“Amity? Why does he go there?”
“I wouldn’t know. I guess he has interests.”
“Do you ever go with him?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m never invited, thank God. Who wants to go to Amity?”
I took a deep breath and held it till it hurt and then released it.
“That’s right,” I said. “Who does? Incidentally there’s something else that nags me. It seems to me that you’re trying to ruin a good thing for yourself, and I don’t understand it. What happens to you and all this if Silas turns out to be a murderer?”
“Whatever it is, I’ll try to bear it. I may even celebrate. In the meanwhile, on the chance that I’m wrong about him, I may as well be comfortable.”
I stood up and looked down, and she stayed down and looked up. And because she was a shrewd and tough wench with looks and brains and queer attachments and flexible morals, I thought it would be pleasant and acceptable to kiss her once in return for the time she’d kissed me once, and that’s what I did, and it was. It was pleasant and acceptable. It even started being exciting. Just as her hands were reaching for me, I straightened and turned and walked to the door, and she came out of the chair after me. She put her arms around my waist from behind.
“It’s worth developing,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve decided.”
“Sorry,” I said. “My own mind isn’t made up yet. I’ll let you know.”
I loosened her hands and held them in mine against my belly. After a few seconds, I dropped them and opened the door and started out.
“You ugly bastard,” she said.
“Don’t call me,” I said. “I’ll call you.”
“Go to hell,” she said.
I got on out and closed the door softly and began wishing immediately that I hadn’t.
6
The next morning I checked a couple of morgues—the newspaper variety. I turned the brittle bones of old dailies and disturbed the rest of dead stories, but I learned nothing of significance regarding Constance Markley. She was there, all right, briefly and quietly interred in ink. No one had got excited. No one had smelled anything, apparently, that couldn’t eventually be fumigated in divorce court. I left the second morgue about noon and stopped on the way out of the building at the desk of a guy I knew. He was sitting hunched in a chair staring with bitter animosity at a silent typewriter, as if the typewriter were somehow an oppressor and an object of hatred. His name was Ludwig Anderson, and he was a good reporter as reporters go. He looked up at me sourly, brushing lank dun hair out of one eye with one hand, and I had the impression that I shared with the typewriter his repressed and sour hatred.
“Hello, Lud,” I said.
“Hello, Percy,” he said. “What’s the occasion?”
“I been down in the morgue,” I said. “I didn’t learn much of anything.”
He shrugged and made another pass at his intrusive hair. “What’s in a morgue? Old paper. Old mistakes. You working on something?”
“More or less. You remember Constance Markley?”
“Sure. Graham Markley’s third. She got tired of him and ran off with another man. They’ve been bedded down, now, a couple of years. I didn’t know you took divorce cases.”
“Nothing like that. I was just wondering who covered the story for your paper.”
“A frustrated chicken farmer. He’s bored sick by most of the odd balls and pretenders who make the news that people read, and most of all he’s bored by the antics of a prowling wife.”
“You?”
“That’s right.”
“You ever get any idea of where Constance Markley went?”
“No.” He shrugged again and looked as if he were on the verge of a sour belch. “Who cares? She was doing extra-marital business with Regis Lawler. That was established. She and Lawler ran off together. The implication was clear. Why make a case of it?”
“You satisfied there was nothing more to it?”
“I was satisfied at the time. Nothing’s happened to make me dissatisfied since. You know anything that might?”
“Not I. I’m just trying to earn a fee.”
His expression soured again, the belch, this time, erupting.
“God-damn ulcer,” he said.
Opening a drawer in his desk, he removed a quart thermos bottle and a paper cup that had seen much service. He poured milk from the thermos into the cup and drank the milk slowly. The sour animus that I had previously shared with the typewriter was now directed toward his ulcer and the milk and beyond the milk to a guilty cow. He seemed to have forgotten that I was there.
“Ulcers are hell,” I said.
“God-damn milk,” he said.
“I could never stand it,” I said. “I weaned early.”
“I hate all God-damn cows.” He capped the thermos bottle and put it in the drawer with the paper cup. “Fee for what?” he said.
“Didn’t I tell you? Trying to find out where she is.”
“Who wants to know?”
“A client.”
“What for?”
“Just assurance.”
“It’s two years old, Percy. Who’s getting anxious for assurance after two quiet years?”
“I told you. A client.”
“That won’t do. You come in here and stir up my ulcer with questions, but you don’t want to answer any. You ought to know better.”
“All right. The client’s name is Faith Salem. She’s got an interest in Graham Markley, and she wants to give it legal status.”
“Number four?”
“That’s the project.”
“Dames are nuts. Don’t they ever learn anything from each other?”
“This one learns from herself. She knows what she wants and what she doesn’t, but she’s willing to take some of the latter with a lot of the former. She’s realistic.”
“That’s one word for it, I guess. There are others. What’s on her mind that would make her hire a detective?”
“Nothing specific. She wants things clarified, that’s all. No complications. Did you know Constance Markley?”
“No. I never saw her. She did something that rated a few lines, and I wrote them. That’s all.”
