by Eric
"Never mind that, please, Dearborn. Where's the young gypsy, now?"
"Over at the diner, like I said."
"Well, thank you for calling, Dearborn."
"You're welcome, and you know what?"
"This isn't about Cooley and his brother-in-law, is it?"
"Oh, no, it's about the gypsy. I've seen that fella in McCook before."
I hung up, kissed Charlotte, told her how much I appreciated the apple pie and regretted I couldn't stay and chat. Then I said how I thought she was doing the right thing planning to marry Wilbur.
"You were saying something about settling down, Jake," she said, putting her hand on my arm so I couldn't get out the door.
"Well, as you can see, that's hardly possible. I'm a good playmate but a bad partner, Charlotte."
"Well, gather ye rosebuds while you may," she called after me as I hurried to the car. "You're not getting any younger!"
She didn't have to go and say that.
TWENTY-FIVE
I parked the rented car in the same spot where the station still gave some shade, then walked across the street toward the diner. A big semi with aluminum sides was parked next to a milk tanker. There was a Piels sign glowing neon-pretty in the window beside the screen door, which hadn't been taken down for the cold weather yet. My mouth was dry and the thought of a cold beer felt good except I doubted it would settle very well on top of Charlotte's apple pie with butter under the crust.
I was dithering inside my head a little because I had the feeling that the way I handled this meeting with the gypsy was going to make or break the case.
It was three steps up to the screen door, which screeched on its hinges when I opened it. I held it with, one shoulder and used the other to open the regular door. A cozy damp warmth, smelling of bacon fat and coffee, hit me in the face like a wet washcloth and lifted my spirits.
A fella with a white counterman's hat perched on thinning red hair turning white—it had to be Cooley—was standing behind the counter reading the sports page. He gave me a glance but decided not to move until I decided which stool or booth I was going to pick.
There were two men in leather jackets at the counter, driving gloves sticking out of their back pockets, hunched over cups of coffee. One of them swiveled his head around and took a gander at me, but there was nothing about me that interested him so he went back to staring into his mug.
I looked down the right-hand length of the diner and there, facing me, was the only person in the joint who could have been the gypsy. A kid about twenty-three or four, black hair curling all over his head like a basketful of snakes, small gold loop earring shining in his ear. His eyes flicked up at me. I knew the look of the hustler checking out every stray rustle in the brush, looking for a score. His eyes were as black and shining as the girl's. They could have been family.
There was somebody sitting facing him. Somebody who was big and had a pale neck and wore a mackinaw of a pattern I'd seen more than once before. Freeman half turned his head looking for Cooley and the coffeepot while he stuck out his empty mug. I could see the metal bows of his spectacles pressing against his temples. He had his hair cut white-sided in a way you don't often see nowadays, so there was no mistaking him. I wondered why I'd never noticed that about him before. It was the sort of thing a sophisticated but not too clever man might do who wanted to look like a clodhopper.
I don't know if anybody says that anymore, Bess.
I stood as still as a hare in a hedge. Cooley looked over his paper at me again as if waiting to see should he serve me first, if I ever made up my mind where I was going to light, or should he just go and give the big, pale-faced man a refill. I don't think I was much more than a fuzz in Freeman's peripheral vision when he noticed Cooley looking at me. He shifted his head another fraction. I was turned around with my back to him and half out the door before he thought to take the bother and twist his whole body around.
"Refill!" I heard him say, just as the screen door slammed behind me.
I got back across the road fast, ducked into the station, and sat down on the first bench inside the door so I could take a minute and think about what I'd just seen.
What had they been doing when I came out of the cold into the steaming diner?
They'd been hunched over the table like the truckers had been hunched over their mugs of coffee on the counter. But there'd been something else. Unless I was just wishing for it, I could've sworn I caught a flash of green as money and something brown like a wallet passed from hand to hand.
"You find that gypsy over to the diner?" Simmons called out from the ticket window.
"He's in conversation with somebody," I said, getting up and looking out of the window. "I'll just wait here until they get through."
It wasn't long before Freeman came out. He stood on the top step buttoning up his mack and putting on his gloves, looking one way and the other, but never looking directly across the street at the window of the station where I stood back watching him through the grimy pane. He came down the steps and went around the tail end of the trucks. A minute later his pickup backed out from behind the tanker where it'd been parked out of my sight. He hit the highway heading back to Akron.
When I walked through the door of the diner the second time, Cooley put down his paper and picked up the pot, staring at me as though ready to make sure I sat down this time and ordered something.
"Hamburger rare. Toast the bun. Pickle, no relish. Mayonnaise, no mustard. Fried onions."
He lifted the coffeepot. I started walking down the aisle toward the gypsy who was looking at me in speculation again.
"Coffee. Milk and sugar," I said.
I sat down across from the gypsy. He didn't protest, just smiled like a man who figured he was about to do some more business.
"You've got good hands," I said. "You been picking pockets and cleaning purses long?"
