Torrant hid a sudden small elation. He had a feeling that Mrs. Stark didn’t feel nearly as polite as she sounded. He said in her own level tone, “What was Annabelle like?” and waited in a growing tensity, because the stranger who occupied all of his mind was about to assume a face.
“To look at, you mean? Attractive, I suppose,” said Mrs. Stark, frowning, “although men and women don’t see eye to eye about that. Phil—my husband—and I look at a Vogue model and I say stunning and he says Ugh. But I thought Annabelle was attractive. She’s a little older than I am, maybe thirty-six. Dark hair, blue eyes, I think, and a very good figure.”
She stopped, pushing the toe of her boot around in the snow as though she didn’t much care for the subject of Annabelle Blair. Torrant wondered why; she didn’t look like a woman to brood over mere dislike of a former neighbor. Mrs. Stark gave him her cool gaze again, and said, “I know that doesn’t tell you much about her, but it’s all we knew. We had the Fennisters over here a few times, and we went there for drinks now and then—my husband’s a camera fiend and he crept over Martin like moss—but Annabelle was very seldom there.”
And there it was, the thing she didn’t want to say but wanted him to know. It wasn’t dislike she had felt for Martin’s wife, but distaste. Torrant said, feeling as though he were taking the maximum weight over a fragile bridge, “Mrs. Stark, I have my reasons for asking this, and there isn’t another soul in the world to hear whether you answer or not. Would you say there had been another man involved?”
“I thought so,” said Mrs. Stark. She sounded at once troubled and relieved. Torrant came out of an instant of black bitterness to hear her adding, “. . . benefit dance committees and things like that, she said, but—well, charity work may give you an inner glow and all that, but not that particular kind of glow. And then over here one night, when we’d all had a few drinks and Martin and Phil were downstairs in the darkroom, she said something that made me almost sure of it. She mentioned a man’s name . . . Simon?” asked Mrs. Stark tentatively, and shook her head. “Something like that.”
Thirty thousand dollars, another man, a bloodless weapon . . . one of the children had gotten snow inside his mittens and was shrieking with rage. Mrs. Stark went nimbly across the snow and undid the damage. She came back to say suddenly, “What a shame I threw Annabelle’s letter away—I’m almost sure there was a company letterhead.”
“She wrote to you?” asked Torrant in surprise. It didn’t seem in keeping until Mrs. Stark said, “Yes. Martin had a terrific amount of equipment, as you know, and she didn’t know how to dispose of it and Phil took care of it for her. She wrote to acknowledge the check, but I’m afraid I didn’t look at the address or even the postmark.”
She had kept her own curiosity nobly in check; Torrant thanked her for that as much as anything, and walked back along Bolton Road for the last time. He passed the gray white-shuttered house again; without the warmth at its windows it looked haughty and withdrawn, and he wondered wearily how he could ever have thought that Martin was there.
When he reached his hotel again it was close to six o’clock, which meant close to three in San Francisco. Time to call Alan and, if the magazine job was still open, accept it with thanks, for the reasons he had repeated to himself during the walk home.
For one thing, tracing a woman as quietly evasive as Annabelle Blair would be a long and possibly a hopeless project without the help of the proper authorities—and if she knew that Martin’s closest friend was searching for her she would be forewarned and forearmed.
For another, Martin was dead, had been dead a year, and no amount of rebellion at the manner of his death could alter that. Whether a man were caught in an airplane crash or the strong web of someone else’s brain, it came to the same final thing in the end. You could sort through the wreckage, but what would you get out of it besides a fresher pain?
Because the law couldn’t touch Annabelle Blair Fennister, widow. She had destroyed Martin, Torrant knew, as surely as though she had used a gun or a knife or an axe—but it was Martin who had made up his own tortured mind.
Call Alan, then . . . but Torrant put it off. He said to himself, After a shower, and then, sternly, After a drink. He was finishing the drink while he dressed when the telephone rang.
Mrs. Stark hadn’t thrown away Annabelle s letter after all. Her husband, handling the sale of Martin’s cameras and equipment for a woman he didn’t like, had kept it punctiliously in case any question about payment should ever arise.
And there was a letterhead: Gerald Mallow, Inc., Winter Building, St. Louis.
Torrant wrote it down and stood staring at it for a long moment before he lifted the telephone again and asked for long distance. When Alan’s voice came on at last, he was not surprised to hear himself making plausible excuses for declining the magazine offer; he knew now that his mind had been made up all along.
The law couldn’t touch Annabelle Blair. In one sense, perhaps nobody could.
But the weapon she had used was two-edged, and he could try.
