by Guy Bolton
Craine steered through to the front of the crowd, brushing people aside, knowing that unless he made it onto that train, Peterson would be gone forever. He glanced up—the second man was still there but Kinney had disappeared. Had he made it through the ticket barriers?
Passengers were shuffling slowly through the underpass toward the gates to the platforms but it was no use, the crowd was too thick; he was stuck where he was. Craine faced back toward the concourse, where the minute hand of the large illuminated clock inched toward midnight: 11:58 P.M. He would never reach it in time, there were too many people. The Chicago-bound Challenger was leaving any moment now. He was going to miss the train.
* * *
Sitting under the arc lights of platform two was a Los Angeles Challenger, one of the most highly patronized passenger trains to run between Los Angeles and Chicago. Dragged by a railroad steam locomotive with twelve coupled driving wheels, the westbound Challenger could complete its run in under forty hours, leaving Los Angeles at midnight and arriving at Wells Street Station shortly before 7 P.M. Central Time two days later. The train was due to depart imminently; wisps of steam rose from the wheelsets and clung to the cool evening air as passengers rushed to board. Finally, the last trolley of luggage was loaded onto the baggage car and the door locked shut.
Russell Peterson was a few feet from the ticket barriers leading up onto platform two. Ahead of him, two ticket inspectors and a policeman stood with a large bloodhound sitting quietly at their feet. A mass of passengers were being ushered through the gates one by one toward the waiting train, and the crowd was becoming restless. Peterson stood in line beside a blond woman and her two children. He was wearing a cheap brown overcoat he’d bought from across the street, but underneath his shirt was damp with sweat. He could feel the material clinging to his back. Trying his best to slow his breathing, he took out a handkerchief and wiped the moisture from his face. He was nearly there.
When he reached the head of the line, Peterson strode forward, stepping in front of the other family. He was almost through the barriers when a voice behind him called out:
“Ticket, please, sir.”
Without hesitating, Peterson turned. It was the ticket inspector; the policeman was distracted with someone else. He put his bag on the floor and quickly reached inside his overcoat pocket for his ticket. If he gave any indication of reticence or unease he’d almost certainly be caught out. Neither did he smile or try to appear too casual. Instead, he let out a long exaggerated sigh, reasoning the inspector would appreciate that under the circumstances this was a considerable annoyance.
Peterson handed over his ticket. The inspector studied Peterson’s face then looked down at the paper rail ticket, officially stamped and dated but—thank God—not named. He prayed that the inspector wouldn’t ask for any form of identification. He put his hands in his pockets and thumbed at a pocket knife. He clasped it between his fingers, using his thumb to twist out the blade. He was ready to use it if he had to.
The policemen glanced over. He frowned briefly, a hint of recognition in his face. Then the dog at his feet started growling. Peterson felt a bead of sweat form at his temples and begin its slow crawl down the line of his jaw. Please make them hurry. He watched as the policeman rested a hand on his pistol belt and slowly started to walk over. He gripped the knife in his palm, drawing it cautiously from his pocket.
The policeman tapped the ticket inspector on the shoulder.
“Excuse me—”
Behind him, the bloodhound jumped up at the blond woman and started barking and baying at her skirt. The woman let out a shriek, dropping her bags and falling to the floor. The policeman turned and ran over, apologizing profusely as he helped her to her feet.
“Quiet down, you! I said quiet down!” The policeman struck the dog on its hind leg and the hound yelped before falling silent.
The ticket inspector rolled his eyes and slapped the ticket against the palm of his hand.
“Second carriage from the front, sir. Have a safe journey.”
Peterson passed through the ticket barriers carrying his single suitcase grasped tight in one hand. He hadn’t had time to go home. Once he’d heard that Craine was still alive, he’d known it was only a matter of time before someone realized what he’d done. Every second counted; he was running for his life.
