Area of Suspicion

Chapter 7

It was midnight when I got to The Pig and It. It was a small white building, garishly lighted, set in the middle of a huge, floodlighted parking area. A juke, amplified beyond all reason, blared from speakers set on posts. There were a few dozen cars in the lot. A damp night wind was blowing and the car hops looked chilly, full of false bravado, in their crisp little mid-thigh skirts, white boots, Russian blouses, and perky hats.

A blonde one came up to my car window with order pad and I said, “Is Lita on tonight?”

“Yeah. You wanner?”

“Please.”

“Sure thing,” she said and walked toward the other girls, rolling heavy hips. A dark girl came toward the car. She was small-bodied, and her legs were thin. She came to the car window and looked in at me. Her dark eyes were large in her white face and her expression was one of surly indifference.

“You want something with me?”

“If you’re Lita Genelli, I do.”

“That’s me, mister. What’s on your mind?”

“My name is Dean, Lita. Gevan Dean.”

She looked blank for a moment and then her eyes went wider, and she bit her lip. “Dean! Jesus! It was your brother who — say, what do you want with me?”

“I talked to Walter Shennary. Sergeant Portugal told me you tried to give Shennary an alibi. I wondered if you were telling Portugal the truth or lying to him. I want to be certain they’ve got the man who murdered my brother.”

“Hold it a sec,” she said. She hurried toward the building to see the clock inside. She hurried back. “I want to talk to you, but I can’t talk here.” She dug into the pocket of her short red skirt, pulled out a handful of change, found a key in with the change, and handed it to me. Our hands touched. Her fingers were cold. “You go a hundred yards down the road, down that way. It’s the Birdland Motel. This is my key. It’s number nine. The next to the last one on the far end, the right end as you’re facing the place. Park right in front. Nobody will bother you. Go right on in and wait for me. I’m supposed to be on till one, but it’s a slow night and maybe I can get off quicker. Make yourself at home, Mr. Dean. There’s liquor and soda and ice in the kitchen. Turn on the radio if you want, and read the magazines. Please, will you wait for me?”

“Okay, Lita.”

“Remember, it’s number nine and nobody will bother you.”

She stepped back, hugging herself against a raw wind as I drove out. I parked where she told me to. Red neon told the world there was no vacancy. My headlights illuminated liverish-yellow stucco, small sagging wooden stoops, windows with discouraged curtains, a window box full of dead stalks.

I let myself into a dark room that smelled of dust and perfume, of laundry and stale liquor, of bedclothes and girl. I used a match to find the light switch beside the door. It turned on a ceiling light with a single bulb and the bodies of bugs in the reflector. Her bed was a studio couch and she had left before making it. On the table near it was a coffee cup with coffee dried in the bottom of it. There were the charred black lines of forgotten cigarettes on the edges of the furniture. The room had an unkempt, cluttered look, a look of stale loves and brutal hangovers.

On a chair was a stack of newspapers, and the top one was the paper containing the account of my brother’s murder. AILAND EXECUTIVE SLAIN. Prowler Shoots Kendall Dean, with a picture of Ken, taken long ago, with half-smile and quiet eyes.

I read the accounts, then looked at the room. In the glow of the overhead bulb it was a grubby place. A man like Portugal could understand this place. A man could go out from a place like this with a gun in his hand and his belly full of rye. The room made me feel quixotic. I could tell myself that I could understand these people, but I knew I didn’t. And I wanted to leave, and be content with Portugal’s shrewdness, but I had gone so far that, even assuming Shennary’s guilt, it would be a needless act of cruelty toward the girl. She wanted her man free. I still wondered what sort of person she was. I made certain the blinds were closed. I began a bungling, amateurish search of the room.

I found letters in the top drawer of a maple-finish dressing table. I hesitated for a moment, and then took them over to where the light was better. I read a few of them. They were nearly all penciled on cheap stationery, and addressed to her at the Birdland Motel or The Pig and It. They all had a pattern:

They were signed Joe and Al and Shorty and Red and Pete and Whitey, and they bore dirty thumbprints and they were mailed from all over the East. And they were all over two months old.

