I drove back to the centre of the city on Meridian Street. I thought about a couple of visits I could make but stamped them Immediate Attention, Tomorrow. I hardly glanced at Wanda Edwards’ house as I passed it.
It was half past seven by the time I crossed the bridge over Fall Creek, near The Fandango, where I was not keeping track of Lance Whisstock. But it made me think of law and order. I stopped at a liquor store and bought a six-pack.
I drove to Vermont Street and parked in front of a three-storey frame house of turn-of-the-century vintage. There was a glow through the curtains on the ground floor. I took the six-pack and went to the front door. I rang the bell and a porch light came on.
It was answered by a tired-looking man with thin grey hair and only seven toes. ‘Hello, Powder,’ I said. Leroy Powder was another lieutenant of my acquaintance in the Indianapolis Police Force, head of Missing Persons. But to call him a friend would be to take liberties with the word. It is hard for those of us not privy to his innermost workings to think how a social roughneck like Powder could actually have a friend.
He sighed heavily. He said, ‘If you hear one coming, you leave by the back, which is why you people have to wear gumshoes.’
He did not invite me in.
‘Show some hospitality or fix the porch roof,’ I said. ‘It’s wet out here. I even brought you some beer.’ I held the six-pack up. ‘I won’t stay long enough to drink more than one.’
He stood mute before me for several seconds more. Then he made way and held the door. As I passed him he said, ‘A gumshoe bearing gifts. Who did you kill?’
We sat in his front room. When I had been there last it was covered in papers like a, snowfall. Tonight it was tidy, clean, even sparkling on the bits which could reasonably be made to sparkle.
I broke two cans off the pack.
Powder left the room. He returned with two glasses. He put one down next to me, and picked up one of the beers.
‘And lost weight too,’ I said. ‘Someone is having a good influence on you.’
He opened the can, filled his glass and drank. ‘O.K., shamus,’ he said. ‘I’ve accepted your bribe. What is it that you want? The answer is no.’
‘I came on an impulse,’ I said.
‘Strange urges you P.I.’s get.’
‘I’m trying to trace a woman who left Indianapolis in 1940. I don’t know where she went or for sure whether she is still alive now. Other things have happened, even a murder, but the core of the job is a Missing Persons case. I’m confused as hell, so I thought I would be humble and come to an expert.’
‘Office hours begin at nine,’ Powder said.
‘Come on!’ I said. ‘I read all your PR in the papers about the best Missing Persons solution rate in the Midwest. I’m paying you a compliment. Help me.’
Powder sipped from his beer.
I drank mine quickly and felt the benefit.
I told him about the case.
‘You don’t know where she went in 1940?’
‘No. No idea.’
‘But she cares for this child.’
‘Set her up with a woman as a mother. Provided money all through childhood.’
‘What am I supposed to do for you, gumshoe? Pull the broad out of a top hat?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Make a suggestion? Give an opinion?’
‘I don’t think your habeas corpus ploy will help you much.’
‘I’m hoping to establish whether she is alive or dead.’
‘In the fullness of the time it takes to utilise the law?’ I smiled, accepting the point.
‘So what are you left with from the 1940 end?’ Powder leaned back and rubbed his face with both hands. ‘The dead man’s sister,’ he said. He thought. ‘I suppose Miller could check out the houseboy in California for you.’
‘Miller is pretty busy with the Murchison case, and some personal problems,’ I said. Then, ‘But why check that?’
‘I don’t like his wife coming back to Indianapolis. What’s the name again?’
‘Mitsuki.’
‘Why the hell come here? There is no Japanese community here. There are a dozen other places she might have gone first.’
I thought about it. I said, ‘I have the feeling that she was pretty unworldly then. Maybe even now. She still gets emotional about her husband, and that was more than thirty-five years ago.’
‘A long time,’ he agreed. ‘But you asked.’ He shrugged. ‘Or you could try to go at it from the other end.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘If this Edwards woman cared about the kid,’ he said, waving a finger at me, ‘enough to arrange for her bringing-up, then chances are she still keeps some kind of eye on it. If she’s alive. Either she isn’t far away or she has somebody here who lets her know how the kid is doing.’
I paused with a lip on the rim. I said, ‘That makes considerable sense.’
‘I always make sense,’ Powder said. He looked at his watch. ‘Go away, will you?’
On the way home I stopped at a supermarket and filled a recycled paper bag with an ecologically unjustifiable steak. A thick one.
For a change there was no message on the answering machine.
I was grateful, because my mind was in tired tatters.
I grilled my steak: ‘Where were you on the night of November 18th?’
I was sopping up the last of the blood with instant mashed potato when the telephone rang.
I felt better for the food. I answered immediately.
It was Charlie Carson. He said, ‘I got a date for you on that Daisy Wines thing.’
‘Good man.’
‘She first worked here August 11, 1935. She did two weeks. I don’t know if you know the business . . .?’
‘No.’
