There were some messages on my answering machine. One of them was even from someone other than family or tantamount to family. It was cryptic and nasty. It said, “Impersonation of a police officer is grounds for revocation of a gumshoe license as well as being a criminal offense.”
Made me quiver in my sneakers.
Before I set off for Nashville in the morning, I stopped at Missing Persons. “Decided to surrender yourself,” Powder said with menace as I walked into the office. “Very sensible.”
“What’s your problem?”
His extensive forehead gleamed and a vein stood out, nearly vertically. “Your problem,” he said. “Impersonation of police.”
“I do imitations of policemen I have known and loved,” I said, “but I don’t impersonate them.”
“You told the records people at the University of Bridgeport that you were a cop.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“They said you did. They’ll identify your voice.”
“I told them I was phoning from the Indianapolis Police Department. That’s different. That’s a lie, but I never said I was a cop.” Private eyes can be as good as philosophers at splitting hairs.
“Tell it to the judge,” he said. He rubbed his face. “Enjoy your visit to I.U.P.U.I.?” he asked.
“I thought you were having nothing to do with this case.”
“We found everybody missing in Indianapolis before ten yesterday. I made a couple of phone calls to avoid dying of boredom. They barely worked.”
“That include one about draft records?”
“Venice,” he said.
“Italy?”
“California. It’s a suburb of Los Angeles.”
“Address and phone number?”
“No longer effective for providing anyone who has heard of your man. So I’m happy to give them to you.”
He had them written out on a piece of paper, which he passed across to me.
“So,” he said, “found your client yet?”
“Not exactly.”
“How surprised I am,” he said, yawning. Subtle fellow.
“But I found out who she is.”
“I thought you already knew that.”
“I knew who she said she was.”
“So who is she?”
“The woman she asked me to find.”
I expected an eruption of abuse, but Powder leaned forward, rested his chin on his knuckles and thought about it. “And she hired you to find herself,” he said.
“But since she already knew where she was,” I said, in Dick and Jane logic, “she wanted some other information from me.”
“Which was?”
“Whether she was being actively looked for.”
“And you told her she wasn’t.”
“So she took me off the case.”
“Only, now you are looking for her.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Have you got a sighting since your own?”
“Not yet,” I said.
When I got to Dave Hogue’s office, I found a state police car in front of it.
Inside in the waiting room a middle-aged trooper, whose head and long neck extended like a stem from his pear-shaped body, towered over Betty Weddle as she sat at her desk. She looked uncomfortable, even flustered, and she turned to me with obvious relief when I walked in.
“Mr. Samson. You want to see David?”
“That’s right. Is he in?”
“Yes. Upstairs. I . . .” She seemed hesitant and rose from her chair.
“I’ll find my own way,” I said. “I don’t want to interrupt.”
“He’ll be all right alone, Miss Weddle,” the trooper said.
She turned to him with a pained expression, but sat down again. I went up to Hogue.
The door to his big second-floor room was open. He was staring out the window, but he stood up as he heard me enter. I closed the door behind me.
“Hello, Samson,” he said.
He looked terribly tired. “You look awful,” I said.
“Yes.”
“You have an Indiana law enforcement officer interviewing your secretary down there.”
“I know,” he said. “It’s about this business of Boyd’s will. They seem to be going down the list.”
“What for? Prurience value?”
“I suspect it’s all they can think of to do, but it is certainly unimaginative and insensitive,” Hogue said.
“Your secretary looked pretty uncomfortable.”
“I can well believe that.” He looked gloomy. “I feel responsible,” he said, looking at me, then away.
“How?”
He didn’t answer at first. Then he sighed and said, “Oh, maybe I should have kept up closer track of her social life.”
That sounded vague to me. “Kept up? Does that mean you did know more about it once?”
“I got rather involved in her private life when she was being beaten by her second husband. But that was ten-odd years ago.”
“Involved in other than a legal capacity?”
“She confided in me a good deal and there was a critical time when I gave her some shelter.”
“He injured her seriously?”
“A number of times. But she is a loyal and resilient person.”
“But in the end she came to you? After a beating?”
“In the middle of a beating sequence,” he said. “But her fear was that she would lose control of herself, that she would shoot the man. Feeling she was nearing the limit of her own control, she finally sought help.”
“Men like that are usually possessive too. Did he follow her?”
He sighed. “Yes, Mr. Samson, he did. There was a confrontation and I resisted him physically.”
“Isn’t that risky for someone with a bad heart?”
“Yes,” he said. “But I get involved when I believe in things. And a gross, drunken man beating his wife and screaming obscene accusations is something I find it hard to step back from.”
“Accusations? Involving you?”
“Among others, yes.”
“I see.”
