Two Trains Running

by Andrew Vachss

  “It’s still a puzzle, isn’t it, Beau,” she said, her tone making it clear she was pondering the situation.

  “A big one.”

  “So now you’re glad you’ve still got Lymon,” Cynthia said, smiling wistfully.

  * * *

  1959 October 06 Tuesday 18:50

  * * *

  “You had a fine old time, didn’t you, Big Brian?”

  “Didn’t I just, Mick! You don’t often run across a man who follows the fight game the way Seth does.”

  “The man at the guardhouse?”

  “Yeah. He got someone else to cover for him, and we just strolled the grounds, talking.”

  “And had a couple of cold ones?”

  “Sure did. Pretty decent, too. Although it’s not Guinness they brew over here, that’s for sure. I told Seth he’d have to come by sometime and I’ll draw him a real—”

  “You invited him to our place?”

  “Well . . . sure I did, Mickey. I thought you’d be pleased.”

  “I am, Brian. What did he say, when you asked him?”

  “He said he would. And I hope he does. He’d fit right in. With the fellows, I mean.”

  “Not like Lymon, hey?”

  “Lymon? He’s a bloody tout, isn’t he? Grassing on his own. Seth wouldn’t do that.”

  “You can tell?”

  “That man would step in front of a bullet for his chief, Mickey. Same as I would for you. I could see it in him, strong and clear.”

  “You saw the grounds, too, Brian?”

  “Well, I don’t know as I saw them all. That’s a huge spread Beaumont has got. Big enough for a man in training to do his roadwork and never go off the property. Did get a long look at the house, though. Looks like it could take a direct hit from a mortar and laugh it off, it does. Solid stone, all around.”

  “When we get back, you can draw us a map, Brian. It’s good work you did today.”

  “Aye, Mickey. And thanks. Did your own work go well?”

  “Well, I met the man. And I believe we took the measure of one another. But as for whether we have a deal, that I don’t know. We have to show him something first.”

  “But that part’s easy, isn’t it? Dioguardi already said he would—”

  “Starting tomorrow, we’ll just see about that, Big Brian,” Shalare said. He tapped the fingers of both his hands lightly on the dashboard, playing a song only he could hear.

  * * *

  1959 October 06 Tuesday 18:56

  * * *

  “Like I said, I came of age right in the middle of the Depression,” Sherman said to Ruth. “It was hard times.”

  Harder on some than others, Ruth thought, remembering. She was next to Sherman on the couch, hands clasped in her lap. Her burnt-cork eyes never left his face.

  “There wasn’t any work,” Sherman went on, “except the WPA stuff. Didn’t bother my father much—he’d been a drunk all his life, so he just stayed drunk. It was my mother who fed us.”

  It was me who fed us, Ruth thought. Only I wasn’t the mother, I was the child. The rented child.

  “My mother wasn’t a church person, but she had a sense of right and wrong that would have shamed a preacher. There were only two ways a man could go back then. Get on with the government, somehow. Or pick up the gun.”

  “So you became a policeman?”

  Sherman made a sound Ruth had never heard before, but instantly recognized. He’s calling home, she said to herself.

  “Not at first,” Sherman finally said, holding her soft brown eyes with his own pair of faded-denim blues. “The only way to become a cop in Locke City back then was . . . Well, it’s the same way it is today: you have to buy your job. Today, you can buy it with things other than money. If you know someone, someone political, I mean, you can go to them, make the right promises, and they’ll maybe take you on. But back then it was always done in cash.

  “It was all a crazy circle,” he said, nodding his head as if agreeing with some unseen person. “If you had enough money to buy a job, well, you didn’t need a job. Not a job as a cop, anyway. People didn’t just want that job for the paycheck, Ruth. There were always plenty of extra ways to make money. . . .”

  “I know,” she said, whisper-soft.

  “So I made . . . I guess you’d call it kind of a bargain. I knew there was only one way for me to get the money to become a cop. So I swore, if . . . He let me get away with it, I would be the most honest cop there ever was. I’d never steal another dime as long as I lived.”

  “So you did pick up the gun, but just one time, is that what you’re saying, Sherman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “Because I never told anybody else.”

  “Oh,” was all Ruth said. She felt as if a malicious nurse had just given her an injection of sadness. I get it now. Once you get past the dollar tricks in alleys, once you start dealing with a higher class of customer, they all have a story they need to tell.

  “It’s not that,” Sherman said, sharply.

  Ruth sat up as if she had just been slapped. Her cheeks darkened, but she didn’t say a word.

  “You’re not . . . Whatever you think you are, you’re not that to me,” Sherman told her. “I don’t have any need to tell my secrets, like going to confession. What I . . . trusted you with, what I come . . . used to come . . . to your place for, that’s nothing. I don’t mean it’s not a secret—sure it is—but it doesn’t tell you anything about me. This . . . what I’m saying, it does. I hope it does, anyway.”

  “I already knew,” Ruth said.

  “How could you? It was almost thirty years—”

  “I don’t mean about what you did to get the money to become a policeman, Sherman. I mean, I already knew you. I’m ashamed of myself. For what I was thinking before. I don’t know how you knew, but . . .”

