Chapter 3
Beaver's Police Headquarters hadn't changed since Jody Powers was a little girl. She sat in the sheriffs office on a straight backed chair, her knees primly together, her hands folded over the purse in her lap. She was wearing a summer shirtwaist dress and her hair was freshly brushed. As usual, she wore no make-up-didn't have to-though lines of fatigue were etched around her luminous amber eyes, for it had been daylight before she'd been able to free herself from the straps binding her wrists and arms to the dining room table. Her wrists were braceleted with deep red marks, raw and sore.
Arnold Pigson, Beaver's Chief of Police, eyed the girl with wry amusement, sprawled as he was in the swivel chair beside the khaki filing cabinets. His meaty ankles were crossed atop his scarred wood desk, his buttocks flattened against a chair struggling on the two hind legs. His collar was open and he idly chewed at an unlit cigar. As of this moment, he had not yet said a word.
"I heard one of them call the other Mac and the other was, um, Chuck," said Jody Powers. "They must have come through the screen door becuase they were hiding, waiting for me in the living room. They turned off the electricity-obviously so I couldn't get a look at them. After that they ... well...." And here she flushed. "I already told you what they did to me."
"They didn't steal anything, break anything...?"
"They ... they killed my dog! Slit his throat from ear to ear...!"
"That's all?"
"All?" Jody's eyebrows arched and her forehead went tight with anger. "Two men break into my house and rape me, kill my dog and tamper with the electrical company's equipment and you say 'that's all'?"
Pigson's chair rocked down on all fours as he lifted his feet from the desk and sat staring at her. "I make the charges around here, Miss Powers. They switched off the mains, right? They didn't cut wires, right?"
"Yes, but-"
"So they've damanged nothing. They came through an opened door ... they didn't force entry. My God, girl, a woman like you living out there alone, I should think you would lock the doors."
"It was closed...." Jody compressed her lips. "What about killing my dog and raping me ... I suppose I asked for that, huh?"
"You claim you were assaulted and raped," said Pigson. "How am I to know your boy friend didn't get ideas with you and you plumped up this story. A lotta women claim to be raped, and the books prove nine times out of then they were only too willin' in the first place-and then they change their minds when it's over."
Jody's amber eyes narrowed into slits. "Are you suggesting," she stormed, "that I willingly ... that I wanted a couple of dirty bums to come into my house and terrorize me?"
"Lady," said Pigson mockingly, "I ain' suggestin' nothin', I'm just try in' to get the facts straight as far as the law is concerned. I ain' Ann Landers you know. Now...." he said, resuming the monotonous gnawing on his cigar and leaning back, balancing on two hind chair legs. " ... If you're chargin' them with rape we need evidence. Bruises, wounds? You gotta be willin' to show them to me so we can take some photos." A slight smirk crossed his lips.
Jody's cheeks went red. What was she supposed to do...? Show him the purplish spots on the soft flesh of her buttocks, or the swollen lips of her ravished vagina? "Here are the marks from where they tied me up," she said, rolling up the sleeves to her dress. "There's more on my shoulders where they dragged me from the kitchen to the living room...."
After a cursory glance, Arnold Pigson's crooked smirk grew. "Come on, Miss Powers. How can I be sure you didn't get that from ropin' calves or tossin' hay?"
"But I-"
"I guess that tosses the assault charge out the window. Now about the rape." The bulbous man chewed on his cigar thoughtfully for a moment, hooking one thumb in the gape of his pocket, studying her unnervingly. "I assume you went to a doctor first thing this mornin'-and got him to sign an affidavit testifying to the sperm count?"
Jody fell silent. Finally, she cleared her throat. "I ... ah ... no. It didn't occur to me....
"Sorry, Miss Powers." He shook his bowling ball bald head. "Can't take it to court without an affidavit," he fawned. "And it ain' no good goin' now. If the doc found anythin', who's to say you didn't get yourself la... ah, you didn't have intercourse with someone since then."
Jody burst out angrily. "D'you think I enjoy coming here and telling you all these intimate details so that you can tell me I'm a promiscuous woman who doesn't know if she's being made love to or raped?"
"I ain' makin' no personal judgment, miss. I'm just tryin' to get the facts that will stand up in a court of law, and so far," he said, shaking his heavy jowls, "I ain' found nothin' in your story that the citizens of Beaver's gonna buy. So far," he said, swinging his feet off the desk and poking around in the desk drawer for a pencil. " ... we got no evidence. How about a description."
"It ... it was dark. They turned off the mains."
Pigson pooched out his livery lips. "I thought you said they used a flashlight?"
"They did ... but it was a little one and they only used it to ... to look at me ... down there." Her embarrassment was getting the better of her composure, a tough fight for the Powers girl. "One of them was sitting on my back with my face down across the table. I ... I could only see a shadow on the wall."
