Whispers (25 page)

“Maybe you'd have been better off if your father had died poor,” Tony said.

Frank's red-rimmed eyes grew watery, and for a moment he looked as if he was about to weep. But he blinked rapidly and held back the tears. In a voice laden with despair, he said, “I'm ashamed to admit it, but when I found out how much money was in the estate, I stopped caring about my old man dying. The insurance policies turned up just one week after I buried him, and the moment I found them I thought,
Wilma
. All of a sudden I was so damned happy I couldn't stand still. As far as I was concerned, my dad might as well have been dead twenty years. It makes me sick to my stomach to think how I behaved. I mean, my dad and I weren't really close, but I owed him a lot more grieving than I gave. Jesus, I was one selfish son of a bitch, Tony.”

“It's over, Frank. It's done,” Tony said. “And like I said, you were a bit crazy. You weren't exactly responsible for your actions.”

Frank put both hands over his face and sat that way for a minute, shaking but not crying. Finally, he looked up and said, “So when she saw I had almost a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, Wilma wanted to marry me. In eight months, she cleaned me out.”

“This is a community property state,” Tony said. “How could she get more than half of what you had?”

“Oh, she didn't take anything in the divorce.”

“What?”

“Not one penny.”

“Why?”

“It was all gone by then.”

“Gone?”

“Poof!”

“She spent it?”

“Stole it,” Frank said numbly.

Tony put down his cheeseburger, wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Stole it? How?”

Frank was still quite drunk, but suddenly he spoke with an eerie clarity and precision. It seemed important to him that this indictment of her, more than anything else in his story, should be clearly understood. She had left him nothing but his indignation, and now he wanted to share that with Tony. “As soon as we got back from our honeymoon, she announced she was taking over the bookkeeping. She was going to attend to all our banking business, watch over our investments, balance our checkbook.

She signed up for a course in investment planning at a business school, and she worked out a detailed budget for us. She was very adamant about it, very businesslike, and I was really pleased because she seemed so much like Barbara Ann.”

“You'd told her that Barbara Ann had done those things?”

“Yeah. Oh, Jesus, yeah. I set myself up to be picked clean. I sure did.”

Suddenly, Tony wasn't hungry any more.

Frank pushed one shaky hand through his hair. “See, there wasn't any way I could have suspected her. I mean, she was so good to me. She learned to cook my favorite things. She always wanted to hear about my day when I got home, and she listened with such interest. She didn't want a lot of clothes or jewelry or anything. We went out to dinner and to the movies now and then, but she always said it was a waste of money; she said she was just as happy staying home with me and watching TV together or just talking. She wasn't in any hurry to buy a house. She was so . . . easy-going. She gave me massages when I came home stiff and sore. And in bed . . . she was fabulous. She was perfect. Except . . . except . . . all the time she was cooking and listening and massaging and fucking my brains out, she was . . .”

“Bleeding your joint bank accounts.”

“Of every last dollar. All except ten thousand that was in a long-term certificate of deposit.”

“And then just walked out?”

Frank shuddered. “I came home one day, and there was a note from her. It said, ‘If you want to know where I am, call this number and ask for Mr. Freyborn.' Freyborn was a lawyer. She'd hired him to handle the divorce. I was stunned. I mean, there was never any indication. . . . Anyway, Freyborn refused to tell me where she was. He said it would be a simple case, easily settled because she didn't want alimony or anything else from me. She didn't want a penny, Freyborn said. She just wanted out. I was hit hard. Real hard. Jesus, I couldn't figure out what I'd done. For a while, I nearly went crazy trying to figure out where I went wrong. I thought maybe I could change, learn to be a better person, and win her back. And then . . . two days later, when I needed to write a check, I saw the account was down to three dollars. I went to the bank and then to the savings and loan company, and after that I knew why she didn't want a penny. She'd taken all the pennies already.”

“You didn't let her get away with it,” Tony said.

