Missing Woman

by Michael Z. Lewin

  “Hello!” I called.

  My voice seemed to reverberate through the night, and suddenly there was the return sound of feet running and car doors slamming.

  A voice came through a bullhorn. “Whoever you are, come out slowly and with your hands above your head.”

  As I walked into the glare of the lights, I made out three police cars and a number of figures.

  There were people pointing guns at me again.

  But I was tired. I couldn’t have cared less.

  “Get your hands up!” the voice from the bullhorn shouted.

  “Go away,” I said.

  They either didn’t hear me or were naturally contrary. Two men rushed at me and each grabbed an arm.

  “Oh, cut it out,” I said.

  They twisted my arms behind my back and brought me out of the glare into comparative dark. From behind an open car door, a figure rose, and I saw the bullhorn in his hand. A sound-gun. I had guns on the mind.

  Then there was an unamplifled sound. “Do you know who it is, Sheriff?”

  I recognized the voice. Darrow Junkersfield.

  A powerful flashlight blinded me.

  “Turn it off!”

  “Ah,” Junkersfield said. “The private detective.”

  “My head hurts. I want a doctor.”

  “None of my men laid a finger on you,” he said sharply.

  “Your paranoia is showing,” I said. “I got shot earlier this evening. I want treatment.”

  “You look all right to me,” he said.

  “By God, I’ll die if you don’t get me to a doctor,” I said. I felt like throwing a tantrum. “Look at the back of my head.” I turned it to him. “Go on, look.”

  “Some blood,” he said. “So maybe you cut yourself shaving.”

  “I demand medical attention.”

  “Is there a hospital around here?” he asked Jeanna Dunlap.

  “Nearest is in Columbus. About fifteen miles.”

  “That’s that,” Junkersfield said, expecting me to be unwilling to travel as far as fifteen miles.

  “I don’t want a hospital. Take me to Andrew Kubiak in Nashville. He’s the coroner there. You’ve already got him out of bed to deal with the body. He might as well fix me up too.”

  “As soon as you tell me why you killed the lady there,” he said.

  “Aren’t you supposed to read me my rights first?”

  “I already did.”

  “And you have witnesses to prove it. Just as well I don’t need them. But don’t take my word for it. You go into the woods and get yourself a real witness to what happened. Even though the angle the bullet went in should have told you, unless you think a gunman hid in her bra until he got a chance to plug her under the chin.”

  “What’s he talking about?” one of Junkersfield’s flunkies asked.

  “What witness?” Junkersfield asked.

  “David Hogue,” I said. “He’s in there shooting snakes. I bit pieces out of the trees on the way in. All you have to do is follow the trail.”

  “And he saw what happened to the woman?”

  “With his own two eyes. He also killed Billy Boyd. He is also trying to work out a way to shoot himself with a gun that has no bullets. The gun is the one that killed the woman and made all the holes around her house.”

  There was a rush of activity which led to a party of state policemen taking a walk in the woods.

  “It is also the gun that wounded me,” I said. But people didn’t seem to care very much.

  I was left in the tender care of Jeanna Dunlap. Almost as an afterthought, Junkersfield told her to get me some medical attention. She, led me to her car woodenly, silent.

  Junkersfield hadn’t noticed the effect on her of my identifying Dave Hogue as Boyd’s murderer. But I had.

  I was also adequately compos mentis to turn my van’s lights out. If I left them on and drained the battery, you could be sure none of this platoon of cops would be around to help push it. They’re never there when you want one.

  Jeanna Dunlap remained silent as we pulled onto the main road. But when we got up to cruising speed she spoke, without taking her eyes off the road ahead. “I suppose you’re sure.”

  “About Dave Hogue? Yes,” I said.

  She was quiet only for a moment. “I want to apologize to you,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I’ve disgraced the honorable office I hold. And at no time worse than when I broke the glass in my door.”

  “You were suffering then far more than I have about it since,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said meditatively.

  I didn’t ask what it was all about. But, proving that Leroy Powder’s was not the only way to learn things, she volunteered, “I always thought I was a special person for Billy. Not just another entry on a list. It hit me where I am vulnerable.”

  We were silent the rest of the way into Nashville. We both had things to think about.

  There were lights on downstairs at the Kubiaks’ house.

  Mrs. Kubiak answered the door. She wore an embroidered bathrobe, and she didn’t seem surprised to have people on her doorstep.

  “What’s the problem, Jeanna?” she asked.

  “He says he was shot.”

  She peered at me in the porch light. “Do I know you, mister?”

  “We met several months ago,” I said.

  “Don’t quite place you,” she said. “And I can’t see no holes in you.”

  “I was grazed twice. Once on the ear. Once on the back of the head. They need cleaning up, mostly.”

  “No point in waiting for the doctor for cleaning up,” she said.

  She took me to the doctor’s office and had a look at my wounds. Jeanna Dunlap waited on the front porch.

  “Your head’s kind of flat back there,” she said. “Good thing too, ’cause if it stuck out more you’d have lost a piece of it.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You already lost a piece of ear.”

