“I don’t like this business of a summons, Sis. Aren’t you scared?”
“Not yet. Just numb. But I’m going to be. I’m going to be terrified. Do you think Roger was a — thief?”
Marian shook her head slowly. “I hardly think so. When they get that sort of money back, I think it goes to the people it was stolen from. The tax people wouldn’t take it.” She giggled a little too harshly. “Imagine the tax return. Occupation: Burglar.”
“If Mr. Crees is right, it answers one thing, Marian. I never could understand why Roger couldn’t hold a job. He was really bright, you know. And had a good personality. I used to cry every time he was fired because it seemed like such a terrible waste.”
“Harry and I were just as wrong as you were, Sis. We thought he’d make a wonderful husband.”
“I guess I stayed in love with him right up to when I realized there were other women. That killed something, Marian. I couldn’t stand that. Then I stayed because I told myself he needed me. I’m terribly frightened, Marian.”
“I’ll have Harry get a lawyer.”
“They cost money.”
“Please stop worrying about money. Harry’s still making it. When you’re on your feet, you’ll pay it back.”
“Out of the forty dollars a week I was making before I married Roger?”
“Harry will get you a lawyer. Don’t fuss at me, Sis. This is serious, you know. If Roger was making that much money, who on earth is going to believe you didn’t know about it?”
“But he would have — shared.”
Marian shrugged her comfortably plump shoulders. “Or maybe kidded himself along, Sis, telling himself that he’d keep you in the dark until it was time to run away with the bank roll.”
Beth finally agreed to see a lawyer. That night when Harry came home, they told him the second installment of the Crees story. He was incredulous, and yet obviously nervous about it. “A lot of these Government people,” he said, “get an idea in their head and can’t admit they’re wrong. And with the kicking around the Internal Revenue people have taken lately, they aren’t exactly easy to get along with. But I guess they never were.”
Beth said, “I hate to cause more expense, Harry.”
He patted her shoulder awkwardly. “Can’t have you in a jam like this without doing something about it, Beth. I’ll have my lawyer stop around tomorrow evening. Good man. Name’s J. Kane Thompson. Lots of tax experience.”
That night Beth lay awake for hours. Her thoughts kept revolving in a slow circle from which there seemed no escape. She had always taken stern pride in making her own way. During the lean periods with Roger, borrowing money had seemed to be the ultimate humility. She tried to remember how he had acted when they had been without money. Never worried, certainly. Always childishly confident that things would come out all right. Had he been too confident?
Now she was in debt, both financially and emotionally, to her sister and to Harry. Harry made, at best, a comfortable living. She knew this drain must worry them, no matter how much they pretended it didn’t.
If Roger had made all that money, where was it?
Harry brought J. Kane Thompson home with him. Beth had hoped he would be firm, confident, optimistic. He turned out to be a portly man, short of breath, with sleepy eyes and cigar ashes on his vest. He asked questions with an air of vast indifference. When she had told him everything, he sat blinking in a tired way, a cigar pinched between thumb and middle finger.
“Mr. Thompson,” she asked, “what if Roger did make all that money, over a hundred thousand dollars a year? Since I didn’t know about it, can they do anything to me?”
“Depends. You signed the returns. Have to prove absolutely no knowledge of the extra income, plus no knowledge of where the money is. Another thing, too. Sounds like they were ready to grab your husband. He died. I don’t want to accuse anybody of being vindictive, but you’re available and he isn’t. See what I mean?”
“Yes, but to be punished for something I didn’t know anything—”
Thompson waved his cigar. “Please, Mrs. Talbott. I’m an attorney. Every one of us has seen the guilty go free, seen the innocent punished. After a while you get used to it. The law isn’t infallible. It catches most of the guilty, lets most of the innocent go free. Maybe that’s all you can expect. A good average. We’ll try to get you out of this. Being sick is handy. We can wangle postponements until we can get it before a judge we like the looks of.”
“I don’t want this hanging over me,” she said tensely.
He inspected his cigar, tapped it on the glass ashtray beside him. “If you had the money, we could dicker.”
“But I don’t have the money. I don’t know anything about any money.”
“If you did, it would be smart to tell me, Mrs. Talbott.”
“Now you sound like Mr. Crees.”
He studied her for a few moments. “Well, I’ll give you a ring tomorrow. I’ll see what I can find out.”
Thompson telephoned Beth just before noon the following day. He said, “Mrs. Talbott, I couldn’t find out much. Howard Crees is a good man. A worker and a digger. The local police have nothing on your husband.”
“What do I do now?”
“We’ve got to find out what they know. They won’t talk. So we’ll have to do some digging on our own. I’m sending you a good man. A licensed investigator. Good reputation. Very shrewd. His name is Brock Ellison. Be frank with him. I took the liberty of telling him to call on you at three this afternoon. Is that all right with you?”
“That will be fine.”
As the clock moved slowly toward three, Beth built up an image of Brock Ellison, compounded of equal parts of Dashiell Hammett and B movies. She was nervous about talking to him. Employing an investigator seemed unnecessarily melodramatic.
She watched the gray rain slant through the maples and wished she had told Mr. Thompson she didn’t want an investigator. Yet she had a great eagerness to learn what they thought Roger had done, or what he actually had done. Mostly, and this she knew to be slightly absurd, she wanted to know about that expensive car. There had to be some perfectly sane and ordinary reason.
Brock Ellison arrived promptly at three. She waited in the living room as Marian took his coat and hat, and she heard a mild, pleasant voice saying something about web-footed weather.
He came into the living room, smiling and at ease, utterly destroying her preconceived picture of him. He looked about thirty, a man with a lean, alert face and quick gray eyes. He wore quiet clothes well, and seemed rather like a young doctor or lawyer. He came toward her, smiling, and took her hand, saying, “You’re the lady in a jam? I’m Brock Ellison.”
There was something neatly compact about the way he moved; his control was almost feline, yet not distasteful. He brought into the room that air of assurance she had expected from Thompson, and had missed so keenly. There was something both amiable and mocking about him, and she felt as if she had been admitted to a small, select circle that believed the world to be a sad and comical place.
“They tell me I’m in a jam, Mr. Ellison.”
He turned toward the doorway and smiled at Marian. “Come in and help answer all the rude questions, Mrs. Palmer.”
Marian showed her pleasure at the invitation. Brock said, “If you ladies will permit, I’ll tromp around while I ask questions. I can think of more this way. The correspondence course said to start at the beginning. I’ve heard J. Kane’s version of the Crees visit. So let’s go way back. Where did you meet Roger Talbott?”
“It was years ago. We were both at Thrace Academy at the same time, but I was a freshman when he was a senior. I didn’t know him at all well. Later on, after two years of working his way through college, he was drafted. He was in the Army for six years, and when he came back I met him again. His mother had died while he was overseas. He got a job selling insurance out of the office where I was working as a secretary. Except for my sister and her husband, I was alone, too. We were married six weeks after he got the job. I helped with the down payment on the house. We lost it later on. I guess I should have gone back to work. I kept thinking that maybe if he had the responsibility for me, it might straighten him out.”