Missing Woman

by Michael Z. Lewin

  “No,” she said, “but—”

  “There you are, fella,” Cohee said. “Why you talking about more than one? And why you talking about someone other than Frank killing people? What do you know about it all? You tell me that, what do you know about it all?”

  I addressed Peg. “I’m going across the road to get something to eat. Could you try to explain things to the gentleman in words of two syllables or less, and then tell Sheriff Dunlap I’ll stop back later this afternoon?”

  I didn’t give her a chance to answer, and turned to leave.

  I made it to the door.

  But I couldn’t open it. Not after Cohee pushed me up against it, kicked at my legs and whispered sweet nothings in my ear like “You ain’t going nowhere, clown. You take the position so I can see if you’re carrying, or I’ll blow your fool head off.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Cohee’s attitude was neither flexible nor constructive. He threatened that if I didn’t answer his questions, he’d lock me up.

  I told him I wouldn’t talk to him anymore until he apologized nicely.

  That kind of made him mad.

  He took me to the cells, shoved me into the first empty one and secured the door. It showed me he was as good as his word.

  I was as good as my word too. I didn’t say a thing. I didn’t even ask what the charges were or what he thought would happen when Jeanna found out he’d done all this without benefit of the formalities.

  It wasn’t that I minded irritating him with such trivial little questions. It was kind of a matter of principle.

  I hadn’t been locked in a jail for years. I was pleasantly surprised by its cleanliness and comfort. It was a design-conscious two-cell-by-two-cell layout, with toilet and beds provided. If I hadn’t already found accommodation and premises, I would have considered making an offer.

  Cohee seemed to think that locking me away for a while would make me think and become more willing to talk.

  He was partly right. I hadn’t expected him to make a gesture to distract Jeanna Dunlap from roasting him about his stupid two-hour lunch. But as it was happening, it occurred to me that it might not be, such a bad way of passing the time. And I was willing to talk, I was.

  To Frank Pynne.

  Pynne was in the cell next to mine. He sat on the lower bunk staring at the jail door. He had a couple of books, but wasn’t reading. As Cohee left, Pynne looked momentarily through the bars at me.

  “We’ll have to stop meeting like this,” I said.

  He looked away.

  “I’ve met you before, Mr. Pynne,” I said.

  He turned back. “You know me?”

  “About four months ago I was hired to look for your wife. I spent half a day at it, and talked to you and lawyer Hogue in his office in the late afternoon.”

  He nodded. “I remember now. You didn’t find her.”

  “No.”

  “Damn bitch,” he said.

  We both contemplated that for a moment.

  He said, “Goddamn Boyd.” He lay down on the bed and stared at the bottom of the upper bunk.

  I asked, “Have you been charged yet?”

  He didn’t look at me. “No.”

  “Held for questioning?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think Hogue’s going to have you out soon.”

  He sat up. He faced me. “What the hell do you know about it?”

  “I was in the office out there. He’s got some sort of order, to make them either charge you or let you out.”

  I paused. He didn’t speak.

  “So unless they have some evidence, they’ll probably spring you.”

  It was a delicate fishing expedition.

  “Fuck evidence,” he said.

  I wasn’t sure if I’d caught nothing or not. I cast again. “What are they going on so far? Motive and opportunity?”

  “What the hell business is it of yours?” he asked.

  I shrugged.

  He lay down again.

  And I found myself locked in a jail in southern Indiana.

  The question of what business of mine it was kept coming up. If it wasn’t me asking, it was someone else. I was tired of it as an issue. I decided to make it my business. A client? I would be my own client.

  Might not do much for me financially, but it did wonders philosophically. Who says incarceration isn’t rehabilitative?

  I said, “Mr. Pynne, I’m still trying to find your wife.”

  “You should be out in the woods with a shovel,” he said. “If you believe Jeanna Dunlap.”

  “Should I believe Jeanna Dunlap?”

  “Half the town does, why not you?” he said.

  He seemed disinclined to latch on to the straightforward opportunity I was giving him to deny his guilt.

  I asked, “Why only half the town?”

  I saw a flicker of a smile at the springs of the upper bunk. “Why only half?” he repeated. “Good question.”

  I waited him out for a good answer.

  “I figure half,” he said, finally, “because this town is divided into pro-Billy Boyd and anti-Billy Boyd. I figure the pro-Billys all want to lynch me and the anti-Billys all want to buy me a drink.”

  “Why is Boyd such an issue?”

  “ ’Cause he makes it that way. Made it. He liked to shake things up for the rattle they made. Always talking you down, always arguing. I’ve seen him take on both church people and atheists. I’ve seen him push Dave Hogue as if he wanted to cement over the whole county. Yet if B.C.T. was all women, Billy’d have been in the middle of it and all for tearing the town down to grow the forest back.”

  “A stirrer,” I said.

  Pynne rubbed his eyes with both hands. “Ah, fuck,” he said. “How did I end up here? What the fuck am I doing here?”

  And I was suddenly back where I started. I didn’t know whether he was regretting what he had done, or regretting that he hadn’t done anything.

