Area of Suspicion

Chapter 12

Friday morning was rainy, blustery. Soggy papers whipped around River Street in tight spirals trying to paste themselves against your ankles. I stopped at a corner store and bought a plastic raincoat.

The night’s sleep hadn’t done me much good. Too much tension makes too many dreams. Niki, Perry, Hildy, Lita, Alma — all of them had twisted through my dreams in perfumed confusion, saying things I couldn’t understand. At one point Mottling had been carefully explaining to me that a D4D was alive, and if you looked closely enough, you could see it breathe. He forced my head down against it, and under the metal skin I could hear the thud of a great slow heart. It felt oddly warm against my ear, and when I straightened up I saw it was a gigantic breast, and I had been listening to the woman-heart. There was a second breast in the shadows off to the right, and beyond them a foreshortened sleeping face. My midget feet sank into the rubbery skin and Mottling was gone and I ran in terror and fell from the sleeping body into darkness...

So when I awoke I felt tired and drained and odd, with sour mouth and aching joints.

River Street paralleled the river, but the warehouses blocked the view of it. Freighters off-loaded at the river docks into the warehouses for trans-shipment by rail and truck. Huge trucks were parked on the west side of the street, tailgates against the loading docks, cabs swiveled at right angles to the trailers to let traffic edge by. Men wheeled hand trucks into the trailers, and forklift trucks were hurrying with insect intentness. Wildcatters dickered for loads with warehouse agents, and assorted hangover victims huddled in doorways, watching the wan morning world, flinching at too much noise. The early bars were open, smelling of stale beer.

I found number 56 on the east side of the street, a narrow doorway with a flight of stairs leading up. The doorway was between a bar and a marine supply store. Just inside the door, fastened to the wall, was a series of small wooden signs. There was a studio of the dance, a Russian bath, a twine company, a watch repairman, a skin specialist, a Spanish teacher, and Acme Supply. The Acme Supply sign was newest. It indicated the fourth floor of the narrow building.

The wooden steps of the three flights were dished by fifty years of wear. Dun plaster had crumbled off the wall exposing small areas of naked lath. It was a strange location for a company that could be grossing as much as a quarter of a million a year. On the second floor landing I heard voices chanting, “Yo tengo un lapiz.”

On the third floor a tired samba beat came through the door that announced the studio of the dance. A sailor stood in the hall talking in low tones to a miss in black velveteen slacks and a cerise blouse. Neither of them looked at me as I went by. She was shaking her head dully. His lips were an inch from her ear.

Acme shared the fourth floor with the skin specialist. On the opaque glass of the upper half of the aged oak door was painted, without caps: acme — industrial supplies — c. armand lefay, president.

There was a mail slot in the door. I knocked. No answer. I looked closely at the knob and saw dust on it. I tried the knob and found the door was locked.

The skin specialist’s door was not locked. A sign said COME IN. I went in. A girl in white behind the desk looked up at me with visible annoyance. She was blonde and sallow and her eyes were set too close together. There was a book propped up in front of her, an historical novel with a mammary cover, and she had been filing her nails as she read.

“Do you have an appointment?” she asked. Her voice was colorless and nasal.

“I don’t want to see the doctor. I was wondering how I could get in touch with your neighbor across the hall, Mr. LeFay. How often does he come in?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Do you see him often?”

“I don’t pay no attention.”

“Have you ever seen him?”

“A couple times, sure.”

“Could you tell me what he looks like?”

“What goes on? You a cop or a bill collector or what? Or you want to sell him something?”

“None of those. I just want to get in touch with him. I thought you might help me out. I’d appreciate it.”

She smiled reluctantly. “You don’t look like any of those things except maybe a salesman. He’s a mousy little guy. I mean you wouldn’t ever look at him close. He could be five-foot-four or five-foot-seven, and thirty-five or fifty-five. Just one of those people you don’t look at.”

“Does he have a secretary?”

“If he has, I’ve never seen her or heard her. I’m too busy to keep my nose in what goes on across the hall. Honest, I’m sorry I can’t help you, but honest to God, I couldn’t even tell you what it says on the door — and I couldn’t care less.”

I smiled, “I was going to ask you where he lives, but I guess that’s no good.”

She smiled, and again it looked as if it hurt her mouth. “I could maybe help a little bit. I got a hunch he lived right in that office for a while. It’s against the rules, but who’s going to check? I figured that because I’d smell something cooking when I’d come in in the morning. But I haven’t smelled anything lately.”

“Have you ever seen an army officer in uniform on the stairs? Man in his fifties? Florid complexion?”

