Area of Suspicion (11 page)

On a chair was a stack of newspapers, and the top one was the paper containing the account of my brother’s murder. A
ILAND
E
XECUTIVE
S
LAIN
.
Prowler Shoots Kendall Dean
, with a picture of Ken, taken long ago, with half-smile and quiet eyes.

I read the accounts, then looked at the room. In the glow of the overhead bulb it was a grubby place. A man like Portugal could understand this place. A man could go out from a place like this with a gun in his hand and his belly full of rye. The room made me feel quixotic. I could tell myself that I could understand these people, but I knew I didn’t. And I wanted to leave, and be content with Portugal’s shrewdness, but I had gone so far that, even assuming Shennary’s guilt, it would be a needless act of cruelty toward the girl. She wanted her man free. I still wondered what sort of person she was. I made certain the blinds were closed. I began a bungling, amateurish search of the room.

I found letters in the top drawer of a maple-finish dressing table. I hesitated for a moment, and then took them over to where the light was better. I read a few of them. They were nearly all penciled on cheap stationery, and addressed to her at the Birdland Motel or The Pig and It. They all had a pattern:

Lita, baby—The rig busted at Norfolk and I missed the Buffalo load, so I won’t see you as soon as I figured. I got a load to K. C. now and maybe there I can get one to Philly which will bring me by there and you know I will be stopping so be on the lookout for me honey. We had us a time and I’m looking forward to seeing you soon again
.

They were signed Joe and Al and Shorty and Red and Pete and Whitey, and they bore dirty thumbprints and they were mailed from all over the East. And they were all over two months old.

She owned cheap bright clothes, and a large collection of cosmetics in elaborate jars and bottles. I could learn nothing else about her. I turned on a table lamp with a red shade and turned off the overhead light. It made the room look better. I turned the small radio on low to a disc jockey program.

It was twenty to one when she opened the door and came in and shut it against the force of the night wind. She looked cold, and her car-hop uniform looked forlornly theatrical.

“Gee, I’m sorry I couldn’t get off sooner. I was worried you’d be gone. I was glad when I saw the car. Jesus, it’s getting cold. I’m all goose bumps. Didn’t you make yourself a drink? I’ll fix you one, hey? I got to get these goddamn boots off. My feet are killing me. I need a drink bad.” She talked with hectic vivacity, being the gay hostess.

I agreed to a drink and she slumped into the kitchenette. Over the rattling of the ice tray, she called out to me, “I’ve been going nuts trying to get somebody to listen to me. I’m glad you came by, believe me. I know Wally didn’t shoot anybody. He wouldn’t kill anybody. If I thought he had it in him to kill anybody, I wouldn’t have nothing to do with him, Mister Dean. He was right here with me when he was supposed to be killing your brother. But can I prove it? Can he prove it?”

She came out with the drinks and handed me mine and plopped down on the unmade studio couch. The drinks were stiff. They looked like iced, black coffee. She pulled off her boots and sat on the bed, Buddha-fashion, adjusting the skimpy red skirt as a casual concession to modesty. The light came through the red lamp shade and made bloody highlights along her lean cheek, on her small arm and knee.

“I suppose,” I said cautiously, “they think you’d try to give him an alibi anyway.”

“That clown Portugal laughed in my face. It would be okay, maybe, if he didn’t have a record.”

“And they hadn’t found the gun in his possession.”

“In his room. Not on him,” she said firmly. “There’s a big difference. Anybody could put it there. I’ll tell you how
it was. I was off. We drove out here and we stayed here. We got here about ten. We had some laughs and some drinks. He was going to stay all night. Then, you know, drinking and all, we got yelling at each other about something. So he took off. And I know that was right around two o’clock, and he was drunk and I worried about him driving. We got fighting about him not reporting to the parole officer the way he was supposed to. The thing is, nobody saw him here but me.”

“He told Portugal he robbed a supermarket a while back.”

“Sure. He confessed that because this murder thing has him scared bad. He got six hundred bucks. It wasn’t armed robbery. He busted a back window and got in and pried open a drawer. They can’t drop him too hard for that. Not more than three years, maybe.”

