The policemen, both young, had been firm but also quiet and polite so that Erica felt less intimidated than by the antagonistic woman detective in the store. In any case, she was now totally resigned to whatever was going to happen. She knew she had brought disaster on herself, and whatever other disasters followed would happen anyway because it was too late to change anything, whatever she said or did.
“Our orders are to take you in, ma’am,” one of the policemen said. “My partner will drive your car.”
Erica gasped, “All right.” She went to the rear of the cruiser where the policeman had the door open for her to enter, then shrank back when she realized the interior was barred and she would be locked inside as if in a cell.
The policeman saw her hesitate. “Regulations,” he explained. “I’d let you ride up front if I could, but if I did they’d likely put me in the back.”
Erica managed a smile. Obviously the two officers had decided she was not a major criminal.
The same policeman asked, “Ever been arrested before?”
She shook her head.
“Didn’t think you had. Nothing to it after the first few times. That is, for people who don’t make trouble.”
She entered the cruiser, the door slammed, and she was locked in.
At the suburban police station she had an impression of polished wood, and tile floors, but otherwise was only dully aware of the surroundings. She was cautioned, then questioned about what happened at the store. Erica answered truthfully, knowing the time for evasion was past. She was confronted by the woman detective and the security guard, both hostile, even when Erica confirmed their version of events. She identified the briefcase she had stolen, at the same time wondering why she had ever wanted it. Later, she signed a statement, then was asked if she wished to make a telephone call. To a lawyer? To her husband? She answered no.
After that, she was taken to a small room with a barred window at the rear of the police station, locked in, and left alone.
The chief of the suburban police force, Wilbur Arenson, was not a man who hurried needlessly. Many times during his career, Chief Arenson had found that slowness, when it could be managed, paid off later, and thus he had taken his time while reading several reports concerning an alleged shoplifting which occurred earlier in the afternoon, followed by a suspect’s attempted flight, a police radio alert and, later, an interception and detention. The detained suspect, one Erica Marguerite Trenton, age twenty-five, a married woman living at Quarton Lake, had been cooperative, and further had signed a statement admitting the offense.
Under normal procedure the case would have gone ahead routinely, with the suspect charged, a subsequent court appearance and, most likely, a conviction. But not everything in a Detroit suburban police station proceeded according to routine.
It was not routine for the chief to review details of a minor criminal case, yet certain cases—at subordinates’ discretion—found their way to his desk.
Trenton. The name stirred a chord of memory. The chief was not sure how or when he had heard the name before, but knew his mind would churn out the answer if he didn’t rush it. Meanwhile, he continued reading.
Another departure from routine was that the station desk sergeant, familiar with the ways and preferences of his chief, had not so far booked the suspect. Thus no blotter listing yet existed, with a name and charges listed, for press reporters to peruse.
Several things about the case interested the chief. First, a need of money obviously was not a motive. A billfold, dropped on the shopping plaza parking lot by the fleeing suspect, contained more than a hundred dollars cash as well as American Express and Diners cards, plus credit cards from local stores. A checkbook in the suspect’s handbag showed a substantial balance in the account.
Chief Arenson knew all about well-heeled women shoplifters and their supposed motivations, so the money aspect did not surprise him. More interesting was the suspect’s unwillingness to give information about her husband or to telephone him when allowed the opportunity.
Not that it made any difference. The interrogating officer had routinely checked out ownership of the car she was driving, which proved to be registered to one of the Big Three auto manufacturers, and a further check with that company’s security office revealed it was an official company car, one of two allocated to Mr. Adam Trenton.
The company security man had let that item of information about two cars slip out, though he hadn’t been asked, and the police officer phoning the inquiry had noted it in his report. Now, Chief Arenson, a stockily built, balding man in his late fifties, sat at his desk and considered the notation.
As the police chief well knew, plenty of auto executives drove company cars. But only a senior executive would have two company cars-one for himself, another for his wife.
Thus it required no great deductive powers to conclude that the suspect, Erica Marguerite Trenton, now locked in a small interrogation room instead of in a cell—another intuitive move by the desk sergeant—was married to a reasonably important man.
What the chief needed to know was: How important? And how much influence did Mrs. Trenton’s husband have?
The fact that the chief would take time to consider such questions at all was a reason why suburban Detroit communities insisted on maintaining their own local police forces. Periodically, proposals appeared for a merger of the score or more of separate police forces of Greater Detroit into a single metropolitan force. Such an arrangement, it was argued, would ensure better policing by eliminating duplication, and would also be less costly. The metropolitan system, its advocates pointed out, worked successfully elsewhere.
But the suburbs—Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, Troy, Dearborn, the Grosse Pointes and others—were always solidly opposed. As a result, and because residents of those communities had influence where it counted, the proposal always failed.
The existing system of small, independent forces might not be the best means of providing equal justice for all, but it did give local citizens whose names were known a better break when they, their families or friends transgressed the law.