"That's a hell of a way to start a conversation with a stranger."
"You tell me your name and we won't be strangers."
"Nick Kemp. What's yours?"
"Jake Hatch. Mine's real."
I was calling him a liar but he didn't take offense. Gypsies believe lying to a non-gypsy is no sin and telling the truth to one no virtue.
"A name's just a convenience," he said. "I'll call you anything you want and you can call me anything you want."
"How about thief?"
He shrugged. The quality of his smile changed. "Why don't you put an egg in your shoe and beat it?"
I made a show of silent laughter and slapped my knee. "The first time I heard that I laughed so hard I fell out of my cradle." I reached into my pocket and took out my badge, cupped it, and stuck it under his nose.
"Railroad," he said.
"You've seen one before."
"Once or twice. When I was on a train. You notice I'm not on a train."
"You ask your elders about Jake Hatch. They'll tell you I don't roust your people for no reason. I don't hassle them in public and take away their faces. You tell them I said their son, Nick Kemp, refused to talk to Jake Hatch, so now Hatch's going to step on their toes every chance he gets. Search them in the aisles. Doubt their honesty out loud. Tell them the trouble will come from my hand but that it's on your head."
Cooley brought over my hamburger and coffee.
"How's it going, Cooley?" I said.
"Working goddamn double shifts."
"Ought to kick that no good son-in-law out on his ass."
"I would but then my daughter'd give me hell and never let up."
"Son of a bitch. You'll find a way."
"You said it."
He walked away with a little lift to his step as though having somebody know how bad his son-in-law was and how good Cooley was made it a little easier to bear. I knew he was back behind his counter, looking at me and wondering where he knew me from.
"You know why I did that?" I said.
"Did what?" Nick replied.
"Had a little frien
dly chat with Cooley?"
He didn't answer.
"I did it so that when I start beating up on you he won't step in and take your side or ask those two truckers to take your side. You see, he figures I'm a friend. He doesn't know from where, but still a friend who cares about his troubles. So when I start punching you around they won't jump in to help you and they'll be slow to stop it."
"Railroad dicks are sons of bitches," Nick said.
"We are. Now, what I want to know is what business you had with that fella who just walked out of here."
"What fella?"
"The one with the pale face and the round glasses. The one in the mackinaw who slipped you some cash."
"That a good hamburger?"
"Is that your way of saying you're not going to cooperate with me?"
"You want to talk to the old men, go talk to the old men. What do I care? You think my family'll give me the silence because some gaje cop makes a threat?"
I still had half the hamburger left and I hated to leave the rest, but I put it down, finished off the coffee, got up, put down a five, and without waiting to see if there was any change, told Nick to come outside with me.
"Is this when you beat me up?"
"This is when I show you a pretty girl who's not a pretty girl anymore."
He came scrambling after me as I walked down the aisle. "What the hell you talking about? What pretty girl you talking about?"
When I got outside I stopped. He almost ran up my back.
"You missing a pretty girl?" I asked.
When he hesitated, I turned around and crossed the street, heading toward my car.
"Jackson said my friend was in a safe place," Nick said weakly.
We'd reached the sidewalk. I stopped and faced him. "Jackson?"
"That man you saw me talking to in the diner."
"I think he lied to you. I don't think your friend's safe."
"Hey, wait a minute. Wait a minute." He was three shades lighter, all the blood gone from under his olive skin. He turned his head a little sideways as though trying to get a new, clearer angle on me and what I was saying. His mouth wasn't young and hard anymore. It was younger than young and soft, like the mouth of a baby ready to cry. "What do you know about my woman?"
"I think she's dead. I want you to look. Then you can tell me if it's her."
I started walking again and he stumbled along after me, plucking at my sleeve and saying, "Wait. Wait."
We were at the car. I got out the keys and stuck the trunk key in the lock.
"Wait a minute," Nick said. "You're not going to tell me you got somebody in there. You're not going to tell me—"
I lifted the trunk lid.
"—you go around carrying bodies in the back of your car."
I untied the knots on the twine that held the groundsheet around her head while he rattled on about what kind of a person I was playing such rotten jokes.
"You're not going to tell me you got—"
I pulled aside the folds of rubberized cloth and revealed her face.
"Cara! Cara." First it was a shout, then it was a moan. He tried to go down on his knees and gather her in his arms. I threw my arms around him instead and backed him off three paces.
"Don't do that, for God's sake. You'll never forget it if you live to be a hundred."
He turned around and I let go. He stood there trembling. "I'll never forget it now," he said.
"That's her? That's your woman?"
He nodded his head. He said something very softly in a language I didn't understand.
"Your love?" I heard myself say, and he nodded again so I suppose I understood after all.
"You gave her the little book of poems?"
"Yes."
I quickly covered her up again, closed the trunk and locked it. I asked him if he wanted to go back across the street for a coffee or maybe he'd like to find a bar and have a shot of something. He said no. We went into the station instead. Simmons stuck his head out of the ticket window. He was smiling as though pleased to have been of help. He was about to say something but I shook my head and he disappeared.
