Hard Line Read online

  A momentary pause. “No.”

  “Or why you were burning your clothes before you tried to kill yourself?”

  Here she clearly reacted and hesitated before saying, “Why what?”

  “No one has mentioned that to you?” Powder asked evenly. “You’re not a nudist, by any chance?”

  The woman squinted, wagged her head again, and said, “I don’t think so.”

  Powder tipped back onto the back legs of the molded plastic chair. “Naked as a jaybird,” he said. “Chanting a mystical song and praying for rain until two people you’d waked up with the howling and racket—”

  The woman shook her head again, and lay back onto the pillows behind her.

  “A young couple,” Powder said, “disturbed by the merriment, came down to see what was happening and no sooner did they appear in the alleyway than you picked up a gun and took a couple of pot shots at them.” Powder drew the automatic from his pocket and raised it, at arm’s length, to point at the woman’s face.

  “No,” the woman said, beginning a response but ending with a strangled sound.

  “Excuse?” Powder said. “I didn’t quite hear.”

  “I didn’t say anything. Nothing.”

  “Except to deny my version of the story,” Powder said. He let the chair come forward onto all four legs again, then leaned closer to the woman, who had turned her face away. “It doesn’t much matter anyway,” he said. “I came here not believing that you have amnesia.”

  She said nothing.

  He pulled his chair up to the edge of her bed. “I’m fifty-three. I’ve only got seven toes and my remaining hair’s so gray people are always surprised that I’m not in a wheelchair. I’ve known a lot of people who think their troubles are insupportable. Once they decide to cut the crap, they find there are good things along with the bad. So give it a think and I’ll be back with my notebook tomorrow.”

  The head nurse on the fifth floor, a slightly built woman with large, commanding eyes and an aura of authority, called Powder over as he waited by the elevator.

  “How did you do?” she asked him.

  “I used my very best bedside manner,” he said. “Never fails. Can you tell me the way to your morgue?”

  “I want a picture too,” Powder told the attendant, after he had taken the fingerprints of the unidentified male corpse. “Help me sit him up a little, will you?”

  A series of awkward adjustments allowed Powder to take a face-on shot by standing on a chair.

  “Can you get him to smile?”

  “If you let me get a chisel.”

  “Haven’t got the time,” Powder said. “At least he won’t blink. But get your face out of the way, will you? So we can tell which one is dead.”

  Chapter Three

  Fleetwood was behind a desk, studying papers. Agnes pounded a typewriter. Powder paused to look at his little family and enjoyed a fleeting sense of satisfaction.

  He sat suddenly on Fleetwood’s desk top and, as she looked up, he said, “I felt like shooting at a woman just now. There I was, all warm and cozy by her bedside trying to get her to tell me why she took her clothes off, and then I was waving a gun in her face and feeling like sending a couple of shots past her ears to show her I meant business. What do you think of that? I must be losing my mind.” He smiled pleasantly and got up.

  He went to Agnes’s desk and waited until she stopped.

  “What have you got for me?” he asked her.

  “Two follow-up calls regarding missing juveniles.”

  “What stage?”

  “Both ten-day. And Carollee made a couple of sixties. But there has been no new business. Very quiet. I’ve been able to go through the whole procedure routine with her.”

  Powder said, “I’ve got two new files to open. And there’s a set of fingerprints and a gun I want the owners of traced.” He passed the fingerprint card and the .22 automatic over to her.

  “Prints on the gun?”

  “No.”

  “OK,” Agnes said. “I’ll take them up as soon as I’m finished here.”

  Powder returned to Carollee Fleetwood. He pulled up a chair and sat facing her.

  “And how is my new sergeant finding life with us?”

  “Undemanding,” she said.

  “Agnes has taken you through the forms and procedures?”

  “And gave me this mimeographed booklet. You wrote it, right?”

  “It’s how I like things done.”

  “I’ll learn it.”

  “You’re right. You will.”

  Two minutes later, three men entered the office.

  Powder looked up and exhaled heavily. The man he knew best was Henry Howard, a sergeant from Public Liaison.

  “What do you want, Henry?” Powder asked.

  “Good morning. Lieutenant Powder,” Howard said with the easy formality of a man about to introduce strangers. “Do you know Ben Brown? Star reporter who covers us here?”

  “Vaguely,” Powder said.

  The man referred to nodded, but left the talking to the policeman. The third man carried a camera.

  “Well, we’ve come for a few words and a picture to mark the return to active service of Sergeant Fleetwood. Good to see you again, Carollee.”

  “Hello, Henry. Ben. Larry.”

  “Larry is Ben’s photographer. Do you think you can come out front, honey?”

  Howard lifted the flap to make a passageway for Fleetwood’s progress to the public side of the counter. She did not move.

  “Get out,” Powder said to the men.

  “Now look. Lieutenant,” Howard said, “I think we all realize that—”

  “All three of you. Out.” Powder took hold of the flap and slammed it with a frightening noise. “No pictures. No few words.”

  “News is news. And Sergeant Fleetwood’s return to service is good press for the department.”

  “And for Sergeant Fleetwood. But it is bad press for Missing Persons.”

