Plugged Nickel

by Eric

  "Schedules ain't sacred, Halt," Laws said.

  "They are to me," Halt snapped back, his temper frayed right down to a nub.

  "You're the one who's holding up the parade."

  "Why don't we just off-load the body and let Keely sign for it as though it were unconsigned freight?" I asked, trying to give Halt his out and everybody else a chance to go about their business.

  "Can I do that?" Keely said.

  "Of course you can do it."

  "How do I route the paperwork?"

  "Back to the front office. They'll tell you what to do."

  "What the hell would the railroad have to do with deciding what's to be done with a corpse?"

  "Not a damn thing. But by the time they get around to saying so, Sheriff McGilvray'll show up and take responsibility. That way there'll be no chance of you or me or anybody from the railroad getting hit with any flying debris."

  "You know something about covering ass too," Freeman said.

  "Where's that body going to be kept in the mean time?" Laws said, unable to keep from putting in his two cents. "You going to shove it into the cold-drink machine? I say we should carry it to Denver and turn it over to the medical examiner there. They'll thank us for it."

  "Well, it's really not up to you, is it, Laws?" Halt said.

  "Well, here's what we'll do," I said. "I'll stay on here with the body as the official representative of Burlington Northern until we get McGilvray or some other properly constituted authority to take official possession of the body. You go on ahead. All I ask you to do is write down what you saw, if anything, last night"

  "This morning," Halt said, a stickler for accuracy as well as for running things on time.

  "—and ask everybody on the Burlington Northern crew to do the same."

  "What's that supposed to prove?" Laws said.

  "I haven't got a clue," I said. "How am I supposed to know what anybody saw or didn't see, heard or didn't hear? Maybe something one person writes down won't check with something somebody else writes down. Maybe something somebody writes down will check with something somebody else writes down. Why do I have to explain every damn little thing to you, Laws?"

  "Well, you don't. I was only asking."

  "So all right. Is what I'm asking for okay with everybody?"

  "Okay, not okay, it's the only sensible thing to do," Billy said, closing off any more discussion.

  "You want to get a wagon, Laws, and get that bundle out of the baggage car?" Halt said.

  "I notice nobody's gone looking for the sheriff yet," Laws said, getting in his last shot.

  "No reason to," Keely said. "Here he comes now."

  A tall, lean drink of water was crossing the street from the Donut Shop across from the station, taking his time, carefully looking up and down the street, though there wasn't a vehicle in sight. He was carrying a big camp Thermos by its handle.

  A blond, curly-headed woman, in a pink waitress's uniform with a white apron and a sweater thrown around her shoulders, trotted just a pace or two behind him. She had a cardboard carton in her hands.

  I've known George McGilvray for some time now.

  Small as Washington County is, George's no hicktown sheriff leaning against a wall growing a belly. He'd been a precinct captain in Denver until he retired out to Akron and had been appointed to the sheriff's job, with some reluctance, only after old man Chickering dropped dead of a heart seizure. He'd run unopposed ever since and would probably die in office too.

  He was a very friendly man, but somewhere along the line he'd taken on the habit of scarcely ever smiling when he was on duty. His long Scots face, pale blue eyes, and gray hair cut short gave him the look of some old-time Presbyterian minister, ready to comfort you one minute and smack you for cause the next.

  "Having a railroad convention?" he asked when he joined the crowd. "Hello, Freeman, long time no see. And how are you doing, Jake?"

  "Hangin' in. How's Bess?" I asked, sticking out my hand.

  "Oh, she's good," he said.

  I knew she probably wasn't. His wife had arthritis very bad, but he wasn't the sort to air his troubles.

  "How come nobody thought to tell me you had a dead man on the train?" he said, very soft and mild-mannered.

  I knew he was irked.

  "Well, the fact is," Halt said, "I left it up to the dispatcher in Denver to do what he was supposed to do according to the book."

