Area of Suspicion

by John D. MacDonald

  She reached out and moved the figurine to a place where her typewriter carriage wouldn’t knock him over.

  “Perry, which office was Ken using?”

  “When Mr. Mottling arrived, Ken moved out of your office and gave it to him. Your brother took over the office where Mr. Mirrian used to be.”

  “I know the one. Has anybody else moved in?”

  “No. It’s empty. I don’t believe anybody has even been in there since—last Friday. There wouldn’t have been anything in there that had to be processed.”

  I saw the faint bluish shadows under her eyes. “You look tired, Perry. What did you do—have a late date after you left me?”

  “No. I just—couldn’t sleep. There seem to be so many things that don’t make any sense. It’s like there’s something we don’t know. Something big and important, and if we knew it, or could guess it, then everything else would be—understandable. Maybe when you go to that Acme office …”

  “I went there this morning. Nobody there. It’s just a mailing address, a cubbyhole. Perry, word will get around that I’m in the plant. They may check with you. Call me and tell me who’s looking for me. I’ll be in my brother’s office.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and I realized I had dropped back into the habit of giving her orders. She looked amused.

  I got to the office where Ken had been without encountering anyone in the hall who looked even vaguely familiar. The outer office door was closed. I went in and shut it behind me. It was designed like the other executive offices, with the windowless outer office for the secretary. There was dust on the secretarial desk—more dust than could accumulate in one week, and it gave me a wry appraisal of my brother’s importance in the firm. I opened the second door and went into his office. It was small, with pale paneling, pale green plaster walls above the paneling, a gray steel desk. The room was as gray as the rain outside.

  I sat in Ken’s chair and pushed the black button of the fluorescent desk lamp. The tube flickered, then glowed with a steady white light. The light slanted across the bottom half of a framed picture of Niki, bold against her mouth, shadowing her eyes.

  I sat there and tried to pretend I was Ken, tried to think as he had thought. Perhaps he had merely sat there, waiting for the long hours to pass until he could leave without being too obvious, and go to the Copper Lounge, to Hildy and stingers and a sedate alcoholic haze. I needed clues to what had been troubling him. I began looking through the desk.

  There were pencils in the top drawer, and paper clips, and scratch pads. The other drawers were equally devoid of any hint of the personality of the man who had sat at this desk—a few cigars, some antique copies of Business Week, some engineering journals, a few competitors’ catalogues with their prices penciled in. Ken never wanted to be a big wheel. He lacked drive. He had been useful to me. He was content to let me make the decisions, and when I asked him to do something, he did it doggedly, thoroughly, and well. He was slow, methodical, and performed best when not under pressure, when there was no deadline.

  I had left him perched on a high, vulnerable place. With complete objectivity, I knew that he was an employee type. Responsibility made him uneasy.

  His appointment pad was on the right corner of the desk. It was that brand which has a clock embedded in the middle, the dial showing through the circular hole in the cover, each page divided into wedge-shaped sections to correspond with the hours of the day as shown on the clock.

  All the sheets had been torn off down to the previous Monday. And that sheet was blank. I began to wonder why the Monday sheet would be on top rather than the sheet for the previous Saturday. Saturday was a working day. Assuming he tore off the Friday sheet before he left the office that last time, there was no reason for him to remove the Saturday sheet. I checked blank pages and found the pad included sheets for Sundays also. So two sheets had been removed.

  I picked up the pad and tilted it so that any indentations of previous notations would show up. The Monday sheet was unmarked. I looked at the pencils in the drawer again. All had very soft lead.

  I knew I had to operate on assumption, with the knowledge that if one assumption was illogical, all the rest in the chain would be meaningless. Assume that Kendall had made a notation on the pad for either Friday or Saturday. Perhaps it had been a memo of an appointment someone did not want him to keep. Then the removal of that incriminating or indicative sheet was in direct relation to his death. And the death, of course, was in a cause-and-effect relationship to the appointment.

