Stargill nodded, touched the tip of his beard.
Milo said, “So your last contact would be around two and a half years ago.”
“That’s right.”
“You never talked about the divorce?”
“Well, sure. A phone call here and there to wrap up details. I thought you meant a real conversation.”
“Ah,” said Milo. “And after the divorce you never came back to visit?”
“No reason to,” said Stargill. “Claire and I were over- we’d been over long before we made it official. Never really started, actually.”
“The marriage went bad quickly.”
Stargill sighed and buttoned his jacket. His hands were broad, ruddy, coated with beer-colored hair. “It wasn’t a matter of going bad. The whole thing was essentially a mistake. Here, I brought this. Found it this morning.”
He fished out a crocodile wallet and removed a small photo, which Milo examined, then handed to me.
Color snapshot of Claire and Stargill arm in arm, “Just Married” banner in the background. He wore a tan suit and brown turtleneck shirt, no beard, eyeglasses. His nude face was bony, his smile tentative.
Claire had on a long, pale blue sleeveless dress printed with lavender pansies, and she carried a bouquet of white roses. Her hair was long, straight, parted in the middle, her face leaner than in the headshot I’d seen, the cheekbones more pronounced.
Full smile.
“Don’t really know why I brought it,” said Stargill. “Didn’t know I even had it.”
“Where’d you find it?” said Milo.
“In my office. I went in early this morning before driving up here, started going through all the paperwork Claire and I had in common: divorce documents, transfer of ownership for the house. It’s all out in the car-take whatever you want. The picture popped out from between some pages.”
Stargill turned to me. “Guess a psychologist could interpret that-still having it.
Maybe it does mean something on a subconscious level, but I sure don’t remember holding on to it intentionally. Seeing it again was bizarre. We look pretty happy, don’t we?”
I studied the photo some more. A flimsy-looking altar flecked with glitter was visible between the newlyweds. Glittering red hearts on the walls, a pink Cupid figurine with Dizzy Gillespie cheeks.
“Vegas?” I said.
“Reno,” said Stargill. “Tackiest wedding chapel you ever saw. The guy who officiated was an old geezer, half blind, probably drunk. We got into town well after midnight.
The geezer was closing up and I slipped him a twenty to do a quickie ceremony. His wife had already gone home, so some janitor-another old guy-served as witness.
Afterward Claire and I joked that they were both senile-it probably wasn’t legal.”
He placed his hands on the counter, stared blankly into the kitchen. “When I lived here, we had appliances all over the place-juicer, blender, coffee maker, you name it. Claire wanted every gizmo invented…. Wonder what she did with the stuff-looks like she was stripping everything away.”
“Any idea why she’d do that?” I said.
“No,” he said. “Like I said, we weren’t in touch. Truth is, even when we were together I couldn’t have told you what made her tick. All she ever really liked was going to the movies-she could see a flick a night. Sometimes it didn’t seem to matter what was on the screen, she just liked being in the theater. Beyond that, I never knew her at all.”
“Where’d the two of you meet?”
“Another major romantic story: hotel cocktail lounge. Marriott at the airport, to be specific. I was there to meet a client from the Far East who never showed up, and
Claire was attending a psychology convention. I’m sitting at the bar, irritated because this guy does this to me all the time, and now I’ve wasted half a day.
Claire glides in looking great, sits a few stools down.”
He pointed at the picture. “As you can see, she was an eyeful back then. Different from my usual type, but maybe that’s what did it.”
“Different, how?” I said.
“I’d been dating legal secretaries, paralegals, a few models, wannabe actresses-we’re talking girls who were into fashion, makeup, the whole body-beautiful thing. Claire looked like exactly what she was: a scholar. Great structure, but she didn’t mess with herself. That afternoon she was wearing granny glasses and one of those long print dresses. Her whole wardrobe was those dresses and some jeans and T-shirts. No makeup. No high heels-open sandals, I remember looking down at her feet. She had really pretty feet, adorable white toes. She saw me staring and laughed-this low chuckle that struck me as being really sexy, and then I started to look past the glasses and I realized she was great-looking. She ordered a ginger ale, I was well into the Bloody Marys. I made some crack about her being a wild party girl. She laughed again and I moved closer and the rest is history. We got married two months later. At the beginning, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”