  "Not everybody's read the book," George said, looking at Laws as he trundled the handcart with the tarp-covered body parts on it up to where we stood. The briefcase was on the corpse's chest.

  "Lucky for me old Chuck Keppler was on the train and came across the street to spread the news," George went on.

  He bent down with the ease of a much younger man and picked up the briefcase. "Anything important in this?"

  "Just a Denver newspaper," I said.

  "On a train that hadn't pulled in there yet." He laid it aside, then flicked back the top of the tarp.

  "Doesn't happen to be somebody from around here, does it?" I asked.

  "Don't know him. Looks like he's been bled white."

  I lifted up the side of the tarp so he could see it all.

  "I've seen a lot, but that's the first time I've ever seen that," he said. "Small feet," he added, pointing to the wet slip-ons.

  We dropped the tarp. George tucked it in all around, like he was a nurse making a patient comfortable, then stood up.

  The waitress was passing out coffee in Styrofoam cups in the shelter of the wall, far enough away so she didn't have to look at the horrible mess everybody else was trying to get a look at. The carton was on the bench and I could see it was filled with sweet rolls. She wasn't being a sister of mercy; she was collecting from the gallery for everything they took. She saw me looking and lifted her eyebrows and an empty cup. I counted heads and raised ten fingers twice, saying that I was buying coffee and sweet rolls for the bunch of us.

  "This is about the damnedest accident I've ever seen," George said.

  "Maybe it's not an accident," I said.

  "What makes you say that?" Freeman said. "There's nothing on the body to say who this fella is."

  "You looked?"

  "I went through his pockets and put it all back except this." I handed the little book to George. "I was trying to find out who he was in case he was traveling with somebody on the train and they hadn't missed him yet."

  "So?" George said.

  "So, he had no wallet."

  "You think it was robbery?"

  "That's what I'd say, except he's got money in a clip in the pocket of his trousers. It looks like he met somebody in a deadhead the train was hauling. But if that means anything, I don't know what."

  The waitress came over with the ten coffees, some packets of sugar, sweetener, and powdered whitener. Those who wanted, took. I noticed that the waitress handed Freeman his coffee and knew him well enough not to have to ask him if he liked it any other way but black. He thanked her and called her Millie.

  "Maybe we should get him under cover and have another look through his pockets," Freeman said.

  I remembered the nickel and started to reach for it.

  "I don't think so," George said. "I'd just as soon wait until we get the medical examiner in from Denver."

  Freeman flushed, then turned pale the way he had before. His face was a barometer of his feelings. His eyes flicked to Millie. I could see he didn't like being challenged in front of her. But he didn't sound angry when he smiled and said, "Well, Sheriff, I'm the coroner, duly elected, and I could order the body searched and take the contents of his pockets in charge."

  George just stared at the bigger man. "I don't see any sense in chewing our cabbage twice."

  Freeman didn't stop smiling when he said, "We'll chew it if I say we'll chew it. I'll just go get a manila envelope from Keely and we'll have a look."

  The blonde turned away and went back to get the sweet rolls.

  "Upstart," George sa
id, staring at the back of the departing Freeman.

  "I had the idea that Freeman has been around here longer than you have," I remarked.

  "Oh, no. He's only been around a couple of years. Maybe less."

  "You don't like him much?"

  George turned his ice-blue eyes to me and tapped his nose.

  I knew what he was saying. There are times a cop can tell that there's something wrong about somebody but can't say exactly what. It's what cops call growing a nose and every cop grows one or has no success to speak of. Some noses are better for some things than other things. The one I've grown can smell out a thief or a pickpocket in a convention of saints.

  Freeman came back with one of those nine-by-twelve routing envelopes with the string closure just about the time that Millie, carefully not looking at the body, came back with the pastries.

  "I don't think so, thank you very much, Millie," George said, taking a pair of rubber surgical gloves out of his jacket pocket. Smart big-city cops always carry around a pair because they never know what they'll be asked to stick their hands into. George had never given up the habit.