"So can you describe the shadow...? Any impression of size? Color?" He straightened when he said it: "Probably those goddamned good for nothin' Indians from the reservation off makin' a peyote panty raid."
"I doubt that!" Jody drew in her breath, straightening. Like her father, she harbored a soft spot in her heart for the downtrodden, culturally raped Indians planted on the reservations in rural Oklahoma. They bore the brunt of prejudice, were accused of every crime. For his humanistic compassion Martin Powers had been subtly ostracized from his community, which is why he had sent his only child away from Beaver to a private high school in Oklahoma City. "They didn't speak like Indians."
"Then what did they speak like?"
"Ah, they were both big men ... with deep voices. One was much deeper than the other and seemed to be more in control of himself, if you know what I mean." She leaned back and looked at him expectantly.
"Somebody rapes you and you call him in control of himself?" Pigson let out a deep sigh and threw the pencil down on the desk. "That's no description, Miss. Would you recognize these men if you saw them in a line-up?"
"I ... I might if I heard them talk."
"We need a physical description."
"Then I guess not." Jody looked down at her lap, nervously scraping her thumb nail against the leather of her handbag.
A bored expression came over Pigson's face. "So we have two unidentified men coming in through your open screen door with no evidence of foul play and you, I 'spose, expect me to have them behind bars in twenty four hours."
"That's your job, isn't it?" she asked coldly. "And I brought you the belts as evidence. There must be dozens of fingerprints on them." She nodded toward the coiled straps laying on Pigson's littered desk.
"We don't keep everybody's fingerprints on file. "This isn't Columbo you're watchin', Miss ... this is real life!" Pigson swung his chair around to face her and planted his big feet in their cowboy boots solidly on the floor. He slapped the palms of his meaty hands down on his wide knees and glared at her. "Miss Powers," he said, "I got plenty to do right now. I'm still working on the inquest on your father, we got Indians pow-wowin' on the reservations kicking up their heels with complaints, dope sellin' in grade school, and God knows what else. I ain't got time to mamby pamby around with a crime with no evidence."
Pigson waited for her to leave, but she sat there reticently, staring disbelievingly at him, her cheeks flushed with anger. He picked up the gnawed pencil and scribbled something down on the pad and, feeling her eyes burning on the back of his neck, he nodded curtly to her. "Thanks for comin' in, Miss Powers. If we find any thin' out, I'll be sure to let you know."
Jody's amber eyes were still burning with anger and disgust as she trod down the stairway to the sunny main street of Beaver lined with pick up trucks glittering in the hot noonday sun. Of course she hadn't expected these Barney Fifes to satisfy her complaints, but she'd made it as a matter of form, for the record. Nor did she expect them to find the culprits. They could have been prison escapees, hitchhikers across the state line in Kansas, Texas or Colorado by now. But she had expected at least a thread of sympathy from the police instead of his suspicious doubts of her story. What bothered her the most was that she was not a newcomer to Beaver: She had been born and raised here, and still they treated her like some foreign hysterical nymphomaniac. It was his insolent attitude, his belittling of her femininity that irked her most.
Jody strolled along the row of stores making her daily purchases, ignoring the stares and nudges of passing housewives and the covert grins of men sitting on the old church bench outside of the local saloon. She was something of a local phenomenon-a pretty girl who preferred roping cattle and baling hay to baking apple pies and raising children ... and there was her charity work for the Indians on the reservations, coupled with her father's blatant hiring of the dirty savages, bringing them into Beaver to smell up the town and steal jobs away from decent, hardworking people.
By that afternoon the story would be all over Beaver that the Powers girl was so damned man crazy that she invented a story about being molested against her will. 'Probably to cover herself in case the little bitch's pregnant...." that's what they'd say! Well, she had as much right to be here as they did!
Jody loaded a sack of gorceries into her pick-up truck and drove back to the ranch. When she had made the turn from her gravel driveway onto the two lane highway, a dusty jeep with its motor running had been parked across the highway on a seldom used tractor trail leading to the wheat fields beyond. She was about half a mile down the highway heading toward Beaver when she noticed the vehicle in her rearview mirror. Suspicious, she'd accelerated and the jeep gained speed, too. When she slowed, it slowed, playing cat and mouse with her all the way into town. The driver was alone, she noted with relief.
Now, enroute back to the ranch, the directional lights blinked as she approached the turn off to the ranch, passing by the tractor trail behind her. A hundred yards from the road she saw the jeep parked back amidst a thick mass of elderberry bushes. The driver was slumped in the seat smoking a cigarette.
The day before a station wagon had been parked there, and she shrugged it off, thinking it might be a hunter. Evidently she was being followed by somebody who didn't care if she saw him or not! Who ... and why?
Perhaps it was Pigson. But after he had made mincemeat out of her assault and rape charges, certainly he wouldn't waste the time to spy on her. Jody's anger at being spied upon began to sizzle with alarm.