secretary continued. “She’d like to see you as soon as you’re free.”
Gilmore rose instantly. “I’ll go right up,” he said.
Peggy Bayliss had an office high in the ornate tower which rose above one corner of Barzac’s Main Building. Since it was just one flight higher than Gilmore’s eighth-floor office, he walked. As chief of Barzac’s Home Economics Department, Peggy presided over a neat, busy little experimental kitchen, where she invented new sauces and original dishes by blending Barzac soups with a pound of this and a can of that. Food editors from all over the country dropped in to sample her concoctions and to arrange exclusive rights to use her recipes in their own columns. Understandably enough, the male professional gastronomes liked Peggy, for she was a big, vivacious, dark-eyed girl with a boyish bob but a girlish figure. She was quick on the uptake and just as avid on the intake to judge from her ample but far from unpleasing contours. And she had a forthright quality about her that appealed to the female food columnists as well.
And to Gilmore.
As he climbed the stairs, Gilmore wondered what it was that had stirred him to immediate action at the mention of Peggy’s name, whereas he had not moved when told that Barbara Wall had phoned—not even to return her call. It must be that he wanted to re-orient himself in the completeness of Peggy’s friendship. Peggy was such a comfortable person. It was women like Peggy that men ought to marry—not madcap dancers like Zina or turbulent problem children like Barbara.…
“Come in, Genius,” Peggy said. “I’ve had a six-state alarm out for you for hours.”
“Did you call me at home last night, Peg?”
Peggy nodded. “I forgot about your carrot carnival,” she said. “It must have been quite a thing, judging from the play you got for the Carrot Queen in the morning papers. Did you score a personal triumph, too?”
“How’s that again?”
“I mean with La Froley. I hear you took her home.”
“News travels fast around here,” Gilmore said.
“I have an efficient spy network,” Peggy said. “That’s what I called you about last night. I had a report on you from my Chicago operative.”
“Who’s your Chicago operative? George?” George was Peggy’s ex-husband. Peggy nodded. “What’s the matter? Have you fallen behind on your alimony payments again?”
“George didn’t want money this time,” Peggy said. “He just wanted to know if Robert Gilmore was still a good friend of mine. I told him yes. Was I right?”
“You’re damned right you’re right,” Gilmore said.
“So George said that if you were a friend of mine, I should tell you emphatically to watch your step, that you were heading for trouble.”
“He called from Chicago just to tell you that?”
“I guess he was thinking of me,” Peggy said. “George thinks he still loves me, and he thought if you were heading for trouble, maybe I’d get mixed up in it too. His exact words were, ‘Tell him for Pete’s sake to watch his step, or he’s going to land in trouble clear up to his navel.’ He may have been a little tight, but he must have thought it was important, because he didn’t try to reverse the charges. I refused his last two collect calls.”
Gilmore frowned and sat on the edge of Peggy’s desk. He didn’t like this second-hand warning from George Bayliss. He had known Bayliss a long time, much longer than he had known Peggy, and he disliked intensely being under obligations to him. The several times that Bayliss had done favors for him, in college and in the Army, Gilmore had always felt uncomfortably and eternally indebted, to him, even after he had done favors in return. Gilmore had not seen Bayliss since he and Peggy had separated, yet he was sure that Bayliss blamed him for the split-up. It wasn’t true, of course, although Gilmore had tipped Peggy to the fact that there was an opening at Barzac and she had come right down from Chicago.
Peggy had been set in a comfortable job on the woman’s page of a Chicago daily, and she had been more or less supporting George ever since their marriage. Not that George Bayliss could be called lazy; he was always terribly busy in an idealistic sort of way, but somehow nothing he did ever paid off. He was an earnest young intellectual who wrote for the avant-garde magazines, circulated petitions for civil-rights proposals in initiative-and-referendum elections, and made eloquent speeches to leftwing groups. Even after Peggy got tired of supporting him and left him (and Chicago) for the Barzac job in Northbank, she was still fond of him. She called him “my ineffectual intellectual,” but when he was knocked down for the count of nine bv double pneumonia with complications, it was Peggy who picked up the hospital tab, including specialists and all the more expensive antibiotics. And she still frequently responded to less humanitarian calls from her ex-spouse.
“You know what I think?” Peggy said. “I think George has heard some of the scuttlebutt that’s been going around—that the new administration is going to swing the axe around here pretty soon.”
Gilmore laughed. Since he had been public relations director for Barzac Soups, he had weathered three administrations, two nasty family fights, one major change in policy, and one bit of intramural skulduggery involving homicide.
“Don’t laugh, Gil. You haven’t got a stainless-steel neck. And don’t you realize that beautiful, bewitching and ambitious young bitch on the eighth floor has the knife out for you?”
