Area of Suspicion

by John D. MacDonald

  And there was another odd thing about his letters. They now rambled on about old days, old times, long before our trouble. Like the time at the lake we went searching for the lost Harrison girl and became lost ourselves. It was odd for him to bring up those old days, as though he were trying to recreate the warmth between us. I could try to deny that warmth, but it was still there. That sort of thing can’t really be killed.

  Midge made a ceremony of inspecting the burning tip of her cigarette. I waited for her to speak, concealing my impatience.

  “Sooner or later,” I said, “you’re going to have to tell me. I’ve got all day too.”

  She made a face. “There’s a man waiting. He says it’s important. He’s a stuffy type. I think he disapproves of me. His name is Fitch.”

  “Fitch!” It shocked me. I wondered what on earth Lester was doing in Florida. I couldn’t imagine him taking a vacation—or looking me up if he did. He belonged entirely to the world I had given up.

  “He says it’s important, and whatever it is, I guess the phone call was about the same thing.”

  “Maybe I should know about that too,” I said with forced patience.

  “Oh, that was a long-distance from Arland yesterday. It came right after you sneaked off in the boat.”

  “I didn’t sneak off. George loaned it to me. Who phoned?”

  “I took it and explained we couldn’t get in touch with you and didn’t know when you’d be back.” She took her long dramatic pause and said, “It was your brother’s wife, Gevan.”

  Maybe I could have successfully kept my expression blank and bland if I’d never told Midge about the whole mess. Perhaps not. Even after four years it was much too close, too vivid, too hurting. I had to turn my back and that, of course, told Midge precisely what she wanted to know, confirmed all the rest of it, and made me resent her.

  The thought of Niki phoning me was like a knife. Niki phoning, and Lester Fitch coming to see me. Maybe it was just a new angle on the old game of trying to get me to go back into the firm, back to that life that had become impossible four years ago. But that didn’t fit. The method seemed implausible. Niki would never be a part of any such sales attempt—not if she wanted it to succeed. I felt the dread I’d had when I’d seen Jigger’s boat bearing down on me.

  Midge came up beside me and put cold fingers on my arm. She is a woman with little warmth. Yet she needs warmth. She gets what she needs by becoming involved in the emotional problems of others. She knew my problem and I was sorry I had ever told her, because her interest is too avid.

  “That man wouldn’t tell me what he wants. He just kept saying it’s important, Gevan. He didn’t want to ride with Jigger, so I said I’d bring you back. He got in on the plane this morning. So apparently he started right after they found out they couldn’t get you by phone.”

  “Take over, Midge, and I’ll get the hook.”

  The starters whined and the motors caught as I pulled in the wet line, hand over hand. I swashed the gunk off the anchor and laid it in place on the bow. Midge eased the “Vunderbar” around and headed toward the channel on the outgoing tide.

  I went below and changed to a shirt and slacks. When I came back up she was just making the turn into the open Gulf.

  “Do you think they want you to go back?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. They stopped asking me a long time ago.”

  “Maybe you should go back, you know.”

  “It’s so gay here, Midge. Who’d want to leave?”

  “Be serious! You know as well as I do what’s wrong. You’re going sour, Gev. You tried to get over her. You tried all the methods and now you’ve stopped trying and you’re going sour.”

  I looked at her dark, avid eyes, and saw the flick of tongue tip across her underlip. This was her meat.

  “Once upon a time, Midge, I told you too damn much about my life. I’m not a soap opera for your private pleasure. Tune in tomorrow and find out if Gevan can find happiness.”

  She smiled. “I’m not going to let you make me angry, my friend,” she said firmly.

  I moved away and stood at the stern, watching the boil of the wake. There was little point in restating my position to Midge, or to myself. After my father died I had taken over the job of running Dean Products. I’d been too young for the job—too young and inexperienced. But sometimes, when you have to grow fast, you can do it. Two years at Harvard Business School had given me the theory. But practice is another animal. At Harvard they don’t have any course in how to react to men your father, and your grandfather, hired. To them you are a punk, and there can be great joy in tripping you up.

