The Burning Day (2 page)

“And why would that be?” I asked, with some trepidation.

With one slender finger, she slid a business card across her desk to me.

Henry Wiggins, Accountant, the card proclaimed. Beneath the name there was an office address and telephone number.

“The gentleman came in to see you while you were out. He was initially in a bit of a rush, and said that he couldn’t stay. So he left his card with me, but then I saw you drive up so I told him to wait in your office.” Jeannette’s eyes continued to twinkle with obvious amusement.
 

When I walked into my office, I was wondering, at first, what Jeannette found so funny about this man named Henry Wiggins. When I saw him, things starting falling into place. He was a tall, good-looking man with thick blond hair slicked down and combed harshly to one side, and round glasses perched on his nose. Nothing funny there; he might have been a model or a real lady’s man, except for how he was dressed—for the late Nineteenth Century, that is. He was decked out in a brown tweed jacket over a gray sweater vest. Both were buttoned all the way, despite the humidity outside. Once he opened his mouth, the caricature was complete.
 

“I wish you good day, Mr. Longville. A pleasure to meet you.” He reached out with a bit of a flourish, and we shook hands. I indicated that he should sit, and I went around my desk and did the same. He sat, and crossed his legs and assumed an air that was seriocomic to me, although maybe to him it was one of deadly earnest. All in all, he made me think of someone out of a Charles Dickens novel.

Henry Wiggins had also read one too many books on how to increase his vocabulary, if his speech was any indication. Or maybe he’d been raised in a convent by very literate nuns who were a little out of touch with the modern world. All in all, he seemed like someone who had stepped out of a former time into my own.

“Mr. Wiggins?” I asked, wondering when I’d actually last seen a sweater vest. “How can I help you?”

“Mr. Longville, like you, I’m in business for myself. I’m a freelance accountant. I have some very high-profile clients. I am also a happily married man.”

“Go on.” Wiggins wasn’t starting out like most people did, with tears in their eyes, going on and on about their problems, right up front. Maybe he just needed to work up to it. I sensed that he liked to hear himself talk, and since it was his dime, he was getting around to his problem in his own time, so I let him run on.

He cleared his throat and said with great gravity, “If I do say so myself, I am a devoted husband. My marriage, I don’t mind telling you, is the focal point of my life. Now, I don’t mean to pontificate or engage in self-aggrandizement, but marriage dominates my life in every way, and it’s something to which I devote myself in a conscientious manner. My business, while important, is ultimately secondary, and all other concerns are, at best, tertiary. So, as you might suppose, I am rather reticent to reveal certain sensitive facts to you.”

 
“To be blunt, if you want to hire me, Mr. Wiggins, you’d best tell me what’s on your mind.” I must have frowned. Wiggins looked disconcerted.
 

“Of course—I apologize, it’s just that I don’t want to leave you with a misperception of myself or of . . . someone else . . . some idea that isn’t . . . accurate.”

“You don’t have to worry about what I think. I’ve seen everything under the sun, a half-dozen times. It’s something that goes with this business, Mr. Wiggins. Without the details I can’t work for you, however dirty they might sound to you. So, if you please, details?

“Of course, how rude of me, your time is money, the same as with me.” The spectacles came off and he wiped them with a checked hanky that lived in a pocket on the sweater vest. He replaced the hanky and the glasses and went on, as if simply exasperated by what he was being forced to relate.

“It’s my wife, you see.” With a dramatic flourish, he produced something from inside his coat. I saw that it was a thumb drive, one of those tiny computer peripherals used to store files. Wiggins waved the drive before me, like a magician waves a wand before he pulls the rabbit out of the hat.

“There are pictures of Mary on here.”

“Mary is your wife?”

“My wife, yes. I . . . I hate to say this, Mr. Longville, but I am beginning to harbor the suspicion that she might be cuckolding me.”

