Pursuit

by Gene Hackman

  “Sorry, that was weak. Jesus, when Walker gets pissed, he’s funny.” He glanced across the seat to Julie. “Hey, what’s going on?”

  “He’s like my dad.” Julie turned away, her hand going to her face. “Always so direct. Painful. How much farther? Are we there yet? Let’s move it.”

  They checked in with Rensaler when they got close to Jonesboro. His only advice: “She’s upset and difficult, should probably be in a hospital being looked after. By the way, she doesn’t have a phone, so I guess you just show up. Good luck.” He gave them her address.

  They located the Hogar digs easily. A rented room above a workingman’s bar on the hard side of town.

  She wasn’t home. Another tenant stuck his head out his door and volunteered that he thought she was at work, waitressing. When pressed, the Good Samaritan shrugged and suggested downstairs.

  Todd spoke with Walker while Julie went to the tavern. She waited for her eyes to adjust, the dark interior a violent contrast to the midday sun. Someone played a pinball machine to her left. She noticed a silhouetted image reflected in the liquor bottles and back bar mirror.

  “What’s your pleasure, miss?” The barkeep, an older fellow.

  “Hi, looking for a girl by the name of Angelina, works here. Can you help me?”

  “You a cop?” He continued drying a cocktail glass.

  “Out of state. Just want a word with Miss Hogar. She’s not in any trouble, just want to talk a bit.”

  “Good luck on that. Our Missy Hogar is screwed up. Don’t know what happened. She was gone for a spell, then reappeared and was different.”

  “Different, how?”

  “Don’t know, just different. Used to be all bright lights and grins, worked here for a while, then left. Like I said, weird. Wouldn’t talk about it; boss had to let her go. Shame, nice gal. Works over at the cafeteria on Main.” He glanced at his watch. “Probably still there, since it’s late lunchtime.”

  Julie thanked the man and hurried toward the exit. The fellow at the pinball machine rubbed himself suggestively when Julie glanced his way.

  “Hey, Ned, cool it. Five-O.” From the bartender.

  She would add the pinball fool to her list of recent candidates for bozos of the week. Todd was just getting off the phone as she came blinking out of the bar. “Sorry to report nothing new. Find out anything?”

  Julie headed for the car. “Our girl works at a cafeteria over on Main—and, incidentally, bars that open at noon suck.”

  After several inquiries, they came upon the Mayfair. The cafeteria was half empty. In the back, a girl stood with a large tray of fried chicken. Julie watched her distribute food into the steam table and then look as if she had forgotten what to do next.

  “Let’s grab something to eat and wait until things thin out a bit, okay?”

  Todd headed for the line. “Don’t you think we should inquire if our Hogar girl is even here, Sarge?”

  “She’s here. Watch the kid with the food trays. She’s in the kitchen now.”

  Julie gestured to the food line as the girl drifted back and forth behind the counter.

  “I see what you mean.” Todd watched her. “She’s out of it.”

  An older man in full apron and pencil mustache came up to speak with the girl. He pointed to different parts of the cafeteria before rushing back to the kitchen. Eventually she cleaned and bussed the table next to Todd and Julie.

  “Angie, how are you?” Julie asked.

  The girl’s eyes darted back toward the kitchen and then settled on Julie. “Ah, fine, thank you.”

  Julie got up and walked toward the middle of the stainless-steel food line, just opposite the doors leading to the kitchen. “Hello, Mr. Manager, hello.”

  “What’s up? Help you? I’m the owner.”

  “May I have a word with you?” Julie pointed toward the end of the stacked food trays. They met behind the cashier. “Loved your chicken a la king,” she lied. “Everything was great.” Julie flashed her out-of-state badge and took on a conspiratorial tone. “We wanted to have a word with Angelina. She hasn’t done anything wrong. But we think she could help us with something. Would that be all right?”

  The man nodded but lost a bit of his hospitality.

  Julie walked up to Angie. “Miss Hogar, you don’t know me. I’ve spoken to your boss, asking if I might have a few words with you. Do you mind?” She motioned to a seat next to Todd.

