The Disappearance (The Lt. Hastings Mysteries)

by Collin Wilcox

  I took out my notebook and ball-point pen. “I won’t take much of your time, Mrs. Touhy. I just wanted to get your account of Carol’s life before she came to San Francisco. Plus, of course, anything else you can tell us that might be helpful in finding her murderer.”

  Slowly she shook her head. “Honest to God, I been thinking about it all night, and I—I still can’t get it. I mean—” She waved a slack hand in a limp, baffled gesture. “I mean, when I think—really think—how it must’ve happened: that someone shot her and then hauled her out and buried her like some—some dog or something, it just—” Again she flapped the hand, still shaking her head in a dull, despondent arc. “It just stops me, that’s all. It just really stops me.”

  Slightly shrugging, I glanced at Canelli. He raised his thick eyebrows, rolling his eyes briefly upward. I pitched my voice to a more purposeful note as I said, “I know you’ve got lots to do, Mrs. Touhy, and so do we. So if you’ll just tell me everything you can about your sister, from the beginning, we’ll be on our way.”

  “What’d you mean, ‘everything’?”

  “I mean exactly what I say, Mrs. Touhy: I’d like to know everything you can tell me about Carol, whether or not you think it’s relevant. Her childhood, high school days—everything. Why don’t you start with your parents? Who were they, what’d they do for a living? How did they get along with Carol?”

  She looked at me for a long, puzzled moment. Then her gaze wandered off as she made a blank-eyed, lip-chewing effort to collect her thoughts. Watching, I imagined her as a small girl, earnestly trying to cope with classroom questions she could never understand. As a child, I was thinking, she’d probably been very attractive. As a teenager, she could have been a quick-ripening beauty, a gum-snapping small-town swinger, making the scene at the roller rink, the drive-in and the malt shop.

  “Well,” she said finally, “Carol was always pretty—just as pretty as a picture, even when she was just a little kid. Even when she was in the sixth or seventh grade, I remember that the boys used to hang around the front porch, waiting for her to come out. That was in the summer, just when it was getting dark usually. I was older, of course—nine years older, so we was never close, Carol and me. But I still remember how the boys used to hang around, waiting for her to come out.” She paused, blinked, then tentatively looked at me. “Is—is that the kind of things you mean—things like that?”

  “Yes, perfect. Go ahead. Tell it from the beginning to the end.”

  “Yeah. Well—” She shrugged. “Well, there isn’t much to tell about when she was a little girl, except that she was pretty. I mean, she just did the ordinary things that little girls did, I guess. Of course, Carol was always smart. She didn’t always get good marks, because she didn’t care much about school. At least, she didn’t care much about high school. In grade school she did pretty well. But in high school, after—” She caught herself, furtively glanced at me, then cleared her throat. “She—she kind of lost interest in high school after a while. But her teachers used to say how smart she was if she’d only work. I mean, I was nine years older, like I said. So about half the time I’d be the one who talked to her teachers if Carol got out of line or something.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Why was what?”

  “Why did you deal with her teachers? Was your mother alive?”

  “Oh, sure. But—” She frowned, thinking about it. “But I guess I’d have to say that Mom was just plain worn out by the time Carol got to be school age. I mean, she had Carol late, in the first place. Then she always had to work, at Sears Roebuck. So—” Her voice trailed off as she paused to catch her breath.

  “Your father, I understand, had a drinking problem. Is that right?”

  She snorted derisively, then loosely nodded. “If ‘having a drinking problem’ means drunk all the time, then—” She broke off, looking at me closely. “Say, how’d you know?”

  I didn’t reply.

  The spasm of curiosity passed, and her broad face again sagged into a kind of dull, perplexed sadness. “Yeah,” she said heavily, “my old man drank. He was a good mechanic when he was sober, which was only about half the time. Whenever he got paid, he’d blow most of it across the bar before he ever got home. So like I say, my Mom had to work whether she wanted to or not.”

  “Are your parents alive now?”

  “Mom is. But she’s seventy-seven, and for about five years now she hasn’t recognized anyone. She’s out at the county rest home.”

  “What about your father?”

  Briefly she hesitated, her eyes faltering. “He got killed,” she mumbled. “In an accident.”

