Pursuit

by Gene Hackman

  Soon after a four-way stop, she noticed a do-it-yourself car wash. “Pull in over there, will you, Todd-O?”

  “What’s up? Restroom? Sandwich?”

  “Nah, I just got this nutty idea.”

  “You want to get the car washed—do it together like a couple of newlyweds.” He forced a laugh.

  “Humor me, will you?” Julie walked around the four-stall car wash.

  A woman carrying an infant in a belly pack washed an old VW beetle.

  “Hi, ma’am. Do you know if the owner is around?”

  The woman pulled the soapy brush away from her vehicle. “Nope. Never seen anyone around who looks like they know what they’re doing.”

  “What’s up? You mind telling me?” Todd drove forward without getting out.

  Hands on hips, Julie continued to survey the concreted area. The four covered wash stalls were located in the very center of the square. A fenced area in the far corner of the square housed a large garbage Dumpster. “I’m going to take a look around, see what’s up.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I think our guy might have taken one last swipe at cleaning that Bronco, and since this place is on the way to where he left it, maybe he threw out trash, emptied ashtrays, vacuumed mats. I don’t know. Just a hunch. It’s the closest do-it-yourself car wash to the Everetts’ house, and it’s a straight line to the turnpike.” Julie walked toward the fenced off garbage bin. “Wanna help?”

  “Yeah, sure. I thought maybe I’d get us snacks for the trip home. There’s a 7-Eleven right across the street. Back in a jiffy.”

  Julie laughed to herself as Todd bounced out of the driveway and cut across traffic to the convenience store.

  The gate to the metal garbage receptacle was padlocked, and the chain-link fence looked formidable. On the right side of the gate, outside the enclosure and next to an alley, sat a fifty-gallon drum of detergent up against the backside of the fence. Julie climbed on top of the four-foot-tall drum and stepped easily across the wire fence onto the lid of the large Dumpster. The opposite lid had a convenient handle and opened easily to rest on the alley-side fence. She looked inside and saw the bottom of the metal Dumpster covered sparsely with trash. Lucky for me it isn’t full, she thought. Someone had cleaned out the two small wastebaskets next to the vacuum areas and probably deposited it in the metal bin. Maybe with providence on her side, some of it might be from Mr. Yahoo’s Bronco. Julie eased her way down into the shoulder-high receptacle. She kicked her way through nearly a third of the waste material before she heard Todd.

  “You there! What’s you doing in my garbage bin?”

  Julie’s head bobbed up and down. “Fuck off, Mr. Garbage Owner. What did you buy?”

  “Oh, bunch of Cokes, cookies, crunchy goodies. Is there room for two in that tiny abode?”

  “Yeah, sure. Mi casa es su casa.” She nudged a milk carton with her foot. “Nah, I’m almost done. Not much here. I’ll just be a couple more minutes.” Julie continued her search for she knew not what. Most of the debris turned out to be paper towels provided at the vacuum unit, newspapers, chewing gum wrappers, McDonald’s Happy Meal bags, and dry pizza crusts. She looked for a date on one of the newspapers—from two days earlier. She toed through the last pile of crap when her heel caught on a roll of paper towels. Stepping on the almost fully used roll, she looked down and noticed “Bounty” printed in small letters on the edge of the paper towels. She picked it up and turned it, looking down both ends of the stiff cardboard tubing. A crumpled piece of paper fell to the metal floor. Opening it, she saw it was a grocery receipt. The faded store name and underneath that, “Miller County.” It could have come from anyone’s car; however, she thought it was worth checking out. She’d need a magnifying glass at least and probably an FBI lab report to make it work, but at least it was a lead.

  She slipped the paper into the breast pocket of her jacket and levered herself up waist high on the downside of the bin. Todd had just started to climb the fifty-gallon drum.

  “No pizza crust for you, partner. The treasure hunt is over.” She had never lied to Todd about anything really serious, but she wanted to keep this little item to herself, at least for now.

  What’s up, sweets, did you have a good weekend?” Julie had arrived home Sunday only a few hours before Bart dropped off Cheryl. As soon as her daughter came through the door, Julie knew something was cooking.