  “I didn’t do anything. Did I?”

  “No, of course not.”

  Smoothing her hair, Angie took a seat and then straightened her skirt. “Are you police?”

  “If we were the police, would you still speak to us?” Todd gave Angie his card.

  The girl studied it and fussed with a loose button on her shirt uniform. “Would three o’clock be okay? I have an hour-and-a-half break before dinner.”

  “We don’t have a lot of time, miss.” Julie smiled. “What we’re dealing with is serious sh—well, an abduction. I’ll speak to Mr. Mustache, get you to meet with us now.” Outside, the three of them stood next to the cruiser.

  “We don’t want to make trouble for you, but let’s talk,” Julie said to Angie. “Do you want to sit in the car or—”

  “I don’t feel well. Could we go to my place?”

  They drove the short distance to the girl’s room above the tavern. Angie led them up the narrow stairwell, taking what felt like far too much time.

  Julie stayed patient, thinking that with any luck the girl would give them something. Anything would be better than what they didn’t have now.

  “Excuse the room. Have a seat if you can find a spot.”

  Julie cleared a chair of old magazines while Todd stood near the kitchen counter.

  “Sorry, Officer. I don’t mean to be deceitful. I just don’t know how to think about it. I don’t even know what to call it.” The girl sat on a single bed, gazing out the window at the metal fire escape.

  The light caught a gleam in her eyes. “I was thumb tripping to West Memphis when—oh, I didn’t even ask what you wanted of me. I assumed it was about my incident.”

  “It’s okay. Go on.”

  “He hit me several times before I got settled in the car.” She paused, digging her nails into the mattress. “He put me in a nasty little room, odd wallpaper, a bed—really just a cot—a toilet stool, a fridge.” She continued to stare out the window. “At first he would be in the room every night. What a horrible little human being. I had to wear this smelly black hood when he came into the room, so I couldn’t see him. He would leave food, and I wouldn’t see him for what seemed like a week. He would be different, trying to be sweet or charming.” She dropped her head into her hands.

  “He talked about the stupidest things. A ring of rocks he looked down on from high places, girls who loved him. I have no idea what he meant by that. He was impossible to care about, even if you wanted to.” She paused. “He smelled of garlic, mostly. I was in a basement; it was cold and damp. He was short for a man. His body, was, I guess you would say, inadequate. I thought he would kill me—he talked of it.” She cast her eyes to the floor once again. “He would play sappy guitar music outside the room; the same passage over and over. It drove me nuts.”

  “What did he say?” Julie tried not to break the spell. “Did he threaten you?”

  “Uh-huh. Said some women deserved to die. Some days there were motorboats; the house might have been by a lake. One day he made me strip and put on the hood. He put me in the vehicle, and he must have driven for hours. Then he stopped and pulled me from the back of the truck and left me on the road.”

  “You were hitchhiking, right? When you first got in the car, didn’t you get a look at his face?”

  “I should have, but he was bent over, getting something from the floor. The driver’s footwell. He said something about my seat belt, so as I turned to grab it, he socked me hard. Maybe with a handle from a hammer. Wow, I don’t even know why I would say that—about the hammer, I mean.�
�� She paused. “Oh yeah. Once, after one of his nightly visits, I peeked under the hood and saw him slapping a piece of round polished wood against his leg. It looked like he was going to hit me again.”

  She circled the room. “Dirty little bastard.” She covered her face with crossed arms. “Excuse the language.” She went to the window. “Once in a while he would put his hands around my throat as if he were about to strangle me. Then he would laugh as if it were a joke. I never saw his face that well except the night he let me go, and even then it was pretty dark.

  “His smell, I’ll never forget that.” She waited, as if for permission to continue. “Cheap aftershave, sweat, and the garlic.” She turned back to Julie. “Where he let me out was close to a place called Heber Springs. There’s a bunch of lakes there. That’s where I might have been the whole time. He just drove around those hours to confuse me. If you catch him, tell him for me, ‘Angie thinks you’re a coward.’ ”

  Julie walked over and gave the girl a hug, and then signaled to Todd that they were leaving.

