“Taxi. Her momma, my sister, she give money for that, tell her how, all simple. No buses to house, gotta change, all that.”
Powder nodded thoughtfully. “All right, Mrs. Woods,” he said. “I’m going to send you upstairs, to the Detective Division.”
“You no cop?”
“Yes, I’m a cop, but I can’t easily leave here to go out and find what happened to your niece. The people who can go out are upstairs.”
The woman nodded gravely. “All again.”
“Yes. Take this form. Give it to them and tell them about it. If there is a problem, come back to me. All right?”
“Problem my niece.”
“I mean if you have problems upstairs. You ask whoever you talk to for his name and if there is a problem, you come back down here and I’ll look into it.”
“All right, mister. What your name?”
Powder took the woman to the information desk inside the main door on Alabama Street. Carollee Fleetwood was behind the Missing Persons counter when Powder returned.
“You weren’t early,” Powder said. “I like my people to be early.”
“Tough,” Fleetwood said.
Agnes Shorter entered behind them, and as she passed Powder, he handed her a pile of routine work that he had not managed to think about before opening hours.
To Fleetwood he said, “What did you make of the file I gave you to take home?”
Fleetwood took the folder from the pouch behind her seat. “What do I make of it? It’s dull. What am I supposed to make of it?”
“That’s it exactly!” Powder said. He pounded a fist on his desk top.
As if on cue, William G. Weaver, Jr., walked into the office.
“Ah, Mr. Weaver. My colleague and I were just talking about you.”
“You were?” Weaver said mildly.
“We were just commenting on how well you seem to be taking what must be a very trying and upsetting time for you.”
“I suppose it is,” he said. “Yes.”
“Such a settled pattern for years and then without warning a cornerstone, a very linchpin of your life, suddenly, is gone. You must be suffering great turmoil.”
“I am doing my best to cope with the situation.”
“And very well too,” Powder said. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” Weaver said slowly, slightly puzzled. Then, “I brought in some of the items you asked for.” He lifted a small carrying case to counter level and set it before Powder.
“Good. Thank you.”
Weaver opened the case and began to take things out.
“There weren’t really that many of my wife’s things left to gather. She took just about everything. But I do have her birth certificate, our marriage license, her high school diploma, and also her checkbook. I’ve contacted our dentist and doctor and asked them to give you any assistance you ask for, and I’ve written their names and addresses on a card for you. Also the details of three friends. And there are a few things which might have her fingerprints on them.”
“No charge cards?”
“No. She seems to have taken them.”
“Good,” Powder said. He turned to Sergeant Fleetwood. “You’re ready to go out, then?”
“What?”
“Mr. Weaver, I would like you to show your house and business premises to my colleague. Sergeant Fleetwood. All right?”
“Well,” Weaver said hesitantly. He looked at Fleetwood. “If you think it’s necessary.”
“It’s just routine. She will drive her own car and she has your home address. She’ll meet you there. We often find that missing wives leave things in strange places, so she’ll want to make a thorough examination. Any physical help you can give her maneuvering around would be appreciated.”
“All right,” Weaver said.
“As I said, just routine.” Powder held the counter flap up and, without speaking, Fleetwood passed through the gap and left the office with William Weaver.
Chapter Eleven
Powder was completing some juvenile-case closures when the internal telephone rang. He answered it, saying, “Missing Persons.”
“That Powder?”
“Yeah. Who’s that, please?”
“Greenwell. Detective Sergeant.”
“What can I do for you. Detective Sergeant Green-well?”
“You can stop sending people up here who take names if we don’t drop everything, including our drawers, to scour the streets for AWOL twenty-year-olds.”
Stiffly, Powder said, “There is prima facie evidence of kidnap. And my office is not adequately staffed to follow it up.”
“Kidnap? You gotta be joking.”
“I’m not joking.”
“Is there a ransom demand you haven’t told us about or something? Shit! Twenty-year-old girls get lost every day, and damn well celebrate it. So do nineteen-year-olds and eighteen-year-olds.”
“What’s your first name. Sergeant?”
“Now look. Powder . . .”
“Name!”
“Jack. But look, I heard about you too. Lieutenant. And this is just another of your time-wasting referrals.”
“If you haven’t got time to do your job up there, then work longer hours, work faster, or work better.”
“Just what the hell do you expect me to do about it, then?”
“I expect you to find out from the bus company whether the girl was on the bus, or whether they had a ticketed empty seat. If she was on the bus, I expect you to find out whether she made it to a taxi at the bus station. If she made it to the taxi, I expect you to find out where it took her. I expect you to get further details from the aunt and the girl’s parents. I expect you to get photographs and—”
“All right, all right. I know how to do my fucking job.”
“If you know how to do your job. Jack, why call me to tell you what to do?”
While he was at the internal phone, Powder made some calls. The first was to the Gun Analysis Office. There, they had finished work on the ballistics test done in Gun Registration on the handgun Aurora Jane Doe had failed to kill herself with. They were satisfied that it was not a gun they were looking for. The weapon itself was still with Gun Registration.
