“What is it, darling?” she asked.
“Kindly kick me in the head. Right here.” He got up and paced back and forth.
Jen sighed at last and said, “Okay, okay. Round up the kids. I had a hunch this couldn’t last.”
Once he got back to town he pried Oscar Wardle out of his comfortable back yard, and made fat Oscar meet him down at Oscar’s small third-floor office in police headquarters.
Tate was waiting when Oscar appeared, puffing from the two flights of stairs. Oscar said, “Young man, you are a dedicated policeman, and you annoy hell out of me.”
“Dedicated only to laying these meat hooks on one citizen. Then I go back to being as lazy as you are, Oscar.”
Oscar unlocked the door and they went in. Oscar, without stirring out of the small office, had located missing persons all over the world. His filing system was his own, and a failure was a personal affront.
He listened to what Tate wanted, and then dug out his files. “Let’s see now. Some cooky who took off on or about the tenth, eh. Let’s see. No, this guy’s wife says he left in 1987, and she’s just beginning to wonder about him. Here’s a missing woman. This might be it right here. James Harrison Vayse. Age 33. Occupation, Industrial Engineer. His wife, Ethel Ann Vayse, who resides at number nineteen South Ridge Terrace, reported him on the eleventh as having done gone, vehicle and all. Seems he never came home on the night of the ninth which was unusual, but not too unusual. Still gone on the night of the tenth. She came in on the afternoon of the eleventh. Nice woman. Concerned, but not all steamed up like some of them get.”
“Got his business address?”
“Delaney and Vayse. The Dover Building. Let’s see, that makes him gone for eighteen days.”
“What have you done?”
“It smelled to me like a wife-trouble thing. Found out the car is in her name, a ’52 Buick Roadmaster, so I put the plates through as hot.”
Tate thanked him for coming down. It was six o’clock when he parked his small car in front of 19 South Ridge Terrace. It was a very different world out there, eight miles from the center of town. Not at all like the short blocks, thick with heat, not like the park. This was a world of curving asphalt roads. The house was of stone and wide vertical boards stained silver grey.
He pushed the bell and waited. A tall woman came around the side of the house and looked at him, and looked at his car and said, “Yes?” She was a woman with a strong-looking body and a look of plainness in her face. She wore tailored blue shorts and a man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her legs were long and tanned and a bit on the heavy side.
“I’m from the police, m’am. Sergeant Tate. Are you Mrs. Vayse?”
She was quite still for a moment. “You’ve found him.” It was more statement than question.
“No. But there’s a few more questions we’d like to ask. If you don’t mind.”
“Of course. We’re out on the terrace. Won’t you come around this way?”
He followed her. She handled herself gracefully and well, and he saw that though her face looked rather plain, it also was a face with good bones, and a pleasant, quiet dignity. A small dark pretty woman sat in a terrace chair with her knees pulled up, a drink on the wide arm of the chair.
“Betty, this is Sergeant Tate. Mrs. Homer, Sergeant.”
“Have they found Jim?”
“Not yet, Betty,” Mrs. Vayse said.
Betty stood up and finished her drink quickly. “I think it’s perfectly stinking, dear. I’ll see you in the morning. Nice to meet you, Sergeant Tate.”
She went off across the wide lawn, slipped through a gap in the high cedar hedge.
“Please sit down, Sergeant. Can I get you a drink?”
“Not right now, thanks. I... well, I don’t know exactly how to go about this. We picked up the factual information, of course. Now I’d like to go a bit further into the... psychological and emotional factors.”
Mrs. Vayse looked at him steadily. “Of course. What do you want to know?”
“A decision to leave... sometimes they think about it a long time. Sometimes it is something they decided right off.”
She smiled for the first time. “I have to do some soul-baring?”
“I’m sorry. It might help.”
She lit a cigarette with a bit too much care. “It hasn’t been a good marriage for some time, Sergeant. Eight years of it, and the last three have been... disappointing. Having no children might be a factor, of course. Having him leave like that is... almost ludicrous. You see, I was going to do the same thing, though not as furtively. I had very nearly reached a decision to ask for a divorce.”
“In what way weren’t you getting along?”
“That’s what is hard to explain. I married a man with a will, and opinions, and... this sounds crazy, a man who was a human being. About three years ago he began to change. Into sort of a clockwork thing. I’m a strong person. Too strong, maybe. I want my own way. If I get it none of the time, I’m unhappy. If I get it all the time, I’m more unhappy. There stopped being any resistance in Jimmy. As though he had gone away somewhere, and the thing that was left didn’t care to make an issue of anything. A sort of mechanical man.”
“Did you try to ask him about the change?”
“Of course. It was like he didn’t have any idea what I was talking about.”
“Did he go away at times and leave you, with no explanation?”
“Not for quite a long time. Well, we had a lot of friends. But they dropped away. At parties, he’d just sit, or stand, and say nothing, and wear a far-off half smile. When we were home alone here, he’d just sit in a chair. He didn’t read any more, and he gave up his hobbies entirely. I’d ask him what he was thinking about and he’d get a confused look and tell me he wasn’t thinking about anything. I did manage to get him to a doctor about six months ago. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong. But after that he began going out alone without any explanation. I’d be in some other part of the house and hear him drive out. There were never any explanations, before or after.”
“This may sound pretty impertinent, Mrs. Vayse. But it does have a bearing. How about the physical side of your marriage?”
She lit another cigarette and he saw her fingers tremble. “It was never... what I’d hoped marriage would be. I think... either of us would have been better suited to some other person. I think if Jimmy had married some silly little flutter-head, a helpless and dependent sort of person, it would have been better for him. But I seem to have had the effect of... undermining his masculinity. And... for the last six months the physical angle was... nil.”
Tate sat silently for several moments. He asked, a bit harshly, “Do you love the guy?”
“Isn’t that a simplification? There’s a lot of kinds of love, isn’t there? In the way I think you mean, no. I want to divorce him. I’m thirty-two. I’ve got to get out and give myself a chance to have a better kind of love, and kids. But I’d always be interested in Jimmy, and what happens to him, and try to help him in any way I can.”
“I appreciate the way you’ve been frank with me, Mrs. Vayse.”
“I’ve had to take you on trust, Sergeant. Now I think you better tell me what’s on your mind.”
“I think maybe I can. I wasn’t going to. But you do seem to be a strong person.”
“Too strong, perhaps, Sergeant.”
“I think your husband is the man we want for rape and murder.”
He watched her and he could sense how, for her, the whole world seemed to falter and stop, and hang dead and still in the warmness of the fading day. He saw the weak smile of incredulity. He knew that behind that smile the quick strong intelligence was adding all the bits and pieces. And inevitably, the smile faded. The bones of her face looked more prominent then, as though the flesh had sagged. Her lips parted, and she leaned slowly forward, the palms of her hands covering her eyes, her forehead almost touching the round strong brown knees.