Frank slugged down some Scotch. He was sweating. His face was pasty and sheet-white. “At first, I was just kind of dumb and . . . I don't know . . . suicidal, I guess. I mean, I didn't try to kill myself, but I didn't care if I lived either. I was in a daze, a kind of trance.”

“But eventually you snapped out of that.”

“Part way. I'm still a little numb. But I came part of the way out of it,” Frank said. “Then I was ashamed of myself. I was ashamed of what I'd let her do to me. I was such a sap, such a dumb son of a bitch. I didn't want anyone to know, not even my attorney.”

“That's the first purely stupid thing you did,” Tony said. “I can understand the rest of it, but that—”

“Somehow, it seemed to me that if I let everyone know how Wilma conned me, then everyone would think that every word I'd ever said about Barbara Ann was wrong, too. I was afraid people would get the idea that Barbara Ann had been conning me just like Wilma, and it was important to me, more important than anything else in the world, that Barbara Ann's memory be kept clean. I know it sounds a little crazy now, but that's how I looked at it then.”

Tony didn't know what to say.

“So the divorce went through smooth as glass,” Frank said. “There weren't any long discussions about the details of the settlement. In fact, I never got to see Wilma again except for a few minutes in court, and I haven't talked to her since the morning of the day she walked out.”

“Where is she now? Do you know?”

Frank finished his Scotch. When he spoke his voice was different, soft, almost a whisper, not as if he was trying to keep the rest of the story secret from other customers in The Hole, but as if he no longer had sufficient strength to speak in a normal tone of voice. “After the divorce went through, I got curious about her. I took out a small loan against that certificate of deposit she'd left behind, and I hired a private investigator to find out where she was and what she was doing. He turned up a lot of stuff. Very interesting stuff. She got married again just nine days after our divorce was final. Some guy named Chuck Pozley down in Orange County. He owns one of those electronic game parlors in a shopping center in Costa Mesa. He's worth maybe seventy or eighty thousand bucks. The way it looks, Wilma was seriously thinking about marrying him just when I inherited all the money from my dad. So what she did, she married me, milked me dry, and then went to this Chuck Pozley with my money. They used some of her capital to open two more of those game parlors, and it looks like they'll do real well.”

“Oh, Jeez,” Tony said.

This morning he had known almost nothing at all about Frank Howard, and now he knew almost everything. More than he really wanted to know. He was a good listener; that was both his blessing and his curse. His previous partner, Michael Savatino, often told him that he was a superior detective largely because people liked and trusted him and were willing to talk to him about almost anything. And the reason they were willing to talk to him, Michael said, was because he was a good listener. And a good listener, Michael said, was a rare and wonderful thing in a world of self-interest, self-promotion, and self-love. Tony listened willingly and attentively to all sorts of people because, as a painter fascinated by hidden patterns, he was seeking the overall pattern of human existence and meaning. Even now, as he listened to Frank, he thought of a quote from Emerson that he had read a long time ago:
The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience
. All men and women and children were fascinating puzzles, great mysteries, and Tony was seldom bored by their stories.

Still speaking so softly that Tony had to lean forward to hear him, Frank said, “Pozley knew what Wilma had in mind for me. It looks like they were probably seeing each other a couple of days a week while I was at work. All the time she was playing the perfect wife, she was stealing me blind and fucking this Pozley. The more I thought about it, the madder I got, until finally I decided to tell my attorney what I should have told him in the first place.”

“But it was too late?”