‘It’s a slow time, August. He hardly paid her anything. A kind of audition rate, you know. But she musta been O.K., because she did two more weeks at the beginning of September and she got better money. There was two more weeks in October, nothing till end of February in ’36, and then it was off and on until June. June she started a long spell, five straight months. One of the regulars, Ginny, you met her, yeah? She went away for a while and Daisy Wines got herself established. Her money went up good. Ginny got back December. That’s when the newspaper shot I showed you was took. The picture you got is from early ’38.’
‘I’m very grateful that you’ve taken the time to look all this up.’
‘No problem. Makes a nice change from kicking the tails of fourteen-year-olds who think they look like they’re twenty-one.’
He agreed to accept more than my thanks, when I returned his photo. We hung up.
I sat by the phone and thumbed through my notebook.
Paula Wines Belter had been born February 5th, 1936. Making conception sometime after the beginning of May the previous year. When her mother was sixteen. Within a couple of weeks of Paula’s birth, Daisy Wines was working again.
I fidgeted.
The accretion of information about Daisy Wines was making me restless. Every time I learned something, more questions flaked up.
* * * * *
After pacing around the room, until the mice that live under my floorboards began banging their ceiling, with pieces of stale cheese, I decided to call my woman friend and maybe go out. She would understand.
‘You’re not in a fit state to be with anybody,’ she said within a minute on the phone. ‘You always get like this when some case is not resolving itself. It addles your brain. Why take it out on me?’
She understood only too well.
I hung up in a moment of isolation and despair.
But then, as it sometimes does, the telephone relented, and rang.
‘Hello, love.’
A light thin female voice with a thick rural accent asked, ‘Is that Mr Samson?’
Addled or not I sensed a need to speak gently. ‘Yes Ma’am, it is.’
‘Are you the one that’s offering that there reward for information rendered about Vera Wert?’
‘I am certainly trying to learn more about her, yes.’
‘Could you tell me how much in the way of payment that might be, please?’
‘It depends really on how good the information is.’
‘Well, it couldn’t hardly be none better,’ she said.
‘Why’s that?’
‘Cause I’m the only sister what she’s got, and the onliest living direct close relation because all our brothers is dead.’ This was said with strength and defiance.
‘Can I know your name, please?’
‘I am Miss Winnie Jane Wert.’
‘Where are you, Miss Wert?’
‘I have me a little house in Peru.’ In Hoosierland we pronounce the town Peé-roo.
‘I know it’s late,’ I said, ‘but would you be willing to talk to me about your sister tonight?’
‘That would suit me just fine,’ she said.
I looked at my watch. Nine-twenty. ‘I would think that I could be there a little before eleven.’
‘I’ll be here,’ she said.
I asked for and received instructions for getting to her house.
‘Would you,’ she asked, ‘be bringing cash money?’
‘I can do that,’ I said.
‘You ain’t never said how much you was thinking of.’
‘Would twenty dollars be worth some of your time?’
‘I was thinking more like . . .’ She thought. ‘Twenty-five?’
Miss Wert’s house was a clapboard shack on the edge of Peru on the Wawpecong road. I made good time, even at 55mph, on US 31, a divided highway all the way to Nead. From there it was another five miles. I pulled up outside the house at two minutes past eleven.
There was no bell so I knocked at the door. A dog round the back barked a couple of times and some paint came off on my knuckles. After a minute, a short, round woman with one burn-scarred cheek opened the door a crack.
She asked, ‘Who’s there?’
I gave my name and she stepped back to invite me into a room which was Spartanly tidy.
‘Make yourself at home,’ Winnie Jane Wert said. She was dressed in a loose gingham dress with vertical stripes. It looked clean and recently ironed.
I sat and before she followed suit she said, ‘I hope you got cash money.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Because I ain’t got no cheque account. Don’t cotton to banks a lot.’ She sat down and faced me.
‘You looking to capture Vera for something, or what?’
‘I’m a private detective,’ I said, ‘and I’m just trying to find out what happened to her and where she is if she’s still alive.’
‘Someone say she died?’ Miss Wert asked, with her dark eyebrows arching under mostly grey hair. She seemed to be in her mid-fifties.
‘No. But I don’t know much about her since about 1940, and it’s a long time.’
‘She sure left these parts since a long time,’ she echoed. She shook her head, looked down and sucked her lower lip. ‘My big sister,’ she said. ‘My onliest big sister.’
‘When did you last see her?’
‘See her? When I was seven years of age.’
‘Oh.’
‘That was in 1935, two years after Ma and Pa was took.’
‘Took?’
‘Died. They was at a bank, in Logansport, and some robbers come in. They was a sheriff with his deputy come along and gunplay opened up and Ma and Pa both got theyselves killed. Trying to get out’n the line of fire of the one bunch they ran in front of the other. Both of ’em had their heads blowed off.’
‘How many children were there?’
‘The six of us. Vera was the old un. Earl was next, then Cloyd. Me, Jimmie Luke and baby Emmett.’
‘What happened to you all?’