She owned cheap bright clothes, and a large collection of cosmetics in elaborate jars and bottles. I could learn nothing else about her. I turned on a table lamp with a red shade and turned off the overhead light. It made the room look better. I turned the small radio on low to a disc jockey program.

It was twenty to one when she opened the door and came in and shut it against the force of the night wind. She looked cold, and her car-hop uniform looked forlornly theatrical.

“Gee, I’m sorry I couldn’t get off sooner. I was worried you’d be gone. I was glad when I saw the car. Jesus, it’s getting cold. I’m all goose bumps. Didn’t you make yourself a drink? I’ll fix you one, hey? I got to get these goddamn boots off. My feet are killing me. I need a drink bad.” She talked with hectic vivacity, being the gay hostess.

I agreed to a drink and she slumped into the kitchenette. Over the rattling of the ice tray, she called out to me, “I’ve been going nuts trying to get somebody to listen to me. I’m glad you came by, believe me. I know Wally didn’t shoot anybody. He wouldn’t kill anybody. If I thought he had it in him to kill anybody, I wouldn’t have nothing to do with him, Mister Dean. He was right here with me when he was supposed to be killing your brother. But can I prove it? Can he prove it?”

She came out with the drinks and handed me mine and plopped down on the unmade studio couch. The drinks were stiff. They looked like iced, black coffee. She pulled off her boots and sat on the bed, Buddha-fashion, adjusting the skimpy red skirt as a casual concession to modesty. The light came through the red lamp shade and made bloody highlights along her lean cheek, on her small arm and knee.

“I suppose,” I said cautiously, “they think you’d try to give him an alibi anyway.”

“That clown Portugal laughed in my face. It would be okay, maybe, if he didn’t have a record.”

“And they hadn’t found the gun in his possession.”

“In his room. Not on him,” she said firmly. “There’s a big difference. Anybody could put it there. I’ll tell you how it was. I was off. We drove out here and we stayed here. We got here about ten. We had some laughs and some drinks. He was going to stay all night. Then, you know, drinking and all, we got yelling at each other about something. So he took off. And I know that was right around two o’clock, and he was drunk and I worried about him driving. We got fighting about him not reporting to the parole officer the way he was supposed to. The thing is, nobody saw him here but me.”

“He told Portugal he robbed a supermarket a while back.”

“Sure. He confessed that because this murder thing has him scared bad. He got six hundred bucks. It wasn’t armed robbery. He busted a back window and got in and pried open a drawer. They can’t drop him too hard for that. Not more than three years, maybe.”

She talked about it as an expected business risk. I stared at her. She didn’t look over eighteen. “How did you get mixed up with anybody like Shennary?”

She stared back at me. “Don’t think he tried to kid me. He told me right off he had a record and he was on parole. I kidded myself he was going to play it straight from now on. He was just another date. He knew I’d done some playing around. It was for kicks. Then... Oh, hell, I really started to go for him. You can’t help a thing like that. I knew he was no good. Mean temper. Thought everybody was down on him. Knocked me around when he felt like it. But we’d make up, and then I’d do anything for him. That’s something you don’t figure out in your head, Mr. Dean.”

“What kind of a man is he, really?”

“Like I said, he thinks everything is against him and so he acts hard. But he’s soft underneath. Likes kids and dogs and things like that. He just started out wrong. I guess I did too. We were brought up three blocks apart on the north side, but we never knew each other, him being older. That’s funny, isn’t it? He wouldn’t kill anybody, Mr. Dean, unless maybe he had to keep from getting killed himself.”

“Is he bright?”

She shrugged. “Too bright to hold onto a gun if he killed somebody with it, if that’s what you mean.”

“I don’t see how you can ever convince Portugal that he was here with you.”

She drained the last of her drink and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “Look, Mr. Dean. They don’t want to try to think straight about it. I didn’t tell the sergeant this. Maybe I should have. Come over here.” She went over to the bureau and pulled the second drawer all the way out and stood holding it. “Now light a match and look back in there.”

