Area of Suspicion

by John D. MacDonald

  The old man talked on. I could no longer look at him with mild tolerance. He and I were one. He was what I could become once all sense of responsibility was deadened.

  “I think of Kenny a lot,” he was saying. “It’s a damn shame, you know. He was a nice boy. Quiet. You were the noisy one. You were the one always getting the pair of you in scrapes. Always thought both of you would outlive me. I changed my will again yesterday, Gevan. I hadn’t thought about my will for years, until Kenny died. Had Sam Higbee fix it up again. You get everything I’ve got, Gevan. The stock and some property and there’ll be enough cash to take care of estate taxes. You were named after my dad, you know. Tough old man. Gevan Dean. You ought to go back, Gevan. You ought to go back to work, boy. You’ve taken four years off, I’ve—taken sixty.”

  I looked toward the bar to give him a chance to get himself under control.

  After long seconds he spoke again and his voice was more brisk. “From a practical point of view it would work, Gevan. Karch and Walter Granby would go along with it. I know there was trouble between you two boys, about that woman. With Kenny dead, that’s over. You’ve got no reason to stay away now, Gevan.”

  “It’s still a reason, Uncle Al.”

  “Nonsense! Good Lord, while you other Deans were running the business I got myself a liberal education in females. A woman like that is nothing to make a damn fool of yourself over. They had me to the house a lot of times. She’s one of the greedy ones.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I shouldn’t talk about Kenny’s widow this way. But it’s between you and me. She’s one of those women who make the backs of your hands tingle. Like she wore a sandwich sign around with one word printed on it in big red letters. Sex. There are some like that who aren’t after anything, and those are the best kind. But she uses it like a lever to pry loose what she wants, and those are the dangerous ones. I don’t know what she wants. Money, security, position. She got all that when she married Kenny. But it didn’t relax her. She’s after more than that, and I don’t know what it is. Don’t think I’m just an old man rambling on and on and saying nothing. She isn’t obvious about it. The clever ones never are. You and Kenny were overmatched with that one. Out of your league. She pried on Kenny until she finally broke his mainspring. I don’t know how. Kenny gave up. He acted like there wasn’t anything left to live for. You watch out for her, Gevan, because I don’t know what she’s after.…” His voice trailed off. He sat for a time, his lips moving in key with unspoken thoughts. He straightened up and looked at his watch.

  “Gevan, it’s nice to see you. Charles, give this boy another drink on my tab.” He stood up and looked at his watch. “Got to get back into that game and get some of my money back.” For a moment he looked troubled. “I never seem to win any more. Funny thing. Must be a bad run of cards. Come around for dinner here some night. Any night.”

  He went off, and it was a jaunty imitation of the brisk way he used to walk. The barman brought me another drink. The club was quiet, smelling of oiled wood, cigars, dust. Somebody was running a vacuum cleaner in one of the other rooms. The barman stood, heavy lidded, polishing a glass.

  Kenny was the quiet one. The time mother went to California, Dad used to bring us here for dinner every night. It made us feel special to know women were never permitted in the club except once a year at a special party. We watched beefy men play handball, and we swam in the pool. Those were good years, in a safe world. I remembered we had played tag around the pool and Ken had fallen and cracked his head on the tile. The bump was on the back of his head and within minutes it was the size of an English walnut. Dad’s friends had examined it with awe, and complimented Ken on not crying. I remembered standing aside and wishing it had been me, and wondering if I would have cried.

  I finished the drink and walked into the April sunlight of Thursday afternoon. The day had grown much warmer. Seeing Uncle Al had depressed me. My mind operated on two levels. On the deeper level was the Granby-Mottling problem, the choice that had to be made. Uppermost in my mind was the problem of Ken. Who had killed him with such devious care? Who had fired a lead slug into the back of his head? The same head had gone crack on the tile, and he had stood there in the long ago, his mouth rigid with the effort of repressing the tears, for we were in a place where there were men, and men of course did not cry. Ever.

