Late Payments

by Michael Z. Lewin

  “The phone’s been buzzing for you, Powder.” Fleetwood waved some message memos at him.

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Well, your girl friend sounded pretty eager to have you call her back.”

  Powder stared at Fleetwood for a moment. The he burst into enthusiasm. “Yeah? Really? What’d she say? Gosh. Whizz. Where’s my phone!”

  Fleetwood raised her eyes momentarily, an optical sigh. She handed him the messages.

  Powder looked down at her. He kicked at a tire. “When the hell are you going to get out of that wheelbarrow?”

  Martha Miles was clearly pleased to speak to him. “It wasn’t urgent or anything, Leroy,” she said. “I hope I’m not interrupting something important.”

  “No,” Powder said.

  “I wanted to thank you for last night. I wanted to say that I had a lovely time, that it’s been a long time since I went out and enjoyed myself so much. Or enjoyed myself at all. And, well, I’m grateful.”

  Powder looked up and saw Fleetwood watching him, smiling slightly.

  Staring back at Fleetwood, he said, “I had a great time too, Martha. I hope we can do it again sometime soon.”

  “That would please me a lot,” Martha Miles said.

  “In a day or two?”

  “Oh, good.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  “OK. Bye now.”

  “Bye.”

  When Powder hung up, Fleetwood asked, “Hey, Powder, what was she like? I mean back then. Originally.”

  “Terrible,” Powder said. “She’s a whole lot better now.”

  Powder sat next to Noble Perkins as the young man worked at his desk. “Nobe, old buddy?”

  Perkins didn’t respond immediately.

  “Nobe, I want to know about your love life.”

  “What?” Perkins didn’t move his head, but showed that he had heard by turning red.

  “You’ve been working here . . . how long now? Nine months?”

  “A year next week, Lieutenant.”

  “You got a girl, Nobe?”

  “Aw, come on. Lieutenant!”

  “Or maybe a couple?”

  “Cut it out. Lieutenant!” Perkins was smiling, redly.

  “It’s just I was thinking. There was a little girl who worked in here a couple years ago. Great little kid, called Agnes. She got herself moved into our computer section and has a police scholarship to finish college. What say I arrange to introduce the two of you? I figure you got a lot of things in common.”

  “Aw, Lieutenant,” Perkins said, “stop your joshing me now, hey!”

  Powder stopped joshing. He wrote out another name to get police records on: Joseph Miles, Martha Miles’s late husband. They had married a couple of years after Martha had last seen Powder, following the completion of their brief and unglamorous period of intimacy. Joseph Miles had died eight years later. But he had been named with her on both her convictions.

  In exchange, Perkins handed Powder the police records on the Henry Painters and the Husk brothers, Arnold and “Mister Jimmy.” As he did so, he asked, “This new name. Lieutenant. What do you want?”

  “Whatever we have on file. Nothing fancy. Yet.”

  Powder looked at the other telephone messages. Two were internal, from Fingerprints and from Captain Graniela’s office. Another was from Mr. Cass Beehler, asking what Powder had found out about his daughter, Jacqueline.

  Powder laid the three phone memos on his desk top. He reread them. The he covered them with the printout on the Painters.

  Painter Senior had been dead fifteen years, his life of crime having been cut short, at age forty-eight, by a small-caliber pistol fired into his brain from the top of the back of his neck.

  The murder was unsolved. The body had been found in the Grand Calumet River Lagoon near Gary, Indiana. Painter had lived and operated in Gary and was considered, in the records, to be the Gary representative of a loosely organized area criminal consortium based in Chicago. Gary, with Hammond and East Chicago, were the Indiana end of the Greater Chicago strip of cities along the southwestern shores of Lake Michigan.

  Painter’s son, Henry Junior, was listed as seven and in grade school at the time of the killing.

  Painter Junior had gone on to complete high school and had been fined twice, following two relatively minor drug convictions the year after. He was now twenty-two. The address on the records was his mother’s Gary address. No employment was listed.

  Junior was the only son, although Painter Senior had had two daughters by a previous wife in the early fifties. Both older sisters were married and neither lived in Indiana. There was no detail about the disposition of the first wife. The second wife had never been suspected of criminal activity. There was no indication of what she had done since her husband’s death.

  Painter Senior’s known and suspected activities were broadly based and traditional for a man who was something of a gangland boss, even if in a relatively small area. He had spent more than twelve of his forty-eight years in jail, though none in the decade before his murder.

  Powder folded the documents when he had finished reading them a second time. The action revealed the telephone memos.

  He rang Fingerprints.

  “Oh, yeah. Powder,” the nasal voice of Sappolino said. “It’s about those prints we sent to the FBI.”

  “I didn’t think it was about the tread on my left front tire,” Powder said.

  “What?”

  Powder waited.

  “We’ve had two funny calls from the Feds about your print request,” the voice said, seeming to try to begin again.

  “Oh, yes?”

  “The first one was some kind of routine asking what security clearance we had.”

  Despite himself. Powder repeated, “Security clearance?”

  “You know what that’s about?”

  “Negative.”

