Area of Suspicion

by John D. MacDonald

  “I can tell you one thing, Gev. If Mottling has done what you say he has done—and I’ll buy that—don’t for one minute think that it was done out of stupidity or carelessness or anything like that. He had a good reason. He’s the type who would have a special reason. So try thinking along these lines: What can he gain by fumbling production? You say he drove production men away. Would it depress market values of your stock so he could buy in somehow? Could he get a whack at ownership and control by driving down dividends to the point where he could pick up shares here and there on the side?”

  “Not the way the stock is held, and we’re better than seventy per cent cost plus, so a production fumble wouldn’t change the dividend picture too much.”

  “Then that won’t wash. But whether you know it or not, Mottling is pretty heavy in the pocket. His father was one hell of a smart engineer. His father built steel and tractor plants and even got into hydroelectric stuff for the Russians during the twenties. He got them started on air frame production in the Ural area, too. They paid him very well, very damn well, for services rendered. There was some sort of tax dodge, so that Internal Revenue got no slice of what Mottling Senior was paid. He was over there quite a while, and then his wife got involved with some colonel-general or something, and got one of those fast divorces they had in those days. Mottling Senior brought Stanley home. The boy might have been about fourteen then. He got his training at Cal Tech and later at the Stanford Business.”

  “I don’t want to sound weird about this, Mort, but look at it this way. What other reason is there for fumbling government production?”

  I heard Mort whistle softly. “You mean the sympathies are with his mother’s adopted country? I’m afraid that won’t go, Gev. He’s been investigated nine ways from Sunday. Hell, I happen to know he had better than a full year at Oak Ridge before he left there to go with National Electronics. I don’t think we can twist this into a B movie plot. I think you ought to worry about that bundle of money. He’s been around. Maybe Dean Products is what he wanted all along, and he just found it. That money hasn’t shrunk any since his father died. Would ten million bucks at the right place at the right time buy control of Dean? Think along those lines.”

  “Thanks, Mort. I’ll do that.”

  “Watch him closely.”

  “Mort, if he has that much, he wouldn’t have any reason to get tangled up in any crooked financial deals, would he?”

  “He’s too smart for that. If it wasn’t for my instinctive dislike for the guy, I’d tell you to try to get him out of there. But I’m just prejudiced enough so that my advice may stink. Maybe he’s the right man for the job.”

  I thanked him again and told him I didn’t know when I might be coming to New York, and parried his questions about my own future plans.

  I hung up. Dusk had come and the rain had stopped, but I could hear yet another storm coming down the valley out of the north, like a black bowling ball rolling down an echoing valley. I stretched out on the bed with an ash tray beside me.

  When a storm is on the way it does something to the animal part of you, to that very deep, dark place where all reasoning is based on instinct. I’ve heard and read the neat little explanations for that. All about variations in barometric pressure, and the charge of negative electricity that travels in advance of the thunderheads. But there’s something else too, something all tied up with our caves of long ago, and the wet rock, and trees crashing.

  I remembered the feel of the air, the look of the sky, on that Sunday past when I had headed the “Vunderbar” back toward Indian Rocks.

  Now there was the same storm feeling in Arland, in the air and among the people. Currents of personal emotional electricity. There had been Niki, the bereaved wife, and Dolson, the brusque colonel, and Mottling, the quiet executive. But I had seen a few gestures that didn’t seem quite right, heard a few words that seemed oddly timed, heard with the third ear the words that were not said, felt the tingle of unknown currents. And I had done a few small things that had turned two of them into imposter and thief. What would Mottling become? Imposter, thief—and what was needed to round out the circle: Murderer?

  Not with his own hands. Not Mottling. Not when authority could be delegated. But that was one field where you were not permitted to delegate responsibility.