‘Too many to stay together. The two youngest went to Pa’s brother. That was his son’s wife you called on the telephone today what then called me and give your number. Me and Cloyd come to a friend of Ma’s here in Peru. Earl and Vera got placed with different folks in Logansport so as they could be near to go to school there. The deal was they would help at the houses.’
‘Who did Vera get placed with?’
‘Doctor and Mrs Wingfield, only she runned away. Took off and nobody ain’t seen her since. I didn’t see her since they got us together Easter time. The Wingfields was real nice people and saw us kids right as far as meeting up a couple of times a year was concerned even after she left them. But the last time I saw Vera was Easter in 1935. By time the Fourth of July rolled around she was long gone from their house.’
‘Do you know why she left?’
‘Not real for sure,’ Winnie Wert said. ‘But she did take me aside and have a talk about staying away from mens. I was only seven, but I recall that clear. She talked to me because I was her real sister, onliest one she got. And I’ll tell you straight, I sure wish I had listened to her better.’
‘So you think she had trouble from a man here?’
‘I didn’t know nothing about it at the time, but I could guess who that was.’
‘Who?’
‘Tommy Wingfield.’
‘The doctor?’
Winnie Jane Wert laughed hard. ‘Gracious me, no. Old Doc Wingfield was a sweet, kind, gentle kind of man. This was his boy, his only boy what lived in the house with ’em. He must of been eighteen, nineteen when Vera was there and I know for a fact that he made a lot of little babies in his day.’
‘Does he live locally now?’
She grew momentarily grave. ‘No. He don’t live at all. He got killed in France in the War.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘And that’s the last you know of Vera? When you saw her in 1935?’
Looking at me sharply the woman said, ‘Now, I didn’t say that, now did I? That was the last time I saw Vera, but I heard from her since then. Plenty.’
‘When?’ I asked, my heart starting to race.
‘Oh, lots of times.’
‘When was the last?’
‘The last? Lessee.’ She looked at me. ‘You know that all the boys, each an’ ever one, is gone.’ Then, in case it wasn’t clear, she added, ‘Dead.’
‘All your brothers? I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘Last was Earl. That’s ironical, ain’t it, him being the oldest. But he passed over from cancer, it was three years ago come March.’
I sat.
‘Sad time it was. He had him four kids and a wife. Hard on them.’
‘And you heard from Vera then?’
‘Not direct, to me. But she sent a wreath and five hundred dollars for the family.’
‘Three years ago?’
‘That’s right. And she’s had her a wreath at ever single funeral. Each of the boys. And she made a gift to the families too.’
‘But she didn’t attend any of the funerals?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Why was that?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know. Maybe she was too far away to come.’
‘But who told her that the boys had died?’
‘I don’t know that neither. She just knowed. And more than that, she knowed other things. She knowed when I was down on my luck and she got me . . .’ Miss Wert paused. ‘I got to say, I was in jail for thieving, which I did only because I was real hard up and not because I’m a bad person. But Vera give me money, a kind of allowance, when I come out. It ain’t enough to live high on, but it keeps me going. Pays the rent on this place, even if the landlord lets it get like a pigsty outside.’
‘How did you start receiving this allowance?’
‘Governor of the reformatory had me brought in and told me how my sister had contacted them and set it up. Give me a speech on taking advantage of the opportunity.’
‘How do you receive the money. Miss Wert?’
‘In cash. In hard cash. I get me a letter that I got to sign for, twice ever month.’ She spread her hands, palms up, resting on her knees. ‘Like I say, it don’t go very far and when I got extra expenses, you know. . . .’
I nodded. ‘Where are the letters mailed from?’
‘They come from Indianapolis. But they won’t help you much.’
‘Why not?’
‘The address is some lawyers, and you know lawyers.’ She winked. ‘Well, maybe you don’t know ’em, but I never had no joy from no lawyers. And these that sends the money, I wrote to them last year when I was sick and I had some time, see, and expenses, you know. It was a letter of thank you to send on to Vera, but I didn’t get no comeback. Wasn’t just no cold neither. Pneumonia I had. But nothing. So don’t talk to me about no lawyers.’
‘Is there anything else about Vera?’ I asked.
‘You ain’t saying that you knew everthing I already told you?’
‘No. You’ve helped a lot.’
She sank back on her chair with visible relief. ‘Oh, that’s good.’ After a moment she said, ‘I don’t really know nothing else. I got a picture though. That any good?’
Before I answered, she rose and went to another room. She was gone only a moment and returned with a small photograph. ‘This is it.’
It showed the Wert family, all eight of them, in a posed snapshot taken outside a house. The youngest child was in its mother’s arms, and Vera Wert was easily identifiable as a slight, serious-looking girl, standing stiffly next to her father, a sallow-faced man with tiny eyes and stubble visible on his chin.
‘I would very much like to borrow this, if you would let me.’
She shook her head. ‘Oh no.’ Then she stopped shaking her head. ‘But I’ll sell it to you for . . . ten bucks?’