Dolson’s suicide got less of a play than I had expected. It got one column on page three, with a picture of a thinner, younger Dolson in uniform with leaves on his shoulders instead of eagles. There was an indirect hint about his speculations. There was no attempt to link his death to the Brady suicide or my brother’s murder. As any alert legman might easily sense some connection, I guessed Tancey’s people had put a partial lid on the whole thing.
There was some blah about Dean Products being a key plant in the defense program, and some more about officials of the space program arriving today by plane from Washington.
I found myself in the last paragraph:
Mr. Gevan Dean, a resident of Florida, arrived this past week to attend a meeting of the Board of Directors of Dean Products, Inc. He resigned from the presidency of the firm four years ago, relinquishing that position to his brother, who was recently slain. It is not expected that Mr. Gevan Dean will resume active participation in the management of the firm. As yet Mr. Gevan Dean has not been reached for comment on the Dolson suicide.
Also I found that somebody had whipped out a quick editorial. It spoke of all the loyal, efficient men who take leaves of absence from their firms to serve their country as reserve officers on active duty, aiding the military by donating skilled services for lower pay than they could command in industry, and it went on to say how it was a shame that the dishonesty of one man could bring down unfavorable publicity on all those others who do such a splendid job.
I dressed and went downstairs. It seemed very quiet. I found a dining room with small tables, each set for four places. A stone-faced woman asked me if I wanted breakfast, and how I wanted my eggs. She served me with ruthless efficiency. The coffee was superb. Kids were having a noisy Saturday morning somewhere nearby. I could hear them yelling. There was no sound in the big house. There was something institutional in the way the house was furnished, in the plates and utensils.
A stocky nurse in rustling white came in and smiled at me and said, “Mr. Dean? Mind if I join you for some coffee?”
“Please do.” She had a broad, pleasant Irish face.
“I’m Ellen McCarthy, Mr. Dean.”
“Do you happen to know anything about Joan Perrit?”
“Oh, yes. She was brought here from the hospital about an hour ago. She’s sleeping right now.”
“How is she?”
“Fine. Or they wouldn’t have moved her. She had a headache and a slight cold. No fever.”
“Can I see her?”
“Later. Perhaps this afternoon, Mr. Dean. She’ll be sitting up by then, and back on her feet tomorrow.”
The apprehension in the back of my mind faded away, and I grinned so broadly at Nurse McCarthy that she looked startled. After she left me, I wandered toward the front of the house. A young man stepped out of a room and said, courteously, “Please stay away from the front of the house, Mr. Dean. Mr. Tancey’s orders.”
“When will he be here?”
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t say.”
I looked around the rest of the house. There were books and magazines in the study, and I was permitted to go out into the small walled garden.
It was noon when Tancey arrived. He came alone. He found me in the study and sat down. It was obvious that he hadn’t been to bed. He had a gray stubble of beard. It made him look more human.
“Sorry we had to give you such a going over last night, Mr. Dean.”
“I understand.”
“Some people wanted that tape in a hurry. This is just one part of a picture that’s been developing for some time.”
I stared at him. “They knew about this? Who?”
“Just whom you’d imagine, Mr. Dean. When a pattern began to show, a coordinated team was set up. CIA people, and service counterintelligence people, some of us, and some from other specialized agencies. The most effective part of the job has been done by working from the other end, triple-checking operational readiness of complete missile assemblies, reworking the dogs at base installations. Some essential stuff from Dean Products was carefully bitched, so Dean was on the list. Some people have been planted on you, but reports have been negative and we weren’t slated to move in strong until some other deals were cleaned up.”
“How was our stuff defective?” I asked him.
He gave me an almost pitying smile. “I’m no technician, Mr. Dean. But they gave me a crash course. I think I can lose you with one question. When you change the conductivity of one of the ferride plastics, what effect could that have on the reliability of adjacent transistors, diodes, cryotons, masers, parametric amplifiers and so on? Give up?”
“You lost me in the first ten words.”
“Don’t look so troubled. The more sophisticated the birds you build, the more craftily they can be bitched. Take even a sturdy bird like the Polaris—it can and has been jiggered in such a way that the guidance system poops out after six months in the stockpile. That’s among the first ones that were caught. At Dean we’d been thinking in terms of employees, not management, until you started thumping around. Now it’s being reappraised.”
“Can you tell me the status?”
“Some of it. A limited security clearance came through for you this morning. We know of at least four operating outside the plant, and we can assume a few more. LeFay is one of those. We expect to locate him soon. Another one of them rooms in the same place Shennary lived, which makes a neat fit for a murder weapon plant. We’re checking out your brother’s widow.”
“Who is she?”
“All we have so far is proof she’s not Niki Webb. Your Mr. Wilther in Cleveland did a nice job. The photographer who takes the graduation pictures at the high school she went to keeps a file of negatives going way back, for no good reason. We got a blowup of her. There’s a fair resemblance, until the experts start measuring and comparing facial dimensions—placement of the ears, interpupilary gap, etc.”
“Where did she come from?”
