She didn’t look like a murderer.
I went in.
I sat in an empty booth across the aisle from the four male students, on the assumption that it would be one of the tables which she was responsible for.
I took the menu from between napkin dispenser and condiment rack. I found that I was nervous.
I didn’t have much time to worry about it. Priscilla Pitman Pynne reappeared through the swinging kitchen door with a plate of French fries. She brought it to the boys’ table and noted in passing the new occupation of one of her booths.
She went to the end of the service counter and did some figuring. She got a glass of water. She returned to us all, the five men in her life. She put the glass of water on my table and said, “Be with you in a sec.” She then distributed the four checks to the boys across the aisle.
Finally, she turned back, and looked at my face for the first time. And stared.
“Doctor Staedtler, I presume,” I said.
She stood, pen poised, motionless, for enough seconds for it to seem like minutes.
I watched her face intently.
She swallowed. She breathed unevenly. She said, “I . . . my . . . my heavens. What a surprise.”
“I can imagine,” I said.
“Is—? Are . . . you here by coincidence?”
“No,” I said. “I’m pretty hungry. What would you recommend?”
“What?”
“To eat. What’s good?”
“Special burger with the works,” she said, but colorlessly. Her voice, like her face, was suddenly wan.
“Sounds fine,” I said. I snapped the menu closed. “And coffee first,” I said.
Mechanically the pen began to move. Then so did she.
She didn’t even ask if I wanted anything else.
She walked back toward the kitchen. The coffee was near the end of the counter, where the water was. She passed it without a look.
I was on my feet before she pushed through the kitchen doors. I got to them before they stopped rocking.
There were small plastic windows in the doors. I paused to look through, but saw only what I expected to see. Priscilla Pitman Pynne pulling a coat on as she walked to the back of the kitchen.
I went in and got to the back door just after she disappeared through it. I felt a moment of panic when I lost sight of her. I hadn’t quite realized how much of a stake I had in finding her. I wasn’t planning to let her slip away now.
She was walking along the alleyway behind the restaurant when I got outside. She walked at a steady pace. I ran after her. I caught hold of her arm. I swung her so I could see her face. I saw concentrated determination, and anger, but no fear.
“Going my way?” I asked.
She said, “Leave me alone.”
“No,” I said.
“Please!”
Chapter Thirty Three
I walked her to the end of the alley. It was the opposite end from the lot where I had parked my van. Instead of marching her along the sidewalk back in front of Campus Cookhouse, I took her across the street onto the university grounds. I could see some benches along a walkway between buildings and one of them was empty.
She didn’t resist, but I kept a positive grip on her arm.
I sat her down.
“What do you want?” she said passively.
“You remember who I am?”
“Of course.”
Then suddenly she put her hands to her eyes and said with rending mournfulness, “You’re going to ruin it all, aren’t you?”
“Ruin what?”
“My life. My nice new life.”
“All I’m going to do is find out what it cost your old life to set you up in this one,” I said.
“I don’t know what that is supposed to mean,” she said tiredly. She uncovered her face.
“I’ve been looking for you for quite a while,” I said.
“But why? Who cares? Who could possibly care?”
“Technically, I’m working for your husband,” I said.
“Frank?” she said, with all the pleasure of finding a fly in her mouth. “You’re not telling me that Frank wants me back?”
“No.”
“It’s got to be the money, then,” she said. But as a statement, rather than a question.
“Superficially, perhaps,” I said. “But it’s hardly enough to send someone looking for you the way I’ve been looking for you.”
“Thirty-eight hundred dollars may not be much to you,” she said, “but it’s been the chance to live for me.” Her voice was somber, factual.
“What thirty-eight hundred dollars?”
“That I took when I left,” she said.
I had thought I was there to surprise her. “I don’t know about any money except fifty dollars they say you took from Frank’s wallet.”
“Oh yes,” she said.
I waited, but then said, “Tell me about this other money.”
“I found it. It was all in cash and it was under a floorboard. I tipped over a floor lamp and saw the wood was cut underneath. I don’t know why, but I picked at it. I never did that kind of thing before, messing with the house. But that time I did it and a floorboard came up and God, there was all that money. I cried I was so happy.”
“Why were you so happy?”
“Because it meant I could get away. It meant I wouldn’t have to have Frank’s babies. It meant I could start over. It meant I could have my life back.”
“But why did your husband report only the fifty dollars as missing?”
“He wouldn’t want anybody to ask him where he got that kind of money in cash.”
“Where did it come from?”
“I guess kickbacks from people he helped get I.U. contracts for and from selling things on the side. I didn’t ask, though. I didn’t want him to know I knew about it. I just organized my escape as fast as I could and got out.”
“How did you go?”
“I got a ride with a student. They have this ride-and-rider system at the Union at I.U.
