Area of Suspicion

by John D. MacDonald

  I was alone, but I felt positive someone had recently left. I looked at my unpacked belongings. Everything seemed in order. But I realized that if somebody had been waiting to attack me, he would hardly have forewarned me by disarranging my clothing.

  I felt in actual physical danger. Then it receded. Just because I had begun to see myself as the bold investigator of a murder, there was no reason to add all the other aspects of melodrama. I began to whistle. It sounded too loud in the room.

  I ran water into the wash basin. I looked into the mirror and found myself looking over my shoulder out into the bedroom behind me. I made a face at myself in the mirror. Steady, boy.

  Chapter 5

  It was nearly noon when, from my hotel suite, I got the call through to Tom Garroway in Syracuse. It had taken them fifteen minutes to locate him out in the shop. It made me remember the times I had tried to find him, and the uselessness of trying to teach him to leave word where he’d be.

  He came on the line. “Gev! It’s damn good to hear your voice. Say, I read about Ken in the papers. I was going to write you. A damn shame, Gev. A sweet guy.”

  “Thanks, Tom. Can you talk or do you want to call me back?”

  “I can talk. What’s up?”

  “Why did you leave? You had a good deal here.”

  “I know that. After you left, I got lonesome.”

  “Let’s have it, Tom.”

  “Okay. When Mottling came into the picture it ruined things.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t like people leaning over my shoulder. I want to be given something and a chance to work it out my own way. If I had to spit, I had to make out a request in triplicate and get Mottling’s initials on it. I could feel an ulcer coming. Do it this way. Don’t do it that way. Do it my way not your way, and report on the hour.”

  “No way to handle bull-headed Garroway.”

  “You’re damn well told. This is a good outfit, Gev. Fine people. Hot problems. But I want you to know this. The day you toss out Mottling I’ll come running back if you want me to. And two bits says Poulson and Fitz will come back too.”

  “Are they gone?”

  “Man, yes. Where have you been? Mottling really took over. He pushed your brother around too. I don’t know why Ken stood for it. Mottling and that tin soldier Dolson are thick as thieves. The next step is to hoist Grandby out of there; then all the old guard will be gone. I’m not sentimental about it, Gev. If you were a knuckle-head, I’d say stay the hell out. But you’re one Dean who’s entitled to run Dean Products. Why don’t you take over again?”

  “It’s a little late for that, Tom.”

  “Hell, I’ll come back and teach you the ropes. You can be a trainee. One of Garroway’s bright young men.”

  “I’m a beachcomber. There’s something with a real future.”

  His tone changed. “Seriously, Gev. No joke. I almost wrote you a few times. There’s a smell around there. Like something crawled under the buildings and died. Maybe I should have stayed and fought. But it was safer to land another job. Give some thought to going back in there, Gev. Those years were good. I’d like it to be the way it used to be.”

  I thanked him. The odds were against my going back in. I hung up and called room service and ordered a sandwich sent up. I thought of what he had said. Even thought I’d tried to deny it for four years, when I had quit, I’d felt as though both hands had been cut off at the wrist.

  Sure, it was just another corporate entity that would keep churning along whether Gevan Dean was there or not.

  But I missed it. I missed the hot stink of coolant and oil, that rumble and chatter and screech of the production areas, where metal is peeled sleekly back from the high-speed cutting edges, and the turret lathes and automatic screw machines squat heavily and busy themselves with their robot operations. And it had been good to go into the shipping department and smell the raw wood of the big packing cases, and see the fresh-paint stencils which said DEAN PRODUCTS.

  When the pressure was off, I’d go down to Receiving and watch the materials coming in, the sheets and the bar stock, the castings and forgings, the billets and pigs. Raw and semi-fabricated items would come in; they would leave as complete assemblies, machined, assembled, inspected, crated. It all started when some prehistoric genius squatted on his haunches and chipped out an ax head and lashed it to a piece of wood. It must have given him a good satisfaction when he swung the completed tool. And there was a satisfaction in directing the skilled operation that made Dean Products tick, which turned materials into something that could be hefted, used. The skill was the value you added.

