“You know him?” I said.
“We’ve met. He’s weird. What’re you supposed to do for him?”
“Give him my opinion about what happened to Arch Mix.”
She took it well enough. There was a slight tremor in her left hand as she raised the cigarette to her lips, but I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t been looking for it.
“You’re a real son of a bitch, aren’t you?” she said.
“Probably.”
She got up and went over to the sink and ran the burning end of her cigarette under the tap and dropped it down the disposal. She switched on the disposal and let it run for a while, for much longer than was really needed. Then she turned back.
“It’s funny,” she said.
“What?”
“How much alike you and Slick are.”
“Sure.”
“When Slick called last week he wanted to know all about the kids and me. He must have talked for fifteen minutes about that. I thought he’d never shut up. He even offered to take the kids to the zoo. I told him they hated the zoo. Well, he dropped the kids and switched to me. How was I feeling? Was there anything he could do for me? Maybe we could go to dinner soon. And then — ever so casually, he even lapsed into French — he said, by the way, he was just wondering whether I had any idea of what might have happened to Arch Mix. And that was going to be your next question, too, wasn’t it, Harvey?”
“Sure,” I said again.
“Well, I’ll tell you the same thing I told Slick before I hung up on him. I don’t know what happened to Arch. We broke up six weeks ago. He vanished or disappeared or dropped out of sight four weeks ago. He’s dead by now, I guess. He must be dead.”
“It lasted quite a while, didn’t it?”
Audrey turned and started opening and closing cabinets. She finally found what she was looking for, a bottle of Scotch. She poured some into a glass, drank it down, and made a face. She seldom drank. She poured more Scotch into the glass, added water this time, and sat back down at the kitchen table across from me.
“You know how long it lasted,” she said. “A year. Then when he broke it off I came running to my big brother for what — solace? Comfort? A pat on the head? Well, I suppose I got as much from you as you’ve got to give. But Ruth made it worth the trip. She let me talk.”
“I let you talk.”
“You let me talk for fifteen minutes and then started fidgeting.”
“I made a mistake,” I said. “I didn’t know how serious it was. Mix wasn’t the first married man you’d busted up with.”
“I keep forgetting that I’m the whore of the eastern seaboard.”
“I said I made a mistake. A bad one.”
“I reckon that’s as close to an apology as you’re capable of,” she said. Sometimes my sister used reckon, sometimes guess. The reckon came from the South and the guess came from the North. Her voice was much like our mother’s which had had a French tinkle to it although, unlike our mother, Audrey had no accent except upper-income, undefinable American.
She drank a swallow of her Scotch and water and made another face. “How do people drink this stuff?”
“Practice,” I said. “It helps if you don’t start before breakfast.”
“They came to see me.”
“Who?”
“The cops.”
“How were the cops?” I said.
“Polite. Firm. Thorough. And puzzled, I reckon. Or maybe that’s just how they try to appear. I haven’t had too much experience with the police.”
“What about Mix?”
“What about him?”
“I mean how did he seem the last time you saw him?”
Audrey lit another of her long brown cigarettes. This time it seemed to taste better to her. “Noble,” she said. “He was being noble. Sad, noble and nervous.”
“You mean about going back to the kids and the little woman?”
She nodded slowly. “It’s strange how some men get after they turn forty or maybe fifty, especially if they marry early. They find something younger and perhaps prettier and they think it’s going to be their last chance so they grab it. But then they get guilty or scared or both and go back to where it was safe. Dull, perhaps, but safe.”
“You said he was nervous. Was there anything else that was worrying him?”
“If there was, he didn’t talk about it. We talked about Us and Art and Literature and Life. I tried to capitalize all those things, but I’m not sure I made it.”
“You did all right.”
“And sometimes he’d talk about Her. That’s capitalized, too.”
I nodded.
“Well, one time he said that shortly after he’d turned forty he woke up, rolled over, and realized that for fifteen years he’d been married to a stranger.”
“That’s not very noble.”
“But think of the sacrifice he made by going back to her.”
“She’s not all that bad.”
“Mother would have said coarse.”
“Mother was a snob.”
Audrey shrugged. “So am I.”
“You can afford to be.”
“It’s funny, but he was never interested in that. The money, I mean. I can tell. Jesus, how I can tell.”
“Well, rich young widows are rather popular.”
“He mentioned you a couple of times,” she said. “In passing.”
“Oh? He spoke well of me, I trust.”
“Not very.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said that you were a man with principles but no purpose and that he felt sorry for you.”
“You defended me, of course.”
“I said I wasn’t too sure about the principles.”
Chapter Five
The black plymouth sedan was still parked across the street from my sister’s house and a few doors down. It had been there when I had driven around the block three times looking for a place to park an hour before. Although it was still there, the man behind the wheel was different.
I crossed the street and moved down the sidewalk until I reached the car’s front bumper. Then I stopped, took out my tin box, and started rolling a cigarette. The man inside the car watched me. I nodded at him and smiled. He didn’t nod back. He didn’t smile either. When the cigarette was rolled I walked around to the driver’s side and smiled down at the man. He gave me a bleak look.
“Got a match, mister?” I said, all friendly and country.
“I don’t smoke.”
I patted my pockets, grinned like a fool, took out some matches, and lit the cigarette. Then I gave the Plymouth the look of a man who knows his automobiles.
“Nice car, a Plymouth,” I said. “It’s the Fury, ain’t it?”
The man nodded, but only once. He was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine with a round, plump face, light blue eyes, not much of a nose, and a mouth that was much too harsh and cruel for the rest of him. His hair was a sandy blond and long enough to lap over his shirt collar.
“Bet it’s got the big engine in it though,” I said in the knowing tone of one who can’t be easily slickered. “Probably uses a lot of gas.”
The man made himself look exasperated.
I looked around carefully and then bent down so that my forearm rested on the door sill. I grew a confidential look on my face. “You wouldn’t be a kidnapper, would you?”
“A what?”
“My sister lives in that house right over there,” I said and pointed. “In about ten minutes her kids are gonna be comin’ home from the park. Now my sister’s got a little money so I just thought that if you and your buddy, the one who was sittin’ right here about an hour ago, well, I thought that if you all were kidnappers, maybe I’d just better go call the cops.”
“Aw shit, fella,” the man said, reached into his shirt pocket, and brought out a folding case and let me look at a badge and the ID card that went with it.