The Man Who Followed Women

by Bert Hitchens

  Ryerson studied Kernehan attentively. He seemed to be summing up the big frame, the handsome appearance, the dedicated intelligence; and the look in his eyes betrayed a conflict; he ought to like this efficient and willing cop of his. He ought to, and somehow he couldn’t. Perhaps it was too much like cultivating an affection for a machine.

  Kernehan went downstairs, and in the building lobby he stepped into a phone booth and dialed Lora’s office.

  She answered formally, expecting a business call; and then when she knew who it was, her tone grew cold and quiet. “How are you, Mike?”

  “Okay. I’m sorry about the date last night, it was a stakeout in the freight yards, and I couldn’t get out of it.”

  “Probably you enjoyed it,” she said quietly.

  “Let’s don’t—” He broke off. “Look, they’re sending me out of town, I won’t be back till late.”

  “I hadn’t planned to see you tonight, Mike.”

  “I wanted to have lunch again.”

  “Nor that, either.”

  He was suddenly stung, and his face felt hot. “Are you sore about something?”

  “Yes, I am angry. I wanted you to go with me to pick up Jimmy on Saturday. I wanted Jimmy to know that the man I’ve chosen to marry has faith in him, believes that he is a human being worth a little time and trouble.”

  “I told you yesterday—”

  “And of course you never change your mind.” Her tone was still quiet, but there was a growing raggedness in the way she breathed. “You’re like one of those big fast trains; you’re on a one-way track and you can’t and won’t get off. Right to the end. That’s you, Mike.”

  He knew he was asking for it. “The end of what?”

  “The end of us.”

  The phone was quiet. His palm was wet, holding the receiver; and the booth seemed airless and shut in. “Don’t say it, Lora.”

  “Good-by, Mike.” She hung up.

  He went out and headed for the elevators, the basement garage where he could check out a company car. He noticed the bright light from the street as he stood waiting. The night’s fog had burned away and the sun was out, sharp and hot for April, a touch of desert dryness in the air, even here in the cool empty marble-walled lobby. He had a sudden sense of the uniqueness of the day, the passing hours of sunlight; it was the twenty-first of April, and it would last just so long and wouldn’t come again. Night would shut down, bringing another fog. The dropping of time, minute by minute, would touch midnight, and then it would be done.

  He took a down elevator to the big basement garage, checked out a company car, drove up into the crowded street. He worked his way through traffic toward the freeway ramp. As fast as L.A. got a freeway open, it became jammed to the point of obsolescence. Kernehan was a watchful and skilful driver. He jockeyed his way into the lanes for the Santa Ana freeway from the downtown slot. The thin remainder of fog was being tainted into smog; he was suddenly glad to be getting out of town.

  All at once, as if the image of time had revolved in his mind, he was thinking of the past, remembering the night he had first met Lora.

  Six months? Nearer seven. Shortly after the university had opened in the fall and his roommates had given a party, a spaghetti-and-dago-red party, and he had found himself somehow quietly alone in the middle of a lot of college chatter. Who wanted cop talk? He had stood around with a drink in his hand, had had one brush with a blonde who had just discovered Proust and wanted to show off, and had begun to think of ducking out to a movie, when Lora had walked up. A dark-haired girl with a pony tail and leaf-green eyes that made him do a double-take, gawking. A small shell of silence had seemed to be folded around her, too, a shell like his own. He had answered her questions and asked a few of his own. She was a secretary. She was here because she knew a girl who’d been invited, a girl student.

  She had looked at the buzzing clique and asked, wonderingly, “Are we missing something?”

  “What have you read lately?” he demanded, trying to fix her in a pattern.

  “I like travel books.” She had looked straight at him. “Because I never go anywhere. Oh, I crossed the border to Tijuana once. Do you know anything about existentialism?”

  He had frowned into his wine. “I’m not sure. I think it has something to do with the fact that we’re all here on a very temporary basis. But I’d figured that out quite a while back. And I’m sure the idea wasn’t original, then.”

  “Probably you’re oversimplifying.”