  “Stitch it, please,” I said.

  She did so and then went to the back of my head.

  After cutting the hair away, and daubing with cotton doused with antiseptic, she said, “I can stitch this too. Or if you don’t mind a scar, I’ll leave it like it is.”

  “Leave it,” I said. “It’ll give me character when I go bald.”

  She came around the front of me again.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Bad enough to know I’ll live,” I said.

  “What is it? Touch of shock?”

  “Maybe. But I also want to ask your husband about something else.”

  “What?”

  “Ida Boyd.”

  “Oh,” she said, clearly surprised that I should pull that name out of the evening air. “What about her?”

  “Your husband examined the body.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I keep hearing reasons to think that her death wasn’t an accident.”

  “Sounds like you’ve been talking to that David Hogue,” she said.

  “He was the first who raised it.”

  She shook her head. “He made Andy look at her again, and all Andy found was pretty much what he found the first time. Her head was broke bad, and it broke on the edge of her bathtub. It’s the sort of thing that could happen to anyone, and my Andy was absolutely certain that’s what happened to her.”

  “There was nothing funny or unusual at all?”

  “The only thing he said was that her skull seemed a little brittle.”

  “What made him say that?”

  “There were a few more small pieces of bone than there might have been. But folks’ bones get brittle as they get older.”

  “So they do,” I said.

  “You can wait for him if you want,” she said.

  “I don’t suppose he’d tell me much more.”

  “Not about Ida,” she said. She seemed to study me and a worried configuration came across her face. “Are you all right?�
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  “I’m terribly terribly tired.”

  She said, “I can fix you up a bed here.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Kubiak,” I said, “but the kind of tired that I am is not the kind of tired that sleep can fix.”

  I returned to the sheriffs custody on the porch. We walked down the stairs and got into her patrol car. I leaned back to relax a moment.

  “Ow,” I said. I’d forgotten about my head.

  “You’ve had a rough time down here,” Sheriff Dunlap said.

  “All traffic on life’s one-way street,” I said.

  “And all part of the job?”

  “The job’s not over,” I said.

  She looked at me.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Getting on for one a.m.”

  “How do people round here take to folks dropping in this time of night?”

  She said nothing.

  “It’s just they’re likely to be at home, see?”

  She listened attentively to what I had to say.

  We drove out of town to the west.

  With all Jeanna Dunlap’s flashable lights flashing, we turned into Sharon Doans’ driveway. I was not pleased to see Frank Pynne’s Fiesta parked comfortably next to Doans’ VW. But I had planned for that contingency.

  A dull illumination showed through the front window.

  I got out of the patrol car and walked to the front door.

  I pounded on it.

  And I kept pounding until a tousled Sharon Doans opened it a fraction and said, “Who the hell is that?”

  “I’m terribly sorry to disturb you. Miss Doans,” I said. “But I’ve got an urgent message for Frank Pynne and I’ve been helping the sheriff here to try to find him.”

  I stepped aside, just in case she hadn’t noticed that I was accompanied.

  It certainly concentrated her attention. “Oh,” she said. She thought for a moment. “Hang on.”

  She closed the door and it took some time before it was opened again.

  Frank Pynne, looking decidedly displeased with life, stood before me. “What’s so goddamn urgent?” he asked.

  “Your wife,” I said. “She’s been shot.”

  “So?” he asked. Still waiting for the urgent bit. Nice people I mix with.

  “She’s been asking for you. It’s about something she wants to give back to you.”

  He thought about this.

  “Shot, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bad?”

  “Yes.”

  “She going to make it?”

  “I don’t know about all that. I only wanted to. make sure you got the message. She’s in the Columbus hospital. I don’t know exactly where it is, but when you get there, I’m sure you’ll find it easily.”

  “O.K.,” he said. He closed the door again.

  I gave the thumbs up to Jeanna Dunlap. She began the maneuvers to turn around and when Pynne came out of Doans house, the patrol car drove up the driveway.

  Pynne offered no further words before he jumped into his car and spun it away.

  Doans and I stood watching as he left.

  “Hey,” she said, suddenly realizing. “Where’d Jeanna go?”

  “Back to wherever Jeannas go,” I lied.

  “But you haven’t got a ride.”

  “[???]! I forgot about that. Oh well. Doesn’t matter, I can walk. It’s not a problem. Don’t even think about driving me.”

  She thought about it.

  “Just as well she did leave,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “One whiff of the air in there, and I think she would have called out to invite some friends.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” she said thoughtfully. “We don’t usually have trouble with Jeanna about that kind of thing, but with the state police around so thick, that’s a new ball game.”

  I nodded.

  “Hey, before you start, you want a drink or something?”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” I said.

  She paused. “Oh hell. Why not?”

  Though I hadn’t really smelled it from the door, the atmosphere inside was overwhelmingly aromatic. If I wasn’t careful, I would get happy.

  I said, “I don’t mean to waste valuable fragrances, but could you open the window a little?”

  “It’s good for you, you know.”