  He might want me killed if I—

  I punched my cigarette out in the ash tray beside me. It had been a big gray truck. It had been a new-looking truck. Trucks have horns. They bray like great monsters to clear the road ahead. And the truck had come barreling down the hill at me, had come silently, except for the roar of the straining motor. Instinct had been right. Logic had been wrong. It had been a miracle of timing, because it had been the apex of very careful planning. A truck far up the hill. A driver watching the house, seeing Niki’s signal that the victim had proved stubborn. Then the cigarette end slipped away, and the man climbing into the high cab, and idling the motor and waiting for the glint of my car as I turned out of the drive.

  Instinct had been right. And it had probably been right when it had warned me that someone had been in my room, someone with motivations more devious than any hotel maid.

  Perhaps Ken’s death had been the first hint of thunder beyond the horizon—or that first wind that riffles the water, dies into a weighted stillness. The hidden animal dreads the storm. I could feel the pricklings of warning pulling at my skin. It had been an area of suspicion, and now suspicion was confirmed as the gale warnings went up, as the cyclical winds gathered force.

  My decision had placed the burden of action on Mottling. It was his move. He had made one move. He would make another. Something was up, and whatever it might be, he had too much at stake to withdraw tamely, defeated.

  I listened to the thunder, and my thoughts were long, slow and tormented. Who was the blue-eyed woman who had taken the place of Niki Webb? Perhaps she too was lying down, listening to the storm sounds, and perhaps her thoughts were as twisted as my own. I could be there, with her. It would be easy to tell myself it would be in the interest of furthering my investigation. The need for scruple was gone. If she was not Niki Webb, there had been no legal marriage. If she had signaled for the attempt on my life, this could be a special sort of revenge—to take her, to dull the new edge of lust, and then tell her what filth she was.

  The phone rang three times, insistently, before I could get to it. The sound brushed away the erotic images of Niki.

  Chapter 14

  It was Sergeant Portugal, calling from the lobby. He wanted to come up and I told him to come right ahead.

  I splashed cold water on my face. He knocked and I let him in. He half-smiled and nodded at me, walked over to the chair by the windows and sat down heavily, dropped his hat on the floor beside the chair. I asked him if I could order a drink sent up. He said a beer would go pretty good. I phoned the order. I sat on the couch, conscious of his unhealthy look, his heavy breathing. He offered me a cigar which I refused. He slid the cellophane from one, bit off the end, spat it into his palm, and dropped it in the ash tray. He took his time getting the cigar to burn smoothly and evenly in the match flame.

  “This,” he said quietly, “is just between you and me. Not the department. Just the two of us.” He acted ill at ease.

  “How do you mean?”

  “It all went too easy. I kept telling myself that sometimes the worst ones are easy. But I didn’t tell myself loud enough or something. I’ve been in this game a long time. I know any cop is a damn fool if he tries to keep looking around after the district attorney’s office is satisfied with the file. I should have stayed the hell out. I thought I’d take one more little look. Now I’m stuck with it. You didn’t buy Shennary, did you?”

  “I wondered about him.”

  “How about after you saw the girl?”

  “After I saw her, I was sure he didn’t do it. She made sense.”

  “You could have phoned me and told me about the gun. Would that have hurt anything?
”

  “You seemed sure it was Shennary. I didn’t think it would change anything, Sergeant.”

  “After I cuffed it out of her, she showed me and told me she showed you, too. I leaned on everybody in that fleabag motel, one at a time. Finally I found a girl, another one of those car hoppers. She lives a few doors down from Shennary’s girl and she was walking home late that night your brother got it. She saw a trucker stop after midnight and walk up to the Genelli girl’s door and stand there and then go away. She remembered the name of the van line. I figured if I could get the guy to tell me nobody was at home a little after midnight in the Genelli girl’s place, then I could feel better about Shennary. The name of the line was Gobart Brothers. I find the home office is in Philly. They cooperate and look up the name of the fellow who would be tooling one of their rigs through here about that time Friday night. Turns out it is a guy named Joe Russo. I got him up here this morning. He said he used to run around with Lita. He told me he was going to knock and then he heard a guy inside yelling at Lita and she was yelling back. A hell of a scrap. He said he went away. I made him wait in an office. I brought in six guys, on the other side of a door, and made them talk loud. He picked out Shennary as the guy he heard. I mixed up the order and made him do it three times. He was right every time.

