Murders & Acquisitions Read online

  Murders & Acquisitions

  A Reuben Frost Mystery

  Haughton Murphy

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  This novel is dedicated to my friends Nick and Nora, who were married while it was being written.

  THE ANDERSENS

  1

  “Don’t get angry with me, Reuben, but I’ve got a question for you,” Cynthia Frost said to her husband, as they finished their dinner in the dining room of their New York City town house.

  After forty years of marriage, Reuben Frost could recognize trouble when it threatened. He knew from experience that the words “don’t get angry” meant that his wife was about to bring up a subject calculated to provoke him.

  “Of course I won’t get angry,” Reuben answered. “What’s the question?”

  “Darling, do we really have to go to the Andersen family weekend?” Cynthia asked, referring to the annual late-August gathering of the heirs of Nils Andersen—the principal owners of the Andersen Foods Corporation.

  “I don’t see any way out of it,” Reuben said. “We’ve been going for so many years we can’t stop now. We’re expected.”

  “Reuben, dear, I understood all that while you were in charge of the Andersens’ legal work at Chase & Ward. But now that you’re retired as a partner, I don’t see why we’ve got any obligation to be there. One of the young couples should have to suffer through it.”

  “You forget, Cynthia, that even though I’m no longer a partner, I’m still of counsel to the firm and have to do my share. For better or worse, going to the Andersen weekend is one of the ways I can do that. Besides, Flemming and Sally expect us. And you do like Sally.”

  Frost, making his case, referred to his wife’s affection, or at least affinity, for Sally Bryant Anderson, whose career as a professional tennis player had paralleled Cynthia’s own as a leading American ballerina.

  “Yes, I do like Sally,” Cynthia said. “And Flemming and Sally are a fine couple. But three days with someone else’s family, most of them strangers, is really too much. And by the end of August the Mohawk Inn’s like the North Pole.”

  “I know, I know. But Flemming called me just the day before yesterday to make sure we were coming. I can’t turn him down.”

  “I knew that’s what you’d say. So we’ll go, and watch the water-balloon tag and see Billy O’Neal get drunk—if he’s in the mood for one of his drunken fits—and …”

  “Don’t go on, Cynthia. After all these years, I know the drill as well as you do,” Reuben said, with resignation.

  “And I really do think someone else from the firm should take over,” Cynthia declared.

  “It’s not that easy. Since I retired, I haven’t had much to do with AFC—officially at least. You’re right about that. But Flemming’s still Chairman of the Board and he consults me from time to time.”

  “Who’s in charge of AFC at the firm now? It’s Ernest Crowder, isn’t it?”

  “Yes it is. So you see the problem. Ernest’s a wonderful lawyer, but a total social misfit, as you would be the first to point out—a crabby bachelor with no patience, no small talk and a willingness to tell the world what he doesn’t approve of. Such as drinking. Can’t you see Ernest and Billy O’Neal squaring off?”

  “It might be amusing having him around, though. Just think how he would react to the water-balloon nonsense.”

  “You think he’d disapprove?” Reuben asked.

  “Of course.”

  “You’re wrong. Ernest Crowder would see the water-balloon matches for just what they are: good, clean Protestant fun. Innocent, sublimating and thoroughly virtuous.”

  “Oh, God,” Cynthia said, with a sigh, “I guess Andersen Foods did enough for you and the firm so that we have to go. Mature and mellow Reuben Frost and his sweet wife, Cynthia.”

  “Afraid so, my dear. But cheer up. You never can tell, maybe this year there’ll be some excitement.”

  “Doubtful.”

  It might be possible for an American to go through life without coming into contact with a product of the Andersen Foods Corporation—AFC. But not very likely, unless this strange, atypical citizen somehow avoided eating. Scores of AFC products were favorites of the consuming public and made AFC a leader in the so-called “food-at-home” market. There were chopped-up vegetables for the baby and salt-free ones for its grandparents; frozen low-calorie concoctions for those on diets and high-calorie candies and ice creams for those not so inhibited; cereals for breakfast, packaged meat for lunch and TV-dinners for the evening. And all washed down with an AFC soft drink, a cup of AFC coffee or—more recently—a beer made by a brewery acquired by AFC.

