Simon Said (7 page)

By the end of three days, the story of Anne Bloodworth's disappearance had dropped to below the fold of the front page. Nothing had been heard from neighboring cities. Her fiance denied rumors that she had run off with a lover—their engagement was a devoted one, he said, and a wedding date had been set. No ransom demands had been made. The local detective agency had contacted the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. The Pinkerton system of employing underworld informers and railroad spies held the last hope for finding her if she had been kidnapped or had run away.

For weeks, a full-page ad offering a five-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to her return ran in the newspaper. The picture that illustrated it was a line rendition of the same portrait that hung in the house. She was described as of medium height and weight, with black hair and brown eyes. She had a mole on her left cheek and was never without the cameo earrings and brooch she had inherited from her mother. Miss Bloodworth was an accomplished pianist, the ad said, had completed two years at Kenan Institute for Women, and intended to graduate. She was "unusually interested in intellectual matters for a woman," the article went on. There was nothing here that would help the medical examiner, but Simon photocopied the page anyway.

The last paragraph written about Anne Bloodworth's disappearance stated that her picture and description had been placed in all the major American newspapers, as well as in newspapers in London, Paris, and Rome. Her father vowed to search for her forever if necessary.

The glare of the microfilm screen and the persistent hum of the machine wore Simon out after about two hours. With relief, he turned it off, rubbing his eyes and stretching back in his chair. He reread the photocopy he had made of the advertisement offering a reward for the return of Anne Bloodworth. What did "unusually interested in intellectual matters for a woman" mean?

Simon's eyes hurt when he tried to focus on the clock on the opposite wall. It would take a few minutes for his far vision to return after reading blurred newsprint. Then he spotted Bobby Hinton through the open doors into the seniors' study room, and his body tensed.

Might as well get it over with, he thought. He got up and walked out of the reading room and over to Hinton. The boy was stripping his carrel.

"Bobby, I want you to know that I believe the grade I gave you was fair, but I'm sorry about graduate school." The thin, longhaired blond boy stopped stuffing pens and papers into his backpack. Simon had never felt that he knew him as well as he did other students in the seminar. He often seemed to be somewhere else mentally. Now Hinton just grinned at Simon.

"Don't worry, Doc, Professor Andrus is more upset about that grade than I am. I knew I was just sliding through. I mean, I thought a B was automatic, but it was a stupid assumption."

"What are you going to do? Apply to a master's program, maybe?"

 

The boy slung his backpack over his shoulder. It was a nice backpack—black-tooled leather—definitely a cut above what most students bought at the student store. "I'm not sure graduate school is what I want at all, now. I'm not going to go anywhere, for a few years anyway."

 

"What are you going to do?"

 

"My mother owns a real estate firm in Charlotte. I figure all I have to do is sell one house a month to make ends meet. And I can go to the beach and play golf all I want." Damn Andrus, thought Simon as he watched Hinton walk away. The kid himself didn't care about the grade.

"I told you," Marcus Clegg said when Simon joined him for lunch at the student union. "It's not the grade at all; it's the chance to get at you that Andrus is after. You have to hang in there."

"It's going to embarrass me if this gets around campus, Marcus," Simon said. Clegg leaned over his bowl of chili so Simon could hear him over the din of student conversation.

"Be realistic. The academic community isn't any more discreet than any other small, intense, people-oriented environment. Everyone knows everything there is to know about you right now."

Simon's stomach began to react. "Like what?" he said.

"Like your wife left you to go to the bright lights of New York City, and that you're upset as hell about it. You think this is a scandal? Have you watched daytime television recently?"

"It's mostly pride, I guess. I hate to screw up my life in public."

"You didn't screw up your life," Carver said. "Your wife screwed it up. Let her go. And on that word of patronizing and unrealistic advice, I have to leave. My mousies need their next injection."

"Someday somebody from PETA is going to overhear you and you're going to wish you hadn't spent your career torturing small animals."

