Missing Woman

by Michael Z. Lewin

  The line produced nonstop chatter, but Sheriff Dunlap said nothing as she watched me approach. When I stopped in front of her, she said, “Remind me.”

  I gave her my name. “I’m the private detective who was here in June looking for Priscilla Pynne.”

  She swayed in affirmation. “I knew I recollected you. Wait here.”

  She walked to one of the deputies and he stepped out of the line to take her supervisory position. The sheriff then led me several yards away.

  “Now, Mr. Samson, “ she said, “what brings you back to our fair county?” She spoke heavily, and looked as if she hadn’t slept for days.

  “I read about Boyd in the Star this morning.”

  “I think I’d worked that much out for myself,” she said.

  “How was he found?”

  She eyed me before answering, but said, “A couple of folks from Seymour way were camping. The woman was looking for some firewood and disturbed a snake. She hit at it and chased it. There were some rocks and the snake went under them. She turned a couple over, and she found the toe of his shoe. She dug away a little and it didn’t come loose. Called her husband. He called us.”

  “A snake?” I asked.

  “There’s quite a few in these parts. Even some rattlers. We get a few bites each year. Usually kids looking for arrowheads.” She shrugged. “Probably some little old rock snake, this one. But he found Billy for us.”

  “You expected Boyd to return,” I said.

  “Sure as hell didn’t expect it to be like this,” she said.

  I asked, “Is this land open for camping?”

  “No.”

  “Why were they on it?”

  “Experienced campers. Wanting to get away from people.”

  “Bit late in the season, isn’t it?”

  “They say they wanted to camp out through the elections. Idea was to come in on the Saturday, leave the week on Sunday. They picked this part of the area because there are no facilities.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “What’s that to you, Mr. Samson?”

  Quite a good question. “That’s a good question. I just feel involved.”

  “That’s obvious from you being here so quick,” she said. It was not a casual, passing comment.

  I volunteered my explanation. “I was hired to find Mrs. Pynne. I couldn’t do it, but by now the woman who hired me might have found her herself. Or Mrs. Pynne might have got in touch with her. If that’s so, then it has to be followed up.”

  “Except she didn’t find Mrs, Pynne and Mrs. Pynne didn’t find her,” Sheriff Dunlap said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because Mrs. Pynne is in here,” she said. She waved her hand around. “Pushing up grass and rattlesnakes, waiting for us to find her. I know that like I know my own name.”

  She did not encourage questions on the subject. I said, “Has Boyd’s body been here the full time since he went missing?”

  “Near as we can tell.”

  “Has Boyd’s car been found?”

  “No, it hasn’t. But it might even be one of the things we find somewhere in here.”

  “The car?”

  “Billy’s grave was prepared carefully. Way back from the road, in a nice little hollow, piled with rocks and with goddamn poison ivy in the middle. Guy did that might take the trouble to do something fancy getting rid of the car.”

  She seemed defensive and convinced, however unlikely getting rid of a car in a wood seemed to me.

  “We could find a lot of things in here,” she said. “We’re looking at everything. Not just for Cilia Pynne.”

  I went back to the idea of the preparation of the grave. “You haven’t said it, but I assume Boyd was murdered.”

  “Yup.”

  “Do you know how he was killed?”

  “Andy’s called in somebody from Indianapolis to look at it today. No broken bones, no bullet. Nothing simple like that. Andy reckons he was strangled, but we should have it for sure”—she looked at her watch—“pretty soon.”

  “Do you know who did it?”

  “We’ve got us a working hypothesis,” she said steadily.

  “I hear that you have Frank Pynne in custody.”

  She said quietly, “Now, that wasn’t in no newspaper, Mr. Samson.”

  “No. Some bloodthirsty sightseers on the road told me.”

  She didn’t believe me.

  “There’s a family picnicking down there. They’re waiting for you to bring Mrs. Pynne’s corpse down so they can look and see if it has all its fingers and whether she died smiling. You know the type.”