  It had scared me, but I stayed with it, and got up every time I was thrown, and one day I found out I was enjoying it. Maybe you enjoy any skill you acquire. You learn that the raw materials most important are not the special steels, that the production equipment most important is not the stolid rows of machine tools. Your material and your equipment are human beings, and you learn their strengths and their weaknesses, and how to make them part of a production team. Then the rest comes easier. The shoes had looked too big and the steps too long, but after a time I could match the stride and we showed a profit, and that was good because it was a measure of how well I was doing.

  Then Niki came along, fitting into my life in a way that made wonderful sense. Niki, who would inevitably be my wife and bear our children and live with me in a house that would be warm and good with love.

  Girl and Job. Work in itself cannot be both means and end. There must be some person to whom you can bring your small victories and be rewarded.

  But twelve hundred nights ago I walked down a rainy street toward her place, walked with the bumping heart the thought of seeing her always gave me. I walked in, not thinking to knock or call out, and that was neither guile nor rudeness, but the same eagerness which had made me walk so quickly from my car.

  I walked in on her and saw my brother’s hands, strong against the sheen of her housecoat. I saw her on tiptoe in his arms, with upturned mouth and all the long ripe lines of her held by him in the instant before she turned to look at me with the drowsy, tousled look of a woman lost in kissings.

  We were to have been married that month.

  There are pictures you keep with a peculiar vividness in your mind, the very good ones and the very bad ones. There was the look of his hands on her, and the way she stumbled aside when I pushed her so I could get at him, and the look in his eyes as he stood there making no attempt to block or dodge the blow that broke his mouth. There was no memory of the things I said to the two of them before I walked back out into the rain. Nor any memory of the walk, or, much later, of driving the car back to my place.

  During that week I found out that I could not go on. I couldn’t adjust myself to the role of the betrayed, the strong silent type who contents himself with Job alone now that Girl is gone. I might have managed it if it had been someone else who had taken her from me. But Ken and I had been close. I had come to think of us as a good team, his practical, methodical steadiness compensating for my weakness of trying to move too fast, too soon. If it had been someone else who took her from me, hate would have been less complicated. I might have been able to recreate my interest in, and dedication to, Dean Products. But my brother had stolen the satisfactions of my work in the same moment he had stolen Niki Webb.

  I walked out and the presidency went to Ken. He wrote often at first, asking me to come back. I read the first few letters, destroyed the rest unread. Later he did not write as often. The hand that signed the letter was a hand I had seen against the blue of her housecoat. And it was the hand which had put the ring on Niki’s finger.

  The beach house at Indian Rocks was a new world and I tried to keep everything out of that world which could start me thinking of what-might-have-been. When I was least charitable with myself I would think of it as a four-year sulk. But when the sun was bright and the beach girls’ laughter was warm in their throats, and the portable radios w
ere picking up the Latin rhythms of the Havana stations—then it all seemed desirable and good.

  The “Vunderbar” churned south, paralleling the coast. There was a change in the silver-gray day. Gusts came out of nowhere, riffled the water and faded into stillness. There was a yellowish hue in the west, a threat of storm—that sort that appears before the storm clouds can be seen. In moments a day can change just enough for the atavistic warnings to occur, that prickling at the back of the neck, a crawl and pull of flesh.

  I looked at the yellow cube that was the Fort Harrison Hotel at Clearwater, landmark for local navigation, and thought about Lester and told myself they just wanted me to go back. The last annual report to the stockholders had told of an increasing load of government contracts—and the plant expansion, added shifts, increased tool procurement. That was all it was. New management stresses. A desk for Gevan Dean.

  I told myself all that and didn’t believe it.

  I couldn’t get it out of my mind that something had gone terribly, desperately wrong.

