The other man shrugged.
“It was a bright fire?”
“Bright enough to see.”
“So you went up the alley.”
“Yeah.”
“What did you see and hear as you came closer to the fire?”
“Well, I seen the fire and then I seen this woman.”
“Standing or sitting?”
“She was standing, looking at the flames.”
“Poking it with anything?”
“Nope. She didn’t have nothing to poke it with.”
“Naked, you told the ambulance men.”
“Like a babe,” Voss said. “Like a newborn babe.”
“Was she that way when you found her?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, was she that way when you found her? Or was that only how you left her.”
“Look fella. I don’t know what the broad has been saying, but we told it absolutely straight. We found her at her barbecue. She turned at us and waved a gun at us and then just when we was ducking for cover, she stuck it in her mouth and we heard a click. I may not look like much now, but I was a marine. I got to her and took the gun off her and Andy and me brought her back here and I called an ambulance ’cause she was bleeding from her mouth and looked woozy as hell. So you got no call to talk about anything else.”
“She hasn’t said anything yet,” Powder said.
“All right, then,” Voss said, nodding around the room. “I may not be no family man now, but that don’t make me no pervert.”
Powder leaned on the bar and said,“I’ll tell you what’s bothering me.”
“What?”
“The clothes are pretty well burned, even the shoes.”
“So?”
“So, I’m bothered because there is nothing to show how she got the fire going.”
“That’s all right. I can help there.”
“How’s that?”
“There was a lighter.”
Powder eyed the man.
“Andy saw it.”
Powder didn’t speak.
“Hell, if we didn’t pick it up, kids woulda got it from the alley this morning.”
Still Powder said nothing.
“Hell, who could think something like that would be important? You want it? I got it here. Look.” Voss bent behind the bar to a shelf beneath the cash register. He brought up a small disposable lighter and put it on the bar in front of Powder. “It’s just a cruddy lighter. Dime a dozen. But I smoke and Andy doesn’t, so I kept it. So what? Hey? So what?”
Powder remained silent.
“What, you lost your tongue all of a sudden? Hey, look, so maybe we touched her up a little bit on the way in. Maybe a little, ’cause she was fogged out and didn’t know the difference. And how are you not going to when you’re moving somebody in her condition, hey? But nothing else, I swear. Nothing else.”
At three-thirty Powder pulled up on Vermont Street in front of the house in which he lived. He occupied the lowest of the three floors, and had five rooms.
The building was a nineteenth-century Italianate structure that would have looked like an expatriate’s longing for home writ large in almost any other part of Indianapolis. But the house was on the edge of the district centered around and named for Lockerbie Square, and the variety of imaginative houses built by the wealthy of nearly a century ago made the area unique in the city.
When flowers were in power Lockerbie was a hippie haven, but now the spacious houses were fought over by the new urbanites, who liked the fancifulness of the area and the fact that it was only ten minutes’ walk from Monument Circle even if they always drove.
Anchored amidst the transient fashionabilities, an old guard dotted the district, determined to ride out the fuss. The Civil War had come and gone, and so would trendy appreciation of these venerable houses that were, after all, just their homes. The comfortably heeled Hoosier is unsurpassed in his cranky defense of the status quo.
Powder enjoyed the cultural conflict of his neighborhood immensely, and was a fringe participant in occasional civic projects. He also did a little manual volunteer work for the older members of the residents’ association and gave a little law-related advice to the others.
He did not like the fact that his downstairs curtains were closed.
In the morning he had left them open.
He thought about it for a moment. He got out of his car. From the tool kit in his trunk, he took a can of penetrating oil.
Then he walked to the back of the house and mounted the wooden stairs to his back porch. There he oiled the hinges of his kitchen screen door. And he waited two minutes, by his watch.
Carefully, Powder entered the house.
He could hear immediately that there were people inside.
He drew his gun.
He walked to the door of the hallway. Some creaking came from his front room. He thought he heard a whisper.
He waited again, listening for more sounds, suggestions of human activity in other parts of the apartment.
All he heard were inhuman sounds, a house in stasis: refrigerator, clock.
He walked slowly along the hall to the front room.
He settled both hands around the handle of his weapon, took a breath, and kicked the door. It flew open. He jumped in, landed in a crouch, and said, “Police! Don’t move!”
The gun pointed up the wrong end of a large, hairy bottom that was connected, in turn, to four bare legs. The legs sprawled and writhed in the middle of the floor. Someone grunted.
The woman said, “Jesus, Ricky, cut it out! Someone’s there!”
“What? What?” The hairy bottom’s questions were breathless.
As Powder lowered his gun, the man rolled off and sighed. Then he sat up, acknowledging Powder for the first time.
“Hi, Dad,” he said. “I didn’t expect you home so early.”
Chapter Six
“So, I’m kind of between abodes,” Ricky said. “That’s an emergency, isn’t it? That’s what you gave me a key for. And I’d like to crash here for a while. Till I get resettled, you know?”
“You still have your job?”
“Of course I do.”
“Why aren’t you at work?” Powder asked.