  “I think you’re overreacting here. Powder.”

  “Overreacting?” Powder banged his fist on the counter.

  “Overreacting? Who the hell are you to tell me that I’m overreacting because I want my department protected from the curiosity brigade that will march in if you publish a glamour shot of a pretty sergeant showing some dead leg in here?” Powder pounded on the counter top.

  Powder raised the flap and charged at the men. “Do a feature for the Sunday magazine about how great a job we do finding juveniles and filtering out the people the detectives don’t have time for. About how overworked and understaffed we are, about how well we sniff out suspicious disappearances. Set that up and you can take all the pictures you want.”

  Howard said, “I’m sure Ben will put that idea to the features people, but in the meantime—”

  “In the meantime,” Powder said, “you’ll take your circus elsewhere. Go upstairs and audition for Miss Police Canteen. A little ice cream and you’ll have knee à la mode. But get out of here.”

  The Public Liaison sergeant turned to the other two men and shrugged. “Sorry guys, but you gather what the lieutenant’s attitude is. All I can say is that I’ll be reporting it to higher authorities.” At the door, Howard turned back to Powder. “You’ll be hearing more about this. Lieutenant.”

  “I’ll be dead one day too.”

  The men left.

  Powder rubbed his face.

  Agnes, who had been watching the proceedings, returned to the computer terminal keyboard.

  Fleetwood sat, motionless, quiet. Watching Powder.

  He asked, finally, “How long before you are on those sticks full-time?”

  “Soon.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know how long.”

  “Why aren’t you on them now?”

  “My physical control is not quite complete. I’m not reliable enough to use them full-time.”

  “How long since your misfortune?”

  “Six months.”
>
  “Uh huh,” Powder said. “To the day, by any chance?”

  Fleetwood’s mouth assumed a wry expression. “I think it may be close, yes.”

  “So that if you were not on active duty again now, you could be bundled off the force without much ceremony, I believe.”

  “They will never retire me without a fight.”

  He nodded slowly. “Papers gave you quite a lot of attention, didn’t they?”

  “When I was shot,” she said, “it did seem that the media were interested.”

  “A veritable tidal wave of public sympathy, I’d have said. I just hadn’t known, before now, how much of it you drummed up for yourself.”

  “I was under instructions to be cooperative.”

  Powder continued his acknowledgment, recalling touching television interviews.

  “What did the powers-that-be offer when you announced you wanted to come back into service?”

  “They wanted me to go to Public Liaison.”

  “Seems reasonable.”

  “Screw PR. That’s not police work.”

  “I trust,” Powder said, “that you don’t think me so stupid as to believe that The Henry, Ben, and Larry Show thought of you all by themselves?”

  Fleetwood said nothing.

  “No way. No way were they walking down the hall, flicking flies off their noses, thinking, There’s Carollee. She’s a sport. Let’s go take her picture. Do her a good turn. Keep the brass alert to the public interest in her.”

  He rubbed his face again.

  “You’ve been around now, what, three hours?”

  Fleetwood said nothing.

  “I am only going to say this once. Your daydreams of walking the streets with seven-shooters on both hips will be dreamed on your own time. Not mine. Not here. I don’t give a damn what your long-term ambitions are, and I don’t really care how long it is before you can cha-cha-cha. But while you are in this office, hours or years, you will bust ass for Missing Persons and you will build the future career of Carollee Fleetwood on your own time.”

  Carefully, Fleetwood said,“I read you. Lieutenant Powder. Except that my ass is already busted.”

  Chapter Four

  Powder weakened in front of the desserts. His eyes drifted from cakes to pies. Back to cakes.

  “Can we tempt you with something today, Lieutenant?” asked the canteen supervisor, a brisk smiling woman in flowery print dress.

  Brought back to awareness of himself, awareness that people paid attention. Powder said, “It should be against the law to sell things like that.”

  He pushed his pieless tray, with its cottage cheese, yogurt, and whole-meal bread, to the till.

  “If you didn’t have no temptation, then you’d never have the chance to feel real virtuous, Lieutenant.”

  Powder picked an empty table on the window side of the small dining area. Facing east and overlooking the Market Square Arena parking lot, the view was less than spectacular, and it was dulled the more because the glass in the window was tinted and very thick. The glass was a relic of the days when the room was the IPD Communications Center, and had to be protected from snipers.

  Powder began his lunch with no fear of snipers whatsoever.

  Before he had licked his yogurt top, a tall thin man with a heavily ridged and wrinkled face dropped his tray on the table and slid into the facing chair. “How do, Powder, how do,” the man said.

  “Tidmarsh,” Powder said, by way of acknowledgment. The man was in charge of the department’s stored information.

  “So,” the man said, “how’s life with the glamorous heroine?”

  Powder looked up. “Who’s that?”

  “Come off it, Leroy. Everybody in the building knows the raven-haired police beauty, tragically gunned down in the course of duty, the enchanting and ever popular Carollee Fleetwood, fell into your tender mercies today.”

  “I’m training a new sergeant in Missing Persons procedures, if that’s what you mean.”