He shrugged. “We’ll find out. It’s been narrowed down. The one that looks best so far is Mary Gerrity, code name Charlotte. Slum kid from Chicago. When she was fifteen, tough as hemp and alley-cat smart, a pinko professor bedded her down, sold her his version of social paradise and steered her into the YCL. That was in 1941. He sensed when he was about to be picked up and took off with her for Mexico City. Three years later he got killed down there. We got the word it was a party discipline thing. She disappeared. In 1947 when our people were trying to plug some bad leaks in Berlin it turned out she was servicing a BG who should have known better. She was netted and while they were still trying to crack her open, indignant consular types showed up with papers all in order proving she was a Polish citizen and pried her loose. In the next few years we made her a couple of times in group photos out of Moscow, big party fetes and banquets. I’m telling you all this because I’m sure this is the right one, and we’ll know for certain when that maid, Victoria, turns over something with some good prints on it. Next time we picked up her trail was, for God’s sake, in Cambodia, but it was a old trail and the damage was done, and she’d gone the bedroom route to do it. Five years ago we knew she was back in Mexico. It was a good guess she was coming in, and it was our hunch she was all set up for some kind of permanent cover, but we lost her, and we’ve been looking for her ever since, because we know she’s been given top training and she’s one of the very best they’ve got. Five years ago any fool could guess that Dean Products would get some critical space contracts. So they sent the Dean brothers a special package.”
“And it blew us to hell,” I said in a sick voice.
“Because the package was tailored for bachelor brothers, Mr. Dean. The laymen who sneer at the Mata Hari angle and think it’s corny are damn fools. One shrewd broad who despises men so much she adores every minute of banging them because it cuts them down to animal level, and who can accept party discipline out of a tough, genuine dedication, and is such a package it dries out your mouth to look at the wal
k on her, a broad like that is worth, at the very least, one pair of nuclear subs. Don’t call yourself a fool. You swing an amateur bat against big league pitching, and you should average out zero zero zero. But you’ve batted about zero two five, which is exceptional. She chased you off and swung the door open for Mottling when the time was ripe. Now you’re helping us close it a lot sooner than we would have.”
“Can you pick up Mottling too?”
“Wish we could. We’d have to have solid proof, and there won’t be any of that laying around, or anybody who’ll talk. But I hope from here on we can keep him away from critical areas. That’s the most we could expect, and we’ll be happy with that.”
“How about Lester Fitch? He’ll break easy.”
“But give us nothing. He’s a fringe operator. He cut himself into Dolson’s take. Blackmail based on something he found out by accident, I’d say. It’s made him anxious to have things keep going exactly as they were. If you or Granby took over, Dolson might get moved away from the trough, so it made him a hot Mottling man. Perhaps your brother said just enough to him so that Fitch felt there was more to your brother’s death than met the eye. I think he’s been highly nervous lately.”
“You said Joan and I are going to stay murdered for a while. How long?”
“Until the Monday meeting, and then we’ll see if shock has any effect on those people. Probably it won’t. Think this over, Mr. Dean. If they had killed you two, and if we had fumbled the ball when we got around to looking into Dean Products, Mottling would be in, and, because your will still leaves everything to your brother, his estate would pick up the marbles, and that shifty broad would be sitting on sixteen thousand shares of voting stock. If our shock doesn’t work, you can at least vote Mottling out.”
“And put Granby in?”
“That’s your problem.”
“No little lecture about where my duty lies?”
He stood up. “I’ve got to have some sleep. About duty, so-called, you have to live with yourself, and I have to live with myself, and that’s the one trap nobody ever gets out of.” He walked out.
I went to the window overlooking the walled garden. May is a good month in Florida. The tarpon are moving north. The mosquitoes aren’t out in force yet. It’s a good month to go to Marathon and stalk bonefish across the flats.
The size of the alternative frightened me. I would be shouldering a tremendous responsibility. It would ride my back, day and night. But at the same time the thought of it gave me a crawling holiday-feeling of anticipation.
Chapter 17
I was in the small walled garden at three o’clock when Nurse McCarthy came walking slowly out into the sunlight, with a wan Joan leaning on her arm. I stood up quickly, went over to her and took her other arm.
“Joan! God, should you be walking around?”
“It was either this or tie her to the bed,” McCarthy said.
“How do you feel, honey?”
“Want to race?” Joan said. Her head bandage was bright white against the coppery hair.
She stood with McCarthy holding her while I unfolded a deck chair for her. We put her in the chair. She shut her eyes. “Whooo! Now go away, McCarthy, because when the world stops going around I’m going to get kissed.”
“Don’t tax your strength, dearie,” the nurse said, and beamed, and rustled off.
Joan opened her eyes. “Now?”
“Now,” I said. And did. Her lips were sweet.
“Better than that,” she said. “I’m not that fragile.”
So we made it a little better, and it was very fine indeed. She sat back, looking smug. “Now you’ve got my cold too, probably.”
“Indubitably.”
“Now tell me about it. I ran. I was going to get away and get help and something hit me on the back of the head and I fell clunk into a hospital bed, with a headache like a brass band and a case of sniffles and my back feeling like somebody had worked it over with a ball bat.”
