Chapter Fifteen
Before she left at two, Agnes gave Powder a brief history of Ricky’s new car, and an address to go with the telephone number on the insulation leaflet.
The TR7 had been bought new from Vermillion Auto Sales in September by a Rodney Bladon. In May it had been repossessed, and then resold to the repossessors. Commercial Investigations, Inc., a detective agency. They were the last listed owners.
It didn’t mean that the car was not now Ricky’s, however. There was a delay up to a business week before new registration particulars were logged.
Fleetwood arrived back at the office a few minutes after Agnes left.
Powder said, “About time. I’m bored stiff with phone calls from people who’ve just read the Star. All the rest are yours.”
“All right,” Fleetwood said, and she positioned herself at her desk.
“Hey,” Powder said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you, what happened with your calls to the cab companies?”
“There should be a report on your desk.”
Powder looked.
Fleetwood said, “No, my mistake. It’s still here, on mine.” She passed the paper to him.
“Thanks,” Powder said. He turned to it immediately, and before he was finished with it, Fleetwood was talking to a telephone caller.
Between the hours of seven and eight-thirty the taxi companies recorded eleven fares from the bus-station taxi stand who were women, or included women.
None of the recorded fare destinations was Mrs. Woods’s address or an address in her vicinity.
Satisfied that Marianna Gilkis had arrived in Indianapolis, got off the bus and collected her luggage, Powder deduced that either she had made it to a taxi or she I hadn’t.
While Fleetwood was on the telephone he tapped her shoulder impatiently.
As she hung up, he said, “Track down these women. Find out whether they arrived where they were supposed to.”
He waved the report in front of her face.
“And while you’re talking to the cab companies, find out whether there were any unusual gaps in the availability of any of their drivers that night, whether they were on the list with these fares or not.”
“Don’t interrupt me when I’m on the telephone,” Fleetwood said sharply, but Powder was already dialing his own phone.
William G. Weaver, Jr., at his place of business, answered saying, “Lock and Key.”
“Lieutenant Powder here. Have you been to County Hospital, Mr. Weaver?”
“I have. It wasn’t, isn’t my wife.”
“Are you certain?”
“Certain.”
“Why?”
For once, Weaver hesitated over his answer. “What do you mean, why?”
“I gather the body doesn’t have a lot of face left.”
“No,” he said quietly.
“So I wondered how you could be sure that it wasn’t your wife. What things made you so positive?”
“It just wasn’t,” he said.
“Give me a for instance,” Powder said persistently.
“The little toes. My wife has small splits on the toenails of her little toes. If she doesn’t trim them regularly, they catch on her stockings or tights and make holes. The woman I looked at has totally different feet and nails.”
“OK, Mr. Weaver,” Powder said. “I’ll certainly let you know if any other unidentified bodies are discovered in the area.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t sound enthusiastic. Don’t you want to find Annie?”
“Of course,” he said. “But it was so horrible.”
“Suspicious deaths often are,” Powder said cheerily. “Good-bye.”
As he replaced his receiver. Powder’s internal phone rang. The caller was Sergeant Alexander Smith, in Crime Prevention.
“I just wanted to thank you,” Smith said.
“What for?”
“That work you did on TV and video thefts. We’re planning to circulate all the casual-room-rental establishments to warn them.”
“I sent that to Burglary. They were supposed to go catch the guy.”
“That’s a little hopeful, isn’t it. Lieutenant Powder?” Smith asked earnestly. “It’s a big city, after all.”
“They just passed it on to you?” Powder asked.
“Yeah.”
“Not working on it themselves?”
“Gee, I don’t think so. But I think it will do a lot of good, especially with the description you included. If a renter spots a possible and gets back to us, we have a fair chance of picking him up.”
“Shit,” Powder said. He hung up.
About three Powder suddenly stood and said, “Why is nothing happening here?”
Fleetwood, just off the telephone, looked at him as if he were crazy.
“We haven’t had a sensible new case all day.”
“Do you often get like this?” Fleetwood asked.
“How’s your taxis?”
“I think,” Fleetwood said, “that I have just about accounted for them. If you assume that the two who were listed for the airport actually got there and intended to get there.”
“Accepting that, what are you left with?”
“I’m left with one fare who went to a corner, rather than an address, with a taxi driver who was working his last day.”
Powder sat down. “Tell me about it.”
“Not much to tell. One passenger, unspecified.”
“OK. Check the driver out.”
Powder stood up again. He still felt restless.
“Are you going somewhere?”
“You sound like my goddamn wife used to,” Powder said. “Yeah, I’m going somewhere.”
Chapter Sixteen
Powder’s first stop was the morgue in County Hospital. He went to look at the body of the heart attack woman. It was possible that he would be reminded of one of the pictures in his case file.
The body reminded him of no one. The flesh of the face was too badly mutilated.
