The Road To Ruin Read online

  •

  Talk about lightning strikes twice. Hardly was Marcie back from lunch, not two hours after sending Fred Blanchard up to talk to Monroe Hall—and how would that work out and did she hope he’d get the job or refuse it?—here came another one. His name was Warren Gillette, and the first thing she noticed about him was that he used to be the chauffeur for Jer Crumbie, who just happened to be one of Marcie’s most favorite movie stars. “My goodness,” she said, “You know Jer Crumbie?”

  “Mostly in the rearview mirror,” he said, “Nice fella, though. Not one of your uppity types.”

  She was very glad to hear that. “I see he gives you a wonderful recommendation.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Gillette chuckled. “It couldn’t of been better if I wrote it myself.”

  “But why did you leave?”

  “I didn’t,” Gillette said, and shrugged. “He left me. Gave up his New York place and went back to the Coast. For his career, you know.”

  “Oh, I see.” She opened the lower right drawer of her desk and pulled a folder from it. “We have a number of driver-type openings. Not movie stars, though.”

  Another chuckle. “I guess I’ve had enough movie stars for a while.”

  “Fine. Here’s a delivery van, furniture store.”

  He made a little grimace. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’m spoiled or something, but I like to drive for one person, you know. And a good car. Jer always surrounded himself with very good cars.”

  “Oh, my goodness,” she said, with sudden realization. “We have someone, very local, who’s famous for wonderful cars, and I know he’s right now looking for a new chauffeur.”

  “Well, this is my lucky day,” Gillette said. “Who is he?”

  Marcie squinched her eyes up, half in expectation of some sort of explosion. “Monroe Hall,” she said.

  “And he’s a rich man with a lot of cars, you say.” Gillette nodded. “What kinda business he in?”

  Marcie said, “You never heard of Monroe Hall?”

  “Not another showbiz guy, I hope.”

  “He was all over the newspapers,” Marcie told him, “and the television.”

  “At Jer’s house,” Gillette said, “all we ever looked at was the trades. Unless they’re doing a TV docudrama on this guy’s life, I doubt I’ve heard of him.”

  “I bet they will,” Marcie said. “He’s a businessman, stole from his stockholders, stole from his employees, stole from his family, stole from the government.”

  Gillette nodded through all this; then, “Well, nobody’s perfect,” he said.

  •

  Meanwhile, in another cubicle down the line, an applicant named Judson Swope, rather a fearsome large creature, was telling a wee little employee named Penelope, “Yeah, sure, I know who he is. Monroe Hall. Put it over on everybody. Listen, I don’t care what he done. If he pays me, I work for him. People don’t like him, so somebody’s gotta be there to bust heads. I like to bust heads, and I like it best when I get paid to do it. Sign me up.”

  “Yes, sir,” whispered Penelope, while in the cubicle behind her a hangdog sort of man with his hat in his hands was saying, “I was a butler in my previous employment.”

  Daisy, for this was Daisy’s cubicle, looked at him in some surprise. “You were?” It seemed so improbable.

  “I open a mean door,” he assured her. “Here’s the form I filled out, and my references.”

  Daisy studied the form first. John Rumsey, with a temporary address with friends over in Shickshinny. Good work history, excellent reference from the Honorable Hildorg Chk, Vostkojekian ambassador to the United States.

  “A guy I worked with there, at the embassy,” Rumsey said, “he come in here this morning, you got him a job, he said maybe you could get me one, too.”

  “What name?”

  “Fred Blanchard.”

  “One of the other interviewers must have handled him. Where did we place Mr. Blanchard?”

  “With somebody called Monroe Hall.”

  “Mon—His name is Blanchard?”

  “Yeah.”

  “One moment. Just—One moment.”

  She hurried away and it didn’t take long to find Marcie, and then it took no time at all to get John Rumsey signed up to apply for the job of butler out at the Hall estate. If John Rumsey didn’t look to Daisy a heck of a lot like her idea of a butler, so what? He’d been good enough for Ambassador Chk. He’d be good enough for Monroe Hall.

  •

  “Monroe?”

