February 2, 1995

WHEN the collapse came, in the middle of the night, a panic-stricken 70-year-old widow called in the emergency. The medic calmed her and said he'd be right over. Within hours the patient had been stabilized. Luckily the medic had a good bedside manner -- because in this case, the patient was a bed. "I was amazed when he said he'd be right over," said Barbara Cornman of Brewster, N.Y., referring to James D. Braybeck, the furniture repairman who made the house call when her 47-year-old double bed collapsed, with Mrs. Cornman in it. "He told me it was his first real emergency."

When William Agee came home to Idaho to run the Morrison Knudsen Corporation in 1988, both he and the construction and engineering company needed a turnaround in their fortunes. Mr. Agee's reputation as a young, fast-rising business strategist at the Bendix Corporation was upended by his ill-fated attempt to acquire the Martin Marietta Corporation in 1982. Morrison Knudsen, which had prospered for decades by building landmarks like the Hoover Dam, the San Francisco Bay Bridge and the trans-Alaska pipeline, was losing money.

UNDER a light dusting of January snow, this wooded Westchester County town, located some 50 miles north of Manhattan, looks like a sentimental etching by Currier & Ives. Smoke drifts from the chimneys of white clapboard houses. Inky shutters flank small-paned sash windows. And it wouldn't be too difficult to imagine the sound of sleigh bells echoing through the hamlet's rocky hills and wooded gorges. Purists, take note. As residents of this quiet moneyed community will admit -- some only after a stiff cocktail and an oath of confidentiality -- Pound Ridge's founding-fathers' allure is fake. Well, not fake, strictly speaking. After all, the town was settled in 1718 and several pre-Revolutionary buildings remain intact.

One day after President Clinton's rescue plan brought a respite from its financial crisis, Mexico turned today to the task of rebuilding its shattered economy as officials and economists warned of a long year ahead of austerity, disappointment and anger. The $50 billion international package of loans and loan guarantees announced in Washington on Tuesday brought a temporary euphoria to the markets and the business community, which the newspapers were terming the "Clinton effect."

The New York City Police Department is investigating 20 officers of the 48th Precinct in the central Bronx who are suspected of beating up suspects, dealing narcotics and stealing money from drug dealers during the last three years, law enforcement officials said yesterday. The pattern of corruption that investigators have found in the precinct -- small groups of officers who worked together to shake down and beat up drug suspects and enter apartments without search warrants -- closely resembles the case in the 30th Precinct in Harlem, where 29 officers have been arrested on similar charges since last March, the officials said.