Missing Woman

by Michael Z. Lewin

  “And I take it,” I said, “that there was no other student at the time who was a friend of you both?”

  “I don’t feel that Priscilla had any friends,” Elizabeth Weaver said.

  The Weavers drove me back to town and I asked to be dropped at the bus station. From a pay phone I called Dave Hogue collect.

  “Hartford, Connecticut?” he asked. “I thought you were coming down here this afternoon.”

  “As you gather, I didn’t make it. Has anything happened?”

  “The state police have been making a repetitive meal out of questioning Frank Pynne. They’ve been at it all day, though they’re not getting anyplace.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I’ve had a look at Billy Boyd’s will.”

  “And who benefits?”

  “A lot of people,” he said measuredly. “And quite a stir there’s going to be too.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s left a list of forty-nine women, each one to get a bequest between a hundred and a thousand dollars.”

  “That’s going to make some fur fly.”

  “It certainly is. Especially since it specifies that the money is ‘for services rendered,’ and that a list of the people he left money to should be carved on his tombstone.”

  I thought about it for a moment. “That’s a wicked will.”

  “You are very right,” he said somberly. “Anybody whose name is on that list stands damned, with no effective defense.”

  “What a charming fellow this Boyd was,” I said. “Who is on the list?”

  “I don’t have a copy,” Hogue said.

  “But you read through it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you know whether there are any interesting names or not.”

  “They are mostly people that I think you don’t know.”

  “But some that I do know. Who, for instance?”

  He took a breath. “Betty, for one,” he said.

  “Betty? Your secretary?”

  “Yes. For a thousand dollars.”

  “A case in point about condemning without a defense?”

  “I haven’t asked her about it. I . . . I don’t think I really have the right, if it is a matter of her private life.”

  I said, “A list of that size must cover quite a period of time. Perhaps her appearance relates to something from long ago.”

  He was silent.

  “You don’t buy that?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the format of the will has been established for more than twelve years, and he has just added names and amounts from time to time.”

  “And they would have to be dated, I suppose.”

  “They would.”

  “And the date for Betty?”

  “The end of February. This year.”

  I let it go. “What other names were on this infamous list?”

  “Forty-eight people with secrets.”

  “All local?”

  “Yes. While I daresay some services were rendered to our Mr. Boyd elsewhere, he chose to limit his posthumous generosity to residents of Brown County.”

  “Jeanna Dunlap?”

  “Yes, but her relationship with Billy was not something she ever hid.”

  “I can go through the list of names I know, but why don’t you tell me whether there is anything interesting.”

  “Priscilla Pynne is not on the list.”

  “What about Celene Deckard?”

  “Who?”

  “An artist who lives near Lake Lemon. She saw Boyd about nine o’clock the night he went missing.”

  “Did she?” He seemed interested. “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “I’m sure that the state police will have gotten to her by now.”

  “I can check. I don’t remember the name from the will, but I wouldn’t swear it’s not there.”

  “You said that the select forty-nine received individual bequests.”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the bulk of the estate?”

  “The gallery to Mary Tolley,” he said.

  “And the rest?”

  “To be sold off, with the proceeds going to Miss Sharon A. Doans, ‘who will know what I wish done with it.’ ”

  “Sharon Doans?” I asked. “What was she to Boyd?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “nor do I know what Boyd wished to be done with the money. Nor do I know what will become of the tract of land.”

  “You sound pretty fed up, Mr. Hogue.”

  “It’s been a very trying day.”

  “I’ve been trying to track down Elizabeth Staedtler,” I said.

  “In Hartford?”

  “She lives here.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I think I have turned up a witness who saw Priscilla Pynne alive two months after she disappeared.”

  “You have?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Me.”

  Chapter Twenty Four

  I explained to Hogue how my conversation with the real Elizabeth Staedtler seemed to undermine completely the story the person who had hired me had given.

  “Unless there is someone else altogether involved, who sent me to ask questions about one while using the name of the other, I have to assume that my client was actually Priscilla Pynne.”

  “But didn’t you recognize her?” he asked tiredly.

  “I never knew her. She gave me a picture of Mrs. Pynne but the woman I saw looked very different. She was the right height, as far as I can remember. Weight and hair color can be tinkered with. Eyes can be disguised with contact lenses. And clothes are clothes.”

  “But why should she hire you to look for herself?”

  “At the moment, it is my most ardent wish in life to ask her that question.”

  About seven-thirty there was a bus to Springfield, Massachusetts. Near the Springfield bus station I found a hotel which reminded me only too strongly of the Penrod near Union Station. After checking in, I went out to buy a toothbrush and paste, a map of Springfield and a newspaper. When I got back, I watched television in the lounge for a while. But I found it hard to concentrate on the disjointed antics of whatever it was that was on the screen.

  I went to bed.

  In the morning I had a light breakfast and went by taxi to 781 Croxley Boulevard.