“That's about what it comes down to. Oh, I could have initiated some sort of court action against her. But the fact that I hadn't accused her of theft earlier, during the divorce proceedings, would have weighed pretty heavily against me. I'd have spent most of the money I had left on lawyers' fees, and I'd probably have lost the suit anyway. So I decided to put it behind me. I figured I'd lose myself in my work, like I'd done after Barbara Ann died. But I was torn up a whole lot worse than I realized. I couldn't do my job right any more. Every woman I had to deal with . . . I don't know. I guess I just . . . just saw Wilma in all women. If I had the slightest excuse, I got downright vicious with women I had to question, and then before long I was getting too rough with
every
witness, both men and women. I started losing perspective, overlooking clues a child would spot. . . . I had a hell of a falling out with my partner, and so here I am.” His voice sank lower by the second, and he gave up the struggle for clarity; his words began to get mushy. “After Barbara Ann died, at least I had my work. At least I had somethin'. But Wilma took everythin'. She took my money and my self-respec', and she even took my ambition. I juss can't seem to care 'bout nothin' any more.” He slid out of the booth and stood up, swaying like a toy clown that had springs for ankles. “S'cuse me. Gotta go pee.” He staggered across the tavern to the men's room door, giving an exaggerated wide berth to everyone he encountered on the way.

Tony sighed and closed his eyes. He was weary, both in body and soul.

Penny stopped by the table and said, “You'd be doing him a favor if you took him home now. He's going to feel like a half-dead goat in the morning.”

“What's a half-dead goat feel like?”

“A lot worse than a healthy goat, and a whole lot worse than a dead one,” she said.

Tony paid the tab and waited for his partner. After five minutes, he picked up Frank's coat and tie and went looking for him.

The men's room was small: one stall, one urinal, one sink. It smelled strongly of pine-scented disinfectant and vaguely of urine.

Frank was standing at a graffiti-covered wall, his back to the door when Tony entered. He was pounding his open palms against the wall above his head, both hands at once, making loud slapping sounds that reverberated in the narrow high-ceilinged room. BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM! The noise wasn't audible in the barroom because of the dull roar of conversation and the music, but in here it hurt Tony's ears.

“Frank?”

BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM!

Tony went to him, put a hand on his shoulder, pulled him gently away from the wall, and turned him around.

Frank was weeping. His eyes were bloodshot and filled with tears. Big tears streamed down his face. His lips were puffy and loose; his mouth quivered with grief. But he was crying soundlessly, neither sobbing nor whimpering, his voice stuck far back in his throat.

“It's okay,” Tony said. “Everything will be all right. You don't need Wilma. You're better off without her. You've got friends. We'll help you get over this, Frank, if you'll just let us. I'll help. I care. I really do care, Frank.”

Frank closed his eyes. His mouth sagged down, and he sobbed, but still in eerie silence, making noise only when he sucked in a wheezy breath. He reached out, seeking support, and Tony put an arm around him.

“Wanna go home,” Frank said mushily. “I juss wanna go home.”

“All right. I'll take you home. Just hold on.”

With arms around each other, like old buddies from the war, they left The Bolt Hole. They walked two and a half blocks to the apartment complex where Tony lived and climbed into Tony's Jeep station wagon.

They were halfway to Frank's apartment when Frank took a deep breath and said, “Tony . . . I'm afraid.”

Tony glanced at him.

Frank was hunched down in his seat. He seemed small and weak; his clothes looked too big for him. Tears shone on his face.

“What are you afraid of?” Tony asked.

“I don't wanna be alone,” Frank said, weeping thinly, shaking from the effects of too much liquor, but shaking from something else as well, some dark fear.

“You aren't alone,” Tony said.

“I'm afraid of . . . dyin' alone.”

“You aren't alone, and you aren't dying, Frank.”

“We all get old . . . so fast. And then. . . . I want someone to be there.”

“You'll find someone.”

“I want someone to remember and care.”

“Don't worry,” Tony said lamely.

“It scares me.”

“You'll find someone.”

“Never.”

“Yes. You will.”

“Never. Never,” Frank said, closing his eyes and leaning his head against the side window.

By the time they got to Frank's apartment house, he was sleeping like a child. Tony tried to wake him. But Frank would not come fully to his senses. Stumbling, mumbling, sighing heavily, he allowed himself to be half-walked, half-carried to the door of the apartment. Tony propped him against the wall beside the front door, held him up with one hand, felt through his pockets, found the key. When they finally reached the bedroom, Frank collapsed on the mattress in a loose-limbed heap and began to snore.