by Eric
The streets were quiet except for an orange cat who walked half a block with me, glancing up once as if to say that only nightbirds like him and me understood the beauty of the dark and the quiet.
When I passed the Donut Shop, I was surprised to see some lights on. Somebody wearing a coat and a knitted hat was moving around inside. I went up close to the front door and peered in. The person whirled around, sensing an intruder. I could see it was Millie, looking morning-pinched around the eyes and mouth. She grinned and pulled off her cap, her bleached blond hair spilling out as she walked over and unlatched the door.
"We're not open yet," she said. "I haven't even got the coffee going." I looked over her shoulder at the big brushed steel urn with the glass capacity measures on the side in which they brewed their coffee instead of in those glass pots for making it a pot at a time that most restaurants use nowadays. "I could boil a pot of water quick and make you a cup of instant." She made a face. "I know. Instant's not much, but I keep it around for myself. I've got to have something to open my eyes at this ungodly hour while I'm waiting for the real stuff to cook up."
"Thanks," I said, "but I'm on my way out of town and I've got a few things to do before the train pulls in. I'm surprised anybody's here at all this early in the morning."
"Well, we open at six and it takes more than an hour these days to get everything warm and perking. I take mornings sometimes. Calvin hates getting up in the dark. So, will you be coming back?"
"I expect I will."
"I'll be seeing you, then," she said, and shut the door.
I went on over to the sheriff's office in the storefront a block away from the railroad station and the Donut Shop. The key slipped into the lock like a knife into butter.
Inside, there was a light on over the counter and the red patch light glowed on the switchboard. The door to George's office was opened a crack and there was a light on in there too. I thought that it was a funny sort of light as I walked across the room and put my hand out to shove the door open all the way.
The funny light was a bull's-eye lantern sitting on the floor facing the safe. There was somebody crouched down in front of it. George's desk blocked most of my view. All I could see was hat and the impression of eyeglasses flashing dully in the light of the lantern as whoever it was turned around when he felt the draft from the open door.
"Hey," I said, thinking it might be the duty officer and about to tell him I was Hatch and did George get him on the radio to tell him I was coming down to pick up the property envelopes. All I got out was the first word because the lantern was picked up and swung at my head as somebody big and bulky tried to go right through me on the way to the door.
I ducked but managed to get hold of a piece of a mackinaw, enough to send the intruder sprawling but not enough to hold on to, as I went down. The light of the lantern went out. We both scrambled to our feet at the same time. I started moving forward when something flashed out of the big shadow which was all I could see in front of the door to the outer office. There was a crack like a tree limb snapping off on a bitter cold night and I felt a sting on the side of my face that knocked me sideways.
The shadow was gone. I heard heavy footsteps running through the front office and the outer door slamming. I put one hand to my ear. It was warm and wet. I reached out for the light switch.
A car pulled up outside, its wheels spraying gravel.
"Hey, you!" I heard somebody shout. "Hey, you! Stop in the name of the law!"
That was a nice old-fashioned touch.
The safe door was wide open. The metal box was on the floor and open too. But the manila property envelopes were still there. A deputy, bundled up in an anorak, gloves, and a hat with ear flaps, stood in the doorway.
"You must be Jake Hatch." He walked up to me and gently pulled my hand away from my ear. "Somebody clipped off your earlobe," he said in a voice that showed interest but very little concern. "I'd better call the sheriff."
George arrived at the office ten minutes after the deputy, Dan Crack, who'd scarcely said another word since telling me I'd lost a piece of ear, gave him the call.
So, he'd had to go out before sunrise after all.
"Sorry we had to get you out of bed," I said. "After all my good intentions."
"Dan?" George said.
"Sheriff," Crack said.
"Now that I'm here, you want to go take a cruise around? Not the whole tour, just around the middle of town."
After Crack left, George looked at me again. "Clipped your ear," he said.
"I know that, George."
"It looks like it's stopped bleeding but I think you ought to have it looked at by Doc Crowder."
"I would do that except I'm catching the train to Denver in about fifteen minutes, so it'll just have to wait until I get to the morgue."
"That's all right, then. Maybe Bosley'll put a plaster on it for you. Now, what the hell you think this is all about?"
"Your guess is as good as mine," I said, wondering why people do like we do, saying the same things in the same way over and over again.
Probably makes out-of-the-ordinary things seem ordinary. Probably makes us feel in charge when we know that things are spinning out of control.
"Whoever it was, was going through the safe."
His eyes went to the metal box and the envelopes in it. "Didn't get anything?"
"Pick up the first envelope we sealed," I said.
George picked it up and said, "Yeah?"
"Jiggle it."
He stared at me and did what I asked him to do as though he were humoring a child. "So, all right, I jiggled it."
"Notice anything?"
He jiggled it again, then laid it down flat on the desk and checked the flap and the little hasp.
"They're intact," I said. "Take a look along the bottom."
He checked the bottom flap to see if somebody had made it come unstuck.
