A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

  “For several months it was a marriage in name only. I was content to have it go on being that way. But he is a vigorous man, and after a while I became aware that his attitude had changed and he had begun to . . . want me.” She flushed.

  “But you had no feeling for him in that way,” he said, helping her.

  “None. And we’d made no actual agreement, in so many words. But living here with him, I had no ethical basis for refusing him. After that, our marriage became different. He sensed, of course, that I was merely submitting. He began to . . . court me, I suppose you’d call it. Flowers and little things like that. He took off weight and began to dress much more youthfully. He tried to make himself younger, in his speech and in his habits. It was sort of pathetic, the way he tried.”

  “Would you relate that to . . . his disappearance?”

  For a moment her face was twisted in the agony of self reproach. “I don’t know.”

  “I appreciate your frankness. I’ll respect it, Mrs. Davisson. How did he act Thursday?”

  “The same as always. We had a late breakfast. He had just sold some lots in the Lido section at Sarasota, and he was thinking of putting the money into a Gulf-front tract at Redington Beach. He asked me to go down there with him, but I had an eleven o’clock appointment with the hairdresser. His car was in the garage, so he took my convertible. He said he’d have lunch down that way and be back in the late afternoon. We were going to have some people in for cocktails. Well, the cocktail guests came and Temple didn’t show up. I didn’t worry. I thought he was delayed. We all went out to dinner and I left a note telling him that he could catch up with us at the Belmonte, on Clearwater Beach.

  “After dinner the Deens brought me home. They live down on the next street. I began to get really worried at ten o’clock. I thought of heart attacks and all sorts of things like that. Of accidents and so on. I phoned Morton Plant Hospital and asked if they knew anything. I phoned the police here at Redington and at St. Petersburg. I fell asleep in a chair at about four o’clock and woke up at seven. That was when I officially reported him missing.

  “They found my car parked outside a hotel apartment on Redington Beach, called Aqua Azul. They checked and found out he’d gone into the Aqua Azul cocktail lounge at eight thirty, alone. He had one dry martini and phoned here, but of course I had left by that time and the house was empty. He had another drink and then left. But apparently he didn’t get in the car and drive away. That’s what I don’t understand. And I keep thinking that the Aqua Azul is right on the Gulf.”

  “Have his children come down?”

  “Temple, Junior, wired that he is coming. He’s a lieutenant colonel of ordnance stationed at the Pentagon.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Thirty-six, and Alicia is thirty-three. Temple, Junior, is married, but Alicia isn’t. She’s with a Boston advertising agency, and when I tried to phone her I found out she’s on vacation, taking a motor trip in Canada. She may not even know about it.”

  “When is the son arriving?”

  “Late today, the wire said.”

  “Were they at the wedding?”

  “No. But I know them, of course. I met them before Mrs. Davisson died, many times. And only once since my marriage. There was quite a scene then. They think I’m some sort of dirty little opportunist. When they were down while Mrs. Davisson was alive, they had me firmly established in the servant category. I suppose they were right, but one never thinks of oneself as a servant. I’m afraid Colonel Davisson is going to be difficult.”

  “Do you think your husband might have had business worries?”

  “None. He told me a few months ago, quite proudly, that when he liquidated the knitting-company stock he received five hundred thousand dollars. In 1973 he started to buy land in this area. He said that the land he now owns could be sold off for an estimated million and a half dollars.”

  “Did he maintain an office?”

  “This is his office. Mr. Darrigan, you used the past tense then. I find it disturbing.”

  “I’m sorry. It wasn’t intentional.” Yet it had been. He had wanted to see how easily she would slip into the past tense, showing that in her mind she considered him dead.

  “Do you know the terms of his current will?”

  “He discussed it with me a year ago. It sets up trust funds, one for me and one for each of the children. He insisted that it be set up so that we share equally. And yet, if I get all that insurance, it isn’t going to seem very equal, is it? I’m sorry for snapping at you about using the past tense, Mr. Darrigan. I think he’s dead.”

  “Why?”

