“Oh, for crying out loud,” I said.
“She wrote asking if I could get her a transcript. One that didn’t refer to the University of Bridgeport, but with an official school seal.”
“And you did?”
“I did.”
“And where did you send it?”
“To a hotel in your fair city. It was called the Penrod.”
And he gave me the address of the hotel I had seen my client walk to near Union Station.
“And you sent it to her when?”
“She said it had to be in the mail by the first of June.”
“What else did she say in her letter, Mr. Catherman?”
“Not much. That she hadn’t forgotten me and hoped I hadn’t forgotten her. That after an ill-fated marriage, she was planning to continue her education, though her husband would oppose her if he found out where she was. And she asked for my help.”
“Which you gave. Without asking questions?”
“There was no one to ask. Just a short letter and a hotel address and a date.”
“Where was the letter you got postmarked?”
“Memphis.”
“Memphis, Tennessee?”
“I suppose so. I can’t visualize the post imprint, but I remember clearly that it was Memphis. I remember thinking what a long way that girl must have gone in her life, from the last time I saw her.”
“When did you get the letter?”
“Early May.”
“Was there any indication of where she intended to continue her education?”
He paused. “No.”
“Or any intimation that she might get in contact with you again?”
He sighed. “She asked whether, if it were necessary, I would be willing to write a reference for her.”
“Was it necessary?”
Another sigh. “Yes.”
“Where was it for, God’s sake.”
“I would prefer not to tell you.”
“I don’t care what you prefer. I’ve got the police checking all the colleges around here now. They’ll find her. And they will not be amused to find out how much money they’ve had to spend to tell us what you can tell us for free.”
“Ball State University.”
“Thank you so much,” I said.
“My loyalty,” he said, “is to the people I know, my respect for them and their wishes. If it were not plain to me that you would be able to find her from what you already know, then I would not have helped you at all.”
“I am fascinated to hear about your loyalties, Mr. Catherman. The trouble is that the lady is involved in the kind of problem which will not just go away because people don’t ask questions in the right way.”
“My responsibility is to Priscilla, insofar as it exists at all.”
“It’s your responsibility to her that seems to have escaped you,” I said. “It is in her interests to have this business settled. She’ll have no future for education or otherwise until her past is dead and buried.”
A poor choice of words.
Chapter Thirty One
Before leaving Indianapolis I called Powder’s home again. The line was still busy, so I left a message for him at headquarters: “Memphis and Ball State.”
Ball State began life as a teachers’ college in Muncie, Indiana, about fifty miles northeast of Indianapolis. The Ball is of the Ball-jar Balls. The teachers’ college became Ball State University in a rationalization of the mid-sixties, but the campus is still on the west side of the city, a cluster of new buildings among old.
I drove up on IS 69, to within eleven miles, where the IS turns north to find, more directly, Fort Wayne, and, eventually, Lansing. The morning drive gave me a chance to think about what I was expecting to find. I got as far as being able to frame alternatives. It was another way of saying to myself that I didn’t know what I was getting into.
I followed signs to the Administration Center, which was a section of one of the sprawling cement structures built to celebrate universityhood. I could find what I was looking for without access to records, but it would be easier with it.
Inside, gaily painted cement-block walls tried to project the charm of construction techniques instead of just looking cheap. They got about halfway, far enough to show why the limestone industry was in decline.
There was a personnel index in the foyer, a ridged black menu board covered with a glass panel. Perhaps administrators were changed as fast as hot meals.
The directions to the student records office were clear enough, but when I got there, I found the door locked.
I walked along the hall trying handles. I found, finally, an open door, the bursar’s office.
I walked right in.
There was no one in the outer room or behind a cashier’s window. I could see an inner door ajar. I had the option of tapping on the counter to attract attention or lifting the passage flap myself and going through.
I went through. I did my tapping on the frame of the inner door.
A small man whose head was wreathed in fuzzy brown hair looked up slowly. He squinted at me, patted the papers on his desk top and found a pair of glasses. He put them on, pulled at the wire earpieces until they were comfortable.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
“No.”
“Oh,” he said. He worked it out. “Well, what do you want?”
“I am trying to locate one of your students,” I said.
He shook his head immediately. “I don’t know anything about students. I only deal in totals.”
“Yours was the only office open,” I said.
“Football game today,” he said.
“Well, it’s quite urgent that I find this student, but all I have is her name, and that she is here as a freshman.”
He lifted his shoulders and looked around the room. “No freshmen here.”
“Wouldn’t you have her financial records? Tuition, accommodation?”
“No,” he said, with diminishing patience. “That’s all in the records section. All I have is the totals.”
I persisted. “Wouldn’t you have the key to the records section? It’s very important.”
“No, I wouldn’t have the key to the records section. If I dealt with records I might, but I don’t so I wouldn’t.”
