Area of Suspicion (6 page)

She looked at her small jeweled watch. “I’ve got to go sing for the people, Gev.”

She stood up and I stood up too. She was a very small girl. She looked up at me, biting her lip, speculative. I said, “You’ll be back?”

“We’ve said what we had to say about Ken. And all you can give me now is a load of some of your own trouble, Gev.”

“I wouldn’t want to do that.”

“You’d do it without trying to do it.”

“You see a lot, don’t you?”

“I guess. And this whole thing has made me feel older than hills. Old enough and tired enough so I don’t want any new trouble. Come back some time, Gev. When things are straightened out for you, and when we can have some laughs.”

“I will, Hildy.”

Her hand rested in mine for a moment and this time her smile was shy. I watched her walk toward the mike, her small back very straight, her brown hair bobbing against her shoulders with the cadence of her walk. I left while she was singing about a love that would not die, her eyes glistening in the subdued spotlight. Her voice followed me out the door.

Dreams kept waking me up that night, and fading before I could grasp them. Each time I woke up I knew that Niki had been in the dream. But the words she had said were lost.

Chapter 4

The nine-o’clock telephone call interrupted my morning shower. Lester Fitch greeted me in a mellow, oiled voice and informed me that he would be pleased to purchase my breakfast for me.

I stood dripping, holding the phone. “Gevan?” he said.

“I’m here.”

“Oh, I thought we were cut off. I’ll wait right here in the lobby. I didn’t get much chance to brief you on the current status of things at the plant.”

That was just a bit too much. I didn’t want my head patted by Lester Fitch, and I didn’t want to listen to his large editorial we. It’s odd how much of our lives we spend being polite to people in whom we have absolutely no interest. ‘No’ is a word which, if said at the right moment, is the greatest time-saving device in the world. I said it.

“What was that?” he asked, shocked and plaintive.

“No, Lester. Don’t wait.” I hung up.

It was Wednesday morning. If Lester knew, then Niki would know, and Mottling would know, and they would be interested in finding out who I intended to back. I was interested in knowing that myself. I told myself it was the reason I had come up, to make an investigation on my own. Duty to the family firm and all that. Four years of
indifference, and then a sudden burst of dedication. But, last night, Joe and Hildy had given me another problem. Maybe there would be no answer to that one. Maybe it was locked forever in the dead brain of my brother. Sooner or later I would have to see Niki. But I wasn’t ready yet.

Perversely, turning down Lester had improved my morning mood. I rode the elevator below the lobby floor just in case Lester might be hanging around in hopes of my changing my mind. I went out through the grill and up the steps onto Pernie Street. The rain had washed the air. The day sparkled. It felt good to be back where most of my life had happened. Even Pernie Street had a special meaningfulness. My high school class held the graduation ball at the Hotel Gardland. Ken was a sophomore when I was a senior. He attended too, and I couldn’t remember the name of his date. Mine was named Connie Sherman. Somebody had a bottle and Ken and I nibbled on it a few times in the men’s room. Later we took the girls down to the grill when the dance was folding. I had parked my car, a beat-up old Olds as big as a hearse, in a lot down Pernie Steet, so we went out the Pernie Street entrance.

There were some boys there we didn’t know, probably North Side High, hanging around to make trouble with the southsiders. Some of them had tried to crash the dance earlier and were tossed out. As we came out, one of them, in the shadows, made a remark about Ken’s date. It was very explicit and anatomical. Ken turned toward them and his date tugged at him and told him to ignore it. I didn’t want trouble, not with the girls there. I think Ken was going to turn away, but he never got a chance. The sucker punch sent him sprawling. I shoved Connie toward the doorway. She used her head and grabbed Ken’s date by the arm and they ran inside. Ken bounced up as one of them tried to kick him and grabbed the leg and spilled the guy on the sidewalk. Then I couldn’t see what was happening because I was suddenly very busy. Somebody banged me under the eye and I swung back and missed and the scrap moved into
the shadows. It was very confusing. I hit somebody solidly and got kicked in the leg. There was grunting, and the sounds of blows, and then I heard somebody making that distinctive sound of trying to suck air back into the lungs after getting hit in the pit of the stomach. I wondered with part of my mind if it was Ken. Somebody ripped my coat and I got hold of a wrist and heaved and sent somebody spinning out across the curb into the lights. Then there was a police whistle and men running out of the hotel. The ones we were fighting ran down Pernie Street. The police were going to take us in, but Connie was very convincing about what happened. We were a mess.