Ricky smiled wryly. “I am,” he said. He winked. “What Ma Bell doesn’t know can’t hurt her.”
Powder said nothing.
“The truck is out back. Look, is it all right if I stay here or not?”
Powder shrugged and nodded.
“Great. Thanks, Dad. I’ll try to keep out of your way.”
“How about cleaning the spots on my rug?”
“Sure, sure. What does it take?” Ricky turned to his woman friend. “You know. Tammy?”
Tammy shook her head, Then said, “Soap and water, I suppose.”
“They’re little spots, Dad. They’ll dry away.”
Powder said nothing. He rose from the kitchen chair.
“You’ll see,” Ricky said.
“I suppose I will,” Powder said. He walked out the back door.
The top of an Indiana Bell lineman’s truck was clearly visible in the alley, now that he looked for it. Powder stooped to pick up the can of oil and went through the backyard to his garage.
Inside, he examined the front of a bureau drawer. He had intended to add a coat of polyurethane, but instead he trimmed some overflow glue with a linoleum knife and ran his fingers over the dry surface of the last coat. He dabbed at some air bubble irregularities with fine sandpaper, and then put the drawer down and made his way back to his car.
It was twenty past four when he arrived at the office. A stocky man in his early thirties sat behind the counter talking to Sergeant Fleetwood.
“A missing person you’re waiting for someone to claim. Sergeant?” Powder asked sharply as he came in.
Fleetwood straightened noticeably in her chair.
“At ease,” Powder said before she spoke. “Busy afternoon?”
&nb
sp; “I don’t know what the norm is, but I don’t think it’s been particularly busy.”
“Pity,” Powder said. He took the logbook and began to read it. “I hoped you’d be rushed off your feet.” Without looking up, he asked, “Who’s your friend?”
“This is Carl Bywater. Lieutenant Powder. Carl made my wheelchair for me.”
“That’s right,” Bywater said. “Sure did.”
Powder looked at the man, whose shaggy straw-colored hair swung like a mop as he rose and turned to extend a hand. “Glad to meet you, Lieutenant Powder. Carollee here has been telling me all about you.”
Powder returned to his scrutiny of the log entries, which were clearly and precisely written.As Bywater stood. Powder said,“What do you do for a living, Carl? Are you a full-time wheelchair craftsman?”
“Yes sir, I sure am.”
Powder’s eyebrows rose briefly.
“My uncle Berl runs the sales and rentals side and I do the repairs and the custom work.”
“Racing stripes, eh?”
“Well, sir, it’s mostly fulfilling an individual’s practical requirements and seeing how far we can extend the wheelchair frontier.”
Powder straightened and looked at the young man. “And I expect you stopped to see the raven-haired police beauty on her first day on the job to see if there were any bugs in the chair.”
“Uh, that’s right. Yes, sir. Sure did.”
“And are there any bugs?”
“Uh, no. Not really.”
“No bugs at all. Well, that’s mighty fine work, Mr. Bywater. I expect Carollee’s real grateful. And it’s a tribute to the quality control on your production line. Congratulations.”
“Uh, thank you.”
“I’d like to shake your hand on that fine piece of work.”
Powder shook the man’s hand.
“Hope to see you again sometime soon, Mr. Bywater.”
“Uh, right. Guess I’ll be running along now.” He raised the counter flap and passed through the gap.
“Keep up the good work,” Powder said.
“Uh, yes, sir. Sure will. Bye now. Bye, Carollee.”
“Good-bye, Carl.”
Powder waited until the office door closed. He turned to Fleetwood. “Try to keep your swain’s attentions confined to out-of-hours, will you. Sergeant? And keep civilians on the other side of the counter.”
“He was looking at the chair,” she said.
“I don’t care if he was adjusting your truss.”
“In any event, you don’t have to—”
“I’ve got an errand for you,” Powder said, interrupting. “I want you to run up to Forensic and give them this lighter. Tell them it goes with the burned clothes I left earlier and I want to know if there’s anything about it that might help an identification. A long shot, but we do our best. Got it?”
The log showed that his new sergeant had dealt with six people. Three log entries had come to the office and three had telephoned. The office visitors had all been potential new cases, two adult and one juvenile.
Although people of all ages who were reported as missing went onto the Reportable Incident file, only juvenile cases were pursued as a matter of routine. And for the bulk of these, older teen-agers, the searches were generally uneventful, done from a checklist: initial phone calls and visits, and then follow-up calls at administratively established intervals as long as the case was open. More often than not the juveniles were located, even if that was no guarantee of their return to the fold from which they had absented themselves. Missing sub-fourteen-year-olds automatically went to Detectives.
People missing adults often contacted the office, but most did not bother to complete the “long form” when they realized that Powder and his staff would take no active steps to find the missing party. For the most part, leaving home or work, as such, was not against the law. Crimes were generally referred to other departments, which left Powder to work primarily on cases that had features of extra interest, or that he felt like working on.
The refinements of these judgments were hard to convey, first day, to a new sergeant. Fleetwood had handled her contacts strictly by the book.