  I knew I had to go back and see Niki. It would be childish to stay away from her when she was the one who was most likely to give me some small clue as to why he was killed.

  I took my rented car out of the hotel garage and headed for the Lime Ridge house.

  Chapter 10

  The pretty little maid let me in and asked me to wait for a moment. She hurried off and came back and said, “If you would come with me, sir?”

  She led me through the house and out to a small flagstone terrace built into an L of the house. There was a low wide wall around the other two sides. Niki, in a scanty, two-piece, terry-cloth sunsuit of bright yellow lay on a rustic chaise longue upholstered in quilted white plastic. She was in the glare of the afternoon sunlight, her body glistening with oil, and her ink-black hair piled high. She was propped up on one elbow and she had taken off her sun glasses to smile at me.

  “How nice, Gevan!”

  I looked up the slope of the back lawn toward aspen and birch. “It’s nice here.”

  “That door opens into the master bedroom, and whenever we could, we’d have breakfast out here. But it doesn’t catch the morning sun, so we couldn’t really use it often. I’ll show you the whole house sometime, Gevan.”

  I heard myself murmuring that it would be nice. She put her sun glasses on and lay back. They were the kind that are mirrors. You cannot see the eyes of the wearer. It gave her a blinded look. There was some pink in her skin tone. She lay drowsy in the sun, oiled and relaxed, and it was too easy to stare at the arching lines of her, at warm perfections.

  “Sure you’re not getting too much?” I asked, my voice harsh.

  “Oh, I never burn.”

  I sat on the low wall and lit a cigarette. The mirrored glasses gave me the odd feeling that she couldn’t see me. “Light two, dar—Gevan. How stupid! Almost calling you darling. The heat makes me feel so—very far away from myself.”

  “I know that feeling.” I lit two cigarettes and took one to her. She lifted her chin a fraction of an inch and I put it between her lips. She inhaled deeply and took the cigarette from her lips. I sat on the wall again.

  “Grief is such a funny thing, Gevan. It isn’t constant, as you’d think. It goes and comes. You forget for a little minute, and then it all comes back smashing you down.”

  “I know.”

  “Of course you would know, wouldn’t you. I can’t seem to open my mouth without sounding inane. I wish—”

  “What do you wish, Niki?”

  “This will sound even worse. I wish we hadn’t ever been—emotionally entangled. Then I could lean on you harder. The way it is, I feel—awkward and guilty.” The mirrored eyes reflected the deep blue of April sky.

  I did not answer. She sighed audibly. “You hate me, don’t you, Gevan?”

  I smiled at the blind lenses. “I was unique and irresistible. It never occurred to me that anybody could turn me down.”

  “That is a very bitter smile.”

  “Hurt pride.”

  She sat up and inspected her long, lithe, sun-reddened legs, poked experimentally at her thigh and watched the white finger-mark slowly disappear, then lay back again, snapping her cigarette out over the low wall into the grass.

  “We won’t get anywhere talking about it, I guess.” The sun had moved. An edge of roof shadow touched her shoulder. “Would you roll me out from the wall a little bit, please?”

  The chaise longue had two wooden wheels at the head part, and handles at the foot part. I lifted the handles and pulled her out a bit, and knew she watched me through the mirrored lenses as I did so.

  “Why don’t you take off
your coat, Gevan? Your face is just dripping.”

  “Good idea.” I took my coat off and rolled up the sleeves of my white shirt.

  The lovely little amber-skinned maid came out onto the terrace, trim in a well-cut spring suit, demure in manner. “Excuse me, Mrs. Dean.”

  “Oh, you’re ready to leave, Victoria?”

  “Yes ma’am. I fixed a salad for you. It’s in a yellow bowl on the second shelf in wax paper, ma’am, and the dressing is in the bottle next to it. If you don’t need me earlier, I’ll be back about midnight, I guess.”

  “Did your young man come for you? I didn’t hear him drive in.”

  “He’s parked out there on the road, ma’am.”