  Listening to the hums and rattles of the police car on the way back to Missouri, the day turned out to be a long one.

  “You okay to drive, Todd?” She didn’t hear his answer as she drifted into a dream—Cheryl giving a speech at her elementary school graduation.

  “All people—white, black, brown, yellow—are equal in my eyes, as in the eyes of the Lord.” She continued her charmingly naive speech. “There is good in us all, every being has kindness that shines through, every man has the power to be gentle and decent.”

  Julie woke up, wondering if Cheryl’s innocence would betray her, and would she be able to see there were those who didn’t obey the commandments? Be strong, baby, be strong.

  To be in accordance with the truth, one must also understand how ugly it can be once it makes its appearance. Being honest for most of his life had been a mere suggestion; a whiff of a passing breeze, Charles mused. Common folk were anchored to their corny “Honesty is the best policy” cliches. Charles, however, believed that truth and lies were mere tools in life, the best policy being “Whatever it takes.”

  William Drew called him at the Bait Shack to explain that the authorities wanted to interview all of the employees who’d been working at the plant when his niece had gone missing. “I know this is a pain in the behind for you, Charles, but it shouldn’t take long.”

  “Would you like me to organize the whole thing for you? I’ll hustle the men in and out of the interview space; be the goodwill ambassador for the company.”

  “Great. Especially since you are part of the management team. I’ll leave the list with Deedee, and both of you can determine the best way to go with this. Oh, and we have a number of folks who worked here at the time but have moved on. If they ask for their names, tell them they’ll have to hunt them down on their own. Thanks again, Charles.”

  “When did they say they’d be here?” Charles glanced at his watch.

  “They didn’t.” Deedee busied herself at her desk. “I was told midmorning. You seem fidgety today.”

  “Oh, just another day at the mill. Nose to the grindstone. ‘A man’s work is never done.’ Blah-blah-blah.” He willed himself to relax, concentrating on his shoulders and the tension around his neck.

  “Oh no, hold it, Slick-a-roonie. It’s a woman’s work that’s never done. Let’s keep our priorities in order, shall we?”

  Charles tried to conjure up a laugh—not feeling it. “I’ll get going on this group of fellows, have them come up in herds of two, since you say there will be a couple of po-lice.”

  “You should be ashamed. They aren’t cattle.”

  “Of course not. I meant it only as a passing witticism. A mere jest to describe one’s hardworking mates. Our fellow travelers on the road to . . . let me think, the well-traveled path to—”

  “If it’s fellow travelers, they’d be on their way to Moscow, silly.”

  “But yes, of course. Dressed all in pink, get it? Commie tools, headed not for Moscow but for—”

  “—San Francisco,” they answered.

  Deedee waved toodle-loo.

  It pleased him at times to play the innocent fool. He walked down the stairs into the factory proper. Wearing his best blue suit, new Van Heusen shirt, and conservative grey tie, he looked down at the names, choosing the oldest and least likely candidates first. He rounded up the men and assembled them in the break room at the far end of the factory floor.

  “The police want to talk to you people about an event that took place . . . ah, let’s see.” He glanced down at his list as if the abduction date of William Drew’s niece were there. It wasn’t. But he knew the time sequence. “Well, it was somewhere in the neighborhood of seventeen years ago. You were all working here at the plant, so go on back to work and try and think of anything that might help the police. Mel Brown and Douglas Wright Vance, stick around.”

  The rest of the men filed out, leaving the two older fellows sitting hangdog in their hard plastic chairs.

  “Wait here in the break room til I call you, okay?” Charles flinched as he walked past the factory floor area of his nearly fatal overhead crane encounter.

  Deedee scurried about, straightening books, adjusting papers. “I cleared that vacant space next door. The second cop could use my spot here.”

  “Terrific. Now what?”

  “They called; be here in ten minutes.”

