Missing Woman

by Michael Z. Lewin

  “Do you know what he asked?”

  “No. At that time I was not her lawyer. I’ve never seen the papers.”

  “And the woman?”

  “She never figured in his life again, as far as one knows. I was told her name, but I don’t recall it. I can’t remember how long it’s been since anybody talked about this. Years and years.”

  “I see.”

  Slightly ironically, Hogue commented, “In a small town, one never suffers from lack of tittle-tattle.”

  “Suffers from too much of it, perhaps?”

  “I admit I’ve never managed breathlessness while waiting for the latest nuance of who’s with who. But I’m reasonably well adjusted to life here. And very very fond of the surrounding area. I don’t know what I’d do without it now.”

  “What I was getting at when I asked about wills,” I said, “was this. If Billy was involved in his mother’s death, he must have known about the will his mother was going to make. How would he have known about it?”

  Hogue said, “I don’t know for sure. But one is never surprised when people know things around here.”

  “Would his mother have told him what she was planning?”

  “It’s certainly possible,” he said. “Billy never seemed cut out for the role of dutiful child, but they conversed. And he had been after her about the land. She was resisting the kind of plans he had for it. That’s what the will was about, and she had come to feel strongly enough about it to overcome the great fears she had. I respected her a lot for that. However little I respected the fears, they were real for her.”

  “Did Billy and his mother live in the same house?”

  “Yes. Part of their arrangement, although it was more than large enough for him to”—hesitation—“maintain his privacy. The house is just across the street, in fact.”

  He pointed to a very substantial brick building across Thomas Street, a little bit farther from the corner than the building I was in. In the pre-car age, people actually lived in towns and wanted to be near their work.

  “So Billy could have been there when Mrs. Boyd died?”

  “Oh yes. Except he seems to have been elsewhere.”

  “I assume that if there had been any leads in Mrs. Boyd’s death, you would have followed them up at the time.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Mr. Hogue?”

  “I . . . I was . . . If Ida resented his running away when she needed him, she also felt maternal guilt about him. She would say, ‘He is my only child.’ I . . . I could hear her voice just now, saying that.” He hung his head.

  One of the real kinds of ghost.

  Then Betty Weddle walked in. She carried a tray with two cups on it and a large white paper bag. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Samson, but David must eat, and if he has to work while he’s doing it, then he has to.”

  “Betty, this is not—”

  “I’ve been out for a few things, and I have a Danish and coffee for Mr. Samson. Just let me lay it out and I’ll leave. I will not be swayed.”

  Swiftly and deftly, food was unpacked and distributed. Hogue was given soup, a sandwich, a large salad, tea and an apple.

  Good as her word, Weddle left as soon as things were set out.

  “This is embarrassing,” Hogue said.

  “I’m impressed,” I said, from the perspective of someone who’d taken care of himself unaided for years. “And she said that you’d had some heart trouble, so it’s only right that—”

  “Did she tell you that?” he asked sharply.

  “Yes, before I came up.”

  He sighed heavily. “That’s too much, it really is.”

  “It was only in the context of the necessity of your taking care of yourself.”

  “She’s in a . . . a mood, or something. Somehow my authority is being eroded. She’s taking over in areas in which she has no business. This has been going on for weeks now, but it’s getting critical. I’ve really got to do something about it.”

  It didn’t involve me.

  “What makes it the more incomprehensible is that she was on the point of leaving just after Christmas.”

  “Leaving? Why?”

  “Too long in one place, she said. I don’t really know.” He shook his head. He drank from his soup. “However, it is not your problem.”

  “No,” I said.

  But while I had my sweet roll and coffee, I mulled over whether Hogue could be as unaware of his secretary’s attachment for him as he seemed to be.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I drove west out of Nashville. After finding no one at home at Frank Pynne’s cabin I drove on to Sharon Doans’ house. I was not surprised, as I turned left at the S.A.D. mailbox, to see a red Fiesta next to Doans’ yellow Beetle. The two colors seemed highlights in the late-autumn landscape in which the chapel-like house was set.

  A few moments after I knocked, Sharon Doans opened the door, took one look at me and said, “Well, speak of the devil.”

  She stood with a hand behind her back and seemed, for a moment, ready to let the conversational development rest where it started.

  I said, “I’d like a few words, if it isn’t too inconvenient, Miss Doans.”

  “Sure. Come on in.”

  I went in. Frank Pynne sat on one of the wicker chairs near the front windows. He, too, held a hand conspicuously out of sight.

  Doans walked ahead of me. She showed me a cigarette, raised her eyebrows and then drew deeply on it. She was completely without the dramatic dress-up trappings of my first visit. She wore faded jeans and a brown flannel shirt. I looked across the room and saw that the easel was bare. She must have been between covers.

  I said to Pynne, “I’ve just come from your lawyer.”

  “Bully for you.”

  “In case you’re interested, he’s retained me to work on your behalf.”

  I’d expected a reaction, but he only took a puff on his home-roll.