"Right here," I said, stepping over to show him the razor cut about an inch and a half long right along the fold. "Nobody'd ever notice it unless they knew there was supposed to be a small handful of change in there. The cut's just wide enough to let the coins slip through."
"Somebody broke into a sheriff's office, a safe, and a strongbox just to steal a couple of dollars in change?" George said.
"Well, the safe wasn't locked and the strongbox wasn't very strong," I reminded him. "The fact is whoever broke in didn't think they were taking much of a chance. Even so, somebody took a shot at me over something that's not worth a plugged nickel."
Plugged nickel.
I took out my handkerchief and unknotted the corner, letting loose the coin I'd put there for safe keeping.
When I handed it to him, George looked it over. "What's this?"
"A plugged nickel."
"It's not holed through," George said, being accurate.
"When I say plugged, I don't mean holed through. It just looks plugged."
"These marks look like they were stamped there with steel dies."
"That's my thought exactly."
"There's three marks. You know what they mean?"
"I haven't got a clue."
"Where'd you get it?"
"It fell out of one of the pockets belonging to one of the corpses while I was riding with their separate parts in the baggage car. I had no way of knowing which part it fell out of, even if I'd known there were two parts of two different people."
"Why didn't you hand this in before?"
"I was going to. Then Freeman almost had a fight with you over going through the pockets with him there. I figured if you didn't trust the man, I didn't trust the man."
"I never said I didn't trust him. I don't much like him, but I never said I didn't trust him."
"Well, I'm saying it, then."
The train whistle sounded a warning a mile down the track right where the highway cuts across it.
"How come you didn't show this to me while, we were having our soup after we got home?"
&
nbsp; "Well, how the hell do I know, George? I'm tired as hell and I was sleepy and we were talking about this and that and—"
"No need to get upset, Jake."
"Well, I mean, for God's sake, why do you ask me questions I can't answer first thing in the morning?"
"It's pretty lucky," George said.
"What's pretty lucky?"
"It's pretty lucky you're as sloppy and disorganized as me. Otherwise this nickel would've been in the property envelope where it belonged and the thief would've got it along with the rest."
"You think this is what he was looking for?"
"What do you think?"
I shrugged. "We got time to count that money," I said.
"Go ahead."
I slit open the bottom of the envelope a little more with my knife. I slid the money clip out into my hand. It was a plain silver clip, no initials, no engraving. Just the sterling mark stamped into the back of it.
The fold of bills was pretty thick. The top ten bills were hundreds. Under that were three singles, a five and a ten spot.
"Well, what do you make of that?" I said.
"Make of what?" George replied, watching me fan the money out.
I pointed to the way the bills were lined up, hundreds on top. "That's not the way a person keeps folding money, the big bills on top."
"How do they keep it?"
"You use a money clip?"
George pulled it out of his pocket.
"So take a look at how you keep your money in it."
He pulled off the clip and unfolded his little packet of bills. "Ones on top and so on down the line."
"Practically everybody I know who uses a clip lays it out that way so when you pay for your groceries or hardware you have the smaller bills closest to hand. Mix them all up and you could have your attention elsewhere and end up dropping a twenty when you meant to drop a one. Have the big bills on top and you've got a gambler's flash roll which could invite a mugging."
"So, we got the clip from the woman's trousers. If the thousand was a payoff of some kind, she could've just folded them on top and stuck the whole thing back in her pocket."
"Or the man could've been the one paid off."
"How'd it get into her pocket?"
"Maybe she picked it."
"One minute you've got them kissing each other and the next minute you've got her picking his pocket," George complained.
"The two things aren't logistically incompatible," I said.
"I'll forget you said that," George said. This kind of speculation wasn't the kind of police work he was used to. "We're never going to find out what's what by saying what about this and what about that."
"Well, it doesn't hurt to try and figure out where the old trout is hiding before you go fishing," I said.
The Zephyr heading west pulled into the station across the street. I taped up the envelope and we hurried over to the platform, put the tarp-wrapped bottom of the man onto a luggage cart, and rolled it over to the baggage car. Jim Tiptree was dropping bundles of newspapers onto a wagon.
"What have you got there, another dead body?" he joked.
"That's exactly what we've got," I said.
He saw I was telling the truth. "Oh, for the good Lord's sake."
George and I lifted the bundle up and Tiptree dragged it a foot or so inside the door. "A body can't—"
"I'm coming along with it," I said, before he could give me the entire speech.
"Might have expected it," Tiptree said.
"How's that?"
"Well, it's right there in the paper."
The front page on the top bundle said TWO CUT IN HALF BY TRAIN. ONLY TWO HALVES FOUND.
"That should do it," I said. "That should get some other agencies nosing around."
"It's still our case until we're told different," George said.
"You decided you want it too?"
"Well, I can't have you running around with your ass hanging out in the cold wind all by yourself, Jake."
Down the platform a way, Halt Ennery yelled, "All aboard," and stood there looking at me as though daring me to hold up his train one more time.
