Area of Suspicion Read online

  He shrugged. “Actually it’s a case of finding someone acceptable to you, Gevan. We didn’t think you’d care to—have me vote it.”

  I stared at him and he flushed and looked down and did some unnecessary rearrangement of the papers. I knew that he was remembering, as I was, that day years ago when he had come to me with a choice and tainted little scheme that involved a “friendly” salvage officer and a rigged auction of some army surplus material. He’d presented it as though he were doing me a favor, letting me in on it. He was trying to scrape up enough financial backing to swing the whole purchase. He came to see me on a day when I had no time for soft answers and no patience with such schemes. I had told him in blunt words what I thought of the plan, the salvage officer, and Lester Fitch, until he wheeled with flaming face and ran from my office.

  “What’s all this ‘we’ talk, Lester?” I asked him softly.

  “We? Oh, I see what you mean. Through Ken I’ve been doing quite a bit of state tax work for the firm, and I’ve been made a member of the board—pro tem—to be confirmed at the next meeting.”

  “Niki too, I suppose?”

  “She’ll sit in on the emergency meeting a week from tomorrow. An open meeting. Board and shareholders. Notices will go out tomorrow.”

  I looked at the proxy form again. “That doesn’t explain why you want this, Lester.”

  He gave me a condescending glance, big business talking to a beach boy. “You’ve made it definite that you don’t want to come back, Gevan. It was talked over. We—everyone decided when we couldn’t contact you in time to make the—ceremony, you’d rather have it handled this way than come up and attend the meeting yourself.”

  It took a few moments to get my attention back to what he was saying. I had drifted off again into memories of Ken.

  I stared at Lester. “I don’t want to seem dull. But the questions I’ve been asking sound reasonably simple to me. Why do you want a proxy form signed? For what purpose?”

  He waved a large white hand. “Oh, that’s not something so terribly special, Gevan. It’s one of the usual rows. A minority group trying to clobber management. We need a show of strength.”

  “What minority group? What do they want?”

  He sighed, patiently. “You’ve been out of touch, Gevan. I’ll have to give you some background on this. If you happened to glance at the annual report you must have—”

  “I read it with interest.”

  “Good!” he said. “Splendid! That saves time. We’ve just been awarded another twenty-five million’s worth. We have so much government work a Colonel Dolson—a fine officer—has been stationed at the plant with his staff. For some time Colonel Dolson has felt that Ken, quite frankly, wasn’t big enough to handle the new picture. He told me quite confidentially that he had spoken to Ken about stepping down in favor of Stanley Mottling some time ago. Ken had seemed in favor of the suggestion and had said he would think it over.”

  “Stanley Mottling? Just who the hell is Stanley Mottling?”

  He raised his eyebrows. One of those oh-come-now expressions. “Don’t you know about him? Ken brought him in as executive vice-president. Amazing man. Enormously capable. It’s a credit to Ken that he located him and brought him in. A world of experience, believe me. Exactly the sort of man to put Dean Products on its feet.”

  “I wasn’t aware that it had been knocked off its feet.”

  “You don’t realize the tremendous problems involved in setting up entirely new production—”

  “I’m just a poor cracker-boy.”

  He smiled uneasily. “I was about to say, in the quantity that they’ve been loading on us. With Ken gone, Niki and I—and the Colonel, of course—feel that Stanley should take over with the least possible delay. In fact, we’re grateful that he’s available and willing. But Mr. Karch, from the bank, as board chairman, has been rocking the boat. He’s been organizing the other shareholders and putting them squarely behind old Walter Granby to take over.”

  “Any firm could do much worse. Walter is shrewd and able.”

  Lester shook his head. “He was shrewd and able. He’s failed badly in the four years you’ve been gone. You’d be shocked to see him. But even at his best, Gevan, or—and I say this in complete honesty—at your best, neither of you could measure up to Mottling. We need your shares behind Mottling to confirm Ken’s wishes and keep little people from upsetting the apple cart. I’m pretty certain they won’t go as far as a mismanagement suit. It will be enough just to vote Granby down. A suit like that wouldn’t stand a chance, not when you stack it up against Mottling’s record.