There, Powder learned it had been recently purchased, new. The name on the license application was Sheila Smith. The address given was 3852 North Main Street. Powder took the name and address of the store it had been purchased from.
Finally, Powder called Fraud.
He gave them details from the insulation leaflet he had received from Uncle Adg. He asked for information about the company.
Mrs. Woods, noticeably deflated, was back in Missing Persons fifteen minutes after Powder finished speaking to Fraud.
“Not going very well then?”
“They say yes but they do no,” she said. Her shoulders drooped under her dark shawl. “That mean no Marianna. They not do something. She gone.”
Powder reviewed Mrs. Woods’s story and promised to follow the matter up. She listened to him but with little faith and no enthusiasm.
When Mrs.Woods left.Powder turned to Agnes, who was engrossed in a record card and the display screen of the computer terminal.
“Agnes?”
“Yessss.” She drew the word out to preclude interruption before she was finished what she was doing.
Powder waited.
Then he asked, “Have the bodies come in today?”
“None today. But a lot of these places leave it till afternoon. So there may be some later.”
Routine notification of unidentified bodies around the state happened daily.
“Put this description on a match-up list. Anything close, I want to know about.” He gave her the description Mrs. Woods had left of her niece.
Agnes studied the details immediately. “May be a murder, eh?” she asked happily.
“You are too optimistic,” Powder said sourly.
“But maybe?”
“What is a nice girl like you doi
ng with such a taste for blood? Don’t your parents fight enough at home?”
Agnes turned to the keyboard.
“I’m going out for a while. If anyone wants me, I’m on the firing range teaching Fleetwood quick draws from a wheelchair holster, all right?”
“OK, Lieutenant.”
“And don’t forget to notice if somebody comes in. If you don’t pay attention, they’ll steal the rubber plant.”
The gun taken from “Sheila Smith” had been sold fifteen days before at a downtown store called Home of Sport.
The owner remembered selling the gun.
“We don’t get that many women buying stuff in here,” he said, seeking to be chatty with the policeman.
“She gave you a false address,” Powder said.
“She did? No kidding!”
“Thirty-eight Fifty-two North Main Street.”
“Yeah?”
“There are only two Main Streets in town. One at Fort Ben Harrison and the other in Meridian Hills. They both run east-west.
Did you check her driver’s license?”
“She said she didn’t drive.”
“What identification did you take? Let’s see your log.”
“Come on, Lieutenant. Don’t make a meal of it. She came in here, sober and educated . . .”
“And carrying cash.”
“That too. But nervous. Very, very nervous. I started on the routine, but she was surprised when I say she needs ID, and she begins to shake and cry.”
“Why?”
“She says she’s living alone and she’s scared. She got back from a couple days away and her place is burgled. It’s blown her mind, how somebody from the outside can just bust in. And I know how she feels. I got broke into a couple of times. It’s the personal intrusion. So I sold her the gun. She was crapping in her pants about if it happened again and she was there.”
Powder shook his head. “In this line of business, and not suspicious of someone without ID?”
The man shrugged. He asked, philosophically,“Tell me the worst; who’d she kill?”
“She tried to kill herself.”
“Man, what a relief. I was scared, the way you was talking, I thought she’d topped somebody. I’d have been in hell’s trouble then.”
“You’re in trouble now,” Powder said.
Powder used the store telephone to report the man to Gun Registration and got one of their inspectors to agree to check the store weapons register later in the day.
After he hung up the phone, the man said, “Jesus, now why did you have to go and do that?”
“Because the gun you sold her didn’t work and I hate rip-offs.”
Powder was out nearly an hour altogether. When he returned, Agnes told him that a Lieutenant Gaulden had come around and would be back at three. Fleetwood was not in the office. It was ten to twelve.
Powder had only a couple of minutes to think about what he should do next.
A woman whose sixty-year-old husband had been missing for ten days came in at twelve-fifteen.
“He had fits when he was younger,” the abandoned wife told Powder. “Not lately, but when he was younger, he had these fits and he’d take hisself off sometimes for a week. That’s what I thought it was this time, but he never been gone this long. Seven days, most, before. Usually four or five.”
By twenty past. Powder had wrung from the woman the concession that the “fits” had home an association with drink.
“Not now, though,” she insisted. “He’s been dry as a busted pump since Kennedy was shot. Shocked his handle off, that did.”
After asking her husband’s approximate height and weight. Powder showed the woman the photograph of the unidentified corpse in County Hospital.
The woman paled visibly.
“Is this your husband?”
“I . . .” She began to shake. “He didn’t have no beard.” The corpse had several days’ growth.
“That sometimes makes it hard to tell. Look at the eyes and ears.”
The woman closed her own eyes and passed out.
Carollee Fleetwood returned to the Missing Persons office shortly after twelve-thirty.
“Hey Fleetwood! Guess what! The chaplain knows how to revive women who’ve fainted. Part of the training they give them these days. What do you think of that?”
Fleetwood couldn’t think of anything to say.