I frowned. Wiggins’ pretentious way of speaking was getting a bit tiresome after my long day. “You mean you think she’s cheating on you?”

Wiggins took a deep, dramatic breath and let it out. Then he continued making his way through
Webster’s Unabridged Collegiate Dictionary
. “In essence. There have been certain signs—an inordinate number of unannounced trips to see friends and relatives overnight, extra expenditures showing up in the household budget, little things that Mary would laugh off, but that she couldn’t account for in a convincing manner. Things of that sort.”

I sat with my fingers in a steeple, looking at the man. I said nothing. After a beat, he went on. “My profession, I’m afraid, is the cause of much of the trouble. You see, I am an accountant, as I have said, and that requires me to spend long hours away from home during certain periods of the year. Mary gets bored, I realize. So maybe her trips to friends are just that, but I must confess that I am beginning to suspect otherwise. All of which is very painful for me to contemplate.”

“So just what is it that you want me to do, Mr. Wiggins?”

“I need you to follow Mary, on three evenings,” he said without blinking.

“You want me to keep your wife under surveillance for three days?”

Wiggins looked at me as I were a truant seven-year-old who wasn’t applying himself to his math homework. “No, not on three consecutive days, Mr. Longville. Let me be clear. Rather, I would like you to keep tabs on Mary on three specific days. You see, after I became curious about some of the time that she was spending away from home, Mary and I had a little row. Nothing major; we have always had good communication in our marriage, so afterward we had a long talk.” He looked at his fingernails, frowned, and went on.
 

“Mary agreed to let me know ahead of time when she was going to be away when I came home. I’m no fool. I knew that if she was seeing someone else, she would have to come up with a plausible explanation for any subsequent visits. Now, she has given me three dates when she is supposedly going out of town. I want you to follow her on those three days, and report to me where she goes . . . and who she sees, if anyone.”

“Well, I understand. Mr. Wiggins. I have to ask . . . do you want pictures of these meetings?”

The little man seemed very taken aback. “Pictures? Nothing untoward—I mean, nothing of too graphic a nature is required. I would like photos of her talking with . . . anyone of interest.”

“By ‘nothing graphic,’ Mr. Wiggins, I take it that you aren’t looking to begin divorce proceedings? Because usually that’s what’s called for in those instances. People want pictures or movies of their spouses engaged in consensual sex with other people. It’s an unpleasant part of this business. It’s why some people call private eyes ‘peepers.’ Most times, a guy in your position wants pictures of his wife and ‘persons of interest’ caught in the act, on film or digital camera.”

Wiggins looked thunderstruck at the suggestion. “No, heavens, no. I’m not bitter toward Mary. They’ll be no kicking open doors and snapping pictures. I want to work this out with her, Mr. Longville. Anyone can go astray, and I know I’ve left my wife alone and lonely far too many times. She’s my soul mate, Mr. Longville; I love her very much. But I can’t confront her, or facilitate any sort of interaction about something like this without some sort of proof, since she is being evasive.”

Wiggins, it seemed, had a far more forgiving nature than other spouses who had come to my office with similar suspicions. “That’s clear enough. Okay, Mr. Wiggins, I’ll need those dates from you. I’ll also need your address, and so on.”

“Of course. But I need to make one thing absolutely clear. All of our dealings need to be here, in your office. Don’t come to my home. I don’t want anyone to get the least intuition regarding what’s going on. Every housewife in the neighborhood knows Mary, and the first thing they’d do is tell her. So I just can’t risk you coming by. Is that acceptable?”

“No visits at your home. Got it. Fine with me.”
 

“Excellent, then. You’ll also need Mary’s work address. I’d like you to begin your surveillance of her from there.”

“Work? What kind of work does she do?”

“Well, it’s not a paid position. She volunteers at a local hospice. She says it gives her purpose. I suspect that means it gets her out of the house.”

“I understand. And the three days in question?”
 