As he looked at the woman’s mortal remains, Powder felt unaccustomedly agitated. Sick of the aggravation in the world.
Dissatisfied with his own life.
He left to go to the address Agnes had provided as a match for the telephone number on the insulation leaflet.
It was a small brick house with paint flaking off the window frames. There were no signs whatever of commercial activity.
Powder rang the bell.
A small woman with a cane answered the door and smiled at him. “Catalog?”
“No, ma’am,” Powder said. “I’m looking for the Cozy Hoosier Insulation Company. I understand that they operate somewhere close by, and I wondered if you could direct me.”
The woman asked him to repeat the name. She thought about it. Then said, “I’m sorry, young man. Never heard of ’em.”
“Excuse me for disturbing you,” Powder said.
“That’s quite all right. I’ve found life very quiet lately. A little disturbance makes the day more interesting,” the woman said. She closed the door.
Powder drove to the East Tenth Street address given in the phone book for Cozy Hoosier. It was a small administrative office in a street storefront. On presenting his ID Powder was immediately shown in to the boss.
“What can I do for you. Lieutenant?” the man asked nervously. He was short and fat, and as he began to sweat he wiped his forehead with a white handkerchief he took from his desk drawer.
Powder showed him the leaflet. He read it slowly.
Then he read it again.
He looked at the telephone. He buried his mouth in his handkerchief. “Jesus God,” he said. He closed his eyes. “The money I paid for that printing!”
On his way back to the department. Powder stopped at Lock and Key.
Although the store did not have a large street frontage, it was very deep and well stocked.
Powder did not see William Weaver. But two young women glanced at each other as he came in and without speaking decided which w
ould assist him.
Powder asked to see Weaver, but as he did so. Weaver appeared from an office room in the back of the store.
The clerk, a slightly built woman in her early twenties, left without comment.
“Hello,” Weaver said impassively.
“I was driving this way, thinking about absent wives, so I thought I’d stop in and see how you were coping.”
“I see,” Weaver said.
“I haven’t been here before. Quite a place.”
“Thank you,” Weaver said.
“You have three employees, I believe.”
“That’s right.”
“Only two here. One has the day off?”
“Yes.”
“I sort of expect a security store to have male clerks. Is the third one a man?”
“No,” Weaver said. Then, “My wife did all the hiring.”
“Oh,” Powder said. “That’s interesting. And did she do the firing too?”
“When it was necessary. But she has good judgment about staff.”
“You must have confidence in them if you are going to leave the store on Friday and Saturday. Pretty busy days, I would have thought.”
“Sometimes,” Weaver said.
“Who will be in charge?”
“Miss Hilgemeier.”
“Which one is she?”
“She’s not here today.”
“How are you getting along, without Annie? I take it she’s not returned?”
“No.”
“Or called?”
“No.”
Powder waited.
“I’m coping,” Weaver said finally.
“I was thinking,” Powder said, and then paused to look at the photoelectric door openers.
“Yes?”
“Have you canceled the credit cards which Annie took with her?”
Weaver hesitated. Then he said, “No.”
Powder looked him in the eyes. At last, he said, “That’s pretty cunning.”
“What do you mean. Lieutenant?”
“If it were me, I’d probably cancel credit cards my wife took because I wouldn’t want her spending my money. But it’s cunning because if she uses them, then you’ll have an idea where she’s gone.”
“I suppose I will,” Weaver said.
“Well, much as I would like to stay and gas some more, I’ve got to be getting on now,” Powder said. “See you again soon.”
For a few minutes after he returned. Powder worked on the Listing of the Missing, which he distributed monthly to hospitals, travel points, employment offices, housing bureaus, welfare offices, social and community workers, and to other police departments in the Midwest.
Often, work on the Listing was a reminder of his irritation with police planners for their failure to see the advantage of making the document bigger, more frequent, and backed with personal visits by Missing Persons staff.
This time. Powder was less impassioned. When he decided to close the file, he announced to Fleetwood, “With more money, we could get it out every two weeks, maybe, find one extra kid.”
Fleetwood was dealing with the paperwork from a couple whose foster son had been gone from their home for two days. She didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about.
At five to five Powder called his ex-wife at her place of work.
“Good heavens. What do you want? Make it quick I can’t stay on the telephone for personal calls.”
“This is not a personal call,” Powder said.
“You know what I mean, Leroy.”
“It’s about your son.”
“Ricky? What about Ricky? Has something happened to him? Is he hurt? What’s happened? Don’t mess around, Leroy, tell me, for God’s sake!”
“He’s not hurt.”
“What’s happened?”
“Nothing’s happened,” Powder said irritably.
“You wouldn’t call me about him if nothing had happened.”
“I just wanted to know when you saw him last.”
“What’s wrong? You’re talking about him like you were tracking him. What has happened, Leroy Powder?”
“Nothing’s happened. He just seems to have a lot of money all of a sudden. I called you to ask, in a civilized way, whether you made a financial contribution when you saw him last. That’s all.”