“I’ve seen it,” I said. “How long was it between your finding the money and leaving?”
“The longest five days of my life,” she said quietly. “And some of the other days of my life have been pretty long.”
“That was more than a week after Billy Boyd’s party, “ I said.
She was surprised that I mentioned it. “Yes,” she said, shrugging, “I guess so. Why?”
“The business between Frank and Sharon Doans wasn’t involved in your leaving?”
“If anything pushed me over the edge, it was my doctor giving me a lecture instead of the pills when I went in to renew my birth-control prescription. But . . . the whole thing . . . it trapped me, and had outlived its usefulness.”
“Why did you go to Memphis?”
“It was the first place any distance away there was a ride to. And I thought with Elvis having lived there it would be one of those show-business towns with a lot of quacky doctors around so if I’d needed to, I could have got one to change what I looked like a lot.”
“But after hiring me, you didn’t think you needed to.”
“That’s right,” she said. She lowered her eyes, and breathed in heavily. “I still don’t know what you’re doing here.” Before I could tell her, she said, “God, I love this place. I’ve just spent nine years too long getting here.”
She looked up and glanced around. Then started. “What’s he doing here?” It was an unquerying question, a way of noticing.
“Who?”
“You wouldn’t know him.”
I turned and saw the slablike figure of Dean Caldwell standing by the gate to the campus. “Dean Caldwell, you mean?”
“Do you know everything?”
I watched the man. He watched us. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to see him. I’d taken away his options of action, but not his hopes. He could have been expected to drive to town after me, to spectate at events he saw as affecting his future.
/>
“A funny guy,” she said.
“He thinks highly of you.”
“I don’t know about that,” she said, “but he’s helped me a lot. And he’s never made a pass at me.”
“You expect men to make passes at you?”
“I don’t expect it. They do it.”
She turned away, and glared at Caldwell. He saw this and straightened noticeably. She turned back.
I asked, “How has it been nine years too long getting here?”
“I should have been at college when I came out of high school.”
“You were,” I said.
“You know about that, too?”
I nodded.
“They don’t know about it here.”
“I talked to Elizabeth Staedtler. The real one.”
“I always liked her.”
“And I talked to Kenneth Catherman.”
“Oh. Him.” The resigned calm from which she’d been speaking to me began to waver for the first time.
“What about him?”
“A poof, that’s what about him.”
“So?”
“So? So!” she asked, with a raised pitch in her voice. “The first man, the only man I ever wanted to make a pass at me.”
I didn’t say anything. She was talking freely now.
“An innocent I was,” she said, her voice, if not her mind, under control again. “I thought the world was like it was supposed to be. If you worked hard enough for something, you got it. I worked like hell in high school, for him. To please him. Then after I graduated I found out that I couldn’t have him. I know it’s a stupid thing, and kids are supposed to grow up knowing everything like that now, but I didn’t and it blew my head. And it’s taken me till now to find what I want to do again. Only, here you are and I only have to look at you to feel this terrible dread that you are going to ruin it all for me.”
We looked at each other.
I asked, “Why did you kill Billy Boyd?”
She stood up like a shot. “What?”
I stood up with her. I grabbed at her arm instinctively, as if she were about to bolt from me.
“Let go of me!” she said.
Behind her a shadowy figure approached rapidly. He was a blur in the corner of my eye because I was struggling to keep the grip that I needed on this woman. I had listened to quite a bit, rather patiently. I had formed some opinions, but I had gone through too much finding her to let her get away from me without giving up answers to the hard questions.
“I said, ‘Why did you kill Billy Boyd?’ ”
“Kill?” she said. “Kill?”
The shadow behind raised an arm. I didn’t see anything at the end of it, but I heard him say, “Get out of the way. Get away!”
That made me pull at her, clutch at the coat. She pulled; I pulled back.
Just about then a pencil of flame shot out of the end of the dark arm. I felt the woman whose body I was clawing at convulse slightly. She turned to face the shadow, and she snatched at her side. She staggered, she fell.
Dean Caldwell stood and took this in. He followed the only honorable course. He turned his fire-spewing shadowy arm upon himself.
Chapter Thirty Four
A campus cop saw it all. He happened to be on the walkway going to lunch. He called for assistance and ambulances on his radio, and what he said later made the difference in letting me get away from the Muncie police by evening.
My story was that I’d been tracing a runaway wife and that Caldwell was the new boyfriend. It would hold for a couple of days, while I worked on more important things.
From the Muncie police station I managed to call Powder. He helped too, by vouching for me on condition that I come and explain to him what had happened.
That was all right with me. Indianapolis is on the way from Muncie to Nashville.
Powder lived in an alternative life-style district on Vermont. He had the first-floor apartment of a three-floor frame house. He answered the door wearing his muddy boots, then made a show of taking them off after I came in. “Haven’t had a chance before,” he said.
