The Accidental Detective

golf now.”
    “Charlie, I’m not your wife. Your stupid lie won’t work on me. It’s not even your lie, remember?”
    “No, no, there’s no one else. I’ve, well, reformed! It’s like a penance to me. I’ve chosen my loveless marriage and golf over the great passion of my life. It’s the right thing to do.”
    He thought she would find this suitably romantic, but it only seemed to enrage her more.
    “I’m going to go over to your house and tell Marla that you’re cheating.”
    “Don’t do that, Sylvia. It’s not even true.”
    “You cheated with me, didn’t you? And a tiger doesn’t change his stripes.”
    Charlie wanted to say that he was not so much a tiger as a house cat who had been captured by a petulant child. True, it had been hard to break with Sylvia once things had started. She was very good at a lot of things that Marla seldom did and never conducted with enthusiasm. But it had not been his idea. And, confronted with an ultimatum, he had honored her condition. He hadn’t tried to have it both ways. He was beginning to think Sylvia was unreliable.
    “Meet me at my apartment right now, or I’ll call Marla.”
    He did, and it was a dreary time, all tears and screaming and no attentions paid to him whatsoever, not even after he held her and stroked her hair and said he did love her.
    “You should be getting back to work,” he said at last, hoping to find any excuse to stop holding her.
    She shook her head. “My position was eliminated two weeks ago. I’m out of work.”
    “Is that why you’re so desperate to get married?”
    She wailed like a banshee, not that he really knew what a banshee sounded like. Something scary and shrill. “No. I love you, Charlie. I want to be your wife for that reason alone. But the last month, with all this going on, I haven’t been at my best, and they had a bad quarter, so I was a sitting duck. In a sense, I’ve lost my job because of you, Charlie. I’m unemployed and I’m alone. I’ve hit rock bottom.”
    “You could always come back to the company. You left on good terms and I’d give you a strong reference.”
    “But then we couldn’t be together.”
    “Yes.” He was not so clever that he had thought of this in advance, but now he saw it would solve everything.
    “And that’s the one thing I could never bear.”
    Charlie, his hand on her hair, looked out the window. It was such a beautiful day, a little cooler than usual, but still sunny. If he left now—but, no, he would have to go back to the office. He wouldn’t get to play golf at all today.
    “Who is she, Charlie?”
    “Who?”
    “The other woman.”
    “There is no other woman.”
    “Stop lying, or I really will go to Marla. I’ll drive over there right now, while you’re at work. After all, I don’t have a job to go to.”
    She was crazy, she was bluffing. She was so crazy that even if she wasn’t bluffing, he could probably persuade Marla that she was a lunatic. After all, what proof did she have? He had never allowed the use of any camera, digital or video, although Sylvia had suggested it from time to time. There were no e-mails. He never called her. And he was careful to leave his DNA, as he thought of it, only in the appropriate places, although this included some places that Marla believed inappropriate. He had learned much from the former president and the various television shows on crime scene investigations.
    “Look, if it’s money you need—”
    “I don’t want money! I want you!”
    And so it began all over again, the crying and the wailing, only this time there was no calming her. She was obsessed with the identity of his new mistress, adamant that he tell her everything, enraged by his insistence that he really did play golf in his spare time. Finally, he thought to take her down to the garage beneath her apartment and show her the clubs in the trunk of his car.
    “So what?” she said. “You always carried your clubs.”
    “But I know what they are now,” he said, removing a driver. “See this one, it’s—”
    “I know what’s going on and I’m done, I tell you. The minute you leave here, I’m going to go upstairs and call Marla. It’s her or me. Stop fucking with me, Charlie.”
    “I really wish you wouldn’t use that word, Sylvia. It’s coarse.”
    “Oh, you don’t like hearing it, but you sure like doing it. Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fucking!”
    She stood in front of him, hands on her hips. Over the course of their two-year