CHAPTER VII
The next morning Fred Starratt went down to the office alone. Mrs. Hilmer had telephoned the night before an invitation for Helen to join them in a motor trip down the Ocean Shore Boulevard to Half moon Bay and home by way of San Mateo. Hilmer was entertaining a party of Norse visitors. Helen demurred at first, but Fred interrupted the conversation to insist:
"Go on … by all means! The change will be good for you. I can run the office for a day."
Secretly he was glad to be rid of his wife's presence. He didn't know what trouble might be impending and he wanted to face the music without the irritation of a prying audience.
His fears were confirmed. He had been brought before the executive committee on a charge of rebating preferred by Kendrick. The evidence was complete in at least three cases and they all involved Brauer's clients. In short, Kendrick had sworn affidavits from three people to the effect that a representative of Starratt & Co. had granted a discount on fire-insurance business. Obviously all three cases had been planted by Kendrick, and Brauer had walked into the trap with both feet. There was nothing for Fred to do but to explain the whole situation—who Brauer was and why he had an interest in the firm. He found the committee reasonably sympathetic, but they still had their suspicions. Fred could see that even the sudden withdrawal of Brauer from partnership with him had its questionable side. It looked a bit like clever connivance. However, his inquisitors promised to look fairly into the question before presenting an ultimatum.
Fred went back to his office reassured. He had a feeling that in the end the committee would purge him or at least give him another chance. It was inconceivable that they would pronounce the penalty of expulsion, although they might impose a fine. He was so glad to be rid of Brauer, though, that he counted the whole circumstance as little short of providential.
He found a large mail at the office and quite a few remittances, but the Hilmer check was not in evidence. He remembered now, with chagrin, that Hilmer was away for the day. Still, there was a possibility that he had signed the check late last night. He called up Hilmer's office. No, the check had not been signed. Fred reminded the cashier that this was the last day to get the money into the companies. But the watchdog of the Hilmer treasury had been through too many financial pressures to be disturbed.
"They'll have to give us the usual five-day cancellation notice," he returned, blandly. "And payment will be made before the five days lapse."
Fred hung up the phone and cursed audibly. Of course a day or two or three wouldn't have made any difference ordinarily. But there was that damn check out to Brauer. Well, he had told Brauer to hold it until Friday. There was still another day. He hated to go around and ask any further favors of his contemptible ex-partner, and he hoped he wouldn't have to request another postponement to the formality of putting the Brauer check through. Of course he had had no business making out a check for funds not in hand. But under the circumstances… What in hell was he worrying for? Everything would come out all right. What could Brauer do about it, anyway? As a matter of fact, he figured that under the circumstances he had a perfect right to stop payment on that Brauer check if he had been so disposed. For a moment the thought allured him. But his surrender to such a petty retaliation, passed swiftly. No, he wouldn't tar himself with any such defiling brush. He'd simply wipe Brauer from the slate and begin fresh.
He kept to his office all day. He didn't want to run afoul of either Kendrick or Brauer on the street, and, besides, with Helen away, it was a good day to clean up a lot of odds and ends that had been neglected during the pressure of soliciting business. It was six o'clock when he slammed down his roll-top desk and prepared to leave. He had planned to meet Helen for dinner at Felix's. He found himself a bit fagged and he grew irritated at the thought that prohibition had robbed him of his right of easy access to a reviving cocktail. He knew many places where he could buy bad drinks furtively, but he resented both the method and the vileness of the mixtures. He was putting on his coat when he heard a rap at the door. He crossed over and turned the knob, admitting a man standing upon the threshold.
"Is this Mr. Starratt?" the stranger began.
Fred nodded.
"Well, I'm sorry to bring bad news, but there's been a nasty accident. Mr. Hilmer's car went over a bank near Montara this afternoon… Mrs. Hilmer was hurt pretty badly, but everybody else is fairly well off… Your wife asked me to drop in and see you. I drove the car that helped rescue them… Don't be alarmed; Mrs. Starratt isn't hurt beyond a tough shaking up. But she feels she ought to stay with Mrs. Hilmer—under the circumstances."