  This was dangerously vague, yet I could take that assumption another step. If Joe Gardland and Hildy Deveraux had given me the picture of a man facing a tremendous problem, was, then, the missing notation an indication that he had at last made up his mind? And, having made a decision, could he be permitted to live?

  The tremendous and almost insoluble problem involved some facet of Niki.

  Uncle Al sensed something odd about her, about her motivations.

  I sensed the same oddness.

  Niki knew why Ken’s life had become unbearable only when a conflict became too great. What conflict? Love for Niki versus—what? Versus, perhaps, an old-fashioned word? Honor, decency, dignity, self-respect?

  Niki had walked into our lives out of a December rain, and over a candle-dark table she had shown me the shape of her mouth, the bright slant of blue eyes. Niki Webb from Cleveland, indignant, yet with a flavor of being amused at her own indignation, at her boldness in stopping me in the rain to protest. I’d bullied Hilderman into taking her on, even though, at that time, the office staff was being cut.

  She had appeared and changed our lives—changed mine, and Ken’s was ended. I tried to think of the things she had told me about herself, about he past, during the months of our engagement. I reached for the phone and then pulled my hand back. It would be a ghoulish shock for an unsuspecting switchboard girl to have that particular light blink on her board, and hear my voice, so like Ken’s, asking for Hilderman.

  I went to Hilderman’s office. He was out in the shop someplace. His girl was new, a young girl with chunky hips and a self-important manner. I asked for the Personnel card on a Miss N. Webb who had been hired four and a half years ago, and who had resigned several months later.

  “That would be in the storage file.”

  “Obviously.”

  “I’m not supposed to give out cards without Mr. Hilderman’s okay. And only authorized peole can look at them.”

  She irritated me. She was full of petty authority. And I, could see that, as I had hoped, the name meant nothing to her and she did not know me.

  Petty authority wilts under a show of force. “Young lady, I am Gevan Dean, and unless I have that card in my hand within two minutes, Mr. Hilderman is going to have a change in his staff as of now.”

  Her mouth sagged and her high color faded. “I’m—I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Dean. I didn’t know—I mean, I—”

  “I’m glad to see you take your job so seriously, miss.”

  “Yes, I—I’ll get it right away. Webb did you say? W-e-b-b?”

  She trotted off. She was back quickly, huffing the dust from the card. “Here you are, sir.” As she handed it over, I could sense a rebirth of reluctance. She was beginning to wonder if Hilderman would give her hell for disobeying his office rule. I could guess she would try to get the card back into the file without Hilderman ever realizing it had been gone.

  I took the card to Ken’s office, sat at his desk and placed it squarely in front of me under the blue-white fluorescence. The small picture was not good. It gaunted her face and hardened her mouth. The information on the card confirmed the little she had told me of her past. Parents dead. No brothers or sisters. A business school. Job in a Cleveland office. Palmer Mutual Life Insurance Company, Inc. Position—Secretary to the Chief Adjustor. She had given that firm as a reference, and the information on the card indicated that the reference had checked her out as satisfactory.

  I saw a smudge near
the name of the company. I looked at it closely and saw that someone had penciled a small question mark there, and had partially erased it. There was a routing card stapled to the Personnel card. I looked at the routing card and saw that this Personnel card had been taken out of the storage file a year ago. I saw my brother’s initials scrawled beside the date.

  I sat very still. It was the first clue I had found. Ken had examined this card. Perhaps he had made that question mark. It could only mean that Ken had become interested in her past. I could almost assume he had found some inconsistency in her history, and had taken the card out to check. If he had made the question mark, the inconsistency involved the office where she had worked.

  I was no longer eager to try to spend the rest of the day as Ken had spent his last day of life. Through luck and logic I had found a loose piece. I intended to give it a good hard tug and see what happened. The girl in Personnel seemed pleased to get the card back so quickly. She was too anxious to get it back into the storage file to ask for my initials on the routing card. I hesitated in the hall, wondering if I should tell Perry I was leaving. There seemed little point in it. The rain had turned into a steady downpour. It got under the collar of the plastic raincoat and trickled down my back. I drove to the hotel. Traffic moved cautiously, dimmers on. I went to my suite and placed the Cleveland call, then took off my raincoat as I was waiting for it to come through. I had asked for anyone at Palmer Mutual Life in Cleveland.

  The phone rang. “Ready with your call, sir. Go ahead.”

  “Palmer Mutual,” a girl said.

  “My name is Dean. I’m calling from Arland. I think I want to speak to your Chief Adjustor.”

  “Are you reporting the death of a policyholder, sir?”

  “No. How long has your Chief Adjustor held that job there?”

  “Mr. Wilther has been Chief Adjustor for a long time, sir. Twelve years.”

  “Could you connect me with him, please?”

  “One moment, sir.”

  I waited perhaps a full minute and then a man spoke with a heavy, friendly voice. “Hello again, Mr. Dean. What’s on your mind this time?”

  “This time? Oh, I see. My brother must have phoned you.”

  “I thought it was the same Mr. Dean phoning from Arland again.”

  “When was that?”

  “Maybe a year ago.”

  “Would you mind telling me what he phoned you about?”

  “I guess there’s no harm in that, Mr. Dean. He phoned about a girl who used to work here. Before she went with Dean Products. The name escapes me at the moment.”

  “Miss Webb. Miss Niki Webb.”

  “Yes, that’s the girl. He called up to ask me if I’d dig our copy of the letter of recommendation out of the files. He held the line and I had a girl get it out. It said she was satisfactory. Honest, energetic, and likable. We were sorry to see her go. She said it was some personal trouble. We never did learn the details.”

  “Is that all my brother wanted to know?”

  “That time, yes. But he called back the next day and asked a funny thing. He asked me to describe her. Getting the phone call had sort of refreshed my memory. I hadn’t seen the girl in over three years, you understand. So I described her. Tall, dark, very pretty, and so on. Gray eyes.”

  “Gray?”

  “Your brother picked that up too. I was sure because that was what I remembered the best about her. Bug-luminous gray eyes. To make sure I checked with the other people around here, the ones who remember her. They all insist her eyes were gray, not blue as your brother seemed to think. I was curious and he promised he’d call me back and tell me the story, or write me. He never did. That business about the eyes being gray sort of rattled him. You know what I mean? His voice got shaky. What’s up, Mr. Dean?”

  “I don’t know yet, Mr. Wilther.”

  “You sound as shaky as your brother did.”

  “It’s—a shock to me. It isn’t what I was thinking of. I can see how it might have been even more of a shock to my brother.”

  “Maybe it’s none of my business, and tell me so if that’s the way you feel about it, but I would like to know what goes on.”

  I had a sudden idea and I said quickly, “Mr. Wilther, do you have some sort of an organization there that investigates insurance frauds?”

  “In a very small way, Mr. Dean. For bigger stuff we use a national organization. But I don’t see how we could justify doing any work where there’s no insurance interest involved in—”

  “Suppose I pay all costs with a bonus for speed.”

  “We’re in the insurance business, Mr. Dean.”

  “Then could you call it a favor to a potential policyholder?”

  “How big a policy?” he asked quickly.

  “Say a hundred thousand straight life. You can check up on me very easily.”

  “I don’t have to—if you’re one of the Deans. I checked on your brother after that phone call. I shouldn’t do anything, even as a favor to a policyholder, but I’m a man who gets curious about things. Too curious, maybe. What do you want done?”

  “Check on that girl who worked for you. The gray-eyed one. Niki Webb. There are second cousins in Cleveland, I believe. Get pictures and fingerprints if you can. Find out what happened when she left Cleveland. The one who calls herself Niki Webb, a blue-eyed one, showed up here the following December. She resigned there a few months earlier, I believe.”