  “I know that amnesia is a very rare thing, genuine amnesia. And Temple had a very sound, stable mind. As I said before, he is kind. He wouldn’t go away and leave me to this kind of worry.”

  “The newspaper picture was poor. Do you have a better one?”

  “Quite a good one taken in July. Don’t get up. I can get it. It’s right in this desk drawer.”

  She sat lithely on her heels and opened the bottom desk drawer. Her perfume had a pleasant tang. Where her hair was parted he could see the ivory cleanness of her scalp. An attractive woman, with a quality of personal warmth held in reserve. Darrigan decided that the sergeant had been a most fortunate man. And he wondered if Davisson was perceptive enough to measure the true extent of his failure. He remembered an old story of a man held captive at the bottom of a dark, smooth-sided well. Whenever the light was turned on, for a brief interval, he could see that the circular wall was of glass, with exotic fruits banked behind it.

  “This one,” she said, taking out a 35-millimeter color transparency mounted in paperboard. She slipped it into a green plastic viewer and handed it to him. “You better take it over to the window. Natural light is best.”

  Darrigan held the viewer up to his eye. A heavy bald man, tanned like a Tahitian, stood smiling into the camera. He stood on a beach in the sunlight, and he wore bathing trunks with a pattern of blue fish on a white background. There was a doggedness about his heavy jaw, a glint of shrewdness in his eyes. His position was faintly strained and Darrigan judged he was holding his belly in, arching his wide chest for the camera. He looked to be no fool.

  “May I take this along?” Darrigan asked, turning to her.

  “Not for keeps.” The childish expression was touching.

  “Not for keeps,” he said, smiling, meaning his smile for the first time. “Thank you for your courtesy, Mrs. Davisson. I’ll be in touch with you. If you want me for any reason, I’m registered at a place called Bon Villa on the beach. The owner will take a message for me.”

  Darrigan left police headquarters in Clearwater at three o’clock. They had been as cool as he had expected at first, but after he had clearly stated his intentions they had relaxed and informed him of progress to date. They were cooperating with the Pinellas County officials and with the police at Redington.

  Temple Davisson had kept his appointment with the man who owned the plot of Gulf-front property that had interested him. The potential vendor was named Myron Drynfells, and Davisson had picked him up at eleven fifteen at the motel he owned at Madeira Beach. Drynfells reported that they had inspected the property but were unable to arrive at a figure acceptable to both of them. Davisson had driven him back to the Coral Tour Haven, depositing him there shortly after twelve thirty. Davisson had intimated that he was going farther down the line to take a look at some property near St. Petersburg Beach.

  There was one unconfirmed report of a man answering Davisson’s description seen walking along the shoulder of the highway up near the Bath Club accompanied by a dark-haired girl, some time shortly before nine o’clock on Thursday night.

  The police had no objection to Darrigan’s talking with Dynfells or making his own attempt to find the elusive dark-haired girl. They were reluctant to voice any theory that would account for the disappearance.

  Following a map of the area, Darrigan had little difficulty in finding his w
ay out South Fort Harrison Avenue to the turnoff to the Belleaire causeway. He drove through the village of Indian Rocks and down a straight road that paralleled the beach. The Aqua Azul was not hard to find. It was an ugly four-story building tinted pale chartreuse with corner balconies overlooking the Gulf. From the parking area one walked along a crushed-shell path to tile steps leading down into a pseudo-Mexican courtyard where shrubbery screened off the highway. The lobby door, of plate glass with a chrome push bar, opened off the other side of the patio. The fountain in the center of the patio was rimmed with small floodlights with blue-glass lenses. Darrigan guessed that the fountain would be fairly garish once the lights were turned on.

  Beyond the glass door the lobby was frigidly air-conditioned. A brass sign on the blond desk announced that summer rates were in effect. The lobby walls were rough tan plaster. At the head of a short wide staircase was a mural of lumpy, coffee-colored, semi-naked women grinding corn and holding infants.

  A black man was slowly sweeping the tile floor of the lobby. A girl behind the desk was carrying on a monosyllabic phone conversation. The place had a quietness, a hint of informality, that suggested it would be more pleasant now than during the height of the winter tourist season.