Fred tried to appear calm. "Oh yes, of course … naturally… And how about Hilmer himself?"
The man shrugged. "He's pretty fair. So far a broken arm is all they've found wrong with him."
"His right arm, I suppose?" Fred suggested, with an air of resignation. He was wondering whether anybody at Hilmer's office had authority to sign checks.
"Yes," the visitor assented, briefly.
Fred Starratt had a hasty meal and then he took a direct car line for the Hilmers'. He had never been to their house, but he found just about what he had expected—a two-story hand-me-down dwelling in the Richmond district, a bit more pretentious and boasting greater garden space than most of the homes in the block. Helen answered his ring. She had her wrist in a tight bandage.
"Just a sprain," she explained, rather loftily. "The doctor says it will be all right in a day or two."
Fred sat down in an easy-chair and glanced up and down the living room. It was scrupulously neat, reflecting a neutral taste. The furniture was a mixture of golden and fumed oak done in heavy mission style and the pictures on the wall consisted of dubious oil paintings and enlarged photographs. A victrola stood in a corner, and the upright piano near the center of the room formed a background for a precisely draped, imitation mandarin skirt and a convenient shelf for family photographs and hand-painted vases. On the mantel an elaborate onyx-and-bronze clock ticked inaudibly.
Helen sat apart, almost with the detachment of a hostess receiving a casual acquaintance, as she recounted the incidents of the disastrous ride. Hilmer had been driving fairly carefully, but in swerving to avoid running down a cow that suddenly had made its appearance in the road the machine had skidded and gone over a steep bank. Mrs. Hilmer's condition was really quite serious. The doctor had intimated that even if she pulled through she might never walk again. They had a nurse, of course—two, in fact—but some one had to be there to look after things. The servant girl was just a raw Swede who did the heavy work—Mrs. Hilmer always had done most of the cooking herself.
Fred inquired for Hilmer. He had a broken wrist and several bad sprains and bruises, but he was resting easily.
"I didn't get that check for the premiums to-day," Fred said.
Helen rose from her seat. "I'll speak to him about it to-morrow," she returned, lightly.
Her movement implied dismissal. Fred left his seat and stood for a moment, awkwardly fingering his hat.
"I suppose," he faltered, "you don't know just how long you'll be needed here."
"That depends," she answered, shrugging.
"Then I'd better get some one in temporarily at the office."
She nodded.
"Well, good night," he said.
She kissed him perfunctorily and presently he found himself in the street again, bound for home.
A low fog was whitening the air and the breeze blowing in fresh from the ocean was sharp of tooth. Fred shivered slightly and buttoned his overcoat.
"I guess she's still kind of dazed," he muttered to himself. But above his perplexity soared a fresh determination. He would get a woman in his wife's place in the office and he would keep her there. It was time Helen stayed home where she belonged.
The next morning he went early to Hilmer's office. The cashier took him aside.
"Hilmer has authorized me to sign checks," he explained. "But I understand you're in wrong with the Exchange… I think I'll make out checks direct to the different companies. That's always the safest thing to do in a jam."
Fred was too furious even to protest. "I don't quite get the idea," he returned. "But that's up to you. If you want to write thirty-odd checks instead of one, that's your business, I suppose."
"Oh, that isn't any trouble," returned the man, complacently.
Fred swung back to his office. Kendrick must have been gossiping with a vengeance! What would the insurance offices on the street think when they received their checks direct from the Hilmer company? It was insulting! And now he would have to trail about collecting his commissions instead of merely withholding them from the remittance that should have been put in his hand. Still, on second thought, he did feel relieved to know that the matter wouldn't drag on any longer—that he wouldn't have to ask Brauer to hold off with his bank deposit another moment. He waited until after the noon hour to begin the collection of his commissions. Hilmer's cashier had promised to send his messenger around to the different companies before eleven o'clock.