"You want somebody to go along with you?" George asked.
"What for?"
"Well, for company. Somebody to talk to on the way."
"Who did you have in mind?"
"I could spare my deputy, Dan Crack."
"No, thanks. I'll get more chat out of those legs than I ever would out of old Dan."
We were making gruesome jokes again, standing alongside the bottom half of a body, me fiddling with what could have been the man's hat. All of a sudden, I remembered what a lot of men did with train tickets. They stuck them in their hatbands. Sure enough, there it was, a ticket from Chicago to Denver and back again.
"Well, that clears up one little mystery," George said.
"But still leaves us with the other. The man was going east to west from Chicago. The woman had a ticket for a trip west to east. What was she doing on a train going the wrong way?"
"And how did she get there?"
"And how did she get there?" I echoed.
"We'll have time to think about it when you get back. It's nothing that can't wait."
I agreed that gathering up the rest of the pieces and getting the lower half of the man to Bosley in Denver took first consideration.
George stuck out his hand. "Come back when you can. If it's soon, you'll probably find me out on that goddamn mountainside."
Halt hollered, "All aboard!" again, so I scrambled into the baggage car, remembering the neat way Freeman had managed it the day before.
ELEVEN
Tiptree had the door to the baggage car opened more than a crack and was standing there looking out, swaying softly with the switch and sway of the baggage car.
"Indian summer," he said.
"Feels like it."
"You see the size of the moon tonight? Harvest moon. It was hanging up there like a Chinese lantern."
The lyrics to an old song my mother used to sing came into my head. "Shine on, shine on harvest moon up in the sky. I ain't had no lovin' since January, February, June or July." It made me feel all melancholy, like a homeless child who'd grown sick and tired of the open road.
I got up and stood beside him at the door.
"I didn't know you were given to poetic images, Jim," I said.
"I don't know about poetic, but you do get into your thoughts riding alone so much the way I do. Almost makes you see things."
He wanted to tell me something, but was hoping I'd worm it out of him for some reason.
"What sort of things?" I said.
"Well, like the things you think you see in that funny kind of violet-gray light that comes at false dawn."
"Any special things?"
"Like right there at the spot along the tracks where the bodies were found yesterday?" He stuck his head out the door a little, as if he could actually see the spot, then popped back in, his hair all tossed around his face, grinning like a kid from the exhilaration it gave him. "I was hanging out like that, trying to see if the flags Halt planted on the roadbed were still standing up?"
"Were they?"
"A couple. So, I was standing with my head out like that. As we got near the flags I saw something in the light. At first I thought it was a mountain cat or a bear."
"But it wasn't a mountain cat or a bear?"
"Well, I don't really know. I don't think so."
"Think about it."
"Whatever it was—whoever it was—turned away and hunched over as the train went past. There was something on it that flashed."
"Like metal?"
"Exactly."
"You get an impression of what it was?"
He stuck his head out the door a little bit, not as far as he'd done before, pretending to be following something along the road as it sped by, whipping his head from one side to the other, then pulled himself back inside again.
"Like that. It was that fast, so I can'
t be sure what I saw."
"Maybe a broken bottle shining out of the weeds?"
He seemed doubtful. "I think I saw a face and maybe the reflection off somebody's eyeglasses and this metal thing in their hands," he said, more certain, now that I challenged his experience, that it was something a lot stranger and more important than some animal and a broken bottle.
"What the hell would anybody be doing out along there in the dark?" I said.
"Another search party?"
"No. McGilvray's still looking for the missing half of the woman, but he'll be doing it in the daylight now that the only place left to search is down along that river."
"Well, I saw something," Tiptree said in a sturdy way as though daring me to call him a liar.
"I've no doubt," I said, wishing I'd had a glimpse of what he'd seen or thought he'd seen. "I want to stretch my legs. Is that okay?"
"Well, according to regulations . . ."
"Give me a little room here, for Pete's sake, Jim. No railroad inspector is suddenly going to appear out of the blue. . . ."
"All right. All right. I'm just saying, anything happens to that person you got laying there, ain't my fault."
"I'd swear to that," I said, and went out looking for Halt.
I found him in the dormitory car having a cup of coffee, hat and jacket off, conductor's purse sitting on the seat beside him.
"How's it going, Halt?" I said.
"I think we've got some of the curious aboard."
"You mean sightseers?"
"I mean people who stand around car wrecks."
"You telling me there's people would pay a fare to ride a train just because a couple of people fell off and got themselves killed?"
He looked at me as though he wasn't sure but that I was pulling his leg. "Of course there are. Where've you been all your life?"
I sat across from him and unbuttoned my jacket.
"Indian summer," he said.
"You see the size of the moon tonight?"
"I was holding puddles of it in my lap," he said, and smiled, looking young just like Tiptree had done.
"Did your crew do like I asked and write down their impressions of what happened the other night, Halt?"
He fumbled in the big leather purse on the seat beside him and came up with a legal-sized brown envelope. "The depositions are all in here."