 

"Some torture. My subjects get all the food and sex they can handle just for pushing the red button instead of the green one. Our lives should be so good."

 

A MESSAGE FROM Julia McGloughlan was on Simon's answering machine when he got home.

"Guess what," she said. "The police department here didn't even have a filing system until 1950! There are some filthy old boxes in the back of a storeroom that might have something on our case, the file gnomes tell me. I'm going to riffle through them this afternoon. Call me."

Simon carefully wrote down her number and silently rehearsed a message, if, as he expected, he got an answering machine, too. Simon loved answering machines. Communication without the distracting presence of the other person allowed one to tailor one's thoughts precisely. As the phone rang, he silently hoped that she didn't have a stupid message. He would have to scratch her name off his list if she did. She didn't.

When he got the beep, Simon did his best to sound like a grownup Pulitzer Prizewinning history professor entitled to her respect and even admiration.

"This is Simon Shaw. I'm going over to Chapel Hill to the Southern Historical Collection this afternoon to look at Charles Bloodworth's papers. Want to meet for dinner and compare notes? If you do, meet me at the Chinese place across from Kenan at seven."

Chapter Six

SIMON ALWAYS LISTENED TO JAMES TAYLOR WHILE DRIVING TO Chapel Hill. It just seemed appropriate. He had
New Moonshine
blaring on this trip, but he wasn't hearing it. He was so preoccupied with the Bloodworth murder puzzle that he arrived on the outskirts of town without any recollection of the passage of time or of the landmarks he must have passed on the way. Automatic pilot brought him straight to the library, where he found a place to park only because it was too pretty a Saturday afternoon for anyone other than the most desperate students to bury themselves in the windowless stacks. Simon had a sudden urge to defect himself, but instead, he found his way to the Southern Historical Collection and presented his requests to the student in charge. She looked at his request slips in horror.

"Do you know where this stuff is?" she asked. "I don't usually work here."

The girl was obviously in the middle of an intense cram session. She had bags under her eyes and her hair needed washing. Books and notes were piled at the desk where she had been working. She had probably planned to study during her entire shift.

"Exactly where," he said. "I've used these materials many times. Why don't you just let me go get them myself ?"

"I'm not supposed to do that," she said. "The Southern Historical Collection stacks are closed. I'm supposed to find them and bring them to you." She didn't move, though, just looked at the slips of paper and then at the monster card catalog in the middle of the reading room.

"Look," Simon said. "Let me find them myself. I went to grad school here. I just need a few minutes. I'll use them right there in the stacks and put everything back. You don't need to do anything."

Still she hesitated.
"I'm a full professor at Kenan College," Simon said. "I'm not going to steal anything. I just want to look a few things up. I can do it and be gone before you could probably find the stuff. You can hold on to my driver's license as collateral."

"Okay," she said. She carefully looked around before unlocking the barred door that guarded the collection.

Simon walked down two flights of steps and turned left into a regiment of shelves piled with file boxes. He found the aisle he was looking for, then pulled two of the boxes off a shelf. They were labeled CHARLES BLOODWORTH PAPERS, CHESAPEAKE AND SEABOARD RAILWAY. Bloodworth's papers were a small part of the huge inventory of files that the railway had given to the collection when its original Victorianstyle building had been torn down. The files covering the s had been an important source for Simon's thesis and book.

He hauled the boxes over to the nearest table and began to look for Bloodworth's appointment book and correspondence for 1926. Bloodworth left no other written records than these, Simon knew, because Simon and the local historical society's curator had thoroughly searched the Bloodworth House for documents when it had been deeded to Kenan College. Adam Bloodworth had left no written records behind at all.

He found the appointment book first. Among the usual business entries, Bloodworth occasionally jotted a few personal notes to himself: "Have Robt. grease the Ford," or "Lunch at club with Anne today." On April thirteenth, four days after his daughter's disappearance, he wrote, "The search is futile. She is gone." On the fifteenth, after an appointment with private detective Robert Lumsden, he recorded: "Lumsden will communicate with Pinkerton. Adam is all I have left." Bloodworth wrote nothing else about his daughter for the rest of the year.

