As things turned out, Mrs. Haller did answer the door, but this time she was the one wearing the sunglasses. Big ones. They completely covered her eyes and the area around them.
“Oh,” Powder said. The big shades caught him by surprise.
“You.” Her voice indicated surprise, too.
“You recognize me then?”
“I’m not a total dummy, no matter what . . .” She left that sentence hanging and spoke a different one. “I didn’t expect you to be coming back here, Lieutenant.”“No? Why not?”
She frowned. Stuff was going on inside her head but all she said was, “I just didn’t.”
Today’s blue-and-white gingham pinafore was as fresh and bright as the red-and-white one was last time, but the woman herself seemed neither bright nor fresh. The disjointed way she stood in the half-opened doorway struck Powder as saying she didn’t care how she presented herself this time. Or was that too much to read into posture?
Either way, he wanted to take a look at her without the sunglasses. It was not a sunny day. “Would you take those sunglasses off for me, please, Mrs. Haller?” His best commanding tone of voice.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve got conjunctivitis.”
Did she? Or was something more anatomical swelling up in the darkness? Oh well, he’d tried, and if you don’t ask, you don’t get. “Who called you a dummy, ma’am?”
But this time Mrs. Haller wasn’t prepared to allow herself to be shifted away from her own agenda. “What do you want, Lieutenant? Got another letter to deliver? Because if you do and it has to be signed for, you can stick it where the sun don’t shine.”
Underneath the sunglasses? If he’d had an envelope he’d have given it a try. However, he said, “I’m sorry that I deceived you the last time I came to the door.”
“Me, too.”
“So it’ll be cards on the table today. I’m here because I want to speak with Barry, man-to-man and away from the prying eyes and ears we have around the station.”
“He’s not home.”
“Well, I could wait for a while.”
“He’ll be at work tonight. I don’t know if he’s coming back before then or whether he’s going to get a bite while he’s out.”
“What’s he doing?”
“I don’t know where he is or what he’s up to.”
“You don’t mind not knowing?”
“I’m used to it.”
“Not hunting?”
“I don’t know, all right?”
“Look, Mrs. Haller, when I came here the last time it was because I suspected that Barry was one of our officers who regularly takes unauthorized time off to go hunting. I no longer suspect that and I want to apologize to him.”
Powder couldn’t see if Mrs. Haller blinked a couple of times at this, but there was certainly a gap before she responded. “Well, he still isn’t here. You want me to give him the message, or what?”
“You see, quite a few of the guys and gals who work for IMPD, they like to hunt. And they like to get out there on the first day of the season, while the deer are still plentiful and haven’t been scared away from the easiest places to find them. But although Barry took the first day of the season off, I looked at his individual attendance record. And it doesn’t show a pattern of taking off seasonal starts. Not like some other officers whose records I’ve been looking at.”
Mrs. Haller waved her hand with what Powder took to be mild exasperation or confusion. “What’s all that supposed to mean?”
“Does Barry go hunting a lot?”
She considered for a moment. Deciding if she was allowed to say? Then, “Yeah.”
“Does he have a dog?”
“What?”
“A dog. A hunting dog.”
“No. We don’t have any pets.”
“But does he hunt between the middle of March and the middle of April?”
“How am I supposed to know that?”“Think back, around Easter time this year?”
Powder watched as she remembered Easter. Eventually she said, “Well, yeah. I guess so. There’s always something in season.”
“That’s true. But between mid March and mid April the only hunting that’s in season is if you’re running a dog after opossums and raccoons.”
“After . . . ?” She shook her head. “I don’t know anything about possums and raccoons.”
“Does he ever bring the game he bags back home?” When she frowned, Powder said, “You know. To eat or to skin?”
“No. Because I don’t want dead bodies lying around my house. Which he knows, and he respects my wishes.”
“Or maybe pelts from animals he’s killed that were cleaned elsewhere?”
“No.”
“How many rifles does Barry have?”