  “Old dog. New tricks,” I said.

  “Yeah, O.K.,” she said. She opened the window near her wicker chairs. I settled in one of them.

  She got two bottles of beer and gave me one. I sipped from it.

  She sat down opposite me.

  “Whew,” she said. “That was a bit of a shake-up, the heavy knock on the door in the middle of the night.”

  “Not middle,” I said.

  “Right, right,” she said. “Lots of night left. Hey, what happened to your ear?”

  “It got shot.”

  Her eyes opened wide, then narrowed. “For true?”

  “A lady was aiming to miss it, but missed and hit it.”

  “What’s the matter? She come home early and find you with her husband?” Doans snickered and didn’t seem consumed with further curiosity.

  I sipped from my beer again, and then said, “I’ve been thinking about you.”

  She smiled. “You have?”

  “I have,” I said.

  “Hey, that’s sweet.” She looked at me. “Is that sweet?”

  I said, “People have been telling me things that have made me think about you.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “They’ve been calling you a liar.”

  She pulled herself out of a slouch on the wicker chair. “Who? About what?”

  “It’s about the time Billy was here when his mother was dying.”

  She became rigid.

  “People have been saying he wasn’t here all that time. They’re saying that he went back to the house.”

  “Well, it’s not so!” she said emphatically. “He was here every single minute from—from four-fifteen till nearly nine.”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  She sat angry, for a moment or two.

  “I do,” I said.

  She relaxed a little. “Oh.” She didn’t know quite what to say.

  “Well, nearly. You’ve shaded the time he arrived a little. It would have been later, because he didn’t come here until his mother had slipped in the bathroom in the first place. And he would have wanted to be covered over the whole period she might have died in.”

  “That’s not so,” she said.

  “And now that Billy’s will is out, and people know you were more than just a friend of his, they won’t be nearly so ready to believe about the time just because you say it.”

  “I wrote it down,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “I have a book I write things in, things that happen to me, and I wrote it down what time Billy got here that day and it says four-fifteen.”

  “Show it to me.”

  “I . . . I don’t want to. It’s personal, full of private things, you know.”

  “Just show me where it says Billy came at four-fifteen. If you show me that part now, then I can be a witness to say that you didn’t change it, if somebody asks later.”

  She thought about it. “I’ll cover up the rest of it,” she said.

  “O.K. Fine,” I said.

  She got up and went to a bookcase by her bed. I watched as she took one from a row of red books.

  She leafed through.

  “It would be the beginning of March,” I said.

  “I know, I know.”

  She found the part she was looking for, and read it, and came over to me.

  Before she bent down, she said, “Now, promise if I hold my hand over part of it, you won’t knock it away and try to read under.”

  “I promise.”

  She put the book on my lap, holding both her hands over a section beneath the first two lines. The lines read, “
Billy came over about quarter past four. He stayed till nearly nine and we made . . .”

  “O.K.?”

  “I’ve read them,” I said.

  She closed the book, and lifted it off.

  “I’m dying to know what you and Billy made,” I said.

  “Nosy.”

  She took the book back to the bookcase.

  “You’re not shy, are you?” I asked as she returned.

  “A little bit.” She sat down. “So see? He was here when I said and he stayed the whole time.”

  “I said that I believed he was here the whole time,” I said.

  “But now you know.”

  “I know that you are a little bit shy, and that you are a little bit unlucky.”

  She frowned. “Unlucky? What do you mean?”

  “I mean that Billy may have been here the whole time, but you weren’t.”

  She sat.

  “And I say you were unlucky, because somebody saw you.”

  Still silent.

  I repeated, “Somebody saw you.”

  “They couldn’t have,” she said.

  “Oh, but they did.”

  She frowned harder. “They couldn’t have seen me,” she said again, emphatically.

  “Why not? You mean because you were dressed up like a man?”

  Her face went suddenly blank.

  “Let me try this out on you,” I said. “Billy is told his mother is about to make a will to his disadvantage. He goes to the house to talk to her. He is in the house when his mother slips in the bathroom. Maybe he made that happen. Maybe he didn’t. But he definitely knows it’s happened and he knows she is hurt and he comes here instead of getting help for her. He comes here because he thinks she is going to die and wants to make sure he has an alibi, in case people accuse him. But while he’s here, he thinks maybe she isn’t going to die after all. And if she lives, she’ll know he hasn’t sent for help for her. Maybe if she lives she will even be able to incriminate him. He decides to ask you to go to the house to see how badly hurt she is. Maybe you’re willing or maybe you have to be pressured into going, but you agree.”

  I sipped from my beer. Doans stared at me, her eyes and her mouth a little bit open.

  I said, “You decide that if you have to go, you’re better off dressed up some way or another. Maybe you’re just more comfortable that way or maybe you think anybody seeing you go to the house would wonder what you were doing there, since you never go there. Anyway, you dress up. You drive your own car, but you park out of the way, and, dressed up, you walk to the house. Billy has given you a key. But you’re a little bit unlucky because someone sees your car, sees you and sees you go into the house with the key.”