  “You know we don’t want you to leave,” Midge said suddenly. “George and I. You know that.”

  “Thanks, Midge. I won’t go back there.”

  “You say that. I feel lonesome already.” Her laugh had a thin nervous flutter. “We’ve had good times.”

  “Yes.”

  “But not many lately, Gev. Not many at all.”

  I didn’t answer her. Far ahead of the “Vunderbar” a school of fish were striking bait, hitting like bonito, sending the gouts of spray up as though a machine gun was being fired at the water. Gulls whooped and dipped. The Gulf had an oily look and the ground swell had begun to build up. Far out the charter boats were through trolling, were heading home, running for shelter.

  And I had not heard Niki’s voice in four years.…

  Chapter 2

  Lester Fitch wore a dark gray suit, a white shirt, sedate-figured tie. In his felt hat, and with the sun glinting on the perfect prisms of his glasses he was completely out of key with the beach and the sea as he walked beside me down the sand road to my house.

  I have contempt and pity for Lester. I have watched him with others, watched the excellence of his imitation of a sincere young lawyer who is going places in his profession. His act is unsure when he is with me, and perhaps with anyone else who remembers him from high school. He probably wishes no one could remember. He was one of those blubbery, ungainly kids with acne, who grew too fast and who seems to exist in order to be persecuted. He could not run fast enough to avoid torment, and had no strength to match his growth. His cry of pain and outrage was an adenoidal bellow. With those of us who remember him from then, he tries very hard to be the manly lawyer, but the mask is always slipping a bit, exposing the wariness and uncertainty underneath.

  He had watched me somberly while I hosed down the “Vunderbar,” looking more than ordinarily ill at ease. I had concealed my impatience to know what had brought him down, and made the routine job last. The rich leather of his briefcase glowed in the pale and ominous light of the day. When I was through he said he’d rather talk at my place. He walked there, beside me, as out of place in Indian Rocks as one of our tanned beach girls would have been in the raw April of Arland.

  We went into my small, cypress-paneled livingroom. I had left the windows closed and the air was musty, sea-damp. I opened them wide. Lester sat on the couch and put the briefcase beside him and placed his felt hat carefully on the briefcase. He crossed his legs and adjusted his trouser crease. He seemed intent on little routines, and the whole act was wrong. I didn’t know how it was wrong until I realized how he would have acted had it been an attempt to get me back into the firm. Then he would have been full of false affability, full of chat about what a nice little place this is, and you’re looking well, old boy. Instead of joviality, he was acting like a lawyer awaiting an unfriendly verdict.

  “Niki tried to get in touch with you by phone yesterday, Gevan,” he said, on a faint annoying note of accusation.

  “So I was told. And you flew down. I was told that too. Now you’re supposed to tell me why?”

  He polished his glasses on a bone-white handerchief. His naked eyes looked mild and helpless. Usually it is possible to guess which part Lester is playing, which mask he has selected from his limited supply. This one bothered me because I couldn’t guess what effect he was trying to create.

  He put the glasses on, and his smile was something that came and went quickly and weakly, a smile of nervous apology. My unreasoning forebodings had made me as nervous as he acted. I said harshly, “Get to the point! What do you want?”

  “Gevan—I don’t know how to—Gevan, Ken’s dead.”

  I walked to the window and looked out at the sand road, at the beach, and the oiled gray of the Gulf. The swells curled and broke. The wind had freshened. Pelicans, in single file, glided by, somber and intent. Two husky boys in blue trunks were practicing handstands. They could have been brothers.

  Kendall Dean is dead.

  One word. A heavy word, like something falling. It did a strange thing. It changed him from a man I thought I hated back into my kid brother. Kid brother, dead at thirty-one. It awakened all the deep, warm things of long ago, all the things I had pushed out of my mind so I could think of him only as a male who had taken my woman from me, so I could deny brotherhood and recognize only the hate and the resentment.

