automount can appear to be both in a started and stopped state

I was debugging something unrelated about automount which lead me to wanting to
know if had started:

$ service --status-all | grep autofs
[ - ] autofs
# ... other stuff snipped

But I then try,

$ sudo initctl status autofs
autofs start/running, process 1812

I looked at the init script for autofs,

$ sudo /etc/init.d/autofs status
 * automount is not running

It claims it's not running because /var/run/autofs.pid does not exist.

It looks like the following starts automount, but it doesn't create a PID file,

/etc/init/autofs.conf

Is this some nasty interaction between this "service" thing and the old SysV
init scripts? I'm not sure what the correct way of doing these things anymore, but the above behavior seems like a bug to me.

Thanks for your time!