  “It sounds like a smart thing to do, Sergeant.”

  “I wish to hell I hadn’t done it.”

  “Why have you told me?”

  “To fill you in. So long as I got work ahead of me that I’ll have to do on my own time because the Shennary case is officially closed out of our files, I want to save time. I figure if you weren’t satisfied with Shennary, you’ve been lookin’ around. If it wasn’t Shennary, the gun was planted in his room and that spells premeditation, and that means motive, and you’ve been in a better position to think up a good motive for anybody killing your brother than I have. If you can’t tip me to anything, I’ve got to start digging on my own. The place I start is with the widow. She is a handsome chunk of stuff and she inherits a nice piece of money from your brother. The tipster was a man, so I start thinking in terms of her playing around on the side. That is, unless you can give me something.”

  “Why do you start with that motive, Sergeant?”

  “Because I have got experience in police work. When you are green in this work, everything is strange. But after a while you see the patterns and how they work. This is an upper-bracket murder. That means one thing to me. It has to be money, sex, or blackmail. In an upper-bracket murder the victim is knocked off for what he’s worth, or to get him out of somebody’s bed, or to shut his mouth up about something he might say or threatens to say to the wrong people. They all come out that way, when you have premeditation. Sometimes the upper-brackets get drunk and kill somebody because they don’t like the part in their hair, but this wasn’t any spur-of-the-moment thing. Something was nibbling on your brother. We know it wasn’t money. He was getting along fine, the way salary and dividends add up. So he was worried about sex or blackmail. He seems clean. I can’t figure any blackmail aimed at him. So it all smells like sex to me, like somebody got next to that sister-in-law of yours and your brother found out.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good guess.”

  He looked blandly at me. “You have a better guess?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Mr. Dean, kindly don’t try to kid me. I know you’re hiding something. Maybe four or five times in your life you try to conceal essential information. But twenty times a day I am prying information out of people. No amateur does good bucking a pro.”

  It was dangerous to underrate this man. His mind was quicker and keener than I had suspected. “All right. I’ll be honest with you at least this far, Sergeant. Something big is going on. I think Ken found out what it is. I think it concerns the company and I think it concerns his wife. I don’t know what that big thing is. I just think I know the general area where I have to look. I think Ken made up his mind to let some cats out of some bags, and that’s why he was killed. I’m not ready to say anymore than that. It would be guesswork, and it would sound silly as hell. I want to look around. I promise I’ll come to you just as soon as I have something definite.”

  For long minutes he looked as if he were falling asleep. Then he got clumsily to his feet, brushed ashes from the front of his coat. “Okay, I can’t push you if you don’t want to be pushed. I’ll keep looking around in my own way on my own time. But if it is big, like you hint, do me one favor.”

  “Yes?”

  “Write down all these crazy guesses of yours and put them in the hotel safe, addressed to me. Amateurs always seem to have accidents.”

  He waited for my promise and then left. I stood at the door after he had closed it softly behind him. There was a prickling at the nape of my neck.

  I sat down at once and wrote out what I had learned, and a batch of guesses. They sounded melodramatic and absurd. I was tempted to tear up the sheets of hotel stationery. But I sealed them in an envelope and wrote his name on the outside of the envelope.

  The phone rang at that moment. A thin, musical voice said, “Mr. Dean? This is Martha Colsinger.”

  I remembered the huge woman from the boarding house. Over the phone her voice had a young shy sound.

  “Yes. Have you found out anything?”

  “Well, a couple of my girls are home now. I’ve been talking to them, you know, about Alma. She didn’t come home yet.”

  “Did the girls tell you anything?”