He went into the first office with an assumption of buoyance. The cashier looked down at him through quizzical spectacles. Yes, the Hilmer premium was in, but he was very sorry—he couldn't pay Starratt & Co. anything.
"Why?" Fred demanded, hotly.
Because the Insurance Broker's Exchange had sent out a circular asking the companies to withhold any commissions due that firm until certain charges of rebating were investigated further and disproved.
Fred fled to the Exchange. The secretary was out, but his stenographer confirmed the circular. Fred went back to his office to think things over. Again he was tempted to repudiate the Brauer check at the bank and let Brauer do his worst. But he drew back from such a course with his usual repugnance. He saw now that all his high-flown theory about standing on his own feet was the merest sophistry. So far, he was nothing but the product of Hilmer's puzzling benevolence. One jam in the wheel and everything halted. He thought the whole matter out. He was still what Hilmer had intimated on the night of that disturbing dinner party—a creature with a back bent by continual bowing and scraping—a full-grown man with standards inherited instead of acquired. Why didn't he go around to the office of Ford, Wetherbee & Co. and beat up his nasty little ex-partner? Why didn't he meet Kendrick's gumshoe activities with equal stealth? It should have been possible to snare Kendrick if one had the guts. And why accept a gratuity from Hilmer in the shape of two thousand dollars more or less for commissions on business that one never really had earned the right to? He began to suspect that Hilmer had instructed his cashier to pay the companies direct. It was probably his patron's way of forcing home the idea that the commissions were a gratuity. No doubt even now he was chuckling at the spectacle of Starratt running about the street picking up the doles. He decided, once and for all, that he wouldn't go on being an object of satirical charity. He wouldn't refuse the Hilmer business, but he would put it on the proper basis. He would put a proposition squarely up to Hilmer whereby Hilmer would become a definite partner in the firm—Hilmer, Starratt & Co., to be exact. This would mean not only an opportunity to handle all the Hilmer business itself, but to control other insurance that Hilmer had his finger in. There would be no silent partners, no gratuitous assistance from either clients or wife, no evasions. From this moment on everything was to be upon a frank and open basis.
He went out at once to see Hilmer. His wife answered the door as she had done previously and he sat in the same seat he had occupied the night before. He had a sense of intrusion—he felt that he was being tolerated. Helen had removed the bandage from her wrist and she looked very handsome in the half-light of a screened electric bulb. He noticed that flowers had been placed in one of the vases on the mantelshelf and that the mandarin skirt clung a trifle less precisely to the polished surface of the oak piano. A magazine sprawled face downward on the floor. Already the impress of Mrs. Hilmer on the surroundings was becoming a trifle blurred.
He came at once to the point—he had a business proposition to make to
Hilmer and he wished to see him.
But Helen was not to be excluded from the secret of his mission that easily. The doctor had denied anybody access to Hilmer; therefore, unless it was very urgent…
"I want to see about a partnership arrangement," Fred explained, finally.
Helen stirred in her seat. "You mean that you want him to go in with us?… What's the reason? He's satisfied."
Fred drew himself up. "But I'm not!" he answered, decidedly.
She shrugged. "We've had one experience…we'd better think twice before we make another break."
"I've thought it all over," he replied, pointedly.
She colored and flashed a sharp glance at him. "I spoke to him about the premiums this morning… He tells me he ordered them paid." "Yes … direct to the companies… That's one of the reasons that made me decide to get things on a better working basis… I'm tired of being an object of charity."
She smiled coldly. Well, Hilmer simply wouldn't receive anyone now, and she herself didn't see the reason for haste. He ended by telling her the reason … there was no other way out of the situation.
