Area of Suspicion

Chapter 1

I woke with the feeling of disorientation an unfamiliar bed gives you, woke in a room too small, and too still. It took long seconds to remember this was George Tarleson’s cruiser, the “Vunderbar,” to remember I had borrowed it yesterday noon, Saturday noon, telling George I had fishing on my mind. Actually my motive had been to get away from the Tarleson’s usual noisy week-end house party.

My bachelor beach cottage is a few hundred yards from their big house at Indian Rocks Beach. It is a good little party house, and when I bought it four years ago, I wanted the gay life — and got it. The cottage was the setting for a party that lasted one year. The personnel changed, but the party went on. For the next two years the parties were shorter, but just as loud. I endured them. During this past year, my fourth in Florida, I tried to escape whenever possible.

So yesterday noon I had borrowed the cabin cruiser from George, and cast off just in time to avoid the unwanted company of a brown and Bikinied maiden who had decided it would be jolly to shanghai herself. She stood in pigeon-toed wistfulness on the dock and watched me out of sight.

I trolled north, glad to be alone, and at dusk I found a secluded, mangrove-bordered bay near Dunedin Isles and dropped the hook far enough from shore to avoid the bugs.

So this was an April Sunday and I had slept long and well. I pulled on swimming trunks and padded out onto the deck. The day was still and gray and silver. Mullet leaped and ripples circles outward. The water was clear and deep. I balanced on the stern rail and dived, and the water washed away the last mistiness of long hard sleep. I swam straight and fast until I was winded, then rolled and floated. The “Vunderbar” was a blue and white toy resting on a display window mirror. This year I was sun-darkened, as during other years, to the shade of waxed mahogany, hair and eyebrows bleached lighter than my skin. But during other years it had been a veneer of health over a permanent condition of either hang-over or a fine high edge. I was back in shape, a testimonial to the abuse the human body will take without permanent damage, and being in shape again was a minor satisfaction which, more and more often, was balanced against vague, unwelcome stirrings of discontent.

Midge and George Tarleson had thrown the standard party. My group, I suppose, making a busy project out of idleness, giving dedicated attention to a new terrace, or a trip to Nassau, or non-objective art — junior grade — or a meaningless affair. When I felt superior or contemptuous, I told myself all my own little make-work projects in the area were also just so much window-trimming. There was no need for me to do anything except play. I had my inheritance — my nice bundle of eight thousand shares of Dean Products stock, the family enterprise. And every year the dividend was just about eight dollars a share.

It had been the usual party and Midge Tarleson had tried to pair me off with somebody whose motives were not as transient as my wariness likes to have them. She had been pretty enough, but she wore a lost look, and her prettiness was something she wanted to trade for security.

Once I had told Midge Tarleson just enough of my emotional history to give her a yen to cure me. She thinks marriage is a cure. But, to her exasperation, my playmates are the little sun-tanned beach girls who want to keep all alliances informal. I want no lost-looking ones.

Mine was the Great American Dream achieved. Money and idleness. But with it had come a sense of guilt, as though I were accused of some unspecified crime. And I guessed that my playmates, when they were alone, felt the same way. Hence our perpetual and turbulent parties. It was as though we had all begun to have a faint aroma of decay. The world was spinning toward some unthinkable destination, and we sat in the sand with our buckets and castles.

In spite of the restlessness it caused, it was better to be alone — a condition I was arranging with increasing regularity. Alone where gulls teetered on the wind, and made bawdy shouting, and the stingarees leaped high and came down with hard clap of gristled wings against the water.

As I swam back to the “Vunderbar” I heard a gutty droning. I looked south down the channel and saw a speedboat swing gracefully around the channel marker. I hauled myself up over the stern of the “Vunderbar,” shaded my eyes against the sky’s pale glare and recognized Jigger Kelsey’s hot little sixteen feet of mahogany hull with its one hundred horses. Jigger was behind the wheel with two women sitting near him. One of them waved and I recognized Midge.

For a moment I had a quick, inward twisting of alarm, an almost superstitious certainty that something had gone very wrong. But it faded quickly. I had left the party, so here was Midge bringing me a piece of it so that I wouldn’t be lonely. There would be a shaker of rum sours aboard, and an account of the fun I was missing.

Jigger made a sweeping turn and came alongside, reversing the motor, judging the distance nicely. He stood up and caught the rail of the “Vunderbar.” “You’re a tough guy to find, Gev,” he said, his grin white in the tan face. “Don’t you ever use that ship-to-shore?”

I tried to give the imitation of a man welcoming friends. The girl in the middle was the one with the lost gray eyes. But she looked at me quite absently and resumed her silent study of Jigger’s broad brown shoulders.

“How did you find me?”

“I sent out a general call,” Midge said, “and one of the charter boats reported seeing the “Vunderbar” at anchor up here.”