  Charles walked along the long hall connecting the executive wing with the office staff. This, he thought, might be a real test. A day he suspected would come, but not exactly like this. He continued pacing, trying to think of what to say if asked; how to comport himself. He knew he would get through this inconvenience, as it had been seventeen years, and given that the girl was a tramp and more than deserving; she was hardly missed. Bring it on.

  “I’ve taken the opportunity to alert the men, sir. And I’ve asked them to stay at their stations until called. Will that suffice, Mr. Todd?” Charles looked him square in the eye.

  “It’s Detective, sir, and my last name is Devlin.”

  He knew all that. He just wanted to be difficult; maybe appear naive.

  “You haven’t met Sergeant Worth, have you, Mr. Clegg?”

  Charles had been facing away from the door when it opened. When he turned, he was pleased to see the mother of the young lady whose company he had shared the last ten days. Not in the conventional sense, but in a performer-audience-type relationship. Sitting at the top of the stairs, he had played his guitar and sang a number of times. The girl, Cheryl—whose attractive parent now stood in front of him—needed discipline after the concert. His captive’s striking image was reflected in the face before him.

  She looked tired, this clueless mother, her face lined with concern.

  Charles called down to the break room for Mel Brown and Doug Vance. Over the course of the next hour and a half, he heard snippets of questions being asked of the eleven other men, individually, who’d worked at the factory those many years ago. “Did you know Trudy, your employer’s niece?” “How did you learn of her disappearance?” “Have you ever talked to anyone about the event?” “How old are you, sir?” “Do you drive a Ford Bronco?”

  When it was over, he felt confident. All the questions seemed fairly benign. The one question they didn’t ask was, “Do you currently have a sixteen-year-old girl named Cheryl imprisoned in your basement?”

  Charles dug into his well-worn briefcase and pretended to busy himself with paperwork. They had moved to a conference room, Julie and Todd comparing notes.

  “Of the whole lot, I didn’t sense much dissembling, did you?”

  “No, on the contrary, they seemed like a bunch of average Joes.” Todd ran his pen back and forth between his fingers. “No one seemed defensive. It’s a dead end.”

  “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation.” Charles spoke up from the other end of the conference table. “I would have to say that’s right; these are hardw
orking people.”

  Julie eased back in her chair. “Before I forget it, Mr. Clegg, thank you for organizing this little get-together.”

  “How, may I ask, did you come to resurrect this ancient case?”

  “We’re not at liberty to give any details at this point. Suffice it to say there have been recent events that seem to indicate a resumption of earlier”—Julie hesitated—“let’s just say peculiar happenings.”

  He delighted in her choice of words, describing the abductions as “happenings,” just as he liked to refer to them.

  “By the way, Mr. Clegg, do you own a Ford Bronco?” Julie phrased the inquiry as if it were a joke, laughing a bit at the end to take some of the sting out of the question.

  Todd joined in. “Yeah, right, I can just see the headlines now. Top executive at Drew Inc. involved in abductions.”

  “Oh, but I’m not a top exec. Simply a lowly manager of sorts who has been around for a long time, and no, I don’t own a Bronco.” It was true, he didn’t own the Bronco. He had stolen it.

  Todd and Charles laughed while Julie smiled, having come to the realization that the employee interrogations were a waste of time. She looked at Clegg.

  “By the way, you were here when Trudy was abducted. Can you tell us anything about other employees who may have left soon after her disappearance?”

  “Such a shame, really,” Charles replied. “I saw her several times touring the factory with her school friends. A cute, shy kid.” He cleared his throat. “As far as employees, I wasn’t in management yet, just a meager slug in production, trudging along. Don’t recall anyone being in a panic or leaving suspiciously. Nope, can’t say I recall anything like that.” Charles stood relaxed before the two troopers, eager to answer any inquiries.

  “Right. Okay, Mr. Clegg, thank you.”

  Julie had enough from the factory front. She didn’t feel well. A malaise dominated her since she’d stepped into the building. The interviews of the factory workers, the atmosphere, the here-there whiff of overcooked food made her want to pack up and leave.