  It was Sharon Doans who asked, “What can you do for Frank?”

  “Try to find his wife.”

  “That’s what you were trying to do when you came here before, wasn’t it?”

  “You have a good memory,” I said.

  “No, I don’t. I have a lousy memory,” she said. “I’m rotten like that. I didn’t remember any of it till Frank said. So I looked you up.”

  “Oh?”

  “I write the things that happen to me sometimes. You dropped in out of the blue and told me how much longer pot lasts than booze. So I wrote you down for that day. It was June thirteenth.”

  I noticed a red book on the table.

  “So I’ve been reading you to Frank, all the stuff I told you about Silly.”

  “Fucking busybody,” Pynne said.

  “In which case,” I said, “you won’t be surprised to hear that I’m here wanting more information about Mrs. Pynne.”

  “There ain’t no more,” Frank Pynne said, now laconic.

  I said, “Your lawyer believes you are innocent of the murder or murders that other people seem to think you committed. I’d have thought you could muster at least an iota of attention for the efforts being made on your behalf.”

  “I didn’t kill anybody,” he said. “I may when she comes back, but not so far.”

  “Great,” I said. “But suppose the police turn someone up who saw your car near Boyd’s place on the night. Or saw you walking in the woods where he was found. Or suppose they find your wife’s body. How easy do you think it is going to be then for Dave Hogue to spring you from the sheriff’s jail so you can light up with your friend? Can you prove where you were on the night of April twelfth? Are you ready for the grilling you’re going to get when the law gets around to you again after its walk in the woods? If you think you’re going to get a smooth ride through this, then you’re off your skateboard.”

  “All right, all right,” he said. He turned dark and inward, like a man reminded of a past he thought he’d escaped. Only, Pynne’s past was happening now.<
br />
  “When did you last see your wife?” I asked.

  “When I went back to my side of the bed about one in the morning the night she left,” he said.

  “Oh, poor Frankie,” Sharon Doans said.

  “So she left after you went to sleep that night?”

  “Looks like,” he said.

  “Are you a heavy sleeper?”

  “I didn’t hear her go. I didn’t wake up and wave goodbye.”

  “Let me put it this way. Did she take clothes with her? A suitcase?”

  “Yeah. A lot of her stuff was gone.”

  “When did she pack?”

  “How the hell do I know when she packed? She didn’t ask me to help her.”

  “You were out together that night, at a square dance,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, looking at me as if I had no right to know such a thing.

  “And you left it together?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And came home?”

  “And parked the car and walked in the door and—”

  “I’m trying to find out whether she had time to pack her things that night without your knowing about it. Did you leave her alone for any length of time after the dance?”

  He thought. “No.”

  “So,” I said, with a sigh, “either she packed after you were asleep or she packed sometime before. Could she have packed without waking you up?”

  “I sleep when I sleep,” he said. “But . . . I wouldn’t have thought so.”

  “Which suggests she had made plans,” I said patiently.

  “The bitch,” he said. “The goddamn bitch.” He stubbed his cigarette butt out between his fingers and stood up. “I don’t know what the hell is going on.” He walked around the room, uncomfortable in the cage of anger against his wife which he’d lived in over half a year.

  Sharon Doans and I watched him pace the room. He dominated attention. He got a glass and ran some water into it. He drank it fiercely.

  He sat down again, dropping himself in the chair, making it seem frail. “Hell,” he said. He shook his head. “We didn’t get along that well. Never. I led. She followed, only she didn’t like following so much lately. Like, I wanted a baby. If two, three years ago I’d said baby, boom, those pills would be in the John. Now she tells me she wants to wait and I know that means she doesn’t want one.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  I said, “I’d like names and addresses of your wife’s friends and family.”

  “Huh,” he said bitterly. “That won’t take long. She didn’t have any friends and I don’t know where her parents are. And they were the only relatives I ever met.”

  “Elizabeth Staedtler, the friend of your wife’s who originally hired me, told me that she and your wife wrote once or twice a year over the last five years or so.”

  “First I’ve heard of it,” he said. In a way that made it clear he’d heard a lot of things for the first time recently.

  “And her parents?”

  “Springfield, Mass., six years ago. Her mother turned out for the wedding. Her father was too drunk.”

  “Did the parents live together?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you don’t know where they might have gone if they’re not still in Springfield?”

  “No.”

  “What street did they live on then?”

  “It was something like Cawly or . . .”

  “And your wife was never in touch with them since you were married?”

  “No,” he said. But ironically, because he now meant, “Not as far as I know.”

  “What was her maiden name?”

  “Pitman.”

  “And can’t you remember anything that might fill the picture a little?”

  “Sharon already told you more than I remember,” Pynne said. “I could tell you more about Nam.”

  “Did you kill Boyd?”

  He glared ferociously. I took that for an answer in the negative.

  “O.K., what do you think happened to him?”

  The question stopped him. I said, “Hadn’t you asked yourself that?”

  “Nope,” he said. “What happened?” rhetorically. “Huh. I suppose the bastard didn’t kill himself after a blinding moment of lucidity?”