  I didn’t have time to unravel it. The door at the end of the corridor opened and suddenly the quiet jail was filled with people and noise. Jeanna Dunlap, Dave Hogue, Walter Cohee, and all talking at once.

  They walked past my cell to Pynne’s and unlocked his door.

  I felt a moment of panic, stood up and pressed myself against the bars. You hear things about strangers in country towns languishing in country jails.

  But Sheriff Dunlap came and let me out too. Behind her, I heard Hogue explaining to Pynne that he wasn’t allowed to leave the county. Pynne asked about his job being in Bloomington.

  But then I lost what he was told. Jeanna Dunlap occupied my attention. “Had a nice little rap session?” she asked.

  “Quite nice,” I said. “Find your other body?”

  “Not yet,” she said.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Before leaving the cluster of people at the sheriff’s office, I told Dave Hogue that I wanted to see him as soon as was convenient. He asked that I give him three-quarters of an hour to clear up matters with Pynne. I used it to eat.

  It was quarter to three when I presented myself before the desk of Betty Weddle.

  She asked if I had an appointment. I told her what Hogue had said to me and she gave a terrible moan. “But he promised,” she said.

  “Did I come in in the middle of something?”

  “He hasn’t had a bite to eat since this morning. He’s got Mr. Pynne up there now, and he promised me that when Mr. Pynne left, he would go out and have a proper meal, a no-work meal, where he just sat and relaxed.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Honestly, that man will be the death of me,” she said.

  “Mmm,” I said.

  “If he isn’t the death of himself first. He’s got a bad heart, you know.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “A very bad heart. He could be gone in a moment, pffft, just like that.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I said, “Has he had heart trouble long?”

  “
Since he was thirty-two,” she said, almost proudly. “He doesn’t like people to know about it. He’s lucky to be alive. But I tell him, just because he’s been lucky so far is no reason for him to abuse his body.”

  “And does he listen?”

  “Not today,” she said. Angrily, yet equally crediting herself with successes at other times. She shook her head. “But it’s always like this when he’s worked up about something. He gets too involved, he forgets to think about himself I tell him and tell him, he’s got to remember himself, it’s for the good of all of us, but he just goes ahead as if I hadn’t said a word. Well, I can’t sit by without speaking up. That’s what he says about things, like B.C.T. Well, I say the same about him.”

  “Men are foolish creatures,” I offered.

  She looked at me as if I were crazy. “I don’t know about that,” she said. “But he should eat.”

  Footsteps on the stairs outside spared me further opportunities to prove my sexist generalization. Betty Weddle went to the hallway door and we both heard Dave Hogue saying, “You try and get your mind off it. Relax if you can.”

  “That’s easy to say,” Pynne said harshly.

  “Just trust me, Frank.”

  “All right. But sure as shit I’m not going to sit around and get railroaded. You better realize that.”

  “There’s no way that you are going to be railroaded for this,” Hogue said.

  Frank Pynne said, “O.K., Dave,” and left.

  Weddle waited till the outside door was closed, then said, “David, you promised me you would eat, but now there’s a Mr. Samson who says you asked him to come here. Won’t you please tell him to come back later?”

  Hogue didn’t answer until they were both in the waiting room with me. “I’m not really hungry, Betty,” he said. “This way, Mr. Samson.”

  When we were alone in the large room I’d been in before, I said, “I can come back, if that would be more convenient.”

  “Betty mothers me a bit,” he said. “Maybe I encourage her sometimes. But other times . . .” He raised his eyebrows and shook his head slightly.

  “Has she been with you long?”

  “Oh yes. The year after I opened, which would make it since . . .” He thought. “Since 1965. Then I helped her through a little trouble a few years later, and—well, here we are.”

  I nodded.

  “Damn good legal secretary,” he said. “Most of the time she could do as good a job in this practice as I do. I expected her to get married again, or I would have encouraged her to take law classes.”

  “That’s not a very modern attitude,” I said.

  “I guess not,” he said.

  “She’s not too old now.”

  “Thirty-five?” He thought. “Maybe I’ll talk to her about it.” He wrote something on a note pad. “And now,” he said, “what did you want to see me about? Surely you didn’t come down just to chide me about not calling you when they found Boyd’s body?”

  “No. I came down to find some more facts, because I might be of use.”

  He raised his eyebrows, then asked, “What facts?”

  “Has Mrs. Pynne been heard from since she left?”

  “No.”

  “What evidence is there against her husband that supports Sheriff Dunlap’s notion of a double murder?”

  “Nothing concrete,” he said.

  “Come on, Mr. Hogue,” I said. “It hasn’t been pulled out of a hat.”

  “It’s primarily a matter of motive, so far,” Hogue said. “The idea is revenge because Boyd ran away with Mrs. Pynne.”

  “Ran away? They didn’t seem to get very far if Jeanna Dunlap is right.”

  Hogue shrugged. “There are only three other points that I know of. First, that Frank is a part of B.C.T., which was having trouble with Boyd. Second, that Frank and his wife had an argument in public on the night she left.”

