“Probably in the last couple of weeks, but call it four. And probably in the course of some crime, but make it any man shot and killed.”
“In Indianapolis?”
“And environs. Whatever they’ve got on file.”
Agnes nodded.
“I met your mother today.”
“Oh?”
“She doesn’t seem wholly entranced by your preoccupation with microtechnology.”
“She thinks there’s something wrong with a girl who would rather curl up on a couch with a program than some octopus of a boy,” Agnes said dismissively. “Anyway, I’ve got a boyfriend. We make up video games together.” She turned back to the machine.
Feeling at least a generation out of touch, Powder left the office.
He drove along West Washington Street and took the last left before crossing Eagle Creek. He pulled up in front of a former lumberyard bounded by tall, barb-topped link fences.
A free-swinging sign that hung out from the main building advertised the services of a private investigator, Albert Samson.
The Venetian blinds in the broad front window were closed, but Powder went to the door as if he expected it to be unlocked. Which it was.
Inside, a stocky man in his forties was leaning back in a swivel chair, tapping the keys of an electric typewriter with his toes.
Powder stood in the doorway, but the show stopped abruptly as Samson realized someone was there.
“Mr. Lieutenant Leroy Powder, M. A., College of Life,” Samson said. “As I live and breathe.”
“I wasn’t sure you were still in business. Are you?” Powder asked coldly.
“Thriving. I even have to set Saturday mornings aside for paperwork.”
“I suppose,” Powder said, gesturing to an upright piano in the corner, “that you play that with your nose.”
“You’d be surprised,” Samson said. Then thought. “Perhaps not. Have you lost weight? Let me get you a beer.”
“Never drink the stuff,” Powder said.
Samson got two beers.
“What can I do for you, Leroy?”
“Some routine surveillance work.”
Samson blinked. Then he pinched himself. “You mean,” he asked slowly, doubtfully, “surveillance work? For payment?”
“Do you like fresh vegetables and fruit?” Powder asked.
In the late afternoon. Powder returned to police headquarters. He went first to Homicide to ask what had happened since Agnes’s report was sent up.
He was told that it had been read, then put in Bull’s pigeonhole because it referred to one of his cases. It was still there. Bull wasn’t around.
Powder blew his top. He spelled the word “urgent” for them. He defined it from a dictionary. He screamed.
Bull was called.
Powder went downstairs to the Missing Persons office. There he found a small stack of incident-summary printout sheets. All dealt with recently shot men. Though he had intended to read them on the spot, he was too angry. He packed up the reports and took them home.
Chapter Twenty Four
While Powder was reading the Sunday paper, Ricky came home. It was quarter to eleven.
Powder said, “You look exhausted.”
“I am. I’m going to bed.”
“Real live wire, is she?” Powder asked, and he winked exaggeratedly.
Ricky began to say one thing but then said,“Yeah, wild,” instead.
“I don’t know how you youngsters keep it up,” Powder said pointedly. “And after a groovy party night on Friday too. I suppose you’re off and at it again when the chimes strike for noon. You’re something else, Richard, you really are.”
Ricky passed his father, went into his bedroom and closed the door.
Powder telephoned the site manager at McCormick’s Creek.
“That Weaver guy, he’s gone,” the man said.
“Has he indeed,” Powder said.
“Pulled out half an hour ago. I saw his car go by, all filled up.”
“You haven’t been to his site, have you?”
“I have. I have,” the man said, rather proudly. “Went there right off.”
“And?”
“And nothing.”
“It is exactly as it was before?”
“Bit clearer, if anything.”
“No other signs of disturbance? Nothing left behind? Nothing in the grass?”
“Didn’t have much in the way of grass to start. Sorry not to be more of a help.”
Powder called Carollee Fleetwood.
“How are you at making picnic lunches?” Powder asked.
“What the hell are you on about this time. Powder?”
“Not so good, huh? That’s all right. I’ll bring the food. Pick you up in about an hour,” he said.
“I think we’ll go in my car,” Powder said when Fleetwood answered her door. “Hurry up. There are some things I want to talk to you about.”
Fleetwood’s face advertised internal conflict.
He laughed at her. “If you tell me to get stuffed, you’ll miss the action. Come on. Get your Frisbee and let’s go.”
“Is this work or play. Powder?” she asked sternly.
“The only way I know how to live,” he said suddenly, “is to combine the two. My ex-wife used to say it meant I was going to die young, but she got tired of waiting. Now, are you going to get together whatever you need or do you have to do another ten minutes’ falling off your crutches before we leave?”
He wasn’t quite sure how to begin as he set about lifting her out of her chair.
“No need to be fussy,” she said.
Gently he eased his arms under her, lifted, and placed her in the passenger seat of his car.
Perspiration stood out suddenly on his brow.
“What’s the heat for, Powder? Am I that heavy or is it the thrill of the touch?”
“Just as well you can’t tell,” Powder said defensively.
“Who says?” she said. “And is that a clean shirt? Jesus, you smell like sweaty laundry.”