  A very guarded “Yes.”

  “This is Henry, Monroe.” Blank silence. “Henry Cooper.”

  “Ah! Reconsidered Henry? Ready to sell that agency, turn it over to fresh blood?”

  “I just wanted you to know, I’m in the process of sending four new employees out to you today.”

  “Four?”

  Expecting gratitude, possibly even fawning gratitude, Cooper enumerated them: “Chauffeur, butler, private secretary, and a security man.”

  “So,” Monroe said, even more snottily than usual, “you can do it when I goose you a little, can’t you?”

  “What?”

  “If I hadn’t called, called your bluff, offered to take that do-nothing agency off your hands, get somebody eager in there, you still wouldn’t be doing a goddamn thing but rest on your laurels.”

  “Monroe—”

  “Your problem, Henry, is, you spend too much time at the golf course and not enough time taking care of business. I’ll be giving these fellas a very careful once-over, I want you to know that. We’ll see if you’re trying to palm anything off on us.”

  “Mon—”

  But he’d hung up, so Cooper did, too. Then he pushed the button to summon Bernice.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Tell the girls, Bernice, we won’t be sending people over to Monroe Hall’s place any more.”

  “No, sir?”

  “No. Fuck him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  29

  THANK GOD, ALICIA HALL thought, they still had Mrs. Parsons to cook for them. Mrs. Parsons detested Monroe—well, everybody detested Monroe, as she was sadly aware—but Alicia had brought Mrs. Parsons into the marriage with her, Mrs. Parsons having been Alicia’s mother’s cook, and Mrs. Parsons had chosen to stay on where so many of the less steely had fallen by the wayside. Her decision, Alicia knew, had been based on the assumption that Alicia might well need protection, or at least moral support, in the long darkness of the marriage to come. That assumption was wrong, since Alicia was the one human being Monroe treated with unfailing gentleness and concern, but Alicia had been happy to play the part of a Brontë heroine if it meant she wouldn’t have to learn how to cook.

  Their dining room table was really wrong for their lifestyle, since it readily seated sixteen while these days there were never more than two places to be filled, at the end nearest the kitchen. The resulting long empty stretch of table made the two of them seem lonelier, somehow, than they really were. Or maybe it didn’t; Alicia preferred, if possible, not to brood.

  Mrs. Parsons had been a wonderful cook for many years—the woman must be seventy, at least, stout, silent, and hatchet-faced—and her hand had not yet lost its skill. These days, given the servant problem in the house, she did most of her shopping on the Internet, which worked wonderfully well. The Internet really isn’t the place to shop for peanut butter or cereal, but the more expensive, lush, esoteric reaches of the food world were born for Internet treatment. From FedEx or United Parcel to Mrs. Parsons’s kitchen for transmogrification, and finally to the two people seated in candlelight at one end of the very long table, her waddling figure bearing the platters and tureens, preceded by the best of all possible aromas. It made life as an outcast not so bad.

  This evening, as they consumed a fine duck breast and baby new potatoes and haricots vert accompanied by an excellent St. Emilion, Monroe said, “Darling, I have good news.”

  Alicia had forgotten there might be
such a thing. “Really?”

  “Henry Cooper, after just a little nudging from me, has come through at last. I knew I knew how to handle him.”

  “Come through?”

  “Tomorrow, we shall interview four prospective new employees,” Monroe told her, and he beamed when he saw how he’d astonished her.

  Yes, he had astonished her. “Four? Really, Monroe? All at once?”

  “A new chauffeur, at last,” Monroe ticked them off. “A new private secretary. A new butler. And an additional man to beef up security.”

  “But that’s fantastic,” Alicia said. “How did Henry manage?”

  “How did I manage Henry, is what you mean.” He chortled, pleased with himself. “You’ll never guess.”

  “Tell.”

  “I offered to buy the agency.”

  “You what?” She stared at him. “What would you want with an employment agency?”

  “Nothing,” Monroe said. “It was a bluff, of course. I simply told him I could see he wasn’t on top of the business the way he should be, so I’d buy it from him and install someone really topnotch to run it for me.”