  “These two, they live together in a front room, the biggest one, that used to be the living-room. They had the lights out last night and they were sitting in the windowseat that goes across the front of the big bay window. They were talking late because one of them has some kind of love trouble and she is pretty depressed about it, you know, and her friend was trying to cheer her up. They are both nice girls that go to the graduate school over to the college. Miriam, she comes from Albany, and she is the one that—”

  “Did they see Alma Brady?”

  “I was coming to that. No, they didn’t. They didn’t see anybody come in, but around three they heard the front door close and a man went off the porch real quiet and walked away. I’ve told the city people we got to have more lights on this street. If I’ve told them once, I’ve told them a hundred times. It can give you a creepy feeling thinking about a man prowling around in here last night. I feel responsible for my girls, and with a lot of low-class people in town, and with those sailors all over the place from the Naval Training Station, you never know what—”

  “Could the girls describe the man?”

  “Like I was saying, the lights aren’t strong enough on this street, so they couldn’t see him good. They said he was a smallish man dressed dark, walking quick and soft. Now I’ve been thinking maybe it was him I heard walking around up there in Alma’s room. It makes me terrible nervous and I can’t understand her never coming home since Thursday morning when she went to work. Do you think I ought to phone the police and report her missing?”

  “That might be the wise thing to do.”

  “The girls didn’t say anything to me until I started asking, because they thought it was somebody sneaked a boy friend in after I got to bed and he was sneaking out again. But I told them about Alma and now they’re nervous like I am. The man is here changing the lock. It’s a big expense whenever a girl loses her front-door key because I don’t feel right if there’s a key around that just about anybody could have. There’s one key for each girl, and one for me, and if that man got in with a key, he had to use Alma’s key. I’ll phone the police right now.”

  “Mrs. Colsinger, I’d consider it a favor if you didn’t mention my visit.”

  “Well,” she said dubiously, “if they ask me if somebody was around asking about her, I don’t feel awful much like telling lies about it.”

  “If they ask you directly, tell them. Just don’t volunteer the information. I’d like to tell you the reaso
n, but I can’t right now. I assure you it’s a good reason.”

  She seemed to accept that. “Maybe, Mr. Dean, I ought to go ahead and wire her people, too. They live in Junction City, Kansas.”

  “I wouldn’t do that yet, Mrs. Colsinger. It might only worry them when there’s nothing they can do. Maybe she’ll come in later tonight.”

  “I certainly hope so. I certainly hope nothing happened to Alma.”

  She sighed and hung up. I put my jacket on and took the letter for Portugal to the hotel desk and asked the clerk to put it in the safe. He glanced curiously at the addressee.

  “If I should—check out of the hotel, I’d like to have you send that over to Sergeant Portugal by messenger. Could you do that?”

  “Yes, sir. Of course.”

  As I turned away from the desk Lester Fitch came toward me, his polished lenses reflecting the lobby lights.

  “Gevan! So nice to run into you.”

  “Hello, Lester.”

  He was beaming, cordial. “How about a cocktail, old boy? Heard you’ve been on the move.”

  “I’m busy, Lester.”

  “I’ll be frank. Niki phoned me. She asked me to talk to you. It won’t take long.”

  I permitted myself to be steered to the Copper Lounge. We took stools at the bar. The place was beginning to fill up with the five o’clockers.

  We ordered and he said, “This climate must be repulsive after Florida, Gevan. Aren’t you anxious to get back?”

  “Are you anxious to have me go back, Lester?”

  He pursed his lips. “You are on the defensive, aren’t you? Would you mind if I do a little diagnosing?”

  The mask was easy to identify. Fitch, the family lawyer. Just like a family doctor. This medicine may taste bad, old boy, but in the long run it will help you. Drink it down. His expression was just right. Serious, concerned, noble.

  I sipped my drink. “Go on, Doctor. Diagnose.”

  “Gevan, your pride is hurt. Your viewpoint of this whole Dean Products situation is irrational, just because of hurt pride. Certainly, deep down, you must realize that Stanley Mottling is more qualified than you are to run a firm like Dean Products has become. Once you admit that, old boy, you can give up this dog-in-the-manger attitude that has us all so worried.”