Area of Suspicion

by John D. MacDonald

  Joe was quick. “Could be the money is not the Colonel’s?”

  “Could be.”

  “I want to ask questions, but I can tell by that look in your eye you’re not going to answer them. Okay, I’ll do it. I’m getting soft in the head anyway. Let’s get out of here.”

  We rode down in the elevator. Joe got off at the lobby. I went down the next level and into the Copper Lounge. I stood just inside the door. Hildy was singing “All of Me.” When I caught her eye, I held up a circle of thumb and finger. She nodded.

  I went through the tunnel to the hotel garage and waited by the ramp until my rented car was brought down. I was too early at the plant. There were lights on in the offices. A second shift was going full blast in C and B buildings. I turned off the car lights and slouched in the seat and lit a cigarette. I was parked directly across from the main entrance. I wondered if the time had come when I should stop nosing around independently. It might be wise, first thing in the morning, to go to the regional office of the FBI and speak to the Special Agent in Charge, and give him what I knew about Acme Supply. If it didn’t fall within their jurisdiction, they could put me in touch with the right organization. Men from the General Accounting Office would come to the plant and make a complete audit of all vouchers and payments on the D4D contract. The money in Joe’s safe could be impounded, and they could ask the Colonel how he happened to have that much money in cash. Alma was dead, but Perry and I could swear to what she had told us. Perry could inform them of the missing files. And the Colonel would be soon drawing a set of coveralls from the supply counter at Leavenworth.

  I was on my third cigarette when Perry came out, slim against the lights behind her, pausing at the top of the steps. I turned on the lights and beeped the horn. She came hurrying across the street, and in the slant of street lights I saw her smiling.

  With Perry beside me, and the April rain dotting the windshield between slow strokes of the wipers, I drove through the center of town and out South River Boulevard. Perry sat half-facing me, her knees pulled up on the seat, and listened without interruption as I told her what had happened and what I suspected. When I stopped for a light I looked over at her. She wore no hat and her hair looked burnished and lovely.

  “What do you mean, Gevan, when you talk about the whole thing dissolving?”

  “I feel that the Colonel’s racket is only a part of it. Files disappear, Alma dies, the Colonel takes off. That leaves only a mail drop, and one unidentified, obscure little man. So the Colonel is caught and disgraced and imprisoned. The Army replaces him and cleans up the mess. Maybe they catch one C. Armand LeFay, and maybe they don’t. But it’s like giving the getaway car in a bank robbery a parking ticket. Lester Fitch is implicated. Niki is implicated. Mottling is implicated. I can’t see Dolson in any position of knowledge where he could drag them all in, even to save his own hide.”

  “What do they get out of all this, Gevan?”

  “It’s becoming obvious. They get access to the most carefully guarded secret of all—the production rate of the D4D. It gives them the chance to foul up the production program, and sabotage what we produce.”

  I took a quick glance at her as we passed the glaring lights of a shopping center. Her head was tilted and she was giving me an odd, puzzled, almost pitying smile.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Gevan, really! I mean isn’t that a little too much?”

  “It’s been a cold war so long, Perry, too many people have forgotten it’s a war. We’re leery of dramatics. Too many commy hunts have made the whole bit unfashionable. Warring ideologies are in stasis, Perry. Tell me why?”

  “Well … I suppose it’s because if anybody starts anything, we’ll destroy each other.”

  “Okay so far. Now assume that in spite of Cuba and the Congo and all the rest of it, they get the idea they’re losing ground in the cold war. Would they give up?”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “Just suppose, Perry, that a year and a half or two years, the Kremlin decided they have to take the risk of turning it into a hot war. What would they do? They would intensify all espionage activities. We know they’ve done that. They would yell about peace, about the impossibility of nuclear war, and their earnest desire to compete economically. They’re doing that. And let’s try to take a shrewd guess about their third step. I think they would commit their most valuable agents, the ones who’ve never been given an assignment, the ones who’ve worked themselves carefully and deeply into our industrial, scientific and military structure. When they’ve pulled enough of our teeth, and gently loosened the rest of them, they can take the most horrible gamble the world has ever seen, and convince those historians who survive that we started it. How many Mottlings, after all the years of waiting, have suddenly been put to work?”

