"Death Trance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

The man who was burned?' Randolph asked.
'He was standing right over there by the refrigeration controls, according to his buddies,' Tim Shelby said. 'There was a terrific explosion. The wintering tank burst apart and three hundred gallons of purified oil came bursting out and caught fire. He didn't stand a chance. They saw him struggling, they said, but he was just like a burning scarecrow.'
'How about the others?'
They were trapped in the corridor outside. They weren't burned but the door wouldn't open because it was buckled, and nobody could get in to save them because the fire was so fierce.'
Randolph bent down and picked up a workman's safety helmet. It was blackened and bubbled but he could still make out the name 'Clare' on the front of it. He set it down again and said, 'Goddam it.' He rarely profaned but there was no other way to describe how he felt now.
'Have the police been here?' he asked after a while.
They took a look. Chief Moyne came up in person.'
'What did he say?'
Tim Shelby wiped the sweat from his face. 'He commiserated.'
Randolph nodded. That sounds like Chief Moyne. Did his forensic people find anything?'
'If they did, they didn't tell us. They took away one or two pieces of piping and part of the tank casing, but that's all.'
'Well, I'll talk to Chief Moyne in the morning,' Randolph said.
He was just about to leave the ruins when a small group of five or six men appeared and stood outside the shattered factory, inspecting it with obvious interest. Randolph recognized them at once. Nobody could mistake the bulky,
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three-hundred-pound figure in the flapping white double-breasted suit and the wide-brimmed cotton-plantation hat. It was Orbus Greene, president of Brooks Cottonseed and chairman of the Cottonseed Association. Orbus had been a mayor of Memphis in the days before urban renewal, and plenty of local politicians still privately held the opinion that Memphis would not have needed half so much urban renewal had it not been for him and his friends.
The men who accompanied him were his minders: men who opened doors for him and reorganized restaurant tables so he could squeeze into his seat. They had the look of dressed-up yokels: gold rings, gold teeth, greasy kids' stuff on their hair.'
Randolph picked his way out of the ruins. Orbus was standing so that his swollen, sallow face was half hidden by the brim of his hat.
'It pains me to see this, Randolph,' he said. His voice was as high and as clear as a young boy's. Somebody had once told Randolph that Orbus could sing soprano solos from Verdi's operas capable of bringing tears to your eyes provided you were not required to look at him while he sang.
'Still,' Orbus continued, 'there's always insurance, isn't there? Insurance is better than ointment.'
'I lost three good men here, Orbus,' Randolph retorted. 'Neither insurance nor ointment will bring any of them back. Now, if you'll forgive me, I have work to do.'
Orbus thrust his pig's-trotter hands into his sagging coat pockets and raised his head so he was squinting at Randolph from underneath the brim of his hat, one-eyed.
'You're not the man your daddy was, you know,' he remarked provocatively.
'I know that,' Randolph replied equably.
'Your daddy was always an independent kind of man. Free-thinking, free-spirited. But he respected the cottonseed business, and he respected the people who make their living at it.'
'I hope this isn't yet another invitation to join the Cotton-37
seed Association,' Randolph told him. 'Believe me, I have enough clubs to go to. Useful, interesting clubs, where I do useful, interesting things, like playing squash. I have no interest at all in spending my evenings in smoke-filled rooms manipulating people and prices.'
'Well, you sure paint a lurid picture of us,' smiled Orbus. 'Maybe you should remember the kidney machines the Cottonseed Association bought last year for the Medical Centre and the vacations we gave to those crippled kids.'
'I'm sure you didn't forget to enter those charitable donations on your tax returns,' Randolph said. 'Now, please, I just came back from Canada and I'm very pushed for time.'
'You just wait up one minute,' said Orbus. 'What you've been doing these past three years, playing the market, selling what you choose to whom you choose at whatever price you choose, well, that was understandable to begin with. Your daddy had been letting Clare Cottonseed stagnate, hadn't he? For quite a long spell. Me and my fellow members of the Association, we were prepared to some extent to let you re-energize your business, reinvest, build it up again to what it was. That's why - even though we expressed our disapproval - we didn't lean on you too hard. If Clare flourished, we thought it would be good for all of us.'
Orbus licked his lips and then, as slowly and menacingly as a waking lizard, opened his other eye.
'Point is now,' he said, 'that you've gone way beyond re-energizing, way beyond rebuilding. Point is now that you're undercutting the rest of us on major contracts and that you've built up the processing capacity to handle them, the last straw that broke the camel's back being Sun-Taste.'
Neil Sleaman broke in. 'You listen here, Mr Greene. Clare Cottonseed has every legal right to sell cottonseed oil to whomever it likes and at whatever price it likes. So kindly butt out. Mr Clare has urgent business to attend to.'
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Randolph raised his hand. 'Hold on a moment, Neil. Don't let Orbus get under your skin. I want to hear what he's got to say.'
Orbus smiled fatly. His minders smiled too, in vacant imitation of their boss's smugness. Orbus said, 'You're going to be pushed to the limit to meet your contractual obligations to Sun-Taste after this fire, aren't you? Don't deny it. Well, just let me tell you this: no member of the Cottonseed Association is going to help you out. You won't even get one single cupful of oil out of any of us, not at any price. You wanted to stand on your own. You were prepared to steal our profits from under our noses. Now you're going to have to learn what standing on your own really means.'
Randolph laid his hand on Orbus's shoulder. Orbus did not like to be touched; his body chafed him enough as it was, and one of his minders stepped forward warningly. But Orbus, with an odd kind of whinny, instructed the man to stay back and he tolerated Randolph's hand with his eyes closed and his teeth clenched.
'Orbus,' Randolph said, 'I've always understood what standing on my own means. My father made me stand on my own from the day I could first stand up. There's only one thing I'm going to say to you in reply, and that is if any more of my factories happen to meet with explosions or fires or unprecedented accidents, that's when I'm going to stop believing that they are accidents and I'm going to come looking for the person or persons who caused them.'
Orbus kept smiling in spite of the hand on his shoulder. 'You know something, Randolph?' he said. 'You would have made a fine cowboy actor. High Noon in Memphis. how about that? And who knows, you might even have wound up President.'
'Get off my land, Orbus,' Randolph told him quietly and firmly.
'I'm not the kind to outstay my welcome,' Orbus replied and then turned to his minders and uttered another one of his whinnies. This one evidently meant 'Let's go.'
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Randolph and Neil stood watching them walk back to Orbus's black limousine, OGRE 1, where one of the men opened the specially widened passenger door while the others heaved Orbus onto the back seat. The suspension dipped and bucked.
'What do you think?' Randolph asked as the limousine disappeared down the magnolia-strewn driveway.
Neil said, 'He wasn't responsible for this. Leastways I don't think so. Even Orbus Greene wouldn't have the nerve to visit the scene of the crime so soon after it happened.'
'Don't underestimate his capacity to gloat,' Randolph remarked. 'Orbus is one of the world's great gloaters. I think he's glad it happened even if he didn't actually set it.'
'Maybe we ought to rethink our policy a little,' Neil suggested.
'What do you mean?'
'Well . . . I'm not saying that we should think of giving up our independence. But maybe we've been acting a bit too aggressive for our own good. Men like Orbus Greene don't take very kindly to being outsmarted, especially when it comes to big money.'
'That's business,' Randolph replied firmly. 'Besides, I wouldn't change my policies for any fat toad like Orbus.'
'Don't underestimate him,' Neil warned.