  “Oh yeah, great. Concert was super, nice room at the Branson Palace, and a nonstop monologue of complaints from Maisie Belle.”

  “Who’s that?”

  Cheryl tugged off her jacket and wrapped it carefully over her arm as if in imitation of someone. Then she struck a model’s pose.

  “My name is Miss Maisie. But you can call me Amazing if it so pleases you. Ta-ta.”

  She started up the stairs.

  “Is this your father’s latest?”

  “Latest and lastest, if you please. I have a disarmingly throbbing cranial brow. Or headache, as the hoi polloi describe it. So if you see Master Worth, please tell him I’m indisposed.”

  Cheryl’s renewed sense of humor comforted Julie, but still she felt conflicted, for it also came out of a strange weekend.

  “Do men really like big knockers, Mom?” Cheryl called out from the top of the stairs. Julie smiled, but her thoughts went back to the receipt she’d retrieved from the car wash. She’d had a chance to examine it more carefully once she got back home. A partial name and “Rt. 52 Miller County” as an address.

  The store name appeared to have three or four letters. A couple of the lowercased letters were discernible. “Aags” didn’t make sense. Could be “Bags,” but too cute for a grocery store. “Cags”? “Dags”? Possible, but didn’t light any candles. She had a quick laugh when she got to F. G wouldn’t work for a food emporium. H probably described some of their customers. “Mags” could be a possibility; N could describe the owner’s wife. Julie searched the hard-copy yellow pages and Googled food-related Miller County stores for any similar names but came up blank.

  She checked with Captain Walker the next day before hightailing it to Miller County. Todd hadn’t fared well after the Tulsa trip, sidelined with the flu and strep throat. She would canvass the area and ask around on her own. The incorporated area took in part of Lake of the Ozarks, which spread out over several hundred square miles. Miller County bordered only a small portion of that, but it was still a lot of road to cover.

  Julie started in the middle of the county and worked outward. Tuscumbia was listed as the county seat. After numerous inquiries at stores and gas stations, most of them leading to comments about the weather, an older gentleman sitting on a John Deere tractor just off the bridge over the Osage River seemed affable and, as it turned out, helpful.

  “Margaret’s. But everyone knows it as Mag’s. Back on 52, the way you just came from, right there at the corner of 52 and County Road A, as in Adam. Right smart day, ain’t it?”

  She thanked the gentleman and agreed for the umpteenth time that yes, it was “right smart.” Margaret’s. No wonder she couldn’t find it online. Mag’s turned out to be pretty much as she pictured it. A frame stand-alone building with the obligatory wood-rail-enclosed porch and the rusty tin Mail Pouch chewing tobacco sign left of the front door. The fellow inside greeted her with a “Howdy” and a “What can I do you for?”

  Julie introduced herself and took the plastic-encased receipt from her pocket, showing it to the down-home gentleman. “Could you tell me whether or not this is a receipt from your store?”

  He pulled his steel-rimmed eyeglasses from his forehead and held them several inches from his eyes, squinting at the receipt. “Sure looks like one of ours. Named the place after my wife, Margaret, but she really goes by Mag.” He moved over to the cash register and punched in one of the keys. “Would maybe be better for your evidence if you had a purchase on this here re-ceipt.”

  Julie picked up a pack of gum from the display and shoved it across th
e linoleum counter.

  “Sure enough, ma’am, that’s ours. Do we win anything? Is it like a lottery?” He grinned expectantly and then deflated. “Ah, ma’am, I was just funning with you. Didn’t mean nothin’. I sit in this smelly room near to twelve hour a day. You’ll have to excuse me.”

  Julie took her gum and started out the store, having no intention of excusing Mr. Mag’s.

  “I noticed something on that re-seat, ma’am.”

  Julie turned, ready for one more disappointing comeback.

  “We don’t get much of a call for one of the items on your tab there.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “Those nasty fellows all packed up tight in the tin can.”

  Julie looked at her list. Mostly fruit, vegetables, and something described as “preserved meat.” “Would these be sardines?”