I frowned at Midge. “General call?”

She climbed deftly over the rail, ignoring my outstretched hand. Midge is a tall, thin woman with dusty black hair and a pallor the sun never changes. She always looks incongruous in casual beach clothes.

“Thanks loads, Jigger,” she said. Jigger gave a mock salute and shoved off and dropped into the seat. His boat was planing before it had gone twenty yards. The girl sat very close to Jigger. The bow wave sparkled, the drone faded out of the morning, leaving a white wake in a long curve around the channel marker.

“What’s up, Midge?” I gave her a cigarette. “George want the boat back?”

“No. But it was very anti-social of you to take off like this. You act like a hermit lately, Gev.”

“So you came out to tell me that?”

She sat in a fishing chair, hiked one knee up and hugged it. “Oh, not just for that.”

“This is your woman-of-mystery mood.” I made my tone light and casual. I knew Midge well. I knew that the more interesting the news, the longer it would take her to get to it. It all tied in with the twist of fear I had felt when I saw Jigger’s boat.

I thought about Ken, my brother, and felt the guilt in me again. Not the old guilt of having run out on him years ago, but a new guilt. His previous letters to me had been reserved, cool. But there had been recent ones. Odd letters. Full of vague hints of trouble, oblique statements about the plant, about his wife. Yet nothing definite or positive.

And there was another odd thing about his letters. They now rambled on about old days, old times, long before our trouble. Like the time at the lake we went searching for the lost Harrison girl and became lost ourselves. It was odd for him to bring up those old days, as though he were trying to recreate the warmth between us. I could try to deny that warmth, but it was still there. That sort of thing can’t really be killed.

Midge made a ceremony of inspecting the burning tip of her cigarette. I waited for her to speak, concealing my impatience.

“Sooner or later,” I said, “you’re going to have to tell me. I’ve got all day too.”

She made a face. “There’s a man waiting. He says it’s important. He’s a stuffy type. I think he disapproves of me. His name is Fitch.”

“Fitch!” It shocked me. I wondered what on earth Lester was doing in Florida. I couldn’t imagine him taking a vacation — or looking me up if he did. He belonged entirely to the world I had given up.

“He says it’s important, and whatever it is, I guess the phone call was about the same thing.”

“Maybe I should know about that too,” I said with forced patience.

“Oh, that was a long-distance from Arland yesterday. It came right after you sneaked off in the boat.”

“I didn’t sneak off. George loaned it to me. Who phoned?”

“I took it and explained we couldn’t get in touch with you and didn’t know when you’d be back.” She took her long dramatic pause and said, “It was your brother’s wife, Gevan.”

Maybe I could have successfully kept my expression blank and bland if I’d never told Midge about the whole mess. Perhaps not. Even after four years it was much too close, too vivid, too hurting. I had to turn my back and that, of course, told Midge precisely what she wanted to know, confirmed all the rest of it, and made me resent her.

The thought of Niki phoning me was like a knife. Niki phoning, and Lester Fitch coming to see me. Maybe it was just a new angle on the old game of trying to get me to go back into the firm, back to that life that had become impossible four years ago. But that didn’t fit. The method seemed implausible. Niki would never be a part of any such sales attempt — not if she wanted it to succeed. I felt the dread I’d had when I’d seen Jigger’s boat bearing down on me.

Midge came up beside me and put cold fingers on my arm. She is a woman with little warmth. Yet she needs warmth. She gets what she needs by becoming involved in the emotional problems of others. She knew my problem and I was sorry I had ever told her, because her interest is too avid.

“That man wouldn’t tell me what he wants. He just kept saying it’s important, Gevan. He didn’t want to ride with Jigger, so I said I’d bring you back. He got in on the plane this morning. So apparently he started right after they found out they couldn’t get you by phone.”

“Take over, Midge, and I’ll get the hook.”

The starters whined and the motors caught as I pulled in the wet line, hand over hand. I swashed the gunk off the anchor and laid it in place on the bow. Midge eased the “Vunderbar” around and headed toward the channel on the outgoing tide.

I went below and changed to a shirt and slacks. When I came back up she was just making the turn into the open Gulf.

“Do you think they want you to go back?” she asked.

“I don’t know. They stopped asking me a long time ago.”

“Maybe you should go back, you know.”

“It’s so gay here, Midge. Who’d want to leave?”

“Be serious! You know as well as I do what’s wrong. You’re going sour, Gev. You tried to get over her. You tried all the methods and now you’ve stopped trying and you’re going sour.”

I looked at her dark, avid eyes, and saw the flick of tongue tip across her underlip. This was her meat.

“Once upon a time, Midge, I told you too damn much about my life. I’m not a soap opera for your private pleasure. Tune in tomorrow and find out if Gevan can find happiness.”

She smiled. “I’m not going to let you make me angry, my friend,” she said firmly.