He walked briskly, and had to stop himself from running as he walked up onto the platform, striding past the coach-class carriages toward the first-class sleeping cars near the front of the train. The last of the passengers were boarding and the stationmaster was walking down the train closing the carriage doors.
Peterson stepped onto the iron pedestal and climbed up into the second carriage from the front. The conductor was standing in the doorway. He nodded hello as Peterson squeezed past then slammed the door shut behind him.
Peterson walked past the passengers waving from the windows and went down the corridor to his roomette, a small cabin with a foldout bed and washbasin. He checked the room number against the ticket, stepped inside and shut the door behind him.
Peterson heard the locomotive give a long whistle then felt the coach sway from side to side as the train began to creep out of the station. He took out a cigarette and lit it, inhaling deeply until his nerves had settled.
It had started nine months ago. Mayer had refused him a pay raise and Peterson was fed up of being underappreciated. He’d spent most of seven years saving M.G.M.’s actors from themselves. Their entire star image was his construction, and yet they earned more in a week than he did in a year. So it was time for him to take what was due.
Rochelle put Peterson in contact with James Campbell and the three of them devised a plan. Campbell’s girlfriend was a call girl at the Lilac Club. Campbell would take pictures of her with clients and then extort them for payoffs.
Florence—or Felicity, as she went by—was worried she’d get in trouble but the club never found out about it. The key was to only extort those M.G.M. actors that Peterson could handle. Vulnerable, stupid actors who would be only too willing to pay to keep everything hush-hush. They came straight to Peterson, begging the Head of Publicity for advice. All he had to do was convince them that it wasn’t worth the trouble. Don’t go to the police. Pay them off. I can talk to the Lilac Club to take the girl off the roster.
Everything had worked perfectly until Campbell and the girl got greedy. Peterson sighed at the memory, and his thoughts drifted over to the events of the past few months. Hiring Kamona had been necessary. Christ, how could Campbell think that sending the pictures to Stanley would have done anything but drive him to an early grave? Stanley was unhinged. Did they genuinely think that he’d thank them for their discretion, pay them off for not selling the pictures to a local rag?
It was a desperate move to kill Craine but he had only himself to blame. He’d grasped, a little too late, just how close Craine was to revealing his role in this. So with Carell looking for M.G.M.’s permission to go after the two detectives, Peterson gave it to him. After all, if the gunmen did their jobs, there’d be no direct contact to the Lilac Club, so both he and Carell would be able to walk away. And there was no reason for the spotlight to shine on the studio, either. Peterson made it very clear to Carell that Mayer didn’t want to be contacted directly and that Peterson would always act on his behalf. There was no reason for Mayer to ever find out.
But nothing ever works out like it does in the movies. Carell and Kinney had failed. Craine was alive, and it was time for Peterson to leave Los Angeles. He told himself that it didn’t matter. In two days’ time he’d be in Chicago. Maybe he could try and negotiate with one of the Irish syndicates? They hated Carell. He could tell them everything he knew about the Lilac Club in exchange for protection. Or maybe even talk to the F.B.I. Would Hoover grant him immunity if he ratted on the Chicago mob? Maybe—but was it worth the risk?
Peterson drew hard on his cigarette and leaned back in his seat as the train pulled away from the platform. A
t last he started to relax. Through the window he saw families on the platform waving goodbye to relatives and friends. A girl, a pretty girl, ran alongside a carriage, blowing kisses and waving a handkerchief to some unseen lover. Behind her, he caught sight of a man sprinting down the platform after the train. He looked somehow familiar. Wait, it couldn’t be? Peterson strained his eyes and pushed his face against the glass. He felt his heart almost jump out of his chest.
It was Jonathan Craine.
Craine strode down the corridor of the Challenger, moving with the sway of the train. When the clock struck midnight, the ticket guards had bowed to the pressure of the crowd and opened the gates to the platform. He’d stepped onto the rear carriage just as the shrill whistle blew and the train lurched forward on its long journey toward Chicago. He’d made it on board—now he needed to find Peterson before Kinney did.
