“He’s at lunch, across the way,” she said.
“And I suppose Sheriff Dunlap is across the street at lunch too.”
“Now, there you’re wrong,” she said. “Jeanna’s holed up in her office.” She indicated the door behind me with the sheriff’s name written on its upper-half frosted glass. She lowered her voice. “Jeanna, she’s not very happy.”
“I see. Can I have a word with her?”
“You can try.”
I went to the door and knocked on it.
“Go away!” an unambiguous voice said.
I opened the door and walked in.
Jeanna Dunlap was sitting looking out the window. The view was of some grass and the public toilets. I felt she was preoccupied with other things.
“I told you to go away,” she said without turning to look at me.
“I know.”
“Another goddamn interloper,” she said. Though she still hadn’t looked, she seemed to know who I was. That meant she could hear conversations that took place outside her office.
“At least I’m not an official interloper. Nothing I do can make you look bad.”
I was trying to be understanding.
“Stuff it,” she said.
“I’d like to know what you think about all this now,” I said.
“I think in a hundred years we’ll all be dead.”
“Look, Sheriff,” I said, “if you’ve stopped caring, get off your ass and resign. Until then, pull your weight. I’ve got a lot of things I’d be interested in talking with you about, but if you want it short and sour, do you still think Frank Pynne killed Billy Boyd?”
She swiveled in her chair slowly and looked me in the eye. Her depression and desperation were far deeper than I had expected.
“Yes, I think Frank killed Billy,” she said. “He’s the obvious suspect. I suspect him. Go away.”
The instruction was so passionately felt and her gloom so pervasive that I just turned and left, closing the door behind me.
I walked back to Peggy, the receptionist. I leaned over her desk and said quietly, “She’s terribly depressed.”
“Yes, sir, I know.”
“How long has she been like that?”
“Yesterday and today.”
“What triggered it? The state police?”
“They sure are treating her like a piece of shit, if you’ll excuse my language. But I believe she is bothered about Mr. Boyd’s will too. Jeanna, she read that through and a little while later she was in there.” Peggy seemed pleasantly willing to confide in me.
“What was it about the will?” I asked.
“It may just be that it brought home for her that he was really gone.”
Behind me the door flew open with a crash. The glass in the upper half shattered and Jeanna Dunlap stood, a towering silhouette, outlined by the light from her office window.
“If you don’t stop yammering to that man, Margaret, you’ll be gone. And, you, I told you to go away.”
It seemed a good time to take my leave. As I left, Jeanna Dunlap said, “Now, Peg, call the maintenance department about the glass in my goddamn door.”
Chapter Twenty Seven
I went across the road to the Nashville Inn. Through the window I saw two men in state police uniform, and when I went in I walked to their table.
I said, “Excuse me, but is one of you Darrow Junkersfield?”
The taller of them, a youngish man with massive sideburns, looked up and said, “Me.”
I introduced myself.
“You’re working for the lawyer, aren’t you?” he asked.
“That’s right.”
Junkersfield said to the other, “Paul saw him outside Hogue’s office a little while ago.”
“If it’s all right,” I said, “I’d like a few words with you.”
“I’m busy,” Junkersfield said peremptorily. “Try me again tomorrow.”
“I wouldn’t take much of your time.”
“You won’t take any of it today,” he said. “Anything you want to say, say it through Hogue.”
“But it’s about Priscilla—”
He stood up. “No ‘but’s. I’m busy. We’re both busy. Run along now.”
He sat down again and they began to talk.
I felt frustrated, but there was little I could do but leave.
I walked to my car and drove west out of town.
There was no one at home down the gravel track across from the mail-box marked S.A.D. Despite no car being visible and no answer to my knockings, I stood in front of the house for quite a time. I was thinking about going into the place anyway. It was an impulse; just one of those pleasant little notions that pop into one’s mind from time to time. Especially one in a nosy line of work who feels frustrated.
I tried the door.
It was locked.
I tried the big sliding window near the door.
It didn’t slide.
I took a casual little stroll around the whole building.
Nothing budged.
Just preparing to give the lady some advice on guarding her home from intruders, Officer.
Only, she seemed to know all she needed already.
It meant I’d have to make an effort to get inside. I thought about what I would be looking for.
Nothing specific in mind.
Boyd’s car?
Souvenirs of California?
The arms of a butcher?
The more I thought about it, the more my impulse seemed to be a form of retaliation against abusive officers of the local law.
Foolish me, wanting to break and enter.
I took hold of myself.
I abandoned my impulse and followed a hunch instead. I went to Frank Pynne’s log cabin.
I was rewarded. I found both Pynne’s Fiesta and Doans’ Beetle.
I pounded with the wrought-iron-tree door knocker.
Pynne answered the door quickly.
“Oh,” he said.
“May I come in?” I asked. I walked in.
Doans was not in evidence at first sight. But she soon appeared in the sparsely furnished living room, wearing an apron.
“Oh, it’s Mr. Samson,” she said. “Frank has to go out soon so I’m making him lunch. Do you want some?”