“One.”
“Just one rifle for killing deer, squirrels, rabbits, crows, turkeys, everything?”
“How many does it take? I don’t know. Maybe he has a dozen more down in the basement, next to his power tools and the ham radio. I don’t go poking around in his stuff.” After a moment she added, “And he doesn’t poke around in my stuff.”
“May I come in and take a look—at Barry’s stuff?”
She sighed and then shook her head. “No, I don’t want you in my house.”
Powder waited.
“Look, Lieutenant, I want to be helpful here, but I don’t see the point of all these questions.”
“I’ll explain in a minute. First, may I ask if you know that all the deer that are killed in Indiana by legitimate hunters must be checked at an official deer check station, within forty-eight hours of the kill?”
“I’m getting a headache now,” she said. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ve contacted all the state’s check stations and Barry has never checked in a deer kill. Not this year or last year or the year before. Or a turkey kill, because turkeys have stations, too.”
“Why are you telling me all these things?” Mrs. Haller’s agitation was growing.
“Maybe he’s just a bad shot.” Powder turned his eyes away from her. He found a small dark hole just over the top of the doorframe. He spoke to the hole. “Or maybe, Mrs. Haller, maybe Barry has not gone hunting at all. Not for deer, not for turkeys, not for foxes, not for coyotes, not for rabbits, quails, pheasants, or green frogs. Not for anything that has a season here in Indiana.”
“What?”
“Did you get all that, Barry?” Powder said, addressing the camera directly. “Because if you missed anything, we can go through it again tonight at the station. Maybe we should do a few runs together. See what we can manage by way of giving each other backup.”
“It just shows how statistics don’t prove anything by themselves,” Powder said in Carol Lee Fleetwood’s office the next afternoon.
“Does it?” Carol Lee said wearily.
“What statistics prove all depends on what you ask them. You see, I was looking for Deer Flu and I found it. And Haller showed all the signs. The symptoms, if you will. But if I’d gone through his individual attendance history before I went off half-cocked because he called in sick this time, I’d have seen it. It’s all there, plain as day.”
Fleetwood knew he wanted her to ask what “it” was. She sat and waited.
Finally Powder said, “Haller is off duty on a Monday every three weeks. Every single Monday on a three-week cycle for more than two and a half years. Now a lot of those Mondays fitted in with his time off on rotation, but he’s also traded days with people—more than anybody else on his shifts. This time, the Monday just happened to coincide with the start of deer season and maybe that’s why he couldn’t get anybody to trade with him. So in a backwards kind of way it was Deer Flu that got him. He didn’t have any personal days left, or any vacation, so he called in sick.”
“But not so he could go hunting?”
“The hunting was a story for his wife—who I think he beats up, by the way. What can we do about
that?”
“Has she made a complaint?”
“No.” So Powder knew the answer to his original question. He left it and went on with his discoveries. “At first I thought these Mondays might be for something personal, like an affair. But mistresses are more flexible than that, aren’t they? And maybe more demanding. Has to be a Monday, every three weeks? Doesn’t sound like a mistress to me. What do you think?”
Fleetwood stared silently.
“Ah, not willing to go public on your knowledge of mistress behavior. Got it. Smart. Never admit anything. Well, for Haller, it wasn’t that. But the other thing that bothered me, besides the Mondays, was how he knew it was me who came to the door at his house the other day. Well, you know that bothered me. I came here to ask about it.”
“To make accusations,” Fleetwood said.
“And I’m sorry for that. Yeah, sorry, sorry. My apologies to you and your dedicated staff, because it was nothing to do with you guys. The thing is, it also wasn’t because Mrs. Haller recognized me. I finally worked out that the next most likely thing was that Barry put in a camera at his front door, and that’s what it turned out to be.”
“What for? Security?”
“Just the right question,” Powder said. “Have you ever thought that maybe you’re wasted stuck here in this office?”
Fleetwood tilted her head and waited.
