He nodded. “I understand that, but I want you to try, anyway. You see, Ed, I’ll be honest and say that I may be imagining things. I want somebody else’s opinion — after that somebody has lived with us at least a few days. But if you come to agree with me, or find any positive indications that I’m maybe right, then — well, I’ll do something about it. Eve — that’s my wife’s name — won’t give me a divorce or even agree to a separation with maintenance, but damn it, I can always simply leave home and live at the club — better that than get myself killed.”
“You have asked her to give you a divorce, then?”
“Yes, I–Let me begin at the beginning. Some of this is going to be embarrassing to tell, but you should know the whole score. I met Eve...”
2.
He’d met Eve eight years ago when he was thirty-five and she was twenty-five, or so she claimed. She was a strip-tease dancer who worked in night clubs under the professional name of Eve Eden — her real name had been Eve Packer. She was a statuesque blonde, beautiful. Ollie had fallen for her and started a campaign immediately, a campaign that intensified when he learned that offstage she was quiet, modest, the exact opposite of what strippers are supposed to be and which some of them really are. By the time he was finally having an affair with her, lust had ripened into respect and he’d been thinking in any case that it was about time he married and settled down.
So he married her, and that was his big mistake. She turned out to be completely, psychopathically frigid. She’d been acting, and doing a good job of acting, during the weeks before marriage, but after marriage, or at least after the honeymoon, she simply saw no reason to keep on acting. She had what she wanted — security and respectability. She hated sex, and that was that She turned Ollie down flat when he tried to get her to go to a psychoanalyst or even to a marriage consultant, who, he thought, might be able to talk her into going to an analyst. In every other way she was a perfect wife. Beautiful enough to be a showpiece that made all his friends envy him, a charming hostess, even good at handling servants and running the house. For all outsiders could know, it was a perfect marriage. But for a while it drove Ollie Bookman nuts. He offered to let her divorce him and make a generous settlement, either lump sum or alimony. But she had what she wanted, marriage and respectability, and she wasn’t going to give them up and become a divorcee, even if doing so wasn’t going to affect her scale of living in the slightest. He threatened to divorce her, and she laughed at him. He had, she pointed out, no grounds for divorce that he could prove in court, and she’d never give him any. She’d simply deny the only thing he could say about her, and make a monkey out of him.
It was an impossible situation, especially as Ollie had badly wanted to have children or at least a child, as well as a normal married life. He’d made the best of it by accepting the situation at home as irreparable and settling for staying sane by making at least occasional passes in other directions. Nothing serious, just a normal man wanting to live a normal life and succeeding to a degree.
But eventually the inevitable happened. Three years ago, he had found himself in an affair that turned out to be much more than an affair, the real love of his life — and a reciprocated love. She was a widow, Dorothy Stark, in her early thirties. Her husband had died five years before in Korea; they’d had only a honeymoon together before he’d gone overseas. Ollie wanted so badly to marry her that he offered Eve a financial settlement that would have left him relatively a pauper — this was before the onset of his heart trouble and necessary semiretirement; he looked forward to another twenty years or so of earning capacity — but she refused; never would she consent to become a divorcee, at any price. About this time, he spent a great deal of money on private detectives in the slim hope that her frigidity was toward him only, but the money was wasted. She went out quite a bit but always to bridge parties, teas or, alone or with respectable woman companions, to movies or plays.
Uncle Am interrupted. “You said you used private detectives before, Ollie. Out of curiosity, can I ask why you’re not using the same outfit again?”
“Turned out to be crooks, Am. When they and I were finally convinced we couldn’t get anything on her legitimately, they offered for a price to frame her for me.” He mentioned the name of an agency we’d heard of, and Uncle Am nodded.
Ollie went on with his story. There wasn’t much more of it. Dorothy Stark had known that he could never marry her but she also knew that he very badly wanted a child, preferably a son, and had loved him enough to offer to bear one for him. He had agreed — even if he couldn’t give the child his name, he wanted one — and two years ago she had borne him a son: Jerry, they’d named him, Jerry Stark. Ollie loved the boy to distraction.
Uncle Am asked if Eve Bookman knew of Jerry’s existence and Ollie nodded.
“But she won’t do anything about it. What could she do, except divorce me?”
“But if that’s the situation,” I asked him, “what motive would your wife have to want to kill you? And why now, if the situation has been the same for two years?”
“There’s been one change, Ed, very recently. Two years ago, I made out a new will, without telling Eve. You see, with angina pectoris, my doctor tells me it’s doubtful if I have more than a few years to live in any case. And I want at least the bulk of my estate to go to Dorothy and to my son. So— Well, I made out a will which leaves a fourth to Eve, a fourth to Dorothy and half, in trust, to Jerry. And I explained, in a preamble, why I was doing it that way — the true story of my marriage to Eve and the fart that it really wasn’t one, and why it wasn’t. And I admitted paternity of Jerry. You see, Eve could contest that will — but would she? If she fought it, the newspapers would have a field day with its contents and make a big scandal out of it — and her position, her respectability, is the most important thing in the world to Eve. Of course, it would hurt Dorothy, too — but if she won, even in part, she could always move somewhere else and change her name. Jerry, if this happens in the next few years, as it probably will, will be too young to be hurt, or even to know what’s going on. You see?”
“Yes,” I said. “But if you hate your wife, why not—”
“Why not simply disinherit her completely, leave her nothing? Because then she would fight the will, she’d have to. I’m hoping by giving her a fourth, she’ll decide she’d rather settle for that and save face than contest the will.”
“I see that,” I said. “But the situation’s been the same for two years now. And you said that something recent—”
“As recent as last night,” he interrupted. “I kept that will in a hiding place in my office — which is in my home since I retired — and last night I discovered it was missing. It was there a few days ago. Which means that, however she came to do so, Eve found it. And destroyed it So if I should die now — she thinks — before I discover the will is gone and make another, I’ll die intestate and she’ll automatically get everything. She’s got well over a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of motive for killing me before I find out the will is gone.”
Uncle Am asked, “You say ‘she thinks.’ Wouldn’t she?”