  “What kind of an accident, Mrs. Touhy?”

  She shrugged, shifting uneasily in her chair. Something was obviously bothering her, just as something had also bothered her moments before, recounting Carol’s high school days. Canelli and I exchanged a cop’s guarded glance as I repeated, “What kind of an accident?”

  “Well, he—he just got drunk and wandered out in the middle of 99 one night, and he—he got killed. A truck hit him—a big semi—and it threw him two hundred feet, they figured.”

  “How long ago was that?” Canelli asked.

  She shifted her attention to Canelli, frowning uneasily as she levered her heavy body to face him. She hesitated, then said, “Well, Carol was fifteen when he got killed, and she’s—she was—thirty-four. So—” She counted, moving her lips. “So that’d be nineteen years ago that it happened.”

  Again Canelli and I exchanged a glance, realizing that we were close to something we’d narrowly missed. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her watching us, lips pursed, frowning—transparently apprehensive.

  “Had he ever wandered out onto the highway before?” Canelli asked.

  “How should I know?”

  “Guess,” I said.

  She turned her attention to me. “Well,” she said slowly, “maybe he never did. That night, the night he was killed—” She bit at her lip, sucked at her teeth and then said, “He was pretty upset that night, I guess. Pretty … sick of everything, maybe.”

  “Why was that, Mrs. Touhy?”

  “Well, he’d … been in … jail, and he just got out the day before. And the night he got killed, he found some money around the house and went out and got drunk. Me and Bill, we were just about to get married, I remember, and—” She didn’t finish it.

  “Are you saying that you think your father might’ve committed suicide, Mrs. Touhy?”

  Eyes lowered, she half nodded, then half shrugged, twisting her hands in her lap, frowning as she studied the gesture.

  “What was your father in jail for?” I asked. “What was the charge?”

  She pretended not to hear. For a long moment she absorbed herself twisting a button on the fluffy pink sweater. I let the silence stretch uncomfortably, then repeated the question more firmly.

  “He was arrested for”—she swallowed, still twisting at the button—“for child molesting.”

  For a third time, Canelli and I looked at each other. Then, sighing, Canelli slowly asked, “Who was the victim, Mrs. Touhy?”

  “Well, it—it—” She sucked at her teeth, squirmed in the uncomfortable chair and peevishly looked over her shoulder toward the bathroom door, where the drumming of a shower had ceased. “It was Carol,” she said suddenly. Then she drew a deep breath and sat up straighter in the chair, glad to have finally gotten it out.

  A long, regretful moment of silence passed. “How did it happen, Mrs. Touhy?” I asked quietly.

  “Well,” she answered stolidly, “it was just about three weeks after Sears started staying open Friday nights. That was the night that Dad got his pay check, see, and he’d always get loaded before he came home. So—” She spread her hands. “So he got home about seven, and the only one that was home was Carol. I guess it all started when they got in some kind of an argument, and Dad hit Carol. Anyhow, Bill and me, we just happened to stop by the house about eight-thirty so that
I could pick up a jacket, because we were going out riding in someone’s convertible and it was getting cold. So we went into the house, and—” She stopped speaking. Her eyes were sad and distant as she shook her head, remembering. “And there they were, in my folks’ bedroom. He’d hit her across the face and kind of dazed her, I guess. And when I got there, he was—” She swallowed, then went on doggedly: “He was ripping at her clothes, and she was moaning and kind of halfway squirming, to get out from under him. And he—” She closed her eyes. “He was right there, all ready to—”

  The bathroom door opened. A short, muscular man stood in tee shirt and wrinkled slacks, his feet bare. He had the weather-seamed, big-knuckled appearance of an outdoor laborer. His thick brown hair was short and curly; his face was squared off, bullyboy handsome. He was tattooed on both forearms, and his nose had been broken.

  Dully, Blanche introduced us. I was ready for Bill Touhy’s grip, and I watched his shoulder muscles ripple as I tightened my hand against his. Canelli wasn’t so lucky.

  I turned to Blanche. “What happened to your sister after … that, Mrs. Touhy? I mean, was there any … real offense?”