  I remembered how it used to be with my father. When a new item was going into production, his desk top would be littered with machined component parts. He’d spend a lot of time picking them up and turning them over and over in his hands, holding them just so, so the light would turn machined steel surfaces into tiny mirrors. There was always a pair of coveralls hanging in his office closet and he was supposed to put them on before he went out into the production areas. But something would go wrong and he would forget and go bulling down and wade into the trouble and get grease smeared. Then Mother would give him a mean time, and so would his secretary, old Miss Brownell.

  Remembering Miss Brownell made me think of my second valid source of information. When ancient Miss Brownell had finally retired, I asked Hilderman to recommend someone from the stenographic pool, someone I could take into my office on trial. Hilderman had sent Joan Perrit to me, and I wondered if he had suddenly acquired holes in the head. She was nineteen, and gawky and nervous, and she plunged around the office with such a reckless desire to please that I was in constant fear she would fracture herself on the furniture or fall out the window. She was painfully shy. But she could make a typewriter sound like small boys running and holding sticks against a picket fence. And she could take down and transcribe every mumble and grunt in a ten-man conference where everybody interrupted everybody else.

  Technical excellence was just part of her arsenal of talents. Inside of a month she knew my style of expressing myself so perfectly that I couldn’t tell which letters I had dictated and which ones I had told her to handle. And she managed to fend off the pests, even those who would have gotten by Miss Brownell, without ever offending anybody, and without ever shooing away anyone that I wanted to see. She had schedules and timetables and appointments neatly filed away in her pretty head, and each morning when I came into the office there would be a typed notation on my desk, placed with geometric exactness atop the mail I should see. That notation would tell me not only the fixed appointments, but what was likely to come up.

  She was a sweet kid, with dark red hair and a look of virginal freshness. She was so loyal it was embarrassing. On the morning I dictated my letter of resignation, she had to leave the office. She was gone a full ten minutes, and when she came back her eyes were reddened and swollen, but her voice was level and calm again as she read back to me the last sentence I had dictated.

  I got her on the phone and her voice was just the same as on that last day. “I heard you were in town, Mr. Dean.”

  I wondered how much four years had changed her. “I wonder if I could talk to you, Miss Perrit.”

  “Of course, Mr. Dean. When?”

  “Say this evening. After dinner sometime.”

  “Will nine o’clock at the corner of Martin and Lamont be all right? In front of the leather shop.” I agreed. Though her voice had not changed, I knew she undersrtood I wanted information. Thus the quickness of her response was an indication she felt there was information to be given. I trusted her judgment.

  After lunch I looked up car rental agencies in the phone book and found one quite close to the hotel. I rented a new Chevrolet sedan. I drove by the house where I was born, and headed south out of the city. At The Pig and It I found that Lita Genelli was off duty. I drove through the countryside for a time, parked near a place where we had always had family picnics. But they had change
d everything. The elms and willows were gone. The area had been graded and filled. The pool where I caught the six-pound brown trout was gone. They had straightened and widened the highway, and there was a big drive-in movie where Ken and I used to play at being Indian scouts, trying to wiggle through the sun-hot grass until we were close enough to yell and leap out. I remembered the way the grass used to smell, and the way the picnic potato salad tasted, and the time Ken had tied the braids of a female cousin to a tree limb, and the way the line had hissed in the water when the brownie had taken the worm.

  Now there was a stink of fast traffic, and a disheveled blonde on the drive-in ads, and a roadside place where they sold cement animals painted in bright colors.

  And I kept glancing at my watch and thinking about Niki. A bitter excitement kept lumping in my throat. I drove slowly, and it was exactly four-thirty when I drove through the gateposts of the house Ken had built for Niki in the Lime Ridge section. The driveway was asphalt, and it was wide and satiny and curving. It led up the slope toward the house, to a turn-around and a parking area near the side entrance.

