“What kinds of jobs has he held, Mrs. Wylie?”
“Oh, everything, you name it. He’s a very ambitious person, he changed jobs whenever he got bored, or restless, or realized he was in a dead end. He has that marvelous quality of being able to find work anywhere. After the Korean War, when he got out of the Navy, he immediately got a job as a bank teller. This was in Seattle, we’re originally from Seattle. Then, after we got married, we began working our way east, and Arthur found jobs in the most unlikely places. We’d land in a tiny little town on the edge of nowhere, and you wouldn’t think there’d be work there for anyone, but the next day Arthur would come home, and he’d landed a job as a short-order cook, or an automobile salesman, or ... well, anything, really. He sold storms and screens, he worked as a hairdresser, he sold real estate... He’s a good provider.”
“And this most recent job was with a travel agency.”
“Yes. He took it because he expected we’d get a lot of free trips. He’s always wanted to go to Europe, I think he expected Leon would send him over there to check out the various resorts, you know. But it was Leon who went every place. Arthur just sat in the office there and made hotel reservations and wrote out airline tickets ... he was getting terribly bored. I’m not surprised he quit. Would you like to know something? I think Arthur felt he was getting no place in the job, and decided instead that our marriage was bad. Do you think that’s possible?”
“Yes, it’s possible,” I said.
“I don’t think he’s coming back,” she said suddenly. “I don’t think I’ll ever see him again.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He hasn’t sent me a dime since July, when he disappeared. Before that, he’d send me a check every month, a sum agreed upon by our lawyers. But there’s been nothing since July. I think he’s washed his hands of the entire matter.”
“When he left here—when he left this apartment in March—what did he take with him?”
“His clothes, some books. That’s all.”
“His passport?”
“He didn’t have a passport. He’s never been outside this country.”
“Any bankbooks? Stocks? Savings certificates? Bonds?”
“He left the bankbook with me. There’s very little in it. We haven’t been able to save much over the years.”
“Have you made any attempt to locate him since July?”
“I called the Missing Persons Bureau. I thought of hiring a private detective, but I haven’t got the money for that. My father’s been sending me money, not very much, but enough to get by on.”
“Mrs. Wylie,” I said, “do you have any recent photographs of your husband?”
“Yes,” she said, “I think so. Would you like to see them?”
“Please.”
She rose and walked swiftly out of the room. She was gone for perhaps five minutes, during which time I heard her opening and closing drawers somewhere in the apartment. When she came back, she was carrying an album which she placed on the coffee table before me.
“Most of these are old,” she said, “but there are some we took in February, just before he left.”
I opened the album, skipped through the pictures of Helene and Arthur as teenagers, briefly scanned the pictures of him as a young sailor in uniform, and turned to the last several pages in the album.
“Those are the ones we took in February,” Helene said. “We drove up to Maine for the weekend.”
Most of the pictures were of Helene, but there were several good shots of Arthur alone, and a few of both of them together, obviously taken by a third person. In all of her pictures, Helen was smiling. Arthur looked to be in his early forties, a sober-faced man with a pipe clenched between his teeth in every shot. His blond hair was bushy and high, rising from his scalp in a white man’s Afro cut. His blond eyebrows were shaggy, his blond mustache was trimmed in a modified walrus style. All of the pictures were full-length shots, but photographs are sometimes deceiving as to height and weight, especially when a man is wearing a heavy winter overcoat.
“How tall is your husband?” I asked.
“Five feet eleven,” she said.
“How much does he weigh?”
“A hundred and ninety pounds. He’s a big man. And very handsome.”
I made no comment. Instead, I looked through the most recent pictures again. I had never seen Arthur J. Wylie in my life, but he looked vaguely familiar. Troubled, I turned back to the middle of the album. There were photographs of the young marrieds at what appeared to be a ranch, more photographs of them against a backdrop of mountains, another of Helene leaning on the fender of a ‘64 Oldsmobile, one of Arthur holding a duck in his arms and grinning.
“When did he grow the mustache?” I asked.
“When he started working at the bank in Seattle. He thought it made him look older and more dignified.”
“When was that?”
“Just after he got out of the Navy—1953, it must have been.”
“Has he worn a mustache since?”
“Always. I wouldn’t know him without it.”
I kept flipping backward through the album, backward through time, until at last I came to the beginning, or at least the beginning of Helene and Arthur. There were pictures of Helene in a cheerleader’s skirt and a white sweater with the letter S on it. There was a picture of Arthur behind the wheel of a ‘48 Chevy, his bushy blond hair partially hidden by a baseball cap tilted onto the back of his head. There were pictures of both of them in bathing suits, lying on a grassy slope beside a lake. There were pictures of Arthur in Navy uniform. One of these captured my attention because it had obviously been taken while he was still in boot camp. He had not yet grown the mustache, and his bushy hair was cut so close to his scalp that he looked almost bald.
I stared at the picture.
Then I closed the album, got to my feet, and said, “Thank you very much, Mrs. Wylie, you’ve been very helpful.”
“What has Arthur done?” she asked. “You haven’t told me what he’s done.”
I left the apartment without answering her.
Arthur J. Wylie had done two things for sure:
(1) He had “disappeared” to Oberlin Crescent in July, when—using the name Amos Wakefield—he’d rented the apartment across the hall from Natalie’s.
(2) He had since shaved his scalp and his upper lip clean. No more bushy head of hair, no more walrus mustache. Only the shaggy blond eyebrows were there as reminders of “the blondest stud” Carruthers had ever seen in his life.
It always got down to love, money, or lunacy—Jesus, what a bore! How many times in the past had I investigated cases in which a man had left his wife, taken up with another woman, and then attempted a disappearing act? The fleeing husband always changed his name—did Arthur Wylie have to call upon the tired cliché of using his own initials, AW, when becoming Amos Wakefield? The runaway spouse also invariably disguised his appearance by bleaching his hair or dyeing it, growing a mustache or shaving one off, putting on glasses or tinted contact lenses, and taking a job totally unrelated to any job he’d previously held. In Wylie’s case, the job would be no problem—he was a jack-of-all-trades and could presumably find work anywhere. And whereas an errant husband disappeared for a variety of self-styled reasons, the common denominators remained love or money; basically, he was weary of (a) any further emotional involvements with his former mate, or (b) continuing his financial obligations to her.