  “Then we got this other call that said they had no records that matched the prints anyway.”

  Powder considered.

  “Are you there, Lieutenant Powder?”

  “Do you usually get phone calls when prints aren’t on record?”

  “No. The message comes on the telex thing.”

  “Have you ever had calls before?”

  “Not that I can remember. But I wouldn’t want to say never.”

  “All right. Thanks.”

  “So what you want us to do with them now?”

  “Send them in again. Say they’re double urgent.”

  “Do I put it—”

  “Yes, on my budget,” Powder said.

  Then he called Graniela’s office.

  “The captain’s not available at the moment. Lieutenant Powder,” a receptionist said.

  “I’ve got this message to call him immediately.”

  “That’s right. I know he wants to see you.”

  “When, then?”

  “Can you come up in about fifteen minutes?”

  “I suppose.”

  “All right. We’ll see you then.”

  “What’s it all about?” Powder asked.

  “I don’t know exactly. But it’s something about reducing the size of the Missing Persons Department. Does that make any sense to you?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Powder refused to sit as he waited for Captain Graniela. For ten minutes he paced, scowling and muttering.

  When Graniela buzzed, the receptionist, relieved, jumped up and ushered Powder through.

  Graniela, in a brown sweat suit, looked even more like a bear than usual. Barbells on the floor and a stopwatch in his hand made it clear that Powder had been kept waiting so Graniela could complete a fitness routine. “I like to keep a bit of tone,” the captain said as he wrote on a clipboard,“now I’m more on the administrative side of things.”

  “Some of us have to spend our days doing police work,” Powder said acidly.

  “When we have enough to do to justify ou
r existence,” Graniela replied sharply, though he was still looking down. The man had a reputation for hard, unimaginative thinking. He picked up a towel and sat. He wiped at his face and arms.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “How is the Missing Persons throughput holding up?”

  “Higher than ever.”

  “Mmmm. That is what I read in these general circulation memos you keep sending around.”

  Powder sat.

  “And your solution rate?”

  “We call it a resolution rate and it’s the best in the Midwest.”

  “Mmmm.”

  Powder sat.

  “Still leaves you a lot of time to work on non-Missing Persons cases,” Graniela said.

  “What?”

  Graniela leaned forward. “Are you deaf, Lieutenant?”

  “I find nonsense harder to hear than sense,” Powder said.

  Graniela leaned back in his chair. “Nonsense, huh?” He looked at his fitness clipboard. He made another note on it. “Nonsense?” He snorted.

  Powder waited.

  “I was in the field as a detective for a long time. Powder. A damn sight longer than you ever were. I have a lot of contacts, both outside the force and inside it.”

  Powder looked at his watch.

  “I hear things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I hear you’ve been making a lot of requests for police records on people who, when I have them cross-checked against your own section’s file index, don’t seem to be mentioned in Missing Persons reports. I ask myself why. So I ask you, why?”

  “Because,” Powder said icily, “I bust my gut tracking down shadows and suspicions and it’s the kind of attitude that differentiates our resolution rate from departments where they don’t try so hard.”

  “But names not mentioned in MP reports?” Graniela asked again pointedly. “I’d have thought anything—even ‘shadows’—worth pulling files on ought to be mentioned in your reports. So, from here it looks either like gross inefficiency, or . . .”

  “Or what?”

  “If they’re not MP names, then they must be something else. Could be they are even for someone else. Could be you’re selling the information we have here to somebody outside.”

  “I’m corrupt, now, am I?” Powder asked, the tone of his voice rising sharply. “That’s why I spend all my winters in Florida and my summers in Europe instead of working away all my waking hours?” Powder shook his head in furious disgust. “You ask me these absurd questions. I got to ask myself a question. I ask myself why? So I ask you, why are you hassling me, Graniela?”

  “Hassle? I don’t hassle. But we got a lot of pressure on cost these days. We got to look at all this kind of thing. So, I ask you again, why are you pulling records that aren’t on your Missing Person reports?”

  “We come across things in the section that may need investigating.”

  “ ‘Investigating’ is it now? ‘Things?’ ” Graniela rocked forward. “So why not pass these ‘things’ on to the people whose job it is to do the investigating around here? Why are you doing it yourself, if you’re so goddamned busy with missing goddamned persons down there?”

  Powder said nothing.

  “If you got time to do detective work while you’re in MP, then there’s too much slack in MP. You see what I’m saying?”

  “I’ll match my department’s record against anybody’s.”

  “Well, you might just have to do that,” Graniela said definitively.

  Powder said nothing.

  “Besides, that’s not all I hear. I get this whisper that you’re cooking something up with Tidmarsh. What’s that about?”

  “We’re both into health food, so we trade recipes over lunch,” Powder said.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” Graniela said, with overplayed sarcasm. “What kind of stuff? Nut cutlets?”

  “Yeah, and bulgur wheat salads and tofu and mung beans and brown rice juice.”

  “So why is Tidmarsh suddenly coming to work at night?”

  “Gee, Captain, I don’t know. You better ask him. But I’ve spent a lifetime coming in out of hours and nobody ever complained to me. So before you go crazy you might consider whether pushing him about it might not be counterproductive. On a cost-effectiveness basis.”