  "Are they all jelly doughnuts?" I asked, peering into the carton.

  "I'm sorry. That's all that's left," Millie said.

  "Then I think I'll do without."

  It didn't bother the trainmen. They all took one. Laws took two. Then they got on the train. They were waving to me and grinning as I got my cash out of my pocket and found a twenty in the middle.

  "Hey, no," Freeman said. "We can't let you go standing treat, a stranger in town and all."

  "I'd give you the coffee and buns for free except Calvin wouldn't like it," Millie interjected.

  "Calvin?"

  "My husband."

  "Put your money away, Mr. Hatch," Freeman insisted. "I'll settle up with Millie later."

  She flashed him an up-and-sideways glance and a little smile curled her lips for a second as though she'd seen the double meaning in his offer even if he hadn't meant it. Freeman colored again. Millie trotted off, pulling the sweater around her shoulders.

  "You wanted to be in on this," George said.

  The three of us knelt around the body and went through the same routine I'd gone through on my own beside the tracks. Only this time George named off each item as Freeman wrote it down on the envelope and I dumped them in.

  Freeman was a very thorough man, examining the cigarette butts as though they could talk, fingering every penny, nickel, dime, and quarter as though they could too.

  I still held back the nickel tied in my handkerchief because I figured if George had the instinct not to trust Freeman, I wouldn't trust him either.

  Finally we stood up.

  "I think I'm going to call the state police," George said. "If this turns out to be robbery with violence, I'd just as soon somebody took it over. We're not equipped."

  "Now, wait a second, George," I said. "No sense calling in a crowd until we at least hear what the medical examiner has to say."

  "I think it's actually pretty cut and dried," Freeman said. "The verdict's going to be death by misadventure."

  George didn't take kindly to being told how to think, though Freeman was grinning all over his face as if to say we were all friends speaking our minds and no offense intended.

  "This is eating into your day, isn't it, Howard?" George said, flat-voiced and flat-eyed, taking the envelope from his hand.

  For a minute it looked like Freeman was going to assert his coroner's rights over the property, but he decided he'd gone far enough in challenging George. He smiled and said, "Well, I don't get called to earn my pay as coroner very often."

  "But I guess you've done all you can do right at this moment."

  "I guess I have. Sheriff, I want to apologize for the way I talked to you just now. I'll just have to blame lack of sleep."

  George nodded, but didn't break out any smiles in return. We put the body in a tool locker and Freeman took off in his pickup.

  George and I walked over to his office, which was just down the block, so he could call the medical examiner's office in Denver. It was nine o'clock in the morning and I was getting hungry.

  "What time is the M.E. apt to get here?"

  "Well, it's a hundred-and-ten-mile drive from Denver. I'd give him an hour to get started and two and a half hours on the road. Four hours on the outside, let's say. So, after I make the call, you can come home with me and get some breakfast."

  I figured breakfast with Janel over to Fort Morgan, thirty-five miles away, was already a lost cause, but Maggie Wister lived on a farmstead about three miles outside of Akron. If I could borrow a bicycle from Keely, the station master . . .

  I tapped my forehead with my finger, acting like I was thinking about big errands I could take care of as long as I was there in Akron. "I thought I might borrow Keely's bicycle and maybe—"

  "Take a pedal down the county road along the way to Platner?"

  "Well, uh," I said.

  "Maybe have a visit with the Widow Wister?"

  "What makes you say that?"

  "There's not much happens around here I don't hear about."

  We stopped outside his office door.

  He offered to drive me over to Maggie's, but the rain had stopped altogether, the sun was yellow and warm, the air old-fashioned and sweet, and Keely was glad to lend me his bicycle.

  When I got to Maggie's, I went around the back to see if she was in the kitchen. She wasn't, so I went to the front and pushed the bell. No bell rang because Maggie was deaf. The push button made a light blink in every room in the house. In a minute or so the door opened and she was standing there smiling at me.

