Area of Suspicion (18 page)

At one point I started the motor, I was that close to going back to her. But after a time the violence of my need began to fade. I had won, but I had no feeling of victory because I had won but one small skirmish. I had the sour wisdom of the addict who knows that the first episode of self-denial does not make future rejections easier. The need grows. All you can do is pray for increased strength with which to meet the next physiological assault.

I did not want to become the creature she could so easily turn me into. I did not want to release my grasp on pride and fall into the blind arena of sexual compulsion. Yet if there is no provable validity about any activity in which man indulges, if we are indeed but a ludicrous and self-important product of an accident of chemistry in the soupy sea of a brand-new planet …

I knew I could be too agile in such sly argumentation. Weak with emotional fatigue, I started the car and drove on into the city.

Chapter 11

As I walked through the hotel lobby, Joan Perrit got up from one of the lobby chairs and came toward me, earnest, pretty and worried.

“Mr. Dean, I’ve been waiting to—”

“You’re not in the office now, Perry.”

She flushed. “Gevan, then.”

“You look all wound up. Buy you a drink?”

She lowered her voice. “There’s someone who wants to talk to you, Gevan. I left her in the drugstore. If you’re free, I’ll bring her to your room in a few minutes. I tried to get you on the house phone and they said you were out.”

I told her that would be fine and she smiled nervously and hurried off. I went up to my small suite. A few minutes later there was a tapping on my door. I let them in. I knew I had seen the other girl before, and then I remembered that when I had gotten my pass from Captain Corning, she had been at a typist’s desk in the corner of his office.

She was a fluffy blonde in a cheap, bright outfit that emphasized her breasts and hips, She was the Hollywood ideal of the pretty starlet, her cheap, shallow beauty dependent upon the childishness of her features, the upturned nose, pouting mouth, bland forehead, staring blue eyes. Though at the moment she looked frightened and
rebellious, she was predictable as being, in other moods, a giggler, a snuggler, full of kittenish mannerisms and teasings.

“Mr. Dean, this is Alma Brady. She works in Colonel Dolson’s office. She was hired by the Colonel as a clerk-bookkeeper. She has something to tell you.”

“I waited for you,” Alma said to Perry, “and I was about to go home. I was thinking about it. I guess I don’t want to tell him anything after all.” Her voice was thin and immature.

Perry took a step toward her, eyes hot. “You promised, Alma! You promised! You’ve got to tell him.”

“Hold it,” I said quickly. “Sit down, both of you. Behave.”

Alma hesitated and then crossed over to a chair with a sulky strut, sat down, crossed her legs, patted her skirt smooth, hunted in her bag for cigarettes. I gave her a light. “How did you gals meet?”

Perry answered, “Alma rents a room near my house and we wait at the same bus stop, so we got friendly that way. She prepares the vouchers that Colonel Dolson handles through Mr. Granby’s office as charges against the cost-plus contract.”

“I don’t want to get in any trouble,” Alma said in her childish voice.

“I file our copies of the vouchers,” Perry continued. “And I couldn’t help noticing that there were certainly an awful lot of them coming from his office as charges against the D4D contract. So a couple of months ago I asked Alma if he was about through buying stuff. I wanted to know because I was going to have to set up new file folders and re-index them to keep them in order.”

Alma had been staring stubbornly out the window. She turned sharply on Perry. “It wasn’t any of your business what he bought.”

“It wasn’t,” Perry said gently, “until we had that little chat today in the office. You made it my business, Alma.”

“There’s a lot of difference between telling you and
telling him. I don’t want to get in any jam. I was just talking.”

She turned stubbornly away and looked out the window. She exhaled smoke through her nose and it made her look like a petulant little dragon. Perry looked at me and shrugged. I edged my chair closer to Alma and said, “The last thing I want to do is get you in trouble, Miss Brady. I’d like to have you trust me.”

“You say.”

“I have no official connection with the firm. When I was president, Miss Perrit was my secretary. I have every confidence in her judgment. If she thinks you should tell me, then it is probably a good idea for you to tell me.”

Alma looked at her cigarette and then obliquely at me. “She’ll tell you anyway.”