“Did she have a reputation?”
“Everyone has a reputation of sorts.”
“You know what I mean. Any escapades? Any notoriety? Any proclivity for doing crazy things?”
“None to my knowledge. She was a quiet dame who had an affair and left one man for another. That’s what everyone thought, including the police, and that’s what I think too. It’s something that happened yesterday and today and will happen sure as hell tomorrow.”
“Sure. It’s that kind of world. You’re wrong about everyone, though. Thinking that way, I mean. You and the police and others, maybe, but not everyone, I know someone who thinks differently.”
“Who thinks?”
“Never mind. It’s not solid enough to quote.”
“Thinks what?”
“Thinks, for one thing, that Regis Lawler wasn’t the kind to commit himself to a romantic extravagance like disappearing with a woman at the price of a soft spot. Not with Constance, not with any woman at all. Not for any reason.”
“Graham Markley thought he was. So did Silas Lawler.”
“I know. And so did you.”
“I didn’t know anything but what I was told. When a man tells me his wife’s run off with a certain guy, I’m inclined to believe him. When the guy’s brother agrees, I’m inclined to consider the matter closed.”
“You and the police.”
“Right. Me and the police.”
“Who handled it for the police, incidentally?”
“Matt Thurston.”
“I know Matt. I think I’ll have a talk with him.”
“Suit yourself, but it probably won’t do you much good. To tell the truth, he didn’t waste much time on the investigation. Maybe Mart’s biased. He’s be
en married for thirty years and has ten kids, and he’s got no more time than the minimum for a wife who won’t stay home.”
“I can understand why he wouldn’t. Thanks, Lud.”
“Sure,” he said. “For nothing.”
I left him hunched in his sour animus, full of milk and hatred for cows. In my old clunker I drove to police headquarters and found Matt Thurston, sergeant by rank, in the area assigned to the Bureau of Missing Persons. Matt was crowding sixty and going to fat. The skin of his face hung in folds from its bones, and his belly hung over his belt. I said hello and shook hands and asked him if he’d tell me what he remembered about the Constance Markley case.
“To hell with Constance Markley,” he said. “Let’s go get a beer.”
I thought it was a good idea, and we went. In a dark and comforting little bar down the street in the next block, we crawled onto stools and sank to our elbows on mahogany. The bartender drew two without asking, on the grounds, I suppose, of Matt’s established habits and known cronies. It was all right with me. I accepted one of the beers and paid for both. Behind us, someone put a dime in a juke box, and one of the rock-and-roll rash began to sing about sugar. He had it in the morning, he had it in the evening, he had it for supper. It was a silly and rather nauseous song—so much sugar all the time—but the machine was modulated, and it gave to the dark and quiet little bar a soft substance and sense of motion that were not unpleasant if you were not particular.
“How’s the family?” I said.
“The family’s fine,” he said. “Ten kids and not a mistake in the litter.”
“Litter means all born at the same time,” I said.
“Don’t be technical,” he said. “Ten kids are a litter however they’re born.”
“Brought forth at one time by a multiparous animal,” I said.
“What’s a multiparous animal?”
“An animal that has a litter.”
“That’s my old lady,” he said.
We finished our beers and had two more drawn. I paid again as a matter of course. A cop with ten kids is entitled to certain freeloading perogatives when he is in the company of a private detective with none, and this is an opinion almost always shared by the cop.
“Ten kids are quite an accomplishment even when you space them,” I said.
“We wanted a dozen, but it doesn’t look like we’ll make it. The old lady wore out on me.”
He swallowed some beer and looked reproachfully into the suds, as if he saw there the worn out old lady who would never make a dozen. “What’s your interest in Constance Markley?” he said.
“I’m trying to locate her for someone who wants to know what happened to her.”
“Nothing happened to her. She ran off with a man, that’s all. Wherever she went, she went because she wanted to.”
“So I keep hearing. Just disappeared. She and Regis Lawler. You’ll have to admit it isn’t the usual pattern of infidelity.”
“Is there a pattern of infidelity? I never found one.”
“All right. Maybe there’s no pattern. Nothing consistently repeated except the infidelity itself. But at least it’s possible to see some kind of bad sense afterward in whatever was done or not done. In this case, there are too many things that make no sense at all, not even bad. Why all the mystery? Why all the indifference of people who should have cared for one reason or another? Damn it, Matt, why not simply a separation and a divorce? I keep asking that question, and I keep getting answers, but the answers amount to speculation, and no one knows anything for sure.”
Matt glared at his beer. A curious expression of diffused and hopeless anger began in his eyes and spread perceptibly through the folds of his face.