“I don’t think he’s staying,” Frank Pynne said.
“You know,” I said chattily, “I don’t understand that.”
“What?” Pynne asked.
“People I talk to seem to like you well enough, but with me you are always surly. Here I am, hired by your lawyer to work on your behalf, and yet I feel nothing but irritation from you.”
He said, “I’m irritated with my whole fucking life.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll leave Dave Hogue to talk to you.”
“Waste of money,” Pynne said.
“Dave Hogue?”
“You.”
“Tell him to take me off it. You’re the client.”
He made a sucking sound. “He wouldn’t listen.”
“Why not?”
“He won’t talk to me about money. He says we’ll work it out when things are finished.”
I shrugged. “It’s Hogue that retained me, so it’s him that’s responsible for me. I’m cheap, but I’m not free.”
“Frankie’s terribly depressed by this business,” Doans said.
“I don’t mean to make it worse,” I said. “But if the world’s thrown him a curve, he’s got to swing his bat if he’s going to knock the thing back where it came from.” I looked from Doans to Pynne.
He shrugged and sat down.
I was disappointed. I thought it was quite a pretty speech.
But that’s show biz. I changed audiences. I said, “I’ve come for a few words with you, Miss Doans. Shall we go to the kitchen?”
“I’m making a meat loaf,” she said when we had walked through.
“It smells good.”
“Thanks. And a salad there, too. See?”
<
br /> She showed me a large mixed salad with things crinkle-cut and fancy.
“A cook too, among your other talents.”
“Well, maybe a little bit,” she said. “I don’t cook much for myself. It’s kind of nice to have an excuse. And poor Frankie is so down.”
I was a little bit tired of poor Frankie. I said, “What I wanted to talk to you about was Billy Boyd’s will.”
She left her salad and her busyness to examine my face. She tried to sustain a chatty matter-of-factness. “That was amazing, wasn’t it? Billy had a lawyer in Columbus who called me. I went over there and he explained about it. It was such a surprise.”
I said, “Boyd didn’t just pull your name out of a hat, Miss Doans. He says you know what he wants done with the proceeds.”
“How do you know that?” she asked sharply. “That’s supposed to be a private thing.”
“What did Boyd want you to do with the money?”
“That’s between Billy and myself,” she said.
“What was your relationship with him?”
“Friends. Hey, you’re sounding like that cop that talked to me, day before yesterday.”
“Junkersfield?”
“Yeah. And I’m not on trial, you know.”
“I’m just trying to tie up some loose ends. Get things straight in my own mind, so I can work better for Frank.”
I had caught her by a handle. She said, “Well, you can ask. I won’t promise to answer. And I’m saying nothing about what Billy wants me to do, because if he’d wanted people to know, he’d have written it out in the will, wouldn’t he?”
“O.K.,” I said. “When did you come to Nashville?”
“1968,” she said.
“How old were you?”
“Older than I looked,” she said peevishly. “Like now.”
“You were nineteen? Twenty?”
“Nearly nineteen.”
“And did you come to Nashville alone?”
“Yes.”
“To do what?”
After a moment she said, “To paint and draw.”
“Did you live where you live now?”
“I don’t think I want to talk about this.”
“There’s no harm in my asking you where you lived when you moved here. I can check it elsewhere anyway.”
“I lived where I live now,” she said.
“A house which Boyd owned. Or was it still Mrs. Boyd’s? How did you get it?”
She didn’t say anything.
“How much rent did you pay for it?”
“That’s not your business,” she said.
“What’s your middle name, Miss Doans?”
Her eyes opened wide. “What?”
“Your middle name. Is it Askew?”
“How did you know that?” she asked, wide-eyed, and threatened, as if somehow I had magic access to the secrets of her mind and was dangerous.
“I didn’t. That’s why I asked. But since your last two initials are A.D. and I think your mother’s are D.A. I thought you might just have reversed your names for the sake of a little anonymity. That makes your middle name Askew and hers Doans.”
“What do you know about my mother?”
“Before now, nothing. I’d guessed that she was Tee-Dee Askew. Just like I’m guessing that what you’re to do with Boyd’s money has to do with her.”
Sharon Doans steadied herself on the edge of the kitchen work surface. “Nobody knows about this,” she said. “Nobody knows about this. I haven’t told anybody.”
“Where is your mother, Miss Doans?”
“That’s my business.”
“It’s not going to be hard for me to find out. Just harder than if you tell me.”
“The harder the better.”
“It’s a matter of going to Venice and checking the records there and—”
“She’s in a hospital!” It burst out. “She’s in a hospital, and she’s paralyzed and a vegetable, all right? Is that what you want to know? Is that what you wanted me to tell you? And yes, Billy wants me to see she’s taken care of, without all the crap of the lawyer. Because he knows I’ll do it. All right?”
Quietly, I asked, “What happened to her?”
“She tried to kill herself, only she wasn’t very good at it, not being of a mechanical turn of mind,” Doans said acidly.