  “I know the type. I just don’t know how they know we’ve got Frank locked up.”

  “It’s true, then?”

  “It’s true,” she said. She scratched the back of her neck. “I bet it’s goddamn Milt. I saw him talking to some people. I thought he was telling them to go away.”

  “One of your deputies?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why Frank Pynne?” I asked.

  She looked at me as if I had gone too stupid for belief. “Up in the big city you folks may go in a lot for changing your partners, but down here a man runs off with your wife, we take it serious.”

  “Jeanna!” The call came from the search line.

  Sheriff Dunlap looked from me to the caller. “Don’t suppose you want to join in the search?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  She left me to mull over what she had been saying. It didn’t take me long. I didn’t credit it. Indeed, the social piousness even sounded out of character. I followed her back toward the line and saw that the deputy she’d left in charge was holding up a soiled sneaker. It looked like a man’s, and a large one at that. Sheriff Dunlap didn’t seem very interested.

  Neither was I.

  I turned back toward where I thought the road was and walked for a while. Then I lost certainty of my direction. On the way in I had stopped paying attention to my route when I’d heard voices ahead of me. Now the more I looked around, the less idea I had of which way the road lay. Trees look pretty much the same to a timber-yard dweller.

  I was about to go back to the sheriff when I saw a burly little Boy Scout sauntering in a direction which would pass near me. He was going at about right angles to what I would have guessed was the right way. He carried a hatchet and now and then he took a swipe at a tree.

  “Excuse me,” I called to him.

  “Huh?” He stopped.

  “You going back to the road?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m a little bit disoriented. I’ll follow along with you, if that’s all right.”

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  He resumed his jaunt as if I hadn’t ever appeared. A troll on a stroll. I had to make an effort to keep up with him. “You guys been out here all day?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Is it a school holiday of some sort?”

  “Naw. They let us out special. Mr. Jacobs, the scoutmaster, he gets us out.”

  It struck me as a gruesome project, but I didn’t know quite how to put it. “Wouldn’t it be kind of creepy if you find what you’re looking for?”

  “Naw,” he said. “Mr. Jacobs, he gets us helping on a lot of stuff. Accidents and people lost in the woods.”

  “I see.”

  “Besides, you gotta face death sometime,” he said. He took a hatchet-swipe at a tree. “Like over there,” he said.

  I looked where he pointed with his blade and saw a rocky hollow in which much of the earth had been disturbed. “That’s where they found him?”

  “Yes, sir. We spent yesterday digging the whole place up. Then filling it in again.”

  He stood looking at it for a moment, and without further ceremony started for the road again.

  He chopped a hunk off a tree about every twenty steps. He seemed to enjoy it. I wondered how the trees felt on the subject.

  When we emerged on the roadside, the Mappes fa
mily was playing Wiffle Ball. Maurie Mappes sacrificed a pop fly when he saw me.

  “Hey, hello!” he called. He waved and trotted over. “How you doing?”

  “I’m doing fine.” I could see Ma Mappes accosting the scout.

  “They found anything yet?”

  “Yes, some dead . . .” I let it hang.

  Mappes nearly had a hemorrhage.

  “Some dead leaves. In fact quite a lot of dead leaves.”

  He didn’t understand.

  I tried to explain. “You gotta face death sometime,” I said.

  I felt him growing angry, but I was saved possible violence by his wife calling, “A rusty knife, Maurie! They found a rusty knife.”

  The scout’s audience doubled. I was left alone and I made use of the opportunity to find my panel truck.

  As I got in, I heard an urgent voice. “Jeanna? You there, Jeanna? Please answer.”

  It was the sheriff’s car radio. I started to get out again. But then I didn’t. It wasn’t my business to send scouts to get sheriffs to respond to their unattended radios.

  I drove back toward Nashville.

  Not that much around here was my business.

