Free Area of Suspicion by John D. MacDonald Page B

instant I released her, how harsh and glad would be her cry, how astonishingly strong her arms would be, how hotly sweet the heavy mouth would taste, how all of her tallness would be in urgent, rhythmic, helpless movement.
    Tires made a droning sigh on asphalt and stopped outside. A car door slammed. I held her until I felt the straining go out of her arms, and then I released her. I watched her come back to the objective world. Her mouth healed itself and her eyes became quick and her body straightened and tightened into formality. After a purely animal sensation of fury at my loss, I felt all the gladness come. I knew I would not have stopped. Nor could she. By accident I had been delivered from a sweaty interlude that would have shamed me beyond my ability to forgive or excuse myself.
    She touched her hair and looked at her watch. “It’s Stanley Mottling,” she said. “I forgot I’d asked him to stop by.” She tilted her head and looked at me in a challenging way, arched and roguish. “It isn’t really too late, darling.”
    “For a moment I almost forgot it was. Go greet the nice man. What does he drink? I’ll start fixing it.”
    I was puddling the sugar in a teaspoon of water when Stanley Mottling came in. No one had described him to me. I had expected one of those hard-jawed, little terrier types, with nerves drawn tight and sharp and quick. Mottling ambled in and was introduced. He was vast and rangy,tweedy and shaggy. He looked sleepy … a young forty with mild, watchful eyes, and, in tweeds that looked slept in, there was an upper drawer flavor to the way he looked and handled himself. He was at least six-four, and his handshake was firm.
    “Nice to know you, Mr. Dean. Damn shame it had to take a mess like this to bring you back here. Hope we can get along as well as Ken and I did.”
    I said trite things while I tried to figure him out. The guy was likable. He had charm and ease of manner without seeming to be conscious of either. He also seemed very much at home. Though he had been in the room only a few moments, he had the air of host rather than guest.
    I took the drinks over and he sat facing Niki and me on the other couch. The two couches were at right angles to the fireplace with a squat cocktail table between them.
    We said pleasant nothings while I decided on one fast and definite gambit which might teach me something about the man.
    “I was disturbed, Mr. Mottling, to learn Tom Garroway left us.”
    He nodded. “It was a hell of a shame. A good man. The kind we ought to make a special effort to keep. If there’d been less pressure, I would have tried to re-educate him. He was spoiled.”
    “Spoiled! For what?”
    He smiled. “Mr. Dean, you’ve just let yourself in for a short lecture on one of my pet management theories. I feel that industrial techniques have advanced beyond the point where any one man can be given a production problem to work out in his own way. I believe in operation on a team basis. Suppose, for example, I have a tool-design problem, a tricky cutting edge for high-speed operation. I want to form a team consisting of a mechanical engineer, a metallurgist, and a practical shop man to lick it. It saves time because what they come up with will have a minimum of bugs. If it is a quantity situation, I want somebody from purchasing on the team too, so that they’ll specify somethingwe can get without too much delay. Tom Garroway wouldn’t work that way. And I didn’t have time to re-educate him.”
    It was one of those things that sounds perfectly plausible if you say it fast enough. A fine theory—and I didn’t like it. “Same problem with Fitz and Poulson?” I asked casually.
    His eyes narrowed just a bit, and for a moment the real Mottling spoke. “I keep men around me who work with me, Dean, not against me.” The real Mottling was a most impressive organism. Cold, direct, tough, and ruthless. A deity who would countenance no atheism. Then the mask was back, and