  Like many successful American enterprises, AFC had started modestly. It had been founded in 1898 by Nils Andersen, a Dane who had migrated with his family to Duluth, Minnesota. Andersen was both a farmer and a tinkerer, and the process of storing fresh products in metal cans, then coming into common use in the United States, intrigued him.

  Starting in a workshop at the back of his barn, Andersen succeeded in bettering the canning methods then in use, taking advantage of the research on canning spoilage being done by Professor Henry Russell at the University of Wisconsin.

  Andersen’s improved techniques not only cut down on the number of cans that exploded from defective processing, to the delight of retailers, but better preserved the flavor of what was inside them as well, to the satisfaction of consumers. Soon the immigrant tinkerer had a thriving processing plant, canning and distributing corn, peas and other vegetables grown in the midwestern heartland.

  As the business prospered, Nils Andersen showed a talent for expanding its operation and scope, building new canneries in California and Baltimore before he retired in 1920. His son, the first Laurance Andersen, continued the business with even greater success. He led the expansion of AFC’s product line out of canned goods, adding breakfast cereals and other dry foods. But his greatest success, pursued all his life, was supervision of AFC’s advertising program. The Company’s direct but low-key promotions succeeded in creating an image of quality—a deserved image of quality—with the consumer. The American public became comfortable with AFC’s products, if not downright proud that it was consuming them.

  Flemming Andersen, the first Laurance’s only son, stepped into the presidency of AFC when he returned from World War II. Although only thirty-five at the time, he justified in short order the confidence his father had shown in turning management over to him. He combined the talents of both his practical grandfather and super-salesman father. Taking AFC public in the early 1960s was a major accomplishment, requiring him to convince other members of the family that it was a good thing for the nation’s widows and orphans—and pension plans and giant insurance companies and other impersonal investors—to have a majority interest in AFC (but with actual control of the Company safely vested in the Andersens).

  The family battle over going public had left scars or, more precisely, had deepened at least one old wound. Laurance Andersen, an otherwise enlightened man of his time, had seen fit to divide ownership of AFC into two parts—two unequal and discriminatory parts. After giving effect to Laurance Andersen’s will, his son, Flemming, owned two-thirds of the shares of AFC and his daughter, Christina, owned one-third. This was not done out of any animosity toward Christina; Laurance had certainly been as fond of her as of his son. It simply reflected a chauvinist notion of preserving family stability through favoring the male line of succession.

  At the time AFC went public, Christina—or more precisely, her husband, Jarvis O’Neal—had tried to have the imbalance corrected. But Flemming Andersen had resisted his brother-in-law’s effort. Not because his arguments were without merit but because the divisi
on between the O’Neal branch of the family and Flemming’s own seemed roughly equitable, since Christina and Jarvis had only one child and he and Sally had three.

  Christina Andersen O’Neal never in her lifetime held Flemming’s action against him. Her husband did, and there was bad blood between the two men until Jarvis died in 1970. His death did not end the feud, however. The O’Neal son, William, known to one and all as Billy, was more than eager to take it up, watching and criticizing Flemming from his position as Executive Vice President of AFC.

  The feud never got out of hand because the Company was an enormous success, and the profits it produced were a balm to hurt feelings. Annual sales hit the billion-dollar mark for the first time in 1972, and had reached five billion a decade later. This volume had most recently produced earnings of over $175 million a year, enabling AFC to pay very comfortably an annual dividend of ninety cents on each of its 80 million outstanding shares.

  For the Andersen family itself, and the Andersen Foundation, begun by Laurance Andersen, this meant annual dividend income in excess of $33 million—not huge by the megabuck figures of the 1980s, but more than enough to make one and all very comfortably off.