  “They could be. We got your spam and your weenies in a can, and for simple sake put them all under ‘meats’ that are preserved. If  ’n we had the right kinda customers, we’d buy us some of that cava fish-eggs stuff. Know what I mean?”

  Julie felt she understood the old coot as much as she wanted to. “Who buys most of your ‘preserved fish’?”

  “Oh, a whole wheelbarrow of folk, mostly older types, retirees. Can’t afford steak or chicken from Splendid Farms, theys just a might better than our cat-food folk; we got a couple of them. Feel sorry about that.”

  “Can you give me the names of your tinned-fish people?”

  The man went through a handful of names, nothing standing out. Julie wrote them all down along with any known addresses. She once again started to leave.

  “There was one name I forgot. Smart fella; only gets our tinned fish on occasion. He buys it like it were going outta style, then nothing for months on end.”

  “Who is this fellow?” Julie stepped back on the porch.

  “I won’t get in any trouble tattlin’, will I? What’s he done?”

  “I don’t know if he’s done a gosh darn thing. Just checking.” Julie didn’t think her speaking his tongue would bring the name out any sooner, but she had to try.

  “That would be Mr. C, ma’am—first name, well, I don’t for the life of me know. Hmm. Lives down the lakes way, I hear.”

  The C name resonated through Julie’s brain.

  “You okay, missy? You seem flustered.”

  Julie got as much information from the fellow as possible, making it a point to question him more thoroughly on some of his other tinned-fish customers to try to divert his attention from Mr. C, but it was not to be.

  “If Mr. C comes in, I’ll pretend you were never here. Would that be hunky-dory?”

  She nodded her thanks. She knew the man wouldn’t be able, in light-years, to keep the secret of Mr. C’s sudden notoriety. She wondered what in the hell she was going to do now.

  On the way back to the station house, she realized that she would have to bring Todd up to date on her findings. With luck, maybe he’d offer a helping hand when she nailed the bastard.

  Since Todd was still down from the flu, she went first to Walker and laid it out for her captain—all the seeming similarities that added up. She had not yet patrolled the area near the multitude of lakes, perhaps seventy miles wide, north to south.

  “That’s a lot of lakefront to cover, Sergeant. What will you be looking for? A mailbox that says ‘I’m here’?”

  She went along with the joke for a while. “I thought I’d cover the Miller County real estate tax records first, since their lake frontage seems closest to the area where Cheryl was picked up. If there’s nothing, maybe a house-to-house canvass with Todd when he recoups.”

  “Good, keep a low profile. If you find him, don’t make any moves until you’ve checked with me, okay?”

  The folks at the Miller County seat were helpful. The warrant she’d gotten from the district judge seemed to pave the way. Since the county records didn’t show whether a property was on the lakefront or not, Julie was forced to go through the whole lot.

  The Cs didn’t produce any Caldwells, but she figured that while there she would plow through the complete batch. It was late afternoon when she finished. She looked at the tax records, wondering what she’d missed. Julie went back to the Cs, still not finding that elusive Caldwell. She flipped over a few more of the oversized pages and came across the Ds. Realizing her mistake, she started to close the bulky record book when she saw the name Drew under the heading “Business.” The woman at the front desk explained, when asked, that firms doing trade in Miller County typically received their bills at their workplace rather than at taxed homes. Julie requested a printout from the woman with the address and amount of yearly taxes for the aforementioned home owned by Drew Box Factory.

  Once again she checked with Walker, talking of Drew Box Factory’s ownership of this house.

  “Let me think on this for a while,” he said. “If Drew in fact owns that house and put it under the company name, there’s nothing there that one could jump on. All perfectly legal; probably a tax dodge. All companies do it.” He paused. “I’m thinking maybe give the head honcho a call, ask him straight out, ‘What’s up with the house? Is it a client perk? Company investment?’ You name it; could be a hundred reasons to have a weekend place.”

  “Right, sir. But what if, by chance, I was in the neighborhood and dropped by to chat. I could maybe get a better read on the situation as we discuss the place.”

  “Good idea, Sergeant. Nice to hear you’re up to speed on your field skills. Should I call, or do you want to?”

