Area of Suspicion

by John D. MacDonald

  “We can avoid opportunities like that.”

  “Don’t be such a fool! We’ll be creating opportunities like that. I will, certainly. Gevan, my darling, there is something you should know. I should have told you yesterday. It could make you feel better about us. For almost this whole past year he was totally impotent. I think it was a traumatic thing—that terrible scene. Maybe the knowledge that I’ve always belonged to you became so strong in his subconscious … When I tried to talk about it, and tried to get him to see a psychiatrist, he’d get almost violent. It … wasn’t much of a marriage, Gevan. You should know that … and you should remember that Ken would want us to be happy. He did love us both.”

  Again I found myself resenting plausibility. It accounted for his drinking, weeping, and his loss of interest in his work. Maybe it explained why his interest in Hildy was so platonic. It was all so very neat—and so unlike the Ken I remembered.

  “Pretty rough deal for a woman like you,” I said. “Has Stanley been able to perform efficiently in that area too?”

  After a momentary blankness of shock, she came striding toward me, her face contorted. “That is a goddamn filthy, vicious, stinking thing to say to …” She stopped six feet from me and closed her eyes. When her face was calm she opened her eyes and smiled and said, “I must make myself remember you are a very sensitive guy, my Gevan. You feel guilty about Ken, and you feel guilty about yesterday, and you want to punish yourself, so you keep striking out at me.” She came close and made a soft thud as she dropped to her knees on the carpeting. She took my hand in both of hers, kissed the palm, and then held the palm of my hand against her cheek for a moment.

  “Not Stanley, my friend. Not anybody, even though many men seem to have a sixth sense about such situations, and they make little hints about how discreet they could be. Hell, I’m not a hypocrite, Gevan. Certainly I was tempted. I was made to be loved a thousand times a year. There were some highly edgy times around here, believe me, when I’d stalk this house like a randy panther, fighting off that moment when I’d have to shame myself with some nasty, lonely little release or go completely out of my mind. I would ache for you, Gevan. So that’s what happened to us yesterday, darling. So much saved up. Just before I lost the ability to think at all, I was wondering if I was frightening you or hurting you.” She kissed my knuckles and sat back on her heels and smiled up at me. “When I woke up this morning I stretched and stretched. I felt all over silky and warm. I woke into a world full of roses and music and love talk. When I came out of my shower and brushed my teeth, I pretended I was going to crawl right back into bed with you and awaken you in some delicious way. I realized it wouldn’t be long before I could do that, and it made me feel so good I laughed out loud. I guess you think we were dreadfully evil yesterday, Gevan. But today I feel like a bride. Nothing that can make me feel like this can be so horrible, can it?”

  “I guess we’ll have to talk this way,” I said, “and I guess we will, if things are going to get the way you believe they’ll be, but right now, Niki, I have to talk about what I came here to talk about.”

  “You look so earnest!”

  “You made me believe this Mottling thing is important to you, so I decided the fair thing was to come and tell you what I decided. I do not believe Mottling is the man to run Dean Products. That is an objective decision. I’m not trying to spite you or hurt you or show hostility.”

  “But don’t you understand that …”

  “Let me finish. Walter Granby has certain weaknesses and limitations, but he has a lot of strengths too. I can stay around long enough to bring back the good men Mottling drove off, and get it all running smoothly and solidly, and headed in the right direction. That’s my decision, and that’s the way I vote my stock on Monday.”

  Niki came slowly and effortlessly to her feet, frowning. She walked to the coffee table, lit two cigarettes and came back to sit beside me on the windowseat and give me one of them.

  “My first impulse is to go up in blue smoke.” she said.

  “I expected you to.”

  “But if I did you might not listen, and I want you to listen. Will you? This whole thing was botched, right from the beginning. Though our reasons are certainly as far apart as they could be, all of us put pressure on you, Gevan. Lester, Stanley, Colonel Dolson and me. We forgot how stubborn you are. We should have just spread the facts before you and let you make your own logical decision. We should have trusted your judgment. I know you would have backed Stanley.”

  “Maybe not, Niki. Maybe he isn’t as sound as you people think.”

  She tapped her fist on my thigh. “But are you competent to sit in judgment of a man like Stanley Mottling, Gevan? Yes, you ran Dean Products and they all say you did well at it. But the world changes in four years. Stanley has intricate problems you never had to face. So he did get rid of some men you liked, and you resent it. Were they really as good as you thought they were? Or were they just very good at selling themselves to you? In all honesty, you must admit that possibility. Or maybe you made them feel so indispensable, they thought they could afford to ignore the new control methods Stanley introduced. Think about it, Gevan. I know you have a lot of self-confidence. But doesn’t it get close to a sort of … egomania when you judge a man on the basis of rumor, gossip and one trip through the plant? How sound is that, darling?”

  I got up from her side and began to pace through the big room. She had touched the source of my uneasiness. I had decided to come out for Granby as a bluff, but I had been getting closer to deciding that it was, indeed, the proper decision. Karch, Uncle Al and Granby didn’t think much of Mottling, but how much of that was just an emotional resistance to change?