  The bar lounge opened off the lobby. The west wall was entirely glass, facing the beach glare. A curtain had been drawn across the glass. It was sufficiently opaque to cut the glare, subdue the light in the room. Sand gritted underfoot as Darrigan walked to the bar. Three lean women in bathing suits sat at one table, complete with beach bags, tall drinks, and that special porcelainized facial expression of the middle forties trying, with monied success, to look like middle thirties.

  Two heavy men in white suits hunched over a corner table, florid faces eight inches apart, muttering at each other. A young couple sat at the bar. They had a honeymoon flavor about them. Darrigan sat down at the end of the bar, around the corner, and decided on a rum collins. The bartender was brisk, young, dark, and he mixed a good drink.

  When he brought the change, Darrigan said, “Say, have they found that guy who wandered away and left his car here the other night?”

  “I don’t think so, sir,” the bartender said with no show of interest.

  “Were you on duty the night he came in?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Regular customer?”

  The bartender didn’t answer.

  Darrigan quickly leafed through half a dozen possible approaches. He selected one that seemed suited to the bartender’s look of quick intelligence and smiled ingratiatingly. “They ought to make all cops take a sort of internship behind a bar. That’s where you learn what makes people tick.”

  The slight wariness faded. “That’s no joke.”

  “Teddy!” one of the three lean women called. “Another round, please.”

  “Coming right up, Mrs. Jerrold,” Teddy said.

  Darrigan waited with monumental patience. He had planted a seed, and he wanted to see if it would take root. He stared down at his drink, watching Teddy out of the corner of his eye. After the drinks had been taken to the three women, Teddy drifted slowly back toward Darrigan. Darrigan waited for Teddy to say the first word.

  “I think that Davisson will show up.”

  Darrigan shrugged. “That’s hard to say.” It put the burden of proof on Teddy.

  Teddy became confidential. “Like you said, sir, you see a lot when you’re behind a bar. You learn to size them up. Now, you take that Davisson. I don’t think he ever came in here before. I didn’t make any connection until they showed me the picture. Then I remembered him. In the off season, you get time to size people up. He came in alone. I’d say he’d had a couple already. Husky old guy. Looked like money. Looked smart, too. That kind, they like service. He came in about eight thirty. A local guy. I could tell. I don’t know how. You can always tell them from the tourists. One martini, he wants. Very dry. He gets it very dry. He asks me where he can phone. I told him about the phone in the lobby. He finished half his cocktail, then phoned. When he came back he looked satisfied about the phone call. A little more relaxed. You know what I mean. He sat right on that stool there, and one of the regulars, a Mrs. Kathy Marrick, is sitting alone at that table over there. That Davisson, he turns on the stool and starts giving Mrs. Marrick the eye. Not that you can blame him. She is something to look at. He orders another martini. I figure out the pitch then. That Davisson, he went and called his wife and then he was settling down to an evening of wolfing around. Some of those older guys, they give us more trouble than the college kids. And he had that look, you know what I mean.

  “Well, from where he was sitting he couldn’t even see first base, not with Mrs. Marrick, and I saw him figure that out for himself. He finished his second drink in a hurry, and away he went. I sort of decided he was going to look around and see where the hunting was a little better.”

  “And that makes you think he’ll turn up?”

  “Sure. I think the old guy just lost himself a big weekend, and he’ll come crawling out of the woodwork with some crazy amnesia story or something.”

  “Then how do you figure the car being left here?”

  “I think he found somebody with a car of her own. They saw him walking up the line not long after he left here, and he was with a girl, wasn’t he? That makes sense to me.”

  “Where would he have gone to find that other girl?”

  “I think he came out of here, and it was just beginning to get dark, and he looked from the parking lot and saw the lights of the Tide Table up the road, and it was just as easy to walk as drive.”

  Darrigan nodded. “That would make sense. Is it a nice place, that Tide Table?”

  “A big bar and bathhouses and a dance floor and carhops to serve greasy hamburgers. It doesn’t do this section of the beach much good.”

