Area of Suspicion

by John D. MacDonald

There were some boys there we didn’t know, probably North Side High, hanging around to make trouble with the southsiders. Some of them had tried to crash the dance earlier and were tossed out. As we came out, one of them, in the shadows, made a remark about Ken’s date. It was very explicit and anatomical. Ken turned toward them and his date tugged at him and told him to ignore it. I didn’t want trouble, not with the girls there. I think Ken was going to turn away, but he never got a chance. The sucker punch sent him sprawling. I shoved Connie toward the doorway. She used her head and grabbed Ken’s date by the arm and they ran inside. Ken bounced up as one of them tried to kick him and grabbed the leg and spilled the guy on the sidewalk. Then I couldn’t see what was happening because I was suddenly very busy. Somebody banged me under the eye and I swung back and missed and the scrap moved into the shadows. It was very confusing. I hit somebody solidly and got kicked in the leg. There was grunting, and the sounds of blows, and then I heard somebody making that distinctive sound of trying to suck air back into the lungs after getting hit in the pit of the stomach. I wondered with part of my mind if it was Ken. Somebody ripped my coat and I got hold of a wrist and heaved and sent somebody spinning out across the curb into the lights. Then there was a police whistle and men running out of the hotel. The ones we were fighting ran down Pernie Street. The police were going to take us in, but Connie was very convincing about what happened. We were a mess.

  I remember how we got laughing so hard in the car I could hardly drive. My eye was puffed shut by the time we got home. And by the time the story got around school, there were nine of them and Ken and I had knocked out at least five. We smiled in silent, manly modesty, and I felt disappointed when the last saffron hues had faded from my eye.

  That was one of the memories. The city was full of them. And the countryside where bike tires had purred, and we had known where to get horse chestnuts. Ken was in the memories. I returned to a present tense, a world in which Ken no longer lived. If his death had any reason or purpose, I had to find it. I had to find out why life had become tasteless to him, why his recent letters had been so troubled, oblique, almost disjointed. Niki and Ken and plant politics and the brute hammer of lead against skull. I wanted it all sorted out, and I thought of the trite analogy of a jigsaw puzzle. But this was one of those where pieces are missing. I sensed that they were all there, but too many of them were turned face down, so that I could not see the colors.

  I had a drugstore breakfast and walked eight blocks through the women shoppers to Police Headquarters. I told the desk sergeant my name and said I wanted to talk to whoever was in charge of the investigation of the murder of my brother. He turned me over to a uniformed patrolman who took me down a hall, across an open court, and into another wing of the big building. We went up a flight of stairs and into a big room. There were long rows of oak desks, with men working at about half of them. The patrolman led me down to one. The small wooden sign on the desk said Det. Sgt. K. V. Portugal. The patrolman bent over and murmured something to him. Portugal glanced at me and gestured toward the chair pulled up beside his desk. I sat down. I thanked the patrolman and he walked away.

  Portugal kept working, not rudely, but with air of a man getting routine details out of the way so he could talk in peace. He glanced at reports, scrawled his initials, dropped them in his ‘out’ basket. I guessed his age at about forty. He was a pallid, heavy man, and he looked as if his health was poor. His hair was a scurfy brown, and the flesh of his face hung loose from his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose, sagging in folds against his collar. He breathed heavily through his mouth and his fingers were darkly stained with nicotine. He finished the last document, and looked at me. His chair creaked. He took the cigar from his ash tray and relit it, turning it slowly over the flame of the kitchen match.

  “You’re the brother, eh? A sorry thing, Mr. Dean. A mess. Glad we could wrap it up so fast. What can we do for you?”

  “I flew in last night. I read the newspaper account. I thought you could tell me the details.”

  “A phone tip came in. If it wasn’t for informants, this business would be a lot roughe than it is.” His voice was wheezy and pitched high. “We sent a squad car over to the north side and picked up this Shennary fella. We’ve got two witnesses to testify that Shennary left his room around ten Friday night and didn’t come back until nearly two. The gun was in his room. Thirty-eight automatic. Hadn’t been cleaned since it was fired.”

