Missing Woman

by Michael Z. Lewin

I rolled onto my side and rested again.

  I had no sense of passing time, but while I lay there I thought to wonder were Dave Hogue was.

  Nobody was moving in the room. It was very quiet.

  It was a small room. I decided I would have heard him breathing if he was there, even if I couldn’t see him. I seemed preoccupied with breathing.

  I listened. Nobody besides me was breathing.

  No body was breathing.

  When I found the strength to sit up and look to the floor on the other side of the chair, I saw Betty Weddle dead.

  There was a small hole under her jaw on the right side. Her right eye socket was filled with blood and juice, from the pulping shock wave of the bullet passing up. There was a big hole above her forehead on the right.

  Dave Hogue was not in the room.

  I could understand that. She was a sickening sight.

  I looked around. Everything was in chaos, broken lamps, bullet holes in the walls.

  I saw the telephone across near the door, and went to it.

  I dialed the operator. I told him I wanted to talk to the law about a killing but I couldn’t remember the number I was supposed to dial. He put me through to the state police.

  I said where I was and that there was a dead person and that they should send someone over. They asked me how the person had become dead. I said gunshot. They asked whether I had touched the gun. I said I hadn’t.

  They told me to stay put.

  I said I had no intentions of going anywhere.

  When I put the phone down, I looked around the room again.

  I saw both of Betty Weddle’s hands but I didn’t see the gun.

  I looked from all angles and then elsewhere in the room. But I still couldn’t see the gun. It was possible that it had happened to fall just where the body now would cover it.

  It was also possible that it had been taken.

  By the fireplace, three sheets of paper caught my eye. The papers Weddle had been reading from when Dave Hogue interrupted her.

  I picked them up and now read for myself.

  They were all typed, clearly set out and centered on the pages. The first was headed “Reasons for Killing William Boyd, March 29, 1980.”

  Weddle had read me the five reasons listed.

  The second was headed “Risks of Detection, March 29, 1980.”

  One. The best chance is if the body is not found.

  Two. The best time would be one when his absence is not considered suspicious.

  Three. It is safer to hide the body well in territory I know than to hide it less carefully under pressure of time in unfamiliar territory.

  Four. There is no point in trying to disguise the body by removal of fingers, teeth, etc. Any male that size found here will be identified as Boyd.

  Five. I retain the option of confession to protect an alternate suspect.

  The third sheet was laid out like the others, although it was dated December 18, 1979. It was headed “Reasons for Marrying Ida Boyd.”

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  As I got in my van, my head began to throb. At the back I found hair matted with blood, and a wet hurty streak.

  I sat for a minute.

  It was not a particularly smart thing to do. The police were on B their way and if I was still around when they arrived I would be tied up for hours, if not days.

  I didn’t want that.

  I wanted to find Dave Hogue.

  But I sat anyway. It felt too much for me. If I were more liberated, I would have cried. It was because my head hurt. It was because of the familiarity of the interior of my van. It was because I had a woman I cared for. It was because I had a neon sign outside my office. It was because I still had a parent, and a child, and, despite opportunities to stop, was still breathing myself.

  It made me shudder, the jump I had made in this last day.

  I’d spent days prancing around, place to place, talking about murder. Speculating on factors behind murder. Building guesses about murder.

  Nice cozy exercises of the mind. Think about this, work out that.

  All safe, because it was done in the head.

  Then suddenly, harshly, cruelly, I had been thrust through the barrier between mind games and body death.

  I walked in ready for more chatter. I walked out lucky to be alive.

  It had become suddenly real.

  Murder is not a game. Murder is about pulpy eyes, and broken necks and not breathing. People who do murder are ugly, and wicked.

  Dave Hogue had committed murder.

  I needed, worse than I needed anything, to find him, to scream at him, “No! You were wrong! You were bad!”

  I got out of Weddle’s cul-de-sac without passing a police car, but as I turned off Hill Street farther on, I heard the screeching of tires somewhere behind me.

  I didn’t look. Not even in my rearview mirror.

  I went to Hogue’s office. There were no lights visible from the front. I parked, and walked around to the back.

  No lights visible there either.

  I looked in the double garage, but couldn’t make out whether there was a car in it or not. I tried the garage side door. It was locked.

  I didn’t feel like going back to my van for a flashlight.

  I took off a shoe and smashed the little window. I unlocked the door and went in. I felt for a light switch. The sudden light was temporarily blinding.

  One bay of the garage was empty, as before. But I was more interested now in the pile filling the other space.

  I went to it and pulled off pieces of scrap wood, cloth, iron.

  Eventually I came to a fender and the hood of a white Datsun.

  Not long before, I would have given a lot to find that car, but now I was looking for something else.

  I dug through the junk pile on it only as far as a window. The light was good enough to show me that there was no one inside.

  Not that I expected otherwise, but Dave Hogue had to be somewhere.

  I went back to my van. I drove to the center of town. I stopped by a phone box. The operator put me through to the state police. Again.

