Plugged Nickel

by Eric

  "They're not depositions. Just statements. You read them?" I said, holding the envelope in my hands.

  "Were they private?" he snapped.

  "No. I just asked you did you read them?"

  "Yes, I read them."

  "Well, what did they say?"

  "Not much of anything. What did you expect them to say? Just a waste of time, like I told you the other morning."

  "You didn't tell me anything."

  "Well, that's what I was thinking," he said. "When the emergency was pulled and we scrambled off the train, I knew what you knew and that was all there was to know. Charlie Tichenor was on the throttle and Billy Turk in the cab. They saw nothing but the track ahead. Laws Ruskel was reading a book. Harry Bishop was sleeping in the dormitory car with the Amtrak crew. He would've slept through the whole thing except one of the Amtrak stewards woke Harry up after he was woke up himself when the brakes slammed on. What the hell you staring at?"

  "Just thinking."

  "Well, if you're going to go on playing detective, you'd better get your nose to the ground and stop wasting my crew's time writing out useless stories."

  "Why are you talking so goddamn mean to me?"

  Halt brushed a hand across his face and rumpled his hair. "Don't ask me. I just got a feeling."

  "What kind of feeling?"

  "Just this funny feeling."

  "For God's sake, Halt, you've got to talk plainer than that."

  "The feeling this train isn't quits with this whole business yet."

  "What makes you say that?"

  "I was sitting here drinking this coffee and looking out the window when we passed the place where we dragged those pieces out from under the train." He stopped and cut his eyes left and right like a skitterish horse.

  "Yeah?" I said, urging him to finish whatever it was he was trying to say.

  "I saw something."

  "Something?"

  "Somebody. Somebody waving a . . ."

  "Waving what, Halt?"

  "It looked like some kind of funny cross, shining in the dark."

  "I don't think so, Halt. I don't think you had a religious experience. I don't think you saw a ghost or a spirit. I think you saw what Jim Tiptree saw."

  "He saw something too? What'd he see?" Halt said, leaning forward eagerly as though I were about to tell him something that would get him off the hook.

  "Probably a bear walking the mountain and a reflection off some broken glass."

  Halt collapsed back into his seat. After a minute he said, "That's not what I saw." But he didn't say anything more.

  I sat there and read the individual accounts of what the Burlington Northern crew remembered about that night. There was nothing in them worth a thing to me. After riding in silence for a while, I went back to the baggage car and, all the way into Denver, listened to items about the people cut in half by the Zephyr on Tiptree's portable radio.

  TWELVE

  There was a morgue wagon, driven by a surly fella by the name of Potter, waiting at the station. He didn't tell me his name; I had to read it off the license fixed to the sun visor with rubber bands. He didn't ask for any help with the body part, just lifted the bundle up in his arms and carried it over to the wagon.

  Walter Bosley, the medical examiner, acted like be was glad to see me when I arrived at the morgue. He was in the main room cutting somebody up.

  Every big city in America offers a lot of such work for those who like it.

  "McGilvray's office called to say I should expect you," he said. "What's that with your ear? You got a passionate girlfriend?"

  "Somebody took a shot at me," I said. "It's nothing much. I washed it myself."

  "Needs a bandage and maybe a little antiseptic."

  He was getting cotton, a bottle of antiseptic, and a sterile bandage out of a glass-fronted cabinet. "Sit down on this stool over here."

  I handed over the two property envelopes. "You forgot to take these along," I said, sitting down on the stool.

  "Oh? Well, throw them over on the table there."

  "Aren't you going to lock them up?"

  "What for?" He looked at me over the tops of his specs like he already knew something wasn't quite right. "There something valuable in there?" He soaked a piece of cotton in the antiseptic and dabbed it on my wound. It stung like hell and I let him know it.

  "So, is there?" he said.

  "Not that I know about. But somebody might have had cause to tamper with the evidence."

  "I thought those envelopes just had the personal property of the accident victims in them. You have reason to believe it wasn't a case of misadventure?" He slapped a sterile pad and some sticky tape on my ear.

  "There's always a chance it could be something else," I said.

  He went over and picked up the envelopes, checking the seals and the hasps. "Somebody's been at this one."

  "I opened it up to count the money in the clip."

  I told him about the amount of money and how the bills were arranged and what we made out of that.

  "You've got a lot of faith in people doing the same things in the same way, or even the same person doing the same thing in the same way, each and every time," Bosley said.

  "Well, I know there're always exceptions, but most of the time you've got to go with the averages. But what I want to tell you is that I made that slit a little wider to get the money out and then sealed it up again, but it'd been slit open and the change removed before I got to it."

  "This have something to do with your getting shot?"

  "I interrupted the fella while he was at it."

  Potter wheeled in the lower half of the man on a gurney. He looked like he was ready to burst out laughing.

  "Something funny, Potter?" Bosley said.

  Potter didn't answer.

  "You want some lunch first or you want me to get right to it?" Bosley said.

  "If I'm going to watch, I think I'd rather eat after instead of before."

  "It's all in the mind. When we go we're nothing but dead meat."

  "On the other hand," I said.