I remember how we got laughing so hard in the car I could hardly drive. My eye was puffed shut by the time we got home. And by the time the story got around school, there were nine of them and Ken and I had knocked out at least five. We smiled in silent, manly modesty, and I felt disappointed when the last saffron hues had faded from my eye.

That was one of the memories. The city was full of them. And the countryside where bike tires had purred, and we had known where to get horse chestnuts. Ken was in the memories. I returned to a present tense, a world in which Ken no longer lived. If his death had any reason or purpose, I had to find it. I had to find out why life had become tasteless to him, why his recent letters had been so troubled, oblique, almost disjointed. Niki and Ken and plant politics and the brute hammer of lead against skull. I wanted it all sorted out, and I thought of the trite analogy of a jigsaw puzzle. But this was one of those where pieces are missing. I sensed that they were all there, but too many of them were turned face down, so that I could not see the colors.

I had a drugstore breakfast and walked eight blocks through the women shoppers to Police Headquarters. I told the desk sergeant my name and said I wanted to talk to whoever was in charge of the investigation of the murder of my brother. He turned me over to a uniformed patrolman who took me down a hall, across an open court, and into
another wing of the big building. We went up a flight of stairs and into a big room. There were long rows of oak desks, with men working at about half of them. The patrolman led me down to one. The small wooden sign on the desk said Det. Sgt. K. V. Portugal. The patrolman bent over and murmured something to him. Portugal glanced at me and gestured toward the chair pulled up beside his desk. I sat down. I thanked the patrolman and he walked away.

Portugal kept working, not rudely, but with air of a man getting routine details out of the way so he could talk in peace. He glanced at reports, scrawled his initials, dropped them in his ‘out’ basket. I guessed his age at about forty. He was a pallid, heavy man, and he looked as if his health was poor. His hair was a scurfy brown, and the flesh of his face hung loose from his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose, sagging in folds against his collar. He breathed heavily through his mouth and his fingers were darkly stained with nicotine. He finished the last document, and looked at me. His chair creaked. He took the cigar from his ash tray and relit it, turning it slowly over the flame of the kitchen match.

“You’re the brother, eh? A sorry thing, Mr. Dean. A mess. Glad we could wrap it up so fast. What can we do for you?”

“I flew in last night. I read the newspaper account. I thought you could tell me the details.”

“A phone tip came in. If it wasn’t for informants, this business would be a lot roughe than it is.” His voice was wheezy and pitched high. “We sent a squad car over to the north side and picked up this Shennary fella. We’ve got two witnesses to testify that Shennary left his room around ten Friday night and didn’t come back until nearly two. The gun was in his room. Thirty-eight automatic. Hadn’t been cleaned since it was fired.”

He grunted as he bent over and pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk. He took out a Manila folder and opened it, took out a glossy print, and placed it in front of me. He used his pencil as a pointer.

“This here is a microphotograph from ballistics. This is the test slug, and this is the slug out of your brother’s body. See how it’s a perfect match. This Shennary is a punk. Picked up three times for armed robbery and did time twice. He was wanted for violation of parole. Here’s his pretty face.”

He slid the mug shot on top of the ballistics print. I picked it up. There was a double photograph, full face and profile, with a reproduction of fingerprints underneath, with print classification, and a reproduction of a typed slip giving vital statistics and criminal record. He looked to be in his middle twenties. He had dark eyes, deeply set, a lantern jaw, overlong, dark hair, and black brows that met above the bridge of his nose. He looked weak, shifty, sullen, and unremarkable. Looking at his face made Ken seem more dead, more completely gone.

“Paroled, you said?”

Portugal leaned back and frowned at his cigar and relit it. “I’m just a cop, not a social worker, Mr. Dean. Some people think they all ought to serve full time. I wouldn’t blame you if you think so, seeing how this one killed your brother. But a lot of them get the parole and straighten out. It’s exceptions like this Shennary who spoil it for the others. He must have convinced the parole board he was going to be okay, or he wouldn’t have been out. He’s a guy without pressure or contacts to do him any good. So he turns out to be a little man with a big gun and bad nerves, and that’s too bad for him and for your brother.”