  “I’m sure I must be.” And why, in that moment, in that first meeting, had there been this same fleeting taste of failure and loss, of time flying, of an inability to grasp and identify just what he wanted? The green eyes had been steady and appraising. Somewhere in them a smile, too. “Would you care to go to a movie?”

  She’d said, “I would love to.”

  So they had left the party and gone out into the autumn night, walked to a movie house and then decided not to go in, had gone over instead to Exposition Park and walked around near the museum and through the rose garden, the night air heavy with the scent of bloom and the sound of the city seeming far away.

  She had told him some more about herself. She was twenty-two. She could have gone to the university if she had wanted to; her parents had hoped she would be a schoolteacher. She lived at home. Her dad was a bookkeeper for an oil company, and her mother worked part-time as a nurse. She had a brother named Jimmy, and he was in a little trouble over a car. It was later, several dates later, that Kernehan had found out that Jimmy had stolen a car, wrecked it, and was in jail for it.

  She had let him take her home after the walk in the park, and she had kissed him good night at her door, a warm and affectionate embrace that had surprised him. He had presumed a bit, on the strength of it, their next date, and had got his face slapped.

  At some time between the kiss and the slap his feeling about this girl had centered and sharpened; the green eyes and the pony tail had taken on the endearing qualities of the familiarly dreamed-about. Also, now that he was sure of his limits, he wanted a repetition of the kiss. In short, Kernehan had fallen in love.

  He was still in love. Only now there was this thing about her brother and his own stony inability to care.

  He forced the memories from his mind, concentrated on getting out of L.A. alive in the freeway traffic.

  Under the noon sun, in the outskirts of Colton, he got out of the car and stretched briefly but gratefully. The place had the usual look of a cement works. Little stubby hills of gravel, a corrugated-iron elevator, tracks, some hopper cars both empty and filled, a rank of cement mixers minus their trucks, and over all a whitish coating of dust as if the place had been caught in a blizzard of dirty snow. Kernehan spotted a small office beside the towering elevator, walked over, and looked in through the door. He saw a couple of desks and some chairs and a phone. One of the chairs had a man in it. He was reading a comic book and picking his teeth. The remains of lunch, and a Thermos bottle, were on the desk in front of him.

  “Yes, sir,” he said around the toothpick. “What’ll it be?”

  “Are you the manager here?”

  “Everybody’s gone to lunch. Can I help you?”

  “My name’s Kernehan.” Kernehan took out his leather folder with its badge pinned inside and the I.D. “Railroad police. I came about the dead man in your hopper car.”

  The man put down the comic book. “Pleased to meet you.” He offered a hand across the desk. “I’m Farley. Assistant manager. Or head flunky. I’ve told all I know to the Colton police. Wasn’t much. Just that we found the dead man when we emptied gravel yesterday. He was in the bottom of the car, mashed pretty bad, might have fallen back when they started to load and then got smothered and crushed with the gravel on him.”

  Kernehan sat down and put his hat on the desk. “Did you figure this out for yourself?”

  Farley looked a little blank. “Well, we all talked it over. You know, when the cops got here, and we were siz
ing up how it could have happened.”

  “Where had the gravel come from?”

  “Sidewinder, it’s out in the desert, about forty miles. I don’t think there’s even a station there, just a spur and some loading equipment. The gravel outfit’s up in a canyon.”

  “Yes, I know the place. Isolated.” Kernehan took out cigarettes, offered the pack to Farley, lit both their smokes. “Suppose the man had been killed around here somewhere. After all, he had worked for us here in Colton Yards. Is there any way he could have been buried down in the gravel after the car had been loaded?”

  Farley smoked a minute or so, staring quietly out into the sunlight. “I don’t honestly see how. You wouldn’t be able to dig anything like a hole for him, he’d have to be right on top. You know what I mean? Gravel slides if you try to fool around in it. If you wanted him on the bottom you’d have to take most of the load out, put the man in, put the gravel back. Quite a job, without equipment.”

  “Are you sure the body was on the bottom of the car when it came in here?”