  "That's right. On the other hand there's the faces. Almost every one of them looks a little bit like somebody you know."

  He draped the remains and got ready to go to work. He was all efficiency and business. I could see he wasn't the type to crack wise and drop cigar ashes in a cadaver's guts.

  While he took samples of this and that, he murmured more to himself than to me, occasionally raising his head and voice a little so the overhead mike would record his findings. There wasn't much.

  When he was finished he called Potter in. "Put this poor bastard on the same tray with his top half, Potter. Did you ever find out what was so funny?"

  Potter hunched his shoulders, shook his head, and looked hang-dog.

  Walking over to the restaurant after he'd washed up, Bosley said, "I don't like that man. Potter, I mean. He gets pleasure from things a man shouldn't get pleasure from. Sometimes they're the only type we can get for the job. Not always, but sometimes."

  They knew him at the chop house. We were shown to his regular table.

  He ordered a steak with the trimmings and I got a plowman's lunch of black bread and cheese with a bowl of soup to start.

  "You want to read the report when it's typed up or do you want me to give it to you like they do on television?" Bosley said.

  "I'll read the report, but I'd like to hear it now."

  "Male cauc, five feet eleven, one hundred seventy pounds, brown hair going to gray, florid complexion . . ."

  "How's that? He was bled white."

  "Subcutaneous characteristics. The number of capillaries under the skin. Also he had a lot of broken veins in his nose and cheeks usually associated with a ruddy face. And booze. He was a red-faced man who liked to drink.

  "Teeth stained. Heavy smoker. Barrel-chested. He suffered from pulmonary fibrosis and bullous emphysema."

  I shook my head and smiled, letting him know he was losing me, an
d said, "I've heard of emphysema, but this other?"

  "Related conditions. They go together. One is hardly ever found without the other. One will predominate. His emphysema was advanced but not so advanced as to incapacitate him. Not yet. That was in his immediate future."

  I showed my interest.

  "You want to know more?" he said. "You a heavy smoker?"

  "I was, but I kicked it eight years ago. I'd still like to know more."

  "You want the pathology?"

  "I'm interested in the symptoms at his stage of disease."

  "Severe shortness of breath and coughing, particularly after any exertion or under stress. Sputum is tough, tenacious, and mucoid. Not infrequently, bloody streaks'll be present. Chest pains. Marked weight loss as the disease progresses because the patient may be unable to eat without severe discomfort since swallowing demands momentary inhibition of breathing. I think he was beginning to experience some of that. No swelling of the feet or hands. That would indicate a late stage and the onset of heart failure."

  He paused and jerked his head at my plate. "How do you like the soup?"

  I stirred my spoon through the okra and shreds of stewed tomato, then pushed what was left of the soup aside and started on the bread and cheese.

  "Teeth," Bosley said.

  "What's that?"

  "I'm no expert in forensics. We've got people in the police lab for that, but you can't cut up as many and as varied as I have over the years without learning a trick or two. Besides being so badly stained, the subject's teeth were in bad condition. Suffered bad teeth all his life. That was evident from the number of fillings in his mouth. A few of them were gold made the way they haven't made them in this country for over half a century."

  "You'll have to tell me," I said, on to the fact that Bosley liked his little stalls and pauses, his little drama before dropping the shoe. Liked to have somebody ask the question so he could deliver the answer like turning on the lights at a surprise party.

  "Gold foil. Dentist fills the cavity he's cleaned out with layer after layer of gold leaf and tamps it down with a wooden peg and a mallet. Old technique still used in Europe, parts of Asia, and the Soviet Union. I'd say the man was a foreigner."

  We were finished with the meal and having coffee. I took out my handkerchief and untied the corner. I put the nickel down on the table between us.

  "This fell out of a pocket."

  "Whose pocket?"

  "I don't know."

  "Why are you carrying it around or is that a long story?"

  "It's no story at all except I get absentminded sometimes."

  "You want me to put it in the envelope with the rest of their stuff?"

  "I'd like you to take a look at it."

  He picked it up, hefted it as though he were estimating its weight, then turned it over and over in his blunt fingers, putting his head down close, checking it out through the bottom half of his bifocals. "Odd sort of nickel. Its color for one thing. More like dental amalgam than nickel. These marks for another. What do they mean?"

  "I don't know. You got any ideas?"

  "Could be letters from some foreign language. Like Cyrillic, you know?"

  "Well, no, I don't."

  "Or they could be chemical symbols. My chemistry's a little stale."

  "Or electrical symbols?"

  "Could be. You want me to take charge of this?"

  I picked the nickel up. "You don't mind, I think I'm just hold on to it for a little while."

  "What are you going to do next?" Bosley said.

  "Go back to Akron and see if I can help find the rest of that young woman."

  I ended up paying the check, Bosley saying it was better for the railroad to foot the bill for our professional conference than for the taxpayers of Denver County to do it.

  THIRTEEN

  I work out of Omaha because it suits me, but the Burlington Northern begins in Chicago and ends in Denver where the tracks of the Denver and Rio Grande Western take up the route to Salt Lake City. There's offices at both ends.