“Well, could you suggest someone I might go to who could get me this information?”
“Come back on Monday,” he said.
“I need it now,” I said.
He sighed heavily and opened a desk drawer. He pulled out a stapled booklet with a red cover and pushed it across the desk top toward me. “The home addresses are in there,” he said.
“Of the student body?”
“No! Of the faculty and staff. Maybe you can dredge up someone to come into the office to open up for you, if it’s as urgent as all that. A matter of life and death, I suppose.”
“Yes,” I said.
I looked through the booklet, and the bursar took off his glasses and straightened the papers he had been working on. But he didn’t start work.
After waiting a moment, he said, “Well, what’s the problem now?”
“There are a lot of names in here. I’m trying to find the right job descriptions.”
“Oh, give it here.”
I passed the book to him and he leafed directly to the back. “Except for the bigwigs, administrators are always in the back,” he said. “The ones who do the work. All right, ready?”
“Yes.” And I wrote down the name and home address and telephone number of the head of records.
“All right?”
“What about a couple of others, in case I can’t get in touch with—”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he said. “President of the university? That do?”
“I was thinking more of someone in charge of undergraduates, or someone with special responsibility for freshmen or admissions.”
He read me details of the dean of freshmen and the dean of intake. “All right?”
> “Yes, thanks,” I said.
He threw the booklet in the desk drawer and slammed it shut. He looked at his watch. Then he noticed that I wasn’t leaving. He squinted at me again.
“Is there a telephone I can use?”
“Out in the office,” he said with force. “Dial nine for an outside line. And close the door behind you!”
“Thank you,” I said.
I closed the door behind me.
Make it easier for a bureaucrat to give you what you want than to refuse and you stand a chance.
The head of records didn’t answer.
The dean of freshmen was away for the weekend. Her husband told me so.
The dean of intake was eating lunch. He told me that himself.
“I’m sorry to interrupt you,” I said. “But I must locate a student at Ball State. I’ve just come up from Indianapolis and all I have is her name. It’s urgent that I find her.”
“More important than my lunch?” he asked stiffly.
“It is important,” I said.
“Very well. What class is she in?”
“She would be a freshman.”
“There are three freshman dormitories. Try there.”
“She’s older than most freshmen. Would that affect where she lives?”
“Older? How old?”
“Twenty-seven or so.”
“A mature student,” he said. He paused. “And what is the name?”
“Priscilla Pitman,” I said.
“Oh, God,” he said. “You’re not the husband, are you? Please don’t tell me you’re the husband.”
Dean Caldwell opened the door before I knocked. His house was a small modern one-story building in a development to the north of the campus. The front yard sported two twenty-foot maple trees. I figured the house had been there getting on for ten years.
The dean was in his early forties and had a majestic profile but an extremely narrow face front, which matched a narrow body. He was clearly agitated, but making the best of it. We sat facing each other in the living room. I had already told him I was not the husband.
“She told me he was dead,” he had said. “But I keep expecting him to turn up. It’s a major source of my anxiety dreams.”
Once seated, we began talking on a more formal basis. “Why are you looking for Miss Pitman?” he asked me.
“It’s a police matter,” I said.
“You’re a policeman?” Shock.
“No, but they’re not far behind.”
He didn’t say anything. I felt he was deciding whether he had the nerve to ask what it was about.
I said, “You clearly know her.”
“I interview all mature students.”
“You know her better than that,” I said.
“I’ve taken a special interest,” he said measuredly. It was clear that the interest was nearly proprietary. “I am not attached, and she’s—”
“And she’s separated from her husband,” I interrupted. “That’s not the question, or any of my business.”
“Separated,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“What kind of police matter?” he asked finally.
“It is necessary to talk to her about a murder case.”
“Murder?” he asked. It was a word he’d probably never used in earnest before in his life.
“Yes.”
“But, but you’re not police.”
I didn’t answer. That had already been covered.
“So who are you?”
“I’ve been hired by the lawyer of a man who is suspected,” I said, “but I’ve also been cooperating with the police.”
“Hired?”
“I’m a private detective.”
“She’s in serious trouble?”
“She may be. I don’t know. It depends entirely on what she has or hasn’t done.”
He stood up suddenly. “Hide her for me,” he said. “Hide her.”
“What?”
“I’ll hire you. Hide her. Help me hide her.”
I could have told him it was an offensive suggestion, or I could have punched him in the nose.
Instead I said, “Be sensible, man.”
He bowed his head and put his hand over his eyes. He sat down again. “Of course. Always.”
I waited.
“Life is so empty,” he said. He paused. I didn’t speak.