“Who? Barbara Wall?” Gilmore laughed again. When he laughed his brown eyes grew very small, and his good-natured mouth expanded in all directions so that you could see the space between his upper front teeth. “Of course Barbara would like my scalp. Turn about is fair play. I got her fired in New York several years ago. So naturally she hates me.”
“She doesn’t hate you, Gil. On the contrary, I think she—” Peggy shook her head. “Gil, you’re a swell guy, so naturally you’ll never understand anything about women. Not Barbara’s type, anyhow. You’ve been ignoring her ever since she came here. Did you speak to her at the clambake last night?”
“I said good evening. She didn’t stay long. She left early—with Mr. Evans.”
“See what I mean? You snub her, so she takes up with the boss. You hurt her once, so she has to hurt you back. Then you’ll be on equal terms and you’ll have to stop ignoring her. You ought to marry her, Gil.”
“Nonsense. I’d rather marry you. Why don’t we get married tonight?”
“Not tonight, Gil. I have a date.”
“Tomorrow, then.”
“I haven’t the right clothes for it, Gil. A girl can’t get married in just any clothes, can a girl? Besides, it’s too hot.”
“Then let’s have dinner instead,” Gilmore said.
The phone rang. Gilmore discreetly slid off the edge of Peggy’s desk and walked to the window. Peggy’s office was in the northern corner of the Barzac tower. Through one window Gilmore could look west toward the river and north to the long lines of farm trucks bringing tomatoes to the cannery. Through the other, he could see the little city of Northbank stretched out on the slopes rising from the river, simmering on its eight hills like Rome plus one.
Gilmore tried not to listen to Peggy’s conversation, which consisted largely of monosyllables, but something in the tone of her voice made him turn. All expression had died in her eyes, and her face was suddenly drawn. She stared at the telephone after she had hung up.
“Peg, what’s the matter?”
Peggy crumpled two matches before she succeeded in lighting her cigarette. “It was George again,” she said. “He’s coming down from Chicago late tomorrow. He wants me to have dinner with him.”
“But we have a date tomorrow night.”
“I’ve got to see George.” Peggy reached out and patted Gilmore’s hand. She managed a smile. “I’ve got to find out what’s on his mind. Close the door, Gil.”
When Gilmore had complied, Peggy continued: “George had another message for you. He asked me to tell you to get rid of the book. What book, Gil?”
Gilmore shrugged. The cryptic message didn’t register. “It beats me how George found out I had a book,” he said, but Peggy didn’t laugh. “Didn’t he mention the author?”
“No. But he also asked me to tell you that Zina was poison and you’d better stay away from her. Who’s Zina?”
“Zina?” Gilmore’s attempted chuckle was a total failure. “The name’s familiar. I seem to remember vaguely being married to a woman named Zina once, but it was a long time ago.”
“I didn’t know you’d been married, Gil.”
“Well, I wasn’t, very. Just for a few days. It didn’t take. That was before I knew you.”
“I’d forgotten you practically grew up with George.”
The phone rang again. Peggy blew smoke at it before she picked up the receiver. “It’s your secretary,” she said. “The boss wants to see you—urgently.”
Gilmore mopped his brow resignedly and walked down to his own floor. The stairway gave him time to assume the cool jauntiness he did not feel. When he reached the eighth floor, he made his way across the half acre of desks toward the glass-partitioned cubicles of the minor deities lining the approach to the holy of holies marked “Eugene Evans, General Manager.”
“Mr. Evans can’t see you now,” said the girl guarding the inner portals. “He’s dictating.”
“He summoned me,” Gilmore said. “Urgently.”
“I’ll tell him you’re here, Mr. Gilmore.”
Mr. Evans’s urgency required Gilmore to spend the next twenty minutes looking out the window at the long lines of tomato-laden trucks pulling away from the grading platforms to unload their scarlet cargo at the plant across the street. He watched the bushel baskets crawl up the conveyor like a moving red stairway, watched the farmers collect their empties on the return. … It looked like another fifty-thousand-ton day.…
At last he was ushered into the presence of a bald, grayfaced, gray-mustached, little man seated behind a huge bare desk.
“Yes, Gilmore, what is it?” said Mr. Evans.
“You sent for me, Mr. Evans,” Gilmore said.
“Did I?” Mr. Evans drew a nasal inhaler from the pocket of his pongee jacket, unscrewed the cap, inserted the small white nozzle into his right nostril and inhaled audibly. “I don’t seem to recall,” he said. He tipped back his head and transferred the apparatus to his left nostril. The operation appeared to restore his memory. “Oh yes,” he said. “Your memo objecting to the ceremony we have scheduled to mark the first shipment of the new field rations we are canning for the United States Army. Why do you object?”