Simon found three letters in the file about the disappearance. One was from the Southern Detective Agency ("Legitimate detective work of every description handled in every part of the United States. Connections all over the world"). It promised to forward Bloodworth's physical description of his daughter to the Pinkerton Detective Agency in New York and to send a complete written report on progress in a week. A very businesslike letter from Bloodworth to an advertising agency also in New York, arranged for the ad Simon had already seen in the News and Observer to be placed around the country and the world. The final letter was from Bloodworth to the detective agency, dated about three months after the disappearance, enclosing a check "in final settlement of my account."

The sparseness of the documents left Simon with more questions than he had had when he started. Where was the description of Anne sent to Pinkerton? What did it contain? Where was the detective agency's final report? How could a worldwide search for anybody in 1926 be concluded in just three months? Simon knew that nothing he had found so far would help the medical examiner positively identify the body.

Chapter Seven

"EVEN IF WE CAN IDENTIFY THE BODY, THE POLICE DEPARTMENT won't do anything officially," Julia McGloughlan said. "This case has a poor solvability factor."

The two were sitting at the local Chinese eatery decorated with tacky red chandeliers with tassels, paper place mats that told you whether you were a rabbit or a horse, and giant plastic Chinese letters stuck to the walls. It was the same stuff you saw in every other Chinese restaurant in town, and probably the world. Somewhere, Simon thought, there must be one huge warehouse that has a total monopoly on Chinese restaurant decorating supplies.

Julia was wearing a black denim skirt, a green sleeveless T-shirt, black canvas shoes, and gold hoop earrings. A vast improvement over the grey suit, Simon felt. He noted that she was eating her shrimp toast with gusto. Simon hated it when women didn't eat. Diets, if they were necessary at all, should be conducted in private, where they couldn't ruin dinner for anyone else.

"What, pray tell, is the solvability factor?" Simon asked.

"That's the degree to which we might actually have a chance to solve a case," she answered. "In modern police work, we don't spend time investigating cases that look hopeless. It's a waste of time and taxpayers' money. It sounds obvious, but it used to be that a detective was assigned to follow every case forever. So if your bicycle was stolen off your back porch in the middle of the night and no one saw anything, you could count on a detective following up. Not today. You'd be lucky to get a phone call back from the investigative division. It irritates people sometimes, because they like to think something is being done about a crime. But it's not efficient. Investigating this murder just won't make sense to our administrative people."

"So even if the body is positively identified and we think it's murder, there won't be an official investigation?"

"We'll be able to open a file. But we won't be able to use any of the department's resources to work on it. The chief's attitude is, the killer is dead. Everybody else involved is dead, too. What would be the point?"

"The point is, I want to know what happened."
“Me, too."
"What about Sergeant Gates?"

"He's probably the best investigator we've got. He'll follow the rules. But he's definitely interested, so we can probably count on his unofficial help."

 

Simon liked the sound of that "we."

 

After they finished their crispy duck and seafood delight, Julia pulled two single sheets of paper out of her handbag and gave them to Simon.

"This is it," she said. "I found these in a box of old papers in the back of the filestorage room, in an envelope full of stuff, with just the month and date written on the outside. It's the patrol officer's report."

"Peebles," Simon said.
"That's right. He couldn't spell."

Simon read the pages over closely several times. It was written on what looked like plain-ruled school paper, the kind with blue lines—in pencil no less. It was an account of the incident exactly as Simon had read it in the paper, with the addition of several indignant remarks about the mess in Anne Bloodworth's room and around the outside of the house. Peebles noted that during the time Bloodworth must have disappeared, the servants were away, her fiance, Adam Bloodworth, was on a fishing trip, and her father was working in the study on the first floor. The next page was a paragraph, probably written later, which simply observed that no clues to Bloodworth's disappearance had been found and that an intensive search of the city had failed to find her or any evidence of what had happened to her.