She just stared at me, all of the fight had left her. She looked trapped and beaten.
I said, “I have a theory. I can outline it if it would help start the ball rolling.”
She still didn’t say anything, simply stood looking at me as though I was what was left behind after a cyclone.
I said, “I think Arthur Whitewell didn’t want his son to marry you. He thought Philip could make a more advantageous marriage. But Philip was very much in love with you, and Whitewell is something of a psychologist. He knew that, after all, there wasn’t much he could do about it. Philip was inexperienced and callow in some ways, but very much of a man in others. His father had never fully understood him, but he did realize there was a gap he had never been able to bridge. He knew that any attempt to come between you two would bring about a permanent estrangement. And then something happened to play right into his hands. He had the opportunity he’d been looking for. He manipulated things in such a way that you simply stepped out of the picture and left Philip to recuperate as best he could.
“And then,” I said, “Philip took it so much worse than his father had anticipated that something had to be done. It wasn’t just an ordinary heartbreak. Philip is sentimental, sensitive, in his feelings and perceptions. He’s never learned that people sometimes can’t be taken at their face value. It was all too much for him.”
She was crying now, crying quietly. She didn’t try to say anything. She couldn’t have talked.
I walked over to the window, looking down on a drab back yard which was pretty well filled with a litter of old boxes. A clothesline sagged dispiritedly between two poles. Little puddles reflected sunlight. A child’s tin pail and shovel were standing on a pile of damp sand. I kept my back turned to the room so that she could have her cry out and regain her composure without feeling I was watching.
It was several minutes before she had herself sufficiently under control to speak. “Do you think that Mr. Whitewell expected you would find me?” she asked.
“I don’t know. All I know is that he employed us to find you.”
“But he stipulated with me that I must arrange my disappearance so that I could never be found. That was one of the things he insisted on.”
“Exactly.”
“Then hiring you would be just a gesture to pacify Philip?”
“That’s it.”
I could see she was clinging to a straw of hope. “But it costs real money to hire a good detective, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And you must be good — skillful?”
It was her party. If she wanted to kid herself along, it was okay with me. I said, “We think we’re good.”
“Can’t you tell me something that would give me a clue as to how Mr. Whitewell really feels now?”
“Not until after you’ve told me what happened. Then I can put things together and perhaps find an answer.”
“But you seemed to know. You knew all about Helen Framley.”
“No, just that she’d written you a letter. I had to surmise what was in it.”
“What did you think was in it?”
“I thought it was a trap.”
“Set by this Helen Framley?”
“I don’t think Helen Framley ever wrote the letter.”
“But she must have.”
“Suppose you tell me everything you know, and let me draw my own conclusions.”
She said, “I suppose you know what caused me to leave.”
“Sid Jannix?”
She nodded.
“Tell me about him first.”
She said, “I was a little fool when I was a kid. I always had a savage streak in me. I liked fighting and fighters. I never cared much for baseball games, but loved football. Sidney was in school with me. He was on the football team. Then the school took up boxing, and Sidney was the best in our school. He became something of a hero. The boxing died out because there was too much parental opposition, but Sidney was the idol of every boy in school. And I guess he became the school bully. I didn’t realize it at the time. It was our last year in high school.
“Well, I kept up with Sidney, and my family didn’t like rt. Sidney took up professional fighting, and adopted the attitude that he was something of a martyr, and I— Well, when Sidney was making enough to support me, I ran away with him and we were married.” She shrugged wearily, then added, “Of course it was a ghastly, terrible mistake.”
She paused for a minute as though trying to find some way of detouring what lay ahead, then she plunged once more into the recital.
“We lived together for just about three months. The first two or three weeks I was completely hypnotized. And then, little by little, I began seeing him as he really was. He was a bully, and he was yellow. When he could handle anyone, he was ruthless in handing out punishment. When he couldn’t, he was full of alibis. He got good enough to get almost to the top, and then, as he began to meet the better men — however, that’s getting ahead of my story. At the time I married him, he was just coming up from the preliminary fighters, and beginning to attract attention. It went terribly to his head. He was emotional, intensely jealous. He began to treat me as though I were just so much personal property. I could have stood all that if it hadn’t been for the little things — little places where the veneer scraped off, and I could see what was underneath.”
“You don’t need to go into all that,” I said. “Just tell me what happened after you left him.”
“I’d had some business training in school. I got a job. I kept trying to perfect my secretarial work, and I had the satisfaction of knowing I was succeeding. I kept working up.”
“No divorce?”
“I thought Sid had got a divorce. That was the meanest trick he played on me. I told him I wanted to be free. He said that it would be better to wait for a year and get a divorce on the ground of desertion. He didn’t want to have a lot of allegations of cruelty in the record. He said it would hurt his career.
“We started out to wait for that year to elapse. It was a big year for Sidney. He came a long way up for about seven or eight months of that year, and then he went all the way down in three months. I don’t know all that happened, but his manager came to the conclusion he was yellow. He’d been a terror in the ring with the men he could master, but — oh, I don’t know. It’s a long story, and I think he did some crooked work — sold out his manager and threw a fight or something. I don’t know enough of what happened to talk about it. I just heard rumors, but, anyway, about ten months from the date of our separation, he came to me. He was desperate then. He said that he’d never been able to get a grip on himself after I’d left. He said I’d taken the inspiration out of his life.”
“That was after ten months?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, and her voice was bitter. “All the time he was going up, he was very patronizing toward me; but when the bottom fell out, he started begging for sympathy. Well, anyway, he told me that he was the sort of man who needed some woman to be his inspiration, that he knew he could never get me to come back, that he had met another girl, that he could never feel toward her as he felt toward me, but that she was desperately in love with him, and he sort of liked her.” She laughed bitterly. “That was Sidney all over. She loved him desperately, and he sort of liked her.”
“And what did he want?” I asked.
“He wanted to go to Reno and get a divorce.”
“And suggested that you pay for it?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Why didn’t you?”
“I did,” she said. “And he told me the divorce went through.”