Late Payments

by Michael Z. Lewin

  “Meanwhile . . .”

  “Meanwhile more people are being killed, if it’s correct. If. Jesus, Powder, it can’t be true!”

  “So you will do the checking yourself?”

  Tidmarsh ate again. “Who else? I’m the best we’ve got.”

  “Ah, Carollee, my dear,” Powder said when he returned to the office from the canteen. “How nice to see you.”

  Fleetwood looked up.

  “I wanted to talk something over with you, if you have a minute.” Powder sat on the edge of her desk.

  Fleetwood said nothing.

  “Suppose there is this man who kills aged and infirm people over a period of years. A lot of people, at least a thousand. Maybe several thousand. I know such a thing is absurd, and hardly the sort of activity a beautiful and charming young woman would normally speculate about. But consider it with me for a moment, all right?”

  Fleetwood remained silent but looked stern.

  “I’ll tell you the thing that puzzles me, once we’ve agreed to think about such a man. How the hell does he go about it? How does he find appropriate targets? How does he decide when?”

  “Powder, you are the most irritating human being I have ever known.”

  “Flattery aside, how does he do it? I mean, if he runs out and lines the residents in a nursing home up against the wall and uses a machine gun, someone might notice. So what is the rationale, the method? I think it’s got to be things like fires and explosions because to get through that number you can hardly take them on one at a time.” Powder paused, tilting his head to consider. “Unless that’s part of the kick involved.”

  “Excuse me. Lieutenant Powder?” A woman’s voice came from behind them.

  “Your public calls,” Fleetwood said.

  “Well, Carollee, you do your best with the little problem I’ve set you,” Powder said. “I’m sure if you think it through carefully, you’ll end up a better cop for the effort.”

  He turned to the counter. “Miss, what can I do for you?”

  “It’s ‘Mrs.’ ” The woman was short, well dressed, in her early fifties and had a pleasant face.

  “Mrs. Forgive me.”

  The woman pushed her face forward, with something of an ironic smile in her expression. “Don’t you recognize me, Roy Powder?”

  Powder blinked.

  The woman looked past him to Fleetwood and shook her head gently. “How do you like that?” she said. “Here I am, the first woman he ever took to bed, and he doesn’t even remember!”

  Chapter Ten

  “I’d never have believed he could blush,” Fleetwood said to Sue Swatts. “But I am an eyewitness.” Fleetwood raised her voice. “Got that. Powder? I’ll testify you blushed deep-purple, all the way to the Supreme Court.”

  Swatts looked over to the desk where Powder was leaning back in his chair, apparently in thought. “Oh, poor man,” Swatts said sympathetically. Suddenly her shoulders rose and her face became an agony of pleasure. She was stifling laughter.

  Fleetwood snorted. “Yeah, I suppose he is.”

  “But what did she want, this woman?”

  “She said she had seen something strange—”

  “But not recently!” Swatts interrupted, giggling. Fleetwood giggled too.

  “Oh dear,” Swatts said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t.” She glanced again at the seemingly imperturbable Powder. He had not moved from his contemplative position. “Go on.”

  Fleetwood and Swatts looked at each other and after a moment broke into laughter again.

  “I think we better get some coffee,” Fleetwood said.

  The two women made their way to the office door. As they did, Howard Haddix arrived and stood aside for them. Looking at Haddix, they burst into laughter once again.

  “What’s the matter with them?” Haddix asked Powder as he came in.

  From his computer corner. Noble Perkins turned and said sharply, “They’re being damned silly!”

  Perkins’s highly uncharacteristic interjection drew even Powder’s attention. He and Haddix exchanged raised eyebrows.

  Perkins saw the two men look at him. “Women!” he said, by way of explaining his previous comment. He began to turn red. He returned to his VDT.

  Powder said, “Howard, you’re an intelligent man.”

  “I am?”

  “I’ve begun to appreciate your perceptiveness lately. I’d like your opinion on something. Come here; sit down.”