  He grunted as he bent over and pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk. He took out a Manila folder and opened it, took out a glossy print, and placed it in front of me. He used his pencil as a pointer.

  “This here is a microphotograph from ballistics. This is the test slug, and this is the slug out of your brother’s body. See how it’s a perfect match. This Shennary is a punk. Picked up three times for armed robbery and did time twice. He was wanted for violation of parole. Here’s his pretty face.”

  He slid the mug shot on top of the ballistics print. I picked it up. There was a double photograph, full face and profile, with a reproduction of fingerprints underneath, with print classification, and a reproduction of a typed slip giving vital statistics and criminal record. He looked to be in his middle twenties. He had dark eyes, deeply set, a lantern jaw, overlong, dark hair, and black brows that met above the bridge of his nose. He looked weak, shifty, sullen, and unremarkable. Looking at his face made Ken seem more dead, more completely gone.

  “Paroled, you said?”

  Portugal leaned back and frowned at his cigar and relit it. “I’m just a cop, not a social worker, Mr. Dean. Some people think they all ought to serve full time. I wouldn’t blame you if you think so, seeing how this one killed your brother. But a lot of them get the parole and straighten out. It’s exceptions like this Shennary who spoil it for the others. He must have convinced the parole board he was going to be okay, or he wouldn’t have been out. He’s a guy without pressure or contacts to do him any good. So he turns out to be a little man with a big gun and bad nerves, and that’s too bad for him and for your brother.”

  “Could I get a look at him?”

  Portugal shrugged. “If you want to, I guess so.”

  “I don’t want to bother you.”

  “No trouble. Come on.”

  We went down the stairs and across the court to another wing. Portugal walked heavily, leaning forward, teeth clamped on the cigar. His suit was red-brown, shiny in the seat, the jacket wrinkled and hip sprung. An armed patrolman ran the elevator. Portugal asked for the top floor. There was a bull’s-eye window in the door at the top floor and a man looked through at us and unlocked the door. The man grinned at Portugal and, as he went back to his green steel desk, said, “Aces back to back. Don’t you ever get tired?”

  “Ralphie, you know you can’t beat aces with a pair of ladies. We are calling on my pal, Mister Shennary, esquire.”

  When the elevator went back down, the man called Ralphie unlocked the cell-block door. “Call me if Mr. Shennary wants his pillow fluffed up, or hot tea or anything.”

  Shennary was in the end cell on the left. The plaster walls were painted a pale blue. The window was covered with heavy mesh. He glanced up and got up from the bunk and came over to the door, wrapping thin, dirty fingers around the bars. He wore a gray outfit cut like pajamas.

  “How are you on this lovely morning, Wally?” Portugal asked him.

  Shennary glanced at me and back at Portugal. Obviously I meant nothing to him. His knuckles were white where he gripped the bars. “You get the right guy, did you?”

  “You’re it, Wally. Let’s not kid each other.”

  “How many times I got to tell you it wasn’t me? How many times, copper?” His voice was thin and high and it trembled.

  “You’re coming apart, Wally. Your nerves are going bad.”

  “Get that lawyer back here. Get him to come back. I’ve been telling you it’s a frame. It stinks.”

  “This is the brother of the man you killed, W
ally.”

  Shennary looked at me for long moments. He shook his head. “Don’t let them give you that, mister. They’re making it easy for themself. That’s all it is. Look, I’m a loser. These guys, all they think about is keeping the books clean. Wrap everything up. So they grab the first guy the can find and that’s me. Honest, I never in my life saw that gun until they take it out from under my shirts. That blond copper found it. That place hasn’t got decent locks. Anybody could put it there. Even the copper that found it. Look, mister, I’m not a moron. If I shoot anybody, I get rid of the gun, don’t I? That figures, doesn’t it? And I get out of town, don’t I?”

  “You were drunk,” Portugal said heavily. “Pig drunk.”

  “Is there a law now a guy can’t drink?”

  “If he’s on parole, there is. And you don’t have a job, and you had a couple of hundred dollars. Where did that come from?”