  “But what can he …”

  “The D4D is part of the guidance and control system for an ICBM which we can assume operational. They’re doubtless being made elsewhere too. Maybe there are even alternate designs. But they stuck Stanley Mottling on this one.”

  “What … how could he …”

  “First he rides the top production brains out of the picture. Poulson, Fitz, Garroway and the others. He replaces them with fools, stooges and conspirators. Next he corrupts the Colonel, and that is easy because the Colonel is a vain, stupid, greedy little man. On his own I doubt he could figure out how to ream the government. So Mottling maybe made the plausible suggestion of renting outside storage space, then adjusted procedures to give Dolson a freer hand with purchase orders, then had LeFay contact him on the outside and show him the way to wealth and plenty. And one day Dolson found out Mottling owned him, the way a man owns a dog, and Mottling started to use him. Remember, Dolson is contracting officer, inspection officer and shipping officer. Change a few specs, bitch a few dimensions, and you’re in the business of manufacturing intercontinental duds. Dolson could divert the few good ones to Canaveral, or wherever they test them by seeing how they fly.”

  “It sounds as if … you really know.”

  “When the big guess is right, Perry, all the little mysteries make sense. Ken was a wooden executive, but he was a damn fine engineer. I think he finally caught on. And they had to shut him up quickly.”

  “Horrible!” she whispered.

  “If they could keep twenty Mottlings busy for one year, they could afford to pull the string, Perry. They’d bang us twenty to one. They’d have some wounds to lick, but we’d be stone cold dead.”

  I’d been driving so automatically I had to check landmarks to find out where I was. I recognized a country road that turned off to the right, and remembered it as the way we used to get to the river long ago, the place to take a gal who gave the slightest promise of co-operation, a place of beer and blankets and clumsy ecstasies.

  As I turned into the road, I said, “Know this place?”

  “If you hadn’t depressed me so much, I’d try to make jokes, like asking you what kind of girl you think I am anyhow. But this doesn’t seem to be the night for jolly patter, Gevan.”

  We rode the four miles to the riverbank in silence. There were three other cars parked there, widely spaced, lights out, facing the dark oiled flow of the river. I lighted two cigarettes and gave one to Perry, pleased to find she had the gift of silence and the wisdom to know when it was necessary.

  I had been thinking aloud when I had talked to her. It was like the old days. Ideas had always flowed more freely when I had been dictating to her.

  It was ironic that it had been Lester who had triggered my conjecture with his innocent use of the word sabotage. It had embarrassed me to bring that idea up when talking to Mort Brice about Mottling. We’re all too afraid of being thought dramatic. We’re terrified of being thought ridiculous.

  It all made sense when I began to think of Mottling as a man who had lived a life that was a triumph of misdirection. They would commit such a man only when the gamble became important
enough, the same way, long ago, they had finally committed Klaus Fuchs. I could not waste my energy fretting about Mottling’s motives. If I was right, something had twisted him, irreparably, too many years ago. The pipe and shaggy tweed hid an incurable sickness of the soul.

  Obviously, Mottling would be provided with all the highly trained people he could use. Others, like Fitch and Dolson, could be corrupted and enlisted and forced to serve. And, because he was of the utmost importance, every effort would be made to keep him well in the clear, above suspicion.

  Suddenly I had a frightening appreciation of how careful their planning was. It had to go back at least five years, to a decision made to infiltrate a big heavy-industry corporation being run by a pair of bachelor brothers. A woman was an obvious wedge. A special woman, clever, dedicated, merciless and superbly trained. She needed an identity, so they searched until they found a friendless girl without family, in Cleveland, who matched closely enough in age and size. The real Niki Webb gave up her name and her life, and I succumbed to the wiles of an expert, masterful as a grub worm in a hen run.

