Area of Suspicion

by John D. MacDonald

  But I had seen Arland when the streets were dreary with broken shoes, hacking coughs, and panhandlers. I had seen the empty houses. I had seen sharp winter winds blowing the drifters by the closed joints. The heavy metal towns are feast or famine.

  Now it was feast, and in the rain-bright night the town was licking its chops, clapping grease-bitten hands and saying, “Let’s have us a time!”

  The lobby of the Gardland Hotel looked like a movie set for a society mob scene. Everybody seemed to be hurrying in purposeless circles, and they all wore earnest, worried faces. People sat on stacks of luggage looking doleful. I stood near one of the lines at the reservation desk and heard the clerk saying, “Sorry, we don’t have a thing, sir. Next, please? No reservation, sir? Sorry we don’t have a thing.”

  I went to the assistant manager’s desk. In a moment he came hurrying back, looking like a distracted penguin. “Yes, sir?”

  “Is Mr. Gardland in his office?”

  “If you’re after accommodations, sir, I can assure you that it will be useless to—”

  “Would you mind phoning his office and giving my name?”

  “Not at all, but—”

  “Tell him Gevan Dean wants to see him for a moment.”

  “Dean?” His eyes seemed to focus on me for the first time. He murmured into the phone. He hung up and said, “The door is beyond the cashier’s windows, the last door at the end of—”

  I told him I knew where it was. Joe Gardland came out of his office and halfway down the short hallway. His face lighted up. He is a small, plump, balding man, younger than he looks, with shrewd eyes. If they weren’t shrewd eyes, the Gardland would long since have been absorbed into one of the big chains. Purchase or stock transfer would have made Joe permanently, independently wealthy, but he preferred being the king of his own domain.

  He pumped my hand. “My God, Gevvy! My God! Not since Miami two years ago. What a hassle that was! Come in.”

  We went into his office. A pretty girl in waitress uniform sat nervously on a straight chair near the desk. He went to her and put an edge in his voice. “Is it clear now?”

  “Yes, Mr. Gardland.”

  “Shall I send you back to work?”

  Her eyes brightened. “I—I was hoping you would.”

  “Run along then. And watch it. Understand?”

  She stood up and smiled and said, “Gee, I’ll certainly—”

  “Run along.”

  She hurried to the door and smiled again at him over her shoulder and shut the door behind her as she left. He looked ruefully at the door. “Should have tied the can to her. Getting soft, I guess. Sit down. Scotch?… How do you want it?… On the rocks coming up.” As he busied himself at the office bar, chinking the ice into the outsized old-fashioned glasses, he said, without turning around, “Sorry as hell about Kenny. A damn shame.”

  He brought me my drink. “That’s why I came up, Joe.”

  “I’m damn glad they nailed the guy who did it.”

  “What!”

  “Hell, didn’t you know that?”

  “I just got into town.”

  “Then you wouldn’t. They grabbed him around noon in a rooming house in the north end. It’s in the evening papers. Record as long as your arm. He’s all sewed up.”

  “I’m glad they got him,” I said.

  “It sort of surprised me, Gev,” he said, looking down into his glass.

  “That they got him? Have the cops gotten that bad?”

  “I didn’t mean that. It’s not my place to say anything. Look, forget I opened my mouth.”

  “What do you mean, it’s not your place? Whose place would it be, Joe? We’ve been friends a long time. Don’t start something like that and then try to back away from it.”

  He sat down behind his desk. He looked embarrassed. “A man sees a lot in this business. Maybe he adds two and two too often. And makes a fool habit of getting six.”

  “What about Ken?”

  He looked at me. “I had it all tabbed as suicide. Now wait a minute. I thought he’d worked it out in some tricky way, maybe for the insurance angle or something. And I was going to keep my mouth shut. Now don’t look so sore. I know he wasn’t the suicide type. He definitely wasn’t until this past year.”

  “And this past year?”

  Joe shrugged. “It’s a pattern. Came in every day at four-thirty. Eight, nine, or ten stingers. Got very sedately loaded and sat around with ghosts in his eyes. Everybody knew he was on his way out at the plant. He was coming apart. After a while he’d get up and go home. Walking a chalk line, walking like somebody with a big bundle of trouble balanced on his head.”

  “The plant never meant that much to him. He didn’t have enough yen to be top dog, Joe.”

