Chapter 6
LAURIE
June
Delmonico’s
In spite of the short notice of the same-day invitation—done old-school, a runner boy with a letter around sixish, returning with a quick response—Tjofabier F.
Raberding made it to the restaurant before Laurie did.
This wasn’t a surprise. The leisure class, with no working hours, only fashionable ones, were available at any beckon, constrained only by their means of transportation.
And Laurie would’ve bet any money that the ostentatious new-model gold motorcar he’d seen conspicuously parked on Fifth was Raberding’s.
“Laurie Tulley.” There, Raberding did rise from his chair to shake Laurie’s hand, as though having something to prove. “What a surprise to hear from you after so many weeks. I hadn’t held out any hope.”
“Thanks for coming, Mr. Raberding.”
Raberding raised eyebrows as he sank back into his chair. “I thought I was Tjo to you. I will assume from that, and our surroundings, that this is professional over pleasure?”
“This Delmonico’s is close to home,” Laurie said shortly. And in public, where nobody could go to their knees.
“Well, then.” Raberding brightened. “Hope shall not die. Glad to make the trip.” He sipped his drink, an old-fashioned. “Has something been revealed in your investigations?”
Hell, yes, it had been. Four men were missing, two of them confirmably dead. It seemed there were secrets worth killing for at Wright Glass.
“Of a sort. Look, last month, you said August was a thief. You didn’t elaborate.”
Raberding was unfazed. “You didn’t ask.”
“You distracted me.” (Raberding liked hearing that, all right.) “I’m asking now. What did August steal from you?”
“Trade secrets,” Raberding said promptly. “What else?”
“Go on—what specifically?”
Raberding sighed. “Then-unpatented sealing mechanisms for jar canning.”
“Jar canning?”
“Commercial canning technology hasn’t much improved since the Civil War, when men were eating out of knifed-up tins. But jar canning… we produce Mason jars, of course, but they seal unreliably—relegated to home cookery.”
“But Brooklyn’s a flint glasshouse, isn’t it?” Laurie tapped the crystal rocks glass a waiter had dropped before him—also an old-fashioned, which he didn’t drink. “Tableware. Not really jars and bottles.”
“Flint glass simply means clear glass. The metropolitan way is to court the common man. Or women, I suppose, since they do the cooking.”
Laurie kept silent. The “metropolitan way” he’d heard of was a pretty fantasy: the belief that any man, even the poorest, given enough hard work and resilience, could become a Rockefeller, when instead most rich men of today were like Chary and August Wright and Tjofabier Raberding, inheriting their wealth and industry.
“Anyway, the seals didn’t function in the end, so I needn’t have worried. A ridiculous rate of failure. We are keeping on with screw-top lids of tin.”
“How much time passed between August’s theft and his death?”
Raberding considered it. “You’re thinking they’re connected? Erroneously so, Mr. Tulley. I hope you don’t consider me a suspect.”
“Mm. You know what’s said of those who find the body.”
Raberding didn’t react. Not even a wince. “It was six… seven months between the two. We made up. In the end, the theft made no difference as to our ‘friendship.’”
“No?”
Raberding smiled, full of meaning. No twelve-inch-thick concrete walls there. “I forgave him, of course. If you met him you’d understand. He grovels quite prettily.” He grimaced at the slip. “Groveled.”
“An accommodating man, aren’t you?”
“Oh, well. It broke something between us, to be sure.”
“Broke what?”
“Prior to that, we were considering… a more significant amount of commitment. Cutting-edge innovation of the business… perhaps co-ownership…” Raberding lowered his voice. “Husband-owned, I had hoped.” He sighed. “It was not to be.”
Not legal, either, Laurie thought. But not uncommon. Some men, in company, liked to claim marriage and then live like they indeed were. Laurie had known a few men to commit for whole lifetimes, legal or no.
But this was more distraction, tailored just for Laurie’s sympathy. Raberding was good at distraction—possibly as good as Laurie was at getting folks to talk—and he knew it. Because a merger: that was significant. Very significant.
Further motive for murder.
“The joys of horizontal integration,” Laurie drawled. “How romantic. Great for business, isn’t it?”
Raberding laughed and swirled his drink. “It was August who was great for business. I told you he was brilliant. Haven’t I?”
“Classical mechanics, you said,” Laurie agreed. “Which type? And which definition?”
Raberding acknowledged with a tilt of his head. “An educated man, I see. Yes. Engineering. Mathematics. You know, I don’t fully understand the distinctions myself. But the ideas he had, you wouldn’t believe, and at only twenty-four.”
“What kind of ideas?”
“The revolutionizing kind. Industry-changing kinds. You’ll pardon me if I keep them to myself, Lawrence Tulley.”
“No hard feelings.” Mechanization, then.
Almost without a doubt. Behind farmwork, the glass industry was almost the last skilled-labor holdout against automation.
Laurie had heard rumblings—only just, within the past six months, at the start of the New Year—about bottle machines, truly semiautomatic, the kind that needed almost no labor and had six times the output of a blower.
Absolutely, that was something that would make a businessman drool.
“No, you weren’t accommodating,” Laurie revised. “You felt lucky. Gratified to be his dear friend. Yet he never shared these brilliant ideas with you?”
“I wished he would have trusted me with them, yes.” He paused as he likely realized how this looked. “That he would’ve lived, to trust me with them eventually.”
Laurie nodded. Raberding needn’t have worried; he didn’t need to flag this to Laurie, red-scarf’d.
If August Wright had been as smart as Raberding made him out, he’d patented everything down to screws.
That Raberding would’ve been better off, professionally and personally, with August alive, wasn’t in question.
It was clear, however, that Hiram had it totally right. Tjofabier Raberding was all shark.
“Hence your overture. And in return, he stole from you.”
Raberding shrugged. “Aesthetics aside, you must see why I still forgave him.”
“I see why you wanted to overtake him, sure.” More double meaning. “Anybody would, really.”
Raberding preened, a pleased rooster, a possessive sentiment eight months misplaced by loss. Though, as a strange contrast to the tears in the Ansonia apartment, it was not at all tinged with grief.
Maybe he hadn’t wanted August dead—but did he truly mourn him?
“No takeover. A co-ownership,” Raberding repeated.
“I believe it would have benefited everyone. I believed August thought so, too. Why shouldn’t New York have a consolidated glassworks?
Flint glass, bottles, and all? Simpler for all.
Better for the workers to all join up with their union of choice. ”
“Uh-huh.” Or the opposite could happen, and with no competition, the new conglomerate business could boot unioners entirely.
Raberding looked amused. “Aren’t you a union kind of man, Mr. Tulley?”
“I’m not here to argue capitalist exploits, Raberding. Did August refuse more than just your business proposal? The proverbial ball-and-chain, too?”
“Ah. You know, we never got around to confronting each other about that before he died. Another thing I will never know.”
He was lying. “I’m sorry.” So was Laurie.
“It’s in the past.” He looked up and gestured. “If you won’t argue, will you eat? Here is the waiter. My treat, Laurie. No expectation.”
He said it like he meant the opposite, which was Laurie’s cue. He made to stand. “I should go, actually. Thanks for the drink.”
Raberding narrowed his eyes. “You will not stand me up twice? I came well out of my way.”
“Yep.” Came running, he might’ve said, but something told him it wasn’t wise to taunt this man too much. A dead ex-lover kind of something. Maybe Raberding had needed August alive, and maybe even had loved him, but every man had a breaking point.
Raberding threw his napkin. “You know nothing can be had for free in this world. Least of all information.”
“Honey,” Laurie said campily, in parting, leaving cash for the untouched drink, “I’m a socialist.”