“Don’t just sit there,” an irate man was saying. “Do something.”
“You!” Powder said. “I mean you!”
The man turned. He was accompanied by four people: a woman and three prepubescent boys.
“What?” the man asked aggressively.
“Keep your voice down or get out,” Powder said. “If my sergeant weren’t such a compassionate person she would probably have had you thrown out already.”
The man still looked angry.
Powder said, “There’s a bell we use for disruptive members of the public. She taps it with her foot and three big guys come running. If she’s called them, you’ll be lucky to get out of here by next week. Tapped your foot yet. Sergeant?”
“No.”
“That’s a close call for you, mister,” Powder said. “Now come in here, and tell me what your problem is.”
The whole group trooped into the interview cubicle.
Powder sat behind the small desk and let the family sort out among themselves who got the three chairs.
“So, what’s happened?”
“This is what’s happened,” the man said. “Sixteen years old and we get up one morning and find this.”
He waved a piece of paper around.
“Give it to me and keep quiet while I read it,” Powder said.
The note said, “I’m gone to live with Jack. Don’t try to find us or we’ll just go somewhere else. Love, Natasha.”
“She’s left home to live with her boyfriend?”
“Sixteen years old,” the man said. “Go arrest the little bitch!”
“Horace!” the mother said. “Language!”
“Sorry Phyl,” the man said. He explained to Powder, “I’m just so blankety-blank mad.”
Powder looked at him. “She still in school?”
“No. She left two weeks ago.”
“So you want her arrested?” Powder’s eyebrows rose.
While the man hesitated, the woman said, “We’ve been up to the social work. And they won’t make Nattie come home. So we’ve come to you so you could tell her, if she don’t come home she’ll go to jail. “That’s what we want, isn’t that right, Horace?”
“That’s just about the short of it,” the man said.
“We don’t know where she’s at, so you’ll have to find her first.”
Powder said, “If I find her and some law’s been broken, she’ll be jailed.”
“You can’t just warn her to come home?” the mother asked.
“No,” Powder said definitively.
“We pay good taxes. It’s a terrible example she’s setting for the boys here. What if they go astray? Preventative, I call it,” the father said.
“You want me to find her?” Powder asked harshly. He took a form from the drawer of the desk.
The couple looked at each other. “I don’t know,” the woman said.
Powder sighed and put the form away. “You think about it. If you want to involve the police, you come back, hear?” He stood up.
Powder appeared behind the Missing Persons counter when the family had left the office. Fleetwood said, “What do I do with this long form I began filling in for them?”
“Throw it away, my dear. Throw it away.”
She threw it away. “I was handling it,” she said clearly.
“Insecure bosses have to interfere sometimes,” Powder said lightly. “Makes them feel important. Now go to lunch.”
She went to lunch.
Powder looked over the log. The entry that caught his eye was a visit by the young man Burrus, who had reported his girlfriend as missing on the day Fleetwood had started work. The disheveled man who had come to the office at the same tune as William Weaver. The girlfriend sighing in the bathtub.
Burrus had come in to ask what progress was being made.
It reminded Powder that he wanted to call Weaver.
“Mr. Weaver?”
“Yes.”
“Lieutenant Powder here.”
“What do you want, Lieutenant?”
“Have you heard from Annie, by the way?”
“No.”
“Pity. Couple of things. First was, is there any insurance on her?”
“On ... my wife?”
“On Annie.”
“What kind of insurance?”
“Life insurance?”
“She has a small life policy.”
“How much for?”
“Fifteen thousand dollars.”
“What kind of policy?”
“Thirty-year term.”
“And when did you take it out?”
“When we were married. We both did.”
“I see. Thank you. The other thing was to ask what time you would be leaving for your vacation tomorrow.”
“In the morning. Early. I’m not sure what time.”
“So if I want to see you, it had better be today.”
Weaver seemed to sigh. “That would be the more convenient.”
“Bye now,” Powder said.
Agnes, who was not in the office when Powder returned, came back at about a quarter to one. She carried some case files.
“I thought you’d gone,” Powder said.
“No, no,” Agnes said. “I’ve been tracking down your travel-naps for you.”
“Oh yes?”
“I’ve got the three incidents in the file here in Indianapolis and I’ve lodged requests in Fort Wayne, Lafayette, Evansville, Cincinnati, Louisville, Columbus, South Bend, Chicago, and Toledo.”
“Tell me about the three in Indianapolis.”
“I can’t,” Agnes said. “I’ve got to go, or I’ll be late for class.”
Powder read through the files.
Two of the three incidents had occurred before his time in Missing Persons, though none of the cases had gone through the office.
Five years before, a forty-year-old woman returning home by bus from a visit to relatives had not arrived. She had been on the bus and her car, which had been left in the bus-station parking lot, had been collected and driven away. The car was found later, abandoned in the southeast part of the city. Nothing more had been heard of the woman.