  “Not when you knew him. Hell, that didn’t sound very good. Your own brother.”

  “It’s accurate, Joe,” I said briskly. “I used to know him. Now I keep thinking of the four years. I was a damn fool.”

  “A woman like that can make anybody act like a damn fool.”

  “Is that an excuse?”

  “Knock it off, Gevvy,” he said gently. “It’s spilled milk. Stirring it with a stick turns it into the self-pity pitch. Everybody is in some sense a damn fool. Anyway, you don’t have to believe me. Be in the Copper Lounge tonight about eleven. I’ll introduce you to a little girl who knows more than I do. She’s a cutie and she sings for me and her name is Hildy Devereaux.”

  “Was he playing around?”

  “That word covers too much ground, Gevvy. They were friendly. If they were ever in the hay, it wasn’t here. I would have had a report.” He looked suddenly older. “Need a bed?”

  “I left the bag with the bell captain. Haven’t tried for a room yet.”

  He picked up the phone and asked for the desk. “Ralph? What are we holding?” He listened for a moment. “Okay. A Mr. Gevan Dean goes in the suite on eight. Send a boy to my office with the key and the card.”

  Joe built us another drink. The boy came. I signed the card and described my bag and told him where I left it and asked him to bring the key back to me. We had some aimless talk about old times and old places. The boy came back and I tipped him. Joe went with me to his office door. “It’s a hell of a world, Gev. I’ll miss Kenny. He was one of the nice people.”

  It was nearly eleven when I went into the Copper Lounge. Business was very very good. Low lights gleamed on the bar, on the bare shoulders of women, on the forward-leaning, soft-talking, intense faces of their men. A girl in silver lamé sat at a little pastel piano in the light of a subdued spot, doodling old tunes, chatting and smiling up at a heavy man who leaned on the piano, a drink in his hand.

  I found a stool at the bar and ordered a drink. The bits and pieces of conversation around me were in the tradition of boom town. It was the same record that had been played in the early forties.

  “So we finally got it in carload lots out of Gulfport after Texas City turned us down …”

  “… told them if they wanted to hit their delivery dates on the nose, they could put on another shift like we had to …”

  “… the last time I was home it was the middle of February and how the hell do I know what she’s doing while I’m being bounced all over the damn country …”

  “… look, why doesn’t George bring the plane to Cleveland and that’ll give us an extra day in Chicago …”

  “… so they furnish hotel suites complete with girls and then have a hell of a flap if you won’t set delivery ahead to …”

  This was the same record they’d played many years ago. I looked around at the male faces at the bar. Tension in the mouth, eyes moving quickly, pencil whipped out for a fast sketch on the back of a bar tab. “… Like this, see? Then you use extruded plastic for the sleeve, see? Then you don’t have to sweat out deliveries on the metal stampings.”

  Operators. Angle boys. The expense-account boys. A lot of them were chasing the fast buck and the special privilege. But there were j
ust as many who were in it because they loved the tension, the pressure, the excitement of it. In the old wars of long ago the sutlers were scorned. But not in these wars. A hundred-ton press is worth two battalions. One physicist can be worth two allies. The equations are new.

  The girl at the piano bowed off into the gloom to a polite spattering of applause. A sallow man took her place and the spot slid away from him, moved ten feet to focus on a girl who stood at a microphone. She was small and she had long brown hair and gold tones in her skin and big, brown eyes. She bit her lip and smiled in an appealingly nervous fashion. She stood there until the conversations quieted down.

  There was something helpless about her that made you want to give her your attention. She nodded in the direction of the piano, took a short, unobtrusive introduction, and then sang.

  A ballad about loneliness and longing. The lyrics were tired and flat, but her voice, low and tender, and her manner, intimate and warm, gave the words a personal meaning to every man in the Copper Lounge. She was a pro and she was good and she didn’t corn up the gestures or wag her body around the way amateurs do. Yet you were aware of her body, aware of the good lines of it. The dress was clever. Like a kid’s first formal when you half looked at it, but then you saw how, in the fit and cut, it was very daring.

  While I was adding my share to the loud applause, Joe Gardland edged in beside me and asked, “Like our Hildy?”

  “Very choice, Joe. Very special.”

  He flagged a waiter and said, “Give Mr. Dean that deuce by the wall, Albert.” He turned back to me and said, “Take the table, and I’ll bring Hildy over after her turn.”