"Oh," she drawled, when he had finished, "so getting rid of Brauer was too easy, after all!" She made no other comment, but he read her scornful glance. "Any fool would have guessed that!" was what it implied.
Still, even with the fact of Brauer's craftiness exposed, she could not be persuaded that the proposition was quite that urgent.
"You don't?" he inquired, with growing irritation. "Well, you've forgotten that check for some six hundred-odd dollars I wrote for Brauer the other day… I presume you know it's a felony to give out checks when there aren't sufficient funds on deposit."
She stared at him. "That's absurd!" she exclaimed. "Brauer wouldn't go that far!"
He quite agreed there, but he didn't say so. Instead, he insisted that anything was possible. They argued the matter scornfully. In the end he won.
"Well, I'll try," she announced, coldly. "I'll do my best… But I'm sure he won't see you."
She left the room with an indefinable air of boredom. He rose from his seat and began to pace up and down. The whole situation had a suggestion of unreality. In pleading with Helen for a chance to talk to Hilmer he had a sense of crossing swords with some intangible and sinister shadow; his wife seemed suddenly to have arrived at a state toward which she had been traveling all these last uncertain weeks … fading, fading from the frame of his existence. Was he growing hypersensitive or merely unreasonable?
Fifteen minutes passed … a half hour…an hour. Starratt stopped his restless movements and picked up the sprawling magazine… Presently Helen came into the room. He rose.
Her thin-lipped smile shaped itself with a tolerant geniality as she came toward him with complacent triumph.
"Well," she began, easily, "I got a thousand dollars out of him."
He went up close to her. "A thousand… I don't quite understand."
She flourished a check in his face. "Oh, he can sign checks with his left hand," she threw back, gayly.
"You mean you've spoken to him about the partnership and…"
"Of course not … he wasn't in any humor for that."
"Well, then, what is this check for?"
She drew back a little. "Why, it's to help you out, of course. Don't you want it?"
He felt himself grow suddenly cold as he stood and watched her recoil momentarily from his two-edged glance. "No!" he retorted.
She continued to back away from him. He followed her retreat.
"I don't think you quite get me, Helen," he heard himself say, with icy sharpness. "I wanted to see Hilmer _myself! I had a business proposition to put up to him. I want co-operation—not questionable charity!"
She flung back her head, but her voice lacked defiance as she said:
"Was that meant as an insult?"
"No," he returned, quietly, "as a warning."
She stood silent, facing him with that clear, disarming gaze that she knew how to achieve so perfectly. He felt a great yearning overwhelm him … a desire to meet her halfway … a vagrant displeasure at his ill-natured irritation.
"How is Mrs. Hilmer?" he asked, suddenly, as he reached for his hat.
She shrugged. "There isn't any change," she replied, almost inaudibly.
"Shall I bring you anything from the apartment?"
"No… I'll go myself this afternoon and get some things together… I need a little air, anyway." She followed him to the door. "Then I understand you don't want this?" she inquired, indicating the check in her hand.
His only answer was an incredulous stare.
"What excuse shall I make him?"
He put on his hat. The flame of his displeasure had cooled, but he was still inflexible. "None, so far as I am concerned."
A retort died on her lips. He could see that she was puzzled.
"Well, so long," he ventured.
She drew herself up with the swift movement of one parrying a blow.
"So long!" she echoed, and the door closed sharply.
He went down the steps. There was an air of finality in his retreat…
At the office he found a note from Brauer.
Your check has been returned to me… I shall put it through the bank again to-morrow.
He crumpled the sheet of paper and dropped it into the waste basket.
How much would Brauer dare? he wondered.
That night the friend who had first warned him against Kendrick met him on California Street.
"I see my prophecy came true, Fred," he hazarded. "Why didn't you tell me that Brauer was your partner?… By the way, I saw Kendrick and him going to lunch together to-day. What's the idea?"
Fred lifted his eyebrows and laughed a toneless reply. What was the idea? He wished he knew.