  As he neared retirement, Flemming Andersen was especially pleased at the highly profitable outcome of two developments he had encouraged. One was branching out into pet foods, a new departure for the Company. Through shrewd advertising, AFC had been able to capture a modest but profitable share of the pet market; enough of the country’s 56.2 million cats and 51 million dogs were being fed the AFC products to make HEART O’ GOLD pet food a thoroughgoing success.

  Andersen’s other innovation had given him even more satisfaction. He was a competitive person by nature, and it pleased him that AFC had taken on a tough rival—Campbell Soups—and managed to more than hold its own. Many other food processors had tried over the years to compete with Campbell’s in soup selling, but their efforts had usually ended in costly failure, or at least without capturing a profitable share of the market.

  Those around Flemming Andersen—not least Billy O’Neal—had tried to discourage his move into soups, citing this bleak history. But he would not be deterred. Correctly, he sensed that the country was ready for a line of soups containing only natural ingredients—no monosodium glutamate, no artificial coloring, no mysterious junk. And he also sensed that AFC’s reputation for quality would enhance its ability to emphasize the all-natural character of its new SUPERBOWL varieties.

  The results had been sensational beyond even the Chairman’s expectations, and Joe Faxton, the AFC Treasurer, would be able to report, at the family meeting at Mohawk Inn, that the Company was headed for another year of record earnings.

  It was slightly after noon on the last Friday in August when Flemming Andersen left the AFC Building on Park Avenue, climbed into a waiting Company limousine and departed for the Marine Air Terminal at La Guardia Airport. He was accompanied by Casper Robbins, the President of AFC and an obligatory (if not necessarily willing) participant in the Mohawk weekend. The two men would meet their wives, Sally Andersen and Ditsy (née Elizabeth) Robbins, at the airport. Andersen would also meet his son, Laurance (named after his distinguished grandfather), a forty-five-year-old bachelor at the moment (after shedding three successive wives in disastrous and costly divorce proceedings, the most recent within the past year).

  Flemming’s relatives would be coming in from what the family jokingly called the “compound” in Connecticut. (While the Andersens vigorously denied that this estate bore any resemblance to the cluster of Kennedy homes in Hyannis, the fact was that Flemming, Laurance and Flemming’s daughter Sorella all had adjoining properties in back-country Greenwich.) At the Marine Terminal, they would take an AFC corporate plane to the Adirondacks.

  As the car moved up the F.D.R. Drive, Casper Robbins sensed that his colleague did not want to talk (part of his success as a nonfamily survivor at AFC could be attributed to his instinctive, and correct, impulses as to what the wishes of members of the Andersen family were). Flemming, for his part, wondered how many more years the August reunions would go on. They had been started in the 1920s by his father. The first Laurance had been a willing immigrant from Minnesota—decamping from Duluth within months of his own father’s death, moving his family and the AFC corporate headquarters to New York City. He nonetheless had a nostalgia for woods, mountains and bracing weather that the Adirondacks satisfied.

  As originally conceived, the outings had been for the Andersen family, ranking management of AFC and outside advisers like Reuben Frost, and their spouses. (Old Laurance, with only one son and one daughter, could hardly have had very festive weekends had they been confined to blood relatives.) Flemming, who somehow became aware that the Company’s managers might have other things to do on the last weekend in August, had several years earlier made it clear that management personnel, other than essential figures like Robbins and Faxton, need not attend. The result had been an indecently swift attrition in the number of those coming to the Mohawk Inn. Now, in the mid-1980s, attendance was limited to Flemming and his children; Billy O’Neal; Casper Robbins; Reuben Frost; Randolph Hedley, legal counsel to the Andersen Foundation; and several members of the AFC headquarters staff who arranged the weekend’s events and logistics. And, of course, spouses and (very occasionally) spouse substitutes, and a bevy of Andersen grandchildren.

