Killing the Goose by Lockridge Frances & Lockridge Richard

Author:Lockridge, Frances & Lockridge, Richard [Lockridge, Frances & Lockridge, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9781504031196
Google: _VdsCwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 1817997
Publisher: Avon
Published: 1944-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

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Wednesday, 11.10 a.m. to 11.45 a.m.

BILL WEIGAND CONTEMPLATED in retrospect the conversation he had just had with the commissioner and tried to fit it in. Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley had been present, but more or less formally. Inspector O’Malley had—he made it clear to Weigand and to the commissioner—turned the case over, so far as detail went, to Lieutenant Weigand. O’Malley was still in there thinking, but the lieutenant was doing the spade work. The commissioner, who was wiry and deceptively soft-voiced and had been a policeman all his life, accepted this gravely and directed most of his remarks to Lieutenant Weigand.

The commissioner did not, he said, want to interfere or to suggest a line of inquiry. That was up to Weigand. But he did want to hear what Weigand thought of Dan Beck—since Dan Beck had somehow come into it. The Commissioner assumed that Weigand had followed his suggestion and looked Beck up.

Fortunately, Weigand had, on his way from his own office to Headquarters, after receiving the commissioner’s telephoned summons.

Weigand had done it by the simple method of stopping by a newspaper office and having a look at the morgue, this being usually the easiest way of finding but a little about anything. Among the clips Weigand skimmed had been one rather long one, reviewing Beck’s career in connection with a book which Beck had recently written—the kind of book which is reported in the news columns as well as in the book reviews. (Mr. Beck’s book had further been a stick to beat the New Deal with, which had helped.)

Since Beck was, if not fully on the right side—he advocated change, after all—still against the wrong side, the report on his career had been reasonably favourable. He had been, which was in his favour, a business man of sorts and no professor. He was the originator of the Beck System of Industrial Management, which had had, a few years earlier, almost the popularity of the Culbertson System of Contract Bridge. Industry had used it widely; workmen had struck almost as widely because of it; it had been tried out in Germany. It measured the output of each worker in a unit rather intricately compounded of time spent, product achieved, price of product to consumer and supply of labour available for the fabrication of the product, together with the amount of capital involved in the making of each item in the total product and a further component which, to Bill Weigand a little mystically, involved the commodity index averaged over a preceding six-months’ period.

Mr. Beck, or people representing him, had stirred all these elements together in the case of an individual industry which desired to install the Beck System of Industrial Management and given figures applicable, together with a survey showing how the plant could be more efficiently run. The management then paid a fee and happily installed the System. Then, commonly, the workers in the plant walked out; growling and modifications set in. The modifications, Weigand gathered, never reached as far as the fee paid to Dan Beck, who was also Dan Beck Systems, Inc.

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