Area of Suspicion by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

meaningfulness. My high school class held the graduation ball at the Hotel Gardland. Ken was a sophomore when I was a senior. He attended too, and I couldn’t remember the name of his date. Mine was named Connie Sherman. Somebody had a bottle and Ken and I nibbled on it a few times in the men’s room. Later we took the girls down to the grill when the dance was folding. I had parked my car, a beat-up old Olds as big as a hearse, in a lot down Pernie Steet, so we went out the Pernie Street entrance.
    There were some boys there we didn’t know, probably North Side High, hanging around to make trouble with the southsiders. Some of them had tried to crash the dance earlier and were tossed out. As we came out, one of them, in the shadows, made a remark about Ken’s date. It was very explicit and anatomical. Ken turned toward them and his date tugged at him and told him to ignore it. I didn’t want trouble, not with the girls there. I think Ken was going to turn away, but he never got a chance. The sucker punch sent him sprawling. I shoved Connie toward the doorway. She used her head and grabbed Ken’s date by the arm and they ran inside. Ken bounced up as one of them tried to kick him and grabbed the leg and spilled the guy on the sidewalk. Then I couldn’t see what was happening because I was suddenly very busy. Somebody banged me under the eye and I swung back and missed and the scrap moved intothe shadows. It was very confusing. I hit somebody solidly and got kicked in the leg. There was grunting, and the sounds of blows, and then I heard somebody making that distinctive sound of trying to suck air back into the lungs after getting hit in the pit of the stomach. I wondered with part of my mind if it was Ken. Somebody ripped my coat and I got hold of a wrist and heaved and sent somebody spinning out across the curb into the lights. Then there was a police whistle and men running out of the hotel. The ones we were fighting ran down Pernie Street. The police were going to take us in, but Connie was very convincing about what happened. We were a mess.
    I remember how we got laughing so hard in the car I could hardly drive. My eye was puffed shut by the time we got home. And by the time the story got around school, there were nine of them and Ken and I had knocked out at least five. We smiled in silent, manly modesty, and I felt disappointed when the last saffron hues had faded from my eye.
    That was one of the memories. The city was full of them. And the countryside where bike tires had purred, and we had known where to get horse chestnuts. Ken was in the memories. I returned to a present tense, a world in which Ken no longer lived. If his death had any reason or purpose, I had to find it. I had to find out why life had become tasteless to him, why his recent letters had been so troubled, oblique, almost disjointed. Niki and Ken and plant politics and the brute hammer of lead against skull. I wanted it all sorted out, and I thought of the trite analogy of a jigsaw puzzle. But this was one of those where pieces are missing. I sensed that they were all there, but too many of them were turned face down, so that I could not see the colors.
    I had a drugstore breakfast and walked eight blocks through the women shoppers to Police Headquarters. I told the desk sergeant my name and said I wanted to talk to whoever was in charge of the investigation of the murder of my brother. He turned me over to a uniformed patrolman who took me down a hall, across an open court, and intoanother wing of the big building. We went up a flight of stairs and into a big room. There were long rows of oak desks, with men working at about half of them. The patrolman led me down to one. The small wooden sign on the desk said Det. Sgt. K. V. Portugal. The patrolman bent over and murmured something to him. Portugal glanced at me and gestured toward the chair pulled up beside his desk. I sat down. I thanked the patrolman and he walked away.
    Portugal kept