Murder and the Wanton Bride

11

The taxi took him to a shabby residential section of the city, and the house number he sought was attached to a small, one-story house in the middle of a row of similar houses with small, tired-looking lawns in front.

A little girl of five or six was playing alone in the yard with a dirty rag doll as Shayne went up the walk, and she turned her head to watch him with grave interest as he knocked on the front door.

The door opened a cautious foot or so and a woman peered out at Shayne. She was thin and flat-breasted, with slatternly hair and a shrewish face. Her thin voice had a twangy note that matched her features:

“Whatever it is you’re selling, Mister, we don’t want none.”

Before she could close the door, Shayne said hastily, “I’m not selling anything, Ma’m. Just looking for information and I’m willing to pay for it.”

“That’s a new one,” she said grudgingly. “What kinda information?”

“About Richard Watson. Are you Mrs. Watson?”

“That I’m not. Who’s Richard Watson?”

“He used to live at this address. Three or four years ago.”

“Then I wouldn’t know, Mister. We just rented here two months ago.” She closed the door firmly and Shayne turned away, glancing at the houses on either side to see which looked the most promising.

The house on his left had a small front porch with two rockers on it, and he could see the bulky figure of a woman in one of the rockers. He strode directly across the lawn, saw that she was watching him with undisguised interest as he came up the front steps. She was middle-aged and comfortably plump. She wore a shapeless house-dress that was faded from many washings, and had gray hair drawn back tightly from smooth cheeks.

Shayne removed his hat and smiled his nicest smile and said, “Good evening. I wonder if you could help me with a little information about one of your neighbors.”

“If it’s the Moss’ next door, I can only tell you, young man, that they keep to their side of the yard and we keep to ours. Not a speck neighborly, and if that’s the way they want it, mercy knows that’s the way they can have it.” Her voice was strong with a soft, cultivated southern accent, and there was a pleasant twinkle in the depths of her eyes. “Won’t you sit a spell?” She waved toward the other rocking chair and Shayne moved it a little closer, telling her: “It’s not the Moss’. The Watsons who lived in that house in nineteen fifty-four. Were you here then?”

“We’ve been here twenty years. Belle and Dick Watson, eh?” She sat up a little straighter with a look of keen anticipation on her face. “We can tell you plenty about them. Not like these new people, they weren’t. Especially Dick. He was real nice and friendly. So was his wife when they first rented the house with her just a bride. We visited back and forth a lot and it was real homey having them for next-door neighbors. Particularly after living next to the Wolfsons that had the house before them. I remember telling Pa right after they moved in how real pleased I was.” She turned her head and raised her voice to call through the screen door. “You remember my saying that first thing after the Watsons moved in, Pa? And I recollect you told me then not to be too sure because there was something about Belle that bothered you from the beginning, though you wouldn’t tell me what. Not right then, you wouldn’t. But later on when she showed her true colors you claimed you saw through her all the time. Come on out, Pa. Here’s a stranger asking about the Watsons.”

“Another one, Mother?” The voice was pleasant and clear, and the screen door was pushed open by a tall, wiry man in his shirtsleeves. He offered his hand politely as the redhead got up, and said, “Our name is Pease.”

“I’m Michael Shayne. A private detective from Miami.”

Mr. Pease took his hand firmly, but darted a quizzical glance at his wife as Shayne identified himself. “Maybe we’ll find out what it’s all about this time, Mother. We never did get it rightly clear what it was about Dick and Belle from the garbled-up things we heard about the other detective.”

She sniffed and said, “I never could understand why he didn’t come straight to us when we lived next door to them for years and could have told him anything he wanted to know.”

Shayne said, “You mean another detective from Miami has been around recently asking about the Watsons? What was his name? I know practically all of them in the city.”

“It was a few months ago,” said Mr. Pease, seating himself in the other rocking chair when Shayne gestured to it and lowered himself to the top step. “We guessed maybe Belle was wanting to get married again and had a detective looking for Dick to serve divorce papers on him. We never did get the other detective’s name rightly. Those he talked to in the neighborhood said he was the sneaky kind.”