  “I confessed! I told you! So I knocked over a supermarket a couple weeks ago. Send me up for that. But no murder rap. You got to listen to me. Lita can tell you where I was. I told you all that. Why don’t you listen to her?”

  Portugal turned toward me. “Seen enough?”

  I nodded. Shennary’s voice followed us down the cell block, shrill and frightened. “Mister, they won’t work on it because it’s easier this way. And they don’t care if they get the right guy. They just get somebody and make it stick and then the books are clean. Don’t let him tell you …”

  We rode down the elevator. It had shaken me. I guess Portugal sensed that. He said, “They all go into that song and dance. ‘Honest it wasn’t me. There’s some mistake.’ That’s the way their minds work.”

  When we walked into the courtyard Portugal said, “We think he was casing those fancy Lime Ridge houses and your brother surprised him. Wally was liquored up and jumpy and so he fired. They all put on an act. He’ll crack before the trial and give us a statement.”

  “When will the trial be?”

  “One of the assistant D.A.’s was over this morning and approved the file. We’re closing him out and trial will be in the fall sometime.”

  “Who is that Lita he was talking about?”

  “Girl friend. Italian girl. Lita Genelli.”

  “Where could I find her?”

  He eyed me a bit warily. “Look, Mr. Dean, you’re not falling for that act, are you? I see it all the time.”

  “No—I just wonder what kind of a man he is. Why he’d do a thing like that. I want to see what she’s like.”

  “She’s a dumb kid who wants to be a heroine like in the movies and swear Shennary was with her all the time.”

  “I really would like to talk to her.”

  He was obviously reluctant. He sighed audibly. “Okay, she’s a car hop at a drive-in on the South Valley Road. It’s called The Pig and It. They got a big pig on their sign, all made of neon.”

  “Thanks, Sergeant.”

  He picked a bit of cigar leaf off his underlip and rolled it in his fingers. “That’s okay, Mr. Dean. We always feel kind of responsible when people like you get knocked off by some punk.”

  I watched him as he walked back toward his wing of the building. He looked tired, worn, shrewd, and disenchanted. I decided I’d have better luck looking the Genelli girl up later in the day. That would give me some time to find out what was going on at the plant, to learn the facts in the Mottling-Granby tussle. There were two good sources of reliable information and the first one was Tom Garroway, a smart young production engineer. I had promoted him twice before I left four years ago.

  I called the plant from a drugstore booth near Police Headquarters and asked the main switchboard to connect me with the engineering offices. I asked the girl there if she could give me Mr. Garroway.

  “Mr. Garroway left the firm some time ago, sir,” she said. “Can I connect you with someone else?”

  “This is a personal matter. Could you tell me where I can locate Mr. Garroway?”

  “Please hold the line a moment, sir.” She was gone for thirty seconds and came back on the line. “Hello? Mr. Garroway is with the Stringboldt Corporation in Syracuse, New York, sir. He left over five months ago.”

  I thanked her and walked slowly back to the hotel. It bothered me that Tom was gone. He was smart enough to know he had a good future with Dean Products, and he was the sort of man that companies must attract if they hope to maintain a competitive position. He was one of those intuitive engineering brains, the kind that have that extra sense which enables them to cut through to the heart of a problem, instinctively avoiding all those promising bypaths that lead nowhere. And though he was sometimes hard to control, he had a nice leadership talent.

  There was a note waiting for me at the desk. It was in a sealed silver-gray envelope, addressed in Niki’s familiar scrawl. I sat in one of the lobby chairs and held it to my nose. There was a faint perfume. I ripped it open: Gev—Lester told me you’re in town. Can’t tell you how glad I am that you decided to come home. Most anxious to see you. I’ll expect you for a drink at four-thirty at the house.—Niki.

  I crumpled the note, then smoothed it out and read it again. There was no uncertainty in it. Just the confident assumption that I would do exactly as she wished. I was expected to forget the rainy night of four years ago.