  I grabbed a cab and was over at fourteen-o-five Curtis inside twenty minutes. The dispatcher, Henry Frye, was on the phone. He waved me to a chair alongside his desk. When he hung up he leaned back and grinned at me as though I was the prize hog at the state fair.

  "Well, aren't you the one," he said.

  "Aren't I the one what?"

  "Bodies cut in half. I mean that's doing it, that's really making the news."

  "Well, for God's sake, Henry, I didn't cut them up myself. I didn't plant those bodies on the right of way so we could drum up a little publicity ..."

  He kept on grinning and shaking his head as though I were a proper wonder. "The phones don't stop ringing."

  "They don't?"

  "Inquiries about your whereabouts."

  "Oh?"

  "Newspapers. Chicago Sun Times and the Examiner. Denver Post. Omaha World Journal. Magazines. People. Newsweek. Penthouse."

  "Penthouse? For God's sake."

  "Time. National Enquirer. "

  "That's enough."

  "Television stations."

  "Eeeenough."

  "And the head office," Henry trumpeted, pleased to be sitting across from a man being picked out and plucked up for fame, no matter how momentary or fleeting.

  "The front office?"

  "Oh, yes."

  "Why'd they call you?"

  "They're calling everybody, Jake. Calling everybody up and down the line wanting to know if anybody's seen their favorite gumshoe."

  I wished Bess were there to tell him nobody called detectives gumshoes anymore.

  "You really got to tell people what you're up to," he went on.

  "Well, here I am."

  "I ain't the front office, Jake. I ain't even your office in Omaha."

  "You been in touch with Omaha?"

  "Oh, Silas Spinks called too."

  "What did he say?"

  "Said he was looking for you."

  "He say anybody else was looking for me?"

  "Like who?"

  "Like anybody from the state police."

  His grin got so wide I expected it to split his face so his jaw'd fall off. "Oh, yes. The troopers inquired after you."

  "How about the feds?"

  "Them too? Oh, yes, the G-men called. You're an important man."

  "You want my autograph?"

  "You want to call Chicago? You want to call Omaha?"

  "I don't think so."

  "I didn't think you would."

  "How come you think that?"

  "Because this case could make you famous and you don't want anybody to drag it away from you."

  "Why would I care?"

  "Two reasons, Jake." He raised his hand and stuck up a finger. "Because you're like a dog what gets his teeth into a bone and'll die before he lets anybody take it away." He stuck up a second finger. "Because solving these murders'll raise your already substantial reputation with the ladies by a considerable amount."

  "I didn't call them murders. Why do you call them murders?"

  He raised a third finger. "Because you wouldn't be hanging on so tight if you weren't pretty sure that's what they are." He watched me for a minute, then added, "So you're not going to make any calls?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Not even to your boss?"

  "Not right this minute. And you can do me the favor and tell anybody who calls that you haven't seen hide nor hair of me." I stood up. "By the way. Who told you that the coroner over to Akron was out looking after a sick cow?"

  "Well, it would've been his wife, I suppose, wouldn't it?"

  "I don't know that he's got a wife. I think I'll use your phone after all."

  I called Akron, looking for George, and got Bess on the phone.

  "George is out making up another search party," Bess said. "The state police are joining in."

  "I think you can answer this question I've got."

  "Go ahead, Jake."

  "Is H
oward Freeman married?"

  "No, he's not, Jake."

  "Nothing going on between him and Dixie Hanniford, is there?"

  She laughed. "I imagine that Howard, shy as he is some ways, and romantic too, would fancy someone a little more delicate—prettier—than Dixie. Younger too, I'd say."

  "How about Millie down at the Donut Shop?"

  There was a long pause.

  "What is it, Bess?"

  "Well . . ."

  "Yes, go on."

  "I don't like to be just another gossip clucking away."

  "This has to do with an investigation into the deaths of two people," I said, assuring her my interest wasn't idle.

  "Well, there's been some talk about Howard and Millie. Only talk, you understand? But what would it have to do with those poor people if Howard's playing around with a married woman?"

  "I don't know, Bess, I really don't know. But you go around collecting straw long enough, first thing you know you've got a haystack."

  FOURTEEN

  I don’t own a car. That might seem foolish in this day and age, but one of the reasons I thought about working for the railroad when I was nineteen or twenty was the vision of all that free travel on the trains. It didn't work out quite the way I dreamed it, though I've seen about all of this country that's available by rail. However, by and large, I really only know the towns, cities, burgs, and villages along the Burlington Northern right of way. I sometimes feel like the whole 1,042 miles is my true hometown.

  But being without a vehicle of my own isn't always satisfactory. I often get the feeling that I'm being pinned down by timetables. I had some hours to kill before I could catch the 8:20 back to Akron. I didn't feel like hanging out in the business offices or around the station or in some saloon, so I called up a friend.

  Harriet Lawry is an artist who lives in a warehouse loft on a street along the South Platte River between the Denver Union Stockyards and Riverside Cemetery. If you go out and walk across the street, you find yourself leaving Denver and Denver County and going into Commerce City and Adams County. Besides the perfume of the stockyards, there are nights when the breeze blows in from the sewage disposal plant over by Emerson Street. Rents are cheap.