  How badly had four years of idleness dulled the edge of my judgment? If I felt I had become too stale to take charge, could I not also be too stale to decide who should be in charge? Under Mottling the company was making a profit, a good one. Wasn’t that the definitive index of excellence? Suppose I booted him out and things turned sour? A hell of a lot of people would be hurt.

  Suddenly the easy answer became enormously desirable. I could switch to Mottling. I would look like a fool, but what could they expect from a beach bum? I could vote it the easy way and leave at once for Florida, and wait on the lazy beach for Niki to join me.

  I sat in a big chair. She came over and sat on the arm of it and laid her arm across my shoulders. “Gevan, Gevan, my darling. Don’t be so troubled. It’s not a case of humoring me, actually. It’s just the wisest decision you can make.”

  I looked up into her face, so close to mine. “I keep wondering why you can’t just sit the hell back and collect your dividends?”

  “I could have, if we hadn’t gotten so involved in the whole thing, Gevan. I want to be proud of you. I want you to be wise and right.”

  “Have you made some kind of a deal with Mottling?”

  “Don’t be so damn childish and suspicious! You keep looking for things that aren’t there.”

  “I have a hunch, a very strong hunch, I should vote Mottling out.”

  She sprang up and stared at me. “A hunch! Good God! You’d make a decision like that on a hunch? And they talk about female reasoning.”

  “But I can’t ignore it.”

  “We’re both being stubborn and we’re both being silly. There’s an easy way out, Gevan. Abstain from voting. Then whatever happens, neither of us will have any regrets.”

  It made sense. I remembered Uncle Al’s estimate of their voting strength. Even my vote might not be quite enough to oust Mottling. It would save Niki’s pride, and mine. I stood up. I was at the point of agreement when some perverse instinct, some final strand of resistance, made me say, “What would it cost me to vote for Granby, anyway?”

  She gave me a long and level stare. Her mouth tightened.

  “Me,” she said.

  I stared at her. I was shocked and incredulous. “Do you really mean that?”

  “I love you. I love you very much.
But no love is worth spending your life in hell. And I suspect it would be hell, indeed, to live with a vain, silly man who is too stubborn and opinionated to compromise, a man who has your blind need to win all the marbles every time. Look at me, Gevan. Take a good long look. I know what I’m worth. I’m worth a lot more than you’re willing to offer. I yearned for you for four years. I almost got used to it. I guess I can manage to get used to it sooner or later. If you decide I’m worth the price I put on myself, come back and tell me—before Monday.”

  Her eyes were somber and cool. She turned away and walked out of the room. I stood in the silence for a few minutes. She had given her ultimatum like a slap across the mouth. I could not pay that price for her, or for anything in the world. I let myself out, got into my car and left.

  As I drove down Ridge Road I tried, without success, to make her determination to win the point fit with what I had learned about her during the months of our engagement. Then she had seemed to be a balanced person, free of this obsessive bull-headedness.

  I tried some conjectures, just for size. Ken needs help with the firm. Niki recommends Mottling, an old friend or flame. Mottling arrives. They have an affair. Ken learns of it somehow. That is what was tearing him in half. He loves Niki too much to bring it to a showdown, for fear of losing her entirely. At that point the theory began to fall apart. Why should she make Mottling’s keeping his job a condition for our getting together again, unless there was still something between her and Mottling? Yet what could still exist between them if she wanted to go away from Arland and never come back?

  I was doing thirty-five on the two-lane road, that slow driving pace you maintain when you are thinking hard. The long hill was about a seven-degree grade down to the valley floor. I heard something coming behind me, coming fast. I looked in the rear-vision mirror and saw the front end of a truck, alarmingly close, too close to give him a chance to swing out around me, too close for me to avoid him by tramping on the gas. Time was measured in micro-seconds. There was no time to examine the shoulder of the road. I turned hard right, rocking the car up onto the left wheels. It seemed to hang there, poised and vulnerable before it lunged down into the wide, shallow ditch. I was tensed for the smashing blow of the truck against the back of the car. But the truck roared by, the engine sound fading to a minor key as my car bounced high over the far side of a shallow ditch, plunged head-on toward a thick utility pole. I fought the wheel, hauling it back so, for a second or two, it rode down the center of the wide ditch before momentum was lost, the wheels sank deep into the rain-drenched earth and the motor stalled.

  Silence was sudden and intense. Rain dripped from overhead leaves onto the metal car top. I listened. The truck was out of sight down the slope. I was listening for the brake-scream and long shattering crash as it went into the heavy traffic by the stop lights on the valley floor. I listened for a long time and heard no sound.

  I lit a cigarette with the solemn care and formality of a drunk. I opened the car door and got out. It was difficult to keep my legs braced under me. I guessed that the truck had been doing better than eighty. And it had been big. At that speed it would have bunted me end over end. The driver had been asleep—or drunk—or criminally careless—or—

  It was like the moment in the hotel suite with that feeling that someone had just left. That same creeping chill along the back of my neck. For a few moments I believed it had been a cold-blooded attempt to kill me in an exceptionally messy way. I felt very alone. It was an instinctive fear. Then I began to reason it out. It had to be an accidental thing. To presuppose intent meant giving the unknown assailant credit for an incredible piece of timing. I was once again giving myself the lead in a melodrama. The part was beginning to feel familiar.