"I'm sorry I had to do that," I said. "But you let me know you weren't going to believe a thing I said."
"Jackson told me Cara was safe. Did he kill her?"
"I don't know. There was an inquest. They brought in a verdict of death by misadventure." I didn't tell him that the man he knew as Jackson was the man I knew as Freeman and that he'd also been the coroner who'd helped bring down the verdict.
"Misadventure?" He said it as though he didn't know the meaning of the word.
"Didn't you read it in the papers or see it on television about the two people who fell off the Zephyr under the wheels?"
He shook his head. "We don't bother much with newspapers or television. What have they got to do with us?"
"I don't know how you can avoid them nowadays."
"That's what I've been telling the old ones. That's what Cara and me've been saying. These are modern times and things have changed. Why fight it? Why not use it? Why should we go around being different, looking different? Why shouldn't Cara wear pants like the gaje women? It even made it easier to work the games. Now, I don't know. Maybe the old ones are right. Maybe it's better we stay apart. I made a mistake. It's okay to clean the gaje. It's not okay to go into business with them. Cara and me have been punished."
"Listen to me," I said "I'm not going to say if it's right or wrong to follow or don't follow the customs of your people. Maybe it's a small thing, but for what it's worth, if your girlfriend wasn't dressed like a gaje woman, there'd never have been any mistake about who'd fallen under the train or how many'd been killed. It would've been cleared off the books as a tragic accident and everybody would've forgotten about it. But here I am trying to find out what happened to your woman. And you've got to help me."
What he had to say wouldn't have filled the space on a match cover.
Nick and his girlfriend lived with their families in a nice apartment in a nice building in a nice Denver neighborhood. They kept some of the old style and some of the new. The head of the family, Nick's uncle, decided which was to be which. No newspapers, no radio, no television, because they served the gaje world and, like Nick'd said, had nothing to do with gypsies. They played tapes and records on the latest equipment, though. Knew how to wash dishes in sand but cooked in a microwave when they weren't on the road. Traveled in trucks and campers most of the time, but took the jets to this place and that when off on a thieving sweep.
"Jackson got in touch with me through my uncle. He knew I was working the trains from Denver to Chicago."
"How did he know that and why did he pick you?"
"He knew my family from years ago when I was just a little kid. My family worked the circuses and carnivals for a while and he was an acrobat or something."
"So he asked you to do a job of stealing for him."
"At first I told him no," Nick said. "What kind of fool did he think I was, I said, stealing for somebody else.
"He said what it was he wanted stole wouldn't be worth anything to me. He showed me a thousand dollars and said he'd give it to me on the spot and another thousand after we did the job."
"For switching briefcases?"
"Jackson brought one to us. He said it looked exactly like the one the mark'd be carrying. He was right about that but he didn't know much more about it."
"How's that?"
"He didn't know a person, carrying a soft-sided satchel like that, every once in a while could stick it under his arm. They could feel that it's empty."
"So you put a newspaper in it."
"Took it out of the trash basket."
"And the switch went all right?"
"Oh, sure. Easier than we thought it would. Cara dressed like one of them tight-assed gaje women going to the office. Suit, shirt, and tie. Carried the briefcase in her arms against her chest. The mark comes walking down the aisle. Starts to cough. Sticks the satchel under hi
s armpit while he reaches for a handkerchief. I bump him and poke it through. It falls on the floor. Cara bends down and does the switch I shove it back in the mark's hands while she goes around him. The mark thanks me. I follow Cara down to the vestibule where she hands his satchel to me. She turns around and goes back the other way empty-handed. She's supposed to take her seat and get off in Denver. I use the toilet in the club car. I leave the briefcase by the sink."
"Where'd you get off?"
"I got off in Denver too."
"You didn't pull the emergency?"
"Why would I do that?"
"Then you were sitting in one of the cars when I came through making the announcement about the reason for the emergency stop? About the passenger falling under the wheels?"
"Where else would I have been?"
"When you didn't see your partner again, didn't you start wondering where she'd got to?"
"I wasn't supposed to see Cara after we pulled the switch. After a game like that you're not supposed to make any contact until you know your skirts are really clean."
"You didn't wonder if maybe it was your partner under the train?"
"You said it was a man you found along the tracks." He was almost shouting as though defending himself against me. As though I was accusing him of not taking care of the woman he loved. He was saying it wasn't his fault. But he felt it was his fault. I could tell it was running around his head. If he'd taken better care, he might have saved her from whatever sent her flying out into the rain and the dark to get battered and cut in half. At least he could have gathered up the pieces and taken her home.
I put my hand on his shoulder and he didn't shake it off.
"What could you know, kid?" I said. "A couple more questions. I don't like to keep at you, but if we're going to get the person who—"
"Go ahead," he interrupted, not wanting to hear me say it.