Missing Woman

by Michael Z. Lewin

  “I’d like you to put a car on the list, see if anybody notices it.”

  “What’s its number?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. It is a white Datsun sports car and belongs to a William Boyd of Nashville.”

  “Same guy as yesterday, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “O.K.,” he said.

  I knew things were bad. He always wants to know what’s happening, in case of an easy arrest.

  He just wrote the details down, picked up the phone and put the information people to work on finding the license number.

  Then he stared at me. “William Boyd?” he asked. “William Boyd? Are you having me chase after Hopalong Cassidy?”

  “It’s a car you’re after. Not a horse.”

  He looked at me. Then managed to laugh. “You’re a nut case,” he said.

  “I would find it hard to defend myself against that charge.”

  “Jesus, that’s the first laugh I’ve had in weeks. A pitiful little laugh at that. Heard any jokes lately?”

  “Only the one about the guy marooned on a desert island with his dog. The guy ate everything in sight and then ate the dog and, as he was chewing the last scrap of meat off it, thought to himself, Boy, Rover would really love these bones.”

  He listened quietly.

  I said, “So what’s the problem, Jerry?”

  “Hell, if you think those guys out there are trying hard to be President, you should see the politics going on in here.”

  “Anybody got time left to catch crooks?”

  “If they put all their energy into it, this would be the cleanest town in the country.”

  “O.K. You get my vote.”

  The phone rang. It was Boyd’s license number. Miller took it, then asked, “What do you want to know about it?”

  “Just where it is.”

  He shrugged. “Tell me, would I like being a private eye?”

  “You’d love it. No internal politics at all.”

  “Want a partner?”

  “Certainly. Especially one with premises.”

  “Sounds great, when do I start?”

  “Soon as you pass your nut-case test.”

  Chapter Ten

  Albert Connah greeted me warmly. A thickset black man with bright eyes, he was about my age: forty-two.

  “Mr. Samson, Mr. Samson,” he said heartily. “Kind of you to make time to see me.”

  “A pleasure, Mr. Connah, a pleasure.”

  “The deal is this,” he said, not being a man to waste valuable time, “you’re about to be out of a home, right?”

  “So my client tells me.”

  “I’ve got a place for you. You can have it rent free, in exchange for some night-watchful eye-type duties and your private-eye service up to ten days a year for expenses only. I’ll guarantee it to you on this basis for five years, but I’m really thinking in terms of ten or fifteen. Interested?”

  Are kids interested in birthday presents?

  We drove out to the property in question. It was a run-down former wholesale timber business on the west side, near Washington High School.

  “It was folding up anyway,” Connah told me. “Family business with debts, but then the guy killed himself. I got it cheap.”

  The land area involved was large, with a big storage structure around a central open loading yard. The building I was to occupy included an unprepossessing trade counter on the street with three small rooms behind it. One of these opened onto the yard.

  “I’ll take the counter out,” he said, “and have a shower put in beside the toilet. What you do about a kitchen is your problem, but you got one room for that, one room to sleep in and one for a little Ping-Pong table if you want it. The front can double as living room and office, or you can divide it. That’s up to you. In any case, the whole thing is twice as much space as you’ve got now.”

  I made it closer to four times as much. “What are you going to use the place for?” I asked him.

  “I’m a crank,” he said, with a grin. “I buy things and sell things and I make a goddamn fortune at it. I bought this place so I can make a lot of money while everybody else suffers. I’m going two ways here. This is a crappy part of town now, but in ten or fifteen years it’s going to be important again and this land is going to be Worth a mint. Now isn’t the right time to develop it, so in the meantime I’m going to fill it up with glass.”

  “With what?”

  “Yeah, you laugh, whitey, but see who comes out on top.”

  “I’m not laughing.” Smiling, that’s all.

  “Everybody complains about goddamn inflation and goddamn energy prices. I’m gambling they ain’t seen nothing yet. Next ten years the energy pressure from the Third World is going to drive the thing out of sight. People don’t see the goddamn writing on the wall. So I’m going to cash in.”

  “With glass?”

  “That’s it. Anything it takes energy to make is going to be worth its weight. So I buy now and let it sit and it gets more valuable. I pick glass because glass keeps and doesn’t need upkeep. I don’t have to heat it, or humidify it. It won’t explode, and the only thing that can replace it is plastic and that’s made out of oil in the first place. I’m going to fill the place up with quality glass. It’s going to get worth more, enough to cover the interest on my investment in the land here. Then I sell it, I sell the land, I get even richer than I am now. So what do you think of that?”

  “I think you’re a crank, Mr. Connah.”

  He gave me another big grin.

  “One thing,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m kind of fussy about the way things are where I live,” I said. “I was thinking maybe it would be a good idea if I was living on the premises while you had the alterations done. That way I’d be close at hand to consult with the builders in case of difficulties.”

  “And the architects, huh?” he said.

  “That’s it,” I said.

  “So you want to move in on Monday, right?”

