Late Payments

by Michael Z. Lewin

  “Your father has been gone for at least fifty hours and we don’t know where or why. His car is gone but hasn’t been recovered in this state as abandoned. He gave neither you nor his employer warning that he was going or information where he would be. That much we know, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Did he give you any idea, either in what he said or the way he acted, that anything was different the few days before he left?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Nothing at all? He wasn’t extra nice to you, or nervous, or out of the house more than usual or at home more than usual?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”

  Powder nodded. “Then the most probable explanation is that something happened that surprised him. Chances are it wasn’t an accident in Indianapolis, because of the car and because I have checked the hospitals and he isn’t in any of them. But something might have happened out of town. Do you know of any place outside the city where he ever went?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Or where he had any relatives, or friends, even ones he never visited?”

  “No.”

  “All right,” Powder said, and he took out his notebook. “We will do a check on all the hospitals in the state.” He made a note. “Now,” he said, “it’s possible that he got into some other kind of trouble.”

  “You mean like somebody kidnapped him?”

  “Do you have any reason to believe that somebody might have kidnapped your father?”

  “No,” the boy said.

  “No call from anybody about him?”

  “No, no,” Robert Sweet said. “I was just thinking. It was a stupid idea.”

  “All right,” Powder said. “When you made me a list of people your father knew . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “There weren’t any women on it. Is he gay or do you just not know about his social life?”

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  “He didn’t talk about socializing?”

  “No.”

  “But he was out in the evening sometimes?”

  “Yeah. He leaves me notes.”

  “How often in a week was he out evenings?”

  “Maybe twice, three times.”

  “Out of seven days?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Any regular days each week?”

  The boy considered. He shook his head.

  “Where did he say he was going?”

  “Just out. I always thought it was, like, work.”

  “His employer says that he worked a five-day week, eight to five.”

  “But he was home sometimes.”

  “When?”

  “In the mornings or sometimes when I got back from school.”

  “How often?”

  “Pretty often.”

  “How often?”

  “Oh, once or twice every week.”

  “Or three times?”

  The boy nodded.

  “And he was out weekend days sometimes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you don’t know what he did then?”

  “No.”

  “What do you do when he’s out?”

  “Oh, I’m OK. I’m used to looking after myself.”

  “Did he leave you money when he went out?”

  “Usually.”

  Powder felt tired. But continuing, he said, “Social life. Did your father ever talk about women?”

  “Like, specific women?”

  “OK.”

  “No.”

  “Did he like women? Did he comment on them on TV or in the movies or pictures in the papers? Did he talk about them in general?”

  “Well, some I guess.”

  “Did he ask you about your social life? Tease you about girl friends?”

  “A little.”

  “Did the two of you talk much?”

  “What about?”

  “Anything.”

  “Oh, yeah. Quite a bit.”

  “What about?”

  “Well, we talk about baseball a lot. My dad knows a hell of a lot about baseball. Who did what and when. He knows all about the Indians.”

  “You went to games together?”

  “Sometimes, but we watched them on TV more.”

  “Did he come to see you play? In Little League?”

  “Yeah. He watches, when he can.”

  “What position do you play?”

  “I’m a second baseman.”

  “Are you good?”

  The boy shrugged. “Good glove, no hit.”

  “There’s always a place for a good glove at second base,” Powder said.

  The boy stared at the table.

  “You’ve missed two practices?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll write you another note, to get you back into school without fuss.”

  “OK.” Then, eventually, “Thanks.”

  “Robert,” Powder said, “this is a nice house.”

  The boy nodded, watching him.

  “But your dad didn’t earn enough at his job to pay for it.”

  “He doesn’t have to pay for it,” Sweet said.

  “Why not?”

  “He owns it.”

  “Outright? No mortgage?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He says so. Sometimes he says, ‘At least I own my own house.’ ”

  “Where’d he get the money?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve always lived here?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twelve.”

  “And your mother left about a year and a half ago?”

  Eyes down. “That’s right.”

  “Have you seen her since?”

  “No.”

  “But you hear from her sometimes.”

  “I used to get presents.”

  “When was the last one?”

  “Christmas. She was in Mexico then. She sent me a sombrero and a big silver belt buckle.”

  “What did your father think about that?”

  “It made him sad.”

  “OK, kid,” Powder said. “Now what I need is a picture of your father.”

  “I don’t have one. He doesn’t like them.”

  “No picture of any kind?”

  “I don’t know of any.”

  Powder frowned. But took a breath and said, “The other thing I need is to go through his papers. Financial records, letters, all that kind of thing. If you let me I’ll take them home, but if you don’t want me to do that, I’ll go through them here.”

  The boy thought for a long time.

  “I know,” Powder said, “that he wouldn’t like anybody going through them. But if I’m going to try hard to find him, then I think I really have to.”

  “Take them,” Sweet said, “I don’t care.”