  “If this Mottling is so hot, why the opposition?”

  “Jealousy. Unwillingness to keep up with the times. Inability to comprehend that Dean Products is in the big time.”

  “I seem to remember that Dean Products was in the big time ten years ago.”

  He gave me a hush-hush tone of voice, leaning forward. “Gevan, we’ve been entrusted with the production of—some very crucial items. I’m not permitted to say more than that.”

  “Why should Walter buck Mottling? Walter is bright.”

  “He lives in his own world these days.”

  I flicked my cigarette into the small littered fireplace and turned back toward Lester. “It seems so damn fast, Lester. Too damn fast. Ken was killed on Friday. This is Sunday. And here you are with a proxy form.”

  “You have absolutely no idea of the tremendous pressure on the firm,” he said solemnly. I wondered if he knew how he sounded. I sensed anxiety. All right, so Lester had deeded his heart and soul to the company and become a very dedicated young man. But that did not fit my understanding of Lester Fitch. Maybe they were giving him a bonus or something for coming back with the signed proxy.

  “I don’t want anybody voting my shares. You or Niki or Karch or anybody else.”

  He looked at me sadly and shook his head. “I’d hate to think you’d apply emotional reasoning to anything this important, Gevan.”

  I suspected it was a phrase he had thought up on the plane ride down, complete with rehearsed head-shaking.

  “Exactly what does that mean?”

  He coughed and fiddled with the strap on his briefcase. “If you weren’t being emotional about it, you’d have no objection to Niki. That seems clear to me.”

  “Don’t oversimplify. If it’s this important that my stock be voted, I should vote it myself.”

  The light caught his glasses in such a way I couldn’t see his eyes behind them. “Maybe I have oversimplified it. I didn’t realize that now you’d have such a much better reason for coming back.” The insinuation was unmistakable, and unmistakably nasty.

  I reached him in one stride, caught the front of his coat and lifted him up off the couch. His briefcase slid to the floor. I had my right fist back, I saw the mouth go slack, and saw behind his frightened eyes a lumbering lout bleating his way across the playground with the pack shrill behind him. I pushed him back onto the couch. He sat on his hat, mashing it. It wasn’t worth hitting him. He’d used a snide and clumsy weapon. The very crudeness of it was perhaps an index of his anxiety.

  “I know I shouldn’t have said—”

  “Shut up, Lester,” I said wearily. “Just go away. Go catch your plane.”

  He thumbed his hat back into shape. “I’ll leave the proxy form with you.”

  I turned away. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “Go back and tell them you don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  I heard him go to the door. He said, “I’m—very sorry about Ken. When you get over the emotional shock and give this some rational thought, Gevan, you’ll see that the best …”

  I turned toward him. He swallowed, and fixed his hat and left. The wind banged the door shut. I saw him going down the road, holding his hat brim. He looked back. His face was too pallid for this land. The two boys had come back. They had a girl with them. Her yellow suit matched the beach ball. One of them slung the ball
at her. Her back was turned. I heard the thin squeal and watched her chase him, agile and brown.

  I stretched out on the couch and went back through all the years, like looking at old photograph albums. The world had been a safe place then, full of high, square automobiles, full of sailboats and ponies and summer camps.

  But the depression had put an end to the extra things. Other firms had folded, but Dad had held Dean Products together with guts and bare hands. I remember how he would sit with us at dinner, silent, his face very old. The bad years lasted a long time.

  In 1939 Dean Products got an order from the British Purchasing Commission for Bren machine-gun mounts. Ken and I got all heated up over the war. We were going for sure. But in my past was that year in Arizona and the healed scars were too impressive on the X-ray plates. And when the checked Ken they found sugar, and he went on a diabetic’s diet. Healthy kids.

