The Talmage Powell Crime Megapack

nine o’clock. He had been elected D.A. a year ago on a reform platform. He was a short, deliberate man, given to flesh and losing his hair. He smoked black cigars and lived with his slender, greying wife and six children in a rambling barn of a house. “Only place big enough to hold the brood,” he would explain. There were croquet and badminton courts in his yard. His lawn was like the hide of a mangy dog, scuffed bare of its pitiful, dried-up grass by the pounding of many childish feet. He romped with his kids until his balding head gleamed with sweat and his breath grew short, and they tumbled all over him when he went into the house to sit down. Through it all he moved as placidly as a good-natured elephant.

“Going over the Sigmon brief, Doug?” he asked that night on the phone. A radio was blaring and a kid was screaming laughter in his house.

“Just starting on it,” I said. The Sigmon case wasn’t particularly fresh or interesting. It happened a dozen times a day in different parts of the country. Loren Sigmon, a scrawny, underfed, cheap punk. His girl friend, after an argument, had tipped us that he was the boy we were looking for to clean up a filling station robbery. Maybe they made up and she, in that sudden reversal of emotion that takes hold of such women, told him that he’d better scram before the coppers came. Or perhaps she was still angry and threw it in his teeth that he was going to jail, when he showed at her place. He wouldn’t tell us about that. He wouldn’t talk about anything. But we had him. I’d gone to her place not quite in time to keep him from shooting her to death.

Lew tried to tell me something about the Sigmon case over the radio and the noise of his children.

Then he said, “It isn’t important. Put it aside and bring Vicky on over. We’ll have coffee after canasta.”

“Sorry. Vicky’s out to win us a set of ashtrays or something at Thelma Grigsby’s tonight.”

We hung up, and I rocked back in the desk chair, smoking and thinking. You live along for years, and then somehow you start doing that. Thinking. Questioning. What have I done with the thirty three years of my life?

College, an investigator’s job with an insurance outfit. The war. And you remember the eruption of emotion that swept the country, the release from boredom, from the everyday treadmill that seems to have captured you. You return and meet Vicky and marry her. Then you set to work to build a future.

Yet one night, without warning, without reason, you find yourself unable to work, sitting and thinking…

I threw the pencil I’d been toying with on the desk. Dammit, I knew what was wrong with me. I was lonely. I wanted the sound of Vicky’s voice. I wished she were here to go with me to Lew Whitfield’s house. I wanted the noise of his kids, and Vicky’s eyes lighting as she looked at a dress Lew’s wife had made.

“Marge, however do you do it!” Yes, I could hear every inflection of her voice in my imagination.

Or perhaps she’d put her head next to the oldest Whitfield child, Sharon, over Sharon’s high school homework.

And then later we’d leave the Whitfields and drive across town, the soft Florida night a caress in our faces. We might stop someplace and dance a few minutes. Then home—and the warm darkness.

I was still very much in love with Vicky. That night I hoped we would have many, many years together.

* * * *

At ten o’clock the phone rang a second time. I was deep in some notes Lew had made on a joint at the edge of town which was taking, we thought, illegal bets. Minor, but important. You go after those things and splash them big to keep the public convinced of your worth as a public servant. You like to keep the voters saying, “No organized crime in our community.” In our case it was true, as true as in any place in the nation. This was saying a lot, considering that we were in a Florida resort town on the Gulf coast while right across the state from us on the Atlantic side lay a city which had attracted the Kefauver committee itself.

On the second skirl, I picked up the phone. “Doug? Is Vicky busy at the moment?”

I caught my breath. My hand went a little chill on the phone. The voice was that of Thelma Grigsby. Her bridge parties never broke up as early as ten o’clock.

“She isn’t here,” I said. I hesitated. “Didn’t she stop by your place?”

“Why, no. Was she planning to?”

“No,” I said, surprised at how fast the word jumped out of me. “I just thought she might. I’ll tell her you phoned when she gets in.”

“Doug—is anything wrong?”

“Of course not. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, just a silly feeling the tone of your voice gave me.” She laughed. “Old worry bird, that’s me. We’ll be looking at you, Doug.”

“Sure,” I said.

I replaced the phone and sat there looking at it for a moment. It had never occurred to me to mistrust Vicky. She came and went pretty much as she pleased. But tonight my tired mind began asking questions. Was there something behind her absences during the past few weeks? Was this, tonight, a simple matter of her having changed her mind about attending the bridge party? If so, why hadn’t she returned home? There were several places in Santa Maria, movies, the homes of friends, where she might have gone alone, of course. But she hated to go anywhere for a good time alone.

I found it hard to break the chain of thought, once it had started. She had taken an interest in water skiing recently, which occupied most of her afternoons. She was rehearsing a play with a little theater group, and that took several