They drove out Kentucky Avenue and Route 67, the highway to Spencer. The town was about fifty miles away. Powder talked about Aurora Jane Doe.
Fleetwood said, “You did well.”
“I thought so too until I got the list of gunshot killings from Agnes.”
“And?”
“In the last four weeks nobody in town has been shot dead who could remotely be described as having a job where there are ‘positions of trust.’ We got two chronic unemployeds in domestic situations, two druggies—one of whom was a school kid—both in the course of robberies, and a pro burglar who was surprised, got shot, and went over a fourth-floor ledge and broke his back. There were various nonfatal shooting incidents, but I wonder whether she was making the whole damn thing up.”
“Do you think she was?”
“No,” Powder said. “I believe every word.”
In Spencer, which claimed fame as the childhood home of the mother of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, they turned left on Indiana 46 and three miles later arrived at McCormick’s Creek State Park.
The campsite manager introduced himself as Ramey Fry, and grew visibly excited when Powder told him who he was.
“You come all the way down here? Must be something important, huh, mister?”
“We were just out for a ride and a picnic,” Powder said. “Show the man our basket, Carollee, honey.”
Fleetwood sat sternly.
“And since we were in the vicinity, I thought we might as well stop here as anyplace, since you’d been so helpful.”
“But you’re a policeman?”
“That’s right.”
Fry clucked. “Whatever you say, mister. But you want to see the site the guy used, don’t you?”
Powder looked back at Fleetwood and appeared to think. “Well, I suppose we might as well. What you think, Carollee, honey?”
* * * * *
The campsite was as isolated as Fry had said it was on the tele
phone.
When they got to it. Powder parked behind Fry’s pickup and unloaded Fleetwood into her chair. He pushed her down the gentle slope to the level that Fry identified for them. “This here is it,” Fry said.
Powder rubbed his face. The area was bare of grass in an oval larger than any likely tent. The soil was pretty level, lightly gritted, but with little in the way of surface rock. It was patchily streaked with lighter-colored, lighter-textured material. Powder walked across it, springing slightly on the soles of his feet as if testing it.
Then he walked a loop around the edge of the area until he had found four or five places where there were small holes.
“These look like where tent pegs were to you?” Powder asked.
“Oh yeah,” Fry said easily.
Powder scuffed marks with his heel connecting the peg holes and he quickly had an outline of the approximate area that Weaver’s tent had covered.
To Fleetwood he said, “Inside my pretty picture, does the ground look completely level to you?”
Fleetwood looked. “Not completely,” she said. “But just about.”
“Does it look like it goes up, or goes down, where it’s not flat?”
“Up a little. There,” she said, pointing to a slight rise toward the back of the area.
Powder went to Fry, who had watched the process patiently. “Mr. Fry, Carollee and I seem to think that the ground rises a little bit inside my circle. What do you think?”
Fry, unable to work up enthusiasm for a subject that seemed so undramatic, said, “Yeah. I guess.”
“I suppose you don’t recall whether it was like that before?”
Fry shrugged.
“I tell you what I really want,” Powder said easily, fixing the man’s eyes. “What’s that now?”
“I would like to find out what’s underneath that little rise.”
“Underneath it?” Fry scratched the back of his head. “You mean, like, underneath?”
“That’s right,” Powder said. “Kind of unofficial, you know? But if you could find me a couple of guys willing to do some digging there, well, I’d pay them for their time and trouble and that would include filling it back in after, and the rent for the site as well. Do you think you could arrange that for me, Mr. Fry?”
“Plain yogurt, lettuce, unsalted peanuts, oranges.” Powder rooted exaggeratedly through the box of food he’d brought. “Don’t make a face. I invited you to do the catering.”
“Are you going to tell me about it?”
“Just—I don’t know—not a hunch exactly. But the conclusion of the logic of the situation.”
“We’re talking about William G. Weaver, Junior, I take it?”
“Yes,” Powder said. He leaned back on the grass and looked up Fleetwood’s skirt. “I have a confession to make,” he said.
“What?”
“I am suspicious of Weaver. I can’t bear it. That calm. I’ve met a few self-contained people on this job in my time, but he’s so colorless that it has to be phony. Has to.”
“You’re getting emotional all of a sudden,” Fleetwood said. “At least for a frosty, controlled son of a bitch.”
“Me? Controlled?” Powder protested. He found a seed stem of some long grass, and chewed the end.
“It’s all plot and posture, I suppose,” Fleetwood said.
Powder shrugged by wagging his grass.
He said, “So Weaver goes through the motions. Reports her missing, calls her relatives. All that. But then he comes camping alone and never goes out of his tent. He could do that in his backyard. Why here?”
“OK. Why here?”
“I say he killed his wife. I say he stored her body till this trip. I say he stayed in the tent because he was burying her.”
“What else could make sense?” Fleetwood asked easily. “So you’ve come down to dig her up.”
“Yeah,” Powder said. “Want some herb tea?”
* * * * *
They ate near a little waterfall in the creek canyon, and after they finished. Powder pushed Fleetwood leisurely back to the campsite, some two miles.