  “Was Davisson dressed right for that kind of a place?”

  “I don’t know. He had on a white mesh shirt with short sleeves and tan slacks, I think. Maybe he had a coat in his car. He didn’t wear it in here. The rules here say men have to wear coats in the bar and dining room after November first.”

  “That Mrs. Marrick wouldn’t have met him outside, would she?”

  “Not her. No, sir. She rents one of our cabañas here.”

  “Did she notice him?”

  “I’d say she did. You can’t fool Kathy Marrick.”

  Darrigan knew that Teddy could add nothing more. So Darrigan switched the conversation to other things. He made himself talk dully and at length so that when Teddy saw his chance, he eased away with almost obvious relief. Darrigan had learned to make himself boring, merely by relating complicated incidents which had no particular point. It served its purpose. He knew that Teddy was left with a mild contempt for Darrigan’s intellectual resources. Later, should anyone suggest to Teddy that Darrigan was a uniquely shrewd investigator, Teddy would hoot with laughter, completely forgetting that Darrigan, with a minimum of words, had extracted every bit of information Teddy had possessed.

  Darrigan went out to the desk and asked if he might see Mrs. Marrick. The girl went to the small switchboard and plugged one of the house phones into Mrs. Marrick’s cabaña. After the phone rang five times a sleepy, soft-fibered voice answered.

  He stated his name and his wish to speak with her. She agreed, sleepily. Following the desk girl’s instructions, Darrigan walked out the beach door of the lobby and down a shell walk to the last cabaña to the south. A woman in a two-piece white terry-cloth sun suit lay on an uptilted Barwa chair in the hot sun. Her hair was wheat and silver, sun-parched. Her figure was rich, and her tan was coppery. She had the hollowed cheeks of a Dietrich and a wide, flat mouth.

  She opened lazy sea-green eyes when he spoke her name. She looked at him for a long moment and then said, “Mr. Darrigan, you cast an unpleasantly black shadow on the sand. Are you one of the new ones with my husband’s law firm? If so, the answer is still no, in spite of the fact that you’re quite pretty.”


  “I never heard of you until ten minutes ago, Mrs. Marrick.”

  “That’s refreshing, dear. Be a good boy and go in and build us some drinks. You’ll find whatever you want, and I need a fresh gin and tonic. This glass will do for me. And bring out a pack of cigarettes from the carton on the bedroom dressing table.”

  She shut her eyes. Darrigan shrugged and went into the cabaña. It was clean but cluttered. He made himself a rum collins, took the two drinks out, handed her her drink and a pack of cigarettes. She shifted her weight forward and the chair tilted down.

  “Now talk, dear,” she said.

  “Last Friday night at about eight thirty you were alone in the bar and a bald-headed man with a deep tan sat at the bar. He was interested in you.”

  “Mmm. The missing Mr. Davisson, eh? Let me see now. You can’t be a local policeman. They all either look like fullbacks from the University of Florida or skippers of unsuccessful charter boats. Your complexion and clothes are definitely northern. That might make you FBI, but I don’t think so somehow. Insurance, Mr. Darrigan?”

  He sat on a canvas chair and looked at her with new respect. “Insurance, Mrs. Marrick.”

  “He’s dead, I think.”

  “His wife thinks so too. Why do you?”

  “I was alone. I’m a vain creature, and the older I get the more flattered I am by all little attentions. Your Mr. Davisson was a bit pathetic, my dear. He had a lost look. A . . . hollowness. Do you understand?”

  “Not quite.”

  “A man of that age will either be totally uninterested in casual females or he will have an enormous amount of assurance about him. Mr. Davisson had neither. He looked at me like a little boy staring into the candy shop. I was almost tempted to help the poor dear, but he looked dreadfully dull. I said to myself, Kathy there is a man who suddenly has decided to be a bit of a rake and does not know just how to go about it.”

  “Does that make him dead?”

  “No, of course. It was something else. Looking into his eyes was like looking into the eyes of a photograph of someone who has recently died. It is a look of death. It cannot be described. It made me feel quite upset.”