The train rocked from side to side as it screeched slowly up the rail yard, gathering speed, laboring around the first corner as it sped toward the L.A. River. It was busy inside the coach-class carriage, an atmosphere of urgency as passengers with battered suitcases filled the narrow aisles trying to find their seats. It had crossed his mind that Peterson would be hiding among the coach-class passengers, but then again, the risk of being recognized was bound to be too great. He would have paid for a private room in the sleeper carriage.
Craine wove through, breathing the fug of cigarette smoke and perfume as he forced people aside, pressing toward the first-class compartments near the front of the train. There were twelve carriages in total, each with rear and front connecting doors, and twice he almost slipped crossing from one carriage to another as the gyrating metal lips pitched and swayed beneath his feet.
He saw the ticket inspector in the fourth carriage from the front, his narrow face sepia-toned under the glow of low-wattage bulbs.
“Tickets.”
“Police,” he said, showing his badge. “I’m looking for Russell Peterson. What room is he in?”
“Don’t mind who you are or who you’re looking for, you can’t board this train without a ticket.”
Ignoring him, Craine snatched the clipboard from his hands and started up through the carriage.
“Hey, you can’t do that!” the conductor shouted after him. “Hey!”
Craine ran his finger down the list of passenger names. The list was alphabetical, the first page ending in Delancey. He turned to the second page. There he was, half-way down: Peterson, Russell. He was in the second carriage from the front, cabin 14.
Vincent Kinney had entered at the front of the train. He’d seen Peterson climb onto the sleeper carriages and knew he must be in one of the private cabins. First class was an amber-lit corridor with a line of doors to his left. There were six cabins to each carriage and Kinney glanced in each of them as he passed, his right hand holding his pistol beside his thigh.
He considered his options. He could kill Peterson now and be done with it, or he could hold him until the train stopped, drag him off onto the tracks and shoot him in the desert somewhere. The impatient part of him wanted to get it over and done with but being reckless helped no one. He didn’t have a silencer, and if he was caught, there was no way of getting off the carriage until the train slowed down.
Passing a washroom, he glanced in at two more open doors but the passengers in both cabins were families with young children. The third door was shut. Kinney knocked softly.
“Tickets, please.”
There was no reply. He looked to his left and right to check the corridor was empty. He repeated himself and when no answer came he pulled the hammer back on his pistol with one hand and turned the doorknob with the other.
The cabin was empty.
Then, from his left, he saw Peterson dart out of the toilet toward him. Kinney turned his pistol and tried to fix him in his sights but Peterson was too fast and the corridor too narrow. Peterson stepped closer, grabbing Kinney’s pistol wrist with one hand, and arching toward him with a metal blade clasped within the other. There was the sound of a train whistle and with it the sound of his own breath rushing out of him as the knife entered his side. Kinney smelt something in the air and suddenly he was on the floor, a burning feeling inside his belly that got hotter and hotter until he could barely breathe.
Pushing through the first-class compartment, Craine counted the cabin numbers as he went: 19, 18, 17 . . . He was crossing between the connecting doors when he heard a confused scream ringing through the next carriage. Before he could reach under his arm for his Browning, the train let out a long, low-pitched whistle and the hydraulic brakes engaged. Craine was thrown sideways, almost falling under the train wheels as the couplings banged together and the Challenger ground to a halt.
He pulled himself up, took out his Browning and looked down the long corridor. There was a woman standing over a man on the floor. Behind them, he saw a door rattle on its hinges as it clanged shut. He looked through the window and caught a glimpse of a figure stepping off the train and down to the rail tracks.
Peterson.
He went to go after him before the woman stepped to one side and he could see it was Kinney hunched on the floor, his chin resting on his chest as if he was asleep.
“Help me,” she said, “he’s been stabbed.”
The hairs stirred on the back of his neck as Kinney turned his eyes to him. He looked at Craine in a puzzled way and then a light went on behind his pupils. Kinney started fumbling at his pant leg. His fingers wrapped around a small metal object, a gun no larger than the palm of his hand.