  “Please tell him again, Victoria, that when he comes to pick you up he’s to feel free to drive in.”

  “I’ll tell him again, ma’am. Good-by, Mrs. Dean. Good-by, sir.”

  After she left the terrace Niki said, “Victoria is a doll. She has two years of college, you know. She’s working for me for a year to save enough to go back in the fall. She wants to be a teacher. The two of us rattle around in this house. It’s so big. Yesterday I had her move from the servants’ quarters to one of the guest suites. It makes the house seem less empty. People seem to be putting gentle pressure on me to move out of here, Gevan, after what happened. But this is my home. I feel safe here.”

  “It’s a lot of overhead to house one person.”

  “The grounds? I share a gardener with the Delahays, my nearest neighbors. You can just see a bit of their roof through those poplars, Gevan, beyond that ridge. He’s due here again tomorrow. I suppose it is quite a lot for just one person. But if you force me to be vulgar, there is quite a lot of money to go with it, you know. I don’t think I’ll stay here forever. But I won’t leave for the sake of leaving. I’ll have to know where I’m going.”

  “Don’t you always?”

  “Did you come here just to be nasty?”

  “I actually came to ask you about that night Ken was killed, Niki. I’ve read the newspaper accounts. They don’t say much.”

  She remained silent to the point of rudeness, then said, “I guess you have the right to ask. I’ll have to give you some background on it, so you can understand just what that night was like.”

  “I know I’m asking a lot.”

  She stood up and adjusted a latch on the chaise so that the angled part folded down, turning it into a long cot. She picked up the bottle of sun oil from the floor and held it out to me and said, “It’s a long story, so be a useful listener, dear.”

  I took the bottle of sun oil from her. She stretched out face down, her long legs angled toward the far side to make room for me to sit. She craned her hands back and unhooked the narrow strap of her halter. With one languid hand she put the mirrored sunglasses on the terrace stone, then sighed and snuggled into relaxation, her face turned away from me, her fingers laced above her head.

  I tipped warm oil between her shoulder blades, and it ran down along the youthful indentation toward the small of her back. I caught it and began to spread it and work it into long brown silk of her, feeling the flat firm webs of muscle, the hidden ivory roundness of vertebrae, the clever flexing sheathing of scapula. She had piled her dark hair up out of the way, and the nape of her neck looked tender, girlish and vulnerable. There was a downy pattern of pale hair in the convexity of the small of her back, and the oil flattened it and darkened it.

  “For the past six months or so, Gevan, we led the quiet life. I couldn’t say how much choice was involved. Yes, it was quiet. When you don’t return invitations, people eventually stop asking you. Our evenings were all … very much alike. He would come in sometime after seven. I don’t have to hide anything from you, Gevan. He would come home plastered. He was very owlish and solemn when he was drunk.”

  “I know.”

  “Completely proper, erect and dignified, pronouncing every syllable of every word, but completely blacked out. On … that night we had to eat sooner than usual after he got back because I’d promised Victoria she could leave early. She was going to Philadelphia to see a brother who was in the hospital. I served the dinner and she left before dessert. I read at the table while we ate. That’s a little habit I picked up after we began to find out we didn’t have anything left to say to each other.”

  She shifted her position slightly. “After dinner I cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher. By … by the time … by the time I …”

  She had begun to lose the thread of her story. Her voice had begun to get deeper and rougher, and the precision of her diction had begun to blur. I knew what was happening. I should have long since capped the little bottle of scented oil and gone back to my seat on the low wall. I had told myself to do just that. I had told myself many times. Her back as amply protected against the sun of late afternoon. But instead of stopping, I was making longer, slower strokes, one stroke for each two beats of my heart.

  “By the time I got back into the living-room, he … he had fallen … had fallen asleep on … asleep on … the couch. I … I covered … covered him … with a … covered him with a blanket … covered him …”

  Her voice had become a sulky, whispering, rasping sound and her breathing had become long and deep. I had increased the firmness of my stroke, so that each long stroke, from waist to shoulder, moved her, back and forth, an insistent inch or two, face down on the quilted white plastic of the chaise.

