Area of Suspicion (26 page)

They got off at six. When the door slid shut, I asked the operator if they had to take him very far.

“Just to six-eleven, around the first corner. Imagine a guy like that! He wants to get stinking, he ought to wear civvies. He don’t have to wear the uniform all the time.”

“Does it happen often?”

“I never see him that bad before. Now they got to strip him and drop him in the sack. Special service. Courtesy of the hotel.”

I got off at my floor and got my coat. The telephone rang. When I answered it, there was no one there. I smoked a cigarette, wondering about the call, feeling uneasy about it, and then heard the cautious rattle of fingernails against my door. I opened it. Hildy was standing there, brown eyes wide. She came in quickly and closed the door and leaned against it. She was wearing a yellow dress, one obviously styled for the lounge. Over it she wore a polo coat, too large for her, unbuttoned, the sleeves turned up above her wrists.

“Something,” she said, “depth-bombed the good Colonel.”

“I saw him in the elevator.”

“Then you know the condition. Messy, wasn’t he? You’ve been interested in him, so I thought you ought to know this. Tonight was the night. He leaned pretty hard on me. Just pack a little bag, dear. We’ll start in my car. Acapulco, Rio, the Argentine. He couldn’t believe my
no
was final. He offered one other inducement, Gevan. A sheaf of bills—of large, coarse, crude money. Honest to God, I never saw so much money all at one time since I was a little kid and my daddy took me through the Mint with all the other tourists. Maybe there’s larceny in my heart. For five seconds I was thinking about going along for the ride and the off-chance of rolling him.”

“Do you think he actually intends to take off, Hildy?”

“Yes. He can’t act that good. When the money didn’t work, he started drinking too fast and he told me that somebody had told him everything was set, whatever that means. And he said that, by God, he was no fool and he wasn’t going to wait around and be a clay pigeon for anybody, by God. He knew when the sign said the end of the road, and this was it.”

“Now he’s too drunk to go any place,” I said.

“Maybe some of that load is my fault. He kept insisting I,
give him some reason why I wouldn’t go with him. I finally gave him the reason. I told him every time he put his hand on me it made me feel like the time I was a little kid and Buddy Higgins from across the street put an angleworm in my bathing suit.”

“God!”

“I know. Maybe it was too rough. Something was fracturing him and that finished him. He wasn’t lucid very long after I told him that. I guess it’s best that he got so he couldn’t talk at all. I think he could spout some stuff that would make his little pal sore at him.”

“What little pal?”

She gave me a quick glance and pulled the folded-back sleeve up so she could look at her watch. “I’ve got to go sing. Could you take a look at the Colonel, Gevan, just to make sure he doesn’t fly out any windows?”

“How do I get into his room?”

She handed me a key. “With this. He forced it on me during one of his relatively sober moments. Be a good guy, Gevan. I’ve got to run.”

“Do you want a report?”

“Please.”

After she left for the elevators, I went in the opposite direction, toward the stairs. I went down to the sixth and found six-eleven. I knocked and listened with my ear against the door panel, then let myself in. They’d taken off his jacket, tie, and shoes and put him on the bed. He didn’t stir when I turned the lights on. I made a careful search. I found a .45 Colt in the bureau, complete with web belt, holster, and extra clips. I thumbed his eyelid up. He was too far gone to twitch. He blew bubbles in the corner of his mouth. The Colonel was a careful man. There was nothing in the room to incriminate him. So I took a look through his pockets. All Army officers come equipped with little black notebooks for their shirt pockets. I stood over him and thumbed through his little black notebook.

Most of the pages were full of unimportant stuff. Memos about appointments. Shopping lists. There were two pages
of names in the back. Josie, Annabelle, Alma, Judy, Moira, and so on. The names had one, two, or three stars. Alma had four stars. The colonel’s code. I replaced this notebook, pulled the blanket down, and levered him over onto his stomach. I pried his wallet out of his hip pocket. He had sixty-three dollars, and enough membership cards to prove he was a joiner. I put the wallet back. I had just covered him up again when I heard a key in the door. Joe Gardland came in. The husky bellhop was behind him. Joe registered acute surprise.

“What the hell are you doing in here, Gevvy?”

