Some Came Running (33 page)

Judge Deacon listened to him silently, looking at him shrewdly, as Frank explained what he wanted. He laid the whole thing out for him. The story he told was not the truth, but it served his purpose much better than the truth would have. Then, before the judge could make any kind of an answer beyond a grunt, he brought in his clincher: Dave refused to go into it if anybody else but the two was brought in; he distrusted businessmen.

The judge nodded brusquely, asked no questions, and wheezed in his scornful withering voice: “You may find, that you’ve got yerself in a lot more trouble, than just havin that money in the Second Nashnul would have made.”

“Well, I didn’t know what else to do,” Frank said. “And I knew you wanted that money out of there?”

The judge merely grunted.

“Now,” Frank said. “I just want a regular partnership contract, sort of. You know. That calls him a junior partner. Except that there’s one extra thing I want put in it. I’ve got to be out of town a few days, and I’d like to have it ready for me when I get back.”

“It’ll be ready,” the judge grunted, without bothering to ask about the extra.

“Thanks. But about that extra thing: I want a regular ‘Give or Take’ partnership clause put in it. You know, the kind that says if for any reason either partner wishes to get out, his partner is then allowed to set the price and the partner who wishes to get out must then either buy his partner’s share or sell his own at the price set by the other. You know what I mean. ‘Give or Take.’ You’ll know how to word it better than me.”

“You don’t need that clause in this contract,” the judge said scornfully, as if talking to an idiot. “That ‘Give or Take’ thing is for full partnerships that are fifty-fifty. The partner who sets the price thus sets the price for both halves. Since that screwball brother of yours will own less than half, and you’ll have the controllin interest, you don’t need it.”

“I know all that,” Frank said, “but I’d like to have it put in anyway, if it’s all right with you.”

The judge looked at him a long moment, peering out with those shrewd little eyes set very deep between the fat cheeks and that broad forehead. He seemed to be making some mental note Frank thought.

“All right,” the judge grunted, “it’ll have to be worded so as to include two prices stead of one. I’ll put it in. If it’ll make you sleep better nights.”

That seemed a strange thing for him to say Frank thought. He could not be sure what was going on in his mind. “The reason I did that,” he explained, “is that the business is liable to expand some. And it might be hard to appraise what a share of it is worth exactly. And besides we’re relatives.”

“I been writin contracts for years,” the judge said witheringly.

Frank still did not know what he had in mind. If anything.

“I got work to do,” the judge grunted, and swung his chair around to the little table full of papers beside him.

“Okay,” Frank said. “I’ll see you then. You’ll have it ready for me when I get back?”

The judge merely looked at him, scornfully, witheringly. He made no answer.

The pigheaded, miserly, insulting old son of a bitch, Frank thought furiously as he went down the stairs from the office. Someday he would learn his goddamned lesson. If he ever lost his money, there wouldn’t be a single soul in town who would speak to him on the street, or give him a chunk of bread for a handout. Still, in spite of his fury, he felt it had come off the way he wanted it. It was mid-afternoon outside. Almost all the snow was gone, and everything looked wet and dirty. Now all he had to do was go home and pack, which he dreaded.

Everything went all right at home, but then it always did. It was a dreadful experience just the same. Agnes had just got home from one of her club luncheons and was still all dressed up. She had her own car, a Ford. He packed a two-suiter in the bedroom, the bag lying spread open on his bed. She came and stood in the doorway. As he packed, he explained to her
why
he was going. He had already told her he
was
going. The call from Jeff Miller, the Indiana Jewelers’ meeting in Hammond, his staying in Chicago because he liked that hotel. It was horrible.

Agnes did not say anything. But he was positive she knew, and knew he knew she knew, he was sure from little things she had let drop at other times. She even knew who, he was quite sure. At that moment, as he finished packing the bag, he wondered why the hell he was doing it, and what the hell good there was in it, and if he had not already gone this far with it he would not even have gone. Chicago actually seemed nothing, nonexistent. And he was puzzled at himself wanting to go there.