“Ah, ah, it’s because you’re wasted that you are in this office. Well, getting back to Haller, it’s not just the expense of putting a surveillance camera in. Or maybe more than one—maybe he has them all around the property—because they’re not as expensive as they used to be, what with webcams and all that. The bigger question was your question. Why would he put them in? Who might come to the door that he wanted a record of? It wasn’t just in case I happened to show up trying to catch him out, now was it?”
Fleetwood again sat silently. But she was interested. He could tell she was.
“So what could he be up to that required him to go away for the day every third Monday and that also required him to have unusually tight security in a house in an ordinary residential development?”
This time Powder out-waited her. Fleetwood said, “I know you want to tell me, Roy, so why don’t you just get on with it.”
“Turns out Officer Haller needed those Mondays to make deliveries of hydroponically grown skank to his connection every three weeks, north of Lafayette. Good stuff for top dollar. They raided the warehouse where it grew on the edge of Muncie this morning—it’ll be all over the news tonight. Lots of exaggerated numbers about street values, no doubt, but it was a big operation. Long flat building about fifty feet on a side, with heat and lights. The growers got around the tell-tale sign of unusually large electricity consumption by making most of it with their own generators. Of course, Barry didn’t do the farming himself—that was his brother. But Barry did the delivery runs because it impressed—and scared—the buyers to have a cop in the loop.” Powder paused for a moment. “Don’t you find it surprising that the powers that be don’t celebrate how nowadays in this country we’ve liberated ourselves almost completely from dependence on foreign-grown weed?”
“I’ll try to remember to send around a memo,” Fleetwood said, although her face showed that she was impressed at what Powder’s number crunch had turned into.
“Well, we don’t really have to worry about Mrs. Haller getting beaten up anymore, because Barry will be spending all his time away from home now. There are a lot of lessons to be learned here, you know.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I really try to help my officers to become better cops, you know that. But it’s a lesson to me, because there’s no point trying to make a ‘better’ cop out of someone who isn’t a ‘good’ man in the first place. Or woman.”
“True enough,” Fleetwood said.
Powder got up. “And I hope you’ve learned your lesson and will become a better non-cop from it.” He didn’t wait for her to respond this time. “Because Haller shows that you really must not rush to take punitive action against all those other guys—and gals—who seem to have been afflicted with Deer Flu. Give me a chance to check out their individual absentee records first. See you around, Carol Lee,” he said, and he was gone.
Copyright © 2010 by Michael Z. Lewin
Previous Article DEPARTMENT OF FIRST STORIES
DEPARTMENT OF FIRST STORIES
GOLF ETIQUETTE
by Jim Davis
Jim Davis is a veterinarian who lives near the Lake of the Ozarks in central Missouri. He enjoys hunting and fishing as well as riding his motorcycle. When he is not punching cows, the rest of his...
Top of DEPARTMENT OF FIRST STORIES
Fiction PASSPORT TO CRIME
DEPARTMENT OF FIRST STORIES
GOLF ETIQUETTE
by Jim Davis
Jim Davis is a veterinarian who lives near the Lake of the Ozarks in central Missouri. He enjoys hunting and fishing as well as riding his motorcycle. When he is not punching cows, the rest of his free time, he tells us, goes to reading and writing fiction, fixing up old cars, and the occasional round of golf. He has hinted that he has several new story ideas for Bradley Carter, the private eye who debuts here in his first published story. We hope so, because it’s a fine debut.
Parker Goodman was the chicken king of northwest Arkansas. I grew up hearing his name on almost a daily basis, but most anyone from the Bentonville-Rogers area could say the same thing. Parker had taken a hillbilly butcher shop with seven employees and parlayed that bet into a nationwide poultry company. Housewives had come to believe that nothing but a Goodman’s bird would do. My father had something to do with that as well. He took a job with Goodman Poultry when Parker–Goodman had to borrow a nickel to have two to rub together. My father put his money on Parker when they took that fledgling company public, and the stock that made up most of my daddy’s pay those first few years put five kids through college. All of this made me even more nervous when the Great Man said that he wanted to hire me to find his wife.