  It was the house I would have wanted to build for her. A long, low white frame house, in an L shape, with a wide chimney painted white, with black shutters, with deep eaves. The spring grass was clipped to putting green perfection. High cedar hedges isolated the property from the neighbors. The three-car garage was separated from one wing of the house by a glassed-in breezeway, and beyond the garage was an apartment affair which I imagined belonged to the help. The house sat quiet and content in the spring sun, and it looked like a house people could be happy in.

  There were two cars parked near the garage. One was a big fin-tailed job in cruiser gray, and the other was a baby blue Jag convertible with the top down. Both cars had local licenses, and I guessed the big one had been Ken’s and now both of them were Niki’s. And the house was Niki’s, and all the manicured grounds, and all the cedar hedges. A very fine take for the lass who had stood in the rain with her eyes ablaze on that December afternoon. Such thoughts helped still my nervousness.

  I pressed the bell at the side door and a pretty little Negro maid in a white uniform let me in and took my hat, murmuring that I should go straight ahead into the living-room and she would tell Mrs. Dean I was here. It was a big room, and quiet. Low blond furniture upholstered in nubbly chocolate; lime yellow draperies framing a ten-foot picture window that looked down the quiet expanse of the lawn. A small bar had been wheeled to a convenient corner. There were fresh flowers, built-in shelves of books in bright dust jackets, wall-to-wall neutral rug. I lit a cigarette and tossed the match behind the birch logs in the fireplace. I looked at book titles. I looked out the window. The room was empty and silent, and I could hear no sound in the house. I felt the jitters coming back. I looked out the big window and wondered if they had stood there in the evening, his hand on her waist, her head on his shoulder, before going to their bed. And had they read any of the books aloud? And had he gotten up to poke at the fire while she sat in uxorial contentment.…

  “Gevan!” she said. She had come into the room behind me and I had not heard her. I turned, my mind foolishly blank, staring at her as she walked tall toward me, her hands outstretched, smiling.

  Four years had changed Niki. The years had softened the young tautness of her figure. Her waist was as slim as ever, but under the strapless dress of some bright fabric, there was a new warm abundance of breast and hip. Her cheeks were the familiar flat ovals and her mouth was the same as it had been, deeply arched, sensuous and imperious.

  She moved in the same gliding walk like the pace of some splendid animal. She walked toward me for an endless time while, with all senses sharpened, I heard the slither and whip of the hem of the heavy skirt and scented her familiar perfume.

  “You’ve changed your hair,” I said inanely.

  “Oh, Gevan, what a sparkling greeting!” When she said my name I saw the remembered way she said the v, white teeth biting at her underlip, holding the consonant sound just a bit longer than anyone else ever did.

  I tried to take one of her hands and shake it in polite formality, but her other hand found my wrist, long warm fingers wrapping tightly around it, and she stood like that, smiling at me, tall and rounded, that black hair sheening like spilled ink.

  “It’s nice to see you, Niki.” My voice was husky.

  She closed her eyes for a moment. “It’s been a bit too long,” she said as she released my hand and turned away with an uncharacteristic awkwardness. I saw she shared my nervousness. It made her more plausible, made her more believable as the girl who had said she would marry me so long ago. She had betrayed me, and in her manner was awareness of that. Somehow, I had fallen into the habit of attributing to her a perfect poise, a bland denial of any guilt. To see her now, unsure of herself, uncertain of her ground, even perhaps a bit afraid of me, destroyed that false image of her. It was right she should feel guilt. In some obscure way she had destroyed Ken. She was the evil luck of the Dean brothers. And the warmth I felt for a few moments faded.

  Perhaps she sensed that. She turned with a controlled smile and said, “You’re looking preposterously healthy, Gevan.”

  “I’m a beach boy. A muscle-flexer.”

  “With no dissipations? I’m quite good at martinis these days.” It made me remember the burnt-acid abominations she had mixed for us long ago.

  “Prove it.”

  I sat and watched her at the small bar. The room was silent. Ice tinkled. She measured with small girl intentness. She swirled the cocktail in the crystal bubble of the shaker, poured carefully, brought me the first drink. I stood up and took it and sipped. “You’re better than you used to be,” I said.

