Area of Suspicion (7 page)

“She’s a dumb kid who wants to be a heroine like in the movies and swear Shennary was with her all the time.”

“I really would like to talk to her.”

He was obviously reluctant. He sighed audibly. “Okay, she’s a car hop at a drive-in on the South Valley Road. It’s called The Pig and It. They got a big pig on their sign, all made of neon.”

“Thanks, Sergeant.”

He picked a bit of cigar leaf off his underlip and rolled it in his fingers. “That’s okay, Mr. Dean. We always feel kind of responsible when people like you get knocked off by some punk.”

I watched him as he walked back toward his wing of the building. He looked tired, worn, shrewd, and disenchanted. I decided I’d have better luck looking the Genelli girl up later in the day. That would give me some time to find out what was going on at the plant, to learn the facts in the Mottling-Granby tussle. There were two good sources of reliable information and the first one was Tom Garroway, a smart young production engineer. I had promoted him twice before I left four years ago.

I called the plant from a drugstore booth near Police Headquarters and asked the main switchboard to connect me with the engineering offices. I asked the girl there if she could give me Mr. Garroway.

“Mr. Garroway left the firm some time ago, sir,” she said. “Can I connect you with someone else?”

“This is a personal matter. Could you tell me where I can locate Mr. Garroway?”

“Please hold the line a moment, sir.” She was gone for thirty seconds and came back on the line. “Hello? Mr. Garroway is with the Stringboldt Corporation in Syracuse, New York, sir. He left over five months ago.”

I thanked her and walked slowly back to the hotel. It bothered me that Tom was gone. He was smart enough to know he had a good future with Dean Products, and he was the sort of man that companies must attract if they hope to
maintain a competitive position. He was one of those intuitive engineering brains, the kind that have that extra sense which enables them to cut through to the heart of a problem, instinctively avoiding all those promising bypaths that lead nowhere. And though he was sometimes hard to control, he had a nice leadership talent.

There was a note waiting for me at the desk. It was in a sealed silver-gray envelope, addressed in Niki’s familiar scrawl. I sat in one of the lobby chairs and held it to my nose. There was a faint perfume. I ripped it open:
Gev—Lester told me you’re in town. Can’t tell you how glad I am that you decided to come home. Most anxious to see you. I’ll expect you for a drink at four-thirty at the house.—Niki
.

I crumpled the note, then smoothed it out and read it again. There was no uncertainty in it. Just the confident assumption that I would do exactly as she wished. I was expected to forget the rainy night of four years ago.

I remembered the first time I had seen Niki. That too had been a time of rain. One of those December afternoons when dusk comes at three. I came out of the offices, heading for my car, ducking my head against the misty rain. The girl came up to me, slim and dark, with a raincoat belted around her, rain beads caught in her hair.

“If your name is Dean, I have a question,” she said. She looked and sounded angry. In a job spot like that you are always running into cranks. She didn’t look like one.

“Come in out of the rain, then, and ask your question. I’m Gevan Dean.”

“I like the rain. And I don’t like a brush-off, and I’d like to know what you have to do to make an appointment with that Personnel Manager in there. If he says no, I’ll accept that. But I don’t want to be told no by some little sheep-eyed receptionist.”

“Did you make an appointment?”

“I tried to.”

I looked at her. She stood there in the rain, purse strap looped around her waist, hands shoved deep in the slash pockets of the raincoat, feet planted, eyes of hot blue like a gas flame. Very much girl. Very completely girl.

It started right there. She came with me and we talked it over at a little rainy-afternoon bar. I ignored my scruples and saw that she got the job she wanted. I knew it made a certain amount of office gossip, and marked her as my protégée, which meant she had to be better than good at her work.

She turned out to be crisply efficient, superbly trained. She wore neat black and navy suits, starched white blouses. But the sedateness of her office uniform seemed only to enhance the proud, free swing of her body when she walked down a corridor. She hit the office males like a pickax dropped from a roof. They found excuses to go to her desk, lean over her and repeat unnecessary instructions.