  “But that’s insulting,” Alicia pointed out. “And Henry is our friend. Or was.”

  “Insulting was the point, dear,” Monroe said. “And don’t worry about losing Henry Cooper. As I’d thought, my offer goaded him into finding fresh people for us right away.”

  “Well, that’s wonderful, of course.”

  “They’ll be coming by for their interviews tomorrow, and I really find it hard to believe I’ll reject a one of them.”

  “I certainly hope not.” Alicia looked at the food still on her plate. “With a chauffeur,” she said, “Mrs. Parsons could do some farmstand shopping. The season’s just beginning, Monroe.”

  “Life is getting better,” he said, with his big smile. Then his smile turned into a laugh, as he said, “Oh, I have to tell you, the most comic thing.”

  “Comic?”

  “You know,” he said, “I must constantly make out tax returns, reports to the bankruptcy court, all of these things.”

  “The accountants do, you mean.”

  “Yes, of course, when I say ‘I’ I don’t mean literally ‘I.’ But the thing is, my instructions have always been, overload them. Give them every detail, no matter how irrelevant. If I buy a newspaper, put it down. Put everything down.”

  “But, Monroe, why?”

  “Two reasons,” he said. “They want reports, I’ll give them reports, I’ll give them so many reports they’ll choke on them, they’ll go blind trying to keep up with all my reports, I’ll bore them into an early grave with the volume of my reports. And the second thing, connected to that, if it ever does become necessary, and you know I hope it never does—”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Yes, I know. But if it ever does become necessary to tuck a little something naughty in there, I can reasonably hope, with all the mass of detail over such a long period of time, no one will notice.”

  “I hope it never has to happen,” Alicia said. “We’ve had all the trouble we need, my dear.”

  “Oh, exactly so,” he said. “But here’s the comical thing, I found this out yesterday. The trouble that descended this time was not on me but on that personal trainer fellow of mine, Flip.”

  “Flip?” She didn’t understand. “How can he be in trouble?”

  “Because I reported to the IRS that I’d paid him so much and so much,” Monroe said, “as I report everything. But I paid him in cash, and he never reported it.” Monroe’s laugh was hearty indeed. “One of the little people,” he said, “he’s not supposed to get away without paying taxes. We’re supposed to get away with that sort of thing. He’s supposed to pay his little mite, to take up our slack.”

  With a little moue of distaste, Alicia said, “Monroe, don’t joke like that.”

  He looked briefly sober, but the laugh was still back there. “Oh. Yes. In any event, he got caught. He wanted to complain about it, I could see it in his eyes, but he didn’t have the guts for it.”

  Alicia said, “Did you ever tell him you were going to report those payments?”

  “It never occurred to me,” Monroe said. He shrugged, drank wine, patted his lips, said, “It will be a good lesson to him.”

  30

  DORTMUNDER WAS NEVER HAPPY outside the five boroughs. There was always something wrong with the rest of the world, some way it had figured out to make him uncomfortable. For instance, at the moment, in the uncharted middle of Pennsylvania, he had to sleep on the kitchen floor.

  Chester and his jolly wife, Grace, lived in a very small house in a very small town. Because Tiny and Stan, in their new persons from Jim Green, didn’t know each other or anybody else in this area, they could stay at nice motels along the Susquehanna River while waiting to be employed by Monroe Hall, but Kelp had given the employment agency Chester as his kinsman and local contact, and Kelp and Dortmunder had to already know each other because they’d both allegedly worked at the same embassy down in Washington, D.C., so they both had to stay with Kelp’s “relative” at least the one night, and even before the coin toss Dortmunder had known which of them was going to get the living room sofa. So it was on some folded blankets on the kitchen floor that Dortmunder was expected to get his night’s rest, and fat chance.

  The problems were many. The floor, to begin with, but beyond that the very fact of kitchen. Even a small kitchen in a small house in a small town, like this one, is as full of gleaming machinery as that inside the villain’s mountain in a James Bond movie. The stove, the microwave, and the clock radio all had sharply bright numbers to tell you the time, in two shades of green and one shade of red, and of course they were all a minute apart except for a few seconds every now and then when two of them pretended to agree. So they were irritating, and they were also bright.