  We understood each other. “Where do I sign?” I said.

  Chapter Eleven

  Not that it was quite so simple, but Glass Albert checked out as what he said he was and our respective men of law needed little time to produce the agreement on paper.

  I actually moved in the first week of July, after two weeks of transition accommodation.

  One of the first things I did when the phone was connected was call Miller, and in the course of conversation I asked whether Boyd’s car had been sighted.

  “What’s your problem?” he asked. “Paper doesn’t get dusty on my desk. If anybody’d seen Hoppy’s car, you’d have been the first to know.”

  I decided he was feeling better.

  And I forgot all about my last case on Maryland Street.

  I was feeling better too. It felt like a chance for a new beginning. Dying embers of enthusiasm glowed hot again. I polished my furniture. I painted the outside of the new office and hung my neon sign. I went off my diet and lost weight anyway. I mounted my old office door, with its invitation “Walk right in,” in a place of honor on a side wall, like a first dollar. I used the fact that I had changed addresses as an excuse to circularize all the law offices in town, and I borrowed money to advertise for a month in the newspaper. I turned the neon sign on for the first time on Bastille Day and as an office-warming present my woman got my telephone-answering machine out of hock.

  Through the course of the summer, as the timber bays filled with glass, I even got some work.

  I was not bound by the tenancy agreement to be on the premises for any set number of hours each day or week. My irregular pattern of work and usual attendance on the premises at night provided my contribution to the protection of Glass Albert’s appreciating assets. He chipped in a chain fence topped with barbed wire and I became the best-protected private detective in town.

  I began to dream sometimes about children throwing stones and about sopranos with piercing voices.<
br />
  With reasonable notice, Glass Albert had claim to ten of my working days a year. His idea was that I might do the same background work on other prospective offspring-in-law that I had already done on his eldest son’s friend.

  “I’ve got seven children,” he said, “and they are all stubborn. I’m not fussy about who they marry, but I want to make sure their lives aren’t centered around sucking up to me for money.”

  There was also the prospect, in time, that I would come in for some of his regular investigation work, above and beyond the ten days. “Getting information is the hard part of what I do,” he said. “If you know things, understand things, you get rich.”

  I took his word for it.

  In September, I also agreed to make an addition to our arrangement.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said, “about all that space in the loading yard.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re going to roof it and fill it up with marbles.”

  He looked up and gave it a moment’s thought before he said, “Nah. I want to put a basket up out there. That all right with you?”

  “A basket? Like basketball?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, my man!”

  The basket projected from the back of my living quarters and was erected the next day by a pair of carpenters. Glass Albert came along in the afternoon with a ball.

  “Sometimes I feel like shooting a few hoops,” he said, “but these days I get embarrassed going to the parks among all those kids.”

  I sympathized.

  “I always wanted a basket, someplace to shoot in private. My family’s gone so goddamn soft and fancy, they try to make me feel bad about liking this game. My wife calls it a nigger game and wants me to strut around a golf course. To hell with that. And even my young kids won’t watch the goddamn Pacers with me.”

  I told him what a hard life he led, and offered, as a special favor, to let him store his ball with me. I even undertook to look at it occasionally and check that it had enough air.

  By the standards of my adult life, it was an idyllic summer.

  Chapter Twelve

  I read about the discovery of Billy Boyd’s body on the first Tuesday in November. I’d set the day aside to catch up on paperwork, so I was reading the Star with a thoroughness I don’t always apply to it. Especially in a time of elections.

  It was a brief notice. It said that a body discovered in Brown County by campers on Sunday had been identified as that of a local businessman, William Boyd.

  When I read the story the first time, my reaction was interest. That it was something from my past, far removed because of all the things which had happened to me in the intervening four and a half months.

  I began to read on in the paper. But I stopped. I went back to the story and, read it again.

  Spectator detachment started to give way to something sharper, more immediate. My heartbeat increased.

  It suddenly seemed conceivable that I was involved.

  I couldn’t decide at first. It seemed superficially so unlikely that there would be any real need to change my comfortable plans for the day.

  But Boyd dead . . . If he’d been dead all the time . . .

  I put the Star aside and went to my files. I found the notes on the work I’d done for Elizabeth Staedtler, and I read them through.

  The question remained open. The newspaper report was too short, hadn’t said how long Boyd had been dead, whether he’d been killed, died naturally or committed suicide. But it was possible that they were looking for Priscilla Pynne. If they were, they might want to find Elizabeth Staedtler. And in the whole world I was probably their best link to her, weak as I was.

  I had to go to Nashville.

  I did that part of my paperwork which was essential.

  I turned on the answering machine and got out the van.

  In the old days I had a human answering service, a woman I never met called Dorrie. But she went out of business. When she called me to say she was folding up, she cried. “I’m an anachronism,” she said.

  I thought a lot about things like that as I drove south. I found I didn’t enjoy the late-season foliage or the unseasonably warm weather at all.

  My first stop was the sheriff s office.