  “You show me where they are. And if you don’t mind, I’ll have a look around the house at the same time.”

  “All right.” The boy paused. Then he said, “You don’t think he could have amnesia or something like that?”

  “It’s possible, Robert,” Powder said. “But in all the years I’ve been a policeman the only real amnesia cases I’ve seen have been the ones on television.”

  Powder spent more than an hour looking around the house and gathering Sidney Sweet’s papers in a cardboard box. While he did so, Robert put two TV dinners in the oven to heat.

  After they had eaten. Powder sat with Robert Sweet and played Old Maid for three quarters of an hour. He left the boy at about nine-thirty to go home.

  As he carried the box of papers from his car to his own front door Powder saw that his front window was broken.

  He stood and looked at it.

  Then he continued up the path.

  Inside, among the scattered fragments of glass, he found a stone. First he checked through hi
s rooms to make sure nothing had been stolen. Then he brushed and vacuumed until he was satisfied the glass was gathered. In his workshop he found a piece of plywood to fit the pane and cut it to size. He took it back to the house and fixed it in place.

  He threw the stone away.

  Chapter Nine

  When Powder arrived at the office in the morning, Fleetwood was already there.

  So was Jules Mencelli.

  To Fleetwood, Powder said, “What’s he doing here at this time of day?” But before she could reply. Powder turned to Mencelli, saying, “This office is not yet open.

  “Look, Powder—” Fleetwood began.

  “Why the hell don’t you become a missing person, Mencelli?”

  “What did I say? What did I say?”

  “Don’t pay any attention, Jules.”

  “Pay attention,” Powder said sharply. “What do you think? I make noises just to feel the rush of air between the gaps in my teeth?”

  “Powder, we want to talk.”

  “Just keep your voices down so you don’t bother the working people around here.”

  “About business.”

  “Whose?”

  “Yours. Ours. Police business.”

  Fleetwood raised the flap for him. Sourly Powder passed to his desk.

  “Jules and I went through it all again last night,” Fleetwood said.

  Powder said nothing.

  “About his work. About what is happening.”

  “Have we decided to accept that something is happening?”

  “Tidmarsh accepts it.”

  “Tidmarsh is checking your friend’s work for mistakes.”

  “There aren’t any mistakes,” Mencelli said. “I’d bet my life on it.”

  “So, in life terms,” Powder said, “you lose either way.”

  “Having talked about it—” Fleetwood said.

  “I understand that you’ve talked about it,” Powder snapped. “Are you going to tell me a third time? What the hell is the bottom line around here? Is anybody going to get to it? If not, I have work to do.”

  Fleetwood tilted forward in her wheel chair, balancing on her hands and looking furious. “Put a zipper on it, Leroy,” she said. “I don’t have spare time either, especially not for one of your tantrums.”

  Jules Mencelli smirked. Ostentatiously he put a hand over his mouth to cover his smile.

  Powder rubbed his face.

  “Bottom line,” Fleetwood said. “We shouldn’t sit around on Jules’ conclusion.”

  “Which is?”

  “That somebody is killing people.”

  “OK. You think the case is ready? Go to Captain Gartland with it. He’s your man, I think.”

  “What I wanted to do was talk to you about it.”

  “Gartland will talk to you. He likes talking to police-women, especially ones with big chests. Good thing he’s not a leg man.”

  “Are you incapable of being constructive this morning?”

  “You want permission to work on the case? I give you permission. How much more constructive can I be?”

  “You can tell us what you think might actually be happening.”

  “What I think is happening?” Powder pursed his lips and leaned back in his chair. “I think that you and Ace here have got yourself swept up in the excitement of a mutual admiration and that you are trying to run before you can jointly walk. That’s what I think. I also think that when Tidmarsh says the work is sound and asks what I think about it, then maybe I’ll jog my brain cells. But I won’t even put a sweat suit on them for Jules.” He leaned forward. “Anything else I can do for you this morning. Sergeant?”

  Powder sat brooding at his desk after Fleetwood and Mencelli left the office. He pushed pieces of paper from one location to another. He considered momentarily whether immediate action on Mencelli’s hypothesis was appropriate. But he concluded quickly that it wasn’t. He was satisfied with his decision. And then he was simultaneously dissatisfied with it.

  There was a lot of early activity in the office. Powder managed to dredge up enough civility to deal with a few of the people who came in. But he was nearer the edge on the routine phone calls which, to help Haddix, he made between conversations with visitors to the counter. These were the contacts with relatives at defined intervals after the initial filing of a missing person report, on cases the department itself was not making headway with. Sometimes the relatives had remembered or received additional useful information. Sometimes the missing person had come home. The relatives by no means always informed the department.

  Powder made a dozen calls before he realized that he was coming across as tired and irritated. That was because he was irritated, and, probably, tired. He didn’t know what to do about it.