  “I know you, Ruth. Like you say you know me. I don’t know how I know, or how you know. But . . . I want you to hear . . . what I have to say. It’s important to me.”

  “It’s important to me, too,” Ruth said.

  Sherman watched her eyes for a long moment, polygraphing. Ruth dropped her curtain, let him in. Sherman nodded slowly and heavily, as if taking a vow.

  “Remember what I said about my mother?” the big detective began. “Remember what I said about her shaming a preacher? Well, that’s the opposite—the reverse, really—of what happened. The preacher, in the church we used to go to, he shamed her. That sanctimonious dog stood up before everyone and denounced my mother. For the crime of feeding her child, he said she was going to burn in hellfire for all eternity.”

  “What could possibly have made him—?”

  “My mother went with men for money,” Sherman said, tonelessly. “It started when I was little. When my father wanted to bond me out. You know what that is?”

  “Yes,” Ruth said. Some children get sold to farmers, she thought. And some get sold to pimps.

  “My mother knew what that would mean. She and my father fought about it. I could hear every word. In that house, you always could. She told my father she was going out to get some money. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I knew it was a bad thing. My father didn’t say anything.”

  Sherman lowered his head, dropped his voice.

  “When my mother came back, it was real late. Almost morning. I remember my father calling her that word. ‘Whore.’ He whipped her. With his belt. Then he took the money she brought home.”

  “Filthy pig,” Ruth whispered.

  “No pig would do what he did,” Sherman said. “My mother kept me from being bonded out, but it cost her . . . everything.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “How do you know something did?” Sherman asked.

  “I just know, Sherman.”

  “He had an accident. Out in the barn. He was drunk. Must have tripped and fell down from the loft. Hit his head against an anvil. Right after that, he ran o
ff.”

  “Oh.”

  “That was when I was thirteen. I wanted to quit school, but my mother wouldn’t let me. I pleaded with her, but she wouldn’t budge, and I couldn’t go against her. You know what she told me, Ruth? She said she was already damned. I couldn’t save her; nobody could. But if I ever became a . . . bad person, then all her sacrifice would have been for nothing.”

  “You really loved her,” Ruth said.

  “I always will. My . . . I was going to say ‘friends,’ but that would be a lie . . . the kids I went to school with, they knew what my mother did. So I turned into a pretty good fighter. Everyone said I would end up in reform school, but we made them all eat crow at the end. My mother was so proud when I became a cop.”

  “Is she still—?”

  “She died a couple of weeks after I got sworn in,” Sherman said. “She’d been sick for years. It was like she was holding on, just waiting for that.”

  “Is that why you . . . ?”

  “Feel the way I do about you?” the big man said, meeting the challenge head-on. “No, Ruth. Listen, my mother never was a whore. I don’t care what people called her, or called what she did. She was a mother, protecting her child. My father was the whore, selling his honor and his name for a few dollars, then drinking up all the money because he couldn’t look himself in the mirror.

  “My father wasn’t a man,” the big detective said, “but my mother, she was a woman. A real woman. And so are you, Ruth. Understand?”

  “Yes,” Ruth said, between her tears.

  * * *

  1959 October 06 Tuesday 19:04

  * * *

  “Wow! Where did you get this jalopy?” Tussy said, as Dett held the door of the ’49 Ford open for her.

  “I just borrowed it,” he said. “From a guy I met. Actually, we traded. He had a big date, and he thought the Buick would help him impress the girl.”

  “And you don’t want to impress me anymore?” Tussy said, smiling.

  “I wish I could,” he answered. “Only I know you. And I know a car would never do the trick.”

  “Even after I got you to take me to the most expensive restaurant in town?”

  “Well, that was like . . . an adventure, right? It wasn’t how much it cost, it was just that you hadn’t done it before.”

  “Yes! And now this,” Tussy said. “I feel like a teenager. I mean, in a car like this—boy, those mufflers are loud—dressed like we are, going to the drive-in . . .” Her voice trailed away into the silence. “Do you feel like that, too? A little bit?”

  “No,” said Dett. “But I don’t look like it, either.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you do, Tussy. You look like you’re sixteen.”

  Tussy pulled a cigarette from her purse, put it in her mouth. Before Dett could react, she reached over and patted his jacket pocket, then extracted his little box of wooden matches. Christ! Dett thought, his mind on what else he was carrying. I didn’t expect that.

  “You know what?” Tussy said, thoughtfully, once she got her cigarette going. “If I was sixteen, and my folks were still . . . with me, I wouldn’t be going to any drive-in.”

  “Your father wouldn’t let you?”

  “I don’t think he would have. I never asked . . . never got the chance to ask him. A couple of boys asked me, when I was around fourteen, but I didn’t even dare to mention it. Dad would have hit the ceiling.”

  “Nice girls don’t go to drive-ins?”

  “I don’t think that was how he felt. He took us, and there were always plenty of girls there. But he never said anything, except . . .”

