Area of Suspicion

Chapter 16

I knew the calls had been made. I wanted to sleep. But the man knew I was badly chilled and shocked and he got me into a hot tub. It had the right effect. I felt life and strength coming back into drained muscles. He left me when he was sure I wouldn’t pass out in the tub. He left fresh underwear, a wool shirt, and blue jeans. I soaked for a long time. I could hear heavy voices in the house, and people walking around. I got out and used the big rough towel. I looked in the mirror. There was a knot in the middle of my forehead. My left cheek was puffed and purple, the eye swollen to a slit.

I dressed in the clothes left there for me and walked out of the steamy bathroom. Kids peered at me and darted into other bedrooms. I went into the living-room. Sergeant Portugal stood there, looking solid and safe and comforting. He was talking to a tired-looking young man with an unkempt mustache.

“How is she?” I asked.

“By God, you look rough, Dean,” Portugal said. “Meet the doctor.” He was bouncing a small object in his hand. He held it up between thumb and forefinger. “The doc took this out of her head.”

“She’ll be all right, Mr. Dean,” the doctor said.

“I figure it was an air gun,” Portugal said.

“A powerful one. It hit at an angle right at the crown of her head, and traveled between scalp and skull all the way around and came to rest just above her left eyebrow. If it hadn’t hit at an angle, I’d judge it could very easily have perforated the skull.”

“Can I see her?”

“No. I removed the pellet, treated her for shock, and gave her a shot that will keep her out for eight hours. She’s okay to be moved. There’s an ambulance on the way out.”

“She’ll go into Arland General under another name, Mr. Dean,” Portugal said. “And you and I are going into town too, so let’s thank these people and arrange about clothes and see if your wallet is dry, and you can start talking on the way in.”

I rode with Portugal in his sedan. As we turned onto the highway, the ambulance turned in. I talked. I kept nothing back. I was so weary, I would begin to ramble until Portugal would haul me back onto the subject with a terse question. He stopped near a drugstore and made a phone call. I sat in the darkness. I felt uneasy. The river had done something to my nerves. Every time I thought of Joan I felt gladness.

Portugal came back. He got in and didn’t start the motor. “I got to make another call in ten minutes. We’ll wait right here.”

“What call?”

“I got to know where to take you. I got to know where they want you.”

“They?”

He turned. There was enough light on his heavy face so that I could see his weary smile. “It’s out of my league. You’re going to be in good hands. Just relax and ride with it, Mr. Dean.”

Suddenly he was shaking me awake. I came to, bleared with sleep. “Did you make your call?” I mumbled.

“Made it and drove three miles. You’re to go with them.”

I saw two men standing by the sedan. We were parked in an alley. I sensed that we were in downtown Arland. I got out and turned to thank Portugal, but the sedan was already in motion.

“Please follow me, Mr. Dean,” one of the men said. We went through a door and down steps and through a boiler room to a waiting basement elevator. The elevator took us up to a high floor, to an empty, echoing corridor, to lighted offices.

There was a man waiting, sitting at a table. There were three empty chairs. There was a small microphone on the table, a large tape recorder with oversized reels on a stand. The two men who brought me up looked young and competent. The seated man was older. I was conscious of the poor fit of the wool shirt and the jeans, of my bruised face and soggy shoes.

“Please sit down, Mr. Dean. My name is Tancey. I’m with the FBI.” He did not introduce the other two. We all sat down. Tancey was one of those curiously professorial-looking men who, on closer examination, suffer a subtle alteration. You see the hard-knuckled hands then, and the steady eyes, and the breadth of chest, and the clean, compact physical movements, and you wonder what gave you the original impression of the subdued scholar.

Tancey turned on the tape recorder, checked the gain, gave the date and hour and my name, and began asking questions. They took me through it, right from the beginning. Facts and conjectures. And when I did not give enough detail to satisfy them, they made me back up and go over the incident again. They asked questions that seemed to me to be immaterial, and when I asked a question, it was ignored. They were not rude. They were businesslike. It was a strain. I kept yawning. At last Tancey was satisfied. He turned off the recorder, rewound the tape, checked it for sound, using the monitor speaker. I heard my own voice, scratchy with fatigue.

During the last half-hour of it, I had begun to get annoyed. They were undoubtedly fine, capable men, but their attitude was as though they were dealing with a rather stupid, naughty child.

Tancey lit a cigarette and gave me a weary smile. “We may have to go over some of it again tomorrow, Mr. Dean.”

“Can I go back to the hotel now?”

“I’m afraid not. You and Miss Perrit were murdered tonight. We’ll keep it that way.”

“How about her people? You can’t keep them in the dark.”

“They’ve been contacted. They’ll co-operate. They know she’s all right. We had them report her missing.”

“There’s something about this cloak-and-dagger atmosphere that doesn’t set too well with me, Mr. Tancey. Why don’t you sweat it out of Colonel Dolson and wrap it up?”

“You’ll be taken to a place where you can sleep and we’ll see you in the morning.”

“Mr. Tancey, I got myself and Miss Perrit off the bottom of the river. I’ve opened up for you. I’m tired. But I’m not going to accept being brushed off. I want to know the score, and I think I’ve earned the right to know the score.”

Tancey looked at me. It was the first time he had looked at me as a human being rather than a source of information. I sensed the extent of his dedication.

“I’m tired too, Mr. Dean. I haven’t meant to brush you off. Colonel Dolson died tonight. It was arranged to look like a suicide, with note and all. The note was in the form of a confession, so it could have been written by him in exchange for a promise to get him out of the country.”

Weariness had so dulled my reaction time that it took long minutes to understand what had happened, and the implications of it. With Dolson dead, Stanley Mottling might be in the clear. Not beyond suspicion, but beyond proof.

“There is something else you should understand, Mr. Dean,” he continued in his grave voice. “Your will names your brother without any alternate heir. If you had died tonight, his estate would inherit, and that means his widow would inherit your holdings, giving her a solid sixteen thousand voting shares.”

I hadn’t thought of that. Tancey said, “There is more we can talk about. Believe me, Mr. Dean, I’m willing to talk to you, but right now I think you’d better go to bed.”

I could not resist. The brisk young men took me down in the elevator and out through the basement to a car waiting in the alley. I managed to stay awake while they drove me to an old Georgian brick house in an old and no longer fashionable residential section of the city. I was taken to a bedroom. The bed opened like a cave and gobbled me up...

They were efficient. When I woke up I could tell by the sun that it was at least mid-morning. My wrist watch had stopped. The river had gotten into it. Someone had visited my hotel suite. My toilet kit was there, and the rest of my clothing. There was a morning paper just inside the door. I felt astonishingly good. I wondered about Joan. I wondered if the doctor had been lying to me. That thought shadowed the sunshine. My face was not swollen, but I had a black eye that looked like a comedy effect. Deep blue and purple, and I knew it would fade to bilious saffron before bleaching out. I showered and shaved and sat on the side of the bed and looked through the paper.

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:

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 walk 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.