“Is that why you’re here, Mr. Shayne?” Mrs. Pease asked eagerly. “I always said Belle wasn’t the kind to go very long without a man on the string, and the very worst thing Dick could have done to her was just exactly what he did. Left her high and dry, that’s what.” She chuckled amiably, wrinkling her eyelids at what was undoubtedly a most pleasant memory.

“Let’s get one thing straightened out the first thing we do,” said Shayne hastily. He produced the picture of Belle and handed it to the couple. “Is this a photograph of Belle Watson?”

They looked at it together, and both nodded their heads emphatically. “That’s Belle right enough,” said Mrs. Pease. “I recollect when she had that picture taken, Pa. It was in the summer. Just a month or so before it happened.”

“I remember, too,” Mr. Pease agreed soberly. He took a stubby pipe from his pants pocket and carefully loaded it from a leather pouch.

“Well, land sakes, Mr. Shayne, do tell us whatever you know about Dick,” said Mrs. Pease eagerly. “We’ve wondered and wondered. Such a nice man, he was. Deserving of better than Belle.”

“I hoped you’d be able to tell me,” said Shayne.

“You mean he never has shown up again and you’re still trying to trace him? You hear that, Pa? If Belle has got another man wound around her finger I bet she’s just near crazy not knowing where Dick is so she can sue for divorce. So she’s got two detectives looking for him now.” She chuckled again, folding her hands happily across her lap.

“Tell me all about them,” Shayne urged the couple. “What sort of people were they? What sort of lives did they live?”

“I guess you know Belle already if you’re working for her,” said Mrs. Pease. “Goodness knows what kind of lies she’s told you about Dick, she was that mad when he left her. But don’t you believe a word of it. If any man was ever driven away from his home it was Richard Watson. I’ve said it a hundred times and I’d say it right to her face if she was here now to hear me.”

“Now, Mother,” said Mr. Pease waving his pipe gently. “She did change a lot after it happened. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. Kind of wilted, she was. And she did buckle down and take that secretary’s course and go to work.”

“After she’d spent the last of his savings,” Mrs. Pease sniffed, “and it was perfectly clear he hadn’t any intention of coming back to support her any more. She changed all right after she lost a good, steady provider and didn’t have his weekly pay-check to waste on drinking in bars and all.”

“Dick Watson was a fine steady worker,” Pease told Shayne. “Head bookkeeper for the Barnett Lumber Mills here in Atlanta. I guess you’ve heard of the Barnett family even in Miami.”

The name did strike a faint chord in Shayne’s memory. He wrinkled his brow and asked, “Was there something in the newspapers?”

“I guess there was plenty in papers all over the country when their little boy was kidnapped. They got the boy back and caught the kidnapper right after Dick left home. Police and FBI were even around here asking questions just because Dick had worked there so many years. It made Belle mad because the papers made so much of that and didn’t print any big stories about her husband leaving her. But I remember one reporter I talked to from the Constitution and she’d been after him to print a big piece and he shook his head and said to me privately that he wasn’t going to do anything to hound the poor fellow. Any man that was married to Belle, he said to me, he didn’t blame him one mite for walking out on her.”

“Now, Mother,” said Mr. Pease reprovingly, “Mr. Shayne isn’t interested in what any reporter said to you. Tell him about the Watsons when they first moved in next door and what led up to him walking out on her. I reckon that’s the kind of thing he wants.”

Shayne lit a cigarette and hugged his knees and listened patiently to the story of the Watsons as it poured from the eager lips of the elderly couple, interrupting now and then to ask a pertinent question to get the background clear in his mind.

In essence, this was the drab story of the decline and disintegration of a marriage as Shayne extracted it from the Watsons’ next-door neighbors.

Richard and Belle Watson had moved into the neighborhood and rented the five-room house next door in 1947 or 1948, while Belle was still a gay and (according to Mr. Pease) beautiful bride. Richard Watson had been of a different temperament from Belle, and the Peases tried to be fair by agreeing that it was difficult for a woman of her volatile disposition to settle down to humdrum housewifery, and they felt it was too bad there hadn’t been a child to give her roots, so to speak. Not that Belle had really wanted a child, Mrs. Pease averred strongly, but Dick was the type to have made a wonderful father. He was a good neighbor and a good citizen, one who paid household bills promptly on the tenth of each month, drove a respectable secondhand car to and from work, and spent his evenings at home puttering around the house and lawn. He was a friendly man, well-liked by his neighbors and a confidant of most of the youngsters in the block.