  “No. Not the way you mean, anyhow. Carol was examined, and they sent Dad off to—”

  “Hey,” Bill said, standing spread-legged against the wall. “Hey, you talking about the time your old man—” He blinked. “That time he—” Again he blinked. As his wife nodded, Bill Touhy’s knotted fists tapped together. “That miserable old bastard,” he said. “That crummy bum. Honest to God, I never slammed anyone so hard in my life. I mean, I bounced him all over that goddamn house until the cops came. And then, for God’s sake, they locked me up for the night, the same as him.” He snorted balefully, swinging his head from Canelli to myself accusingly.

  Ignoring him, I turned to Blanche. “What happened to Carol then, Mrs. Touhy?”

  “Well, there wasn’t much that happened. I mean, Carol always kept pretty much to herself, even when she was a little kid. You never really knew what she was thinking, most of the time.”

  “An experience like that must’ve upset her, though.”

  “Well—” She considered the question. “It didn’t seem to upset her. Not that you could see, anyhow. I mean, she was kind of quiet for a week or so, but that was all. I remember that she stayed in her room a lot. But pretty soon she was out on the front porch, watching the boys mooning over her and kind of smiling to herself, just like always. It wasn’t until later—a year or two—that she started to change. But that happens to a lot of girls, you know, when they get to be sixteen or—”

  Her husband snorted derisively. “I’ve never seen a woman yet that don’t cover up for another woman, sister or not.”

  I turned to face Bill Touhy squarely. “What’d you mean by that, Mr. Touhy?”

  He shrugged his thick shoulders, at the same time bulging his biceps. “Ask her—” He jerked his chin toward his wife.

  “I’m asking you, Mr. Touhy.”

  His eyes flattened for a surly moment as we stared at each other. Then he said, “She got herself in trouble—big trouble. She had to leave town.”

  I nodded thoughtfully, allowed a few moments to pass and then turned to Blanche. “What kind of trouble was that, Mrs. Touhy?”

  She was glaring angrily at her husband, her lips pressed back against her teeth, her breath coming fast. Then, slowly turning to me, her voice a monotone and her eyes averted, she said, “When Carol was seventeen, there was a boy named Kirby, Charles Kirby. He was a—a no-good. His father—stepfather, he was really—had a big farm-machinery agency in town, and there just wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for that no-good Charles, who wasn’t even his son. The father’s name wasn’t even Kirby; it was Brown. And a nicer, more generous man you’d never want to meet. I mean, Mr. Brown was a past president of the Rotary and the Chamber of Commerce—both of them. He was a deacon of the church, too, and lots more. And when his wife died—they didn’t have any kids—he married this Kirby woman, and took her and her son in, and treated them better’n most men treat their natural family. And the two of them, that woman and her no-good kid, they just took Mr. Brown for everything they—”

  “What about Carol, Mrs. Touhy,” Canelli interrupted gently. “Tell us what happened to her.”

  I looked at him, slightly frowning. I’d learned long ago to let witnesses ramble. It took longer going in, but usually saved time in the long run. Canelli again raised his eyes, apologetically nodding.

  “What happened to Carol,” Blanche said peevishly, “was that she got pregnant. I mean, Dad was dead, and Mom was working, and I’d got married by that time. And Carol, she started to run wild. She did it in a quiet way, but that’s what happened. I mean, she didn’t get drunk or loud or anything, but—” She paused, fretfully sighing. Then, in a lower voice, avoiding my eyes, she said, “But, anyhow, she started taking boys home in the afternoons after school, and especially she’d take this Kirby kid home. I mean, he was one of those mean, good-looking, smooth kind of kids that the high school girls go for because they think he’s dangerous or something. And Mr. Brown had just bought him a car and everything. It was a convertible, I remember—a big red convertible. So Carol, she decided she wanted this Kirby kid, I guess—maybe because all the other girls wanted him. And she got him. And then she got pregnant.”

  “What happened then?”

  Bill Touhy snorted. “What happened then was that little Miss Carol got busy. That one was born smart. I wouldn’t’ve touched that one with a—”

  “You wouldn’t’ve got the chance,” his wife flared. “Carol wasn’t looking for sweaty ’dozer drivers with dirty fingernails.”

  He returned her flat, furious stare. Then, ripping a plaid sports shirt from a doorknob, he jerked open the door. “You tell it your way. I got to get the pickup washed. For her goddamn funeral.” He slammed the door. Canelli, on his feet, glanced at me. I shook my head.

