Area of Suspicion Read Online Free PDF

It wasn’t fat and gray. It was in wind-driven sheets. I shut the windows on the west. The kids were gone from the beach. A brown palm frond slid across the sand road with the wind.
    No point in going up there. Nothing I could do. Nothing I could do about the four wasted years. They don’t give you two chances. Not on the biggest table in the house. They make you pass the dice.
    No adolescent urge for vengeance would hasten the capture of the prowler by the police. Stay here, Dean, and keep on with the routines of four years.
    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 toubled dreams, George Tarleson drove me across Courtney Campbell Causeway to catch a flight from Tampa International. And George seemed to be driving too slowly.

Chapter 3
    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 hadbeen 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