She talked about it as an expected business risk. I stared at her. She didn’t look over eighteen. “How did you get mixed up with anybody like Shennary?”

She stared back at me. “Don’t think he tried to kid me. He told me right off he had a record and he was on parole. I kidded myself he was going to play it straight from now on. He was just another date. He knew I’d done some playing around. It was for kicks. Then … Oh, hell, I really started to go for him. You can’t help a thing like that. I knew he was no good. Mean temper. Thought everybody was down on him. Knocked me around when he felt like it. But we’d make up, and then I’d do anything for him. That’s something you don’t figure out in your head, Mr. Dean.”

“What kind of a man is he, really?”

“Like I said, he thinks everything is against him and so he acts hard. But he’s soft underneath. Likes kids and dogs and things like that. He just started out wrong. I guess I did too. We were brought up three blocks apart on the north side, but we never knew each other, him being older. That’s funny, isn’t it? He wouldn’t kill anybody, Mr. Dean, unless maybe he had to keep from getting killed himself.”

“Is he bright?”

She shrugged. “Too bright to hold onto a gun if he killed somebody with it, if that’s what you mean.”

“I don’t see how you can ever convince Portugal that he was here with you.”

She drained the last of her drink and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “Look, Mr. Dean. They don’t want to try to think straight about it. I didn’t tell the sergeant this. Maybe I should have. Come over here.” She went over to the bureau and pulled the second drawer all the way out and stood holding it. “Now light a match and look back in there.”

I did. There was an automatic back there, held in place by a strip of heavy rubber that had been thumbtacked to the wood. I straightened up.

She replaced the drawer, banging it shut. “That’s his. He didn’t want it over at his place in case he got picked up or something. He thought it would be better here. So why would he have another one over there? Does that make sense?”

I had to agree that it seemed odd.

“Another thing,” she said. “He told me how he worked. Never with anybody. Always alone. He said it was safer. So I ask you, who sent in that phone tip? How would anybody know? Forget he was right here all the time. Just imagine he
did
shoot your brother. How would anybody know that if he was alone?”

She looked at me with defiance and shrewdness. “You see,” she said, “it’s like Wally figures. He’s an easy answer, and the killing is off the books. They don’t
want
to listen to anything that makes sense. He has to lose on that supermarket thing. He knows that. Will you laugh if I tell you something?”

“I don’t think so, Lita.”

“Make you another drink first?”

“No thanks.”

“I’ll make me one.” She made it quickly and came back in her bare feet and sat as before. “I’ve been working on Wally. In my own way.” She seemed shy. “I wanted to
marry the guy. And I don’t want to marry a crook. I think in another week or so I could have gotten him to turn himself in. Look at this.” She padded to the bureau, dug around in the top drawer, and brought back something I’d missed in my search, a small blue bankbook with gilt lettering. “Go ahead. Look at it.”

There were no withdrawals. There were deposits of two and five and nine and eleven dollars. The total was just under nine hundred. I handed it back to her.

“That’s what we kept fighting about, but he was weakening. Sooner or later I was going to make him see that we could give back the money he took and turn himself in and maybe he could get off with just serving the rest of the sentence he was paroled from, and that’s only two years. Two years more. Or suppose it’s five? I can take that. So can he. But I can’t take it if they clip him with this murder thing. I—can’t.”

“I don’t see how—”

“Mr. Dean, you’re a big man in this town. Anybody named Dean is big in this town. They got to listen to you. You can go to the Chief of Police or the Mayor of the District Attorney or somebody and say you’re not satisfied. Say you want more detective work on it. They’ll listen and maybe they’ll find out who it was and get off Wally’s back.”

“I’m not so sure they’d listen, Lita.”

“I’d sure appreciate it if you’d try.”

I didn’t answer. She’d made a pretty good case for Shennary, but at the same time I could remember what Portugal had said. I didn’t want to make a fool of myself, and yet …

She took the bankbook back to the drawer, and then, on her slow and thoughtful way back toward the daybed, paused, turned, looked at me in a strange, still way. A rumble of trucks shook the room. She touched the center of her upper lip with the sharp pink tip of her tongue, nervous, speculative.