“By God! You are the spitting image of old Clayton,” said Parker. He handed me a glass of single malt with one ice cube. I would rather have had a beer. “How is your daddy? I haven’t seen him in a coon’s age.”
“He’s doing well,” I said. “Spends most of his time fishing. Losing Mom kind of took the wind out of his sails.”
“Yes, sir, I can imagine. We all hated to see her suffer so. Damned cancer.” He motioned to a leather couch near the bar, and we sat down. Parker had always been larger than life to me, but right then he just looked like an old man. He had played linebacker for the Razorbacks back in the sixties; it looked like all that beef had finally gone to seed. “She was a fine woman, your mother. Yes, sir.” Parker was saying the words, but he seemed to be gathering himself, perhaps to tell me why I was here.
I had done some work for Goodman Poultry Company since I became a private investigator, but I had always dealt with the company lawyers. The work had been pretty straightforward: exposing employees faking injuries and digging up background material to defend lawsuits, that sort of thing. The corporate offices were nice, but Goodman’s home was opulent. Parker had built his current home only a few years ago, and he’d certainly spared no expense. The elaborate woodwork was highlighted with hand-painted gold pinstripes; original paintings were individually lighted against dark burlwood panels. A slight smell of furniture polish hung in the air. I’ll admit to having been somewhat intimidated by it all until I saw a black-and-white photo on the marble mantel over the fireplace. There was Parker Goodman and my daddy, both in bib overalls, standing next to a scald pot. The ground was covered with feathers, looking like a snowstorm where they had been plucking chickens hanging from a rail fence. I looked around at the house and thought, Old Jed’s a millionaire.
“How’s Marcus?” I asked, trying to make small talk. Parker’s son and I played baseball together growing up. We were friends then, although Marcus was always
rather aloof, maybe stuck-up.
“Oh, Marcus, yeah, Marcus is just fine. He pretty much runs the company now.”
I knew that wasn’t true. Parker was the company, and he would hang on to the reins of Goodman Poultry until they peeled them out of his cold dead fingers.
“Listen, uh, Bradley,” said Parker, “I’ve got a little trouble. I think you can help me.” The older man stood up and went to the bar to refill his glass. I had yet to touch mine. “You see,” he said, still facing the bar, “my Lorna, she’s wandered off.” He turned toward me and hefted the bottle. I shook my head.
I didn’t know how to respond. Parker’s wife Lorna was one of the pillars of society around Bentonville. She had been involved in or hosted every worthwhile charity event in the past twenty years. Was Parker telling me that she had run off?
“Lorna’s not herself lately,” he said. “She’s got some issues—health issues.” He plopped back down on the couch, spilling some of his scotch on his white shirt. I saw other stains now on the jacket, and his nose looked like a relief map of the Ozark Mountains. He had always been one of the best-dressed men in this neck of the woods and always wore a suit to the office. But right now, he looked like an alcoholic version of Colonel Sanders.
“I’m not sure I’m following here,” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said, sounding frustrated. “Maybe she got the Alzheimer’s or somethin’.”
“Have you filed a missing persons re—”
“No, no, no!” He cut me off, stood up, and began to pace. “She left without telling me a damn thing. I don’t know what the hell she was thinking.” He sat down on the coffee table right in front of me. “I want you to find her.” He pointed a thick finger at my chest. “I want her back here.” The finger pointed down at the floor.
“I really don’t do missing persons,” I said. I had no intention of getting in the middle of a marital dispute.
“Goddammit! You don’t have to do anything but tell me where she is. I’ll do the rest.” His face was inches from mine, his neck bulged at the buttoned white collar, and his rancid breath made him that much more common. My respect for the man was plummeting. Parker Goodman was desperate.
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 02/01/11 Page 15