“He’s all right?”
“As all right as he ever is,” Powder said.
“Always facetious.”
“Always,” Powder agreed. “Did you give him money, or not?”
“So what if I did?”
“Several thousand bucks?”
“Now where would I get cash like that?” she snapped.
“The question that I want to answer is where he got cash like that,” Powder said.
“I’m sure that there is nothing wrong.”
“Good. Where did he get it?”
“He lived here for about three months, until a couple of weeks ago.”
“You’re not telling me he opened a savings account with the rent he didn’t pay you?”
“No, but he was doing some work on the side with some friends.”
“What sort of work?”
“I don’t know what sort of work. I didn’t pry. But he was working very hard. Evenings, weekends.”
“Doing what?”
“I said, I don’t know what.”
“He’s just bought a fancy new car,” Powder said. “Any parent would be entitled to ask how he paid for it.”
“By working, of course. How else?”
Too involved to allow for the fact that she couldn’t see him over the telephone. Powder shrugged.
“Trust him, Leroy.”
They hung up.
When he turned to look, he saw that Fleetwood was watching him.
For a moment he stared back. Then he chuckled. “I don’t know about you, kid, but I’m beat.”
She said, “It’s been a long day.”
He rose and looked at the log.
They had recorded twenty-three phone calls as a result of the stories in the Star and the afternoon News. Some had been referred to Bull; two had been opened as new cases in Missing Persons.
“The power of advertising,” Powder commented sourly as he turned the inside lock of the front door of the office. “But you already know about that, with your Heart Line Wheelchair Appeal.”
Fleetwood, who looked gray and tired, said nothing.
“We’ll have another batch tomorrow morning, when the Star reports no progress today.”
“Did you want me to go to the hospital in the morning?” Fleetwood asked.
“No.”
“All right.”
“Why put off till morning what you can do tonight?”
Chapter Seventeen
When Powder pulled up in front of his house, there was a young man on the porch ringing the bell. Getting no response, the young man seemed uncertain what to do. He carried a shallow, wide cardboard box.
Powder approached him slowly.
“Can I do something for you?” Powder asked.
“What? Oh. Is this where Rick Powder lives?”
“I think so.”
“Is he around?”
“I don’t know,” Powder said.
“Can I leave this for him?”
“Sure.”
“Tell him Sal brought it, will you?”
“All right.”
Powder took the box and the young man hurried down the front walk and turned toward downtown. Powder watched till he passed out of sight, then held the box up to his ear. He heard nothing.
Powder opened the door and let himself in.
He put his shopping in the refrigerator and carried the box to Ricky’s room. There, he penciled on the outside, “From Sal, no carrying charge.” He put the box on the bed.
Then Powder searched the room.
The things he found that interested him most were Ricky’s checkbook, a large plastic sports bag, a nylon money belt, and a sh
oulder holster.
The last check stub in the checkbook showed the amount Ricky had sent to register his new car. But that wasn’t what interested Powder. There was no stub for a check that paid for the car.
The sports bag contained a variety of items of electronic equipment and several tiny reels of tape. Much of the equipment had the Indiana Bell logo on it.
The money belt held nearly seven hundred dollars in fifties and twenties.
The shoulder holster was empty and looked new.
Before he left the room. Powder looked in the cardboard box. Inside was a dark-tan trench coat.
Powder parked in front of a dusty horizontal duplex on Tecumseh Avenue just north of Michigan. He rang the bell for the lower house. When the door wasn’t answered he rang again. Then he knocked.
A woman with streaks of light and dark red hair threw the door open, smiled broadly, and asked, “You been there long? The bell doesn’t work, I suppose I should put a sign on it. But that kind of thing is really a landlord’s responsibility, don’t you think?”
“I suppose so,” Powder said. He held up his ID. “I’m a policeman. May I come in and talk to you for a few minutes?”
The woman’s smile faltered only for a moment. She stepped back. “Please enter,” she said. “Always pleased to cooperate with our men in blue. Even when they’re not in blue.”
She led him to the door of her living room. She turned, however, and asked, “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
They sat in the kitchen while the woman made coffee. “What is it about?” she asked lightly.
“Mrs. Annie Weaver.”
After a little thought, she said, “Is that the woman from the lock store?”
“I was under the impression that you were friends.”
“Well, we’re not enemies,” the woman said, turning to smile as the coffee began to brew. “But I hardly know her.”
“She is missing from home, and her husband listed you as one of his wife’s three friends.”
“You know,” the woman said, “the other day I had a phone call from a man asking whether Mrs. Weaver was here. I said she wasn’t, so he said good-bye and hung up. I thought it was peculiar, but then being a single girl again I get some odd phone calls from time to time. I hadn’t given it another thought until now.”
“What day was that?” Powder asked.
The woman considered. “Saturday? How do you take your coffee?”
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