  “He was stuck to the bottom,” Farley said without looking squeamish. “Squashed and dried there. That’s how we found him.”

  “What was the position of the body? I mean, huddled down perhaps, as if he knew what was coming?”

  “No. Straightened out, face up. Cops said the back of his head had been crushed. As if he might almost have made it out of the hopper car, then been brushed back from the rim.”

  “I’ll have to check the autopsy report,” Kernehan said, thinking aloud.

  “Last time we found anything funny, it was a mutt,” Farley offered. “A dead dog.” He smiled a little under Kernehan’s stare of fixed interest. “He wasn’t buried, though. He’d just been tossed in.”

  “When was this?”

  “Oh, a month or so ago.”

  Kernehan’s principal feeling was the vaguely chilling one of being haunted.

  Chapter 6

  Haunted by dead dogs …

  Kernehan shook off the feeling and asked to be taken to the spot where the body had been discovered. Farley took him up to the unloading ramp. It was empty under the sun, all around them acres of cement dust threw the light back at them, and Kernehan suddenly felt hot and dirty. He also thought that the cement dust would rise and choke them under the slightest wind.

  “Nothing to see, really,” Farley said. “The car’s gone. Nothing in it anyway but him and the gravel.”

  “How was he dressed?”

  “Old army pants, looked like, and a blue shirt, maybe one he’d worn working for the railroad, and it hadn’t even been ironed. The collar was wrinkled and … oh, it looked as if he’d washed it out himself in some puddle. But then there was the watch he wore. I noticed that. My brother has one like it, and I know how much they cost. Plenty.”

  Kernehan felt a tickling in his nose, as if the dust were rising invisibly. “Any wallet? I.D.? Anything with a home address in it?”

  “I don’t think so. I think his pockets were bare.”

  He was right, as Kernehan found out at police headquarters.

  Kernehan talked to a detective. The police were working on the case, and they were no longer calling it an accident. The autopsy had shown that Hart Jennings had been dead when the gravel had poured in on him, and the crushed skull had not been the result of a fall backward into the hopper car. Hart Jennings had been beaten to death with something flat, metallic, and rusted, about the size of a tire iron.

  The doctor refused to try to pinpoint the time of death, except to estimate it as more than twenty-four hours from time of autopsy, and less than sixty. The dead man had eaten a meal of chili, beans, and tortillas shortly before death, but there was as yet no way of knowing the time or the place and so no anchor. Kernehan looked over the clothes, and the shoes, and they were as shabby as Farley had said. The stained clothing had a fine dust, or silt, in it that drifted into Kernehan’s palms, and he remembered the white dust all around the cement works.

  The watch crystal had been broken, the hands stopped at twelve minutes past two. Again as Farley had said, it was a very expensive watch.

  The police had talked to a woman who ran the boarding-house where Hart Jennings had lived while he had worked for the railroad in Colton. This interview had not been written up as yet; the detective told it directly to Kernehan. The woman at the boarding-house had described Jennings as an easygoing young fellow, free with his money, a little wild when he was drinking—which wasn’t too often. She had no idea where he had lived, or worked, in the months since he had left her house.

  The police had found no record of a family, a wife, or surviving relatives, if any. They hadn’t had time to check with other railroad employees who might have known Jennings. The detective thought Kernehan might help them out there, and Kernehan said he would; he was going to the yards on another matter, anyway.

  Homicide was not the usual chore of railroad bulls. They were company men; but in this case a former employee had turned up dead on railroad property. And though Ryerson hadn’t said so, keeping a hand in was taken for granted.

  Kernehan left police headquarters and drove out to Colton Yards. In the yard office he interviewed the trainmaster, a veteran of about forty years with the railroad, a stooped little man with steel-framed spectacles looped over clamshell ears. The trainmaster remembered Jennings. He hadn’t the kind remarks of the boarding-house keeper.

  “I got to feeling uneasy about him, a long time before we got rid of him. We had a whisky shipment broken into, three or four cases missing. He laid off on a drunk then, and I always thought he got one of those cases. It wasn’t like he’d plan the job, do the breaking in—but if somebody else was already at it, he’d join them. Like that.”