“In the first place,” Gilmore said, “the ceremony isn’t going to move soup cans off the grocer’s shelf. I thought our job was to sell Barzac soups.”
“Good will, Mr. Gilmore,” said Mr. Evans. “The fact that we are helping feed the Army establishes the patriotism of Barzac Kitchens. People will naturally want to buy soup made in patriotic kitchens.”
“And in the second place, the whole idea is phony. We shipped our first carload of field rations out of here last week.”
“I think you’d better take the matter up with Miss Wall,” the general manager said. “She’s promotion manager.”
“The reason I called this to your attention, was that the idea was Miss Wall’s originally. So obviously—” Gilmore stopped. A frown of dawning realization wrinkled his forehead. “Are you implying that Miss Wall is now my immediate superior?”
“I thought that was understood, Mr. Gilmore.”
Gilmore swallowed hard to keep down the three juicy expletives rising spontaneously in his throat.
“When you brought Barbara Wall here from the East last month,” he said, “you took great pains to point out that while she was to act as promotion manager, I was to continue in my functions as public relations director. You indicated at the time that the two jobs were independent and of equal rank.”
“I’m afraid you misunderstood,” said Mr. Evans. “In a vast and complex organization like ours there must be a chain of command. I can quite understand your reluctance as a man to work for a woman, but—”
“I don’t mind working for a woman if she can pitch them up faster than I can. I’m not against women in principle. Some of my best friends are women. I—’
“Miss Wall is a very able young woman,” Mr. Evans interrupted. “She has considerable background in promoting canned soups. You know of course that she organized the campaign for Gold Label Soups that has twenty-six million Americans eating soup for lunch every day?”
“I know that I hired Miss Wall as a copywriter when I was working for an advertising agency in New York several years ago,” Gilmore said. “And I know that I fired her six months later.”
Mr. Evans patted his mustache with the corner of a silk handkerchief. “I can see where that might put you in a somewhat awkward position vis-à-vis Miss Wall,” he said. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to work out your personal problems directly with her. Thank you for coming in, Gilmore.”
Gilmore made his exit feeling very virtuous at not having blown a gasket—at least prematurely. He paused just outside the holy of holies, however, to take a deep breath. Before proceeding to Barbara Wall’s cubicle, he wanted to be sure he was angry enough to spend fifteen minutes in her presence without reverting to a moon-struck invertebrate.
III
Ever since Barbara Wall had turned up in the Midwest a month before, Gilmore had known that he would have to face her eventually. He had been dismayed to learn that she was going to be his colleague at Barzac, but he was not entirely surprised. Nothing that happened at Barzac surprised him any more.
The Barzac Soup Kitchens—née Barzac Canneries—had been going through many changes of late. The original canneries had been built into a national institution by a Frenchman who had parlayed an idea, a side-street restaurant, and a few acres of tomatoes into a multi-million-dollar business with an AAA Dun & Bradstreet rating. When Jacques Barzac died and left the works to his only daughter Louise, things began to fall apart. A sticky-fingered attorney got his hand caught in the estate, and had killed the then general manager who was sensitive to the odor of corruption.” Not long after that, Louise had disposed of her controlling interest, so that within a few years, the Barzac plant was being operated by two banks and an insurance company.
The new interests had elected a new board of directors and the new board had brought in a new management and a new policy. They had raided several of the big eastern canneries for top executives and production men, and had abandoned Barzac’s traditional line of ready-to-serve soups for the condensed varieties. Condensed soups were definitely the trend. Gold Label, after hesitating for several years, had definitely given up the ready-to-serve lines it had been holding as an ace in the hole. Even Zenith had gone over to condensed soups for good. So, after a brief shut-down for re-tooling and re-indoctrination of the crew of two hundred chefs, including Pierre Lenormand, the grumbling old Director of the Kitchens, who was due for retirement in a few years anyway, Barzac became a condensed-soup concern. And Barbara Wall, a bright nova in the firmament of condensed-soup publicists, had been hitched to the Barzac wagon as part of the new team.
“Hello, Gil. Come in and park,” Barbara said as Gilmore stuck his head into her office.
She was a small girl, but she had indisputable stature as she sat behind her pale lemon-wood desk with cool, crisp efficiency in her cool, crisp, apple-green linen tailleur. Only Barbara Wall could be quite that cool and crisp on a steamy August day. Sheer will power, Gilmore decided, would keep Barbara cool under any circumstances. She was two parts burning ambition and three parts icy determination and the end-product was as invigorating as an evening breeze—if you remembered to wear a topcoat. Gilmore had been wearing his for years.…
