“Wasn’t there something on report from you the other day about television and video sets?”
“Yes,” Powder said slowly.
“Well, you remember that taxi driver?”
Powder was silent.
“Well, I eliminated him from the burned body because the company records showed he was working regularly all that night except for coffee stops. He came down and we went through his sheet. And the other drivers confirm he was with them at the usual tunes and wasn’t acting strangely.”
“So?”
“They also say he’s been offering secondhand video sets around, cheap. Thought you might want his address.”
* * * * *
When Powder came back to the office, Fleetwood said, “Good morning.”
He glared at her. He said, “Don’t just sit there. Go out and do something.”
“Like what?”
“I’ll give you a choice of two.”
“Why do I have this feeling I’m not going to like it?”
“You don’t like choice? You can do them both.”
“Thanks.”
“Number one. Go out and see an ex-taxi driver about some television sets. Number two. Go to the hospital and have a little talk with Jane Doe.”
“About what?”
“Tell her that the ‘man’ giving her trouble was a sixteen-year-old boy called Harold Sillit and that the responsible job she had was as a high school teacher. See what she has to say about that.”
The meeting at eleven turned out to be an affair of six officers: Captain Gartland, two lieutenants from outside sections—one of whom was Tidmarsh, the computer supremo—two sergeants including Bull. And Powder.
Gartland opened proceedings in a surprisingly personal way. “You’ve all heard of Powder, even if you haven’t run into him. Most of what you’ve heard is probably bad. Troublemaking, tune wasting, clogging up the works. But sometimes the guy comes up with the goods, which is why he wasn’t out on his duff a long time ago. What we’re trying to decide here is whether this is one of those times.”
Powder sat stonefaced while the others rattled copies of Agnes’s report.
“In his zeal to stick a name on a corpse that Sergeant Bull here is responsible for, Powder had his secretary—”
Powder interrupted to correct, “My computer operative.”
“Shut up,” Gartland said. “Powder had his goddamn secretary absorbing all available general computer time. The justification is a suggestion that there is a pattern to, maybe even a link between, a statewide series of serious offenses. You’ve had copies of the report. What I want to decide this morning is whether there is enough here to indicate if there might really be a connection between these incidents and if so, what we should do next.”
Powder was back in the office at ten to twelve. He said to Agnes,
“Been nice to know you, kid.”
“Lieutenant?”
“You’re being kicked upstairs.”
“What?”
“To act as secretary to a team that’s following up your travel-kidnap report.”
“Yeah?”
“You get to try to fill in the holes, working in the computer section with Lieutenant Tidmarsh.”
“Yeah?” Her reaction was pleasurable anticipation.
“All sounds a little farfetched to me. But you’re to report upstairs to Captain Gartland.”
“Is this to be a permanent reassignment?”
“Not yet. But once Tidmarsh gets over the disappointment of your not being Fleetwood, it’ll be a chance for you, kid. If you want it. So pull your plug out and get the hell upstairs.”
Powder called Mrs. Woods when Agnes had gone.
“I call police yesterday. You out,” she said.
“A day off, Mrs. Woods.”
“Oh.”
“I was calling about your brother-in-law. What did you call me about?”
“The same. He no come.”
“I don’t understand,” Powder said.
“He no come. He after John Langston.”
“Who is John Langston?”
“He reason Marianna sent here.”
Powder rubbed his face with his free hand, thinking suddenly that he had never asked Mrs. Woods why her niece, who knew nobody in Indianapolis, should abruptly, remove herself to live with an aunt who didn’t know her well enough to identify her body.
“Tell me about it.”
“John Langston no-good boyfriend. Leon send Marianna to me. Now Marianna disappear. Leon say he kill when he catch them. He say no point coming. Body not Marianna.”
“How is your sister, Mrs. Woods?”
“Something better.”
“If she could look at the corpse again and give us a decision, it would help a great deal.”
“It hard.”
“Things are going to get complicated if we don’t have an identification. It might end up with the police making your brother-in-law come here.”
“Make Leon terrible mad.”
“Could that possibility help your sister face the ordeal?”
“Maybe,” Mrs. Woods said.
“I’ll ask the hospital to look out for you and help you as much as they can.”
Fleetwood returned to the office at a few minutes after, twelve. It was much too early for her to be back.
“Number one,” she said, “your television taxi man was not at home. At least that’s what his landlady said. And he lives on the second floor. I can’t do second floors yet.”
Powder sat.
“Number two,” she said. “Jane Doe ducked out of the hospital this morning.”
“The hell she did,” he said quietly.
“I tried to get more information, but there isn’t a lot. A nurse found the bed empty about seven. No one around the place spotted her leaving.”
Powder thought. He said, “It feels wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“Phooey,” he said. “Suddenly this has become one of those days.”
“You get yourself personally involved in all these cases,” she said.
“Is that supposed to be a newsflash?” he snapped.