Her best work was with a woman concerned about a daughter absent over the weekend. Fleetwood had taken her through the procedure, and had found that not all the possible places the girl might be had yet been eliminated. The woman had been sent to the public telephones in the hall around the corner and had found her daughter. A saving of several taxpayer dimes.
The two other callers in the office were men missing women. One had left after hearing that the department would not punish his wife if they did find her. He’d said he had a pretty damn good idea where she was.
The second man, missing a girlfriend, had begun the form and then gone home to get supplementary material to complete it with.
Fleetwood had also dealt with three telephone calls.
Major Tafelski had made his Monday inquiry about “the search” for his missing sister. She had been gone for nearly seven years.
A man had asked how one went about listing a wife as a missing person.
And the last call had been to report that a seventeen-year-old son had returned home.
Powder closed the log, happy enough that Fleetwood had had a varied if not frantic dip in the Missing Persons pool. It seemed she would swim.
He went to the manual Male file, where the case forms relating to Indianapolis’s missing men were stored in order of birth date.
There he spent ten minutes leafing through photographs of men who had been born between 1915 and 1945. He compared them with the photograph of the unidentified male corpse he had taken at County Hospital in the morning.
He pulled three cases, but without confidence. The corpse had a couple of weeks’ growth of beard, which masked some features. But Powder’s guess was that it wasn’t on record.
Then he turned to preparing for Fleetwood a list of the thirty-, sixty-, and hundred-and-twenty-day follow-up phone calls that were due in the week. The department had a card file, rather like those of precomputer libraries, in which case calls moved to the front of the racks as they came due.
Two men walked in.
Man day. Powder thought. Manday Monday.
The younger was dressed in a tattered gray jacket and baggy trousers. He was unshaved and he carried a small plastic bag, which he lifted carefully to the counter space.
The second man held back. Perhaps forty, he wore a well-blocked navy-blue sweater with the collar of the underlying shirt turned out over the crew neck. He seemed a trim, well-organized figure and Powder spoke to him first.
“If you would care to sit in one of the chairs, I’ll be with you as soon as I’ve seen to this gentleman.”
The older man pivoted to look for the chairs.
The younger man said, “I talked to someone else when I came before. She sent me home to get some stuff.” He fingered the plastic bag.
“Ah,” Powder said. “You would be Mr. Burrus.”
“Yeah. Right.” He took a pack of cigarettes from his inside jacket pocket.
“This is a no-smoking zone,” Powder said.
“Oh. Hell. Sorry,” Burrus said. He put the cigarettes away. “I went back to my place to look for a few things.” He began to empty the plastic bag. “Like I told the lady, I don’t have a picture. That’s the way she was. Is. She’d be there sometimes and then not.” The man shrugged, seeking sympathy. ”After nearly a year. I know her birthday, but not how old she is. Her taste in music— none. And some pictures, she drew. And I’ve got some clothing sizes, and a few other things.” He picked them out and named them one by one.
Powder watched and listened as the recital ran its course. He thought of a magician, pulling things from a hat. Ta dah! And didn’t notice at first when Burrus had finished.
Powder said, “As my colleague spoke to you earlier, I think it would be best if you were to speak to her again.”
“Yeah? Well, OK. Where do
I go?”
“You stay here. I’ll track her down for you.”
Powder called Forensic on the internal telephone. “Is Sergeant Fleetwood there?”
They knew immediately that she was. Everybody knew Fleetwood. She came to the telephone. “Lieutenant Powder? I was waiting here because they said they were about to have preliminary information on the items you gave them this morning.”
“There is a Mr. Burrus down here. He has brought in a kitchen sink and other artifacts from his ruined life. As you know what you asked for and why, I thought you might care to stop being flirted with and come down and do some work.”
Powder hung up. “She’ll be with you in a couple of minutes,” he said.
As Burrus fidgeted. Powder moved along the counter and hailed the man sitting across the room.
“What can we do for you?” Powder asked as he came to the desk.
“I phoned an hour and a half ago. I want to report that my wife is missing.”
“Yes sir. Your name?”
“William G. Weaver, Junior.”
“And your wife’s name?”
“Annie. Not Ann. Maiden name, Coates. No middle name.”
“I see. Address?”
“Thirty-seven Twenty-eight Oxford Street.”
“And your wife’s date of birth?”
“January twenty-sixth, 1952.”
“Where was she born?”
“Quincy, Illinois.”
“All right,” Powder said, looking up. “Tell me about it.”
“It? Oh, the circumstances.”
“That’s right.”
“She wasn’t home on Saturday when I got back from the store. It is really just about that simple.”
“What kind of store is that, Mr. Weaver?”
“I run a small security-hardware business. Locks, alarms, that kind of thing.”
“Where is this?”
“On Massachusetts Avenue, just northeast of the junction with Tenth Street. It’s called Lock and Key.”
“I take it that your wife is ordinarily at home when you get back from the store on a Saturday.”
“Invariably. I would say that there have been no exceptions for ten years.”
“Until two days ago.”
“That’s right.”
“What do you think has happened, Mr. Weaver?”
Hard Line Page 3