I did. There was an automatic back there, held in place by a strip of heavy rubber that had been thumbtacked to the wood. I straightened up.

She replaced the drawer, banging it shut. “That’s his. He didn’t want it over at his place in case he got picked up or something. He thought it would be better here. So why would he have another one over there? Does that make sense?”

I had to agree that it seemed odd.

“Another thing,” she said. “He told me how he worked. Never with anybody. Always alone. He said it was safer. So I ask you, who sent in that phone tip? How would anybody know? Forget he was right here all the time. Just imagine he did shoot your brother. How would anybody know that if he was alone?”

She looked at me with defiance and shrewdness. “You see,” she said, “it’s like Wally figures. He’s an easy answer, and the killing is off the books. They don’t want to listen to anything that makes sense. He has to lose on that supermarket thing. He knows that. Will you laugh if I tell you something?”

“I don’t think so, Lita.”

“Make you another drink first?”

“No thanks.”

“I’ll make me one.” She made it quickly and came back in her bare feet and sat as before. “I’ve been working on Wally. In my own way.” She seemed shy. “I wanted to marry the guy. And I don’t want to marry a crook. I think in another week or so I could have gotten him to turn himself in. Look at this.” She padded to the bureau, dug around in the top drawer, and brought back something I’d missed in my search, a small blue bankbook with gilt lettering. “Go ahead. Look at it.”

There were no withdrawals. There were deposits of two and five and nine and eleven dollars. The total was just under nine hundred. I handed it back to her.

“That’s what we kept fighting about, but he was weakening. Sooner or later I was going to make him see that we could give back the money he took and turn himself in and maybe he could get off with just serving the rest of the sentence he was paroled from, and that’s only two years. Two years more. Or suppose it’s five? I can take that. So can he. But I can’t take it if they clip him with this murder thing. I... can’t.”

“I don’t see how—”

“Mr. Dean, you’re a big man in this town. Anybody named Dean is big in this town. They got to listen to you. You can go to the Chief of Police or the Mayor of the District Attorney or somebody and say you’re not satisfied. Say you want more detective work on it. They’ll listen and maybe they’ll find out who it was and get off Wally’s back.”

“I’m not so sure they’d listen, Lita.”

“I’d sure appreciate it if you’d try.”

I didn’t answer. She’d made a pretty good case for Shennary, but at the same time I could remember what Portugal had said. I didn’t want to make a fool of myself, and yet...

She took the bankbook back to the drawer, and then, on her slow and thoughtful way back toward the daybed, paused, turned, looked at me in a strange, still way. A rumble of trucks shook the room. She touched the center of her upper lip with the sharp pink tip of her tongue, nervous, speculative.

She took one slow step toward me, then came the rest of the way with a tumbling haste that seemed a product of shyness. She scrambled onto my lap, thudding with an unexpected force and heaviness against me, then quickly curling and fitting herself against me, her fingers cold at the nape of my neck, bare knees hooked over the arm of the chair, drawing small lines on the side of my throat with the edges of her teeth.

“You could help,” she whispered. “You could help Wally and me so much! You can have anything you want, if you’ll just help us.”

With her free hand, with great deftness, she caught my right hand and lifted it, turned it, cupped it strongly against a breast of astonishing abundance in comparison to all the rest of her. There was an odor of fried meat caught in her hair, mixed with some flower scent. I did not want her. Her scrambling assault had been such a surprise to me; my mind was working too slowly as I sought some kind of rejection that would not wound her pride. It was a tawdry little sacrifice, but it had meaning to her.

As I sought some gentle gambit that would end it, I found myself becoming ever more conscious of the female warmth and weight of her against me. She made an intent series of practiced little motions and adjustments, a click of snap fastenings and a slither of fabric just as her mouth — surprisingly fresh and sweet — came up to meet mine, so that in the beginning of the kiss, fabric pulled aside and the bare warm roundness of her breast seemed to burst into my hand, which no longer required the pressure of hers to hold it there. There were other tuggings and graspings and adjustings, such an agile and continuous shedding of what she wore that it left the long kiss uninterrupted.

