“Irene seemed happy with me,” Thayer said.
“That’s not what her mother said.”
“What did her mother say?”
“If I recall the report correctly,” Kling said, “Mrs. Tomlinson referred to you as a bully. And a boss.” Kling paused. “Did you argue with your wife frequently?”
“Hardly ever.”
“Did you ever strike her?”
“What?”
“Strike her, hit her? Did you ever?”
“Never. Of course not.”
“Bert…”
“Just a second. Cotton, will you? Just a second?” He leveled his impatient gaze on Hawes, and then turned back to Thayer. “Mr. Thayer, you’re asking us to believe that there was no friction between you and your wife, while all the time she was playing footsie with…”
“I didn’t say there was no friction-”
“… another man and planning to divorce you. Now either you didn’t give a damn about her at all, or else…”
“I loved her!”
“… or else you were just plain cockeyed and didn’t see what was going on right under your nose. Now which one was it, Mr. Thayer?”
“I loved Irene, I trusted her!”
“And did she love you?” Kling snapped.
“I thought so.”
“Then why was she going to divorce you?”
“I don’t know. I’m just learning about this. I don’t even know if it’s true. How do I know it’s true?”
“Because we’re telling you it’s true. She planned to leave for Reno on the sixteenth of May. Does that date mean anything to you, Mr. Thayer?”
“No.”
“Did you know she was seeing Tommy Barlow regularly?”
“Bert…”
“Did you?”
“No.” Thayer said.
“Then where did you think she was going every week, every other week?” Kling asked.
“To see her mother.”
“Why did her mother call you a bully?”
“I don’t know. She doesn’t like me. She could have said anything about me.”
“How old are you, Mr. Thayer?”
“Thirty-three.”
“How old was your wife when she died?”
“Twenty. Well, almost twenty-one.”
“How long had you been married?”
“Almost three years.”
“She was eighteen when you married her?”
“Yes. Just eighteen.”
“And you were how old?”
“Thirty.”
“That’s a pretty big span, isn’t it, Mr. Thayer?”
“Not if two people are in love.”
“And you were in love?”
“Yes.”
“And you claim you didn’t know anything about your wife’s boyfriend, or the fact that she was planning to leave you next month?”
“That’s right. If I’d known…”
“Yes, Mr. Thayer? What would you have done if you’d known?”
“I’d have discussed it with her.”
“That’s all you’d have done?”
“I’d have tried to talk her out of it.”
“And if that failed?”
“I’d have let her go.”
“You wouldn’t have bullied her or bossed her?”
“I never bullied or… I was always very good to Irene I… I knew she was much younger than I. I cared for her deeply. I… cared for her deeply.”
“How do you feel about her now, Mr. Thayer? Now that you know all the facts?”
Thayer hesitated for a long time. “I wish she would have talked it over with me,” he said at last. He shook his head. “What she did wasn’t the way. She should have talked it over with me.”
“Are you a drinking man, Mr. Thayer?” Kling asked suddenly.
“Not… well… a few drinks every now and then. Not what you’d call a drinking man.”
“Did your wife drink?”
“Socially. A Martini now and then.”
“Scotch?”
“Sometimes.”
“There were two Scotch bottles found in the room with her. Both were empty. One had been knocked over, but the other had apparently been drained. What was the most your wife ever drank?”
“Four drinks. Maybe five. In an evening, I mean. At a party or something.”
“How’d she react to liquor?”
“Well… she generally got a little tipsy after two or three drinks.”
“What would a half-bottle of Scotch do to her?”
“Knock her unconscious, I would imagine.”
“Make her sick?”
“Maybe.”
“Did liquor ever make her sick?”
“Once or twice. She really didn’t drink that much, so it’s difficult to say.”
“The autopsy report showed your wife was not drunk, Mr. Thayer. Yet a full bottle of Scotch, or possibly more, was consumed in that apartment on the day she died. Either consumed or poured down the drain. Which do you think it was?”
“I don’t know,” Thayer said.
“You just told me your wife didn’t drink much. Does killing a bottle of Scotch sound like a thing she would have done?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head again. ‘Suicide doesn’t sound to me like a thing Irene would have done. Adultery doesn’t sound to me… divorce doesn’t sound… so how do I know what she would or wouldn’t have done? I don’t know this woman who supposedly killed herself, who had a lover, who was going to Reno. I don’}t know her! So why are you asking me about her? That’s not Irene! That’s some… some… some…”
“Some what, Mr. Thayer?”
“Some stranger,” he said softly. “Not my wife. Some stranger.” He shook his head. “Some stranger,” he repeated.
* * * *
The lobby of the Brio Building was crowded with musicians and girl vocalists and dancers and arrangers and song writers and agents who filled the air with the musical jargon of Hip. “Like, man, I told him two bills for the weekend or adios,” a din arising to meet the detectives’ ears the moment they stepped from the elevator, “The jerk went and hocked his sax. So I said, like, man, how you expect to blow if you ditched the horn? So he tells me he can’t blow anyway unless he’s got junk, so he peddled the sax to buy the junk, so now he can’t blow anyway, so like what’s the percentage?”; bright-eyed girls with bleached-blond hair and loose-hipped dancers’ stances, trombone players with long arms and short goatees, agents with piercing brown eyes behind black-rimmed bop glasses, girl singers with hair falling loose over one eye, “Like I said to him, like why should I put out for you if I don’t put out for anybody else on the band, and he said like this is different, baby. So I said how is it any different? So he put his hand under my skirt and said this is like love, baby”; a lonely pusher standing on the edges of the crowd, The Man, waiting for an afternoon appointment with a piano player who’d been an addict since the time he was fourteen; a seventeen-year-old girl with a Cleopatra haircut waiting to meet a trumpet player who had arranged for an audition with his group; the babble of sound hovering in the air, none of which Kling heard, the pretty girls, overly made up, but pretty with a fresh sparkle in their eyes and with tight light dresses stretched taut over comfortable behinds, none of whom Kling saw; the thronged lobby and the newspaper stand with the tabloids black and bold, the headlines no longer carrying the news of the death of Irene Thayer and Tommy Barlow, both of whom had been shoved off the front page by Khrushchev’s latest temper tantrum; they shouldered their way through the crowd, two businessmen who had just completed a business call, and came out into the waning light of a late April afternoon.