  Ken and I, at that time, made a hell of a good team. She had a long and intimate chance to appraise me, and perhaps she decided I was too strong and too able. So she arranged her surprise party, after giving Ken the treatment that had been so effective with me. She couldn’t know how it would come out. I might have killed one of them or both of them. The result would have been the same—to make Dean Products more vulnerable by destroying able management. I destroyed it when I walked out. So she married Ken and slowly gutted him, and made room for Mottling to come in when it was time.

  But Ken fooled them. He figured it out, and they had to kill him. And it was disconcerting to learn I was no beach bum. They had thrown everything at me, including Niki, and nothing had worked, so they had tried with the truck, and that hadn’t worked.

  Now, maybe, they were sweating. I’d stirred up too much. I’d caused them to fold the Dolson swindle, empty the files and kill Dolson’s blonde playmate. They would have to protect all the apparatus they had left. I shuddered.

  “Somebody walked over your grave,” Perry said. My eyes had become accustomed to that faint light cast by the reflection of the distant city on the overcast. The rain had stopped again. She sat facing me, her back against the far door, her legs curled on the seat. When she raised her cigarette to her lips, the red glow of inhalation exposed the pleasant girlish structure of her face.

  “Wherever the grave is,” I said, “I hope it’s a long time waiting for me.”

  “The good die young,” she said with a throaty amusement. “Feel safe.”

  In the new silence I was aware of how comfortable I was with her. I felt no need to strut, protest, strike attitudes, invent gambits. She knew me well, so well I could afford the rare luxury of being entirely myself. In the warmth and relaxation of that relationship I grew pleasantly aware of her in a physical way. She was girl-in-the-dark, nubile, fragrant—a slender, quick-minded copper-blonde who had become dear to me long before there was any of this awareness. I felt a special stir of tenderness toward her.

  “It was so unreal to me when you were talking, Gevan,” she said. “It all sounded wild and mad. That business of gray eyes and blue eyes, and Niki being somebody else—I wondered if you were losing your mind. But … every minute it seems more real and true. I remember something. I think it fits.”

  “In what way?”

  “I told you the other night how much I hated her after you started to date her. I used to yearn for ugly, terrible things to happen to her. She seemed so … invulnerable. We used to talk about her. She was polite and friendly to all the other girls, but nobody could get an inch closer to her. She seemed to be laughing at all of us, somehow. There was a lot of gossip … on account of the way she got her job. She made us all feel inadequate. There was a strangeness about her we all sensed. She didn’t seem entirely real. One of the girls was from Cleveland too, and about the same age. She kept trying to pump Niki, to find out more about her, and we kept egging the girl on. Niki was polite and evasive. One day the girl cornered her, alone, in the second floor stock room, determined to pin Niki down. We never found out what actually happened. When the girl came back to her desk she acted frightened out of her wits. She was chalky and shaking, and she moved strangely, as if she’d been hurt somehow. In the middle of the afternoon she suddenly had hysterics and went home. Two days later she gave notice. She wouldn’t tell us what happened. She wouldn’t even talk about it. It made Niki seem more eerie than ever. When I found out you were going to marry her, I knew with all my heart that it was a dreadful mistake. I didn’t know why. I just knew it. It seems to fit, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m so glad you didn’t marry her, Gevan. I’m so glad you didn’t have that kind of relationship with her. She’s like … some kind of animal, different from all the rest of us.”

  I thought of white quilted plastic, the black line of poplars watching us, the sliding scent of the sun oil, the narrow scabs on my back. The vividness of my total recall seemed as inexcusable at this time and place as if I had shouted an obscenity into the silence. Yet so complete was my reappraisal of the dark, compelling magic of Niki that I had the feeling of being convalescent. I had gone under a strange knife. A rotten place had been cleaned and drained. With proper care and caution, I could live a long life.

  “I never knew her at all,” I said.

  “I don’t think your brother did, either.”

  “Would you sneer at an act of total cowardice, Perry? Excuse me, dammit, but that Perry name doesn’t set quite right. Joan fits so much better.”

  “Joan is family. Perry is kind of a public name. It sounds better to me for you to call me Joan. What am I supposed to sneer at?”

  “I’ve brought you to an old-timey necking spot, and now I think I’ll take you to a motel.”