“A friend of the Colonel’s asked me to take a look at him and see if he was all right.”

“How did you get in?”

“The friend gave me a key. Here. You want it?”

Joe took it and handed it to the bellhop. “Here you go, Willy. Leave it off at the desk.” The bellhop looked nervous. He took the key and nodded and left.

Joe shut the door. “Is he okay?”

“Except for the head he’s going to have.”

Joe stared at the unconscious officer. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his forehead. “Once in a long while,” he said, “a hotel owner gets a break. Not often. Just once in a while. Willy is a good boy. He decided the Colonel would like his jacket cleaned. On the way down, Willy finds a fat envelope in the inside pocket. He takes a look in the envelope and sees money. So he does the right thing. He brings it to me. Thank God he didn’t count it. If he had, I’d never have seen him again. Even a nice boy like Willy has a price. I take the envelope into my office. I start counting. Pretty soon I start sweating. I can’t get it into the safe fast enough, and I don’t even like having it there. I come to wake him up and tell him the dough is safe. What are they paying colonels lately, anyway?”

“Not that much, Joe.”

He walked over and took a close look at the body. “This bird-colonel is really a bird, Gevvy. He has a built-in wolf call. Around four o’clock he had to come back from the
plant and have a chat with the police. They tied him in with the little girl who took a leap off the bridge. You know about that?”

“Yes. I knew her. Was Dolson mentioned in her suicide note?”

“No. The way I understand it, they’d been seen around. Not lately, though. They were seen in clubs and so on.”

“How did Dolson make out with the police?”

“I got a report. I have to keep in touch when there’s a chance I might get some bad publicity for the hotel. He was very manly with them. Straight-from-the-shoulder stuff. ‘Yes, men, I knew the little girl. Yes, indeed. Like a daughter to me. Lonely, you know. Took her around a bit until she got better acquainted here. Helped her morale.’ ”

“Did they buy that?”

“I guess they had to. Anyway, even if they figured he’d been jumping her, they wouldn’t want to smear up his career. I don’t like the son of a bitch, but he is decorative around here. Until tonight. It doesn’t look like he’ll wake up in a hurry, does it?”

“Not for hours.”

“I usually get along good with the military, Gevvy. Most of the brass is okay. Once in a while you get one of these. Eagles on his shoulders, and he thinks he’s the Second Coming. I’ll bet you in his home town they’d blackball him at the Lion’s Club. Then all of a sudden he’s back in uniform and he’s a social lion. Knows every headwaiter in town.”

“Will you do me a favor, Joe? He’s going to wake up and find the money missing and come yelling to you. I want you to stall him.”

“How, for God’s sake? He’ll run to the cops.”

“He might not. He might be very easy to stall. Think up some excuse. Maybe you took it to the bank for safekeeping.”

Joe was quick. “Could be the money is not the Colonel’s?”

“Could be.”

“I want to ask questions, but I can tell by that look in
your eye you’re not going to answer them. Okay, I’ll do it. I’m getting soft in the head anyway. Let’s get out of here.”

We rode down in the elevator. Joe got off at the lobby. I went down the next level and into the Copper Lounge. I stood just inside the door. Hildy was singing “All of Me.” When I caught her eye, I held up a circle of thumb and finger. She nodded.

I went through the tunnel to the hotel garage and waited by the ramp until my rented car was brought down. I was too early at the plant. There were lights on in the offices. A second shift was going full blast in C and B buildings. I turned off the car lights and slouched in the seat and lit a cigarette. I was parked directly across from the main entrance. I wondered if the time had come when I should stop nosing around independently. It might be wise, first thing in the morning, to go to the regional office of the FBI and speak to the Special Agent in Charge, and give him what I knew about Acme Supply. If it didn’t fall within their jurisdiction, they could put me in touch with the right organization. Men from the General Accounting Office would come to the plant and make a complete audit of all vouchers and payments on the D4D contract. The money in Joe’s safe could be impounded, and they could ask the Colonel how he happened to have that much money in cash. Alma was dead, but Perry and I could swear to what she had told us. Perry could inform them of the missing files. And the Colonel would be soon drawing a set of coveralls from the supply counter at Leavenworth.