  To get back to sanity, I walked around the car, looking at the situation. My shoes sank into the mud. The car was unmarked, but very probably the wheels had been knocked out of line, or the frame wrenched. There was no traffic on the Ridge Road hill. It had been a big, fast gray truck. That was all I knew. I had but one glimpse of it, lasting not over half a second, through the constricted field of the rear-vision mirror. Not much information to give the traffic patrol.

  My knees began to feel better. I flipped the cigarette away and got behind the wheel and started the motor. I tried to rock the car out of the mud. I gained about a foot and then it settled in, deeper than before. A pickup truck stopped beside me. It belonged to a farm equipment dealer.

  I told the heavy-set driver what had happened. He cursed the local traffic in general and fast trucks in particular. He had a chain and we hooked it to the front left corner of the frame. On the first try it came up out of the ditch and diagonally across the shoulder and onto the pavement, the rear wheels slapping mud up into the fender wells. I tried to pay him, but he refused belligerently, tossed his chain in the back of the pickup, and drove off.

  I drove down the hill at a sedate pace. There was no front-end shimmy, but I knew that didn’t mean too much. I took it back to the rental agency and explained what had happened. I borrowed a rag and wiped my shoes off. I had lunch at a diner across the street while the agency checked the alignment. When I went back, they said the castor, chamber, and toe-in were way out of line, and they had a new sedan ready to go, and a new form for my signature.

  The near-accident had made me feel washed-out, dulled. I parked in a lot in town, wandered into a movie. I sat there in the semi-gloom for an hour. Over the soundtrack I could hear thunder moving down the valley. I looked at the movie and did not see it. I was seeing Niki and Uncle Al, seeing Ken, fusty with after-dinner napping, taking a cool walk at midnight toward something that stood waiting for him by the entrance posts. I wondered if it would all make sense if I could see it from a different angle, if I could step out of myself, if I could climb up on some hypothetical box and look at all of them in some new way.…

  It was Friday again. One week ago my brother had been alive in Arland, not knowing it was his last day of life, not knowing there were so few breaths and steps and heartbeats left to him. From Sergeant Portugal’s point of view it had been a random and accidental death, as meaningless as most crimes of violence. Yet everything I had found out had pointed to its having been carefully planned. The motive, once discovered, might be that ingredient which would make Niki’s obsession and preoccupation understandable.

  My hunch grew stronger. A hunch that Ken, somehow, on his last day of life, had done some one thing, had performed one action that had triggered all the rest of it, so that, in the night, the firing pin had fallen inevitably against the primer of the thirty-eight cartridge.

  I left the movie. Rain was a streaming curtain, fringed with silver where it danced high off the asphalt in the false dusk of mid-afternoon. I knew that I must turn the calendar back. I would become Ken on that Friday of a week ago, and I would try to do what he had done, go where he had gone, try to feel what he had felt. The plant was the place to catch up with him on that day, to catch up with my death-marked brother moving inevitably toward his appointment by the gateposts of the Lime Ridge house.

  Chapter 13

  The lights were on in the Dean Products’ offices. The reception girl gave me my pass when I signed the register. Dulled by the heavy rain, the sound of the production areas filtered into the offices like the thick slow beatings of a hundred dozen giant hearts.

  Perry gave me a startled look when I walked into her office. “Oh! Did you see Alma?”

  Niki and the near-accident had driven Alma Brady completely out of my mind I looked blankly at Perry for a moment and said, “She didn’t sleep at her place last night. She was back there for a few minutes around three and then apparently went out again.”

  “Do you think she—could have been with the Colonel, Gevan?”

  “Not considering how she felt about him last night.” I had moved close to her desk and we kept our voices low. I saw an object on her desk that looked vaguely familiar, and, without thinking, I picked it up. It was a small comic
figure, a gay-colored plaster figure of a golfer in the middle of a grotesque swing, and I remembered I had been given it at the Arland Golf Club as a consolation prize one day long ago. It had been on my desk the day I cleared out my personal belongings, and I remembered tossing it into the wastebasket with a lot of other junk, because on that day I had no appreciation for the comic.

  I replaced it and looked at her and saw she was blushing furiously. “I always sort of liked him,” she said. “I rescued him. You chipped his nose when you threw him in the basket, but I found the chip and glued it back on. He’s a mascot, sort of.”

  “He didn’t do me much good.”

  She went abruptly back to the Dolson-Brady problem. “I know it doesn’t seem logical that she’d go back to Colonel Dolson, Mr. Dean, but on the other hand, the files are missing, and that might be what would happen if she told him about telling us. I mean maybe she regretted it later.”

  “After you left in the cab, Perry, I went to the Copper Lounge. I ran into Dolson. I had the idea of needling him into taking some action. I scared him thoroughly by telling him I was backing Granby. With Walter running the whole show, it wouldn’t be very damn long before he’d start checking Dolson’s purchases more thoroughly. So that may be what made him get hold of the files—or get somebody to take them out of this office. I moved too fast, if that’s the case. I should have waited.”