I told her. In detail. I tried to keep it calm, but I heard my own voice getting a nervous edge to it. She listened and became more pale. I saw what I was doing to her and exerted more control. I tried to make light comedy out of dropping her, and fumbling over those fences and falling on my face in the kitchen. Her color became better. But she was very grave.
“Thank you, Gevan,” she said in a small voice.
“For what?”
“For all the days of my life from now on. Thank you very much because they are going to be good days.”
“You don’t mind my taking an ownership interest in them?”
“Try to get out of it. Just try. I’ll follow you on the street, beating on a pan and waving a sign: ‘This man ruined me!’ ”
“Ruined you?”
“That’s just a suggestion—for after I get my strength back. My God, Gevan, that’s a delicious black eye!”
“And that’s a delectable bandage.”
“They shaved the top of my head. It’s hideous. They let me look with a hand mirror when they changed the dressing. I look like one of those monastery types. You’re looking at me funny.”
“I’m making up for all the time of having you around and not looking at you.”
“What’s the verdict?”
“You are lovely, Joan Perrit. You have good bones.”
“Thick ones, apparently.”
“Mind if I keep staring?”
“If you keep staring in just that way, I’m going to clutch at you. That’s bad technique. I’m supposed to be shy and girlish and reserved. Mother said never clutch. It makes men nervous.”
“Make me nervous.”
It was a fine Saturday and a fine Sunday. We spent every possible moment together. We had talking to do, but I haven’t the faintest idea of what we talked about. We were memorizing each other. If it happens to somebody else, it is just a standard moon-June case of love. When it happens to you, it changes the world.
It had never been this way before. Not with anybody. She was alive and gay, and there was no question about what we would do with our lives. She was Joan and I wanted her for keeps. I wanted her complete with her sudden fits of shyness, and faint awkwardnesses of posture, and the clean, soft texture of her skin, and the good bones, and the structural miracle of wrist and ankle, and the surprising richness of the curve of her waist. I looked at her body and I wanted it ripe with our child. I had never felt that way before. I told her about that and she said it was a good thing. She said it could probably be arranged, that she’d seen a diagram somewhere about how you went about it. There was a lustiness about her sense of humor that I had never suspected, and it delighted me. She told me gravely that she needed to know nothing about other women in my life, because given the opportunity, she felt confident that she could induce in me considerable amnesia on that point. By the look of her eyes and lips when she said it, I had no doubt it was true. Each moment with her made the narrowness of her escape more terrifying.…
The meeting was scheduled for ten o’clock on Monday morning. I was smuggled into the offices ahead of the early birds, and had a long wait in a storeroom full of office supplies. On the way to the offices Tancey told me that LeFay had been picked up in Baltimore and brought back to Arland, and there was no file on him.
At the proper moment one of Tancey’s young men unlocked the door and nodded to me. It was quarter after ten. I followed him to the paneled board room. I felt ridiculous as I walked toward the room, as though I were a female entertainer about to leap up out of a big pasteboard pie.
I erased a wide, idiotic smile from my lips as I walked in. I came very close to yelling. “Surprise!”
At first the room was a smear of smoke and faces. Uncle Al spoiled my electric moment by saying, “Thought you’d forgotten about this, Gevan.”
Tancey was in the room. I looked at Mottling and saw that look of a professional gambler who had learned not to tear up the cards when he loses. There is always another hand coming up. Niki may have gone p
allid when she saw me, but I could not be certain. Her eyes were like Mottling’s. Cool, aware, speculative.
Then I saw Lester Fitch. The flesh of his face had sagged loose from the bone. His complexion was yellow. He mumbled something to Karch, the Chairman of the Board, and left the room, wavering so that his shoulder struck against the door-jamb as he left. One of Tancey’s young men followed him.
The proceedings were brief. The books confirmed my holdings and voting privilege. Walter Granby requested permission to speak. He stated that he hoped I would resume active management of the firm, pleading that he could be more valuable if he could continue to devote his entire attention to financial matters. Karch made an objection that seemed too routine. Uncle Al backed Granby’s suggestion. They all stared at me. I cleared my throat and heard myself saying that under the circumstances I would be glad to take over if it could be confirmed by a vote. Granby declined the nomination Karch made. The voting was between me and Mottling. I saw why Niki had wanted me to abstain from voting. One sizeable shareholder had been won over by Mottling, and I saw from the expression on Karch’s face that it was an unpleasant surprise. Had I not voted, Mottling would have been in.
With my block of voting shares, it was no contest. I was in. And I knew I had to show I could handle it, show that previous success had not been a fluke. I saw Tancey watching me with something like amusement in his eyes. There was a polite spatter of applause. I was renamed to the Board. I blocked Lester’s appointment to the Board.
Karch closed the meeting and people moved slowly out of the smoky room into the wide hallway. Niki came up to me in the hall and put her hand in mine and looked into my eyes. “I guess I was a stubborn, officious fool, darling. I should have realized this is where you belong. Where you have always belonged.”
Area of Suspicion Page 23