Powder said, “I’m glad to see you back. Hold the fort, will you? I want to go upstairs and see somebody.”
Fleetwood watched him leave, astonished that he could walk out after making such a palaver about sending her with William Weaver.
Powder stopped first at Fraud, where he gave them Uncle Adg’s insulation leaflet and requested, formally, a check on the company.
Then Powder went to the fourth floor to look for Detective Sergeant Jack Greenwell.
Greenwell was a thin man, but with a markedly round head. When he saw Powder standing at his desk, he didn’t recognize him. “Yeah? What can I do for you?”
“I want a progress report.”
“A what?” Greenwell put down his pen.
“I’m Leroy Powder. Glad to meet you. Jack.” Powder stuck his hand out and Greenwell shook it, formally and by reflex. “And I’d like to know how things are going on the Marianna Gilkis disappearance. I sent the girl’s aunt up this morning. You remember. Mrs. Woods. So, what’s happening?”
Stiffly, Greenwell said, “Nothing is happening, Powder.”
“Oh? Why is that?”
“Because I went to Captain Graniela and he agreed with me that there were insufficient grounds to open it as a case.”
“Graniela,” Powder said. “My, my. That’s a pretty big gun to protect yourself from a little tiny case with.”
“Yeah, funny, funny,” Greenwood said. “And captain also tells me this story about how there’s a nut case somewhere downstairs who spends his life bitching about how his section isn’t as important as it ought to be and how nobody understands police work the way he does. So this guy, he spends all his time wasting other people’s time.”
“Gee, sounds like a real sorehead. Jack,” Powder said. “Thanks for the help.”
Fleetwood was on the telephone when Powder returned to the office.
He went to his own phone, called the bus station, and asked for the station manager.
“This is Lieutenant Powder, Indianapolis Police Department.”
“Yes, Lieutenant. What can I do for you?”
“I need you to check some records urgently.”
“All right,” he said without hesitation. “I hope I can help.”
“A bus from Chicago was due in last night at ten past seven.”
“Yes.”
“Number one: any unclaimed luggage? Number two: on the passenger manifest, was there an unaccounted absence?”
“You’re looking for somebody, right?”
“Right. A woman who traveled from St. Paul and transferred at Chicago. Perhaps you could check the same things on the bus she was supposed to make her connection from.”
“I can do that. Glad to help. Lieutenant.”
Powder gave the man his number and extension.
One day he intended to have a telephone number of his own, listed in the White Pages along with Homicide and Robbery, Gambling and Vice, and Auto Thefts. Then he could just say, “It’s in the book.”
Powder saw that Fleetwood was staring at him.
“What are you looking at, kid?”
“What was all that about?”
“Don’t let’s talk about me,” Powder said, exaggerating a stare back at her. “Let’s talk about you.”
“He’s still going camping?”
“Leaves Friday. He says they bought the tent specially and the site is paid for. McCormick’s Creek State Park. He’s already arranged his employees’ schedules. So he’s going.”
“And comes back . . .?”
“Sunday night.”
“Rather than go campin
g with William G. Weaver, Junior, would you run away?”
“No,” Fleetwood said. “But I would roll away.”
Powder rubbed his face.
“No clothes left?”
“Virtually none. Yet the house is packed with bric-a-brac. Shelves of little figurines, pictures of the two of them, mementos of all kinds.”
“How many people does he employ?”
“Two were there today. There is a third. I have their names, addresses, and phones.”
“And a sense of success or of hard times?”
“It all looks pretty prosperous,” Fleetwood said. Then, “Look, if you are suspicious of Weaver, why don’t you send the case upstairs?”
“Upstairs?” Powder asked dismissively. “To that bunch of inertia mongers? To get them out of their chairs, you got to drop a body in their laps.”
Fleetwood raised her eyebrows.
Powder said, “Last time I took a case up there, guy ran to his captain for permission not to take it. What do you think about that?”
“Sorry I asked.”
“Besides, who says I am suspicious?”
“I say you’re suspicious,” Fleetwood said. “You are asking the questions which one would ask if one were suspicious.”
“Ah,” Powder said. “But that’s different.” He paused. “ ‘One,’ huh?”
Fleetwood shook her head. “I’m used to more straightforward people than you. Powder. Guys who say what they mean, if they mean something.”
“I didn’t ask you how many men had propositioned you recently.”
“More than you’d think.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Can I go to lunch?”
“Let me ask you a question. You’re leaving home, right? You pack everything you own, just about.”
“Yeah?”
“Why do you leave the china owls and the souvenir cigarette lighters?”
“I had the feeling that she had taken everything that she owned by herself, and left the rest.”
“By herself. That helps.”
“It does?”
“The checkbook. I’ve been worrying why she would take all the personal papers and the credit cards but leave the checkbook. But the answer is that it was a joint account.”
“I think I’d take the checkbook,” Fleetwood said. “It might come in handy.”
“OK,” Powder said. “Take the checkbook.” He took it out of the file and pushed it along the counter to her. “The last three stubs were written the day before the woman left. Talk to the people she gave the checks to.”
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