  Like my hotel and me, it had seen better days. A five-story brick apartment building on a corner, with a dirt alleyway running behind it off the boulevard. Garbage cans stood in-a battered row along the side wall, lids ajar in various angles of ragged salute.

  The main entrance was recessed a few yards from the street. There were two cement benches either side of the entry walk. One was smashed in the middle, like a balsa board stepped on by a giant foot. The other looked as if it would last forever.

  There was no name on the mailbox for 4A. I climbed to the fourth floor. One apartment door had a plastic “A” screwed tightly at eye level. I knocked. And again.

  The door behind me, marked “D,” opened a few inches and a woman with long strands of white hair among a majority of black stared blandly at me.

  “He’s in there,” she said. “He’s in there, but he ain’t gonna answer.”

  “No?”

  “He had a bucketful last night. He’ll sleep till five, he will.”

  “I see,” I said. “But I’m not even sure I have the right place. I’m looking for some people named Pitman.”

  The head nodded, like a jerky puppet’s. “It’s the right place.”

  “Well, ma’am,” I said, trying to be ingratiating, “I’m a private detective and I’m looking for the Pitmans’ daughter Priscilla. A few months back she left her husband and he wants to find her. So I came by here to see if maybe she’d been in touch.”

  The woman looked at me. “Priscilla? That married the soldier?”

  “I believe so, yes.”

  “She left him?”

 
“Yes.”

  The woman detonated a shriek of laughter. Her shaking knocked the door open, and she stood in a tattered nightdress, vibrating. Finally she stopped, and said, “That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  While I had already suspected that, I asked, “Why is that, ma’am?”

  “Because the mother has been swanking around on that marriage ever since it happened, that’s why. Oh, how are the mighty fallen!”

  “I take it Mrs. Pitman isn’t at home now?”

  “No. She works. Always out before eight.”

  “Do you know where?”

  “Supermarket, She’s on the checkout at A. and P. It’s down the main road about a mile.”

  “Did you know the girl?”

  “Missy Prissy? Sure I knew her. Too good for the likes of me, and the rest of us living round here. Not smart enough for her, ordinary, people. Only, I saw her when they sent her back from New York, We all saw her then, and it was a little harder to tell who was the ups in life and who was the downs. Till she hooked that poor soldier boy, I saw his picture in the paper. They never brought him around here. But we all saw her when they sent her back.”

  “Has Priscilla been around here lately?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know if she’s written or been in touch otherwise?”

  “I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell the likes of us that the precious picture girl left her old man. Someone too good to lend a neighbor a couple of bucks wouldn’t tell anything ugly and ordinary like that.”

  The apartment building was on Croxley Boulevard’s intersection with Arbor Avenue, and Arbor was the major road. I walked toward town, and found the A. & P.

  I went to the manager’s office, elevated and enclosed with glass, in a position to survey the premises. I asked for a few words with Mrs. Pitman without explaining what sort of words they would be.

  The manager, a bald man whose stomach was inadequately restrained by a tight belt, didn’t ask any questions. I suspected men in well-worn jackets had asked for words with Mrs. Pitman before, that the men had come and gone but Mrs. Pitman remained a fixture to be relied on.

  He took me to the checkouts where a gray-haired woman was ringing up a dozen items for a child-mother.

  “Man to see you, Marjory,” he said.

  Mrs, Pitman looked over her shoulder at me, then slid without hesitation off her seat. The manager picked up the checkout rhythm where she had left it.

  I led her out of casual earshot.

  “What’s he done now?” she asked. A careful layer of makeup covered a wrinkled face. She was about fifty, and was the source of the fine structure, bone and otherwise, which showed in the picture I had of her daughter.

  “I’m not a policeman,” I said. “And it is not about your husband.” The statements did not bring her relief. She could tell I was bringing her trouble.

  “What, then?”

  I explained my business in the same way that I had explained it to her neighbor.

  “Left him?” she repeated. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. She took off one night and he hasn’t heard from her since. I thought that maybe she had been in touch with you.”

  “Fat chance,” she said. “I had two letters from Chicago. Last one on February seventeenth, 1977, saying that Francis got him a job somewhere in goddamn Indiana.”

  “That’s right. Bloomington.”

  “Well, you know more than I do.”

  “You’ve had no word of her in the last six months, then?”

  “I just said so.”

  She had. And I believed her.

  “Six months?” she said then. “Ran away six months ago?”

  “A little more than that.”

  She eyed me with an impersonal suspicion. “Where are you from, mister?”

  “Indianapolis.”

  “You come out here all the way from Indianapolis?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you aren’t telling me the half of it. You wouldn’t come all the way from Indianapolis if all she did was run away from her husband six months ago. That ain’t life.”

  “No,” I admitted. “I suppose it isn’t.”

  “Are you a cop?”

  “No. I’ve told you no lies,” I said.

  “I didn’t think so. But you haven’t told me much truth, neither.”

