Area of Suspicion (12 page)

Beauty can emerge in the most grotesque and unexpected places. Beauty is involved with dignity. With this cheap girl in this drab room, perched so ludicrously at my arm’s length, there should have been no dignity—but there was. Far more, in fact, than I had encountered with any of the random beach girls of the four lost years, even the ones who spilled Neiman-Marcus beach wear onto my rush rug and murmured their lust-talk with that precision and word choice refined during the Smith and Wellesley years, and sweetened their bodies at an outlay of forty dollars an ounce, while they co-operated with me in my futile campaign to bury all the nerve-end memories of Niki under so many layers of sensation that no sudden memory of her could bring back the pain.

Lita tilted her head with a simian shrewdness. “But you don’t wanna anyhow,” she said, and sighed, and slid back away from me and walked to a cardboard closet and took out a lavender rayon robe and put it on, and zipped it from hem to throat. I stood up, when she picked up a cigarette and went to her and held the light.

“I should get the idea I’m such a big prize bonus deal,” she said with a weary irony. “You can do better, hey?”

“It isn’t that. You see what I mean by things getting too
complicated. We’ll have to work together on your problem. And mine. Let’s just stick to that.”

She looked at me with that special hostility of class antagonism. “People like you do too goddamn much thinking.”

“Lita, I like you. I like you very much. So let’s see what we can do to help Wally. I’m certain he didn’t kill my brother.”

We moved to the door. When I took the knob to open it, she stayed me by putting her hand on my wrist. She looked up at me, tiny and intense, the dark hair unkempt. In spite of the $9.98 sophistication of the robe, she looked about twelve years old.

“Either way, Mr. Dean,” she said, “I’m going to be without him. If you try and it doesn’t work, I’m without him forever. If you help him, he still does time for the supermarket thing. Either way it goes, I owe you. After it’s settled, I’ll be right here, except when I’m working or visiting him. I lived it up maybe too much before I met him. That’s over. I told him so, and I mean it. I’m going to be lonely. I know how guys figure. There’d be no claims on you. No fuss and no trouble, and I wouldn’t con you for nothing. And the way it is, I wouldn’t feel trampy. I’ll fix this place up so it’s a better place to come to. I think you’d like that. So when it’s over, anytime you want a place and a girl, with nobody pressuring you or able to find you, and nothing you have to do or say unless you feel like it, you got a permanent rain check good any time.”

I clasped her fragile shoulder and bent and kissed her lightly on the mouth. We smiled at each other. There was nothing else we had to say to each other.

When I turned my car lights on they shone brightly on her as she stood in the doorway, shoulders hunched against the cold, her hands cupping her elbows, the red lamp glow silhouetting her. She squinted into the light and waved good-by as if I were a hundred yards away instead of five. I backed out and drove toward the city.

I believed her. Portugal would not call me a fool in so
many words. But I could guess at the expression he would wear. I drove to the hotel garage through the late city, remembering the look in Lita’s dark eyes.

If Shennary hadn’t killed Ken, the whole structure of a clumsy killing collapsed. Clumsiness became cleverness. The gun hidden in his room. Premeditation, cunning, motivation. It made the night and city seem darker. Something mysterious called They. Why had They killed him? How could his existence bother Them?

There is a sickness in murder. It made a sickness in the city, and made me think, perversely, of the Gulf in pre-dawn grayness, the sudden hard strike on the trolled lure, the dip of the rod tip, the singing of the reel, the breath-taking silver of the tarpoon at the height of his leap. Later the sun would come up and the Gulf would be blue and the terns would dip and waver on the morning wind, white as bone, squabbling like picnic children. I had left all that and I had begun to walk along a narrow place. Too narrow to turn around.

I stood in the dark hotel room and looked at the faint pinkness of neon against the overcast. It looked like a fire beyond the horizon. The emotional climate of the city was pre-storm—a stillness and a brassiness and winds out of nowhere that flickered and faded into stillness. I remembered a girl who had been visiting the Tarlesons over a year ago. I remembered the late afternoon when we had been on the beach, she and I, in front of my place, and the strange excitement with which we watched the storm moving in off the Gulf.