I was on my third cigarette when Perry came out, slim against the lights behind her, pausing at the top of the steps. I turned on the lights and beeped the horn. She came hurrying across the street, and in the slant of street lights I saw her smiling.

With Perry beside me, and the April rain dotting the windshield between slow strokes of the wipers, I drove through the center of town and out South River Boulevard. Perry sat half-facing me, her knees pulled up on the seat, and listened without interruption as I told her what had
happened and what I suspected. When I stopped for a light I looked over at her. She wore no hat and her hair looked burnished and lovely.

“What do you mean, Gevan, when you talk about the whole thing dissolving?”

“I feel that the Colonel’s racket is only a part of it. Files disappear, Alma dies, the Colonel takes off. That leaves only a mail drop, and one unidentified, obscure little man. So the Colonel is caught and disgraced and imprisoned. The Army replaces him and cleans up the mess. Maybe they catch one C. Armand LeFay, and maybe they don’t. But it’s like giving the getaway car in a bank robbery a parking ticket. Lester Fitch is implicated. Niki is implicated. Mottling is implicated. I can’t see Dolson in any position of knowledge where he could drag them all in, even to save his own hide.”

“What do they get out of all this, Gevan?”

“It’s becoming obvious. They get access to the most carefully guarded secret of all—the production rate of the D4D. It gives them the chance to foul up the production program, and sabotage what we produce.”

I took a quick glance at her as we passed the glaring lights of a shopping center. Her head was tilted and she was giving me an odd, puzzled, almost pitying smile.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Gevan, really! I mean isn’t that a little too much?”

“It’s been a cold war so long, Perry, too many people have forgotten it’s a war. We’re leery of dramatics. Too many commy hunts have made the whole bit unfashionable. Warring ideologies are in stasis, Perry. Tell me why?”

“Well … I suppose it’s because if anybody starts anything, we’ll destroy each other.”

“Okay so far. Now assume that in spite of Cuba and the Congo and all the rest of it, they get the idea they’re losing ground in the cold war. Would they give up?”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Just suppose, Perry, that a year and a half or two years, the Kremlin decided they have to take the risk of turning it
into a hot war. What would they do? They would intensify all espionage activities. We know they’ve done that. They would yell about peace, about the impossibility of nuclear war, and their earnest desire to compete economically. They’re doing that. And let’s try to take a shrewd guess about their third step. I think they would commit their most valuable agents, the ones who’ve never been given an assignment, the ones who’ve worked themselves carefully and deeply into our industrial, scientific and military structure. When they’ve pulled enough of our teeth, and gently loosened the rest of them, they can take the most horrible gamble the world has ever seen, and convince those historians who survive that we started it. How many Mottlings, after all the years of waiting, have suddenly been put to work?”

“But what can he …”

“The D4D is part of the guidance and control system for an ICBM which we can assume operational. They’re doubtless being made elsewhere too. Maybe there are even alternate designs. But they stuck Stanley Mottling on this one.”

“What … how could he …”

“First he rides the top production brains out of the picture. Poulson, Fitz, Garroway and the others. He replaces them with fools, stooges and conspirators. Next he corrupts the Colonel, and that is easy because the Colonel is a vain, stupid, greedy little man. On his own I doubt he could figure out how to ream the government. So Mottling maybe made the plausible suggestion of renting outside storage space, then adjusted procedures to give Dolson a freer hand with purchase orders, then had LeFay contact him on the outside and show him the way to wealth and plenty. And one day Dolson found out Mottling owned him, the way a man owns a dog, and Mottling started to use him. Remember, Dolson is contracting officer, inspection officer and shipping officer. Change a few specs, bitch a few dimensions, and you’re in the business of manufacturing intercontinental duds. Dolson could divert the few good
ones to Canaveral, or wherever they test them by seeing how they fly.”

“It sounds as if … you really know.”

“When the big guess is right, Perry, all the little mysteries make sense. Ken was a wooden executive, but he was a damn fine engineer. I think he finally caught on. And they had to shut him up quickly.”

“Horrible!” she whispered.

“If they could keep twenty Mottlings busy for one year, they could afford to pull the string, Perry. They’d bang us twenty to one. They’d have some wounds to lick, but we’d be stone cold dead.”