  So it was college then, and the feeling of being left out. There were all kinds of uniforms and training programs around the colleges. I went on to Harvard Business School. After I got out I went into the firm and got a full year of shop experience before Dad’s stroke, coma, and death. The war was over and things had eased, and I guess they made me boss man because there didn’t seem to be any specific damage I could do. Scared witless, I concealed it behind what was supposed to be a confident manner. Walter Granby helped. They all helped. I found out how reins can feel good in your hands, and a profit is a good thing to make because it shows you how well you’ve been doing. When I found Niki I knew that she had been the one thing missing.…

  The phone rang and I reached over and picked it up after the first ring. “Mr. Dean, sir? One moment, please. Arland is calling.”

  I knew who it had to be before she spoke, and I knew precisely how her voice would sound. “Gev?”

  “Hello, Niki.” You couldn’t say that and let it go at that. There had to be more. The standard words. “I’m sorry about Ken, Niki.”

  “It’s so—so unfair. That’s all I can think. So unfair.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m lost, Gev. Just terribly lost and alone. I want to crawl away and hide. But there’s all these business things I don’t understand. I just talked to Lester. He said you’re upset.”

  “About Ken. And Lester irritated me.”

  “He shouldn’t have gone down there. He thought it would be all right after we couldn’t get in touch with you yesterday.”

  “I supposed he told you I refused to sign the proxy.”

  “I don’t know what he said. I hardly listened to him. Oh, Gevan, it’s raining here like it would never end. Fat gray rain. What do they say—a good day for a funeral?” The sound she made was half-sob, half-laugh.

  “Easy Niki.”

  “Lester didn’t know whether you’re coming up here or not. Maybe you should come up here, Gev. I—I want to see you.”

  Yes, you want to see me. To check on the damage, maybe. Ken never would have touched you without invitation. Bitch.

  I kept thinking of how she would look. Four years older now. Sitting with her fingers white on the telephone, a strand of that black hair swinging forward, to be thrown back with the familiar, impatient gesture. In the right light her hair would glint violet and blue. Her eyes were a strange blue, darker when she was troubled or aroused. Now she would be staring into an empty distance, her white teeth set into the roundness of underlip, and she would be wearing black …

  I could sense the pull of her, the sheer physical pull that could moisten my palms, shorten my breath, even when she was fifteen hundred miles away. I remembered my finger tips on the silk of her cheek, remembered how when my arms were around her I could feel, under my palm, the slow warm sliding of her muscles under the warmth of her back.

  “Like Lester said,” I told her harshly, “I haven’t decided.”

  “I’m sorry I said that. I wasn’t thinking. I haven’t any right to ask you to come up here, or ask you for anything, Gevan.”

  “You have a right to ask. You were my brother’s wife. I want to do anything I can for you, naturally.”

  Her voice became fainter and there were noises on the line. I had to strain to hear her. “… all this company business. I don’t know. I have to leave soon, Gev. Good-by.”

  “Good-by, Niki.” I went to the window. The rain came out of the west. It wasn’t fat and gray. It was in wind-driven sheets. I shut the windows on the west. The kids were gone from the beach. A brown palm frond slid across the sand road with the wind.

  No point in going up there. Nothing I could do. Nothing I could do about the four wasted years. They don’t give you two chances. Not on the biggest table in the house. They make you pass the dice.

  No adolescent urge for vengeance would hasten the capture of the prowler by the police. Stay here, Dean, and keep on with the routines of four years.

  If I went up there, Ken wouldn’t come striding toward me out of the rain, an inch shorter than I, a few inches broader. A husky guy with nice eyes. Always a bit shy. He had always followed my lead. Even, I thought mockingly, with Niki.

  I looked at my watch. The services would begin soon. The plot was on a hill. There were cedars there. The big granite stone said Dean. Three generations there. Now Kendall. If Niki never married again, she would be there one day. And I would, too. Strange reunion on the green hill.

  The wind rattled the jalousied windows and I told myself again that I would not go back.