  I told them that the man they were looking for was Dave Hogue. That there was a chance he had run for it.

  I didn’t want him to have a chance.

  The duty officer had taken my last call.

  “You said you were staying at the scene,” he said. “But they’ve just called through that you aren’t there. Where are you?”

  “I’m getting medical attention,” I said. “There were a lot of bullets whizzing around the place. A couple of them grazed me.”

  I jiggled the lever in the receiver’s cradle to make some static on the line.

  The state cop said, “Where are you?”

  “Something’s wrong with the line,” I said. “I can’t hear you.”

  “The hell you can’t.”

  “I can’t hear you,” I said, louder. “Can you hear me? Can you hear me?”

  I drove out State 46, to the east.

  A mile or so on this side of Gnaw Bone.

  By the roadside edge of Ida Boyd’s tract of land I found a car. It was pulled into the space where I’d met the Mappes family frolicking.

  I was worried about walking in the woods. I’d become disoriented I last time. In daylight.

  But . . .

  I drove at the woods head on. Put my headlights on high beam shining into the shadowy trees. Took my flashlight out of the glove compartment.

  And went in at about the same place I had come out some days before.

  My headlights helped for a little while, though I had left them on more as a help to get me out.

  If, when, I managed to get out.

  But they were bright enough for me to notice the last of the blazes which my Boy Scout had casually chopped into some of the trees as he passed them.

  I’d thought him stupid and destructive at the time.

  I thanked him now. They led me, with the help of my flashlight, exact
ly where I wanted to go.

  The hollow which had been Billy Boyd’s grave.

  I saw Hogue first when my light picked up his white shirt.

  He was lying on the ground, his feet in the center of the disturbed earth from which Boyd’s body had been reclaimed, his head near some rocks.

  I stopped where I was. Hogue didn’t move. I approached him cautiously.

  As I shined the light over his body, I located the gun. In his right hand, pointing nowhere in particular.

  I saw no blood.

  I bent down and put my, ear near his mouth to listen for breath.

  “Come to hear the last words of a dying man?” he asked.

  I jerked back, stood up. Hogue pulled himself to a sitting position against the rocks.

  For the third time in less than a life, I found myself at the wrong end of a gun.

  He said, “I listened to you get closer, just as I’ve been watching you get closer to . . . what happened.”

  “You surprised me.”

  “It’s dangerous to walk alone in the woods at night unless you know them well.”

  I thought of a lot of things to say. I said, “I suppose so.” I turned my light out and sat down, facing him.

  “There are wild animals in the woods,” Hogue continued. “Not that they usually are dangerous to people. Only when they’re cornered, only when you don’t leave them alone.”

  “Are you threatening me?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Not really. It’s just that I have been lying here trying to die and I haven’t managed it yet.” He sounded almost dreamy.

  “How are you trying to do it?”

  “My heart,” he said. “I’ve been on the edge since I was thirty-two. I’ve taken care of it pretty well, so you would think that in a time of crisis, it would take care of me.” He exhaled hard, a throaty half-laugh.

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “The weather might get worse. A touch of exposure would do nicely. But if I wake up in the morning, and I’m not dead, I will just shoot myself. It’s messy and I don’t like the idea of disturbing this nice little place again, but it may have to be.”

  “Why die at all?” I asked.

  “Natural justice,” he said. “I killed someone intentionally. And that led to someone else dying. I didn’t intend that, but it is the direct consequence of my actions. And I don’t want to live with the consequences of my actions.” He stopped talking for a moment, then said, “It feels different to have killed than I thought it would. Less important, yet more wrong.”

  There was much I wanted to know, but I couldn’t find words to ask.

  He said, “You saw the sheets of paper I left at Betty’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “She must have found them at the office,” he said sadly. “Poor Betty.” Then he asked, “Was she really trying to kill you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” He seemed genuinely puzzled and curious.

  “She knew I knew you had killed Boyd. She was going to kill me to protect you.”

  “What an extraordinary thing to do.”

  “She was accustomed to protecting you,” I said. “And it was a last chance to win your affection.”

  “My affection?” He considered it, as if it were a point of law.

  “What a blind and arid bastard you are,” I said.

  “I don’t think it’s up to you to make judgments like that,” he said sharply. He shifted his position leaning against the rocks. “You don’t know what it’s like being me.”

  “You’re breaking my heart,” I said.

  “The heart,” he said. “That’s the rub.” Hogue began to speak loudly, aggressively. “By nature I am an active person,” he said. In the night light I saw him wave his right hand at me, to emphasize his point. I don’t think he remembered that he had a gun in it.

  “After Korea, I was a social worker in Detroit,” he said. “Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know what it’s like to be a social worker in Detroit?”

  “No.”

  “One who cares? One who gets involved?”

  I didn’t speak.

  “It’s hell,” he said. “Hell on wheels, that’s Detroit. And too involved, that’s my problem. Not arid. Not detached. I was swamped with the utter unsolvability and injustice of it all. It became too much for me, and I had to get out.”