Craine’s first instinct was to run, but thinking of Patrick O’Neill in his bathtub, and thinking of Michael, of how close he came to dying by Kinney’s hands, carried him forward.
“Get out of the way, get out of the way.”
Kinney wrapped his left hand around the woman’s face and tried to pull her body toward him. Using her as a shield, he swept his pistol hand toward Craine.
As the woman screamed, Craine realized he’d been in this exact situation only months before. But if nerves held him back in the corridors of Campbell’s apartment block, then this time there was no hesitation. His arm was steady. Craine fired only once but the shot was clean, entering Kinney’s skull a little above the eye and exiting the back of his head in a spray of crimson blood that shoelaced across the windowpane.
Craine stood there for a second to be sure Kinney was dead, then, ignoring the woman’s desperate wails, he bounded toward the carriage door.
Craine jumped down onto the edge of the tracks, his feet sinking into the deep gravel, his ankles almost giving way beneath the weight of his fall. It was almost completely black outside and he couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead. From nearby, he could hear the ghoulish howls of trains rushing through the rail yard and the hiss of the steam as white clouds poured out of the Challenger’s couplings and wandered through the night.
Revenge, perhaps the simplest emotion, perhaps Craine’s only true spur, was gasoline in his veins. O’Neill’s death mustn’t go unpunished. The demon in his heart had set to work, images of Peterson spinning in his mind’s eye like a carousel. Through the smudges of engine fog he made out a concrete barrier running along the side of the train, too sheer and too high to climb. He paused irresolutely and fingered his collar loose, pricking his ears to the sound of movement. Peterson could only have gone right, back to the rear of the train toward the station or left toward the river. He cocked his head to either side. Did he go left or right?
Suddenly he heard something—shoes scraping against the scree. He listened for the rhythm of his step. Peterson was to his left, running for the guard’s van and the locomotive coach. He had to be going toward the river.
Craine sidled along the train with his pistol outstretched, his free hand bracing his face against bursts of steam exhaust. He kept his mouth shut and breathed through his nose, gathering pace, his feet finally finding the same rhythm as the man ahead. He couldn’t be far away.
W
hen he reached the nose of the engine car, Craine followed the beam from the giant headlight as it probed out across the eddying clouds. His eyes grew accustomed to the light but the steam exhaust was impenetrable and it was almost impossible to see any more than a few yards in front of him.
He walked away from the engine car and stopped on the tracks but he couldn’t see or hear anyone. At last a sudden gust of wind began to clear the way ahead; he started to make out the rail lines snaking through the darkness toward two green pinpoints—a signal box flashing beneath a bridge underpass. He hesitated then pressed on, following the tracks, placing his feet down carefully so he wouldn’t trip, pausing every few seconds to listen and adjust.
Away from the engine car, the thick clouds of steam were melting into a thin haze and he opened his eyes wide, trying to look for signs of movement. His heart skipped a beat. There he was: a black figure silhouetted against the fog. Peterson was loping across the railroad toward the underpass. He was making his escape to the freight yard and the main road beyond. If he made it onto the street he’d be lost to the city; Craine would never find him.
Bursting into a sprint, Craine scrambled across the tracks in Peterson’s direction, arms raised and gun poised. To his surprise, his hands were steady. Dread would no longer fracture his resolve. He wasn’t a coward. He wasn’t afraid.
Peterson hurried onward, running toward the underpass ahead of him. Hearing the sound of gravel underfoot, he turned around with Kinney’s pistol outstretched. Craine was behind him, striding forward, his coat flapping about his sides. He must have found Kinney and followed him off the train when he’d pulled the emergency alarm. He was gunning for him now. There was no going back.
Peterson picked up speed, concentrating on the underpass ahead. From there he could climb out of the railroad and make his way back to his car. To reach it would mean running over open ground, but he had no choice.