  Then there was the refrigerator. At least it didn’t have any shiny numbers glaring off it, but that was about the only good thing you could say about it. Occasionally it was silent, but that in a way was the worst, because that meant the victim had to wait, never knowing when the motor would suddenly thrug-ug-ug-ug… And then also the icemaker, from time to time, with a muffled crash like somebody disposing of a skeleton in a Hefty bag, would spit out another strip of ice cubes onto the previously existing cubes below.

  A very busy place, all in all, this kitchen, at the bottom of which, like at the bottom of a well, Dortmunder lay in discomfort and tried to grab a little sleep before morning, when he was supposed to be bright and rested enough to go play butler, an impersonation he’d never tried before.

  Well, he’d gone into training for it, with May’s help. May was a movie fan, which meant she went to movies and remembered them, and which also meant she had recently added a time-flashing machine to their own lives, a DVD player, in the living room. Which was all right, because Dortmunder never slept in the living room anyway, except in front of the six o’clock news.

  Once this butler task had arisen, May said, “I told you that would come in handy,” and rented disks of Ruggles of Red Gap and My Man Godfrey and The Remains of the Day. He watched them all, parts of them more then once, and gradually felt he’d got the idea. He wouldn’t be able to work the accent, but other than that he thought he could handle the assignment. A lot of it, he’d decided, was in the clothes.

  Which could have been another problem, but in the end it turned out okay. When you do your shopping after midnight, what you bring home has got to be ready-to-wear, because you can’t very well ask for alterations. Dortmunder’s new black suit, picked up with Kelp’s guidance and assistance, bagged a little bit here and there, but was, generally speaking, fine.

  But now, lying all night in this very active kitchen, looking at the brightly lit if equivocal numbers, listening to the symphony of the refrigerator, thinking about butlers, all while he was supposed to be asleep, he did make a pretty long night of it. On the other hand, when Grace Fallon walked in at seven tha
t morning to start twice her usual number of breakfasts, Dortmunder actually was asleep. Her arrival startled him awake, and for just a minute he couldn’t figure out what he was doing lying on a kitchen floor or who was that woman in the blue jeans and pink sweater and gray hair walking around, reaching for the coffeemaker.

  “Morning,” she said, as cheerful as anybody who’d spent the night in their own bed. “Sleep well?”

  Memory returned. Dortmunder sat up, aching all over. “Just fine,” he said.

  Well, according to his research, butlers did tend to have bags under their eyes.

  31

  IT WAS THE MOST jam-packed day in Monroe Hall’s life since all the trials and depositions and press conferences and hearings had wound down, leaving him free but not exonerated, loose but unable to move. And this was even without Flip’s usual Wednesday session, the silly sod being off to Harrisburg to pay his pittance to the IRS. Teach him to emulate his betters.

  Well, in any event, there were four prospective employee interviews scheduled for today, which was four more employee interviews than most days, and Hall couldn’t help it, he had to just keep looking at that list, as though he hadn’t already memorized the thing, down to the last parenthesis:

  TIME / NAME / POSITION / LAST EMPLOYER

  10:30 / Warren Gillette / chauffeur / Jer Crumbie (actor)

  11:00 / Judson Swope / security / Securitech

  11:30 / John Rumsey / butler / Vostkojek embassy

  12:00 / Fredric Blanchard / secretary / Vostkojek embassy

  “I know all about you,” Warren Gillette said.

  Not knowing how to take that, Hall said, “You do?”

  “Jer just loved your cars,” Gillette told him.

  “Oh! My cars! The actor!”

  “That’s it.”

  “He knew about my collection, did he?” Hall was very pleased at that idea.

  “Oh, sure,” Gillette said. An open-faced cheerful man with a shock of red hair, Gillette somehow looked like a chauffeur, even without the cloth cap he held folded in one hand. “Jer always said,” he told Hall, “the bad thing about living on Central Park West, you didn’t have any room to keep some cars around you. Jer just loves cars.”