  The small attendance made the weekends very expensive, even by bargain Adirondack prices; not only did Flemming Andersen have to pay for those who attended—he was far too scrupulous to attempt to saddle AFC with the bill—but for the Mohawk Inn’s weekend expectancy as well. He felt the privacy he purchased was worth it; his only doubts were about the value of the underlying event itself. But tradition was tradition, and he intended to carry this one on at least until protests from the younger generation grew too loud.

  (It was also one of Flemming’s ways of dealing with his grandchildren. The weekends gave him a chance to get to know them—at least this had been true until the grandchildren had grown into sullen and antisocial teenagers—and he saw it as a means of impressing upon them the existence of a special family, and corporate, ethic that they would be expected to uphold.)

  Given AFC’s rosy condition, Flemming Andersen should have been in a contented mood as he started the weekend. But he was not. Two recent events intruded into his consciousness as he looked out at the East River from the back seat of his car.

  The first had been a scare three weeks earlier when he had had pains in his chest for the first time ever. The pains, which occurred in early afternoon in his office, startled him and sent him scurrying to Michael Odell, his doctor for many years. Odell tried to calm his patient’s anxiety, insisting—quite truthfully—that Andersen’s cardiogram showed nothing amiss and that he almost certainly was suffering from something no more severe than a slight case of indigestion.

  Andersen was reassured—almost. He realized that, at seventy-five, pains or aches—or worse—were inevitable; and, while he had almost literally never been sick a day in his life, he could not deny the existence of occasional but brief spells when he felt weak and below par. This self-knowledge, and the recent heart scare, had made him focus reluctant attention on the question of his succession at AFC. Since the beginning, the Company had always been run by a member of the Andersen family. But now succession by a family member did not seem realistic.

  Years before, he had thought that Laurance would be his heir-apparent. After a volatile college career at Yale, during which he was elected editor of the campus humor magazine on one day and threatened with expulsion for gambling the next, Laurance had joined AFC. Despite a collegiate reputation as a playboy that did not diminish as he got older, he took his work at AFC seriously and got a broad experience in every aspect of the Company’s business. He was a handsome, athletic man and mostly well liked by those he worked with at AFC.

  But Laurance always seemed to be at odds with his father about Company matters, often of the most
minor sort. Flemming had been dismissive of his son’s ideas, and Laurance had gradually seemed to lose interest in AFC. He was a member of the Board of Directors, but had resigned in the early eighties as one of the Company’s two Executive Vice Presidents, a title he had shared with his cousin Billy O’Neal. After his resignation, he had invested heavily in a Colorado ski resort, which in short order had brought him to the brink of personal bankruptcy, from which his father had grudgingly rescued him.

  His latest enthusiasm was involvement with a group of young wheeler-dealers in a venture capital partnership based in California—a partnership that Flemming dearly hoped would prove both solvent and successful.

  As for his nephew Billy O’Neal, there was no doubt about his desire to take over AFC’s management. With justification, he demanded some of the credit for AFC’s recent prosperity. As Executive Vice President, he had engineered the Maxwell beer acquisition and his hands-on management had rejuvenated the declining Maxwell brand. One in four Americans still said “Give me a Bud,” but now almost one in ten said “Make it Max.”

  O’Neal’s problem, aside from his antipathy to Flemming’s branch of the family, was that he was a more than occasional user of his own product—or at least other alcoholic beverages. He was an odd sort of drinker. Most of the time he was fully capable of functioning in his job with both intelligence and genuine Irish charm and wit. But every so often he would disappear on a monumental bender that might last a few days, or a week, or (as had happened at least three times) a month. All of which did not matter too much as long as his responsibilities were limited and he had good assistants. But it was conduct that was simply not suitable, in Flemming’s view, for the Chairman of the Board of Andersen Foods.

  (Flemming was a realist, not a moralist, in these matters of human failing. While he had grave reservations about his nephew’s drinking, he did not think of Billy’s tawdry and frequent adulteries as a disqualification. Billy’s wife thought otherwise and was now separated from him.)