by Eric
"What was he doing on the Chicago Zephyr?"
"He lived in Chicago. He traveled a lot. But almost always east. To Detroit, Pittsburgh, Scranton. Smokestack cities. Sometimes to New York, Boston, or D.C. We figure he was an expert who vetted industrial intelligence gathered by other agents. That's where most of the action is these days. Or he could have been nothing more than a courier."
"He was on his way west."
"That's why surveillance was a little more than casual this time."
"Maybe he was taking a vacation."
"Why not? Spies, government agents, and cops do the same things everybody else does."
"The surveillance. How much more than casual?"
"I don't mean that he had an army tailing him. Just one operator. On his other trips we just saw him aboard and made certain he arrived on time at his destination. This time we put a man in his pocket."
"A new man?"
"Why do you say that?"
"He didn't do a very good job," I said.
"No, not a new man. A good man with plenty of experience."
"So how did he let it happen? How did he let the hare fall or get pushed off the train? How come he didn't at least know about it?"
"Well, he did know about it."
"Is he the one who pulled the emergency?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"He was under instructions not to let our presence be known."
"Was he CI-three?"
"What do you know about CI-three?" Trask said. If he hadn't been sitting on the tombstone, I expect he would've taken a step away from me as though believing I was about to pull a knife or gun on him.
"For God's sake, Trask, the way you people act. Do you shred your laundry list? CI-three's common knowledge. Half the schoolboys in America say, 'You be SMERSH and I'll be CI-three' when they play spy and counterspy."
He got off the tombstone, smiling in his sleepy way, and I knew he wasn't taking my kidding too well.
"A friend of mine read about CI-three in a magazine," I said quickly. "Don't take it so goddamn serious."
"Well, it is serious, Hatch. Don't you know it's serious? Foreign agents are sucking up the industrial secrets and technology of this country like a bunch of vampire bats. Sucking the country dry. Keeping the bastards away from military secrets is the smallest part of it."
"Are you CI-three?"
He grinned. "I come and go, come and go."
"If you wanted to stay out of it when those bodies took the tumble out of the train, why are you getting into it, now?"
"We didn't expect anybody to go as far as you've gone, Hatch. We expected it'd just be chalked up as another accident along the right of way. That somebody'd finally come to figure that two lovers were playing grab-ass in the deadhead car and didn't notice the door was open. But them getting chopped up the way they did kept you interested, didn't it?"
"And I'm still interested. How much of what happened did your operator see?"
"Wouldn't you say I've already given you more than you expected or deserve? Where's the tit for tat?"
"Do your people know that your Benjamin May was carrying a gate pass to some company in his wallet?"
"How did you find that out?"
"I tracked down the dead woman's boyfriend. They were both gypsies. Did you know that?"
"Oh, we got that far."
I didn't think they had.
"Well, she passed the wallet to her partner after she picked May's pocket."
"He showed you the wallet and its contents?"
"No. He said he got rid of everything but the cash that was in it."
"Didn't try to sell the credit cards?"
"Sold the wallet, credit cards, driver's license, gate pass, and all."
"You don't happen to know who bought it?"
"Sure I know who bought it. A guy calling himself Jackson."
"Calling himself?"
"He also calls himself Howard Freeman—"
Trask's eyes opened as wide as I ever saw them open.
"—and he's the coroner of Washington County, Colorado. Now you tell me what you know about Howard Freeman."
"What makes you think—"
"For God's sake, Trask, I'm not the enemy."
"That's what you say, but damn if I don't go crazy trying to figure out sometimes who's the enemy and who's not."
"Like Howard Freeman?"
"Freeman was an agent."
"For who?"
"For us. He worked for the agency. He was separated about two years ago."
"For cause? Was he a rogue agent? Was he dealing secrets?"
"Nothing like that. He was just an overachiever who was more than a little foolish. You know about that agent working out of D.C. got himself all tangled up with some Russian emigre woman sometime back? Got her into bed while she was thinking she was getting him into bed? Lay there night after night screwing and trying to worm secrets out of one another? All the time the CIA has a tab on his ass?"
"I seem to remember something like that flashing by on the late news."
"Goddamn life's turning into a bunch of flip cards," Trask said. "Well, that bugger, without telling anybody, set up the whole operation on his own. Wanted to stick in his thumb, pull out a plum, and say, 'Look what a good boy am I.' Well, Howard Freeman tried to pull the same thing locally."
"Have we got Russian emigre lady spies running around the prairie?"
"I told you the action was with industrial secrets," Trask said. "Between Denver and Chicago there must be fifty companies with government contracts that hardly anybody knows about. Everything from chemical and metallurgy firms to ceramic engineering and computer companies. Freeman thought he'd found himself a foreign agent. It turned out she was a looney tune who liked to fuck a lot and play let's pretend. He was let go without prejudice because they figured he was just a romantic—you know he ran away and joined the circus once?—without any real harm in him. He begged for another chance and said he'd follow orders like a good soldier from then on but the whole thing had been a big embarrassment to the agency and they separated him anyway. Now it looks like maybe that wasn't such a good idea."