It was in some way that defied explanation, more of an innocence than a sexuality. She was a gamine child, playing some involved game at which she excelled. There was an intentness about her, which must have paralleled the same humorless energy she had brought to her games of hopscotch and jacks too few years ago.

Sexual rationalizations and excuses are sick, sly and agonizingly strong. I had begun to tell myself that no one need ever know about this, that it was a simple and meaningless way to ease all the tensions Niki had aroused. This spindly busy animal I held did not have to have a name or an identity.

“You’ll help Wally,” she murmured, her mouth against mine.

Without breaking the kiss, she turned in a limber way, knelt astride me in the chair and murmured, “Carry me over there,” knowing of my readiness. As I ran my hands up the bare, spare, smooth lines of her back, they touched the jutting bony wings of her shoulderblades, and she was suddenly a pathetic starveling, and, in self-derision, my hungers collapsed and I knew it could not happen.

I put my hands on her narrow waist and lifted her up and out and away from me, and sat her out there on my knees, facing me. She had stripped to a pair of threadbare peach panties. She was so thin the insides of her thighs were concave. The light glowed red through the shade onto washboard ribs and the unlikely breasts, high, round and plump. A sheaf of dark hair screened one eye. She palmed it back and stared at me, alert as a bird. Here were no sultried paintings, no race of breath and heart, no tumid lollings.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” she demanded.

“This isn’t a very good idea,” I said.

“It’s been pretty popular lately.”

“I don’t want to... complicate matters, Lita.”

She gave me a lewd, angelic smile, half seen in the ruby light as she perched there, shameless as a child. “Complicate? I had the idea it was going to be real easy.” Her eyes narrowed. “You make me look real good, don’t you? You make me feel like I was some kind of tramp.”

“Hush now, Lita. Look at me. Was Wally really here that night? Tell me the truth.”

As I held her balanced there, my hands on her waist, she straightened her shoulders, lifted her chin. Slowly and solemnly she crossed herself. “I swear he was. I swear to Jesus and his Holy Mother that Wally was here with me while your brother was being shot, right here in this room, Mr. Dean, and may I burn forever in hell if I’m lying.”

In that moment we were no longer strangers. I believed her. I was certain Portugal was wrong. Somebody else had killed my brother. Not Walter Shennary. Somebody far more clever.”

“I believe you,” I told her, “and I’ll help all I can.”

Tears stood in her eyes, shiny in the red of the light. “Now,” she said in an uncertain voice, “where were we when you interrupted us?”

“Let’s skip it, Lita. It’s a gesture you don’t have to make.”

Tears spilled. “The way it was before, Mr. Dean. I was conning you. Now it’s a way to say thanks. What else do I have I could give you anyhow? And now... it’ll be more like with love, you know?”

Beauty can emerge in the most grotesque and unexpected places. Beauty is involved with dignity. With this cheap girl in this drab room, perched so ludicrously at my arm’s length, there should have been no dignity — but there was. Far more, in fact, than I had encountered with any of the random beach girls of the four lost years, even the ones who spilled Neiman-Marcus beach wear onto my rush rug and murmured their lust-talk with that precision and word choice refined during the Smith and Wellesley years, and sweetened their bodies at an outlay of forty dollars an ounce, while they co-operated with me in my futile campaign to bury all the nerve-end memories of Niki under so many layers of sensation that no sudden memory of her could bring back the pain.

Lita tilted her head with a simian shrewdness. “But you don’t wanna anyhow,” she said, and sighed, and slid back away from me and walked to a cardboard closet and took out a lavender rayon robe and put it on, and zipped it from hem to throat. I stood up, when she picked up a cigarette and went to her and held the light.

“I should get the idea I’m such a big prize bonus deal,” she said with a weary irony. “You can do better, hey?”