  But on Tuesday, after too many restless, aimless hours, too many drinks and toubled dreams, George Tarleson drove me across Courtney Campbell Causeway to catch a flight from Tampa International. And George seemed to be driving too slowly.

  Chapter 3

  The city of Arland, population four hundred thousand, is constricted by two conical hills into a crude figure eight. In the waist of the eight is the downtown section, three bridges across the river, a convergence of railroad lines and national highways. The north half of the eight is industrial—slum land, saloon land, ptomaine diners along the highways, shops and railroad sidings and tarry belch of smoke, complete with city dump, littered streets, candy stores where you can place a bet.

  The southern half is old residential, with high-shouldered Victorian, shoebox post-Victorian, and Grand Rapids Gothic sitting too close together on quiet, shaded streets. The new subdivisions clamber up the southern slopes of the two hills and spread south into the flatlands.

  I fastened my seat belt on order and I cupped my hands against the glass and looked down at the north end of the city, trying to spot the hundred acres of Dean Products, Incorporated. But the night lights were confusing, mazed by the shower that whipped against the wings and fuselage. Down there somewhere was the original plant building, sitting in fussy matronly dignity, overshadowed by the saw-toothed roofs of World War I construction, the pastel oblongs of World War II expansion. Modern offices had been completed in ’42, fronting on Shambeau Street, and the offices in the tiny wing of the original plant building had been turned over to the representatives of the procurement branches of the armed services.

  During any period of armament the government looks primarily for those contractors who can cut heavy metal to close tolerance. That means having the precision machine tools, the men to run them, the men to set them up, the engineering staff to lick the bugs, and the executive control to keep the whole operation moving. Military production is full of bastard threads and tolerances down to a ten thousandth and metallurgical specifications that give ulcers to promising young engineers.

  In both wars Dean Products acquired the reputation of being able to machine anything—from aluminum optical fittings so light they had to be hand-shimmed in place with tin foil, to traverse rings for medium tanks, to bases for coastal defense rifles. We made few complete assemblies. But we were prime subcontractors for Rock Island Arsenal and Springfield, and for boys like G.E. and the Chrysler Tank Arsenal and Lima Locomotive.

  During that second war the totalitarian nations op
erated their war production on the basis of freezing design and then making no changes until the production order was complete. Not so with our people. Mandatory changes came in by the bale. Each change would effect all future production. We won the war. So the system must be okay. But there are a lot of executives underground who would be walking around today if it hadn’t been for the load it placed on them. My father was one of them.

  The plane slowed as the wheels came down. The runway lights streamed by and we were down and the plane slowed quickly. We taxied to the terminal. The rain was coming down. Women trotted toward the entrance with newspapers over their heads. The unaccustomed collar had rubbed my throat raw. The feeling of excitement and anticipation that I had felt on the way up from Florida did not die now that I, was home. It became more intense. In a strange way it had been easier to believe Ken dead while I was in Florida. Thoughts of him kept slipping into my mind through unguarded doorways. Transition by aircraft is unreasonably abrupt. The scene changes too fast. Yet there was no overlapping. Florida was gone as though it had never happened. It was like walking out of a movie into the dark rainy streets of Arland in April, pausing for that wrench of readjustment and then turning in the right direction and letting the sunlight of the movie fade out of your mind.

  At last I got my suitcase and I shared a cab into the heart of town, to the Gardland Hotel. The streets were wet tunnels, lined with neon. I could sense how the town was. Hopped up. Every night is Saturday night. The heavy industry cities get that way when plants put on the extra shifts. It was like the forties. I knew how it would be. The factory girls in slacks, the bars lined three deep, the juke jangle, blue spots on the girl doing the trick with the parrots, green floodlights on the tank where the girl was doing the underwater strip. The high-priced call girls with their hatboxes and miniature dogs. The too-young tramps with tight skirts and mouths painted square. That’s when the town jumps and the big cars get sold on time, and you can hear in the night the bingle-bang of ten thousand cash registers.