"You think Freeman took what he learned working for the agency and went into business for himself?"
"It's certainly starting to look that way."
"You know, Trask, this is a lot more than I expected you to give me."
"Well, Janosky and I talked it over—"
"I figured."
"—and decided we should be generous to an old friend and colleague."
"Am I going to be a colleague?"
"We'd like you to be. We'd like you to help us get the goods on Freeman if there're any goods to get."
"What did you have in mind?"
"Well, we'll just have to think on that, Jake, and if you'd be so kind, why don't you think on it too?"
TWENTY-EIGHT
Ping-Pong ball. George had called me a Ping-Pong ball. I felt more like a chicken running around with his head cut off. If you've never actually seen such a thing, it's hard to imagine just how awful it can be.
I'd said a quick good-bye to Harriet, dropped off the rental car, and made it to the station in time to catch the nine o'clock to Akron. I walked the train, saying hello to Halt and Billy and Laws, then my legs gave up on me and I took a seat.
Halt sat down with me outside of Fort Morgan.
He put his shoulder satchel on his lap and a woman's brown leather pocketbook on top of it.
"You taken to carrying a purse, Laws?" I said.
"Picked it up under a seat back there. Didn't belong to anybody in the car. Probably left behind some other time and the cleaners missed it when they went on through. I'll just turn it in to lost and found."
"What do women carry in their pocketbooks nowadays?" I said.
"How should I know?"
"Well, let's take a look. Got to find out who it belongs to anyway. If she doesn't come looking for it, lost and found could give her a c
all."
He pulled things out one by one and laid them on the seat between us. It made quite a pile after a while.
"Comb. Lipstick. Compact. Toothbrush," Laws said. "Dental floss. Change purse. Wallet."
I nodded off while he was going through the inventory.
When I came to, we were pulling into Akron. It was almost 11:00 P.M. I stood there wondering if it was too late to call Maggie Wister. I called George instead and said I wanted to talk if he wanted to talk. He said come right on over or should he come and get me. I said I'd walk.
The same orange cat picked me up, looked at me with his knowing eyes, and left me at a corner.
I saw the light on in the kitchen when I reached George's house so I went and knocked on the side door. Bess let me in.
George was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee.
"That stuff will keep you awake," I said.
"I want to be kept awake," be said.
"Oh, then, if it's no trouble, I'll have a cup and stay awake too."
"Help yourself," Bess said, sitting down as though wearied by her pain.
"Why don't you go to bed?" I said.
"I will, in a little while."
"Everything all right in Denver?" George said.
"G-men were at the morgue to officially take over the case."
"They were here too."
"I know. Trask told me they wanted to make sure you didn't miss the message."
"That Janosky," George said, and made a sour face.
"That was one of the ones gave me my orders to mind my own business. Then the other one, Barry Trask, a man I've known for some time from Omaha, fed me some information. Told me the man who was killed under the wheels was a foreign agent."
"Now, why would he do that?"
"Because he wants me to help him put the bee on Howard Freeman."
"You'll have to run that train by me one more time," George said, hunching nearer.
"Why, for heaven's sake," Bess exclaimed, "Howard lives right here in Akron. He shops at the same stores. He's the coroner."
"Well, let me tell you, Bess," I said, and proceeded to lay out my surmises on the table.
I told them how Freeman had been so hard to raise because he said he was out to the barn with a sick cow, except he had a farm that didn't show hide nor hair, nor sign nor sound, of any cattle, even though he'd told me a story lately about not using one barn but another. "I've got a feeling that if we go over to his farm we won't find any cows, sick or otherwise, in that barn near the house."
I went on to say that Freeman had claimed he couldn't get near the train because the bridge across the stream on the vehicular road wasn't safe, and there was no other way to get there. But there was another road, a fire road, along the ridge, paralleling the track.
"It's more than possible that a man wouldn't think of a fire road as a way of getting anywhere in a storm like the one we were having that night," George said.
"I'll give you that. What I'm saying is that it's a road that could've been used to get from the train to Akron if someone pulled the emergency right at the spot where it was pulled and got off the train."
"That'd mean somebody'd have to have a vehicle waiting."
"That's right."
"They'd have had to know that they were going to get off the train at that spot. That they meant to get off."
I nodded and laid out the next sequence. How Freeman had risked a quarrel with George over searching the body while Freeman was there to see. How later on he'd asked me if anything else had been found when Bosley did the autopsy and then how the change was stolen from the envelope in George's office.
"Well, there goes your theory up in smoke," George said. "If Freeman was standing right there going through their possessions with us, why would he have to take the trouble to break in and steal a handful of change later on?"
I pulled my handkerchief out of my pocket and untied the corner one more time. I laid the nickel on the table. It sat there giving off an oily sheen. "Maybe because he didn't know what he was looking for the first time. Then he thought it over and figured, there was more than one way to carry information than on film or on a piece of paper."