I moved away and stood at the stern, watching the boil of the wake. There was little point in restating my position to Midge, or to myself. After my father died I had taken over the job of running Dean Products. I’d been too young for the job — too young and inexperienced. But sometimes, when you have to grow fast, you can do it. Two years at Harvard Business School had given me the theory. But practice is another animal. At Harvard they don’t have any course in how to react to men your father, and your grandfather, hired. To them you are a punk, and there can be great joy in tripping you up.

It had scared me, but I stayed with it, and got up every time I was thrown, and one day I found out I was enjoying it. Maybe you enjoy any skill you acquire. You learn that the raw materials most important are not the special steels, that the production equipment most important is not the stolid rows of machine tools. Your material and your equipment are human beings, and you learn their strengths and their weaknesses, and how to make them part of a production team. Then the rest comes easier. The shoes had looked too big and the steps too long, but after a time I could match the stride and we showed a profit, and that was good because it was a measure of how well I was doing.

Then Niki came along, fitting into my life in a way that made wonderful sense. Niki, who would inevitably be my wife and bear our children and live with me in a house that would be warm and good with love.

Girl and Job. Work in itself cannot be both means and end. There must be some person to whom you can bring your small victories and be rewarded.

But twelve hundred nights ago I walked down a rainy street toward her place, walked with the bumping heart the thought of seeing her always gave me. I walked in, not thinking to knock or call out, and that was neither guile nor rudeness, but the same eagerness which had made me walk so quickly from my car.

I walked in on her and saw my brother’s hands, strong against the sheen of her housecoat. I saw her on tiptoe in his arms, with upturned mouth and all the long ripe lines of her held by him in the instant before she turned to look at me with the drowsy, tousled look of a woman lost in kissings.

We were to have been married that month.

There are pictures you keep with a peculiar vividness in your mind, the very good ones and the very bad ones. There was the look of his hands on her, and the way she stumbled aside when I pushed her so I could get at him, and the look in his eyes as he stood there making no attempt to block or dodge the blow that broke his mouth. There was no memory of the things I said to the two of them before I walked back out into the rain. Nor any memory of the walk, or, much later, of driving the car back to my place.

During that week I found out that I could not go on. I couldn’t adjust myself to the role of the betrayed, the strong silent type who contents himself with Job alone now that Girl is gone. I might have managed it if it had been someone else who had taken her from me. But Ken and I had been close. I had come to think of us as a good team, his practical, methodical steadiness compensating for my weakness of trying to move too fast, too soon. If it had been someone else who took her from me, hate would have been less complicated. I might have been able to recreate my interest in, and dedication to, Dean Products. But my brother had stolen the satisfactions of my work in the same moment he had stolen Niki Webb.

I walked out and the presidency went to Ken. He wrote often at first, asking me to come back. I read the first few letters, destroyed the rest unread. Later he did not write as often. The hand that signed the letter was a hand I had seen against the blue of her housecoat. And it was the hand which had put the ring on Niki’s finger.

The beach house at Indian Rocks was a new world and I tried to keep everything out of that world which could start me thinking of what-might-have-been. When I was least charitable with myself I would think of it as a four-year sulk. But when the sun was bright and the beach girls’ laughter was warm in their throats, and the portable radios were picking up the Latin rhythms of the Havana stations — then it all seemed desirable and good.

The “Vunderbar” churned south, paralleling the coast. There was a change in the silver-gray day. Gusts came out of nowhere, riffled the water and faded into stillness. There was a yellowish hue in the west, a threat of storm — that sort that appears before the storm clouds can be seen. In moments a day can change just enough for the atavistic warnings to occur, that prickling at the back of the neck, a crawl and pull of flesh.

I looked at the yellow cube that was the Fort Harrison Hotel at Clearwater, landmark for local navigation, and thought about Lester and told myself they just wanted me to go back. The last annual report to the stockholders had told of an increasing load of government contracts — and the plant expansion, added shifts, increased tool procurement. That was all it was. New management stresses. A desk for Gevan Dean.

I told myself all that and didn’t believe it.

I couldn’t get it out of my mind that something had gone terribly, desperately wrong.

“You know we don’t want you to leave,” Midge said suddenly. “George and I. You know that.”

“Thanks, Midge. I won’t go back there.”

“You say that. I feel lonesome already.” Her laugh had a thin nervous flutter. “We’ve had good times.”

“Yes.”

“But not many lately, Gev. Not many at all.”

I didn’t answer her. Far ahead of the “Vunderbar” a school of fish were striking bait, hitting like bonito, sending the gouts of spray up as though a machine gun was being fired at the water. Gulls whooped and dipped. The Gulf had an oily look and the ground swell had begun to build up. Far out the charter boats were through trolling, were heading home, running for shelter.

And I had not heard Niki’s voice in four years...