“We were on our honeymoon when I told him that he was much neater about himself than most men. I was going on what I had seen of my father. Colin took excellent care of his clothes and his grooming. He was meticulous—I don’t mean fussy. It pleased him to know he was that sort of person. It was our honeymoon and it pleased him to know that something he hadn’t thought of made me proud of him.”

“His recent pictures show that he hadn’t changed his habits,” Leland said.

“I’m wasting your time,” she said.

“There are questions I want to ask you. This has you upset and you’ve drawn a blank for the moment. I’d like you to tell me about the way he drove a car.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The way he drove. In the time he was married to you, he picked up more than forty traffic and parking tickets. What can you tell me about them?”

She was staring at him, unbelieving. “Who told you that?”

“The police of Manitou and Port Smith. There’s no question of it.”

“I remember two parking tickets. He gave them to me and I bought money orders for them. Are you sure you have the same man?”

“Absolutely.”

“He handled the money. I wouldn’t have known if he had gotten all those tickets or not. He did such a good job of handling our money that I never questioned him. He could have paid the fines without letting me know.”

“He did. How did he drive?”

“Fast. He could shift gears by just stabbing at the clutch pedal, not pushing all the way down. He liked to drive and he kept testing his abilities.”

“I want to talk about money, Betty, where he got it and how he saved it. Did he borrow from his mother, for example. Give me the figures, if you can recall them.”

“We were both working. When my parents died, we couldn’t sell the store. There were no takers because it had been closed awhile and there was a supermarket going up on the next block. We disposed of the stock and the fixtures and used that money and their insurances to pay their medical expenses and funerals. His mother gave us a thousand dollars as a wedding present. So we started out with over a thousand dollars in the bank and the incomes from our two jobs, let’s see, sixty and twenty-five dollars a week, plus his GI Bill money. We had to finish paying for the car, which he had bought before we met, and the usual running expenses. He wouldn’t touch the thousand his mother had given us for more than a year. It was a question of getting us saving regularly first.

“He bought stock with it, after he had studied the market. It scared me, I remember, and I think we made seventy-five dollars in four and a half months. I couldn’t keep up with it, so I left it to him.