In that little bar she had told me her history. Orphaned at fifteen, she had lived with second cousins in Cleveland until she could make her own way. She had resigned her job in Cleveland because her married employer had begun to make a damn fool of himself, and she said she had picked Arland almost at random, and picked Dean Products because she wanted to be in a big firm, not in some small office again.

I kept seeing her around the offices. She always had a small grave smile for me, merely polite, with no connotation of intimacy. After I would see her, and then try to look at the papers on my desk, there would be a retinal image of her, as though I had looked at a bright light, and she would stride across the neatly typed papers, her skirt tightening across her hips with each stride, breasts high and firm under the starchy white blouse, dark hair alive against the nape of her neck.

One day I walked down the hall and she was at the water fountain. I walked toward her and she turned to face me as she straightened up, almost running into me, stepping back, saying, “Oh! I’m sorry, Mr. Dean.”

“Would you go out with me? Tonight?”

“Would that be—wise, Mr. Dean?”

“I don’t know about that. I don’t care much, I guess. You don’t have to say yes because I got you the job. You know that. You only have to say yes if you want to.”

“I—I think I’d like to.”

After that I saw more of her and thought more about her. There is an unwritten law about office girls. I ignored it. She had a small apartment. I tried to stay there with her, but she would have none of that. I realized I wanted to be married to her. I can’t remember how I asked her. But I know she said yes, and after that the world was a very fine place. I spent too many hours a day thinking about her. She kept working, of course, and scrupulously avoided any familiarities in the office, yet the news was all over the plant, and the wolves gave up.

Then I found her in Ken’s arms and I had not seen her since that night. And today I could see her at four-thirty, I could call on the widow, and have a drink with her, and look at the woman who had come between Ken and me and turned us into strangers for the last four years of my brother’s life. She had lived with my brother in that house. It angered me to be summoned. Yet I knew I would go. Just to look at her again. Just to try to understand.

As I rode up to eight I remembered how we had planned the honeymoon, that night sitting in the car, the radio on, dash lights glowing green. The British West Indies, and I thought how it would have been, the long still nights, with the flavor of the day’s sun still caught in her hair. Joe Gardland had told me two years ago in Miami that Ken and Niki had honeymooned in the Pacific Northwest. I was glad they hadn’t gone to the islands.

I unlocked the door to my suite and went in. I stood and felt an odd prickling at the back of my neck. There is a special flavor about a room which is occupied, or where somebody has recently been. There is some atavistic instinct in us which quickens the senses. I found myself on tiptoe as I went to the bedroom door and glanced in. I looked in the bath and then, feeling a bit ridiculous, I yanked the closet door open.

I was alone, but I felt positive someone had recently left. I looked at my unpacked belongings. Everything seemed in order. But I realized that if somebody had been waiting to
attack me, he would hardly have forewarned me by disarranging my clothing.

I felt in actual physical danger. Then it receded. Just because I had begun to see myself as the bold investigator of a murder, there was no reason to add all the other aspects of melodrama. I began to whistle. It sounded too loud in the room.

I ran water into the wash basin. I looked into the mirror and found myself looking over my shoulder out into the bedroom behind me. I made a face at myself in the mirror. Steady, boy.

Chapter 5

It was nearly noon when, from my hotel suite, I got the call through to Tom Garroway in Syracuse. It had taken them fifteen minutes to locate him out in the shop. It made me remember the times I had tried to find him, and the uselessness of trying to teach him to leave word where he’d be.

He came on the line. “Gev! It’s damn good to hear your voice. Say, I read about Ken in the papers. I was going to write you. A damn shame, Gev. A sweet guy.”

“Thanks, Tom. Can you talk or do you want to call me back?”

“I can talk. What’s up?”

“Why did you leave? You had a good deal here.”

“I know that. After you left, I got lonesome.”

“Let’s have it, Tom.”

“Okay. When Mottling came into the picture it ruined things.”

“How?”

“I don’t like people leaning over my shoulder. I want to be given something and a chance to work it out my own way. If I had to spit, I had to make out a request in triplicate and get Mottling’s initials on it. I could feel an ulcer
coming. Do it this way. Don’t do it that way. Do it my way not your way, and report on the hour.”