“Could I get a look at him?”

Portugal shrugged. “If you want to, I guess so.”

“I don’t want to bother you.”

“No trouble. Come on.”

We went down the stairs and across the court to another wing. Portugal walked heavily, leaning forward, teeth clamped on the cigar. His suit was red-brown, shiny in the seat, the jacket wrinkled and hip sprung. An armed patrolman ran the elevator. Portugal asked for the top floor. There was a bull’s-eye window in the door at the top floor
and a man looked through at us and unlocked the door. The man grinned at Portugal and, as he went back to his green steel desk, said, “Aces back to back. Don’t you ever get tired?”

“Ralphie, you know you can’t beat aces with a pair of ladies. We are calling on my pal, Mister Shennary, esquire.”

When the elevator went back down, the man called Ralphie unlocked the cell-block door. “Call me if Mr. Shennary wants his pillow fluffed up, or hot tea or anything.”

Shennary was in the end cell on the left. The plaster walls were painted a pale blue. The window was covered with heavy mesh. He glanced up and got up from the bunk and came over to the door, wrapping thin, dirty fingers around the bars. He wore a gray outfit cut like pajamas.

“How are you on this lovely morning, Wally?” Portugal asked him.

Shennary glanced at me and back at Portugal. Obviously I meant nothing to him. His knuckles were white where he gripped the bars. “You get the right guy, did you?”

“You’re it, Wally. Let’s not kid each other.”

“How many times I got to tell you it wasn’t me? How many times, copper?” His voice was thin and high and it trembled.

“You’re coming apart, Wally. Your nerves are going bad.”

“Get that lawyer back here. Get him to come back. I’ve been telling you it’s a frame. It stinks.”

“This is the brother of the man you killed, Wally.”

Shennary looked at me for long moments. He shook his head. “Don’t let them give you that, mister. They’re making it easy for themself. That’s all it is. Look, I’m a loser. These guys, all they think about is keeping the books clean. Wrap everything up. So they grab the first guy the can find and that’s me. Honest, I never in my life saw that gun until they take it out from under my shirts. That blond copper found it. That place hasn’t got decent locks.
Anybody could put it there. Even the copper that found it. Look, mister, I’m not a moron. If I shoot anybody, I get rid of the gun, don’t I? That figures, doesn’t it? And I get out of town, don’t I?”

“You were drunk,” Portugal said heavily. “Pig drunk.”

“Is there a law now a guy can’t drink?”

“If he’s on parole, there is. And you don’t have a job, and you had a couple of hundred dollars. Where did that come from?”

“I confessed! I told you! So I knocked over a supermarket a couple weeks ago. Send me up for that. But no murder rap. You got to listen to me. Lita can tell you where I was. I told you all that. Why don’t you listen to her?”

Portugal turned toward me. “Seen enough?”

I nodded. Shennary’s voice followed us down the cell block, shrill and frightened. “Mister, they won’t work on it because it’s easier this way. And they don’t care if they get the right guy. They just get somebody and make it stick and then the books are clean. Don’t let him tell you …”

We rode down the elevator. It had shaken me. I guess Portugal sensed that. He said, “They all go into that song and dance. ‘Honest it wasn’t me. There’s some mistake.’ That’s the way their minds work.”

When we walked into the courtyard Portugal said, “We think he was casing those fancy Lime Ridge houses and your brother surprised him. Wally was liquored up and jumpy and so he fired. They all put on an act. He’ll crack before the trial and give us a statement.”

“When will the trial be?”

“One of the assistant D.A.’s was over this morning and approved the file. We’re closing him out and trial will be in the fall sometime.”

“Who is that Lita he was talking about?”

“Girl friend. Italian girl. Lita Genelli.”

“Where could I find her?”

He eyed me a bit warily. “Look, Mr. Dean, you’re not falling for that act, are you? I see it all the time.”

“No—I just wonder what kind of a man he is. Why he’d do a thing like that. I want to see what she’s like.”