  Haddix sat down.

  “A woman comes into some cash when her only brother dies and decides to buy a house with it. One she can rent part of out.”

  “Yes ...?”

  “So she gets it all set up and sorted out and furnished and she finds a tenant. Are you with me so far?”

  “Yes,” Haddix said, and then felt stupid for answering a stupid question.

  “The guy that rents it seems all right. Pays in advance. Doesn’t cause any trouble, but after a while the woman notices that he keeps odd hours and spends most days in his room.”

  After a pause, Haddix saw that Powder wasn’t going to continue without a prompt. “Yes,” he said.

  “So the woman doesn’t know what to think and it worries her. Then the woman remembers that she knows a cop. She hasn’t been in touch with him for a long time but she’s seen references to him in the papers.”

  “So she asks the cop about the man?” Haddix asked.

  “Exactly!” Powder said. “And invites him to come over for a look, maybe a bite to eat. Nothing so strange or suspicious about that, is there?”

  Haddix shrugged. “Nope. Sounds quite reasonable to me.”

  “My feelings exactly,” Powder said. His face, however, remained wrinkled in a frown of dissatisfaction.

  “Is this what just happened, Lieutenant? Are you the cop?”

  “I said you were intelligent, Howard. You haven’t let me down.”

  But,” Haddix said, looking around for Swatts and Fleetwood, “I still don’t see what’s so funny.”

  In the early afternoon Noble Perkins gave Powder a printout on the ownership history of Sidney Sweet’s Bernard Avenue house. It showed Sweet as having owned the house for fourteen years. There was nothing in the record that suggested any family relationship between the previous owner and Sweet, nothing to explain a mortgageless purchase.

  Powder asked Perkins to try to locate the previous owner of the house, one Morris Kijovsky.

  Then Powder remembered the other sheets of paper he had been given nearly twenty-four hours before. They were where he had put them, in his jacket pocket.

  He considered why he had neglected them, then remembered he had planned to study them at home the previous night. But he had spent the allotted time sweeping up glass and boarding his window instead. Then this morning he’d forgotten them because of his mood.

  Powder took the papers out and studied them.

  The first was a short résumé on the East Haven Bottling Company, Sweet’s employers. The summary showed that while the business held a number of small bottling contracts, their mainstay was a long-standing agreement to supply own-brand carbonated drinks to state and federal institutions of a wide variety of kinds. East Haven’s listed owner was another company called Leisure Services. There were no profit-and-loss figures.

  Powder took the sheet to Noble Perkins.

  “Yes, Lieutenant?”

  “Where’d you get this stuff?”

  Perkins smiled faintly. “Well, you know the brokers O’Nions and James?”

  Powder held up a hand to forestall further explanation. “And the reason you don’t know if East Haven is making money is . . .?”

  “It’s not incorporated.”

  “So how about something on Leisure Services?”

  “I already tried. O’Nions and James don’t have anything on them.”

  Powder frowned. “Is that unusual?”

  “I reckon it is, though I don’t know all that much about routines in accountancy.”

&nbs
p; Powder looked then at the short files on the Stanton sisters. Sunny, whose birth certificate name was Bettina, had been questioned twice—at seventeen and eighteen years of age—because she had been in the company of men arrested for felonies, but she had no criminal record of her own.

  From her birth date. Powder worked out that she had married Sidney Sweet when she was nineteen.

  Imelda Stanton was the elder sister and the better known to the police. She had only one conviction, for solicitation—a charge she had pleaded not guilty to—but she had been considered a regular associate of criminals until her marriage to Earle Nason at the age of twenty-four, sixteen years before.

  Nason, in turn, had a substantial criminal record. Several juvenile and minor adult theft offenses had preceded three assault convictions and two short stays in jail. Then Nason had been convicted of second-degree murder, two years after his marriage. Since his release there had been no further arrests.

  The murder conviction had come from a killing committed in the course of a bank robbery. Nason had become agitated and pulled the trigger of the shotgun he was carrying. Although he had not, apparently, intended to shoot, a man had died.