But Belle Watson, Shayne gathered, was a different kettle of fish. She was inclined to consider herself above her neighbors, though, goodness knows, the Peases didn’t know why, for she was a slovenly housekeeper and a discontented wife.

Things hadn’t been too bad the first year or so of their marriage, but after that Belle took to going out a lot in the daytime while Mr. Watson was at work, and there were many rumors and much speculation as to what she did while absent from home.

Mr. and Mrs. Pease were scrupulously honest in agreeing that there had been no direct evidence that Belle had been unfaithful to her wedding vows, but they did agree that no one could deny that she often returned late in the afternoon in a taxi obviously intoxicated; and the number of empty bottles that were known to accumulate in the Watsons’ garbage each week were definite proof that she also did a lot of drinking at home, because it was well-known that Mr. Watson was a strict teetotaller.

And she was known throughout the neighborhood as a nagging wife who was discontented with her husband’s modest salary and inclined to live beyond it; and it was the consensus that the poor man had been badgered and bullied by her into doing what he finally did on the quiet Sunday evening preceding Labor Day of 1954.

Because this was the most dramatic event that had ever directly impinged on the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Pease, they remembered every moment of that entire Sunday very clearly and insisted on describing the day in minute detail though Shayne did his best to hurry the telling along as he kept glancing at his watch and departure time for his plane grew closer and closer.

Richard Watson had stayed home all that day as usual, working around the yard some and passing pleasantries with the Peases as they rocked comfortably on their front porch, and there hadn’t been any indication they could see that he was nerving himself up to his final action that evening.

Belle, on the other hand, hadn’t been in evidence all day. They knew she was at home, and could only surmise that she had been sitting in the house sullenly drinking by herself because she certainly was well along in her cups at dusk that evening when they observed Mr. Watson emerge from the kitchen door carrying a shabby brown suitcase in his hand, and she followed him out onto the back stoop, railing at him like a fishwife (though they couldn’t distinguish her words from where they were sitting in these very rockers).

But they did clearly see the husband stalk away from her and place the suitcase in the back of his shabby sedan parked in the driveway, and then back out carefully while she remained at the back door with her hair awry while she gesticulated angrily.

And he had glanced at them with a pleasant smile as he backed past on the driveway, and even lifted his hand in a sort of wry acknowledgement of their interest in the marital drama, but neither of them had the slightest idea that was the last they would ever see of Richard Watson.

But it proved to be the last anyone ever saw of Richard Watson.

He simply backed out of the driveway and drove away into the dusk, leaving a drunken wife and a rented house and a secure job behind him.

Belle never heard from him again. He and his secondhand sedan disappeared as completely as though the earth had swallowed him up, and goodness knows what had happened to him, and Belle kept saying she was sure he was dead and how much better it would be if she just knew instead of the awful suspense of not knowing, and in the beginning they sympathized with her, but later they got to thinking it was only the insurance money she was thinking about and wanted to collect ($2,500, it was... which the insurance company refused to pay without proof of death), and later they suspicioned that what bothered her most was being in the anomalous position of still being legally married without a man around to provide for her, and without being able to remarry.

So now, they were eager to know what the Miami detective knew about Richard Watson. Had he ever been found and were they right in guessing that Belle had hired him to find her missing husband so she could get a divorce?

Shayne parried their questions as best he could, evasively explaining that he hadn’t actually been retained by Belle, but that he’d heard indirectly that she had gone to another state to take a secretarial position in a bank, and it was well after five-thirty when he was finally able to break away from their questions and hurry out to the street to hail a passing cab to take him to the airport.

He made it with only minutes to spare and boarded the Tampa plane just as the stairway was about to be rolled away, and settled back in his seat for the return trip with a lot to think about.