  “In September, Mr. Dean.”

  “Let me know as soon as you find out anything. You can phone me here at the Hotel Gardland. I’m Gevan Dean.” I gave him the suite number.

  “Right. I’ll mail you a bill for services after we’ve finished. It might help if I knew the reason for the impersonation.”

  “I wish I knew. It doesn’t make sense yet.”

  “I’ll try to give it a priority handling. Are you too busy to go take a physical for that policy?”

  “At the moment, yes. Next week sometime.”

  I hung up. My hands felt sticky. I washed them. I had found a new way to put myself in Ken’s shoes. Suppose you are married to a lovely woman, and deeply in love with her, and you learn she is not who she pretends to be; you find out she is wearing a mask. By unmasking her, you may lose her. Your marriage is a fiction, yet you can’t face a life without her.

  I was going to carry a lot of tension around with me until I heard from Wilther. I wondered if Ken had found out why she was hiding under some other name. Who had she been? What had she been? Why do people change their identity? To escape from something. From the consequence of some criminal act. Or they are running out on some responsibility. Or, as in the traditional con game, there is a mark to be fleeced. I knew the history of the girl whose identity she had assumed. But what of Niki’s own history? I began to imagine strange and terrible things. Yes, oddly, discovering the flaw in identity made Niki, as a person, more believable. From the beginning there had been just too much sophistication, too much poise for a girl who had no more experience of the world than the genuine Niki Webb. I realized it had bothered me four years ago without my putting my finger on the exact reason. It had not been the sly wanton pretending to be a lady. It had been more subtle.

  After useless conjecture, I went to the phone and made a call which I knew I should have made right after meeting Stanley Mottling. It took the long-distance operator a half-hour to locate Mort Brice. He had been one of the young assistant deans when I was at the Business School. Since that time he had formed a company in New York that was partly devoted to handling industrial management problems on contract, but was mainly a clearinghouse for executive personnel all over the country and over most of the world, finding the right man available for the right job as soon as it opened up.

  I got him on the line and Mort said, “My God, it’s the beachcomber! What in the world are you doing? Going back to work?” His voice changed suddenly and I knew he had remembered Ken’s death. It was the sort of news his office would pick up quickly. “S
ay, I didn’t mean to sound so flip, Gev. I forgot for a minute about your brother. That was a hell of a thing. Gev. Shocking.”

  “A bad thing, Mort. I’m trying to get things straightened out.”

  “Hope you’ll keep us in mind if you need a couple of shrewd boys to fill out the roster. Production men are in damn short supply, but I think I could round up a couple for you. I understand you people have a lot of government work. Loaded you down, haven’t they?”

  “Pretty heavily. But that isn’t what I called about. I’m being pressured to put a man named Stanley Mottling in as president, now that Ken is gone. I thought you might have an opinion, if you know him.”

  “Oh, I know him. But I don’t like to give any opinions.”

  “Isn’t that your business?”

  “It is when I can stay cool and calm and objective. But that is one gent I don’t like. He’s shrewd, able, maybe brilliant. All the adjectives. But I don’t like him.”

  “He’s driven away some of the men I had a lot of confidence in when I was here.”

  “Then they needed driving, Gev. One thing I do know about Mottling, his strong point is that he can recognize ability and then delegate authority and responsibility.”

  “The hell you say! That’s the last thing he’s done here. And he drove away good men. Hell, you know one of them. He came through your office. Poulson.”

  “He resigned for a better offer.”

  “No. Mottling drove him out, and drove out other men just as good.”

  There was a silence on the line. “Were they undercutting him, maybe?”

  “I think you know Poulson better than that.”

  I heard an odd sound over the line and then I remembered Mort Brice’s little habit of snapping his front teeth with his thumbnail when he was thinking hard. “It sounds funny,” he said.

  “I’m paying a phone bill to have you tell me something I knew already.”