“She probably will. But I promise to keep you out of trouble if it’s humanly possible.”

The bland forehead wrinkled, and I could almost hear the wheels going around in her head. She sighed. “All right. Gee, I guess I’ve got to trust somebody in this thing. But the main thing is I want somebody to catch up with Curt Dolson and really clobber the hell out of him, but I don’t want him knowing I had anything to do with it.”

She looked at Perry. “Now I’ve started talking, I better cover some ground I didn’t tell you today, Perry.” She looked down at her crossed legs and tugged her skirt a bit forward where it had started to slip above her knee. She kept looking down. “He hired me in Washington and it was with the idea I’d be willing to be transferred here. I got here and it was a strange place to me, and you know, you get lonesome, especially around Christmas time. I got here just before Christmas. He was nice to me. I knew he was getting ideas. I mean that fatherly act is one you see through pretty easy, but I didn’t brush him off because I was lonesome, and I figured if it ever came to an issue, I could handle it all right without making him sore. He got me a promotion right after Christmas and hinted about getting me another one. And he gave me a Christmas present and I thought that was sort of
cute, you know. I guess he is a little smoother than I thought. He said we’d have our own private New Year’s party. I took on so much champagne I thought I could even come up to his room here in the hotel and still handle him. Like a challenge, I guess. I don’t know exactly how I ended up in bed with him, but I did. It wasn’t going to happen again, believe me, but he was sweet about it, and sorry and all, and gave me presents, and I figured, oh, hell, the damage is done and who cares, so it got to be a regular thing. Now he’s had enough. He’s after the little broad that sings here. Hildy something. He’s chasing her. He hasn’t got time for me. Yesterday I tried to talk to him and he asked me what I was kicking about. I got my promotion, didn’t I? That’s why I want to see him get it in the neck. He’s a stinker and I don’t want to see him get away with doing that to me or anybody.”

I said carefully, “It’s unethical for a man in his position to get into that sort of situation, Miss Brady. But there isn’t any basis there to—take any action against him.”

She looked directly at me and her blue eyes narrowed. “All that, my friend, was telling you the why of it. I haven’t gotten to the how yet.” I sensed I had underestimated her intelligence. Those blue eyes in that moment were very knowing.

“I brought her here on account of the other part,” Perry said.

“Mr. Dean, once it happened to me, I started thinking. I started wondering about something. When we were—going together, he was always in a sweat about money. He likes to live it up, you know. He borrowed money from Captain Corning a few times, near the end of the month. He had his pay and some income from that store of his. Then, while we were still—friendly, he started living better. That was back in late January and early February. He started carrying fat money around with him. And he gave me nicer things. This watch, for instance.

“It wasn’t until after he broke if off that I began thinking about how he suddenly had a better income. When I got
here, Curt Dolson and Mr. Mottling weren’t getting along at all. He used to yammer about Mottling to me. Then, in late January they kissed and made up or something. That was about the time Curt started having money.

“Then I remembered Perry asking me about those vouchers, and I thought some more and I wondered if Curt was pulling something. I began checking our purchase order file against shipping instructions and inventories. Curt was ordering a lot of things chargeable to the cost-plus contract. A lot of it was coming to the plant and a lot of it wasn’t, even though the inventory reports checked against the total ordered. With Curt doing the ordering and also being responsible for inventories, he could order stuff and have it shipped someplace else. And I remembered that in January, about the time he and Mottling got friendly, he’d gotten permission to rent warehouse space in town because storage facilities at the plant weren’t adequate. I kept checking the files every time I had a chance, and finally I spotted one purchase order that looked like a duplicate. It was made out to something called Acme Supply. That’s right here in Arland, 56 River Street, and that’s close to the warehouse space the Colonel rented. Letters from Acme are signed by some man named LeFay. I’m positive, Mr. Dean, that Curt is placing legitimate orders, then having the incoming stuff diverted to Acme, and then placing a duplicate order with Acme.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Let me get this straight. Say Dolson had to order typewriters. He’d order, say, three and divert two of them to that rented warehouse space?”