  Tidmarsh rocked back in his chair. “I love you, Powder. You crease me.”

  Powder ate.

  “I tried to get her assigned to Computers,” Tidmarsh said. “I begged, I pleaded. But they claimed she preferred to work with you.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “I suppose it must mean she is innumerate, the poor flower. No one prefers to work with you.”

  “And keep your hands off my computer kid, while you’re at it.”

  “Who’s this?” Tidmarsh asked.

  “Hired as a secretary but taking courses. She’s better than the lot of you and she’s staying in Missing Persons.”

  “How long she been there?”

  “Since September.”

  Tidmarsh said, “I knew some bugger on a terminal had been tying up more free time this year. I should have goddamn known it would be your terminal.”

  “We need a little computer of our own.”

  “Sure, sure,” Tidmarsh said. “But instead you’ll have to make do with Miss Fleetwood.”

  “Great,” Powder said.

  “Come off it. Even a bullhead like you has to admire the lady. You wouldn’t mind a partner who would step into a slug meant for you. And she had a lot of offers, you know. Outside the force. Even with TV, I hear. With the news, or some damn thing. But she’s put her head down and wants to get back to active service. You got to admire that.”

  “I admire somebody who does the job,” Powder said.

  Tidmarsh leaned forward. “You figure she’s never going to walk again, then?”

  “She’ll be too fast for you by the Fourth of July,” Powder said.

  On his way back from lunch Powder stopped at the Forensic Lab on the third floor. There was no reception officer to deal with the range of scientific requests from members of the department, so Powder had to look around for the technician in charge of the lab.

  He was bent under a hood that drew away noxious gases.

  Powder waited till the man was finished.

  Peeling off gloves and mask, the man turned to Powder and greeted him. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” the man said. “But once you’re in the fart extractor, it’s hard to tear yourself away.”

  “Keeping busy then, Oliver?”

  “It’s a fulfilling life, forensic science,” the man said. He placed a hand over his heart. “I’d recommend it to all little boys and girls. Especially girls.”

  “I’ve got something for you.”

  Oliver peered at the plastic bag Powder carried. “Let me guess. Picnic lunch?”

  “A woman’s clothes, burned.”

  “Christ, was she inside them?”

  “No.”

  “As you’re in the misplaced-baby section of this police department store,” Oliver said, “I presume you wish me to examine these charred remains because you’re having trouble making the woman they belonged to.”

  “In the sense of identifying her, yes,” Powder said.

  “Is that a glint of ivory I see between those puffy, aged lips? No? Not even a little smile?”

  “The owner of the clothes attempted suicide and now doesn’t want to be identified. She bothered to try to bum these before she stuck the popgun under her tongue. Maybe she knows better than I do whether they might help tell us who she is.”

  “OK, Powder. When I get a chance I’ll have a look if she left her camp name badge sewn to the inside of her panties.”

  Fleetwood was alone in the office when Powder returned from Forensic. Her desk was covered with the contents of a lunchbox.

  “Agnes gone?” Powder asked.

  “About ten minutes ago. She left you some messages.”

  Powder perused two sheets of paper on the top of an otherwise clean desk surface.

  Then he asked. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That stuff.”

  “My lunch? Is there a problem about that?”

  “Several. Count ’em. One, we close for lunch, but if J
ohn or Jane Public sees you in here, stuffing your face and making them wait while they’re suffering with some loss they hope you are going to fix, it devalues them. It puts them down. We don’t do that here.”

  “Point taken.”

  “Two, you should get out in the building and mix with the street cops and the detectives as much as you have time for. Find out what’s happening with them. Show an interest, and then hit them with what a bastard your boss is and how much it will help you if they happen to notice your Missing Person of the Week that you just happen to have a picture of you can give them.”

  “Now, wait a—”

  “Three, you need all the practice you can get wheeling yourself around.”

  Fleetwood was silent.

  “And four, if you eat here routinely, I will routinely take advantage of you, just like I am going to do now.”

  Powder took two large manila envelopes from his desk drawers.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Going out.”

  “For long?”

  “Could be hours,” Powder said. “Sink-or-swim time, kid.”

  Chapter Five

  Powder made a series of routine stops and he also stopped at Sam’s, hoping to find the two men who had found the Jane Doe in the alley behind.

  One of the men, James Voss, was the owner. He was behind the bar as Powder entered the small, barely lit premises. The darkness fell suddenly as Powder left the bright day. The air conditioner seemed to draw away light as well as warmth. Most of the illumination came from beer brand signs and from the head of a nonelectronic shuttle bowling game.

  James Voss didn’t look happy. But he looked as if he never looked happy.

  Powder identified himself, which did little to cheer Voss up. “You and . . .” Powder consulted his notes. “. . . Andrew Warren found the woman.”

  “Andy. Yeah. We saw this fire up the alley. Well, a light really. But except for this one, all the buildings around here are wood, so ...”

  “It was a long way up the alley.”

  “We was in no hurry.”

  “You’d just closed the place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Busy night?”

  Voss, a fat man with rolled-up sleeves, turned to the closest of the bar’s four drinkers. “Are any of them busy these days?”