“Look,” he said. “I’ve been in this business for a long time, more years by far than it should take a man to get where I am, which isn’t very far from where I started. And the one thing I’ve learned, if I’ve learned anything, is that you don’t look for sense where there isn’t any. Every day people are disappearing for their own reasons, and there are always other people who want the people found who have disappeared, and sooner or later they usually turn up in one place or another. And the reasons they give for what they did are reasons you wouldn’t believe, but they’re reasons, just the same, that were good enough for the people who had them. What I mean is, people who disappear are people with problems, and they don’t think straight. They’re running away from something, or after something, or maybe they’re just running, period. And most of the time they don’t know themselves just which way it is. Take this Markley dame. You ask me why the mystery. You ask me why people didn’t give a damn who normally should have. You ask me why not a separation and divorce, all open and sensible. My answer is, how the hell should I know? Everything suggested that she’d run off with a man. Nothing suggested anything else. Am I supposed to get all worked up over the cheap affair of a dissatisfied wife?”
“Not if that’s all it was.”
“That’s all. What else you got in mind?”
“Nothing definite. It just seems to me that there are a lot of loose ends no one’s bothered to tie up.”
“There are always loose ends. The lives of people like that are littered with loose ends.”
“Was there anything, anything at all, that seemed out of line the night Constance Markley and Regis Lawler disappeared?”
“Sure. A man’s wife ran off with another man. That’s out of line.”
“Okay. Granted. Nothing else?”
“All right, all right.” He lifted his glass and slammed it down in a sudden concentration and explosion of his diffused anger. “I know what you’re thinking, and I’ve thought it all before. If it wasn’t a case of a man and a woman running away together, what was it? Amnesia? One of these fancy fugue cases you read about in the psychology books? It might have been worth considering if it had only been one of them. But it wasn’t only one. It was both of them disappearing together. A man and a woman who were having an affair. Did something happen to both of them together that made them lose their memories at the same time? This is something that is hard to believe, even for a private detective.”
“Thanks. It is.”
“So what’s left? Murder? One by the other? If so, what happened to the body? And why run if the body was so well disposed of that no one could find it? Both of them by a third party? Two bodies disposed of with no clues, no mistakes, no trail at all to follow? Look, Percy, it bores me to talk about it. They’re somewhere together, if they haven’t traded each other off by this time, which wouldn’t surprise me. And if you want to earn a fee by looking for her, it’s all right with me, but don’t try to find something in it that isn’t there and never was.”
“I appreciate the advice. Thanks very much. Did you ever learn how they left the city?”
“No. There are lots of ways to leave a city.”
“Did Regis Lawler cash in on any investments before he disappeared?”
“Apparently he didn’t have any. Guys like Regis Lawler don’t have any confidence in anything but cash.”
“Guys like me too. Speaking of cash, did you know that Regis lifted seventy-five grand that belonged to brother Silas?”
“I didn’t know.”
‘That’s what Silas told me. He said he cut his loss and let it go.”
“Maybe Silas can afford it. As for me, I can’t even afford another beer. If you want to buy me one for my time, I’ll drink it and say thanks and get back to work.”
“Sure. Have another beer.”
I had one with him and paid and said good-bye and stopped for a bowl of clam chowder and a sandwich on the way to the office.
7
In the office, sitting, I elevated my feet and began to think.
Maybe thinking is an exaggeration. I didn’t really have an idea. All I had was an itch—a tiny burr of coincidence that had caught in a wrinkle of my cortex. It didn’t amount to much, but I thought I might as well worry it a while, having nothin
g else on hand or in mind. What I thought I would do specifically was go back and see Faith Salem again. And I would go, if I could arrange it, when Faith and the sun were on the terrace. She had said to call ahead of time, and so I lowered my feet and reached for the phone, and that’s when I saw the gorilla.
He was a handsome gorilla in a Brooks Brothers suit, but a gorilla just the same. There’s something about the breed that you can’t miss. They smell all right, and they look all right, and there’s nothing you can isolate ordinarily as a unique physical characteristic that identifies one of them definitely as a gorilla rather than as a broker or a rich plumber. But they seem to have a chronic quality of deadliness that a broker or a plumber would have only infrequently—in special circumstances, if ever. This one was standing in the doorway watching me, and he had got there without a sound. He smiled. He was plainly prepared to treat me with all the courtesy I was prepared to make possible.
“Mr. Hand?” he said.
“That’s right,” I said.
“I have a message from Mr. Silas Lawler. He would appreciate it very much if you could come to see him.”
“I just went to see him yesterday.”
“Mr. Lawler knows that. He regrets that he must inconvenience you again so soon. Apparently something important has come up.”
“Something else important came up first. I was just getting ready to go out and take care of it.”
“Mr. Lawler is certain that you’ll prefer to give his business priority.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what to do. You go back to Mr. Lawler and tell him I’ll be around this evening or first thing tomorrow.”
“Mr. Lawler is most urgent that you come immediately. I have instructions to drive you there and bring you back. For your convenience, of course.”
“Of course. Mr. Lawler is notoriously considerate. Suppose I don’t want to go.”
“Mr. Lawler hopes you will want to accomodate him.”
“Let’s suppose I refuse.”
“Mr. Lawler didn’t anticipate that contingency, I’m afraid. He said to bring you.”
“Even if I resist?”
“As I understood my orders, Mr. Lawler made no qualifications.”
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