“This has to have been a long time ago,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Not long before you and Billy came here.”
“Billy came first,” she said. She was gulping at her air now.
“Was what happened why Billy came back?”
She looked at me poisonously. “You know damn well it was.”
“I’m guessing,” I said. “I’m guessing that an arrangement with his mother was the only way he had of getting the money to pay for the care for her.”
“Close enough,” she said, quietly now.
“And if that was so, then he felt responsible for what happened to her. And if you followed him here, maybe you were involved too.”
“I’m saying nothing about that,” she said sharply. “Nothing. Nothing.”
Which in its own way said quite a lot.
As I stood silently in front of her, Sharon Doans began to sob. Frank Pynne materialized by her side and comforted her while looking at me.
She gripped him tightly. She bit at his shirt, held it tightly in her teeth, pulled at the fabric.
He said, “Go away.”
Chapter Twenty Eight
I stopped to eat once again at the diner on the road from Morgantown to Samaria.
Between Dunlap, Junkersfield and Pynne, I’d been told to go away three times in barely an hour. That was pushing a record, even for me. And after thinking about it, I had decided to take them seriously. I was on my way back to Indianapolis.
There was little more I could do around Nashville until some dust settled, and I had thought of a favor I could ask Powder to do. A fourth “go away” would hardly faze me.
Not that I am insensitive to rejection. Such things scar my psychical core. But psychotraumatic scar tissue is an occupational hazard.
In the diner I ordered meat loaf. I enjoyed it. I had pie a la mode. I enjoyed that too.
And the waitress, a slight woman with long dark hair and half-closed eyes, actually said, “Come again, now, hear?”
I took it personally and fell in love with her.
Powder was talking to a woman when I entered the Missing Persons office. She was clearly distraught.
“No, she’s never been out overnight before,” the woman said. “I’m scared to death. I made the dinner at the usual time but she just never came back for it. And not all night, and now it’s been the whole morning and she’s still away. I’m just petrified. I don’t know what to do. I didn’t know how I could get help.”
The woman cried freely and dropped tears on the counter.
Powder was soft and fatherly. “You know, these things happen, dear. And it’s only been over one night.”
“But I’m afraid for her! Genuinely afraid for her safety. Who knows what might happen. The way the world is . . . accidents, or even worse. Oh God!” The sobs continued.
Powder took the woman’s hands. “Try to relax, if you can. You don’t want to be a nervous wreck when she does walk in, do you?”
“You think she’ll come back?”
“Yes,” he said convincingly, “I feel sure of it.”
“Really?”
“Really,” he said.
“Really really?”
“Really really.” He patted her on the shoulder. “You go on home. Get her box ready and a can of food out.”
“I’ve got last night’s in the icebox,” she said, “with some of that plastic wrap on it.”
“O.K., good. Then you watch some TV and keep busy, and before you know it there’ll be a scratching at the door.”
“I’ve got a cat flap,” she said.
“All the better,” he said soothin
gly.
I felt soothed.
“Bye, now,” the woman said.
“Bye-bye. Take care.”
The woman left.
I took her place at the counter in front of Powder. I was ready to make a crack, but then I didn’t. I didn’t want to.
Powder and I stared at each other for a moment.
I just nodded. I could appreciate a man who was strong enough to wait to worry about what would happen if everybody with a missing cat came in until everybody did come in.
In my hesitation he nearly killed me with a shock. “I’m glad you stopped in,” he said.
We went to his desk. When we were settled, he asked, “Have a good time in Venice?”
I said, “I’ve managed to find out what I wanted to know about that.”
“What?” he asked baldly.
I told him about my conversation with Sharon Askew Doans.
Powder asked, “So what did Boyd and the lady do to make the mother try to top herself?”
“I can guess,” I said.
“Didn’t you ask her?”
“No. She was pretty upset.”
“You had her going, spouting her life history, and you didn’t ask her?” He looked at me, disbelieving.
“No.”
“You’re too fucking soft,” Powder said. “If you’d kept at her, she would probably have admitted killing Boyd.”
“I don’t think she did it,” I said. “She was the main beneficiary of his will, and the statement about knowing what he wanted done with it meant she knew she was beneficiary, but I don’t think she did it.”
Powder shrugged. “You’re lucky you’re not a sergeant investigating this under me,” he said.
“Luck has nothing to do with it,” I said.
“The killing’s not what I have to work on anyway,” he said.
“It’s not?”
“Not my business. You lost a client. You came to me at the Missing Clients office. So that’s what I work on. And I want to ask you a hypothetical question.”
“O.K.”
“You’re this lady you’re looking for.”
“O.K.”
“Why do you hire you? What can a crummy P.I. do for you?”
“I don’t know,” I said to be cooperative. “What?”
“Shit,” he said with disgust. “That’s a goddamn gumshoe for you. Does a job and doesn’t even know what he did for her. “That apply to you and women too? Come on, come on. What did you do? Tell her whether they’d found the body?”
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