Prestol—the chief remembered where he had heard the name Trenton before. Six or seven months ago, Chief Arenson had bought a car for his wife from the auto dealer, Smokey Stephensen. During the chiefs visit to the dealer’s showroom—a Saturday, he recalled—Smokey had introduced him to an Adam Trenton from the auto company’s head office. Afterward, and privately, while Smokey and the chief made their deal about the car, Smokey mentioned Trenton again, predicting that he was going higher in the company, and one day would be its president.
Reflecting on the incident, and its implications at this moment, Chief Arenson was glad he had dawdled. Now, not only was he aware that the woman being detained was someone of consequence, but he had the further knowledge of where to get extra information which might be helpful in the case.
Using an outside line on his desk, the chief telephoned Smokey Stephensen.
24
Sir Perceval McDowall Stuyvesant, Bart. and Adam Trenton had known each other and been friends for more than twenty years. It was a loose friendship. Sometimes two years or more slipped by without their meeting, or even communicating, but whenever they were in the same town, which happened occasionally, they got together and picked up the old relationship easily, as if it had never been set down.
A reason, perhaps, for the lasting friendship was their dissimilarity. Adam, while imaginative, was primarily a master of organization, a pragmatist who got things done. Sir Perceval, imaginative too and with a growing reputation as a brilliant scientist, was essentially a dreamer who had trouble mastering each day’s practicalities—the kind of man who might invent a zipper but subsequently forget to zip up his own fly.
Their backgrounds were equally at variance. Sir Perceval was the last of a line of English squires, his father dead and the inherited title genuine. Adam’s father had been a Buffalo, New York, steelworker.
The two met in coll
ege—at Purdue University. They were the same age and graduated together, Adam in Engineering; Perceval, whom his friends called Perce, in Physics. Afterward, Perce spent several more years gathering scientific degrees as casually as a child gathers daisies, then worked for a while for the same auto company as Adam. This had been in Scientific Research—the “think tank”—where Perce left his mark by discovering new applications for electron microscopes.
During that period they spent more time together than at any other—it had been before Adam’s marriage to Erica, and Perce was a bachelor—and they found each other’s company increasingly agreeable.
For a while, Adam became mildly interested in Perce’s hobby of manufacturing pseudo-antique violins—into each of which, with peculiar humor, he pasted a Stradivari label—but rejected Perce’s suggestion that they learn Russian together. Perce set out on that project alone, solely because someone had given him a subscription to a Soviet magazine, and in less than a year could read Russian with ease.
Sir Perceval Stuyvesant had a lean, spindle-shanked appearance and, to Adam, always looked the same: mournful, which he wasn’t, and perpetually abstracted, which he was. He also had an easygoing nature which nothing disturbed, and when concentrating on something scientific was oblivious to everything around him, including seven young and noisy children. This brood had appeared at the rate of one a year since Perce’s marriage which took place soon after he left the auto industry. He had wed a pleasant, sexy scatterbrain, now Lady Stuyvesant, and for the past few years the expanding family had lived near San Francisco in a happy madhouse of a home.
It was from San Francisco that Perce had flown to Detroit specifically to see Adam. They met in Adam’s office in late afternoon of a day in August.
When Perce had telephoned the previous day to say that he was coming, Adam urged him not to go to a hotel, but to come home to stay at Quarton Lake. Erica liked Perce. Adam hoped that an old friend’s arrival would ease some of the tension and uncertainty still persisting between himself and Erica.
But Perce had declined. “Best if I don’t, old boy. If I meet Erica this trip, she’ll be curious to know why I’m there, and you’ll likely want to tell her yourself in your own way.”
Adam had asked, “Why are you coming?”
“Maybe I want a job.”
But Sir Perceval hadn’t wanted a job. As it turned out, he had come to offer one to Adam.
A West Coast company, involved with advanced electrical and radar technology, required an executive head. Perce, one of the company’s founders, was currently its scientific vice-president, and his approach to Adam was on behalf of himself and associates.
He announced, “President is what we’d make you, old boy. You’d start at the top.”
Adam said dryly, “That’s what Henry Ford told Bunkie Knudsen.”
“This could work out better. One reason—you’d be in a strong stock position.” Perce gave the slightest of frowns as he regarded Adam. “I’ll ask you a favor while I’m here. That’s take me seriously.”
“I always have.” That was one of the things about their relationship, Adam thought—based on respect for each other’s abilities, and with good reason. Adam had his own solid achievements in the auto industry and Perce, despite vagueness at times and his absent-mindedness about everyday matters, turned everything he touched in scientific fields into notable success. Even before today’s encounter, Adam had heard reports about Perce’s West Coast company which had gained a solid reputation for advanced research and development, electronically oriented, in a short time.
“We’re a small company,” Perce said, “but growing fast, and that’s our problem.”
