“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 been 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.”