  I had expected it to be buzzing with activity, but it was empty, except for my soft-spoken switchboard operator. My notes said her name was Peg.

  When I walked in, she was on the telephone. She looked tired and strained. She could not be the only communications operator employed by the department, but if Boyd’s body had been found two days before, I could understand that there was enough tension to go around.

  “Yes, sir?” she asked. “Help you?”

  “I want to speak to Sheriff Dunlap about the Boyd case.”

  “Doesn’t everybody?” she asked rhetorically. Then she looked at me again. “Do I know you?”

  “I was in here in June, trying to trace Priscilla Pynne.”

  “Haven’t you lost some weight?”

  Woman after my own heart. “I have,” I said.

  She nodded. “Jeanna’s gone out to see how the search party’s getting on. I don’t know when she’s going to be back.”

  “What search party is that?”

  “Billy, he was found in the woods.” She paused. “You know about this or not?”

  “I know what was in the Star this morning.”

  “Well, he was found in the woods and they’re out looking for Mrs. Pynne’s body.”

  It sounded stark, and rocked me slightly. “Oh.”

  “You knew they went away together?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, it’s like my mama used to say, Where one is, the other is. When I was trying to find my shoes or my gloves or something.”

  “How long have they been looking?”

  “Since yesterday afternoon.”

  “So they knew it was Boyd then?”

  “Jeanna took one look on Sunday night when the body came in and she knew it was Billy. With him missing, there wasn’t much chance remains that size was going to be anybody else.”

  The switchboard sounded. She turned from me and answered a phone call. She explained that they were sorry Deputy Cohee had missed an appointment to give the caller advice on home security, but an unavoidable emergency had come up and he was required to stay in the office.

  When she turned back to me, I asked, “Where is Deputy Cohee, then?”

  “Eating lunch,” she said sourly. “You want me to call Jeanna?”

  “I’ll go out to her, if you tell me where to go.”

  “You follow State 46 out of town, toward Columbus.”

  “East?”

  “Yes, sir. And you’ll likely see the cars and that on the road. It’s after 135 branches off, a mile or so this side of Gnaw Bone. The land doesn’t have a name, but it’s the north side of the road.”

  “This isn’t the land that Boyd inherited from his mother, is it?”

  “That’s right. You know where it is?”

  “No, but I was told about it. It’s a large area, isn’t it?”

  “Couple of square miles, I think.”

  “And it’s all woods and hills?”

  “Sure is.”

  “And they’re searching it all?”

  “They sure are.”

  * * * * *

  I found the cluster of cars easily. There were perhaps a dozen, though the only people among them were a picnicking family, two adults and three near-teenage children. The adults were resting on folding aluminum chairs, drinking from a giant thermos bottle. One child was eating cake amidst the debris of a meal while the other two grappled in the grass.

  I was going to interrupt them, but as I approached, the woman saw me and nudged her husband. He got up immediately and trotted to me with a hand extended. “Maurie Mappes,” he said. “Glad to meet you.”

  “I was coming over to ask if you know where everybody is.”

  “Up in the woods,” he sai
d.

  His wife joined us. “They’re looking for a body to go with the one they found day before yesterday.”

  “I know,” I said.

  He nodded. “You press? State police? Federal? Or what?”

  “What,” I said. “Do you know which way in the woods? And how far?”

  “Well,” the wife said, “we can’t hear them anymore, can we, Maurie?”

  “No. They been out of earshot now for more than an hour.” He checked his watch. “Yup. They’re going through the whole place, you know.”

  “The whole forest,” Mrs. Mappes said.

  “But they’ll find her, all right. And then they’ll have him dead to rights, they will.”

  “Dead to rights,” Mrs. Mappes echoed.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Why, the husband!” he said.

  “The husband of the woman they’re finding,” she said.

  “They’ve arrested him. It’s a bit of a surprise to me he doesn’t just tell them where he put her and save them all this trouble,” he said.

  “Though it’s possible he doesn’t remember, Maurie. That’s possible.”

  “Anything’s possible,” he agreed. “But you’d think he would remember where he buried his wife, wouldn’t you? I mean, that’s only reasonable.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  I made my way into the woods. There was no clear footpath, but it was the gnarled roots of the established trees rather than the light undergrowth that made me pick my steps with care.

  I walked up a short rise from the roadside and then dropped into deepening forest. Half the trees were bare now, patchily dressing the forest floor with a fresh and florid cloak.

  I soon felt very much alone and once woke out of woody distractions to find myself poking a clump of heart-shaped leaves to look for second-flowering violets.

  I had to force my mind back onto work, against the magnet of bosky musings on man’s insignificances and the effect of a dry fall.

  As the terrain rolled and rocked, I tried to keep a straight line in from the road.

  It was several minutes before I heard voices and found the searchers.

  Jeanna Dunlap stood watching them dourly, hands on her hips. A line of thirty men and boys moved slowly forward, prodding the earth with poles. Half were in civilian dress, four were sheriff’s deputies and the rest were Boy Scouts.