He went on, explaining that a group of scientific people like himself had banded together in formation of the company, their objective to convert new, advanced knowledge with which the sciences abounded, into practical inventions and technology. A special concern was freshly emerging energy sources and power transmission. Not only would developments envisaged bring aid to beleaguered cities and industry, they would also augment the world’s food supply by massive, powered irrigation. Already the group had scored successes in several fields so that the company was, as Perce expressed it, “earning bread and butter and some jam.” Much more was expected.
“A good deal of our work is focusing on superconductors,” Perce reported. He asked Adam, “Know much about that?”
“A little, not much.”
“If there’s a major breakthrough—and some of us believe it can happen—it’ll be the most revolutionary power and metallurgical development in a generation. I’ll tell you more of that later. It could be our biggest thing.”
At the moment, Perce declared, what the company needed was a top-flight businessman to run it. “We’re scientists, old boy. If I may say so, we’ve as many science geniuses as you’ll find under one umbrella in this country. But we’re having to do things we don’t want to and are not equipped for—organization, management, budgets, financing, the rest. What we want is to stay in our labs, experiment, and think.”
But the group didn’t want just any businessman, Perce declared. “We can get accountants by the gross and management consultants in a dump truck. What we need is one outstanding individual—someone with imagination who understands and respects research, can utilize technology, channel invention, establish priorities, run the front office while we take care of the back, and still be a decent human being. In short, old boy, we need you.”
It was impossible not to be pleased. Being offered a job by an outside company was no new experience for Adam, any more than it was to most auto executives. But the offer from Perce, because of who and what he was, was something different.
Adam asked, “How do your other people feel?”
“They’ve learned to trust my judgment. I may tell you that in considering candidates we made a short list. Very short. Yours was the only name on it.”
Adam said, and meant it, “I’m touched.”
Sir Perceval Stuyvesant permitted himself one of his rare, slow smiles. “You might even be touched in other ways. When you wish, we can talk salary, bonus, stock position, options.”
Adam shook his head. “Not yet, if at all. The thing is, I’ve never seriously considered leaving the auto business. Cars have been my life. They still are.”
Even now, to Adam, this entire exchange was mere dialectics. Greatly as he respected Perce and strong as their friendship was, for Adam to quit the auto industry voluntarily was inconceivable.
The two were in facing chairs. Perce shifted in his. He had a way of winding and unwinding while seated which made his long, lean figure seem sinuous. Each movement, too, signaled a switch in conversation.
“Ever wonder,” Perce said, “what they’ll put on your tombstone?”
“I’m not at all sure I’ll have one.”
Perce waved a hand. “I speak metaphorically, old boy. We’ll all get a tombstone, whether in stone or air. It’ll have on it what we did with the time we had, what we’ve left behind us. Ever thought of yours?”
“I suppose so,” Adam said. “I guess we all do a little.”
Perce put his fingertips together and regarded them. “Several things they could say about you, I suppose. For example: ‘He was an auto company vice-president’ or even maybe ‘president’—that’s if your luck holds and you beat out all the other strong contenders. You’d be in good company, of course, even though a lot of company. So many auto presidents and vice-presidents, old boy. Bit like the population of India.”
“If you’re making a point,” Adam said, “why not get to it?”
“A splendid suggestion, old boy.”
Sometimes, Adam thought, Perce overdid the studied Anglicisms. They had to be studied because, British baronet or not, Perce had lived in the U.S. for a quarter century and, with the exception of speech, all his tastes and habits were American. But perhaps it showed that everyone had human weaknesses.
Now Perce leaned for
ward, eying Adam earnestly. “You know what that tombstone of yours might say: ‘He did something new, different, worthwhile. He was a leader when they carved new pathways, broke fresh ground. That which he left behind him was important and enduring.’”
Perce fell back in his chair as if the amount of talk—unusual in his case—and emotional effort had exhausted him.
Amid the silence which followed, Adam felt more moved than at any other point since the conversation began. In his mind he acknowledged the truth of what Perce had said, and wondered, too, how long the Orion would be remembered after its time and usefulness were ended. Farstar also. Both seemed important now, dominating the lives of many, including his own. But how important would they seem in time to come?
The office suite was quiet. It was late afternoon, and here as elsewhere within the staff building, pressures of the day were easing, secretaries and others beginning to go home. From where Adam sat, glancing outside he could see the freeway traffic, its volume growing as the exodus from plants and offices began.
He had chosen this time of day because Perce had asked particularly that they have at least an hour in which they would be undisturbed.
“Tell me some more,” Adam said, “about superconductors—the breakthrough you were speaking of.”
Perce said quietly, “They represent the means to enormous new energy, a chance to clean up our environment, and to create more abundance than this earth has ever known.”
Across the office, on Adam’s desk, a telephone buzzed peremptorily.
Adam glanced toward it with annoyance. Before Perce’s arrival he had given Ursula, his secretary, instructions not to disturb them. Perce seemed unhappy about the interruption, too.