A year later another woman traveling alone had disappeared from Weir Cook Airport. She had had no car and police were told by her father that she had planned to take the bus into the city. She was twenty-six at the time. Her decomposed body was found seven months later in an empty house in Terre Haute, Indiana.
“The third incident had also happened at the bus station. A nineteen-year-old woman en route from Kokomo to Evansville had been accosted by a man in a trench coat who pressed a gun into her side and told her to keep quiet and come with him unless she wanted to be killed on the spot. The woman had screamed and run, and the man had fled. This incident had taken place on an early evening the previous July. The man had not been identified.
Powder closed the office and went upstairs to copy the files. He put the copies in an envelope addressed to Bull, delivered the envelope to Homicide, and then went out.
He walked up to Twelfth Street, where he looked in the windows of a couple of costume companies.
On the way back he stopped for lunch in a salad bar and became engrossed in making doodles on the paper napkin.
Fleetwood had already opened the office by the time Powder returned.
“Hey,” he said. “What did the guy Burrus want?”
Fleetwood looked up and said, “Didn’t I record it in the log?”
“Yeah, but what did he want?”
Fleetwood sighed and ran her hand through her hair as if trying to muster the energy to deal with unraveling this one of Powder’s games.
Powder said, “He was told that we wouldn’t be looking actively for his lady friend. So what does he want?”
“He wants her trussed up and returned in manacles. How do I know?”
“Still as dirty looking as he was the first time?”
Fleetwood said, “He certainly didn’t look any to
o appetizing.”
“Mmmmm.”
“One thing he did say. That he might be going to a private detective.”
“Pity I wasn’t here,” Powder said.
“Why’s that?”
“I could have recommended one.”
“Do we have a list of recommended private investigators?” Fleetwood seemed interested. “It’s just I have a friend, but I didn’t know whether to mention it.”
“No. This would have been unofficial. Anyway, my acquaintance is probably out of business by now.” Powder looked at her. “You know a private eye, huh?”
Fleetwood said nothing.
“This wouldn’t be the recently retired Detective Capes, would it?”
Fleetwood shrugged.
“Sergeant.”
“Yes?”
“How the hell did you end up taking a slug for Capes? What’s the story?”
Fleetwood inhaled sharply.
“A boyfriend, was he?”
“No,” she said quietly. “He wasn’t. He was married.”
“But he’s not now?”
“Almost not.”
“A boyfriend now?”
“No,” she said.
“What kind of duty were you on?”
She looked at him. “Do we have to talk about this?”
“Yes,” Powder said.
“We were on the ground, staking out a meeting of some armed-robbery suspects.”
“On the ground?”
“There was an alley in the back. No easy vantage point, so we hung around in it.”
Powder frowned.
“We hung around, as if we were a couple making out. He had his arms around me, hands on the guns in the back of my belt; I had my arms around him, hands on the guns in the belt at his back. I also had a small repeating weapon hanging from my neck and it was damned uncomfortable and we were giggling about it and pretending to cuddle while we were keeping watch. And then, for a moment, we weren’t pretending, and that was the moment that something went wrong at the other end. One of the suspects came out the door, shooting. I pushed Mark off and pulled a gun and I don’t remember a lot after that.”
“Did they catch the guy?”
“Not then. Mark emptied at him, but he got away. They caught up with him the next day and killed him.”
“I see.”
“Happy now?” Fleetwood asked him, staring rigidly at his face. Powder’ saw how much effort it had cost her to talk with such apparent ease about the incident.
“Yeah. Great,” he said.
She straightened the papers on her desk. “I’m going out,” she said.
“Oh. OK.” Powder said. “Great.” He turned to routine work of his own and only looked up after she had left.
Powder closed the office late. He stopped at home and then drove to William Weaver’s store. It looked empty. He banged loudly, insistently, on the door. There was no answer.
At Weaver’s house the bell was answered quickly.
“Oh. Lieutenant Powder.”
“I told you I would be coming,” Powder said. “But I left it late because I wanted to have a look at your house.”
Weaver did not make way for him at the front door. He stood mute for a few seconds, as if deciding whether to say anything.
“Have you heard from Annie?” Powder asked.
The question tipped the balance for Weaver. He shook his head tensely. He stepped back into his hallway and held the door open.
Powder strode in, looking at all the trimmings. Powder carried a sports bag and casually turned to Weaver and said, “One of the things I wanted to see you about was this.” He passed on the bag, which he had taken from Ricky’s room.
“What about it?”
“There are various items in it which reminded me of things I saw in your store. I wondered if you would have a look through and tell me what the stuff in there is used for.”
Without eagerness, Weaver said, “All right.”
“OK if I have a look around while you do it?”
Again Weaver hesitated, but he said, “Feel free.”
Powder walked quickly through the rooms. Downstairs he felt the working of an unusually fussy hand, with color coordination in each room going beyond paint, paper, and furnishings to include the profusion of small decorative trinkets Fleetwood had noted.
Upstairs there were two bedrooms. One was used as a study and all that Powder really looked at in either was the closets, where he found only men’s clothes and not many of those.