“I don’t have time to keep going up and down the stairs and anyway, I keep my door shut all the time. That junky music from downstairs drives me nuts. The same records, over and over and over, and if all that’s down there is a dance studio, I’ll eat every record they got in the place. We’ve been here nine years and it gets worse and worse. The doctor talks about moving, but will he ever do anything? Not him. We’ll be right here the day the goddamn place falls down.”

I backed to the door. “Thanks a lot.”

“For what?”

I went down the stairs. The sailor was gone. The girl in black slacks and cerise shirt was still there, cupping her elbow in her palm, shoulders against the wall, staring at the floor, smoking. She gave me an opaque look as I went by her, tramped on her cigarette, and went into the dance studio. Another record started to play.

I walked three blocks to my car. The rain had stopped. I tossed the raincoat onto the back seat. I put the car in a lot near the hotel and went to my room and called Mottling from there. I got him on the line and told him in as casual a voice as I could manage that I had decided to back Granby.

“I’m sorry, of course,” he said smoothly, “but thanks for letting me know.”

“That was the arrangement. Glad to do it.”

“I guess you know I hate like the devil to give up this job. Thanks again for letting me know, fella. ’By now.”

I hung up and frowned at the wall. The reaction had been too perfect, too casual. There was no doubt that he had known. Dolson had known, Lester had known, and Mottling had known. The phone rang, startling me. I picked it up.

“Gevan? Stanley Mottling again. Wondered if I have your permission to tell Mrs. Dean? She’s anxious to know.”

“I thought I’d go out there and tell her myself later on today.”

“I think that’s a good idea. See you at the meeting on Monday.”

The moment I hung up, the phone rang again and the switchboard girl downstairs said, “I’m holding a call for you, Mr. Dean. Go ahead, miss.”

“Gevan?” I recognized Perry’s voice. She was upset.

“Yes, Perry.”

“I’m across the street from the offices. This is the second time I tried to get you this morning, Gevan. I’m scared. Somebody got into my files last night, or before I got in this morning. The Acme folders are gone. I could still get totals from the books but they won’t mean as much because they don’t show the items.”

“Was the file locked?”

“Yes. It’s a combination safe file. But when Captain Corning came here, he got authority to change all the combinations on the safe files. He’d have a list in his office, of course. Colonel Dolson could have gotten hold of that list, wouldn’t you think?”

After a few moments she asked in a small voice, “Are you still there, Gevan?”

“Sorry, I was thinking. There should be duplicates in the Army office files. Do you think Alma Brady could grab those, if they haven’t already disappeared?”

“I thought of that when I couldn’t get you on the phone. I made an excuse to go over there. She didn’t come in this morning.”

“Maybe she was too upset after last night. Do you have her address? I could go see her. You said a rooming house, didn’t you?”

“Go by my house headed east and take the next right. It’s in the middle of the block. A green and white house on the left. I think the number is 881. I’ve got to get back, Gevan. I haven’t told Mr. Granby about files being missing. Should I? He’ll be wild.”

“Keep it to yourself for a while. If there isn’t a big furor, somebody is going to start wondering why. It may make them nervous.”

It was just eleven o’clock when I parked in front of the only green and white house in the middle of the block. She had missed the number, but not by much. I went up onto the porch. The wind rocked a green wicker rocking chair. I pushed the bell and above the wind’s sound I could hear it ring in the back of the house. I felt uneasy. Through the glass of the door, between lace curtains; I saw a vast woman waddling down the hallway toward the door, emerging from the gloom like something prehistoric.

She opened the door. She couldn’t have been more than twenty pounds too light for a fat-lady job in any circus. Her eyes were pretty, and the rest of the huge face sagged in larded folds. She was a prisoner inside that flesh. Somewhere inside the half-barrel haunches, the ponderous, doughy breasts and belly, stood a woman who was not old and who had once been pretty. Her tiny pink mouth crouched warily back in the crevice between the slablike cheeks.

Her voice was thin and musical. “Good morning.”

“I wonder if I could see Miss Alma Brady.”

“You can find her over to Dean Products. She works civil service over there, for Colonel Dolson.”

“She didn’t report for work this morning.”

“That’s funny! If somebody’s sick, the other girls, they tell me. I can’t get upstairs and the girls, they all take care of their own rooms, so I wouldn’t see her if she was sick in bed. Come to think of it, I didn’t see her go out this morning.” She moved to the foot of the stairs. The hall floor creaked under her weight.

“Alma! Alma, honey!” Her voice was thin, clear, and young. She was a yard across the hips.