“It isn’t that. You see what I mean by things getting too complicated. We’ll have to work together on your problem. And mine. Let’s just stick to that.”

She looked at me with that special hostility of class antagonism. “People like you do too goddamn much thinking.”

“Lita, I like you. I like you very much. So let’s see what we can do to help Wally. I’m certain he didn’t kill my brother.”

We moved to the door. When I took the knob to open it, she stayed me by putting her hand on my wrist. She looked up at me, tiny and intense, the dark hair unkempt. In spite of the $9.98 sophistication of the robe, she looked about twelve years old.

“Either way, Mr. Dean,” she said, “I’m going to be without him. If you try and it doesn’t work, I’m without him forever. If you help him, he still does time for the supermarket thing. Either way it goes, I owe you. After it’s settled, I’ll be right here, except when I’m working or visiting him. I lived it up maybe too much before I met him. That’s over. I told him so, and I mean it. I’m going to be lonely. I know how guys figure. There’d be no claims on you. No fuss and no trouble, and I wouldn’t con you for nothing. And the way it is, I wouldn’t feel trampy. I’ll fix this place up so it’s a better place to come to. I think you’d like that. So when it’s over, anytime you want a place and a girl, with nobody pressuring you or able to find you, and nothing you have to do or say unless you feel like it, you got a permanent rain check good any time.”

I clasped her fragile shoulder and bent and kissed her lightly on the mouth. We smiled at each other. There was nothing else we had to say to each other.

When I turned my car lights on they shone brightly on her as she stood in the doorway, shoulders hunched against the cold, her hands cupping her elbows, the red lamp glow silhouetting her. She squinted into the light and waved good-by as if I were a hundred yards away instead of five. I backed out and drove toward the city.

I believed her. Portugal would not call me a fool in so many words. But I could guess at the expression he would wear. I drove to the hotel garage through the late city, remembering the look in Lita’s dark eyes.

If Shennary hadn’t killed Ken, the whole structure of a clumsy killing collapsed. Clumsiness became cleverness. The gun hidden in his room. Premeditation, cunning, motivation. It made the night and city seem darker. Something mysterious called They. Why had They killed him? How could his existence bother Them?

There is a sickness in murder. It made a sickness in the city, and made me think, perversely, of the Gulf in pre-dawn grayness, the sudden hard strike on the trolled lure, the dip of the rod tip, the singing of the reel, the breath-taking silver of the tarpoon at the height of his leap. Later the sun would come up and the Gulf would be blue and the terns would dip and waver on the morning wind, white as bone, squabbling like picnic children. I had left all that and I had begun to walk along a narrow place. Too narrow to turn around.

I stood in the dark hotel room and looked at the faint pinkness of neon against the overcast. It looked like a fire beyond the horizon. The emotional climate of the city was pre-storm — a stillness and a brassiness and winds out of nowhere that flickered and faded into stillness. I remembered a girl who had been visiting the Tarlesons over a year ago. I remembered the late afternoon when we had been on the beach, she and I, in front of my place, and the strange excitement with which we watched the storm moving in off the Gulf.

The day had been like a wire pulled tight, full of expectancy. We waited there, watching it come until the last possible moment, then grabbed the beach things and ran for my place, the first fat thunderous drops driving against our bare backs, lightning breaking the sky, and we laughed as we ran.

I remembered how dark the day became. We ran through the beach house, shutting windows. We turned on lights but the storm put the lights out. We were children in an attic. We made love while the storm winds made the house creak, and afterward we heard the thunder moving east. When the storm was gone we were strange with each other and tried too hard to recapture the way it had been while the storm was on.

At the Tarleson party the next day she got very drunk and very sick. I walked her for an endless time on the beach, and later she cried. The next day she went back north.

I felt there was a storm coming, and all the lights would go out, for all of us.

I went to bed and dreamed that I was at the drive-in and Niki, dressed as Lita had been, kept taking care of the customers in the other cars and would not look toward me, and I could not call to her because all the car windows were rolled tight and locked.