“The dates are, quite simply, the next three Friday evenings. It’s tax season and I will be in the office on each of those nights until late. There’s no way around that. It’s simply part of my job. Mary has told me that since I won’t be available, she’s going to visit friends on those nights, people from college who she hasn’t seen in several years. I merely want you to follow her from our home.” Wiggins pushed an index card toward me with an address and two telephone numbers written on it in calm, square handwriting, “Keep a log of where she goes, and do remember to take photos of her and any individuals who seem . . . pertinent.”

I was already nodding, glad that Wiggins had come round to his purpose at last. “All right, Mr. Wiggins, I can do that. Not a problem.”

“Of course, any additional operating money that you will need, I will provide.”

“This seems pretty straight forward. I can’t imagine running into any added expenses, though if I do I’ll be in touch.” I turned to my side desk and slid the memory stick into a media slot on my computer. I opened up the folder and double-clicked one of the picture icons. After a second, a gorgeous smiling face filled the screen and radiated out at me. Mary Wiggins was a beauty, with high cheek bones, smooth ivory white skin and thick red hair with a hint of gold in it. Her smile was flawless. I resisted the urge to look backwards and forwards between the face on the screen and the odd man in my office.

“I married up, I know.” Wiggins said, as if reading my thoughts. “Please, just do what you can.”

Chapter 2

After Wiggins left me, I went home. It had been a long day, and Wiggins and his strange drama had come at the very end of it. There was a light spring rain on my way to my quiet little house. I let myself in and shucked off my jacket and shoes and stretched out on the sofa. I didn’t turn on the TV or the lights, I just sat there in the dim natural fading glow of the day and thought about the mystery of Mary Wiggins.
 

Was Henry being paranoid or was his wife really wandering? I decided to put it from my mind for the moment and take a stab at it in the morning. I picked up the remote and turned on the cable. I might as well catch up with what’s going on in the rest of the world, I told myself.
 

There was nothing really new. There were the usual riots and bombings and mayhem rocking the four corners of the world, with the places and the players changing, but the basic storyline staying the same. It seemed the only thing about humankind that never changed was its gnawing hunger for self-destruction. After a few minutes, I tired of the network news and its litany of hopelessness, and started surfing the channels, looking for a quality movie.

On one channel, Tommy Lee Jones was some sort of Law Enforcement officer, and was talking to the ghost of a confederate general in a Louisiana swamp. I watched for a few minutes, but decided that I had missed too much of the movie to make sense of what was going on. On another channel, there was Tommy Lee Jones again, dressed as some other kind of Law Enforcement officer, and now he was talking with a woman in a cafe. He was telling her a story of some sort. Once again, I decided that I had joined the movie too late to enjoy it, though it looked pretty good.
 

I figured that it must be Tommy Lee Jones’ birthday, since he was being featured on so many channels. I thought I might get lucky and catch one of the
Men in Black
movies on another station, but it didn’t happen. I did catch
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
just in time to watch the three-way gunfight at the end. After Clint Eastwood rode away into the sun, I decided to go check the contents of the fridge.

 
I opened the refrigerator door and stood there staring at the leftovers in their plastic containers. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Henry Wiggins and his beautiful wife. Something about his story bugged me, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I’d been going over it subconsciously since I got home. It wasn’t that what he wanted me to do wasn’t ethical or plausible . . . after all, I had done the same for other people plenty of times before. But something in his story didn’t fit. A wheel was spinning in the back of my mind, stuck on just what that thing was.
 

I walked back into the living room and picked up the telephone book and flipped through to the “Accountants” section. I ran my finger down the column of advertisements. There it was. Henry Wiggins, Certified Public Accountant, serving Homewood, Mountainbrook, and Vestavia for fifteen years.

I wondered if I might be getting a little paranoid, myself. Wiggins was a strange bird, all right, but I’d had limited exposure to accountants, anyway. Maybe they were all weird like him, with archaic clothing and a stilted way of talking.