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll wait til I get close by and then pop in. Don’t want to give him time to alibi out. I’ll keep you posted.”

  Under normal conditions, Julie’s trip to the box factory would take her twenty minutes. She waited until she was close to the factory before phoning.

  “Ah, Miss Worth. Mr. Drew just this moment left for home. Can I take a message?”

  “No. Maybe I can catch him. It’s kind of important. What is his number?”

  “Very sorry. I can’t do that.”

  “What does he drive?”

  “Well, I don’t, oh . . . it’s probably all right. A silver late-model Mercedes. He’ll be heading toward Arnold on 141.”

  Julie switched on her bar lights and sped up. She was just a couple of minutes out. Nearing the factory, she doused the lights and continued past for about a mile. A silver automobile chugged along several notches below the speed limit in front of her. Approaching a gas station—a proper location to pull into—she switched her blinker back on. The driver’s head bobbled up and down, from the rearview mirror to the dashboard and back again. He pulled into the Conoco lot. Julie got out of the cruiser, nudged her elbow against her Sig, and approached the car carefully. Not from any sense of danger but because, to use the old saw, she was “way out on a limb.”

  “Mr. Drew, sorry about the stop. It’s Juliette Worth. We met a while back about your missing niece, Trudy.”

  “Oh yes. For a moment, I thought I’d committed some sort of crime.”

  Maybe, but not what you’re thinking. “Could I have a few minutes of your time?”

  “Well, this is sort of unusual, wouldn’t you say, Sergeant?”

  The passenger-side door unlocked.

  “Okay. Join me here. We’ll be more comfortable in my Benz.”

  Julie slid into the soft leather seat of the Mercedes. “I’ll get right to the point. Do you own a home in Miller County out toward Lake of the Ozarks?”

  “No, no. Afraid not. That’s reserved for the can’t-afford-the-Caribbean crowd.” He guffawed at his little joke.

  Julie took out a clipboard from her portfolio case. “Says here the Drew Box Factory pays $1,600 a year on lot 762 in Miller County, Missouri. Is that a mistake?”

  “Let me see that.” He looked at the memo on Miller County letterhead, stationery that Julie had procured on her recent sojourn. “Huh. This can’t be right. We don’t have property at
the lakes. Let me call David Wright, see what’s up.”

  Julie waited while the executive on his cell switched back and forth between his comptroller and his in-house accountant.

  “Dave Wright’s man, Robert, says in fact we do own a property in Miller County. I’ll check on this. There’s no reason we would carry something like this on our books. Odd.”

  Drew seemed honestly at a loss as to why the property was listed as theirs. Julie got out of the Mercedes and slipped into her cruiser. She started to U-turn out of the lot when she saw the Mercedes’s lights flashing on and off behind her. One good blinker stop deserved another. She reversed back to Drew’s driver-side window.

  “We need to talk. Do you have the time? Follow me, please.” He pulled out and around her Charger and drove back toward the factory.

  Julie noted that this time he pushed the speed limit, along with having his cell pressed solidly against his right ear.

  When they arrived back at the factory, Drew hustled from his Mercedes, giving Julie a quick hand signal. By the time Julie got out of her cruiser, William Drew stood holding the office building door for her.

  “Is there a big hurry?”

  He didn’t answer, just headed upstairs to his office, where a short, heavyset man waited, tapping his fingers on a stack of papers. An assistant stood next to him.

  “Dave, I need an explanation of this property, right now. By the way, this is Sergeant Worth with the State Patrol. Proceed.”

  “When I began working here some twelve years ago”—Wright thumbed through several legal document folders—“our bookkeeping was in serious disarray. Among the equity holdings, along with this building and the factory, was the property in Miller County.”

  “Let me see that.” Drew spread the sheaf of papers on his desk. He glanced through a large manila envelope at the bottom of the pile and pulled out a letter. “Did you see this?” He thrust it out. “That property was supposed to be transferred years ago—close to eighteen—for Christ’s sake. We’ve paid nearly twenty-five thousand dollars in taxes. Oh, hell. Technically, it looks as though we do own this land. Technically, Miss Worth.”