“She was desperate when she came into my office. I think she had been to the admissions office of every state university there is. It was not an easy situation, of course. She was late applying and had no money. The academic credentials seemed all right, but several years old. Mature students are always a risk. They either fail abysmally or succeed dramatically. The failures are so upsetting that we try to be very careful. But she was so needful, she wanted it so badly. I let her in despite everything, and since then, I’ve helped her. I think she’s just about got herself settled, and against the odds she seems to be coping. I feel for her. And she’s been manna for me. I’ve been constricted to dealing with pimply havealls and racial quotas for years. Then she comes along. She makes me feel that a dean of intake can do something, once in a while. I don’t know whether I could bear her not getting a chance to work it all out for herself I have a kind of investment in her. I need to know how she’s going to get on, how she will deal with problems she faces. I love her future, in that way. She doesn’t know what she means to me, but I feel like a guardian angel and it makes me feel good. Worthwhile. I don’t know whether I can stand for it not to have a chance to work itself out.”
He stopped.
I said, “She will have no future until her past is straightened out.”
“Did she kill someone?” he asked, simply.
“Do you think she’s capable of it?”
“Certainly,” he said. “As we all are, if there’s nothing else we can do.”
“Oh,” I said.
“It’s been one of my small pleasures to try to show her that extremes needn’t be approached. That the world can be rational, helpful, can respond to an individual’s needs.”
“Where can I find her?” I asked finally.
“She has a part-time job as a waitress at the Campus Cookhouse. It’s a restaurant on Uhle Street on the eastern edge of the campus. She’ll be off duty at two. That’s an hour earlier than usual because of the football game. But she’s not going to it. She’ll go to the library until five. She’ll go back to her dorm, rest for a few minutes and then be back at the Cookhouse at six.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“I know her every move,” he said lightly. “I got her the job, although after this year I think I can get her some financial aid. She has a loan already, which I have underwritten, although she doesn’t know that. She should get some scholarship money if her grades are as good as I think they will be. I see her on a weekly basis, sort of as a secular counselor. I also see her instructors from time to time.”
“Dean Caldwell,” I said, “I’ve got to insist that you don’t warn her that I am coming.”
He did not speak.
“I will call the police now and have her taken into custody if you can’t make me believe that you will not tell her to run away.”
“What good would that do?” he asked. “Her future is here. I don’t want her to run away. I only hesitated just now because I was deciding whether there was some way I could keep you from getting to her.”
“What did you decide?”
“I have a gun. I could shoot you. But that doesn’t seem terribly sensible.”
“I am relieved,” I said. I intended to be sarcastic, but found that I felt it more than I expected.
“You said before that the police are not far behind you.”
“That’s right.”
“So there wouldn’t be time for her to get away effectively anyway.”
“That sort of thing takes careful planning,” I said. But his Priscilla could tell him more about that than I could.
Chapte
r Thirty Two
Campus Cookhouse was one of a row of commercial premises on the public side of what appeared to be a boundary road separating the university from the rest of the world. All sorts of academically related services were provided and there were several eating places along the row, offering the cosmopolitan last-food palate choice between Chinese, Mexican and Italian meals. The Cookhouse was your standard American, HAMBURGERS A SPECIALTY, a sign said. Pretty snappy.
I couldn’t park on Uhle, but a big drugstore offered parking space around a corner.
It was about one-thirty.
I walked back to the Cookhouse and for a couple of minutes stood looking in the front window. There were two dozen booths and counter service for fifteen. It was about quarter full and at first I didn’t see anyone who looked familiar. There was a waitress behind the counter and another on the floor, but both were too tall to be Priscilla Howell Donohue Pitman Pynne.
At least I thought they were. It was hard to remember, and harder still because I was looking for two different people. One a blonde bikinied beauty with a sulky face; the other a carefully downbeat brown-haired woman, who was a bit chubby.
I thought about the chubbiness while I watched. I pictured the woman eating calculatedly for two months, to help herself hide. It felt extreme to me. I began to feel stupid for having left Dean Caldwell. I visualized him meeting her somewhere not far from where I was standing. He would take her to her room for a quick pack-up, and then they would be off.
I would have to start the hunt all over again.
I grew uneasy and wondered if I should walk around the back before I went in.
A couple of minutes can be a long time.
Then she came out of the kitchen carrying a tray.
The woman I saw was a cross between the two I recalled. The hair was still brown, but longer than it had been when she came into my office in June with it cropped short to be undistinguishing.
She was also thin again.
But she was smiling, obviously comfortable and relaxed. That was new. Before, I’d seen a disapproving face in the picture and a tense face in my office. I’d never seen her really smile.
She carried the tray to a booth of four male students near my window. She distributed four different orders to the individuals without asking whose was which. Four different drinks; four different desserts. She was thriving in the situation, absorbing it. She chatted lightly, staying and swaying for a moment. She took an additional order for something, and went away again.
Missing Woman Page 17