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“No.”
“Thank goodness,” she said. “I can’t keep track of them anymore. I don’t know how Dirk does it. He has wives coming out of the woodwork.”
I gave her my card. “I’m a bond enforcement agent,” I told her, “and I’m looking for Dirk.”
“Good luck,” Margaret said on a sigh. “I’ve given up looking for him. He went out for ice cream two weeks ago and never came back. And now it turns out I’m wife number four. I read about it in the paper. I suppose I should get a lawyer, but they’re so expensive.”
“What’s it like being married to a bigamist?” Lula asked her.
“It’s perfect,” she said. “He told me he was still managing his company in Des Moines. So he would show up on Thursday night in time to set the garbage out for Friday pickup. And then he would leave early Sunday. He was very attentive, and he was always a gentleman. And he was excellent in bed.”
“No kidding,” Lula said. “You and McCuddle have a lot of sex?”
“No, but we talked about it.”
“Do you know where he is now?” I asked her.
“Jail?”
“Not yet,” I said.
Lula and I said good-bye to Margaret McCurdle, and I drove us a half mile to Ann McCurdle’s house on Sycamore Street. Ann lived in a small ranch house in a neighborhood filled with small ranch houses. Her house was pale gray, with blue shutters and a blue door. Her yard was tidy, and it looked like someone had just mulched around her azalea bushes.
“This is fascinating to me,” Lula said, “because I’m a student of human nature. That’s why I was such a good ’ho. I took an interest in my clients. And now here I am seeing all these bigamist wives living in all these different kinds of houses. Don’t you think it’s fascinating?”
Actually, it wasn’t high on my list of things that fascinated me, but I thought it was nice that Lula was fascinated.
I rang Ann’s doorbell with Lula hovering behind me. I rang a second time and the door was answered by a wiry old lady with a paintbrush in her hand. She had gray hair the color and texture of steel wool, her bifocals were crooked on her face, and she was dressed in white orthopedic shoes and a shapeless cotton creation that was somewhere between a dress and a bathrobe.
“Mrs. McCurdle?” I asked her.
“Yeah,” she said. “Me and everybody else.” She craned her neck to look past Lula. “This isn’t another one of them television interviews, is it? I’m painting my kitchen, and I don’t have my hair fixed.”
I introduced myself and gave her my card. “I’m looking for your husband,” I told her. “Do you have any idea where he might be?”
She pushed a clump of hair back from her face and left a smudge of lemon yellow paint. “I don’t know where he is, and if you find him, I want to know so I can hunt him down and wring his neck. He started painting my kitchen this stupid yellow color three weeks ago and never came back to finish.”
“It’s gonna be real cheery when you get done,” Lula said.
“Cheery, my behind,” Ann McCurdle said. “Every time I look at it, my blood pressure goes up. I’m popping pills like they’re M&M’s.”
“So I guess marrying a bigamist didn’t work out for you,” Lula said.
“It could have been worse. Just when I was getting sick of him, he’d go off on a two-week business trip. That’s the secret to keeping the magic in a marriage,” she said. “You don’t see too much of each other. Men are only interested in one thing anyway. S-E-X. And then after they get it, they go to sleep and snore.”
“I noticed that,” Lula said.
I thanked Ann McCurdle for her help, and Lula and I went back to the Jeep.
“Maybe bigamists aren’t as fascinating as I thought,” Lula said, cinching her seat belt. “According to the newspaper, none of these wives knew there were other wives. Now that I’m meeting them, I could see how that could happen.”
I motored out of the lot and turned onto Klockner Boulevard. “His first wife lives in the Burg. I thought we’d try her next, since it’s on our way back to the office.”
The Burg is an odd-shaped chunk of Trenton bordered by Hamilton Avenue, Liberty Street, Chambers Street, and Broad Street. I lived in the Burg for my entire childhood, and my parents still live there. Houses are small, yards are narrow, cars are large, windows are clean. This is a neighborhood of hard working second-generation Americans. Families are extended and proudly dysfunctional. Although dysfunction in Jersey might be hard to measure.
Tomasina McCurdle lived one block in from Hamilton in a single-family house with brown clapboard siding and brown trim.
“This house looks like a turd,” Lula said. “How could someone live in a all-brown house? You’d think you were going into a turd every day. It’s just my opinion, but I’d find that depressing. When you had company over, what would you tell them? The directions would be to turn off Hamilton and park in front of the house looks like a turd.”