  After her songs were over, I saw her coming through the tables toward me, smiling. I stood up. She said, “I’m Hildy. Joe couldn’t bring me. He had to send me.” A waiter held her chair. “Ken spoke of you often, Gev.”

  At close range her features had that flavor of boldness typical of entertainers. She was no longer a shy child singing tender for the people. Entertainers are a separate breed. They have their own language and customs and tribal mannerisms. Any other person is enough to form an audience. I often wonder what they do when they are completely alone—or if they ever are.

  “It was nice of you to come over.”

  “I sing the words other people write, Gev. It doesn’t leave me any of my own to tell you how terribly sorry I am about Ken.”

  “Thank you, Hildy,” I said, and my tone may have been a bit stuffy. “You sing other people’s words very nicely indeed.”

  She tilted her head a bit on the side. “Thank you. I guess you’re a lot like him, aren’t you? You’re kind of standoffish right now. Looking at me as if I were ‘the other woman.’ ”

  Some re-evaluation of Hildy was in order. “I don’t know what my reaction is to you, Hildy. Mostly I don’t know exactly what to say. Joe said Ken was troubled. I thought maybe—”

  “Some of the trouble was me? I don’t think so. He was a friend. We talked. If he’d wanted to put us on a different basis, I don’t know what I would have said. It just never came up.” She smiled a bit bitterly. “Which can be called a new experience for Hildy. Being given no chance to say no, I mean. I don’t know yet if I liked it. I guess I did. He needed somebody around who didn’t make any demands.”

  “That doesn’t fit so well. Ken was never a moody guy.”

  “I never saw him otherwise, Gev. Something was nibbling him. I tried to get him to talk it out. He talked, but not enough. Ever.”

  “Did you ever get any clues?”

  She had a pleasant trick of raising one eyebrow. Her arms were round, and her skin had that golden tone. “He carried his drinks pretty well. Too many drinks. One night he went over the edge a little too far. That was the night he told me dead men didn’t have any troubles. You know the way a drunk talks. He said it like it was a big discovery. I told him he was being morbid. And he said that he could tell the medical profession what it felt like to be torn in half. That didn’t make much sense to me. I got him into a cab and sent him home. The next night he was worried about what he might have said to me. He acted relieved when I told him he hadn’t said anything I could understand.”

  “Torn in half. Funny thing to say. The only way it makes sense is if you think of it as being some decision he had to make and couldn’t make. Like Solomon threatening to chop the baby in two hunks.”

  She drew on the table top with her thumbnail and stared at the little paper tent which advised us to order a Gardland sour. “I read once a out a lab where they trained rats to find their way out of mazes. Then they’d put them in a maze with no way out. The rats would finally lie down and chew their own feet.”

  “Was Ken about to do that?”

  “Something like that. A guy with no way out. I wanted him to talk it out. I thought it would help. But he seemed to like just being with me, and he wanted me to stay in type. Sweet, dumb little songstress. So that’s what I was, most of the time. When I stepped out of character it bothered him.”

  I reached over and put my hand on hers. “I’m glad you were around, Hildy.”

  She pulled her hand away slowly. “Don’t, please. You’ll make me cry and I don’t want to. Let’s get back to our guessing game, Gev. Was it wife trouble? I know there was trouble at the plant, but it didn’t seem to bother him that he wasn’t running the show out there.”

  I thought of Niki leaving me for Ken. And then, perhaps, leaving Ken for somebody else. I thought of her voice on the phone. It didn’t seem possible. And yet, the night before I had found her with Ken, she had been all eagerness in my arms. All soft words and sighs. Maybe neither of us had known Niki.

  “I don’t know, Hildy. I just don’t know.”

  “Sometimes the love bug is a virus, and after a while you go dead inside.”

  “I know that,” I said softly.

  She studied me for a few moments, head tilted again, eyebrow raised. “Is your whole family messed up?”

  I saw then what Ken had seen in her: that capacity for warmth and understanding which seems, always, to be the product of a very special kind of heartbreak. She said, “You’re a stronger one than he was. You’re not as much like him as I thought. Now I know why he missed having you around.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “Yes, he said that, Gevan. And said he didn’t blame you for not being around.”

  “Don’t kid me, Hildy. I should have been around and I wasn’t.”

  I wanted to believe what she said about Ken. I had to believe it.

  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.