Area of Suspicion Read Free Page B

ominous light of the day. When I was through he said he’d rather talk at my place. He walked there, beside me, as out of place in Indian Rocks as one of our tanned beach girls would have been in the raw April of Arland.
    We went into my small, cypress-paneled livingroom. I had left the windows closed and the air was musty, sea-damp. I opened them wide. Lester sat on the couch and put the briefcase beside him and placed his felt hat carefully on the briefcase. He crossed his legs and adjusted his trouser crease. He seemed intent on little routines, and the whole act was wrong. I didn’t know how it was wrong until I realized how he would have acted had it been an attempt to get me back into the firm. Then he would have been full of false affability, full of chat about what a nice little place this is, and you’re looking well, old boy. Instead of joviality, he was acting like a lawyer awaiting an unfriendly verdict.
    “Niki tried to get in touch with you by phone yesterday, Gevan,” he said, on a faint annoying note of accusation.
    “So I was told. And you flew down. I was told that too. Now you’re supposed to tell me why?”
    He polished his glasses on a bone-white handerchief. His naked eyes looked mild and helpless. Usually it is possible to guess which part Lester is playing, which mask he has selected from his limited supply. This one bothered me because I couldn’t guess what effect he was trying to create.
    He put the glasses on, and his smile was something that came and went quickly and weakly, a smile of nervous apology. My unreasoning forebodings had made me as nervous as he acted. I said harshly, “Get to the point! What do you want?”
    “Gevan—I don’t know how to—Gevan, Ken’s dead.”
    I walked to the window and looked out at the sand road, at the beach, and the oiled gray of the Gulf. The swells curled and broke. The wind had freshened. Pelicans, in single file, glided by, somber and intent. Two husky boys in blue trunks were practicing handstands. They could have been brothers.
    Kendall Dean is dead.
    One word. A heavy word, like something falling. It did a strange thing. It changed him from a man I thought I hated back into my kid brother. Kid brother, dead at thirty-one. It awakened all the deep, warm things of long ago, all the things I had pushed out of my mind so I could think of him only as a male who had taken my woman from me, so I could deny brotherhood and recognize only the hate and the resentment.
    The hate had been strong. But one word took it away. One word brought back the good days, those good, lost summers. He was a face weeping in the window that first day when I was taken to school, because he was not old enough to go, and the days would be lonely for him without our games and projects. Cave, treehouse, hideout, secret rites of many memberships, codes and plots and complicated wars.
    I remembered the day the roan threw him and broke his arm, and I walked him home and he would not cry.
    I thought of him as my kid brother, and felt a terrifying remorse that we had not spoken in four years, that I had not written him, that the last thing I had done to him was hit him heavily in the mouth and knock him down. I had blamed him, and it was all changed. It had been Niki who had stolen something from me. Stolen the last four years of my brother. All dead now. Mother, father, sister, brother. Sister dead at seven, and all I could remember of her was the way she looked once, running down a wide lawn as fast as she could run, as though she ran away that day from our familiar world.
    Now it seemed Niki had stolen half my life and all of his. Too many deaths. He had been the last one who gave a damn what happened to me, what I did, whether or not I was happy. I had told myself I hated him, but I had not realized these past four years that the very awareness of his existence had been a tie with all the good years.
    The two boys ceased their handstands and walked downthe beach, one of them