Джон Макдональд - Area of Suspicion [= My Brother’s Widow]

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 troubled dreams, George Tarleson drove me across Courtney Campbell Causeway to catch a flight from Tampa International. And George seemed to be driving too slowly.

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 operated 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.

But I had seen Arland when the streets were dreary with broken shoes, hacking coughs, and panhandlers. I had seen the empty houses. I had seen sharp winter winds blowing the drifters by the closed joints. The heavy metal towns are feast or famine.

Now it was feast, and in the rain-bright night the town was licking its chops, clapping grease-bitten hands and saying, “Let’s have us a time!”

The lobby of the Gardland Hotel looked like a movie set for a society mob scene. Everybody seemed to be hurrying in purposeless circles, and they all wore earnest, worried faces. People sat on stacks of luggage looking doleful. I stood near one of the lines at the reservation desk and heard the clerk saying, “Sorry, we don’t have a thing, sir. Next, please? No reservation, sir? Sorry we don’t have a thing.”

I went to the assistant manager’s desk. In a moment he came hurrying back, looking like a distracted penguin. “Yes, sir?”

“Is Mr. Gardland in his office?”

“If you’re after accommodations, sir, I can assure you that it will be useless to—”

“Would you mind phoning his office and giving my name?”

“Not at all, but—”

“Tell him Gevan Dean wants to see him for a moment.”

“Dean?” His eyes seemed to focus on me for the first time. He murmured into the phone. He hung up and said, “The door is beyond the cashier’s windows, the last door at the end of—”

I told him I knew where it was. Joe Gardland came out of his office and halfway down the short hallway. His face lighted up. He is a small, plump, balding man, younger than he looks, with shrewd eyes. If they weren’t shrewd eyes, the Gardland would long since have been absorbed into one of the big chains. Purchase or stock transfer would have made Joe permanently, independently wealthy, but he preferred being the king of his own domain.

He pumped my hand. “My God, Gevvy! My God! Not since Miami two years ago. What a hassle that was! Come in.”

We went into his office. A pretty girl in waitress uniform sat nervously on a straight chair near the desk. He went to her and put an edge in his voice. “Is it clear now?”

“Yes, Mr. Gardland.”

“Shall I send you back to work?”

Her eyes brightened. “I... I was hoping you would.”