Area of Suspicion (22 page)

“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.”

She reached out and moved the figurine to a place where her typewriter carriage wouldn’t knock him over.

“Perry, which office was Ken using?”

“When Mr. Mottling arrived, Ken moved out of your office and gave it to him. Your brother took over the office where Mr. Mirrian used to be.”

“I know the one. Has anybody else moved in?”

“No. It’s empty. I don’t believe anybody has even been in there since—last Friday. There wouldn’t have been anything in there that had to be processed.”

I saw the faint bluish shadows under her eyes. “You look tired, Perry. What did you do—have a late date after you left me?”

“No. I just—couldn’t sleep. There seem to be so many things that don’t make any sense. It’s like there’s something we don’t know. Something big and important, and if we
knew it, or could guess it, then everything else would be—understandable. Maybe when you go to that Acme office …”

“I went there this morning. Nobody there. It’s just a mailing address, a cubbyhole. Perry, word will get around that I’m in the plant. They may check with you. Call me and tell me who’s looking for me. I’ll be in my brother’s office.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and I realized I had dropped back into the habit of giving her orders. She looked amused.

I got to the office where Ken had been without encountering anyone in the hall who looked even vaguely familiar. The outer office door was closed. I went in and shut it behind me. It was designed like the other executive offices, with the windowless outer office for the secretary. There was dust on the secretarial desk—more dust than could accumulate in one week, and it gave me a wry appraisal of my brother’s importance in the firm. I opened the second door and went into his office. It was small, with pale paneling, pale green plaster walls above the paneling, a gray steel desk. The room was as gray as the rain outside.

I sat in Ken’s chair and pushed the black button of the fluorescent desk lamp. The tube flickered, then glowed with a steady white light. The light slanted across the bottom half of a framed picture of Niki, bold against her mouth, shadowing her eyes.

I sat there and tried to pretend I was Ken, tried to think as he had thought. Perhaps he had merely sat there, waiting for the long hours to pass until he could leave without being too obvious, and go to the Copper Lounge, to Hildy and stingers and a sedate alcoholic haze. I needed clues to what had been troubling him. I began looking through the desk.

There were pencils in the top drawer, and paper clips, and scratch pads. The other drawers were equally devoid of any hint of the personality of the man who had sat at this desk—a few cigars, some antique copies of
Business Week
, some engineering journals, a few competitors’ catalogues with their prices penciled in. Ken never wanted to be a big wheel. He lacked drive. He had been useful to me. He was
content to let me make the decisions, and when I asked him to do something, he did it doggedly, thoroughly, and well. He was slow, methodical, and performed best when not under pressure, when there was no deadline.

I had left him perched on a high, vulnerable place. With complete objectivity, I knew that he was an employee type. Responsibility made him uneasy.

His appointment pad was on the right corner of the desk. It was that brand which has a clock embedded in the middle, the dial showing through the circular hole in the cover, each page divided into wedge-shaped sections to correspond with the hours of the day as shown on the clock.