  I remembered the first time I had seen Niki. That too had been a time of rain. One of those December afternoons when dusk comes at three. I came out of the offices, heading for my car, ducking my head against the misty rain. The girl came up to me, slim and dark, with a raincoat belted around her, rain beads caught in her hair.

  “If your name is Dean, I have a question,” she said. She looked and sounded angry. In a job spot like that you are always running into cranks. She didn’t look like one.

  “Come in out of the rain, then, and ask your question. I’m Gevan Dean.”

  “I like the rain. And I don’t like a brush-off, and I’d like to know what you have to do to make an appointment with that Personnel Manager in there. If he says no, I’ll accept that. But I don’t want to be told no by some little sheep-eyed receptionist.”

  “Did you make an appointment?”

  “I tried to.”

  I looked at her. She stood there in the rain, purse strap looped around her waist, hands shoved deep in the slash pockets of the raincoat, feet planted, eyes of hot blue like a gas flame. Very much girl. Very completely girl.

  It started right there. She came with me and we talked it over at a little rainy-afternoon bar. I ignored my scruples and saw that she got the job she wanted. I knew it made a certain amount of office gossip, and marked her as my protégée, which meant she had to be better than good at her work.

  She turned out to be crisply efficient, superbly trained. She wore neat black and navy suits, starched white blouses. But the sedateness of her office uniform seemed only to enhance the proud, free swing of her body when she walked down a corridor. She hit the office males like a pickax dropped from a roof. They found excuses to go to her desk, lean over her and repeat unnecessary instructions.

  In that little bar she had told me her history. Orphaned at fifteen, she had lived with second cousins in Cleveland until she could make her own way. She had resigned her job in Cleveland because her married employer had begun to make a damn fool of himself, and she said she had picked Arland almost at random, and picked Dean Products because she wanted to be in a big firm, not in some small office again.

  I kept seeing her around the offices. She always had a small grave smile for me, merely polite, with no connotation of intimacy. After I would see her, and then try to look at the papers on my desk, there would be a retinal image of her, as though I had looked at a bright light, and she would stride across the neatly typed papers, her skirt tightening across her hips with each stride, breasts high and firm under the starchy white blouse, dark hair alive against the nape of her neck.

  One day I walked down the hall and she was at the water fountain. I walked toward her and she turned
to face me as she straightened up, almost running into me, stepping back, saying, “Oh! I’m sorry, Mr. Dean.”

  “Would you go out with me? Tonight?”

  “Would that be—wise, Mr. Dean?”

  “I don’t know about that. I don’t care much, I guess. You don’t have to say yes because I got you the job. You know that. You only have to say yes if you want to.”

  “I—I think I’d like to.”

  After that I saw more of her and thought more about her. There is an unwritten law about office girls. I ignored it. She had a small apartment. I tried to stay there with her, but she would have none of that. I realized I wanted to be married to her. I can’t remember how I asked her. But I know she said yes, and after that the world was a very fine place. I spent too many hours a day thinking about her. She kept working, of course, and scrupulously avoided any familiarities in the office, yet the news was all over the plant, and the wolves gave up.

  Then I found her in Ken’s arms and I had not seen her since that night. And today I could see her at four-thirty, I could call on the widow, and have a drink with her, and look at the woman who had come between Ken and me and turned us into strangers for the last four years of my brother’s life. She had lived with my brother in that house. It angered me to be summoned. Yet I knew I would go. Just to look at her again. Just to try to understand.

  As I rode up to eight I remembered how we had planned the honeymoon, that night sitting in the car, the radio on, dash lights glowing green. The British West Indies, and I thought how it would have been, the long still nights, with the flavor of the day’s sun still caught in her hair. Joe Gardland had told me two years ago in Miami that Ken and Niki had honeymooned in the Pacific Northwest. I was glad they hadn’t gone to the islands.

  I unlocked the door to my suite and went in. I stood and felt an odd prickling at the back of my neck. There is a special flavor about a room which is occupied, or where somebody has recently been. There is some atavistic instinct in us which quickens the senses. I found myself on tiptoe as I went to the bedroom door and glanced in. I looked in the bath and then, feeling a bit ridiculous, I yanked the closet door open.