  Chapter Fourteen

  In Nashville, I went back to the sheriff’s office. There I found Dave Hogue badgering my soft-voiced switchboard lady.

  “I’m trying to raise her! I’m trying!” Peg pleaded. She sounded exasperated. “I don’t know what else you expect me to do.”

  “I expect you to get the sheriff here right away,” he said with ominous passion in his voice. “You are her communications officer. This is a legal order.” He waved a document, and I doubted whether it was the first time he’d swung it around. “If it is ignored, everybody in this office is vulnerable.”

  The receptionist saw me. “Mister,” she said, “I’ve been trying to get Jeanna on the two-way, but she doesn’t answer. Do you know where she is? Did you find her?”

  Hogue turned to me with fire in his eyes. The blaze obscured any recognition process.

  I said, “She’s with the people combing the woods and she’s out of earshot of her car’s radio.”

  “That’s crass irresponsibility,” Hogue said.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked. Like everything else, it was none of my business. But Hogue hardly needed encouragement to repeat his complaint.

  “I’ve got a judicial order that my client be either charged or released. Jeanna Dunlap leaves a deputy in charge who takes two hours for lunch and wouldn’t be able to make a decision for himself anyway. She clears out to play needle-in-the-haystack and that leaves my client locked up back there when he should be out on the streets.” He waved his document in the direction of a heavy door, which seemed, in the context, to locate the sheriff’s jail for me.

  Peg had regained her composure. “There’s only so much I can do, Dave, and there’s no point in carrying on to me about it.”

  “Looks like Deputy Cohee should be found and sent out for the sheriff,” I said.

  “The sheriff should be within radio contact,” Hogue said pigheadedly.

  “But she isn’t. So next best is to go send someone out to her.”

  “I can find her myself. Looks like I’m going to have to.”

  “They’re not close to the road,” I said. “It might be just as well to get Cohee to do it.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Hogue asked me icily.

  “I had trouble finding my way around in the woods there,” I said. “That’s all.”

  “I won’t have any trouble finding my way around,” he said.

  And he left.

  I said, “I suppose it is obvious, but I take it Mr. Hogue’s client is Frank Pynne.”

  “It sure is.”

  “Could I go through and talk to him?”

  She stared at me, as if surprised I should ask. “No, sir, you can’t. And you know I couldn’t authorize it neither.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She didn’t take the apology. She’d been having some hard days.

  “I am sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think. It’s just I need to find out more about what’s happened so I can decide whether I’m needed.”

  “What would you be needed for?”

  “It is just conceivable that I might be a witness.”

  “A witness? Against Frank?”

  “Not necessarily against him, but in the case.”

  She registered this.

  “I also take it Pynne hasn’t confessed.”

  “No, sir. He says the whole thing is a load of . . .”

  “Falsehoods?”

  “That’s it.”

  I grew silent.

  “Look, mister,” she said. “What is it you want? Waiting for Jeanna again, or what?”

  “I have a few questions, but I can only ask them of the sheriff or of Pynne’s lawyer. So I’ve just got to kill some time.”

  She began to say something but the telephone rang. At the same time, a short, round man in his sixties, with thin white hair both on his head and on his upper lip, came into the room. He seemed comfortable there, and my switchboard lady seemed to know him. He stood quietly, fingering a manila folder, while she dealt with the call. I sat down off to the side.

  When she finished, he said, “Peg, I have the preliminary findings for Jeanna. I’ll go home and write them up tonight, but she wanted the results as soon as possible. She here?”

  “No, Andy. But she’ll likely be back any time now.”

  “O.K. Hey, I was right. He was strangled.”

  “Oh my.”

  “But I was also wrong. There was a little fracture, in his back, just below the neck.”

  Andy seemed more enthusiastic about these details than Peg was.