But when he was free, and out in the Buick on the highway, he felt better. It was as if for an hour he had existed under some kind of a mental fog, an amnesia. And that was strange, because that was exactly how he had felt about the other, about Geneve, when he had been home packing with Agnes there.

It was a good day to drive: sunny with the bright but weak sunshine of early winter, the highway already dry of the melted snow, the fields beautifully damp, and here and there one with the thin green spikes of winter wheat showing. He settled down into the long haul to Chicago, enjoying the power of the car, and the being alone, and put his mind upon his plans that were coming clearer every day now and would soon be at the time to put them into action.

The whole thing centered around the highway bypass. Since the war, they had already built the new bridge and the bypass around Israel. They were working on Route 40 all across the state, widening and straightening it. All the new types of earthmoving equipment, like LeTourneau and Caterpillar, that had been developed during the war to build airstrips, were responsible for this. Nowadays, they could make the earth conform to the road instead of fitting the road to the land. Come summer, they would probably start it. And on all the other new sections of road they were doing the same thing: bypassing the towns. That meant that, eventually, they would build a bypass around Parkman. Right now the highway ran straight through the center of town, with stop signs, and stoplights, and one school zone, slowing the traffic, and the tourist trade in food and lodging on 40 in the summertime was an important item. The bypass would kill all that. The tourists would completely miss the business section.

If a man could find out exactly where that bypass was going to be built, and buy up some of the land it would cross before the price began to go up, not only would he own the land to which business must move when it moved out there, which he could then sell in small lots at a high price, but he could also build and invest in and own a couple businesses himself. Apparently no one in Parkman had thought of this as yet. That, with certain other basic additions, he thought fondly, was his plan.

He was pretty sure the bypass was going to go to the north of town. And if it did, he already owned a small farm there out in back of the college which he had bought up some time ago as a mortgage, and which the highway would if not actually cross almost certainly have to touch along somewhere. That would put him in on the ground floor, but he wanted more and if he started buying adjoining land it would look—at least for a while—like he was only adding to his farm. But first he had to know exactly where the bypass would go. Of course, it was always possible it might go to the south, but he didn’t think so because out east of town, where they had also built new the five miles of highway from the bridge to the Parkman city limits, there was a long slow curve into town, which if it were only extended straight would throw the road naturally to the north side. Ahhh, he had thought it all out very carefully. And so far he had not said a word to a soul, even his own wife.

The only man he knew who might get him the information was Clark Hibbard, who owned and edited the
Parkman Oregonian & Evening News
, a paper founded as a weekly by his grandfather who named it after the title of Francis Parkman’s best seller
The Oregon Trail
and which Clark’s father had changed into an evening daily. Clark, in his spare time, was also State Representative from this district. Frank was a staunch Republican and Clark was a Republican, and Frank had always supported Clark and worked hard for him in the last election. He had been one of the group who first got Clark to come out for office. Clark was still a young man, and had ambitions of someday going to Washington as Senator. He felt he could trust Clark. And Clark could get him the information. The new plans were probably right now being decided by the highway department in Springfield. It might even be remotely possible that Clark had enough influence to get that bypass laid whereever he wanted it. Heh heh.

Of course, that would mean tipping Clark off to the deal, but that couldn’t be helped. Anyway, he wasn’t greedy, he told himself proudly, he didn’t want it all. And besides, he had another plan; a corollary.

This had to do with the new factory. An eastern glove concern had been accepted by the City Council and Chamber of Commerce to build a new plant in Parkman. Naturally they would want to be near the railroad—one of them—and what would be a more ideal spot for them than out north of town, in the strip of land between the New York Central tracks where the freight depot was, a mile from the edge of town, and the new bypass highway! Then they’d have railway freighting and trucking both!