  “Where was that?”

  “We—the B.C.T.—had a square dance. It was just clear that they were not getting along that evening. They left early.”

  “I see. And third?”

  “That Frank has been seeing a lot of another woman since his wife left.”

  “Who? Not the woman she caught him with at Boyd’s party?”

  “Yes. Sharon Doans.”

  “Which is thought to be an extra motive?”

  “I assume so.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Unless they find Mrs. Pynne’s body, yes.”

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t like it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t think Mrs. Pynne’s body is out there.”

  Solemnly he asked, “Why do you think that?”

  “Boyd was buried with care. Far from the road, in a hollow. Sheriff Dunlap says there was even some poison ivy on the grave. If Priscilla Pynne was killed at the same time by the same person, she would have been buried in the same place.”

  He thought about that.

  I said, “It seems clear that Boyd was not meant to be discovered. It was only accident that the body was found. If there were two graves, there would be twice as much chance that one would be come across. So what would be the point? No advantage to preparing two sites. So if there were two bodies, I figure they would both be there. Which means, alive or dead, Priscilla Pynne is elsewhere.”

  Finally Hogue nodded. “I think you’re right,” he said.

  “If that is so, then the simple story that they got together and then got killed together doesn’t work. And it looks to me as if Sheriff Dunlap is on the wrong tack altogether.”

  He nodded again, looking very serious.

  “The reason I came down here,” I said, “was to see whether Priscilla Pynne still needed to be looked for. Based on what we know, it seems to me that she does.”

  Hogue said, “That would appear to be inescapable.”

  “It is partly a matter of helping your client’s case. But it may be more serious than that. If a couple of people are supposed to have run off together, but one of them turns up dead, there is pretty good reason to want to ask the other one some questions.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  For the time being, Hogue hired me to work on behalf of Frank Pynne. He decided it was not in his client’s interests to wait until Sheriff Dunlap gave up woodland rambles.

  I didn’t object.

  We talked about what I would do. I explained about Elizabeth Staedtler and the chance that in the intervening time she had been in contact with Priscilla Pynne. We agreed that I would follow that up. We also agreed that I would have another try at talking to Frank Pynne. He was our best source of information about other leads in Priscilla Pynne’s background.

  I also wished to try to reconstruct as much as possible of what had happened the night of the double disappearance.

  Taking the hypothesis that Mrs. Pynne was alive raised certain questions. Boyd’s car was missing. If she took it, why was her own car left at I.U.?

  I also asked Hogue if he could find out who Boyd’s thousand a month had been paid to.

  “What thousand a month?” he asked.

  “When I was here before, I found that the only activity in his bank account was a regular payment to someone for that amount. But I couldn’t find who the money went to.”

  “I’m surprised he had that much money,” Hogue said.

  “Certainly, since his mother died . . .”

  “Of course,” he said. “I was forgetting that.”

  If he had been solemn while we talked about Frank Pynne’s plight, he became positively gloomy at the memory of Ida Boyd.

  “A fine woman,” he said. “Not an easy woman, but a fine one.”

  “You were among the people who felt Billy was involved in her death, weren’t you?”

  “It was too convenient for him,” Hogue said.

  “That was because his mother was about to make a will, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she not have a will before?
Or was she just about to change an existing will?”

  “She had no other will,” Hogue said. “It would have been her first.”

  “She was in her fifties, wasn’t she?”

  “Fifty-seven.”

  “And—”

  “And yes, she should have had a will drawn up long before.”

  “But she didn’t.”

  “Ida was a superstitious woman,” he began. “She had a number of”—he searched for words—“a number of foibles. She believed in ghosts, for instance, and ‘atmospheres’ and almost anything in the area of the E.S.P.-parapsychology-occult hocus-pocus.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’m not taking anything away from her sensitivity and love of the countryside. We were close friends. We had even just about decided to marry.”

  “I didn’t realize that.”

  “It was not a public matter,” he said gravely. “We started to give it serious thought toward the end of last year. And we did spend considerable time talking about matters of concern to her.”

  “Like her will?”

  “Ida’s husband, Billy’s father, died suddenly of heart trouble in 1960. It was in January, and was only a few days after he had signed his own will. Ida suffered terribly during that time.”

  “And associated wills with that suffering?”

  “Wills,” Hogue said, “and New Year’s resolutions and sudden warm spells and eating shrimp and half a dozen other things.”

  “I see.”

  “And it was also then that Billy ran away.”

  “You said before that he was very young.”

  “Yes. Fifteen. He ran away with a woman who was in her thirties and a sculptor. I don’t know anything else about her. She was not one of Ida’s approved subjects for discussion.”

  “How long was he gone?”

  “He came back in 1967. I’d been here for three years. Billy just reappeared, took over a property his father had owned, and was back.”

  “Had he been in touch with his mother in the seven years before he returned?”

  “Not until the months immediately beforehand. He wrote to her saying that he was willing to come back as long as she made various financial undertakings. She was deliriously happy to hear from him again and she did everything he asked.”