“I doubt that you do, but that is really neither here nor there. I represented Betty in divorce proceedings and injunction procedures to keep the brute from her door. And, I’m pleased to say, he has moved away.”
“I don’t mean to intrude,” I said, “but now to find that she had been involved with Billy Boyd—”
“Putatively involved,” he interrupted.
“It must have been quite a shock for you.”
“It was,” he said. “It is.”
“And you haven’t talked to her about it?”
“No.”
“Will you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Having butted in this far, may I ask another question?”
He shrugged tiredly.
“Did she know you were considering marrying Ida Boyd?”
“Certainly not,” he snapped. “That was not public knowledge. It wasn’t even settled between Ida and myself. We didn’t talk to anyone else about it.”
Then he seemed to recall something. But it didn’t change his point of view. “Why do you ask that?” he asked.
“Only putting things you’ve said side by side. Betty Weddle is clearly very loyal to you. Yet at the end of last year, when you say you were thinking about marriage to Ida Boyd, you also say she suddenly talked about quitting her job here, and we also find that she, putatively, began to take up with someone you were having battles with.”
“The B.C.T. was having battles with him. It was not personal,” Hogue said.
“Nevertheless . . .”
“I never told Betty about my plans,” he said, to close the subject. “What have you been up to?”
His personal life was not my business, so I accepted the shift to more comfortable ground readily. I got out my notebook and summarized my interviews.
After my report, he said, “But you’re not actually closer to find
ing Priscilla Pynne?”
“You mean, do I have her address? No. But she’s out there. I’m sure of it.”
“I see.”
He didn’t say anything more. He seemed terribly weighted under by events. When I saw he wasn’t going to comment, I said, “It has to be good for our client. It undercuts the simplicity of the jealous-revenge theory or the free-myself-for-another-woman theory.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Is Pynne still in custody?”
“No. The state police investigator released him yesterday. They are short of hard evidence, and he didn’t crack under their intimidation But the pressure is still on him. The local paper came out yesterday with his picture on the front page.”
I asked, “How is Pynne taking it all?”
“He’s trying to shrug it off. Keeping busy with various projects he has going.”
“What sort of projects? Things to do with his job?”
“Only peripherally,” Hogue said. “But I.U. has given him vacation time he had coming. They haven’t suspended him or anything like that. They’re not as much under pressure as they might be if he were in contact with students.”
“Is Jeanna Dunlap still walking in the woods?”
“I don’t know what Jeanna is up to. She seems to be out of the picture.”
“What is the state investigator’s name?”
“Darrow Junkersfield.”
“I’m going to have to see him,” I said.
“Why?”
“He should know that Priscilla Pynne was alive two months after she disappeared. “
“Of course,” Hogue said, and exhaled heavily.
“Look, Mr. Hogue,” I said, “I’ll go now and see some of these people and get back to you later.”
“I think that would be just as well,” he said. “I feel rather grim.”
“But could you do one thing for me?”
“What’s that?”
“Maybe you already know. Did Boyd’s body have any money on it?”
He studied me again. “Money? Cash money?”
“That’s right.”
“I . . . I don’t think it did. I don’t remember mention of it.”
“And other papers? Credit cards?”
“I don’t really know, Samson. What—?”
“Mrs. Pynne, leaving home, needed money. If Boyd was buried with his cash, that would tend to rule her out. If the cash and credit cards were gone, that would argue against her too, because the credit cards probably wouldn’t be any good to her. But if the cash was gone, and that’s all, that puts her in again. And he was known to carry cash.”
“You are thinking that Mrs. Pynne killed Boyd?” he asked.
“It’s a hypothesis. One that doesn’t involve Frank Pynne.”
“True.”
“And it fits something else that’s been bothering me,” I said.
“Which is?”
“Her car being left at I.U.”
He frowned.
“If she killed Boyd,” I said, “she wouldn’t want to be seen driving his car, and she certainly wouldn’t run away in it. So driving to I.U. in her own car, and using other means of transportation from there makes sense. From Bloomington she could connect to anywhere.”
“And Boyd’s car?” Hogue asked.
“Hidden? Disposed of? I don’t know. But out of circulation somehow, which explains why there have been no police sightings of it.”
He nodded slowly.
“One way or the other, it seems to be leading away from Frank Pynne,” I said.
Chapter Twenty Six
As I left Hogue’s building. I saw the struthious state trooper sitting in his car making notes. I knocked on his passenger-side window and he rolled it down.
“I want to have a few words with Darrow Junkersfield,” I told him. “Do you know where I can find him?”
The man had a rich and resonant voice which belied his odd shape. He said, “When I saw him last, he was going to an interview, somewhere to the north of town. But he is using the local sheriff’s office as a base. You could wait for him there.”
North of town could well mean Celene Deckard.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll try there in a few minutes.”
First I took the short walk to Boyd’s gallery.