She took one slow step toward me, then came the rest of the way with a tumbling haste that seemed a product of
shyness. She scrambled onto my lap, thudding with an unexpected force and heaviness against me, then quickly curling and fitting herself against me, her fingers cold at the nape of my neck, bare knees hooked over the arm of the chair, drawing small lines on the side of my throat with the edges of her teeth.

“You could help,” she whispered. “You could help Wally and me so much! You can have anything you want, if you’ll just help us.”

With her free hand, with great deftness, she caught my right hand and lifted it, turned it, cupped it strongly against a breast of astonishing abundance in comparison to all the rest of her. There was an odor of fried meat caught in her hair, mixed with some flower scent. I did not want her. Her scrambling assault had been such a surprise to me; my mind was working too slowly as I sought some kind of rejection that would not wound her pride. It was a tawdry little sacrifice, but it had meaning to her.

As I sought some gentle gambit that would end it, I found myself becoming ever more conscious of the female warmth and weight of her against me. She made an intent series of practiced little motions and adjustments, a click of snap fastenings and a slither of fabric just as her mouth—surprisingly fresh and sweet—came up to meet mine, so that in the beginning of the kiss, fabric pulled aside and the bare warm roundness of her breast seemed to burst into my hand, which no longer required the pressure of hers to hold it there. There were other tuggings and graspings and adjustings, such an agile and continuous shedding of what she wore that it left the long kiss uninterrupted.

It was in some way that defied explanation, more of an innocence than a sexuality. She was a gamine child, playing some involved game at which she excelled. There was an intentness about her, which must have paralleled the same humorless energy she had brought to her games of hopscotch and jacks too few years ago.

Sexual rationalizations and excuses are sick, sly and agonizingly strong. I had begun to tell myself that no one
need ever know about this, that it was a simple and meaningless way to ease all the tensions Niki had aroused. This spindly busy animal I held did not have to have a name or an identity.

“You’ll help Wally,” she murmured, her mouth against mine.

Without breaking the kiss, she turned in a limber way, knelt astride me in the chair and murmured, “Carry me over there,” knowing of my readiness. As I ran my hands up the bare, spare, smooth lines of her back, they touched the jutting bony wings of her shoulderblades, and she was suddenly a pathetic starveling, and, in self-derision, my hungers collapsed and I knew it could not happen.

I put my hands on her narrow waist and lifted her up and out and away from me, and sat her out there on my knees, facing me. She had stripped to a pair of threadbare peach panties. She was so thin the insides of her thighs were concave. The light glowed red through the shade onto washboard ribs and the unlikely breasts, high, round and plump. A sheaf of dark hair screened one eye. She palmed it back and stared at me, alert as a bird. Here were no sultried paintings, no race of breath and heart, no tumid lollings.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” she demanded.

“This isn’t a very good idea,” I said.

“It’s been pretty popular lately.”

“I don’t want to … complicate matters, Lita.”

She gave me a lewd, angelic smile, half seen in the ruby light as she perched there, shameless as a child. “Complicate? I had the idea it was going to be real easy.” Her eyes narrowed. “You make me look real good, don’t you? You make me feel like I was some kind of tramp.”

“Hush now, Lita. Look at me. Was Wally really here that night? Tell me the truth.”

As I held her balanced there, my hands on her waist, she straightened her shoulders, lifted her chin. Slowly and solemnly she crossed herself. “I swear he was. I swear to Jesus and his Holy Mother that Wally was here with me while your brother was being shot, right here in this room, Mr. Dean, and may I burn forever in hell if I’m lying.”

In that moment we were no longer strangers. I believed her. I was certain Portugal was wrong. Somebody else had killed my brother. Not Walter Shennary. Somebody far more clever.”

“I believe you,” I told her, “and I’ll help all I can.”

Tears stood in her eyes, shiny in the red of the light. “Now,” she said in an uncertain voice, “where were we when you interrupted us?”

“Let’s skip it, Lita. It’s a gesture you don’t have to make.”

Tears spilled. “The way it was before, Mr. Dean. I was conning you. Now it’s a way to say thanks. What else do I have I could give you anyhow? And now … it’ll be more like with love, you know?”