A boy of about sixteen entered the office and stood uneasily just inside the doorway.
Powder saw him and took a deep breath. “Can I help you?”
“Hope so,” the boy drawled. “My brother been gone a week and our folks don’t make no never mind.”
The telephone rang.
Powder answered the telephone. Fleetwood saw to the young man.
The phone call was from Major Tafelski, his Monday inquiry about developments in the case of his missing sister.
Powder reported none, hung up, and sat at his desk, head in hands, for several minutes, as Fleetwood dealt with the boy’s concern.
“Don’t sit like that,” Fleetwood said, when the boy left. “Gives the section a bad image.”
“I think . . .” Powder said slowly, “that I am losing my grip. Nothing feels right or sane or settled anymore.”
Fleetwood raised her eyebrows.
“I want you to go out,” Powder said.
“Again?”
Powder wrote a name and address. “Question the major about his missing sister. Put a little pressure on him.”
“Can I eat first?”
“No. I want you to go there now.”
“What’s the urgency?”
“Just do it, will you?” He looked up at her. He almost said, “Please?”
She went.
Powder sat again at his desk, his hands over his eyes.
He shook himself. He called Detective Division to find out who had handled the death of Harold Sillit twelve days before. It was on the file of a Detective Sergeant Brindell.
Powder called Brindell and raised the name of the case.
“I remember vaguely,” Brindell said. “Kid killed sticking up a late-night fruit stand? Nothing to it. That the one you mean?”
“He was sixteen, right?”<
br />
“If you say so.”
“It says so on the print-out. What I wanted to know was what school he went to.”
“School? A stickup kid. Woulda dropped out, wouldn’t he?”
“I have reason to believe he was in school. Don’t you know?”
“It was all a formality.”
“So you don’t know.”
“And I don’t care,” Brindell said.
Powder took the boy’s address and found it on a map of Indianapolis. Geographically, it seemed likely that his school would have been William Henry Harrison High.
Despite its being summer vacation Powder called Harrison High School.
There was no answer.
Powder called the board of education and got the names and home numbers of the principal and assistant principal.
Eventually, from the assistant principal. Ponder learned that a social studies teacher of Jane Doe’s general description had quit suddenly, two weeks before.
“Any explanation?” Powder asked.
“None,” the woman said. “She sent a letter. It said, ‘I am forced by circumstances to give up this post.’”
“Was she having problems?”
“No,” the assistant principal said thoughtfully. “Maybe some discipline trouble, but nothing unusual for a first-year teacher.”
“This was her first year?”
“Yes.”
“Is it common for someone to quit like this?”
“No. If they were disillusioned with teaching, perhaps. But Miss Crismore was, well, outspokenly idealistic.”
“This is faculty lounge reputation?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you remember what college she came from?”
“I think it was Hanover College.”
“Near Madison?”
“Yes.”
“And do you know where she came from originally?”
“I don’t know that.”
“Would it be possible for you to find out for me?”
The assistant principal said, “It might be on an employment card in the school. Lieutenant, is Sarah Crismore in some kind of trouble?”
“I explained that I am with the missing persons section,” Powder said. “It’s possible she can help us.”
“But why are you asking for her original home address instead of her current address?”
“I was getting to that,” he said. “Do you know her address here?”
“No,” the assistant principal said.
“But maybe you could find that out for me too?”
“If it’s important.”
Powder continued, oblivious to the fishing the assistant principal was doing. “One other thing. I gather she had a gentleman friend at the school.”
Silence greeted this bit of guesswork.
“I would appreciate his name,” Powder said.
“I have no firsthand knowledge of any special friendships Miss Crismore may have made.”
Powder sighed. “He’s married, huh? Well, I don’t give a damn about that. But I need the man’s name. And address. With the other information you are getting for me.”
“All right, Lieutenant.”
“Good,” Powder said chattily. “Not a very good time for the school, is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I understand you had a bit of trouble lately.”
“Trouble?”
“One of your students. Getting killed in a robbery? That was Harrison High, wasn’t it? Didn’t I read that?”
“Perhaps you also read,” the assistant principal said, “the list of our graduating class and of our record number of college placements?”
“Ah. Must have missed that.”
“Pity.”
“Be hearing from you soon, then.”
Powder exhaled heavily as he hung up the telephone. He was oppressively aware of loose ends, in his work and his life.
But instead of thinking, he began to work on the routine updates of the section’s outstanding cases.
Chapter Twenty Seven
The first reporter to get to Powder was Ben Brown, from the Star. “You can’t kick me out this time,” he said.
“What you want, Ben?”
“Comment, of course. What you think of her, what she has added to the office since she joined your staff last week. That kind of thing.”
Powder stared at the man. There was a glint in Brown’s eye. Powder said, “We’ve been able to sell off one of the desk chairs.”
“May I quote you?”
“No.”