The day had been like a wire pulled tight, full of expectancy. We waited there, watching it come until the last possible moment, then grabbed the beach things and ran for my place, the first fat thunderous drops driving against our bare backs, lightning breaking the sky, and we laughed as we ran.

I remembered how dark the day became. We ran through the beach house, shutting windows. We turned on lights but the storm put the lights out. We were children in an attic.
We made love while the storm winds made the house creak, and afterward we heard the thunder moving east. When the storm was gone we were strange with each other and tried too hard to recapture the way it had been while the storm was on.

At the Tarleson party the next day she got very drunk and very sick. I walked her for an endless time on the beach, and later she cried. The next day she went back north.

I felt there was a storm coming, and all the lights would go out, for all of us.

I went to bed and dreamed that I was at the drive-in and Niki, dressed as Lita had been, kept taking care of the customers in the other cars and would not look toward me, and I could not call to her because all the car windows were rolled tight and locked.

Chapter 8

Thursday morning at nine-thirty I drove to the plant. I drove into that section of the parking lot reserved for executive personnel and nosed into the space labeled K. Dean. By habit, I headed toward the entrance I had used in the old days.

A plant guard in gray uniform stepped out and blocked the doorway. “Have you got a pass, sir?”

“No, I haven’t. I’m Gevan Dean, and Mr. Mottling is—”

“Sorry, if you got no pass, sir, you got to use the office entrance out on the street. I can’t make any exceptions, Mr. Dean.”

I went out the parking-lot gates and around and in the main entrance. Salesmen were waiting stolidly for the receptionist to give them the nod; and applicants for jobs were waiting nervously for their appointment with the personnel office.

The receptionist gave me a cool professional glance and then suddenly reognized me and rewarded me with a brilliant smile. “Good morning, Mr. Dean! Would you sign here, please? I’m afraid you’ll have to wear this badge. Mr. Mottling said for you to come right up whenever you arrived.”

I signed and pinned the badge on my lapel. It said: “Vistor—Offices Only.”

“Shall I phone up and say you’re on the way, Mr. Dean?”

“No thanks. I want to stop off and say hello to Mr. Granby first.”

There was no need to give her that bit of information, but I did it consciously, knowing it was the sort of tidbit that would be transmitted by the office grapevine with the speed of light, and within a half hour I would be labeled a Granby supporter in the Granby-Mottling feud. I didn’t know whose side I was on yet. But I wanted to give Mottling a bad moment, if at all possible.

Joan Perrit sat behind the big secretarial desk in Walter Granby’s outer office. The desk was gray steel. The wall behind her was pale aqua. She wore a white blouse and, with her dark copper hair, the effect was that of an advertisement in color for office décor. She looked up quickly and smiled and said, “Good morning, Mr. Dean.” Both the smile and the tone were professionally correct, and I knew her code would never permit the odd closeness of the previous evening to overlap the working day.

As I answered her I guess some of that speculation was readable in my expression, because she colored slightly.

“Is Walter in, Perry?”

“Colonel Dolson is in there with some vouchers right now, Mr. Dean.” She reached toward the intercom on her desk. “But I think he’d like to know—”

“I’ll wait, thanks. Last night was fun, Perry.”

“Yes—it was.”

“You go right ahead with whatever you’re doing.”

I sat and watched her. She was using an electric typewriter. As she did not have to take her fingers from the keys to return the carriage to the beginning of each new line, the soft clatter of the keys was continuous. I knew she was aware of being watched. Once she frowned and compressed her lips, snatched up an eraser and erased original and carbons. She finished, took the sheets out of the machine, and sorted them.

I said, “I’m seeing Walter before I see Mottling. How will the rumor factory handle that, Perry?”

“It might change the odds a little. I heard yesterday that in the mail room you can get seven to one if you want to bet on Mr. Granby.”

The door of Walter’s office opened suddenly and a man in uniform came out, stepping briskly. He was a wide man in his fifties. His cropped gray hair had not receded. His skin tone was a firm, warm, healthy pink. The uniform was beautifully tailored. The shoulder eagles were as bright as freshly minted dimes.

He was humming softly to himself. He smiled at Joan Perrit, gave me a quick sharp glance out of blue eyes that looked young and clear, and walked on for three sharp paces, setting his heels down firmly. He then stopped and made an about face with parade-ground precision. He gave me another of those sharp glances, and smiled broadly and came toward me, hand outstretched.

