“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.”