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Come on. Powder! You can’t sit on it. She’s here a week and she decides to visit an old guy who has been calling you every week for years and, wham-bam, she turns up the old guy’s sister’s skeleton in the spare bedroom. I don’t want to shit on you, but you could have done that any day for years, only you didn’t. She comes along and a week later it cracks open.”
“She’s a credit to the force,” Powder said histrionically. “I knew from the first day that she would go far.” Powder coughed artificially. “If her career keeps rolling the way it has till now, she could go all the way.”
“Yeah,” Brown said slowly.
Powder looked directly into the man’s eyes. “You’ve never had reason to think I told you anything that wasn’t absolutely straight.”
“I suppose.”
“OK,” Powder said. “So get out, will you?”
The man left.
Two more reporters called Powder before twenty past four, when Lieutenant Gaulden appeared in the office.
“Welcome, welcome,” Powder said. “Come to congratulate us?”
“It’s true, then?”
“Something is,” Powder said enigmatically.
“We’re hearing that goddamn Fleetwood has turned up a years-old murder. It’s all around upstairs. That right?”
“Wouldn’t want to commit myself as to whether it is murder or not.”
Gaulden tightened his lips and exhaled deeply. “In one week on the job, how would she know where to look?”
“How would anybody know where to look for something like that?” Powder snapped.
And behind Gaulden he saw Fleetwood roll in.
Powder continued, “I could have done it any day for years, but I didn’t. She comes in here with a new perspective, a fresh mind. So maybe she gets lucky in that this body was waiting around and it needn’t have been. But my only worry is that she’s too good a cop and you’re not going to let me keep her down here, because you think Missing Persons is a lost and found and only needs one guy half-time to push paper. Oh, hang on. There she is now.”
Gaulden turned around.
Powder made his way through the counter-top hatchway, saying, “Welcome back. Sergeant. A good bit of work you did there. We’ve had the press in already. But have they gotten a picture of you?”
Doubtfully, Fleetwood said, “They took pictures at the scene.”
“Great,” Powder said. “Great.” He clapped Gaulden on the back. “A good little advertisement for a flexible, enlightened police force, eh?”
“Congratulations, Sergeant Fleetwood,” Gaulden said.
“Thank you.”
Gaulden left.
Powder’s smile vanished. “Enter, Indianapolis’s answer to Sherlock Holmes,” he said and he walked back to the counter, where he held the flap up for her.
“I’m not staying. I’ve got to go up and check the guy in. I just stopped in to tell you about it.”
“Thanks a bundle.”
“Really, there was no chance before. First the guy went hysterical, then there were patrol cops and the ambulance. And then the reporters.”
Powder nodded.
“I tried telling them it was your idea.”
“For God’s sake don’t do that! If you want to stay in this racket, then you have to play all the angles you can.”
“Roy—” she began.
<
br /> “‘Roy’? ‘Roy’? What’s with this ‘Roy,’ Sergeant Fleetwood?”
The telephone rang. Powder answered it sharply. “Lieutenant Roy Powder, Missing Persons.”
“Bull here, Powder.”
Powder waved Fleetwood away. She turned.
“Hello, Bull.”
“I hear congratulations are in order. You guys had a good score today.”
“All down to my new sergeant, Carollee Fleetwood.” He spelled out the last name. “A real mover.”
Fleetwood closed the door behind her.
“What I really called about was to tell you that I may have an ID on my body.”
“Yeah?”
“Woman named Gilkis identified it as her daughter. One of your cases.”
“Pity,” Powder said.
“What?”
“I had a different idea for you on that body,” Powder said. “But if you’re sure . . .”
“Well, funny you should say.”
“Why’s that?”
“The husband of the woman apparently swears that it is not the daughter.”
“Is the father here?”
“No. In St. Paul. But he says the daughter is in St. Paul. Only me, I figure a mother knows her own kid.”
“I suppose,” Powder said.
“You know these people, don’t you?”
“A little.”
“Could you go see the mother? See what’s what?”
“You’re not so sure?”
“I was. But I’m not.”
Powder relented. “I can maybe stop on my way home.”
“Great.”
Powder waited.
“You said you had another idea. What was that?”
“If I was you,” Powder said, “I’d take a guy called Clive Burrus to see this body.”
“Yeah . . .?”
“Only do it hard. Make him go. Make him think you know he knows all about it. No answers, only questions.”
“What’s the story?”
“He’s on the list. Missing a girlfriend. I don’t like the way he dresses. No consistency. Unless you’re already sure about what you got,” Powder said. Then he asked, “How’s my kid Agnes Shorter going to work out for you guys?”
“Seems all right.”
“All right? The kid’s a genius. Anybody from down here is good, but Shorter is special and if you guys don’t register that, for Christ’s sake, send her back to me.”
“Yeah, I said she seemed good.”
Powder hung up.
He was about to call Mrs. Woods when a distraught young woman ran in.
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