He began to see clearly a whole new town tacked onto Parkman. There was a strip of land out there that would, depending on the position of the bypass, be anywhere from half to three quarters of a mile wide, and long enough to support five factories—all big ones. Part of that strip was already on his little farm, and he wanted the rest of it. In his mind’s eye he could visualize them: five big, shining, modernistic factories—all in a row—and all built on land owned by Frank Hirsh. From there, it was only a small jump to a subdivision clustering around them. What could be more natural than for people to want to live near where they work? And then the crowning glory: a huge, new ten- or twelve-unit shopping center like they were beginning to build all over the country now: built western style, in a long L, with a tremendous blacktop-marked-off-in-yellow-paint 150-car parking space in the angle, built right at the junction of northbound State Route 1 and the new bypass—and above it, in yellow brick set into red he could see it now the five-foot high legend, Hirsh Block.

Hirsh Block!

Why, not only his subdivision, but everybody in town would end
up
doing all their buying in a modern place like that.

In the car, driving almost seventy, his hands tightened exultantly on the wheel and swerved him clear over to the black line. He pulled it back. The shopping center would be a goldmine, just in itself! He had thought it all over very carefully, and the only thing he was not absolutely 100 percent sure of—outside of Clark Hibbard—was all the capital. He had already begun converting his other holdings, and he had two or three rental houses scattered around town, he could float a loan on them. And he had fifteen thousand dollars stashed away in war bonds. He could not borrow on his holdings at the bank and the Building & Loan on account of the judge—at least not until the news was out. Frank calculated—again—feeling like a parrot he had done it so many times: He was worth just a little bit over seventy-five thousand dollars. And he could probably stretch it to twenty-five thousand dollars more. He probably had enough for the land—if they could get most of it before the price started rising. But projects like the shopping center were going to take more, a lot more, than he could put up alone. But once the thing was under way he was sure he could get all the capital he wanted, even if he had to go outside town, or even the state, to get it. There was Fred Benson, in Indianapolis, always ready to invest in a good thing.

He didn’t care. One way or another it would come to him. He would get what he needed. This was the chance of a lifetime, and he was going to throw everything into it that he could scrape up. It was a gamble, sure. He loved to gamble.

He had put off approaching Clark about it until he had it worked out in his head, and on the theory that the less people who knew about a thing the more likely it was to be kept a secret. But now with Dave coming into the picture, and things beginning to develop—plus the strange way the judge had acted—he was beginning to feel it was about time. He didn’t want to put it off so long that somebody else got the idea, too.

That Dave. He could do a lot for that boy if he would only play ball and work a little. That boy would make him the best partner he could have. That the boy had changed his mind like he did about the taxi service was in itself a good sign. He was, at last, getting some gumption and some common sense.

But—the truth was—what Frank really wanted was a son. Taking Dave was only a substitute for a son, and a poor substitute at that because if he did build a dynasty there wouldn’t be anyone to take over and handle it when he died.

It was not that he didn’t love Dawn. Quite the contrary. Well, who knew, if the thing came off, maybe they might even adopt a son? It was not the first time he had thought of this, but he had never mentioned it to Agnes.

This bypass deal was his first real venture, big venture, away from the judge, and he wanted it to come off. It had to come off. Because if it didn’t, the judge would see to it that he never got an opportunity at another dollar outside his own store the rest of his life.

He thought about it all the way to Chicago, feeling high and exultant. The more he thought about it, the better he felt. About everything.

Only once, going through Monee, did he have a moment of panic, when he remembered he had told Edith one thing and Agnes another—Edith that the meeting was in Indianapolis, Agnes that it was in Hammond—and wondered if Agnes mightn’t call Edith and find out the discrepancy accidentally. But he put it down by telling himself that that Edith was a smart one, she never said anything that she didn’t absolutely have to. And anyway, Agnes knew he was
staying
in Chicago, and would probably think Edith had got her towns wrong—or else would think Edith didn’t actually know the details, which was even better. So it was all right, after all.