  “And I hear from Special Investigations you’re off on some flier about a . . .” Graniela searched on his desk. Special Investigations was the department that dealt with inquiries concerning prominent people.

  Graniela found a piece of paper and studied it. “About a James Husk,” he said. “What’s that about?”

  Powder looked at him. “Special Investigations, huh?” Powder’s eyes narrowed; he pointed a finger. “I have this ugly, stinking feeling that we’ve finally got around to what all this crap is really about.”

  Graniela, who thought he had been subtle, hesitated for a, moment.

  “Mister Jimmy has some clout, it would seem,” Powder said.

  “What’s your interest. Powder?”

  “I’ve never met the man,” Powder said lightly, “though in the course of the normal pursuance of work on a Missing Persons case I have come across the guy who put him where he is.”

  “Why are you pulling files on him?”

  “I am thorough by nature.”

  “Special Investigations don’t want you meddling.”

  “Then we understand each other,” Powder said.

  “Do we?”

  “Because I don’t want them meddling either.” Powder stood up. “Just pass the message on, will you, errand boy? If they’ve got work that I might foul up, then tell them to talk directly to me in simple English. But if it’s just that they’re answerable to Mister Jimmy and he’s told them to take the pressure off the guy who killed his brother, then somebody better explain the concept of ‘counterproductivity’ to them too.” Powder waved his finger at Graniela. “Suddenly this whole thing has the pure odor of a scare-off. I can be scared off things, but not by the likes of you.”

  “I’ve supported the increase in the Missing Persons budget in the past, Powder,” Graniela said, breathing heavily. “In fact, I think it’s fair to say that I was a vital factor in getting your section expanded to where it is now.”

  “Which means you are capable of responding to reasonable arguments, clearly stated. That is a good quality for someone in your position.”

  “Which means,” Graniela shouted, breaking from his shaky selfcontrol, “that I can take my support away and make your life a whole lot less comfortable than it is now. All those pussy-licking newspaper articles about reunited families when some asshole strolls back through the same door he strolled out of, no thanks to you. They make me sick. Gall that PR crap police work? My granny could do what you do. Powder, and she’s been dead for twenty-five years.”

  “Well, you dig her up and roll her in. We’ve got so much work, we need all the help we can get.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Powder arrived at the table just as Tidmarsh was spreading his napkin on his lap.

  “Ah, my luncheon cabaret,” Tidmarsh said.

  “I’ve just been told we’re hatching something up together.”

  “Oh, yes? What? A chicken?” Tidmarsh looked at Powder, sought humorous response, found none, tried again. “A goose?”

  “I’ve been up with Graniela,” Powder said.

  “Society’s beachhead for the ‘new realism’ in police procedures. What did he want? Blackjack practice?”

  “You’ve met the man,” Powder observed.

  “Since I took my new role, as acting head, we’ve had one or two conjunctions.”

  “Well, he’s just told me that I have been drawing arrest records on people not mentioned in my Missing Persons reports.”

  “I see,” Tidmarsh said.

  “Did he order the cross-check through you?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, he didn’t.”

  “He also told me that you’ve been comi
ng in at night.”

  “Did he now?”

  “So he has a direct line to someone in your department. I think the work on me was done this morning, late in the morning. Does that timing suggest anybody in particular to you?”

  Tidmarsh ruminated. “It might,” he said. “I’ll run through my own records this afternoon.”

  “So at least now you know,” Powder said. He rose.

  “No lunch?”

  “I’m dining elsewhere today,” Powder said. “Hey, did you pass the good news on to Jules Mencelli yet?”

  “I called him this morning.”

  “And did he like it?”

  “I think it’s fair to say he wasn’t pleased. As much as anything he is upset that he’s not going to get computer time here.”

  “Awww. Poor baby.”

  “He also thinks I don’t know my bit from my byte.”

  “Sweet guy,” Powder said.

  “I asked him to come in this afternoon. He’s going to give me a lesson in computer analysis.”

  In a luncheonette called Mary’s, five blocks from the City-County Building, Powder found a man and woman deep in cheerful conversation. The man was Lieutenant Miller, and as soon as he noticed Powder approaching he stood up. He adopted a formal demeanor. He said, “You’re late.”

  “I’ve been helping Captain Graniela with his priorities.”

  “Oh,” Miller said. Then, “This is Ms. Wendy Winslow of the CCC Television Network. Champaign Cable Company.”

  “How do you do, Ms. Winslow?”

  Wendy Winslow, bright and friendly, stood and shook Powder’s proffered hand enthusiastically.

  They all sat again and immediately a bony waiter came to the table and addressed Powder. “I am seeing your threesome is complete. Would you be wishing to order now, sir? Your colleagues have already made their choosings clear to me but they were waiting their service for your arrival.”

  “Do you have anything in the way of a nut cutlet?” Powder asked.

  The waiter plucked a kiss from his mouth and said, “Our nut cutlets will be making you forget any other nut cutlet you have ever tasted.”

  “With whatever it should go with,” Powder said.