  She welcomed me with a kiss, letting me know that she was glad to see me again. Maggie keeps things separate and apart, one thing rarely slopping over into another. There's friendliness and there's passion. There's conversation and there's lovemaking.

  While we shared some jam and butter on bread warm from the oven, I told her about the horrible experience I'd lived through in the small hours of the morning, she reading my lips, gazing at my mouth with a soft intensity that always seems more than a little erotic to me. I told her I was sleepy.

  SEVEN

  I just barely made it back to the station before the M.E. arrived from Denver in a morgue ambulance. His name was Walter Bosley, a little fussy fellow who reminded me right off the bat of a banty rooster looking for someone to put his spurs to.

  "What's going on, asking an examiner to drive a hundred miles to do a body? Ties up a vehicle and a driver for a whole day, not to mention my time. You should've shipped the corpse to me. How come the office didn't tell you that?"

  George reared back. I was afraid that Bosley was about to get a piece of his mind. Ordinarily I let people have at it, but this time I stepped right in.

  "Well, Mr. Bosley," I said, "there's this question of jurisdiction."

  "Shouldn't be any problem about jurisdiction. Proper procedure would've been to call the State Board of Health in Denver. That office has precedence over any other in matters constituting a potential health hazard."

  "Well, thank you for telling me that," I said. "You've just taught me something."

  Bosley looked at me as though he sincerely doubted my expression of appreciation. "Where's the corpse?" he said.

  When we took him out to the equipment shed, he looked down at the mound under the tarp. "I can't examine it down on my knees. I've got this back. Have you got any place we can get it up closer to my hands and eyes?"

  We put it up on the wood box where Keely kept his fuel and kindling.

  Bosley unwrapped the corpse. The ambulance driver, who'd probably seen it all, just stood there chewing on a toothpick.

  "To tell you the truth," Bosley said, "I could've sent one of my assistants, but it's not every day a body turns up cut in half by a train. It's just a wonder what that kind of tremendous weight can do, isn't it?"

  He took off his overcoat and his suit jacket, in spite o
f the cold, rolled up his sleeves, and put on a pair of surgical gloves. Then he started poking around. After a while he got a pair of scissors out of his bag and cut away some of the clothing.

  "You want to look at the inventory of the things that were in his pockets?" George asked.

  "I've got no interest in what he had in his pockets." George stepped back and Bosley went at it. Of course, he was just doing a gross examination. The real autopsy would take place in the proper surroundings back in Denver.

  Finally he put the tarpaulin back and stripped off his gloves.

  "Is there anything there we haven't already seen?" I said.

  "What do you think you've already seen?" Bosley replied.

  "Well, a man who's been mashed and pulled apart under the wheels of a train."

  "Then, you haven't seen much."

  "How's that?"

  "You haven't seen that the two halves don't match."

  I don't know if my mouth fell open, because I couldn't see myself, but I know that George's did for the first time in living memory.

  Bosley was enjoying himself. "The head, arms, and torso are those of a male. The legs and pelvis are those of a female."

  "Little shoes," George said.

  EIGHT

  You'd think getting together a search party would be an easy thing like it is in the movies. Well, it isn't. First of all you don't want everybody and his brother tramping around the countryside, maybe getting lost, maybe breaking a leg, maybe getting themselves killed in any one of twenty different ways. Even in places where men are used to the difficulties of the terrain, most of them have jobs and businesses and troubles which make it hard for them to just drop tools and go tramping off through the woods. Also, people will come out to search in one case and not another. They are a lot more apt to join in a search for a missing child or some backpacking greenhorn than for an experienced hunter or the local drunk. And they sure as hell don't see the urgency in going out looking for somebody already dead.

  So it took nearly all of the next day, on toward dusk and cold as hell, before George had collected the men and gear needed for a search along the railroad right of way.