The spacious garage was attached to the house. There Weaver’s preparations for his camping trip were evident. A sleeping bag and air mattress, what appeared to be a very large tent, a kerosene lamp, and a can of kerosene were laid out on the top of a large chest freezer, ready for packing.
Powder thought about clearing the freezer top for a look inside, but instead he passed on to prod a sack of cement and two larger sacks of sand that stood next to a couple of shovels on the back Wall.
He satisfied himself that the sacks contained what they were supposed to, and not Mrs. Weaver.
William Weaver was waiting for Powder in the hall.
Powder said, “I talked to one of your wife’s friends yesterday.”
“Oh?”
“She said that she hadn’t seen your wife for nearly a year.”
Weaver stared silently.
“Does that surprise you?”
“Yes,” Weaver said.
“Why’s that?”
“My wife said she went out with the three of them.”
“How often?”
“About once a month.” Weaver paused. “Could it be that the woman you spoke to had not been going out with the others?”
“No,” Powder said. “It couldn’t. Looks like your wife was telling you fibs.”
Weaver said nothing.
Powder picked up Ricky’s bag. “What’s the stuff in this, then?”
“There appears to be equipment for working with telephones, although some of the tools are for more general use.”
“Working with telephones how?” Powder asked.
“Well, recording from them.”
“Bugging?”
“Yes.”
“Sell a lot of that sort of thing, do you?”
“It is part of the current scope of my business,” Weaver said.
“OK,” Powder said. “Thanks.” He took the bag.
Weaver seemed about to speak, but Powder left.
He sat in the car for several minutes. Then he drove to his garden on Alisonville Road.
Despite a long physical session Powder felt tense as night drew in. Edgily he changed clothes and, on his way back to town, where Alisonville Road ran into Keystone, he stopped at a supermarket.
When he pulled up outside Carollee Fleetwood’s small house. Powder found a car already parked there.
Fleetwood answered the door, saw who it was, and said, “I already have a visitor, Lieutenant.”
“That’s all right,” Powder said. “He or she can stay. I don’t mind.”
The visitor was Mark Capes.
“Hello, Capes,” Powder said, sitting down. “How’s the sleuthing?”
“Fine,” Capes said. “I’m enjoying it a lot.”
“Carollee here didn’t say who you work for. Or are you a noble lonely seeker of truth for a fee?”
“I work for Commercial Investigations.”
“Well, well,” Powder said.
“You know it?”
“Indirectly. They do some repossession, don’t they?”
“Some,” Capes said. “But I’ve been brought in to take charge of their personal-inquiries side. They think there’s a big future there, as a supplement to the work done for commerce. I’m developing it for them.”
“Divorces and that?”
“The range of work is very wide,” Capes said stiffly. “The only restriction on what I can take on is that it’s done for individuals rather than for companies. It’s a real thrust
ing, forward-looking outfit and I’m pleased to be aboard.”
“Hey,” Powder said, “I got a hypothetical situation for you. Test your powers of reasoning.”
“Come on. Powder,” Fleetwood said.
“No, no,” Powder said. “We’ll see how good a gumshoe he is and maybe put him on our recommended list.” He turned back to Capes. “See, you got this lady married to a guy that owns a store. And she works in the store three days a week, but she is at home three days when he is in the store. He’s the most controlled and routine guy in the world, so when he’s in the store, she knows he’s going to stay there, know what I mean?” He winked exaggeratedly. “On top of that, the guy goes away overnight maybe every month. I’m not going too fast for you, am I?”
“Go on,” Capes said.
“OK. That’s the situation. Now what I want to know is, with all this free time—did I say, there are no kids and nobody else at home?—with all this free time, what I want to know is why this gal would have to make up a story that she was going out with girlfriends now and then, when she wasn’t really going out with them at all?”
“I give up,” Capes said. “Why?”
“No, no. You don’t get it at all. You got to tell me why. Because I don’t know. Why’s she got to he?”
Capes shrugged.
“Ah well,” Powder said. He leaned back. “Capes, you were a triple-citation man in your first four years in Detectives, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Why’d you pack it in?”
“What?”
“Couldn’t you face Fleetwood here rolling around in a chair for life, or were you just afraid that the next time nobody would be there to step in front of you?”
Capes paled.
“Leave him alone, Powder!” Fleetwood shouted. “He’s an invited guest in my house, which is more than you are.”
“Nobody can run away from facts,” Powder said. “You know that better than either of us, since now you can’t run away from anything.”
Capes stood up, and said, “I’ve got to go, Carollee.”
“Don’t you dare leave!”
The man looked indecisive, but said, “No, really. I’m on assignment.”
“He’s an ill-tempered, bad-mannered bully, just like everybody says. He’ll be gone in a minute. In fact, he’s going now.”
“I’ve got to get back. Honest.”
Capes left.
When they were alone, Fleetwood said, “Go away, Powder. Go away!”
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