Ramey Fry saw them coming and met them fifty yards from the hole. “I was about to come and get you,” he said.
“Why’s that?” Powder asked.
“We dug out the bit you wanted, and got down about two and a half, three feet.”
“Yeah?”
“And we hit solid rock. Kind of a layer, just after we were through the subsoil. So what you want us to do?”
Powder pushed Fleetwood to the edge of the hole in silence. A mass of earth was piled alongside and a squat, well-muscled boy with no shirt smiled up as Powder looked down. The boy clanked his shovel on several spots at the bottom of the hole.
“It’s all around, mister,” the boy said.
Powder rubbed his face. He looked at his watch, and pulled out his wallet.
“It wasn’t hard digging, mister,” the boy said, intending to make Powder feel better.
Chapter Twenty Five
It wasn’t until they picked up the divided highway outside of Martinsville that the silence in the car was broken.
“Come off it, Powder,” Fleetwood said. “You can’t be right all the time.”
Holding the steering wheel with his knees. Powder rubbed his face with both hands.
Fleetwood waited, but he said nothing.
“Stop being a baby,” she said.
“I wasn’t thinking about that.”
“Your black hole?”
“No.”
“What? Sulking because you didn’t get a straight story out of Jane Doe?”
“No, that neither,” he said.
“Well, why are you looking so miserable? Punishing yourself for being relaxed and almost human for a while this afternoon?”
“I was just thinking that I will probably have my son arrested before long.”
Fleetwood was stopped.
“He’s spending more money than he’s earning and I figure the least he’s doing is bugging jobs by himself for a private detective agency and evading taxes. But I’m worried about this stuff with his friends. He may be looking at jail time instead of a fine or suspended sentence.”
“How sure are you?”
“I could be surer.”
“Oh,” Fleetwood said.
“I warned him to stop.” Powder shrugged. “What else is available to a good cop?”
Fleetwood was quiet for a moment while she worked out that Powder assumed his warning would go unheeded.
“You’re full of surprises. Powder,” she said.
“Hell, I may be wrong. It isn’t the day for me to claim infallibility.”
“Tell me something else.”
“What?”
“Who’s going to pay for your hole?”
He looked at her.
“That means you, I take it.”
“I only claim back when I’m right. Doesn’t do to let the bastards know about my mistakes. Not when they’re nearly as eager to get rid of me as they are to get rid of, you.”
“So, we were off duty today?”
“Yeah.”
“OK. Just wanted to know.”
He said, “If you want to claim tune back for this little fiasco, that’s all right.”
They rode to the city limits in silence.
Suddenly Powder said, “Do you like beans? Fresh beans?”
After a moment, Fleetwood said, “Yes.”
He took her to his garden. Carefully settling her in the wheelchair he said, “I’m getting better at this.
“I can only tell by looking for bruises.”
“The beans are over there,” he said. “Go pick some.” He left her on the uneven ground at the edge of his parking space and went to one of his sheds, where he got out a hoe.
Fleetwood made her way to the beans. Powder hoed furiously.
After twenty minutes he stopped, returned to the shed, and traded the hoe for a plastic bag. He brought the bag, and a towel, to the b
eans.
“Firsts on the towel?”
Fleetwood took it and mopped her brow. Powder bagged the beans she had picked.
As she handed the towel back to him she said, “Take me home, will you, Lieutenant?”
He wheeled her back to the car.
He took her to the door of her house. She said, “I got a little bit tired out there.”
“On warm days, it holds the heat,” he said. “Because it’s in a hollow. I have a lot of trouble with fungus diseases.”
She opened the door.
“OK,” he said. “Here’s your beans.”
She turned her head to him. “Are you leaving?” she asked sharply.
He faced her without speaking.
“Either come in and make love to me or take your goddamn beans with you.” She threw the bag on the walk and banged the door with a fist as she went into the house.
Powder took a shower and then washed her down.
“Any bruises?” she asked.
Later she said, “You know the only reason you’re here?”
“No.”
“Ever since I knew I was going to work for you, I’ve been hearing about this bragging that you only have seven toes.”
He said nothing.
She looked up at him. “Well, there have been quite a few guys wanting to be where you are now.”
Powder stayed where he was.
“But I decided to save myself for another cripple.”
Powder gave her something. He said, “I got them caught in a trapdoor when I was a kid.” Then, “Look, you want those beans or not?”
“Don’t tell me you cook too?”
“No. But you do, don’t you?”
Chapter Twenty Six
On Monday morning Powder got up early, ate, and was waiting in Detective Division when Bull arrived.
But the young sergeant stole the initiative by saying, “Got my message, then?”
“What message?”
“About the decision on the file your kid sent up.”
“What decision?”
“We’re holding a meeting on it this morning, at eleven.”
“It was on your desk two days ago,” Powder said pointedly.
“You want to come or not? I told them you should come.”
“Damn right I’ll come.”
“And another thing,” Bull said.
Powder looked skeptical.
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