  “The pathologist who came down says it’s likely Billy was strangled from behind, either lying down or thrown face down, by someone who put a knee between his shoulder blades while he was pulling on the rope or the wire around the neck. Christ, the guy is good. I sure did miss that crack in the back.”

  “Well, I’ll tell Jeanna. Soon as she comes in.”

  “See, it all comes together, doesn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “That kind of killing. That’s the sort of thing they teach in the Army, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Frank was in the Army, wasn’t he? He was in Vietnam.”

  “Lots of folks been in the Army, Andy.” From my place on the side I applauded this observation. Too many things are found the way they are because people look for them to be that way.

  “I know, I know,” the doctor said. “It wasn’t me that made the point about the services. It was the pathologist. He’s seen a lot of it. He served with them. It’s not me setting Frank up. Frank’s all right. I think he had a dud for a wife. I’m sorry if he’s responsible for all this but if he is, then she gave him cause and I, for one, can’t fault him all that much for it.”

  “Well, I’ll tell Jeanna. The formal report will be with her—when, tomorrow morning?”

  “Yeah. That’s fine,” he said. “There’s some other lab work to do on organs and blood, but they’ll come to her direct from Indianapolis.”

  “O.K.”

  “I’m on home, then; you take care of yourself, Peg.”

  “And you too, Andy.”

  As he was about to leave, I caught his attention. “You’re Doctor Kubiak, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you happen to notice, in the remains of Mr. Boyd’s clothing, whether his wallet was still there and whether there was any money in it?”

  He looked at me hard. “Who are you?” He turned to Peg. “Who is he?”

  She shrugged.

  “I’m a private detective.”

  “Debt collection?” he said. “Sheriff Dunlap will let you know any aspects of my report which she thinks you are entitled to know. Excuse me.” He walked out.

  As Kubiak left, a
tall young man in deputy’s uniform came in. I began to feel as if I should have paid admission. People at work, while I watched.

  “Walter, where the deuce you been? What you doing not coming back? People here been screaming for your neck, no joke.”

  “There was an accident, Peg. Right as I was a-walking by. I cain’t ignore something like that.”

  At that moment the voice of Jeanna Dunlap crackled over her two-way radio. “Peggy? Peggy? This is Jeanna. Over.”

  “I read you, Jeanna.”

  “I’m coming in in a couple minutes. Andy bring a report in yet? Over.”

  “Yes. Just now. Hey, Jeanna, Dave Hogue caught up with you yet?”

  “No. He looking for me? Over.”

  “Sure is. Jumping around like a jackrabbit in a frying pan. He wants you to charge Frank Pynne or let him out.”

  “Hell, we’ve only had him a little more than a day. We’ll have him for a whole lot longer than that, too. Over.”

  “Well, Dave’s on his way out to you now.”

  “I’ll wait here till he comes, then. Anything else? Over.”

  “Nope.”

  “Ten four, then.”

  “Bye-bye.”

  “Wow, Peg,” Deputy Cohee said, “if’n Dave Hogue’s that hopped up, sure am glad I’m here and not out there.”

  I asked, “What are the chances of Hogue getting Frank Pynne out?”

  Cohee turned to me smiling, but as he realized he didn’t know me, his good humor faded. “Who are you, mister? Who is he, Peg?”

  “I think he’s waiting to see Jeanna. He says he may be a witness.”

  “A witness?” Cohee lit up again, but not with a smile. “You saw Frank at it on the night?”

  I felt packaged. No more comfortable because it was a box of my own making. “No, nothing like that.”

  “What is it like? You try me, mister.”

  “No, it’s nothing simple.”

  “It don’t have to be simple for me to comprehend it,” Cohee said. “I got my diploma. I’m no dummy.”

  “That’s not what I meant. It is only that if Frank Pynne committed these murders, then nothing of what I think is relevant. But if he didn’t, then I might be able to help.”

  “Murders,” Cohee repeated, “Murders? Who said anything about there being more than one? They found another body yet, Peg? They got more than one yet?”