“Yes. Then he’d order two from Acme. Acme would get those two out of the rented space and deliver them to the plant. Dolson would see that Acme got paid. The records would show five typewriters ordered, three in use and two in storage, and because the Colonel keeps the warehouse inventory records, there isn’t any way to check. Maybe he had the incoming stuff diverted to Acme somehow, so it never goes into storage, then places a duplicate order with Acme. That way, paying twice for the same stuff, he and this LaFay could split whatever they get for it.”

“Are the amounts involved large?”

“I’ve found one for forty thousand. And smaller ones running five and ten and twenty and so on. They’re for things that aren’t bulky. Small machine tool items. Office equipment, office machines, and cutters and things I don’t know anything about. Now you know as much as I do, and you can do anything with it you want to, just so you leave me out of it. I mean, I won’t testify or anything. As far as I’m concerned, I haven’t told you a thing.”

She turned back toward the window, her childish mouth hard and set, and her eyes still narrow. I could see how Dolson’s scheme could work. It would be a fast way to make money. But it could never be a safe way. It was a fool’s game. There would be a day of reckoning and disgrace and prison. I could assume the girl wasn’t lying. Her shrewdness enabled her to find out what was being done. But she did not have the creative intelligence to invent such a scheme just to embarrass Curt Dolson.

Perry said, “I spent an hour this afternoon checking our files. She’s telling the truth, Mr. Dean.”

Maybe it was the truth, but I mistrusted the way the girl tied it to Mottling. I decided it was coincidence that the two men should have started seeing eye to eye at the time Dolson devised his plan. I couldn’t see Mottling implicating himself in a plan that could only have been devised by a very foolish and greedy little man. I couldn’t see Mottling participating. His motivation was the hunger for power, not cash.

“Alma, thank you for telling me this,” I said. “It’s enormously important, and I’m grateful to you. Now suppose you run along and forget what you told us. Don’t mention it to anybody else. Do you think the Colonel has any idea you suspect what he’s doing?”

She stood up and said with dignity, “He wouldn’t give me credit for being bright enough.”

“Could you stay for a few minutes, Perry?” I asked her. She nodded. I let Alma out. I watched her walk toward the elevators, teetering along on too-high heels, her round hips swinging, her head high. I closed the door.

“What do you think, Gevan?” Perry asked.

“It sounds bad enough to be true, or true enough to be bad. I’m glad you brought her to me.”

“I should have told Mr. Granby. The company is in the clear. We haven’t the authority to disapprove any voucher presented by the Colonel in his capacity as contracting officer. Mr. Granby would know who to contact in Washington. But I knew she wouldn’t talk to Mr. Granby. I wanted someone to hear it from her as soon as possible. She didn’t tell me … about their relationship. It’s—terribly sad, isn’t it?”

“That’s one word for it.” She sat on the couch. Her wool suit was pale, of nubbly texture. I paced to the window.

“Perry, I think we’ve got to assume that at the least hint or suspicion, Dolson will try to cover himself. I think he’s in so deep he can’t cover himself completely, but he could make it a lot tougher to get the facts. You have a file of the dupes of al those vouchers?”

“Yes. I could dig out all the ones that went through for payment to Acme, and make a list of the items and the totals.”

“Good! Do it inconspicuously. I’ll see what I can find out about Acme. Then I know the next step. A phone call to Washington. On a thing like this they move fast. They’ll have a bunch of people in here before Dolson can say General Accounting Office. And if they do it fast, all we can hope for is for some relationship between Dolson and Mottling showing up.”

Perry’s gray eyes were thoughtful. “I’ve wondered about that. I just can’t see what Mr. Mottling would get out of any—relationship like that. It seems so—petty. And yet—”

“What are you thinking about?”

She shrugged. “I suppose it’s meaningless. But you know the sort of man Colonel Dolson is. Self-important, sort of. Something happened a month ago. The Colonel and Mr. Mottling came out of Mr. Granby’s office, through my office. Colonel Dolson was telling Mr. Mottling there were some drawings he’d have to have back immediately. Mr.
Mottling said he’d send those drawings back to Dolson when he was damn well ready to release them and not before. Colonel Dolson took it without a murmur, and he knew I heard it, and he didn’t make any attempt to save face in front of me. It was as though Mr. Mottling had some special hold over him.”