Where There's Smoke полностью

“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: