Executive Suite: A Novel by Cameron Hawley

Author:Cameron Hawley [Hawley, Cameron]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781504025713
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2015-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

8

MILLBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

8.28 P.M. EDT

The Tredway Tower had two lives, one lived by day, the other by night. Its day life was heavily populated, brightly lighted, highly purposeful, and animated by a thousand sounds—men sounds and machine sounds, sighs and shouts, clatter and clack, giggles and groans, door bangs and drawer bumps, whine and whisper, footsteps running, footsteps dragging, the life sounds of business.

The day life ended, except for the final mad rush of outpouring humanity, with the first stroke of the five o’clock carillon, or, if Mr. Bullard was in town and the carillon not rung, with the sweep of the second hand on the master clock that relayed the same moment to repeater clocks on all twenty-four floors.

As the day life flooded out, the night life ebbed in. Gray-faced women shuffled wearily in through the lobby, their eyes down and averted as if they sensed the incongruity of their presence in this great hall of glittering black marble and sculptured bronze. Reaching the back lobby, where marble and bronze gave way to behind-the-scenes gray paint, they clumped into the freight elevator. Finally, after a long and unprotested delay, they would be dispersed to the various floors of the building where, with brush and broom and mop and scrub bucket, they would begin their methodical erasure of the soil that the day life had left.

After the scrubwomen came the men janitors. As befitted their higher level in the social world of the Tower’s night life, they claimed the privilege of a momentarily later arrival. After the janitors came the maintenance men who, through such acts of skill as the replacement of light bulbs and the adjustment of flush valves in the washrooms, had raised themselves to the aristocracy of the Tower’s night life.

Normally, there was no overlap between the Tredway Tower’s day life and its night life. Except for an occasional late-staying day worker—who was called a “hold-up” until eight o’clock and a “sticker” if he remained later—the world of the night life was a world unto itself. It was not as drab as the casual glimpser might suspect. There were coffee percolators bubbling in the slop sink closets, cigarettes and occasionally good cigars in unlocked desks, and the big canvas bags, soft-stuffed with wastepaper, made a pleasantly rustling mattress for an occasional amatory adventure.

Tonight, however, there was neither bubble nor rustle and not a cigar was being smoked. There was at least one “sticker” on every floor of the building. Men had started coming back to their offices just before eight o’clock and now everything was in a turmoil. The head janitors were rushing around from floor to floor trying to reorganize cleaning schedules and placate annoyed scrubwomen. It couldn’t have happened on a worse night. Friday was the end of the week, the night when the once-a-week jobs were done.

The explanation that Mr. Bullard had died was widely used by the harried head janitors, but it had little effect upon the women. They all echoed the sentiments of Mrs.

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