The near-accident had made me feel washed-out, dulled. I parked in a lot in town, wandered into a movie. I sat there in the semi-gloom for an hour. Over the soundtrack I could hear thunder moving down the valley. I looked at the movie and did not see it. I was seeing Niki and Uncle Al, seeing Ken, fusty with after-dinner napping, taking a cool walk at midnight toward something that stood waiting for him by the entrance posts. I wondered if it would all make sense if I could see it from a different angle, if I could step out of myself, if I could climb up on some hypothetical box and look at all of them in some new way...
It was Friday again. One week ago my brother had been alive in Arland, not knowing it was his last day of life, not knowing there were so few breaths and steps and heartbeats left to him. From Sergeant Portugal’s point of view it had been a random and accidental death, as meaningless as most crimes of violence. Yet everything I had found out had pointed to its having been carefully planned. The motive, once discovered, might be that ingredient which would make Niki’s obsession and preoccupation understandable.
My hunch grew stronger. A hunch that Ken, somehow, on his last day of life, had done some one thing, had performed one action that had triggered all the rest of it, so that, in the night, the firing pin had fallen inevitably against the primer of the thirty-eight cartridge.
I left the movie. Rain was a streaming curtain, fringed with silver where it danced high off the asphalt in the false dusk of mid-afternoon. I knew that I must turn the calendar back. I would become Ken on that Friday of a week ago, and I would try to do what he had done, go where he had gone, try to feel what he had felt. The plant was the place to catch up with him on that day, to catch up with my death-marked brother moving inevitably toward his appointment by the gateposts of the Lime Ridge house.
Chapter 13
The lights were on in the Dean Products’ offices. The reception girl gave me my pass when I signed the register. Dulled by the heavy rain, the sound of the production areas filtered into the offices like the thick slow beatings of a hundred dozen giant hearts.
Perry gave me a startled look when I walked into her office. “Oh! Did you see Alma?”
Niki and the near-accident had driven Alma Brady completely out of my mind I looked blankly at Perry for a moment and said, “She didn’t sleep at her place last night. She was back there for a few minutes around three and then apparently went out again.”
“Do you think she — could have been with the Colonel, Gevan?”
“Not considering how she felt about him last night.” I had moved close to her desk and we kept our voices low. I saw an object on her desk that looked vaguely familiar, and, without thinking, I picked it up. It was a small comic figure, a gay-colored plaster figure of a golfer in the middle of a grotesque swing, and I remembered I had been given it at the Arland Golf Club as a consolation prize one day long ago. It had been on my desk the day I cleared out my personal belongings, and I remembered tossing it into the wastebasket with a lot of other junk, because on that day I had no appreciation for the comic.
I replaced it and looked at her and saw she was blushing furiously. “I always sort of liked him,” she said. “I rescued him. You chipped his nose when you threw him in the basket, but I found the chip and glued it back on. He’s a mascot, sort of.”
“He didn’t do me much good.”
She went abruptly back to the Dolson-Brady problem. “I know it doesn’t seem logical that she’d go back to Colonel Dolson, Mr. Dean, but on the other hand, the files are missing, and that might be what would happen if she told him about telling us. I mean maybe she regretted it later.”
“After you left in the cab, Perry, I went to the Copper Lounge. I ran into Dolson. I had the idea of needling him into taking some action. I scared him thoroughly by telling him I was backing Granby. With Walter running the whole show, it wouldn’t be very damn long before he’d start checking Dolson’s purchases more thoroughly. So that may be what made him get hold of the files — or get somebody to take them out of this office. I moved too fast, if that’s the case. I should have waited.”
She reached out and moved the figurine to a place where her typewriter carriage wouldn’t knock him over.
“Perry, which office was Ken using?”
“When Mr. Mottling arrived, Ken moved out of your office and gave it to him. Your brother took over the office where Mr. Mirrian used to be.”
“I know the one. Has anybody else moved in?”
“No. It’s empty. I don’t believe anybody has even been in there since — last Friday. There wouldn’t have been anything in there that had to be processed.”
I saw the faint bluish shadows under her eyes. “You look tired, Perry. What did you do — have a late date after you left me?”
“No. I just — couldn’t sleep. There seem to be so many things that don’t make any sense. It’s like there’s something we don’t know. Something big and important, and if we knew it, or could guess it, then everything else would be — understandable. Maybe when you go to that Acme office...”
“I went there this morning. Nobody there. It’s just a mailing address, a cubbyhole. Perry, word will get around that I’m in the plant. They may check with you. Call me and tell me who’s looking for me. I’ll be in my brother’s office.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, and I realized I had dropped back into the habit of giving her orders. She looked amused.
I got to the office where Ken had been without encountering anyone in the hall who looked even vaguely familiar. The outer office door was closed. I went in and shut it behind me. It was designed like the other executive offices, with the windowless outer office for the secretary. There was dust on the secretarial desk — more dust than could accumulate in one week, and it gave me a wry appraisal of my brother’s importance in the firm. I opened the second door and went into his office. It was small, with pale paneling, pale green plaster walls above the paneling, a gray steel desk. The room was as gray as the rain outside.
I sat in Ken’s chair and pushed the black button of the fluorescent desk lamp. The tube flickered, then glowed with a steady white light. The light slanted across the bottom half of a framed picture of Niki, bold against her mouth, shadowing her eyes.
I sat there and tried to pretend I was Ken, tried to think as he had thought. Perhaps he had merely sat there, waiting for the long hours to pass until he could leave without being too obvious, and go to the Copper Lounge, to Hildy and stingers and a sedate alcoholic haze. I needed clues to what had been troubling him. I began looking through the desk.
There were pencils in the top drawer, and paper clips, and scratch pads. The other drawers were equally devoid of any hint of the personality of the man who had sat at this desk — a few cigars, some antique copies of Business Week, some engineering journals, a few competitors’ catalogues with their prices penciled in. Ken never wanted to be a big wheel. He lacked drive. He had been useful to me. He was content to let me make the decisions, and when I asked him to do something, he did it doggedly, thoroughly, and well. He was slow, methodical, and performed best when not under pressure, when there was no deadline.
I had left him perched on a high, vulnerable place. With complete objectivity, I knew that he was an employee type. Responsibility made him uneasy.
His appointment pad was on the right corner of the desk. It was that brand which has a clock embedded in the middle, the dial showing through the circular hole in the cover, each page divided into wedge-shaped sections to correspond with the hours of the day as shown on the clock.