  The victim’s name was Arnold Husk. He was listed as the proprietor of a club called Leonardo’s and two other businesses.

  Powder read through the details of Nason’s record twice. Then he went again to Noble Perkins, asking this time for further information on Arnold Husk, and on “Mister Jimmy” Husk, Earle Nason’s current employer.

  Powder’s attention turned to Sidney Sweet’s personal papers. These he went through sheet by sheet, finding them to be primarily skimpy tax-related records which told him only that Sweet had been earning a comfortable living from his efforts at the East Haven Bottling Company, considering he did not have to pay for accommodation.

  There was nothing personal. Powder had hoped for letters or a book of telephone numbers. But he didn’t get anything like that, not an old shopping list or check stubs or even the names of Sweet’s doctor or dentist.

  The longer he looked at the papers the more uncomfortable Powder became. It was possible, he supposed, that Sweet had removed all personal records before he left, but that was not the impression Powder had received when he’d collected the papers into the box.

  Powder’s problem was that the close and personal relationship that the boy described having with his father was at odds with the impersonal leavings of the father, just as the assiduous note-writing was at odds with the disappearance.

  Powder didn’t know what he was looking for, only that he wasn’t finding it.

  When he finished, he repacked the papers.

  At four o’clock Noble Perkins presented Powder with pictures of three corpses and a telephone number for a Morris Kijovsky. Powder put the pictures on top of the box of Sweet’s documents and dialed the number.

  Kijovsky was in. “You’re lucky to catch me,” he said. “Was it about some insurance?”

  Powder explained who he was. Kijovsky explained that he was an insurance salesman.

  “What I wanted to know is whether you remember selling your house on Bernard Avenue.”

  “Sure I do,” Kijovsky said without hesitation. “It was the first house I ever bought, and the first one I ever sold. What about it?”

  “Do you remember the man you sold it to?”

  “A guy named Sweet. Big guy, built lke a basketball player gone to seed, you know what I mean?”

  “Sidney Sweet?”

  “I think Sidney. Don’t recall his first name so sharp.”

  “But he was definitely a large man? Not small and nervous?”

  “I don’t think anybody could call the man who bought my house small,” Kijovsky said. “And he wasn’t nervous. I was the one that was nervous, that he would change his mind as sudden as he made it up. What’s this all about? Or is that something you can’t tell me?”

  “I am trying to get some background information on a Missing Persons case, Mr. Kijovsky,” Powder said. “Can you tell me how long it was between Mr. Sweet showing an interest and his buying?”

  “No time at all. A week. He came out and we talked about how fast I could move, which was very fast. He sent a surveyor around the next day and I was gone seven days later. He even paid my price, no haggling. I’m not going to forget that, now am I?”

  “No,” Powder agreed.

  “Who is it that’s missing? I know it’s none of my business, but—”

  “Mr. Sweet is missing,” Powder said.

  “Gee,” Kijovsky said. “You guys are quick off the mark, aren’t you?”

  “What do you mean, Mr. Kijovsky?”

  “Well, I only saw him on the street yesterday.”

  “Where was that?” Powder asked sharply.

  “It was just on the street. On The Circle. I passed him. I’ve seen him eight or ten times over the years. He never recalled me, but I recall him. I’m pretty good on faces and names, which is an asset in my line of work. It’s recalling telephone numbers I have trouble with.”

  “The times you’ve seen him, Mr. Kijovsky, where have they been?”

  “Oh, just around town.”

  “It could be very important. Can you remember seeing him coming in or out of any particular buildings? Or any other details at all?”

  “That’s a pretty tall order,” Kijovsky said. “I’d have to think about that one.”

  “I would be very grateful if you would do that,” Powder said. “And I would also appreciate it if you would help a police artist make a sketch of the man you saw yesterday.”

  Kijovsky recognized the sense of urgency in Powder’s voice. “Yeah,” he said, “well, OK.”