  “I have been hired by her husband’s lawyer. A man has been killed. Her husband is suspected, and it is possible that your daughter knows some things that may help.”

  “Don’t flannel me, country boy. You’re trying to pin this killing on my girl. Now that’s the right of it, isn’t it?”

  “No,” I said.

  She nodded, in confirmation. “Oh yes, it is.”

  “I’m not trying to pin anything on anybody. I’m trying to find her. When I find her, she’ll speak for herself.”

  “I suppose she will,” Mrs. Pitman said. “Except she always was an actions-speak-louder-than-words sort of child. So if she’s run away, maybe that says a lot.”

  “It is knowing the meaning of what it says that is the problem.”

  “You’ll work it out, too,” she said. “I can see it in your eyes. There’s a kind of spark I see there.” She peered hard at me.

  I just went on: “Is there anybody else your daughter might have kept in touch with over the years?”

  “You mean somebody else she might have turned to round here instead of me?”

  “Your daughter seems to have lived very much alone. Her husband doesn’t understand much about her and I haven’t found anyone she confides in where she lived. She hasn’t kept close to you. If there’s anybody she might have got in touch with, I would like to know about it.”

  “Mr. Catherman,” she said.

  Kenneth Catherman was a high-school English teacher. I got the school’s number from the operator. But the secretary there said he was not at work.

  I tried him at home. He answered with the nasal blur of a cold in full flower. I asked if I could come and see him. He asked what about and I said, “Priscilla Howell Donohue Pitman.”

  “Good God!” he said.

  He gave me the address. By the time I acquired a taxi, it was eleven-thirty.

  The house was the lower half of a stucco duplex, in a comfortable residential area. Catherman saw me walk in from the street and opened the door before I rang the bell.

  He invited me in and offered coffee. I accepted, and while he prepared it I sat waiting in the living room.

  “There we are,” he said. He put a tray on the coffee table and sat down opposite me. He wore the trousers and waistcoat of a three-piece suit, a tall, solid man of about forty.

  I said, “You knew Priscilla Pitman’s name immediately.”

  “Certainly. She is etched on my memory.”

  “I’m trying to find her,” I said.

  “Is she lost?” he asked with a detached air.

  “Her whereabouts are not knownn,” I said, formally. “Her mother thought that you would be the person she would have stayed in touch with around here.”

  “I’m afraid not. I would have liked to correspond with her and keep track of how her life unfolded, but it didn’t happen that way.”

  “You don’t know where she is?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  I scratched my head. “I see.”

  “A memorable girl,” he said. “Teachers—teachers who care—get precious few memorable students passing through their tender mercies.”

  “When did you know her?”

  “She graduated in 1971,” he said. “A dedicated student. Very hard-working, yet intuitive enough. A rare combination, especially from her background. And put together with the kind of Greek beauty she had, dear oh dear, an unusual creature indeed.”

  “Your description sounds rather more than pedagogical,” I said.

  “They are people, you know, these kids. I try to see them as people.”

  “Did you have a relationship with her outsi
de of school hours?”

  “Certainly!” he said. But coyly, he added, “Mind you, I try to have relationships with all my better students outside of school hours.”

  I wondered whether I was being toyed with.

  I upped the stakes. “You haven’t asked me why I am trying to find her,” I said. “She may be a witness in a murder case in Indianapolis and I am trying to locate her for the defense.” I gave him my card.

  “I see,” he said.

  “You don’t seem surprised.”

  “How surprised is surprised? You state it as a fact; I accept your statement as such. I had no expectations to be contradicted.”

  “You say Priscilla Pitman was a hard-working student in high school. Yet she ran amok at college. Why should that be?”

  “These things are always complex,” he said, saying nothing. “I see her as . . . a phenomenon. In that sense, one just observes what, happens without judging.”

  “Were you physically involved with her?”

  “Certainly not. Not my type, I’m afraid, old boy.”

  “And did she know that?”

  Serious for the first time, he said, “Not for a long time.”

  “You last spoke to her in June, 1971?”

  “Spoke?” He thought carefully. “Spoke? Sometime in the summer of 1971.”

  I did not have good feelings about this conversation. But I was not sure that it wasn’t just that the man’s style wasn’t sympathetic. And I couldn’t think of how to push it farther, disappointing as what he’d had to say had been.

  I asked, “Is there anyone else you know of who she might go to in an emergency?”

  “I gather she married a soldier some time ago. You could try him.”

  “You speak as if you don’t expect them still to be together,” I said.

  “I’m surprised they got together in the first place.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Priscilla, with a soldier?”

  “Why not?”

  “As a stepping-stone, or a rehabilitative stop, perhaps. But not for life. Not that I’ve met the fellow.” He laughed. “But I flatter myself that I understand something about Priscilla.”

  Chapter Twenty Five

  The quickest way home was a train to Boston and a plane from there back to Indianapolis. I was in my office by the middle of the evening, having used the travel time to seek perspectives on what I had and hadn’t found out.