“No way to handle bull-headed Garroway.”

“You’re damn well told. This is a good outfit, Gev. Fine people. Hot problems. But I want you to know this. The day you toss out Mottling I’ll come running back if you want me to. And two bits says Poulson and Fitz will come back too.”

“Are
they
gone?”

“Man, yes. Where have you been? Mottling really took over. He pushed your brother around too. I don’t know why Ken stood for it. Mottling and that tin soldier Dolson are thick as thieves. The next step is to hoist Grandby out of there; then all the old guard will be gone. I’m not sentimental about it, Gev. If you were a knuckle-head, I’d say stay the hell out. But you’re one Dean who’s entitled to run Dean Products. Why don’t you take over again?”

“It’s a little late for that, Tom.”

“Hell, I’ll come back and teach you the ropes. You can be a trainee. One of Garroway’s bright young men.”

“I’m a beachcomber. There’s something with a real future.”

His tone changed. “Seriously, Gev. No joke. I almost wrote you a few times. There’s a smell around there. Like something crawled under the buildings and died. Maybe I should have stayed and fought. But it was safer to land another job. Give some thought to going back in there, Gev. Those years were good. I’d like it to be the way it used to be.”

I thanked him. The odds were against my going back in. I hung up and called room service and ordered a sandwich sent up. I thought of what he had said. Even thought I’d tried to deny it for four years, when I had quit, I’d felt as though both hands had been cut off at the wrist.

Sure, it was just another corporate entity that would keep churning along whether Gevan Dean was there or not.

But I missed it. I missed the hot stink of coolant and oil, that rumble and chatter and screech of the production areas, where metal is peeled sleekly back from the high-speed
cutting edges, and the turret lathes and automatic screw machines squat heavily and busy themselves with their robot operations. And it had been good to go into the shipping department and smell the raw wood of the big packing cases, and see the fresh-paint stencils which said
DEAN PRODUCTS
.

When the pressure was off, I’d go down to Receiving and watch the materials coming in, the sheets and the bar stock, the castings and forgings, the billets and pigs. Raw and semi-fabricated items would come in; they would leave as complete assemblies, machined, assembled, inspected, crated. It all started when some prehistoric genius squatted on his haunches and chipped out an ax head and lashed it to a piece of wood. It must have given him a good satisfaction when he swung the completed tool. And there was a satisfaction in directing the skilled operation that made Dean Products tick, which turned materials into something that could be hefted, used. The skill was the value you added.

I remembered how it used to be with my father. When a new item was going into production, his desk top would be littered with machined component parts. He’d spend a lot of time picking them up and turning them over and over in his hands, holding them just so, so the light would turn machined steel surfaces into tiny mirrors. There was always a pair of coveralls hanging in his office closet and he was supposed to put them on before he went out into the production areas. But something would go wrong and he would forget and go bulling down and wade into the trouble and get grease smeared. Then Mother would give him a mean time, and so would his secretary, old Miss Brownell.

Remembering Miss Brownell made me think of my second valid source of information. When ancient Miss Brownell had finally retired, I asked Hilderman to recommend someone from the stenographic pool, someone I could take into my office on trial. Hilderman had sent Joan Perrit to me, and I wondered if he had suddenly acquired holes in the head. She was nineteen, and gawky and
nervous, and she plunged around the office with such a reckless desire to please that I was in constant fear she would fracture herself on the furniture or fall out the window. She was painfully shy. But she could make a typewriter sound like small boys running and holding sticks against a picket fence. And she could take down and transcribe every mumble and grunt in a ten-man conference where everybody interrupted everybody else.

Technical excellence was just part of her arsenal of talents. Inside of a month she knew my style of expressing myself so perfectly that I couldn’t tell which letters I had dictated and which ones I had told her to handle. And she managed to fend off the pests, even those who would have gotten by Miss Brownell, without ever offending anybody, and without ever shooing away anyone that I wanted to see. She had schedules and timetables and appointments neatly filed away in her pretty head, and each morning when I came into the office there would be a typed notation on my desk, placed with geometric exactness atop the mail I should see. That notation would tell me not only the fixed appointments, but what was likely to come up.