Peril

STARK

Mortimer stood at the door, the same oddly morose look on his face that Stark had noticed at their last meeting. “I hope it’s enough,” he said as he drew the envelope from his jacket pocket.

Stark looked at Mortimer pointedly, took in the drawn, desolate face, the sense of something frayed beyond mending. If something were wrong with the deal, he thought, and Mortimer knew it was wrong, then what desperation would have compelled him to go through with it? He thought of the years they’d worked together and decided, just this once, to offer an out.

“Do I need to know anything else, Mortimer?” he asked. “Anything else before I go to work on this?”

“You mean about the-”

“About anything,” Stark interrupted.

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

Mortimer looked unnerved by the question but said only, “Yeah.”

All right, Stark thought, what’s done is done. He took the envelope from his hand. “I’ll get back to you.”

With that, Stark expected Mortimer to retreat down the corridor, but he remained in place, staring at the envelope.

“What’s the matter?” Stark asked.

“I thought I’d wait.”

“For what?”

“For you to see if you got enough to do the job.”

“What’s the hurry?”

“No hurry,” Mortimer said quickly, nervously, like a guy covering his tracks. “It’s just that my friend, he’s anxious to get moving on this thing, so if you can’t do it, he needs to know.”

“I can’t read it now,” Stark told him. “I have an appointment.”

“Okay,” Mortimer said weakly. He stepped away from the door. “So, you’ll let me know when…”

“I’ll be back here at midnight,” Stark said. “You can call me then.”

“How about if I just come by,” Mortimer asked.

“You’re not going home now?”

“Dottie’s on the warpath. I’m giving her a little time to cool.”

Stark looked at Mortimer doubtfully. “Why is she on the warpath, Mortimer?”

Mortimer looked like a guy caught with his hand in the till. “This other broad,” he sputtered. “She thinks I got this other broad.”

Of all the answers Mortimer could have given, Stark thought, this was the most ludicrous, and because of that, he knew that it had been yanked from a mind unaccustomed to deceit.

“I see,” Stark said coolly.

“She’s real hot about it,” Mortimer added with a sideward glance.

“No doubt,” Stark said, though he knew that this, too, was ridiculous, since everything Mortimer had ever said about his wife suggested that she was a woman who asked little and demanded nothing, a dull, moonless planet that revolved around Mortimer in an orbit that never varied in its shape or speed.

And so the question was why had Mortimer bothered to concoct such a shallow, pointless, and transparently absurd lie. The only possible answer was that he’d done so in order to conceal some deeper and more dreadful falsehood.

Stark hated both the question and the answer. He looked at the envelope Mortimer had just given him and felt sure that something was seriously wrong in this whole matter of the missing wife.

“The woman,” he said. “Did you know her?”

Mortimer looked as if he’d just been hit with an electric shock. “The one who’s missing?” he asked. “No, I…”

“But she’s your friend’s wife, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And yet you never met her?”

“I met her,” Mortimer said. “But I didn’t really know her.”

“So you’re not involved in it,” Stark said. “In her being missing.”

“Me?” Mortimer’s face froze in shock. “How could I be involved?”

“I don’t know, Mortimer,” Stark told him. “Maybe you and the woman are… close.”

“Close?” Mortimer yelped. “You mean like… close… like that?”

“Maybe she’s the woman your wife is worried about.”

“No!” Mortimer blurted out. “Nothing like that. I never really knew the woman. She don’t mean nothing to me.”

Stark let Mortimer squirm for a moment, then said, “All right. Come back around midnight.”

Mortimer looked like a schoolboy suddenly released from the clutches of a disapproving teacher. “Okay,” he said hastily, then turned away and trudged back down the stairs.

Watching him, Stark recalled how emphatically Mortimer had denied any connection to the missing woman it was his job to find. If this were true, he thought with a renewed and steadily sharper sensation of disturbance, then Mortimer was in Lockridge’s position, hired to find a man who could find Marisol for another man, in this case, Mortimer’s “friend.” But who was this friend, Stark wondered, and was he like Henderson had been, a scorned man, bitter and enraged, the missing wife-if she were his wife-now the sole object of his boiling wrath.