“You must be Gevan Dean! I can see the family resemblance. I’m Colonel Dolson.”

I took his hand. His handshake was energetic. He exuded an aroma of barber shops, facials, rubdowns, manicures. He was a testimonial for prudent exercise, polished leather, a careful taste in brandy. His teeth gleamed.

I told him his guess was correct. “Damn glad to meet you, Dean. By God, Stanley promised me faithfully he’d get hold of me as soon as you arrived this morning.”

“I haven’t seen Mr. Mottling yet, Colonel.”

He glanced toward the door to the inner office, and seemed to realize the implications of finding me here. He pursed his lips for a moment, and then the smile returned.

“Suppose I see you in Stanley’s office as soon as you finish up here, Mr. Dean.” It sounded enough like an order to annoy me. I made no response. “It was a damn shame about your brother, Dean. A shock to all of us. He was a sweet guy.” Somehow the Colonel managed to say sweet in such a patronizing manner that it made it sound as though
Ken had been inane and ineffectual. I thanked him for his sympathy and he went off, his neat leather heels going clopclop-clop on the composition floor, marching to the beat of unheard drums.

I glanced at Perry and saw that the expression on her face matched the way I felt.

I saluted the doorway and said, “Yes sir, sir!”

Perry laughed her good laugh. “I guess he can’t help sounding like that, Mr. Dean.”

“Is he a regular?”

“Oh, no. He’s a reserve officer on active duty. I heard somebody say he owns a hardware store in Grand Rapids.” She reached for the intercom switch again and I told her I’d walk in on him.

Walter Granby looked up at me and grunted with surprise. His slow smile spread the deep bloodhound folds of his cheeks like someone parting draperies with both hands.

“So you finally decided to come home, boy. Sit down. You’ve been missed around here.”

I sat down and grinned at him. There was a stinging feeling in my eyes. Walter had gone to work for Grandfather Gevan at the age of seventeen. He was a link with a good past.

“I won’t try to say anything about Ken, boy. You know how I feel, I imagine.”

“I know, Walter. Somebody said something about you having a private war around here.”

“I didn’t enlist, boy. I was drafted.” He looked older, wearier than I remembered, but he did not sound as though time had dulled the sharp edge of his mind.

“Do you want the job, Walter? Do you want to run the place?”

His eyes sharpened and his laugh was a deep rumble. “Egomania at my age? Not that way, boy. I’ll try to take over just to make sure Mottling doesn’t.”

“No like?”

“You squirts don’t seem to realize that on the inside a
man never thinks of himself as old. He never feels old. Mottling calls me ‘sir’ and acts like he wants to take my arm and help me up and down stairs. Some day he’s going to ask for the inside story on how Lincoln got shot. By God, I may tell him, too.”

“So you want him out because you don’t like his approach?”

“Shouldn’t you remember me a little better than that, boy? As a production man, except for certain tendencies I’d label fascist, he’s pretty sharp. Of course, by the time he finishes driving away everybody with any brains in the production end, it may be a different story. I’d define him as a hell of a good man to come in on a trouble-shooting basis and get out again, and not so good for the long haul.”

“What would you do, Walter, if it were all your baby?”

“Try to get back the production boys he’s chased away. Hell, I’m a figure man. I’d need those boys back.”

“How was Ken doing?”

He stared at me for a moment. “I think you could answer that yourself. Not good, Gev. Too soft for the job. Not enough iron in him. Not nasty like you used to be. Never came in to bang on my desk like you used to when you wanted to get your hot little hands on the reserves.”

“My God, you’d think it was your money, Walter.”

“I’m the watchdog, boy. That’s my job. And we’re in pretty fair shape right now. We haven’t had to dig as deep as I thought we would. On plant expansion, on the fixed-price stuff, we get a percentage of the total contract price as soon as production facilities are set up. Sort of a percentage-ofcompletion deal. Almost like an advance payment.”

“That,” I said, “sounds as if one Walter Granby had done some operating.”

“I pushed and pried a little. We’ve used short-term construction loans rather than dig down into the barrel.”