  “Except what?” Dett asked, as his eyes swept the mirrors for any disturbance in his visual field. He could not have explained what he was looking for, but the years had taught him to rely on his sense impressions, and the scanning habit was now so encoded he wasn’t aware he was doing it.

  “Well, he did say that nice girls didn’t wear skirts to a drive-in. I didn’t even know what he meant until I was older.”

  “And you’re still taking his advice,” Dett said, nodding at Tussy’s jeans.

  “Well, it’s not that,” she said, blushing in the darkness of the front seat. “It’s just more comfortable than a skirt. I should know: I have to wear one every day. But at least they’re nice and loose.”

  “The skirts?”

  “The waitress skirts. In some places, they make the girls wear tight ones. And you know what happens: men get all . . . grabby.”

  “Where you work?”

  “Oh, no. We get a very nice crowd. Families, mostly. Or couples, on dates. Now, my girlfriend—”

  “—Gloria?”

  “Yes!” she said, laughing softly. “Gloria used to work over at the Blue Moon Lounge. They made her wear these outfits that were just . . . scandalous, my mother would have called them. Gloria said, some nights, when she got home, she was too sore to sit down, from all the men pinching her.”

  “Is that why she quit?”

  “No. She was . . . Well, you have to understand Gloria. I’m not saying she liked strange men pinching her, but she would have been pretty annoyed if none of them even tried. I don’t mean she’s like a . . . loose woman, or anything, but she likes it when guys notice her.”

  “I’ll bet you don’t go out together much.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “I know girls like her. Gloria, I mean. It’s like you say, they’re not . . . sluts, but they want the attention. And, standing next to you, she wouldn’t get any.”

  “Oh, stop it! You don’t even know what she looks like.”

  “It wouldn’t matter.”

  “You make out like I’m Marilyn Monroe or something, Walker.”

  “You’re prettier than she is.”

  Tussy turned to face Dett’s profile, curling her legs onto the seat so she could move close despite the floor shift lever. “I know I’m not so gorgeous, okay? But I also know you’re not lying. I mean, you mean what you’re saying.”

  “You could be on one of those calendars,” Dett said, defensively, looking through the windshield. “You know, like they have in gas stations. I’ve seen plenty of those.”

  “You know, a man once asked me to.”

  “Be on a calendar?”

  “He sure did. Right in the diner. He was a professional photographer. With a business card and everything. He said I’d be perfect for . . . well, he said ‘glamour shots,’ but I figured out what he really meant.”

  “So you didn’t do it?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Those girls . . . in the calendars, I mean . . . they have their clothes on.”

  “I didn’t think he was talking about those kind of pictures, Walker.”

  “I don’t, either,” Dett said. “I just didn’t want you to think . . .”

  “What?”

  “That I was saying . . . you know.”

  “You are the strangest man, Walker Dett. That never even occurred to me. I knew all along what you meant. And it was very sweet.”

  Dett exhaled, without realizing he had been holding his breath. “Is up there where we turn off?” he asked.

  * * *

  1959 October 06 Tuesday 19:29

  * * *

  “You sure we can do this on the phone?” Dioguardi said.

  “And why not?” Shalare replied. “All I have to tell you is that I spoke with our friend, and he agreed that these petty business disputes are getting in the way of the bigger objective.”

  “So he’s going to play ball?”

  “I believe that he is. But, first, we have to make a little good-faith offering.”

  “What we talked about before?”

  “That. And all of that, mind you. The best way to prove you don’t want what another man has is to step away from it.”

  “I get it.”

  “A big step,” Shalare said. “Right out of his field of vision.”

  “I said, I get it,” Dio
guardi said, cold-voiced.

  “How long to make it happen?”

  “No later than tomorrow. There’s people out now, working. I have to wait until they come back to give them the word.”

  “That would be lovely, indeed,” Shalare said.

  * * *

  1959 October 06 Tuesday 19:34

  * * *

  “Silk’s not going to be around tonight?” Rufus said to Darryl.

  “I could say ‘no,’ brother, but that would be a guess. The man does come around, you know. And the nighttime’s his time.”

  “Who gets along with him best?”

  “Gets along? None of the men want anything to do with—”

  “This is a job, Darryl. Understand?”

  “If it’s a job, I’ll do it myself. I’ll take him over to the—”

  “Can’t be you, brother.”

  “Why not? All you need is for him to be someplace else, right? So, if he shows, I’ll just slide in and—”

  “I need you there tonight,” Rufus said. “There’s someone I need you to talk with. I’m going to get him, right now.”

  “This the man you don’t want Silk to see?”

  “Don’t want him to even know about. Now, who we got to babysit a pimp?”

  * * *

  1959 October 06 Tuesday 19:41

  * * *

  “Where would you like to park?” Dett asked, as he steered the Ford over the pebbled surface toward the giant screen.

  “Not too near the refreshment stand,” she said.

  “Okay,” Dett said, creeping along in first gear, “is over there too far to the side for you?”

  “No, it looks perfect.”

  Dett slid into the last spot in a left-side row, rolled down his window halfway, and attached the speaker. As he twirled the knob to make sure it was working, a dull orange Oldsmobile sedan went by, heading down front.

  “Would you like anything to eat?”