We listened and she called again and there was no answer. I said, “She might be asleep. If you could tell me which room I could go and check.”

“Well — I don’t like to break the rules and that’s one of the rules, about no men on the second floor.”

I had to try my Arland magic again. “My name is Dean. Gevan Dean. Dean Products. I can show you identification.”

“I was wondering where I’d seen you and now I know it was in the papers, so I guess it’s all right if you go on up, Mr. Dean. Golly, I didn’t know Alma knew you. You go right on up and straight down the hall toward the back of the house to the last door on the left. You know, funny thing, that girl’s been on my mind lately. She used to be so sunny, and lately she’s been awful sour.”

I went up two stairs at a time. The hall had a girl smell — perfume and lotions and astringents and wave set. And the echoes of night gigglings, and whispered confidences and man hunger and pillows salted with tears.

I knocked at Alma’s door. There was no answer. I opened the door cautiously and saw that the room was empty. I went in. The bed had not been slept in. It looked as if our Alma had had a night on the tiles. I couldn’t blame her. Not in her frame of mind. I remembered she had been carrying a red coat in my hotel room. I looked in her closet. No red coat. So the odds were she hadn’t come back to her room last night. There was a picture on her maple dressing table. A tinted photograph of a young man in swim trunks. He looked stiffly into the camera, unsmiling, his arms held awkwardly so the muscles would bulge.

I went downstairs and gave the fat woman a reassuring smile. “I guess she just didn’t come in at all last night.”

“Oh, she came in, all right.”

“You saw her?”

“No, but my room is off the kitchen, right under hers, and I heard her moving around, quiet like. It woke me up. I sleep light, and my clock has hands you can see in the dark. It was after three.”

“I guess she came in and went out again, because the bed isn’t slept in.”

“You know, I remember thinking in the night it was good for her to be going out with a gentleman friend again. She used to keep real late hours, and come dragging in at dawn and sleep a little and go off to work bright as a dollar. I guess you can do that when you’re young as she is. She was cheerful then, like I said, but since she’s been spending the evenings in her room, she’s been broody. No pleasant word for anybody, and she was one of my nicest girls. They don’t go much for the late dates except on week ends, because some of them are studying a lot on their graduate work over to the college.”

“Would it be too much trouble to check with your other girls and see if any of them saw her last night or this morning, Mrs.—”

“Colsinger. Martha Colsinger, Mr. Dean. Where should I phone you if I find out anything, or will you come back?”

“You can phone me at the Gardland. If I’m not in, please leave your name and I’ll phone you back. I hope it isn’t too much trouble.”

“No, because I’d check anyway. I got a kind of uneasy feeling about all this. You don’t think anything could have happened to her, do you?”

“I don’t think so. I certainly hope not.”

I thanked her and left. I told myself I was primarily interested in seeing Niki because I wanted to see what her reaction would be to my decision to back Walter Granby. Of course, it wasn’t a final decision. It was a bluff. I had until the Monday meeting to make my actual decision.

But as I drove, a little too fast, toward the Lime Ridge house, I had enough fragmented decency to be conditionally honest with myself. I wanted to look at her. I wanted to see her because our sunlit orgy had become unreal and implausible. It was an episode I knew I should try to forget, yet, perversely, I wanted some confirmation from her that it had actually happened.

A time of sleep, even when it is as dream-torn as mine had been, erects a curious barrier. The memory of that particular kind of frenzy becomes very like the memory of having been very drunk. It is difficult to credit yourself with the remembered things done and said. You say, “That could not have been me! I am not like that! There is some mistake. There is some significant thing I have forgotten which makes all the rest of it excusable.”

Low, misty clouds were moving quickly, sometimes touching the tops of the rolling hills. The air was humid with spring, and warming rapidly.

Victoria greeted me, smiling, and told me to wait in the living-room. I watched her narrowly, alert for any subtle hint that she had learned, somehow, what had happened. Maids can make an entire construction from the smallest carelessness. I wondered if Niki had been properly careful with my stained clothing and with the toilet kit she had provided. Though usually I give less than a damn about what anybody thinks of how I live and what I do, I surprised myself with the extent of my concern for Victoria’s good opinion. She struck me as being, in that only basic and pertinent way, a lady. And she would assess sudden and sweaty copulation between the new widow and the brother of the deceased as a unique vileness. Which it was.

There was no change in her remote, friendly politeness. As she walked away I suddenly knew that if Victoria guessed what had happened after she left, she would no longer be here. She was that sort of a person. So Niki, no matter what other motivations she might have, would be extraordinarily careful for fear of losing an exceptionally good servant.