  She had begun to arch against each long pressure of my hand. Her back, I swear it, had flowered and luxuriated and changed under my touch, sleek, flexing, hypnotic. I had split into two Gevan Deans who could not communicate with each other. One watched it all, shamed by it, made wretched by this compulsion, wracked by the awareness of immediate guilt and the greater guilt yet to come, the way a child, in the midst of some private act it thinks evil, will yearn to stop and cannot. The other Gevan stroked the oiled, trembling, gasping woman, taking a hard joy in this way of reducing her, through her own need, into a savage helplessness. And throughout that time that could not be measured, after she had lost the ability to talk, there was the knowledge of the empty house, the empty sunny afternoon, bird sounds in the distant spring birches, the sliding sound of my hand upon her, the tearing sounds, like tiny snorings, that had begun to accompany her rough inhalations.

  She eeled violently around with a great broken cry, two vowel sounds, as though she were trying to call out my name but could not fit the straining softnesses of her mouth to the consonants. The sun shrank the pupils of her eyes so that they were wide and blind and monstrously blue. She lunged upward, breasts aimed and tumid, to clasp me and pull me down, gasping and whining in her peak of need to accomplish the specifics of my defeat and depletion.

  So I took my brother’s widow, violent, oiled and naked, squirming and thrusting on quilted white plastic on a redwood chaise on a walled fieldstone terrace in April sunshine, out of the wind, protected by all the formal stature of the dead man’s house. It was without grace, dignity, tenderness or affection. It was like trapping in some narrow place something hard to kill, then killing it clumsily, violently, in fear and hate, with dreadful weapons, killing it as quickly as you can.

  When at last she stirred and made a small sound of irritable impatience, I moved to release her. She got up, scowling at the sun glare, stooped and picked the two scraps of yellow terry from the stone. In picking them up she lost her balance and had to take a quick step to catch herself. She walked heavily to the big glass door that opened into the bedroom. She pulled it open and walked on into the shadowy room without speaking or looking back, and the last I could see of her, fading like the smile of Alice’s cat, was the almost luminous whiteness of the alternating clench of her buttocks.

  I sat on the edge of the chaise. I bent over and retrieved my cigarettes and lighter from the tumble of my clothing, then swept it aside with the edge of my foot. I sat with my arms braced on my knees, staring down at the pattern of the stone between my bare feet. I f
elt dull, heavy, hairy and degraded, a fleshy animal who had reached the end of all its own precious pretention. I studied the brave beach-boy tan on my legs, and the slight continuous trembling of the fingers that held the cigarette. I heard a distant sound and identified it as the sound of a shower.

  A man can acquire a false image of himself too easily. I sat numbed by the collapse of an image. I had sold myself a concept of a certain basic dignity and decency—call it a Gevan Dean ethic. But now I saw the inner sickness. It was a weakness. I repeated to myself that sad rationalization of all hollow trivial men: The libido has no conscience.

  I sat in the listless carapace of my traitor flesh, spent, and sticky with Niki’s sun oil and my drying sweat. I thought of Ken, and the vinegary tears of shame and self-pity began to squeeze out of my eyes, weak and stinging.

  The shower sound had stopped. The sun began to touch the black tops of the poplars. I saw something out of the corner of my eye, a movement in the doorway. “Gevan?”

  I turned my head slowly and looked at her. She held a big blue towel in front of her, covering her from throat to knee. Her mouth was pale without lipstick and she had the grace not to smile.

  “You can use the shower now,” she said in the tone she would use with her maid. “Turn left through the bedroom.” She backed away and disappeared.

  A few minutes later I picked up my clothing and went inside. I dropped my things in a heap on the cherry-red carpeting and paused a moment to look at the luxurious room. It was big enough to accommodate two oversize double beds and shrink them to the proportion of twin beds. There was a special quietness about that room. At the far end was a couch, deep chair, low bookshelves, built-in television and music.