Where There’s Smoke

23

The woman who answered the door was a good-looking brunette in her middle thirties. She was wearing dark slacks and a pale-green sweater, no make-up and no shoes. Through the wood, I had told her I was a police officer, and now she asked to see my shield. She glanced at it silently and then stepped back into the apartment I followed her into the living room. It was inexpensively but tastefully furnished; someone had made a small budget go a long way. We sat in chairs facing each other.

“I’m looking for Arthur Wylie,” I said.

“I’m Helene Wylie,” she said. “His wife.” Her eyes were very blue. She squinted at me across the width of the room, giving the impression that she was either nearsighted or in pain. Her hands were folded tightly in her lap. “He isn’t here,” she said. “I don’t know where he is.”

“Would he still be at work?”

“No.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just know. Why are you looking for him? Has he done something?”

“Mrs. Wylie, is your husband employed?”

“He was employed. I don’t know what he is now. He left the job in July.”

“What job was that?”

“He worked for a travel agency.”

“Where?”

“Shangri-La Travel,” she said. “On Holman and Sixty-first.”

“But you don’t know where he’s working now.”

“I have no idea.”

“Mrs. Wylie,” I said, “are you and your husband living together?”

“No,” she said. “We were separated in March.”

“Where is he living now?”

“I don’t know. His lawyer doesn’t know, either. He moved out of his old apartment in July, and we haven’t been able to locate him since.”

“What’s the last address you have for him?”

“You won’t find him there.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been there. A Puerto Rican family is living in his old apartment.”

“Why’d you go there?”

“I was worried about him. I hadn’t heard from him, and then I got a call from Leon — the owner of the agency, Leon Eisner — and he told me Arthur hadn’t shown up for work, so I... I went to his apartment. I thought he might be sick. He was living alone, you see, and I thought he might be sick. I went to find out. I love him, you see. I still love him.”

“When was this, Mrs. Wylie? When did you go to his apartment?”

“In July, just after the holiday. The Fourth fell on a Thursday, and Leon called me on Friday to say Arthur hadn’t come back to work. I went right over to the apartment.”

“And he was gone?”

“Yes. Diaz. That... that was the name of the family living there.”

“And you don’t know where he is now?”

“No. I wish I did. I’m sure if we could talk this over, we could...” She shrugged, and then suddenly turned her head away and covered her face with her hand. I waited. She stood up, walked to where her handbag was resting on top of the television set, unclasped it, and took out a handkerchief. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Mrs. Wylie, why did you and your husband separate?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

“Was there another woman involved?”

“No. No, there wasn’t. No.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Yes, I am. I asked him, you see. When he told me he... he wanted to leave, I... I naturally asked him if there was another woman, and he said, ‘No, Helene, there’s no one else, I simply want out.’” She blew her nose, and then sniffed. Her eyes were still wet. “After twenty years of marriage,” she said, “he simply wanted out.”

“Do you have any children?”

“No.”

“Where does the marriage stand now?”

“I don’t know. Arthur wants a divorce, and my lawyers keep telling me there’s no holding a man who wants to go.” She turned away again, fighting a fresh wave of tears. “Forgive me,” she said. “It’s just... if we had a little time, I’m sure Arthur and I could... could talk it over and... work it out, you see.” She turned back to me. “I tried to explain that to him on the phone, the last time I spoke to him. Just before he disappeared.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said he wanted the divorce. He said he was through negotiating. He said if I didn’t agree to a settlement soon, I’d be sorry.”

“Had you been negotiating for a settlement?”

“Yes, through our lawyers. I turned down every offer.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want a divorce. I knew the offers were fair, I know what his earning capacity is. He’s held a lot of different jobs over the years, but his income hasn’t varied that much. So I know he was making fair offers, even generous offers, I suppose. But, you see... if I agreed to a settlement, the next step would be a divorce. And... I don’t want one. I want Arthur back.”

“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.”

Arthur J. Wylie had done two things for sure:

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.

Classic. I was dealing with a classic husband on the run. As depressing as this realization was, it was followed within the next thirty seconds by an overwhelming sense of despair. It was then that I suddenly understood the entire scheme. And although I admitted it had taken at least a modicum of ingenuity to concoct, the stupidity of its execution disappointed me nonetheless. I now knew what would happen next. I didn’t know when it would happen, or where it would happen, or even how Natalie and Arthur hoped to make it convincing after such sloppy foreplay, so to speak. But it would undoubtedly happen soon, unless I got to them first and stopped the urgent timetable that had been set in motion on Sunday night. The saddest part of it all was that it didn’t even matter any more. Stop them or not, the damage had already been done; an innocent bystander named Peter Greer had already lost his life.

Despondently, I started the long drive downtown to Oberlin Crescent.