  “What was he canned for?”

  “Didn’t show up for the job too many times.”

  Kernehan made a mental note to check Jennings’s record in Personnel when he got back to L.A.

  “Any particular friends of his I could talk to now?”

  “Not any more. He ran around a lot with a man named Pethro. Around his age, a dark squatty kind of man. He’s gone, too. Left when Jennings did.”

  “Do you happen to know anything about Jennings’s family?”

  “Nope, not a thing.”

  “Do you know where Jennings worked and lived since he left the railroad?”

  Behind the “steel-rimmed lenses the old man’s eyes blinked and studied. “Seems I heard somebody say they’d seen him in Vermillion, in a beer joint. Maybe a month, six weeks ago. I guess he didn’t go too far away. My impression, he’d lived around here for quite a spell, was used to the country, and meant to stay.”

  “Grew up here?”

  The other man scratched a graying lock back off his brow. “I couldn’t say.”

  There seemed no other avenue to explore in regard to the dead man, at least for the present. Something more might be gained from the records in Personnel. It was possible, in Kernehan’s opinion, that Jennings had been living the life of a vagrant since being let out by the railroad. Many casual workers did so at intervals. They were a pretty carefree lot.

  Kernehan turned to the matter of the missing freight shipments. The trainmaster had already heard from Ryerson about the discovery of the cut seal on the carload of leather goods. He said, “Richie’s out in the yards now, checking cars—TVs and radios, tires, cigarettes, and whisky—anything easy to steal and sell.”

  “So far in this particular line of thefts, we haven’t missed any TVs or whisky,” Kernehan explained. “Tire losses have been rough, that’s their main item. Quite a lot of cigarettes. Some plastic and leather goods. Nothing breakable.” He found himself thinking about the last word; it had slipped out almost unconsciously. But it was true. What had been stolen had not been fragile goods. “I think I’ll ask Ryerson to send you another patrolman, and you can put him to work with Richie.”

  “I don’t believe the night patrolman has found any seals cut and stuck ba
ck,” the trainmaster said, “but of course he has the whole yard to patrol, and mostly he just flashes a light on a seal and if it looks okay he goes on.”

  “I’ll leave instructions with Richie, have the night patrolman check way bills and take a close look at anything like tires or cigarettes.”

  “Good idea.”

  Kernehan left the office, went out into the yards. He found Richie tramping a dusty track between two cuts of boxcars. Richie, the Colton investigator, was a short man with heavy shoulders, a thick neck, and a way of holding his head forward as if he were listening for something suspicious. Kernehan knew him for an experienced and conscientious cop. Richie came up, looking into Kernehan’s face, puffing his lips out in a silent whistle. “Just on time. I just found one. Come take a look.”

  He turned and led the way back to a car near the end of the cut, and rolled back the door. Inside next the opening was an empty space where some large corrugated cases were missing. Kernehan looked in; the labels on the cases beyond the vacant space were those of a well-known brand of cigarettes. He mentally filled in what was missing, the number of cases gone, and his face grew grim.

  Richie said, “It’s just like the carload of leather goods, the seal cut and then the wire stuck back in the ball—you wouldn’t know the car had been hit unless you yanked the seal.”

  “What about the door on the other side?”

  “It’s okay. Hasn’t been touched. This is a Southern Railroad seal, put on in North Carolina. We’re going to have to check the way bill and find out how much is gone, and then we’d better call Dyart in Vermillion and see if he checked this car when it went through there.”

  Kernehan went to the yard office to check the way bill, and came back. He and Richie climbed into the car and did some counting. Ten cases of cigarettes were gone, to the tune of around a thousand dollars.

  “Good day’s work,” Richie growled. He was looking for some indication the car might have been hit here in the yards, footprints outside or signs left in here, but there was nothing.

  “Where in the hell are they taking it all?” Kernehan wondered, looking out at the expanse of tracks, dusty earth, cuts of motionless cars, the offices in the distance under the bright sunlight. “They’re going to need a goddam warehouse if this keeps on.”