  “I’ll try to arrange for someone to come out to where you are. Could you wait there now?”

  Powder tried to book an artist to go out immediately.

  “Sorry, no can do.”

  “Oh yes you damn well can,” Powder said.

  The artist agreed to appear at the Missing Persons office at five. Powder called Kijovsky back to fix a meeting for five-thirty.

  “This artist couldn’t do with some insurance, could he?” Kijovsky asked.

  A few minutes before five a man and a woman rushed through the door and up to the desk.

  The woman dropped her purse on the counter heavily and said, “We went exactly where the map we got from your Miss Swatts said, but she still wasn’t there!”

  “Something’s got to be done about these people,” the man said. He pounded on the counter with his fist. “I don’t mean just because of Jacqueline either. They are a blot on the landscape, and you people shouldn’t just let them spirit hardworking families’ daughters away without so much as a by-your-leave.”

  “Don’t bang on my counter top,” Powder said.

  “What?” the man said.

  “I said I will not have you banging on my counter top. Now, do you want to tell me what your problem is, quietly, or would you rather leave?”

  The man and woman looked at each other.

  “I want to see whoever is in charge here,” the man said.

  “I am in charge here,” Powder said.

  “I object to your attitude,” the man said.

  Powder turned to the office log and wrote a few words.

  “What are you doing?” the man asked.

  “Noting your objection to my attitude,” Powder said. He turned back to the couple. “Now, am I to take it that you paid a visit to The Promised Land?”

  The woman burst into tears.

  Powder listened to the Beehlers’ story, which included the possible ruin of two shock absorbers on the rocky track from Moore Road to the “X” on the map. From what Powder could make out, Gale Heyhurst had been apologetic when he told them their daughter was not at the farm. When they had asked him where she was, Heyhurst had told them she was going door to door spreading the message of the movement. If they cared to fix a time and a day, he could see that Jacqueline was available to them.

&n
bsp; “Imagine how we felt,” Beehler said stormily. “Making an appointment with this, this . . .”

  “A guru type,” Mrs. Beehler said.

  “Yes, a goddamn guru-hippy-freak, he’s standing there with a Snoopy diary in his hand and he’s leafing through the pages and he’s telling us to make an appointment to see our own daughter.”

  On the word daughter, Mrs. Beehler burst into tears again.

  Noting that Officer Swatts was not in the office at the moment, Powder was unable to promise immediate action on the case, but Mr. Beehler produced the map to The Promised Land when Powder asked for it and Powder made a photocopy. The act seemed to calm the couple a little and they left.

  Morris Kijovsky was regretful about his attempts to locate his sightings of Sidney Sweet.

  “I’m sure once it was in front of the main post office,” he said. “And a couple of times it was on North Meridian Street, but near The Circle. I really can’t do much better than that.”

  Powder asked him to think further about it at his leisure. “OK,” Kijovsky countered. “If you’ll think about whether you’re really fully insured.” It was by way of a little joke.

  Kijovsky turned his attention to constructing a picture with the police artist, and in half an hour a drawing was completed which Kijovsky stated was about as good as he could recall.

  Chapter Eleven

  Powder drove back to Johnson’s, his local grocery, before taking the artist’s drawing and the three photographs obtained by Noble Perkins to Robert Sweet. But instead of shopping. Powder walked to the back of the store and knocked on an un-marked door between a bread rack and shelves of canned vegetables.

  From inside he heard a grumbled sound which he took to be one of invitation. He opened the door and went in.

  Uncle Adg, patriarch of a clan that extended far beyond its grocery center, sat facing the door. A vastly fat man, misnamed Agile by parents lacking the gift of prophecy, he ran the store and the family from a thronelike chair in the stock room. But family interests were broadly interpreted. Among other things, Johnson took an active part, by proxy, in the activities of the Lockerbie Residents Association, a civic organization of the old-guard “prerehabilitation” families, a shrinking number. Powder was a member.