  During the morning Noble Perkins checked hospitals throughout Indiana and in the big cities near Indiana—Chicago, Detroit, Columbus, Cincinnati, Louisville—for bodies or unidentified patients who might be Sidney Arthur Sweet. Perkins’s initial contacts turned up three possible corpses, and photographs were requested via a telephone printer.

  By way of Noble Perkins, Powder also sent a glass, a library book, and an electric razor to Forensic—articles likely to bear Sweet’s fingerprints—which he’d removed from the house along with the personal papers. He told Noble Perkins to tell Forensic it was urgent.

  When Perkins came back he said that the Forensic people had said all their work was urgent. Powder called the department and told them that the future of a twelve-year-old child depended on their doing quickly what he had asked them to do.

  “Sure, sure,” the officer in Forensic had said, unimpressed. Powder hung up on him.

  When he gave up on telephone calls. Powder spent a little time going through Sweet’s papers. In this first look he found only confirmations of what the son had told him. No mortgage or rent records. The house appeared to be his own.

  Before lunch Powder put Perkins on finding out who Sweet had bought the house from and when.

  Tidmarsh was not in the cafeteria when Powder arrived. That fact increased Powder’s already substantial annoyance with life. Too many things to do; all of them complicated, complicated, complicated.

  He collected a pastry, a doughnut, and a piece of apple pie with ice cream, picked up two cups of coffee. He paid and went to a window table in a corner where he could see everyone in the room. But instead of watching the people in the room he looked out the window, at the Market Square Arena parking lot, the sidewalks on Alabama. Buses. An electric company repair project blocking traffic in the far side’s curb lane. The vehicles clogged the flow of traffic at the repair site. Powder looked down and thought in terms of washing machine waste-water pipes and blockages and plumbers with flexible rods.

  He sighed. He rubbed his face.

  “Your ice cream’s melting. Powder.”

  “What?”

  Tidmarsh stood across the table smirking down at him, a bean pole of a man with a relief-map face.

  “It’s making a puddle on your tray.”

  Powder looked at the ice cream. He pushed the tray, the food, away. “I’m on a diet,” he said. Then, “Tidmarsh, you used to be in traffic, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Look down there.”

  Tidmarsh looked.

  “The way traffic flow is blocked.”

  “I see it.”

  “Why the hell do they put the manhole covers in the streets, tell me that. If they put them in the sidewalks, then you could do your work without making the vehicle flow a mess.”

  Tidmarsh sat down. “You kill me, Powder, you really do. How does somebody as temperamental as you stick it as a cop all the years you have?”

  “Temperamental? ¿Yo?”

  Tidmarsh unloaded his lunch, spread a napkin on his lap and applied condiments to several of his purchases.

  “Do you think you can deny yourself tomato syrup long enough to tell me whether this guy Mencelli is any good?”

  Tidmarsh gently tapped
the bottom of the ketchup bottle over his French fries and then over a helping of creamed corn. “It needs more confirming.”

  “I thought you were doing that.”

  “I picked out a section and obtained some of his data myself. They all checked exactly. But it was a fraction of the work as a whole.”

  “What’s the bottom line, Tidmarsh?”

  “There is no bottom line, yet.”

  “But suppose you had to put your money on whether it will hold up.”

  “I’m not really a gambling man. Powder.”

  Powder glared.

  Somberly Tidmarsh ate three French fries. “My gut feeling is that Indiana has a problem to solve.”

  “Indiana? Who’s that?”

  Tidmarsh shrugged. “I don’t know, my friend. Depends just what kind of problem it is.” He shook his head while keeping his fork hand steady. “It’s hard to believe. It really is.”

  “Would you be able to sell it as a case to open to, say, Gartland?”

  Tidmarsh did not respond immediately.

  “Or to the state cops? Do you know anybody over there?”

  “Nobody with clout.” Tidmarsh paused, then said, “The trouble with someone like Gartland is he’s going to want to know what exactly we’re trying to solve, what our jurisdiction is, how much it’s going to cost, how many people it will take and for how long.”

  “To which you say?”

  “I can’t tell him any of those things yet.”

  “And presumably,” Powder said, “there is also a political aspect. Not good advertising for the state if, when, it hits the press.”

  “Or for the State Health Department officials.”

  “So, suppose we decide somebody is bumping people off,” Powder said. “To get the statistical effect Mencelli’s turned up, how many people has he had to kill?’ ”

  Tidmarsh pondered. He made gestures.

  Impatiently Powder said, “I know it depends on how long he’s been at it and fifteen point eight other things but give me a number to think about.”

  “Several hundreds, maybe a thousand odd. That’s a minimum kind of guess. I’ll work out a real estimate once I’ve confirmed Mencelli’s work.” He thought. “Maybe I’ll do it first.”

  “You’re going to go through more of it?”

  “It must all be checked,” Tidmarsh said forcefully. “Something like this? You can’t possibly do anything with it until it’s all been confirmed, independently.”