He put on slippers which were sitting under the coatrack.
“Still warm?” I asked.
His living room was cluttered with papers. He waved at a chair, and sat on another himself.
“You couldn’t have gotten yourself shot, instead of everybody else, I suppose?” he asked.
“The man was trying to shoot me.”
“When he gets out, I’ll arrange some target practice for him,” he said. Then, “Why? Civic duty?”
“He had plans for the lady. He thought I might be busting them. He brought the gun to threaten me with, in case she wanted to run away with him.”
“He tell you this before or after he pulled the trigger?”
“In the hospital,” I said. “She jumped up suddenly while he was watching. I grabbed at her. He ran over and pulled the trigger. Only, he shot her instead of me. When he saw that, he shot himself. Which he did about as well as he’d done in the first place.”
“Nice company you keep,” Powder said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“So why did she jump up? You pinch her?”
“I asked her why she had killed Billy Boyd.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Subtle approach, huh?”
“I thought you were the one who wanted me to ask things instead of settling for good guesses.”
“And why did she kill Billy Boyd?”
“She didn’t,” I said.
He rubbed his face with both hands. “Oh,” he said. “She said so, huh?”
“No, she didn’t get a chance to answer the question.”
“Well,” he said, “I’m glad we’ve got that all cleared up.”
“I can tell you what I think happened,” I said.
“No,” he said. “You came to me to find the lady. You found the lady. Beyond that I’m not interested in what you ‘think.’ Maybe when you know.”
“O.K.”
“Unless you lost somebody else.”
“Not lately.”
“How is she?”
“She’s got a couple of broken ribs. But she’ll make it.”
“She regain consciousness before you left?”
“Yes. I talked to her a few minutes.”
“You’re becoming a real go-getter, Samson. People get shot during an interview with you and they wake up in the hospital and you remind them of the sentence they were in the middle of. What do you do if someone dies on you?”
“I carry a life-support system in the truck.”
“So what did the lady say?”
“She was worrying she was going to miss classes.”
“That was all?”
“She said she never saw Billy Boyd the night of April twelfth.”
“And you believe her?”
“Yes.”
“Mmm,” he said. “So where do you go from here, sleuth?”
“Back to Nashville,” I said.
He looked at his watch. It was quarter to nine. “Now?”
“I’m not going to get much sleep anyway.”
He rubbed his face. “Sleep,” he said. “A wonderful thing.”
“Yes.”
“You’re at the stage where you don’t want to wait till morning, huh?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, gumshoe, just watch your back.”
Chapter Thirty Five
Before I left Indianapolis, I stopped at home to change out of my blood-spattered clothes. But first I called Dave Hogue.
“David Hogue, Attorney-at-Law,” Betty Weddle said.
“Hello,” I said. “This is Albert Samson. I would like to speak to Mr. Hogue, please.”
“He’s not here, Mr. Samson.”
“You’re working late,” I observed.
“David works late, so I really have to too.”
On a Saturday night? Ah well.
“When will he be back?”
“I
t could be any time.”
“I’m on my way down from Indianapolis and I’ll want to talk to him.”
“He will be tired when he comes in. He shouldn’t do any more business until Monday.”
“It is of the utmost importance that I speak to him tonight,” I said. She heard the urgency in my voice. She didn’t even offer tomorrow morning.
“What is it about?”
I settled for “You can tell him I talked to Priscilla Pynne today.”
“Oh,” Betty Weddle said.
“You’ll tell him, then?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be there—” I looked at my watch—“about ten-thirty or quarter to eleven.”
It had already been a long day, but the end was not in sight. Before leaving, I washed myself thoroughly and felt fresher for it. As I was toweling off, the telephone rang.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Samson?”
“Yes.”
“This is Betty Weddle again.” Her voice was agitated.
“Is there a problem?”
“To tell the truth, David won’t be coming back to his office tonight.”
“He won’t?”
“He will be coming to my place. It . . . it’s a way for him to get away from things for a while. But if it’s absolutely necessary for you to speak to him, you can see him there.”
“It’s necessary,” I said.
She gave me directions.
Weddle’s house was in a cul-de-sac off Hill Street, about three and a half blocks from Hogue’s. A one-story brick structure, it was almost a vacation bungalow. She had told me to pull into the driveway past the shrubs to help keep the turnaround at the dead end clear. There was a small Chevvy parked half on the grass, making space for my panel truck to pull up to the garage door. I’d never seen Hogue in a car. I didn’t know whether the Chevvy was his or not.
Betty Weddle came outside as I got out of the car.
“David’s not come back yet,” she said. “Would you like some coffee?”
We sat in the kitchen at first. There was coffee already on.
“Cream and sugar?”
“No sugar,” I said.
“Piece of cake?”
“No, thank you.”
Missing Woman Page 18