  He shifted again, bringing a hand to his head.

  “So I went to law school,” he said. “I thought the law might give me some perspective on the same problems. But it nearly killed me instead. I was in the city and . . . Oh hell. It doesn’t matter. I had a heart attack. I was thirty-two and I was on death’s string. I had to readjust my whole life, my whole way of thinking. While I was recuperating, I saw a painting, a landscape of what I know now is a hillside near Story, on Route 135. That picture meant a lot to me. It looked like a nice place to come, to be, to survive. So I moved here. And instead of becoming too involved with desperate people, I’ve become involved with the land.”

  “Involved enough to kill,” I said.

  “Involved enough to kill,” he said. “I killed in Korea, to defend democracy. A matter of principle. Things are either important to you or they’re not. Billy’s destruction of this quiet little forest would have been something that could never be put right. I watched him working at his mother to get control of the land, and I knew I had to prevent it from happening. I was ready to marry the woman if I had to. But Billy saw fit to prevent that. I spent days among these trees, walking this soil, afterward. In the end I had no other effective option. I had to decide what was important to me; what life, including my life, was worth. I tried to talk seriously to him at his party, but he only joked and taunted. That was the watershed for me. I went home and worked out what I had to do, and why.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I gave myself two months. I started preparing this grave site and looking for an opportunity. But then early one Sunday morning Frank Pynne called to say his wife had absconded. He didn’t care about her, but she’d taken a lot of money, nearly four thousand dollars that he’d made in off-the-record deals. And he wanted to know what he could do, without having to explain where the cash came from. I was his lawyer—he could tell me—but he didn’t want to tell the sheriff. Anyway, I talked to him about it and then I nearly went back to bed. But I saw it was a chance. She was a pretty enough little thing that people wouldn’t worry about the idea that Billy had run away with her. It was a matter of whether I could kill him in time. So I walked across to his house, and let myself in.”

  “The door was open?”

  “I had a key from Ida,” Hogue said. “I went in. I found him alone. He was even sleeping on his stomach. I put my knee on the back of his neck and I strangled him with a wire. It was terribly easy. And very humane. He never knew what happened. I wrapped him in the sheet and put a fresh one on the bed. I packed some of his clothes and carried him downstairs. I put him in his car and locked the garage with his keys. Then I went home. In the middle of Sunday night, I walked back to the house and drove him across the street and into my garage. I put him into my car and drove him out and buried him. His car is still in my garage.”

  “I found it tonight.”

  “If anybody saw me coming or going, they didn’t register it as important. And I was lucky for a while. I had Billy gone and the rest of my remaining life intact too. But these things catch up with you eventually. There was always that chance. I have no complaints.”

  “Betty Weddle might,” I said.

  “If I were going to live, I would feel very bad about that,” he said. “But I won’t have much time.”

  “You will if I have anything to do with it,” I said.

  “You feel aggrieved about what I’ve done?” he asked lightly.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “On what grounds? An argument based on philosophical foundations of the law?”

  “Right and wr
ong,” I said, sounding more righteous than I expected. “You’re the kind of person who gives having principles a bad name.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said dismissively. “Action and reaction. Consequences. I’ve always thought that there was a utility for someone like me. Living on borrowed time, as they say. And without attachments. I live without fear of death, so I can administer it without fear. The world is a better place without Billy Boyd. He would have died one day anyway. I just hastened it a little, in exchange for hastening my own a little. You can tell I’m going to die soon anyway.”

  “I can?”

  “The way I’ve been talking about all these things. They say one’s life passes before one’s eyes. You—”

  He was interrupted by a sound we both heard.

  A muted kind of rattling.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  We listened again. It seemed to come from near him.

  I turned my flashlight on.

  The rattle came again. Hogue twisted away from the rocks he had been leaning against. “A snake!” he shouted. “Oh God, I hate them!”

  Near his side, on his left, I saw a gray coil. My light picked up two vertical lines above it. The tail, rattling, and the head.

  “Aaaaah!” Hogue screamed, and as he twisted, he aimed his gun at the thing and pulled the trigger half a dozen times. There was only one shot.

  A shock seemed to snatch at the rattling shadow.

  I sat stunned. For one thing, I had been getting ready to bet, if necessary, that Weddle’s gun didn’t have any bullets left in it. For another, as a reflex action, to fire and hit a small shadowy line was impressive shooting.

  If it came to that, the appearance of the snake at all at night was surprising. Though Hogue had been leaning on and disturbing the pile of stones which the snake presumably lived in. Billy Boyd’s body had been found in the first place because the campers had chased a snake around those stones.

  Hogue had drawn himself into a ball behind his gun. He was pulling the trigger again and again. Scared almost to death.

  But not quite.

  Chapter Forty

  I made my way back toward the roadside. I saw my dimming headlights from well inside the woods.

  I also saw someone walk in front of one of them, a momentary human eclipse.