Area of Suspicion

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 reason, 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.”

“Don’t forget poor, decrepit, old, broken-down Granby.”

“That’s not far off the mark. Six months of the job would kill him. By then Stanley would be settled in some other job and where would we be?”

“Up the creek, all on account of my stupid pride.”

“Gevan, I know you’re being sarcastic. Actually, I’m trying to help. I’ve always liked you. I don’t like to see — so many things thrown away.”

The inference did not please me. I did not like what he was hinting at.

“Many things, Lester.”

He leaned closer, twisting his empty glass on the bar top, making wet smears. “You’d be hurting more than the company, Gevan. You’d be hurting Niki too. Hurting her terribly. You must see that. She’s in love with you. And this attitude of yours — it’s sabotaging her.”

Just a good old friend of the family. Sabotage. A lovely word. It gives you quite a mental picture: greasy little men scuttling through warehouses and tossing incendiary pencils into dark corners and molding gelignite to bridge trusses. But there are other kinds. Who can do the best job of sabotaging a school system? One grimy little boy — or the superintendent of schools?

“Are you listening to me, Gevan?”

“Sure. What were you saying?”

But I kept thinking while he rambled on. Suppose our grimy little boy wanted to do a thorough job of sabotage. If he was bright enough, he would lead such an exemplary life that he could become superintendent of schools without anyone every suspecting that his sole motivation was to eventually kick down all the school buildings.

“...Niki has her pride too, Gevan. She wants Ken’s plans to be carried out. And Ken’s plans included Stanley Mottling. Ken was able to forget his pride and hand the reins over to Stanley. You can prove that you’re just as big a man as Ken was.”

“That’s what’s spoiling our lives, Lester. All my foolish, stubborn pride.”

He edged closer. “I know you’re trying to make fun of me, Gevan. But remember, it was Niki who asked me to try to talk sense into you.” He lowered his voice and there was a thin coating of slime on his words. “But I’ll bet you if you do things her way at the Monday meeting, it shouldn’t be too hard to arrange to join her on a trip she’s taking. It could be handled in a discreet way. Join up in some other city, you know. I’m almost positive it could be worked.” He underlined the thought by giving me a little nudge with his elbow. A sly and lascivious little nudge.

I was suddenly very, very tired of Lester. I wondered what I was doing, sitting at the bar listening to him. I didn’t want him offering me the delights of Niki in return for being an obedient boy. There is a limit to the number of handsprings you can turn for the bonus of a fair white body.

I closed my fingers around his wrist. My hand and wrist are toughened by a lot of big tarpon, by makos and tuna in season off Bimini, by water skis behind fast boats. It was childish, schoolyard competition. I clenched my hand on his wrist, on the soft office-flesh, until my knuckles popped and I felt the strain in my shoulder — until his mouth twisted and loosened and I had turned him back to that Lester Fitch of Arland High School, fair game for kids half his size, loping along, blubbering with fear. I took all his masks from him and for a moment enjoyed just that, then felt self-disgust and released him quickly.

I made my voice flat, calm. “Now I’ll diagnose, Lester. Now I’ll tell you something. You’ve gotten into something that’s way over your head. You’re scared witless. Your nerves are shot. You’re in a mess you’d like to get out of and know damn well you can’t.”

He made a weak effort to put on a standard mask. Indignation. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“I’m talking about you. I know you, Lester. The world hasn’t appreciated you. You haven’t been able to move fast enough. You’ll use any method. You’ll be crooked if you have to be, to get that power and appreciation faster. You’re mixed up with Dolson. Both of you are thieves. Neither of you are worth a damn. I don’t know how you were angled into it, but it’s too late for you to get out, Lester. You know it and I know it and Dolson knows it.”

He could not look at me. Perhaps any human being has a right to personal dignity. I had stripped Lester naked, yet it was not done in idle cruelty. It was an application of sudden, unexpected pressure — the kind that opens up a hidden fracture-line.

He sat for what seemed like a long time, with his pale hands motionless on the edge of the bar. He turned toward me. I’ve never seen so much hate.