  “This is terribly sudden. I can’t imagine such a thing. What kind of a girl do you think I am? Pick a nice pretty motel, huh?”

  “No joke. We’re out of town and we’ll keep going. I’m not the hero type. The conspiracy is too big and too tough and too ruthless. We’ll make some miles, and then you can phone your mother and tell some feeble lies, and then we’ll make more miles, and we’ll hole up, in two widely separated rooms, if you say so. In the morning we start making long-distance phone calls from wherever we are, some of them to people who will remember me and listen to me. We’ll come back after the Feds have the situation in hand.”

  I was barely able to see her nod before she spoke. “I’ve always thought heroes would be very dull people, Gevan. I got over wanting one when I was eleven. If, in all your guesses, you’re only twenty per cent right, it is still a very good time to go hide. And afterward, Gevan, there is another thing you are going to do. I took a lot of orders from you in bygone days. Now you take one from me, sir. You haven’t been proud of yourself for a long time. You haven’t been pleased with yourself. You haven’t had any basic, important satisfactions. So I’m ordering you to go back to work where you belong, and do the job you were meant to do, and stop being a forlorn, dramatic, bored guy.”

  I sat waiting for my own anger, annoyance and indignation. Enough people had been prodding me. But I thought of going back, and I felt a hollow fluttering of excitement and anticipation in my belly.

  “You are a marvel, Miss Joan. As long as it’s an order, ma’am, I’ll obey it, ma’am.”

  She laughed with her gladness. I reached on impulse and took hold of her wrist. I had wanted to pull her toward me, with some vague idea of sealing this vow with a kiss that would be light and quick and gay. Her laughter stopped. Her wrist was warm and fine and delicate. There was a tremulous resistance in her, an audible catch of her breath.

  How fine, I thought. How very fine that it should be this way, so that I can be permitted a feeling of protective tenderness, rather than to have my slightest touch bring the woman surging and bulging against me, all blurred
, gasping, softening, with blinded hungry gropings, digging at me with breasts and groin, usurping the aggressive function of the male, using me with a need so animal, so unselective, that were she to be interrupted on her dogged way to her completion, it would take her long moments to remember my name.

  Joan knew who I was, every moment. She said my name after the first tentative kissing, made sweet by the shy-bold curling and shift of her lips, and again, with small and breathless laughter after kneeling in the seat, her palms flat against my cheeks to hold me for the rain of kisses in quick, prodigal, random diffusion, and again, with a note of wonder, after a long and bruising time, a bittersweet ferocity, an adult hunger.

  I held her then, tightly, marveling at a sweet fit of her against me, so perfect as to seem habitual, like coming home, with the silk of her hair against the angle of my jaw, our fast hearts and breathing mingled. This closeness was not enough, and I thought that perhaps the sweet and complete coupling of our bodies—which would come in our good time at some other place—might also have this same flavor of not being the ultimate closeness for us, because this time, and forever, it was the celebration of the joining of the spirit in which we were involved. Our bodies would be good with each other. We could sense that. But they, no matter how hot and keen their pleasures, would be merely symbolizing the more valid union of the souls of Gevan and Joan, rather than performing an ancient act complete in itself.

  I whispered to her, “You said the big crush ended. You said you got over it.”

  “Of course it ended, dear. I just didn’t tell you what it turned into. Just hold me tight, like this, for a long, long time.”

  I looked beyond her, through the car window. I saw the silhouette of a faceless man. As I lunged to trip the lock on the door on her side, the door behind me was ripped open and a hard arm clamped around my throat, dragging me out from behind the wheel as Joan screamed.

  I tried to grab the wheel but my hand slipped. I went back and down, the concealed running board scraping against the small of my back, my shoulders thudding against wet grass. In the endless moment of the fall, I thought of my stupidity in making no effort to find out if we were followed, no attempt to see the car that had probably hung back, lights off, following the rented sedan. And I also thought of the truck that had come barreling down on the hill when I left Niki’s house. Mottling had told her I was coming. The penalty for stupidity was high. Too high, because Joan was in it too, and the Brady girl had talked before they killed her.