  “He was strangled and the top of his back was broken.”

  Pynne thought about it.

  Sharon Doans fainted.

  I’d never been in the presence of someone who had actually passed out without being slugged or something. I didn’t know what to do. We laid her out on the floor and checked her breathing. While I was considering further examination, she came around.

  “Oh God,” she said. “What happened?”

  We told her.

  “It was what you said about Billy. I pictured it. I’m a little bit squeamish.”

  She sat up. It was her turn for a drink of water.

  “I’m all right. I’m O.K.” She moved to a chair.

  Pynne brought us back. “I wouldn’t have thought Cilia could have killed him that way.” But he said it in such a way that it was clear he was giving it careful consideration.

  I was interested that I hadn’t been the one to raise the possibility that she had killed Boyd.

  “How strong was she? Is she?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Pretty strong.”

  “Even small dead men are pretty heavy when you carry them through the woods.”

  “She’d be as strong as she had to be,” he decided.

  “And suppose they are both dead?” I said. “If you didn’t do it, who did?”

  He shook his head and shrugged.

  “Miss Doans?”

  “Someone to kill them both? God, I don’t know.”

  “Or suppose she’s alive and didn’t do it. Who benefits from Boyd dying?”

  “Everybody,” Pynne said.

  “A really useful answer,” I said. “They’ll love it in court.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. Shit.”

  Sharon Doans was recovered enough to be solicitous of Pynne’s deteriorating emotional state. She told me to leave him alone.

  “Do you know who gets the property?” I asked her before I left. “I gather there’s quite a lot here and there.”

  “Especially here,” she said. “He owned this house.”

  “Who will it go to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What about relatives?”

  “There aren’t any. None that I know about.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  I left Pynne and Doans consoling each other in a cloud of velvet smoke. I carried my own kind of cloud with me. It was thin, hazy mental stuff, an unease. But unease seemed a perpetual characteristic of my ramblings in southern Indiana.

  I parked in Nashville and walked to Boyd’s art gallery.

  I managed to get there in business hours this time, shortly before five. But nobody was visible inside.

  I went in. Within a minute I was joined from a back room by a substantial woman of about forty. She wore an autumn-red suit, pink coral jewelry and a big smile.

  I had an immediate sense that I wouldn’t want to play poker with her. There was a basic brightness about her manner and smile which made me suspicious in the way that fit the old story about a Hoosier boy coming across a poker game on a train. He has a roll of bills visible in one of his shirt pockets and after watching for a minute asks, “Gee, watcha playin’, fellers?” The kid gets off the train at the next stop with rolls of bills in both shirt pockets.

  “Howdy,” the woman said. “I’m Mary Tolley, the manager here. If you see something you want to know more about, you let me know, hear?”

  I introduced myself

  “Oh, I remember you,” she said.

  Which surprised me, since we’d never met.

  “You talked to Jeanna about me a few months back. Asking whether I’d heard from Bill Boyd in the time he was gone. You made Jeanna feel a little bad, so she come over to chec
k it again with me.”

  “And,” I asked, nodding, “do you remember what you told her?”

  “Sure do. I hadn’t heard from Bill. And I reckon now we know why.” She referred to it factually, solemn but without grief.

  “Mrs. Tolley,” I said impulsively, “I want very much to understand what happened to Mr. Boyd, because I want to find out who killed him. I’d appreciate it if you’d let me ask you a few questions.”

  “Well, sir,” she said brightly, “I’ll do my best, but I’ve only got a few minutes. I’ve got to get off and pick my daddy up for a doctor’s appointment.”

  “A few minutes would do fine, Mrs. Tolley.”

  “Could I ask one favor of you?”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s not ‘Mrs.’ Tolley. I have never married, and I kind of prefer to be called ‘Ms.,’ if that’s all right with you. Makes me feel like I’m keeping up with the times. And you know, it’s also pretty much the way folks always said the other round these parts anyhow.”

  “O.K. Ms. ’tis.”

  “Only problem,” she said, “odds are I don’t know the half of what you’re going to ask me.”

  “We can try.”

  “That we can.”

  “Do you know who benefits from Boyd dying?”

  “In a money way, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, sir, I don’t. There is likely going to be a will come out, ’cause he mentioned having one, but I don’t know anything of what’s in it.”

  “And you don’t know who the gallery will go to?”

  “No, sir. But it don’t worry me.”

  “Why not?”

  She chuckled. “Mostways ’cause I’m not a worrying sort, I guess. But Bill trusted me and I trust him.” She shrugged.

  “I gather he let you run this business with a pretty free hand.”

  “After the first few years, that’s right, he did. This point, I reckon I know the buying and selling of art round these parts pretty much better than he did. We more than pay our way, which was all Bill asked. Apart from being here to let him show a little special attention to one artist or another who caught his eye.”

  “That would be mostly lady artists, would it?”

  Smile. “Sure would.”

  “Before he went missing, was there anyone whose talent was catching his eye?”