  She sat opposite me with her drink. We were walking a polite and formal line. On either side were quicksands.

  “You have a very nice home, Niki.”

  “It’s too big, actually. Ken wanted a big house. I’ll sell it, I guess.”

  “And then what?”

  “Go away. Get sort of—straightened out. And come back here. Stanley says I should take an active interest in the company.”

  The silence grew. It was not a comfortable silence. There was a tingling to it, a nervous suspense. I liked her hair better the way she used to wear it. The present effect made her face look more fragile, but it also gave her a look of false composure.

  “Do you like Florida, Gevan?”

  “Very much.”

  “You’ll go back, I suppose.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  And again there was the silence of the big room. She sipped her drink. I saw her round throat work. She looked down into her glass, frowning. “We could talk and talk and talk and never say a thing—if we keep on this way.”

  “This is the safe way.”

  She looked up sharply. “Is it? Then I’ll say it. I should never have married Ken.”

  The silence came back but it was altered. It had changed.

  “Don’t step out of character,” I said. “Remember, you’re the shattered widow.”

  “I know I hurt you. I know how badly.”

  “Do you?”

  “Don’t try to hurt back. Not right now. Later, but not right now. Let me say this.”

  “I’ll listen to you.”

  “Six months after I married him I knew it was a mistake. But he loved me, and I’d hurt enough people. I tried to make him as happy as I could.”

  “Not very successfully, from what I hear.”

  “Then you know how he was the last few months. I couldn’t help that, Gevan. I tried. God, how I tried! But he—sensed how it had all gone wrong. He guessed I was pretending. But I never told him I regretted marrying him.”

  I set my empty glass aside. “That raises a pretty question, Niki. Why did you marry him?”

  “For a long time I didn’t know why I did that—dreadful thing to you. To us. Because what we had was so good, Gevan. So right for us. I finally figured it all out.”

 
; “With diagrams?”

  She leaned forward. “You and I are both strong people, Gevan. Terribly strong. Dominants, I guess you call it. Ken was weaker. He needed me. He needed strength. He appealed to something—maternal, I guess. You would never need me that way. My strength seemed to respond to his weakness. He made me feel needed.”

  “And I didn’t.”

  “Not in the same way. It was so queer the way it began. It crept up on us. We weren’t expecting it. And then it got worse and worse and we had to find some time and place to tell you how it was with us. We were going to tell you that same night when you walked in. But having it happen that way made it all sort of nasty. I’ll never forget that night, or the way you looked.”

  “It hasn’t exactly slipped my mind, Niki.”

  “I want to be honest with you. I’ve had to be dishonest for so long. I’ll tell you how it is. I miss him. I miss him dreadfully. He was sweet. But I didn’t love him. So I can’t miss him the same way I’ve missed you for four years. I can’t look at you while I say this. If things had gone on, Ken and I would have separated. And then—darling, I would have come to you and begged forgiveness. I would have come to you on any basis you wanted.” She lifted her head then and looked directly at me. “I would have come to you, Gevan.”

  I looked back into her eyes. They looked darker. “Is that supposed to help?” I asked her.

  “It’s too late, isn’t it?” she asked. Her voice was soft and remote. It was less question than statement, an acceptance of a mistake which had forever changed our special world. “Much too late,” she said, turning away from me.

  I knew how quickly and how easily I could reach her. The impulse brought me to my feet before I could bring it under control, my empty glass bounding and rolling on the silence of the rug. She sat with her head turned away from me. I saw tendons move in the side of her throat. Except for that small movement, she did not stir for the space of ten heartbeats. Then, with a careful precision she put her glass on the table and rose to her feet with a remembered effortlessness and came over to me, her eyes downcast, smudged by the darkness of her lashes. I heard a hush of fabric and a hiss of nylon. She stopped, inches from me, and slowly raised her glance until, with the mercilessness of a blow without warning, she looked into my eyes.