George gave his little grunt that said he wasn't buying yet, but was still willing to listen to the rest of the pitch.
I mentioned that Freeman had asked me one more time about what might have been found on the body after the rest of the woman was found.
Then I told him about the apparition Jim Tiptree and Halt Ennery had seen waving what looked like a sort of a cross made of metal around and how I'd found the metal detector in Freeman's barn.
Then I told him how I saw Freeman buying a wallet from the gypsy kid.
"There's something you can just go up and confront Howard with," Bess said.
"And he looks us in the eye and says he was over to McCook for this reason or that, stopped into a diner for a cup of coffee. Some peddler sells him a snakeskin wallet. If the gypsy says otherwise, Freeman looks him in the eye and calls him a liar. Who's anybody going to believe, a gypsy or a county official, duly elected?"
George looked at me like he was studying my nose. "You've got a powerful collection of speculations," he said. "But the meeting with the gypsy's the strongest thing you've got, and with a little effort, that can be explained away. We really don't know much of anything. We're just speculating. Not even that. More like gossiping."
"That's not all about Howard Freeman," I said, and went on to give them chapter and verse about his career in the FBI.
When they'd exclaimed sufficiently about that, I reminded them of Trask's offer for me to help the FBI get the goods on Freeman.
"One more thing," I said.
George looked at me, frowning like an old boar.
"Somebody's got to go out on that mountain right of way again."
"What the hell for?"
"Bess said something about it, but we just let it breeze by."
"What's that?"
"The girl's purse. She was wearing tailored slacks and a jacket with just one little pocket. Her purse should be out there on the slopes. If it's not . . ."
"If it's not?" George said, too impatient to wait for me to drop the shoe.
"Then it's something we're just going to have to invent and say we found out there."
A car roared into the backyard. George was on his feet and at the window and I was right behind him.
Dan Crack came tumbling out of the cruiser, moving faster than I thought he could. George was through the mud room and had the door open before his deputy got his foot on the first step. I stood in the doorway of the kitchen while Crack gasped out the news. "I just found Annie McMonigle huddled up in the doorway back of the office. She's dead."
TWENTY-NINE
Annie was curled up in the doorway like Crack'd said. And sad to say, she reminded me of a shaggy old hound lying there, just as Bess had feared.
George and I squatted down and gently pulled aside the layers of sweaters and scarves loosely covering her neck and face.
"I uncovered her a little looking for a pulse," Crack said. "But I put her clothes back pretty much like they were."
"You did all right, Dan," George said, standing up. He stood there looking down at her, a sad expression on his plain Scots face, the nearest thing to mourning I expect he'd ever show until the time, God forbid, when and if Bess was taken from him. "What the hell was she doing sleeping in doorways in weather like this? She had a house."
"I guess she didn't like it much," Crack said.
"She had plenty of warm places to sleep when the weather got cold. Plenty of cellars and furnace rooms and sheds." George sounded angry. I guess he was angry, a little, at Annie for living her life and dying her death in such a stubborn, independent way.
"Couldn't we lift her up off the cold ground?" Bes said.
"Unlock the door, Dan," George said.
"It's open." Crack opened the door as George and I stooped down to pick up Annie. Rigor
mortis hadn't set in, despite the cold, and we were able to straighten her out before we lifted her up and carried her into the office where we laid her on the couch.
Bess set a pillow from the couch under Annie's head and folded her hands on her breast. Then she went to get a throw blanket from a cabinet.
Annie's mouth had a little lipstick on it and her cheeks, a little rouge. She'd painted her fingernails. A few were broken. They peeked out of her fingerless wool gloves like peeled twigs. She hadn't done a very good job but I wondered why she'd bothered to do it at all. A piece of nail was snagged in the wool of her topmost sweater. I picked it out and stuck it in my pocket.
"You ever see Annie gaudy herself up like this before?" I said.
"Women like to feel pretty every now and then, no matter what their age," Bess said as she put the cover over Annie. She didn't cover her face, though. Annie's eyes were closed and she looked like she was sleeping.
"I'm here," Freeman said as he walked through the door.
George had called him from the house saying,
"We'll do everything by the books, Freeman. Just like you like it."
Freeman took off his gloves and went to kneel beside Annie.
"Not unexpected, is it?" he said. "Could have happened any day."
Everybody uh-huhed. What else was there to say?
Freeman was fiddling around Annie's neck. "Only thing is . . ." I could hear it coming. "She didn't die natural. Somebody broke her neck."
Freeman stood up. George and Crack knelt down to have a look.
Freeman had a distressed look on his pudding face.
I stood there looking at his face for signs of guilt.
But what reason would Freeman—what reason would anybody—have for killing old Annie?
"What are you staring at?" Freeman asked.
"Sorry. Just thinking."
"Oh? How's that?"
"We found out who the young woman was."
"You did?"
"Oh, yes. She was a gypsy pickpocket who worked the trains and platforms between Chicago and Denver."
"That's something."