Mary Tolley, dressed in pale blue and bright orange, was engaged with a Japanese couple. She spent several minutes with them while I waited, passing my time studying brushwork and texture.
Then she left the couple to come over to me. She said, “Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Samson.”
“Quite all right. Business before business. How are you doing?”
“I reckon it’s only a matter of how much of their baggage allowance they have left.”
“If you reckon it, I’ll bet you’re right,” I said.
“Do I sense that you have decided to purchase one of our fine works of art after all?”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “Though if they are good investments, maybe my best idea is to get some paints and find out whether I’m an undiscovered primitive genius.”
“Everybody has art in him. That’s my belief.”
“I’ll give you first refusal once I get in production,” I said.
Mary Tolley said, “If you didn’t come for a picture, maybe you come in to talk about something else.”
I nodded. “About Billy Boyd’s will.”
“There’s quite a bit of talk about that round town.”
“Did you know he intended leaving you the gallery?”
She stiffened slightly. “I believe I already told you that I didn’t know who the gallery would go to, but that I wasn’t worried.”
“I didn’t mean to be offensive, Ms. Tolley. And do I gather that some police questioning has been rather direct?”
She paused, then laughed quietly at herself “Well, they ain’t exactly brought in the bright lights to shine down on me, but they sure did want to know where I was on the night of whenever.”
I didn’t ask where she was. It showed her I was different. I said, “Perhaps it occurred to them, as it did to me, that you run this place so well and so completely that you might have known more of Boyd’s intentions than anybody else.”
“I don’t think nothing occurred to them,” she said. “I think they got themselves a list and they’re going down it.”
“And quite a list too.”
“So I hear,” she said, without smiling. “Though sounds to me like stirring up a whole lot of trouble for no good reason.”
“I’ve been wondering about something else since I spoke to you last,” I said.
“Uh-huh.”
“About Tee-Dee Askew.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Boyd spent a long time with her, as far as one knows, and she seems to have been quite an influence, yet from what I understand she is not mentioned in his will.”
“I haven’t seen it,” she said cautiously.
“Do you know whether she is dead?”
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“He remembered a lot of other people who seem to have meant a lot less to him.”
“I can’t explain the omission,” she said.
“O.K. Can I ask another thing about the list?”
“You sure can ask.”
“What are the chances that there is a fictitious element in it?”
“You mean that he made up some of the names?”
“Or put some women on the list just to cause them trouble.”
She didn’t like the sound of that. She frowned and scratched the back of her neck and said, “I wouldn’t have thought so.”
“Why not?”
“Bill didn’t have no plans to die just now. Not for another forty years, and what kind of trouble could he cause then?”
Not a lot.
“O.K.,” I said. “Something else. You said that Boyd occasionally used the gallery as a bargaining point in his relationship with some lady artists.”
“I don’t recall having said it exactly like that,” she said, with a smile.
“What I wanted to know is whether he ever bought or exhibited Sharon Doans’ work?”
“What work?” Mary Tolley asked.
“She’s something of an artist, isn’t she?”
“Not so’s I’ve ever seen.”
“She told me she does some book covers. I assumed that she did other artistic work too.”
“I’d of said her inclinations would put her in a somewhat older profession,” Mary Tolley said.
“I see,” I said, not having expected a comment quite so sharp.
She was aware of a needle point having shown through. She said, “Bill seemed to like her. He spent him some time with her over the years, so maybe she has her some qualities underneath the glassy little surface.”
The Japanese couple indicated all too scrutably that they wished to speak to Ms. Tolley, so she left me again, before I had quite finished asking what I wanted to know about Sharon Doans.
However, pictures were selected, and with the packing and paying to be done the odds were that it would be quite a while before Mary Tolley was available again. I decided to ask my questions of Sharon Doans herself.
But first I walked over to the sheriff s office.
Inevitably, it seemed, I found the soft-spoken receptionist Peggy on duty. “Don’t you ever get time off?”
“When duty to my county calls,” she said, “you’ll know that I’ll be here.”
“I hope you get extra money for overtime,” I said.
“No, sir,” she said. “Round these parts the only way to get some extra money is to get your name put into Billy Boyd’s will. You heard about that, I suppose.”
“Yes,” I said.
“If I could do it,” she said, “I’d put my own name on it. Sure could use another hundred dollars just now. Don’t think anybody would believe me for any more.”
“You weren’t well acquainted with Mr. Boyd, then?”
“No, sir, he never got around to me. No excitement in my life, no fun. All the men I know just want to get married and settle down. Plumb boring existence I lead, I do declare.”
“So for thrills, you stay on duty here during lunchtime.”
“Yes, sir, you got it first shot,” she said.
“I’d like to see the state policeman, Junkersfield,” I said. “Do you know where he is?”
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