  The hate had been strong. But one word took it away. One word brought back the good days, those good, lost summers. He was a face weeping in the window that first day when I was taken to school, because he was not old enough to go, and the days would be lonely for him without our games and projects. Cave, treehouse, hideout, secret rites of many memberships, codes and plots and complicated wars.

  I remembered the day the roan threw him and broke his arm, and I walked him home and he would not cry.

  I thought of him as my kid brother, and felt a terrifying remorse that we had not spoken in four years, that I had not written him, that the last thing I had done to him was hit him heavily in the mouth and knock him down. I had blamed him, and it was all changed. It had been Niki who had stolen something from me. Stolen the last four years of my brother. All dead now. Mother, father, sister, brother. Sister dead at seven, and all I could remember of her was the way she looked once, running down a wide lawn as fast as she could run, as though she ran away that day from our familiar world.

  Now it seemed Niki had stolen half my life and all of his. Too many deaths. He had been the last one who gave a damn what happened to me, what I did, whether or not I was happy. I had told myself I hated him, but I had not realized these past four years that the very awareness of his existence had been a tie with all the good years.

  The two boys ceased their handstands and walked down the beach, one of them carrying a yellow beach ball. An old woman in a black bathing suit bent over, fingering a pile of shells. The wind flapped the skirt of her bathing suit against suet-legs and the wind came through the window and I could smell rain and dampness in it.

  Lester touched my shoulder and it startled me. I turned and he pulled his hand back.

  “I—didn’t mean to break it to you so—bluntly.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “It was one of those crazy, pointless things.” There was anger in his voice. “It happened just after midnight Friday night, Gevan. Lord, that seems weeks ago. He and Niki were having a quiet evening. She went to bed, but she wasn’t asleep when it happened. Ken was taking a walk around the place. The police think he surprised a prowler. Somebody shot him in the back of the head. It killed him instantly.”

  I stared at Lester. “In the back of the head!”

  “It’s such a senseless waste,” he said. “It’s the sort of thing that’s always happening to people you don’t know. You read about it in the papers. You think what a bad break, but it doesn’t touch you, because it never happens to people you know.”

  “When is the funeral?”

 
; Lester looked at his watch. “A lot of company people want to attend, of course. And things are so rushed at the plant that it was decided they’d have it today. About three hours from now. Niki is terribly, terribly shocked, as you can well imagine. It shocked the whole city. He had a lot of friends, Gevan.”

  “I know.” I sat down. He had a lot of friends because he was a good man. The news changed the look of my world. My livingroom was alien, as if I had wandered into a place where strangers lived. I got up to make myself a drink. I asked Lester if he wanted one. He asked for a light one. I made mine stiff. A prowler with a twisted mind and a finger on a trigger. There would be quite a few stiff drinks, but I knew there wouldn’t be enough of them.

  As I brought the drinks, Lester was opening his briefcase. The zipper made a secretive sound. I put the drink beside him and said, “What have you got there?”

  His specialized knowledge gave him assurance. He was out of the world of bad tidings, and back in his garden of torts and writs. Assurance brought back his air of patronizing efficiency. “You know I hate to bother you with this sort of thing at a time like this, Gevan. But it’s best to get the details taken care of. I have a plane connection to make. But if you’d rather not, of course, we can—”

  “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  He handed me a paper, saying, “I need your signature on this for the probate court. Under the terms of your father’s will, as Ken died without issue, his share of the trust fund reverts to you. Ken’s will, of course, leaves everything to Niki. You can have another lawyer check this, but—”

  I read it carefully. He uncapped a pen and handed it to me at precisely the right moment. If he had been handling the personal legal affairs of Ken and Niki, he had acquired a pleasantly profitable account. I signed it and gave it back to him.

  He handed me another bit of paper. I saw that it was a standard proxy form. It was made out to Niki, to Mrs. Kendall Dean.

  “This will require more explanation,” he said.

  “I should think so.” I hadn’t voted my shares since I had left.