  “What happened,” I asked quietly, “after she got pregnant?”

  “Well, the first thing that happened, she got herself a lawyer. She didn’t go to Mom, and she didn’t go to me—at least, not right away. I found out later that she knew a girl, nineteen or so, who’d got pregnant six months before, and this girl told Carol about the lawyer her folks had got. So Carol went to this same lawyer, on her own. That’s the way she was—cool. His name was Stanley Wygle. He was one of these sharpie-type lawyers. He hadn’t been out of law school so long, and he’d married a Tulare girl. So he decided to practice in Tulare a little while so he could get a little handout from his in-laws or something.”

  I opened my notebook, scanning the pages. “Stanley Wygle?” I repeated. “You’re sure of the name?”

  She nodded vehemently.

  “All right. What happened then?”

  “Well, Carol was only seventeen, like I said. So Stanley Wygle went to Mr. Brown and threatened to sue him for everything he owned, because he’d adopted the boy, and the boy was guilty of—of—” She hesitated, searching for the phrase.

  “Statutory rape?”

  “Right, statutory rape. Of course, Stanley Wygle never did really sue. He just wanted to scare them. What he wanted was a big wad of money for Carol—and him.”

  “Did he get it?”

  Again she nodded vehemently. “You bet. Carol got thousands. Then she got payments over the next year or two. Big payments.”

  “What about the baby?” Canelli asked.

  “Carol went to Mexico City and had it … taken care of.”

  “What’d she do then?” Canelli asked.

  “Then she went to Los Angeles. She stayed there for five years or so. Then she married this Victor Connoly.”

  “Did you see your sister during those five years?” I asked.

  Her lip curled slightly, remembering. “I saw her a couple of times when I went to L.A. But it was pretty plain Carol wasn’t too hot to see me. I guess I embarrassed her or something, because she was running with a pretty smooth-loo
king crowd. Not that I blamed her. And like I said before, Carol was always different from the other kids. I mean—” She hesitated, frowning. “I mean, she had class. She really did.”

  “What was Stanley Wygle doing all this time?” I asked.

  She glanced at me with a sidelong look of transparent conspiracy. “You knew about that, too, did you?”

  “I’d rather have you tell me, Mrs. Touhy.”

  “Yeah. Well, Carol stayed in Mexico for about a month, maybe a little longer. Then she went to L.A., like I said. And about that time, Mr. Fancy Pants Wygle started to find a lot of work he had to do down in L.A. Then, about a year later, he decides to divorce his wife. And—surprise—he moves to L.A.”

  I thoughtfully nodded as I looked over my notes. I’d gotten to know the victim better …

  “Is Mr. Brown still living in Tulare?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “He hasn’t lived there for years. That floozy of a wife left him and took her no-good son with her. But—”

  “Where’d they go, do you know?”

  “How should I know, Lieutenant? I mean, it wasn’t like I really knew her or anything. I just—you know—I just heard about it.”

  “How long was it after Carol left Tulare that the woman and her son moved out?”

  “Less than a year. Six months, maybe. But that’s all the time it took for the two of them to ruin Mr. Brown. It was just—just unbelievable what happened to that man after those two got through with him. I mean, he went downhill so fast you wouldn’t believe it. One minute he was a prosperous, big-shot businessman, and the next minute he was letting his business slide and getting in arguments with everyone, and I don’t know what all.” As she shook her head, heavily sighing, she seemed more distressed by Mr. Brown’s misfortune than by the death of her sister.

  “So then,” I said, “you’d estimate that Mrs. Brown and her son—later the ex-Mrs. Brown—left Tulare within, say, nine months of the time Carol left.”

  “Right.”

  “And how soon after that did Mr. Brown leave?”

  She thought about it. Finally she shook her head. “I honestly can’t tell you. Except that I know for certain, within a year, he was a ruined man. His business was busted, his so-called wife was gone, and he just—just started looking like a bum. I mean, I never seen anyone change so much. They say he married that floozy out of grief for his first wife dying—on the rebound, sort of. And then, when all that happened with”—she paused, swallowing—“with Charles and Carol and all, and then with his wife, well—” She flapped her hand.