His voice was barely audible. “You’ve always had every damn thing, haven’t you? All the things I’ve wanted. All right. Keep prying. Keep shoving people around. Keep acting smarter and bigger than everybody, because that’s what I want you to do. I want you to keep your goddamn nose in business that doesn’t concern you, because if you get too annoying, they’ll smash you the way they’d smash a bug on a wall. Without even thinking about it. And I want that to happen to you, Mr. Gevan Dean.”

“The way they smashed Ken?” I asked softly.

Hate and pressure had opened the fracture-line. He realized he had said too much. The fracture closed slowly. His eyes became remote again behind optical lenses. He got up from the stool, moving carefully, like a man ill or drunk. He walked away and he did not look like the brisk young man on his way up, the young man to watch. He looked like a toy with a spring that had almost run down.

I had another drink. Perry was right. There was something big and formless in the darkness. I could almost make out the shape of it. Almost.

I paid and left. I went to the lobby and picked up a newspaper. The headlines reflected a world in a tension of conflicting ideologies so familiar to us, we accept it with a glance, yet do not dare think deeply about it. I scanned the front page and saw a box near the bottom of the page. I stopped so quickly on my way to the elevators that the man behind me ran into me, grunted, showed his teeth, and hurried on.

The body of a young girl, recovered from the river eleven miles south of the city at noon had been identified at press time as Alma Brady, civil-service employee at Dean Products. Death was caused by drowning, and the penciled suicide note in the pocket of her red coat confirmed the police theory that she had jumped from one of the Arland bridges some time Thursday night. The note indicated she had been depressed over a love affair.

Poor little chippy, tumbling down the river in her red coat. I could not see her as a suicide type. She was too much on the make, too hungry for life, too tough-minded. With Dolson out of the picture she had started thinking about the next man, not about the river.

There had been a vulnerability about her, but not of the sort that causes suicides. I was making a snap judgment, based on being with her for a half-hour, yet I felt certain she had not killed herself.

Ken had taken his gamble and lost. I mourned him, yet, since I had learned his death had perhaps not been as pointless as I had first thought, I had lost that feeling of resentment a needless death creates. Alma’s death was different. I was positive the fluffy blonde had been murdered. And my anger was strong — stronger than the anger I felt at Ken’s death, because it was more impersonal. There was a callousness about her death. Smashed, Lester had said, like a bug on a wall. Smashed in a professional way which I knew Fitch and Dolson were incapable of.

I turned away from the elevators and hurried to a phone booth in the lobby, found Perry’s home phone number, and dialed. Her mother told me Joan had called earlier to say she was working late and would get her dinner across the street from the offices. I thanked her hurriedly and phoned the plant. The switchboard was closed. The night plug on the number I dialed was into a line to the engineering offices. A man with a weary voice gave me the night number for Granby’s office.

I did not completely realize the extent of my own tension until the sound of Perry’s voice came over the line. I sighed from my heels.

“This is Gevan. Perry. Did you hear about it?”

“I’m sick over it. I wish I’d known it hit her so hard. I thought she was mad at him but not hurt that bad. If I’d known, I could have — stayed with her or something.”

“Did it hit her that hard?”

“What do you mean?”

“Perry, I don’t want to go into it, not over the phone, but I don’t believe it was suicide.”

She made a thin attempt at laughter. “But, good Lord, Colonel Dolson couldn’t possible have—”

“It’s more than Dolson. Have you eaten?”

“I just got back five minutes ago.”

“What time will you be through?”

“Eight-thirty, Gevan.”

“I’ll be parked as close to the main entrance as I can get. I’ll feel better if you lock your office door.”

“You’re frightening me, Gevan.”

“I think it’s time to be frightened.”

It was seven by the clock in the lobby. The storm-lull was over. All the phony words had been said, all the untimed gestures made. Lester had talked his hate, and he would report that no persuasion would work on me. Now the storm could ride down the line of the wind, while the sky changed from brass to ink.