I waited tensely in the rich silence of the big room. It was a handsome but sterile room. I saw it was a room without sign or stain that life had gone on in it. (This model home is in the hundred-and-fifty-thousand price range. Note the subtle yet effective use of color. The small placards show where each item may be purchased. Please do not touch anything.)

Niki came walking in quickly, brisk and smiling, coming to me to put the quick light kiss at the corner of my mouth, then say with a housewife’s glib affection, “Hello, my darling. I’ve missed you.”

She wore a man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and closely tailored pale blue denim ranch pants. Her hair was latched back with a twist of matching blue yarn. A scab of mud was drying on the right knee of the ranch pants. She carried work gloves and a muddy grubbing tool, shaped like a green steel claw. (And this model represents the lovely mistress of the $150,000 house who loves to work in her garden on warm spring mornings.)

“If you need props, you could wheel a wheelbarrow in.”

She looked at the gloves and garden tool. “I didn’t know I’d brought these in. I can be nervous too, you know. Give me that much credit, Gevan.”

She walked over to place the tool and gloves on the raised hearth. As she did so, the pale crust of mud fell from her knee and broke on the rug. She squatted and carefully picked up every crumb, her back to me. The coarse denim was pulled as tight as her skin. There were no kidney pads of fat, no rope of softness above the stricture of the dark blue belt. There was a long and firm blending of line, from the reversed parentheses outlining the trimness of the waist, down into the reverse curve of the inverted, truncated, Valentine heart of solid buttocks. Even as she sat so effortlessly on her heels, she kept her back so straight, the small of her back was concave. Her figure was strangely deceptive. She was so basically sturdy as to be, in thigh, hip and breast, almost massive. Yet the total impression she gave was of actual slenderness. This was the product of her height, of the long oval of her face — designed for a more fragile woman — of the quick, light way she moved, of her short-waisted, leggy build, and of her lack of any sagging softnesses, any self-indulgent bulgings. She was styled for function, designed with the merciless economy men expend on the weapons with which they kill. There are never many of them in the world at any one time, and fewer who, like Niki, had peaked into such rich and awesome splendor.

Looking at her confirmed every memory of the previous day, and made me willing to partially — very partially — forgive myself. Hers was an earthiness and a primitive readiness that created a response so atavistic, all the intellectualizings and moralizings of a modern man were flung aside, like dust from a spinning disk.

She dropped the crumbs of mud into an ash tray, walked over and sat on the flat wooden arm of a handsome chair and seemed to study me with care. “I really thought you would come back last night. I thought of cute little ways of keeping you from feeling too awkward about coming back so soon.”

“Would they have worked?”

“Probably not. But five minutes after you were here, it wouldn’t have mattered, would it?”

“I almost came back.”

“You were a stuffy fool not to.” She carefully examined a fingernail. “You should know this isn’t a good time, dear. If you want, I’ll send her off on some errands, but I think it would be too obvious, don’t you?”

“I didn’t come here for...”

“Not so loud, darling!” She stood up. “I’ll go change. Victoria will bring some ice. You make us some drinks and we’ll have lunch.”

“I can’t stay that long, thanks.”

With a waspish look, she said, “You make it pretty damn difficult for me to remember I’m spending the rest of my life with you.”

“It’s all decided?”

“Isn’t it?”

“Yesterday you seemed to be setting up some conditions.”

“Oh, that! Just get over all the hostility, sweet. But don’t take too long, please. I want to be your girl, without all this... disputation.”

I went over and sat on a low windowseat and looked at her across thirty feet of the room’s silence. “We’re trying to move too fast,” I told her.

“I know it. I didn’t mean it to be this way. I was going to be the muted widow, darling, with a carefully calculated sigh and snuffle from time to time, and I was going to be terribly proper about the whole routine. But that very first time I saw you, just before Stanley arrived, remember? My splendid intentions went all to hell. It was... like a spell. I guess I knew then I couldn’t continue the act, but I told myself it was just one little slip that didn’t count. Yesterday, darling, maybe you won’t believe this, but I plotted that little sun-lotion routine just to prove to myself I was a girl of character. I was going to tease you, darling, that’s all. I wanted you to want me and be able to do nothing about it. I thought you’d cap the bottle and scramble back to the wall and try to look as if it didn’t matter, and I was going to be laughing at you, inside. But... all of a sudden there was no turning back for either of us. Yes, we’re going too fast. I know that. I didn’t plan it that way. But we are, and I don’t think there’s very much we can do about it.”

“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.