Darrigan realized that he was treading on most dangerous ground. “Has it been a good marriage?”
“Is that a question you’re supposed to ask?”
“It sounds impertinent. I know that. But in a disappearance of this sort I must consider suicide. Unhappiness can come from ill health, money difficulties, or emotional difficulties. I should try to rule them out.”
“I’ll take one of those cigarettes now, Mr. Darrigan,” she said. “I can use it.”
He lit it for her, went back to the desk chair. She frowned, exhaled a cloud of smoke.
“It has not been a completely happy marriage, Mr. Darrigan.”
“Can you explain that?”
“I’d rather not.” He pursed his lips, let the silence grow. At last she said, “I suppose I can consider an insurance man to be as ethical as a doctor or a lawyer?”
“Of course.”
“For several months it was a marriage in name only. I was content to have it go on being that way. But he is a vigorous man, and after a while I became aware that his attitude had changed and he had begun to... want me.” She flushed.
“But you had no feeling for him in that way,” he said, helping her.
“None. And we’d made no actual agreement, in so many words. But living here with him, I had no ethical basis for refusing him. After that, our marriage became different. He sensed, of course, that I was merely submitting. He began to... court me, I suppose you’d call it. Flowers and little things like that. He took off weight and began to dress much more youthfully. He tried to make himself younger, in his speech and in his habits. It was sort of pathetic, the way he tried.”
“Would you relate that to... his disappearance?”
For a moment her face was twisted in the agony of self-reproach. “I don’t know.”
“I appreciate your frankness. I’ll respect it, Mrs. Davisson. How did he act Thursday?”
“The same as always. We had a late breakfast. He had just sold some lots in the Lido section at Sarasota, and he was thinking of putting the money into a Gulf-front tract at Redington Beach. He asked me to go down there with him, but I had an eleven o’clock appointment with the hairdresser. His car was in the garage, so he took my convertible. He said he’d have lunch down that way and be back in the late afternoon. We were going to have some people in for cocktails. Well, the cocktail guests came and Temple didn’t show up. I didn’t worry. I thought he was delayed. We all went out to dinner and I left a note telling him that he could catch up with us at the Belmonte, on Clearwater Beach.
“After dinner the Deens brought me home. They live down on the next street. I began to get really worried at ten o’clock. I thought of heart attacks and all sorts of things like that. Of accidents and so on. I phoned Morton Plant Hospital and asked if they knew anything. I phoned the police here and at Redington and at St. Petersburg. I fell asleep in a chair at about four o’clock and woke up at seven. That was when I officially reported him missing.
“They found my car parked outside a hotel apartment on Redington Beach, called Aqua Azul. They checked and found out he’d gone into the Aqua Azul cocktail lounge at eight-thirty, alone. He had one dry martini and phoned here, but of course I had left by that time and the house was empty. He had another drink and then left. But apparently he didn’t get in the car and drive away. That’s what I don’t understand. And I keep thinking that the Aqua Azul is right on the Gulf.”
“Have his children come down?”
“Temple, Junior, wired that he is coming. He’s a lieutenant colonel of ordnance stationed at the Pentagon.”
“How old is he?”
“Thirty-six, and Alicia is thirty-three. Temple, Junior, is married, but Alicia isn’t. She’s with a Boston advertising agency, and when I tried to phone her I found out she’s on vacation, taking a motor trip in Canada. She may not even know about it.”
“When is the son arriving?”
“Late today, the wire said.”
“Were they at the wedding?”
“No. But I know them, of course. I met them before Mrs. Davisson died, many times. And only once since my marriage. There was quite a scene then. They think I’m some sort of dirty little opportunist. When they were down while Mrs. Davisson was alive, they had me firmly established in the servant category. I suppose they were right, but one never thinks of oneself as a servant. I’m afraid Colonel Davisson is going to be difficult.”
“Do you think your husband might have had business worries?”
“None. He told me a few months ago, quite proudly, that when he liquidated the knitting-company stock he received five hundred thousand dollars. In 1973 he started to buy land in this area. He said that the land he now owns could be sold off for an estimated million and a half dollars.”
“Did he maintain an office?”
“This is his office. Mr. Darrigan, you used the past tense then. I find it disturbing.”
“I’m sorry. It wasn’t intentional.” Yet it had been. He had wanted to see how easily she would slip into the past tense, showing that in her mind she considered him dead.
“Do you know the terms of his current will?”
“He discussed it with me a year ago. It sets up trust funds, one for me and one for each of the children. He insisted that it be set up so that we share equally. And yet, if I get all that insurance, it isn’t going to seem very equal, is it? I’m sorry for snapping at you about using the past tense, Mr. Darrigan. I think he’s dead.”
“Why?”
“I know that amnesia is a very rare thing, genuine amnesia. And Temple had a very sound, stable mind. As I said before, he is kind. He wouldn’t go away and leave me to this kind of worry.”
“The newspaper picture was poor. Do you have a better one?”
“Quite a good one taken in July. Don’t get up. I can get it. It’s right in this desk drawer.”
She sat lithely on her heels and opened the bottom desk drawer. Her perfume had a pleasant tang. Where her hair was parted he could see the ivory cleanness of her scalp. An attractive woman, with a quality of personal warmth held in reserve, Darrigan decided that the sergeant had been a most fortunate man. And he wondered if Davisson was perceptive enough to measure the true extent of his failure. He remembered an old story of a man held captive at the bottom of a dark, smooth-sided well. Whenever the light was turned on, for a brief interval, he could see that the circular wall was of glass, with exotic fruits banked behind it.
“This one,” she said, taking out a 35-millimeter color transparency mounted in paperboard. She slipped it into a green plastic viewer and handed it to him. “You better take it over to the window. Natural light is best.”
Darrigan held the viewer up to his eye. A heavy bald man, tanned like a Tahitian, stood smiling into the camera. He stood on a beach in the sunlight, and he wore bathing trunks with a pattern of blue fish on a white background. There was a doggedness about his heavy jaw, a glint of shrewdness in his eyes. His position was faintly strained and Darrigan judged he was holding his belly in, arching his wide chest for the camera. He looked to be no fool.
“May I take this along?” Darrigan asked, turning to her.
“Not for keeps.” The childish expression was touching.
“Not for keeps,” he said, smiling, meaning his smile for the first time. “Thank you for your courtesy, Mrs. Davisson. I’ll be in touch with you. If you want me for any reason, I’m registered at a place called Bon Villa on the beach. The owner will take a message for me.”