The Man Who Followed Women

by Bert Hitchens

  Farrel nodded. Ten years ago Mac had been in the office and Ryerson had laid it on the line—quit drinking or quit the job. And he’d quit the job. He had drifted down to watching. He’d been hurt in a drunk-driving accident and that hadn’t stopped him, but now it was stop dinking or die, and suddenly he’d been able to quit.

  “There was somebody inside, of course,” Mac went on. “That’s where we should have started.” He gave Farrel a glance from under his eyelids.

  “Sure, there’s somebody inside in this. In the Vermillion office.” He remembered Kernehan’s unwilling stare, not wanting to hear it. “Somebody’s tipping off the train consist, spotting cars for them. No other way it can be done.”

  “Get a man in there, then.”

  “You’ve got to work it two ways at once,” Farrel pointed out, “getting the thieves and the man inside at the same time. You grab the one in the office, the others run out. The best way to find the thieves is to find where they’re taking the stuff. This big, they’ve got a warehouse somewhere.”

  “Could be right here. I don’t know, though. Everything’s been pretty quiet lately. Some of the characters I used to notice have cleared out.”

  “Like who, for instance?”

  Mac shrugged against the pillow. “Oh, it’s just … just several ones I figured for small-timers aren’t here any more.”

  “Ever hear of one named Jennings?”

  “Him?” Mac showed signs of interest. “He got killed, I heard.”

  “Who’d you hear it from?”

  “A couple of truckers, down at the beer joint. They knew him, they’d drove with him, some outfit here in town.”

  “How about one named Pethro?”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen him here and there.”

  “You know where he is now?”

  “No. But his wife’s in town.”

  “See if you can find out where he is.”

  Mac sat up uneasily. “Dammit, you act like I’m still a cinder dick. I got no call to run around asking about Pethro. I’m like to get my head knocked off.”

  “Make out like you heard about a job for him.” Farrel stood up, went to the door, turned around. “If you’ve quit drinking, what were you doing in the beer joint?”

  “Buying a beer for the widow, what else?” Mac said indignantly. “By God, you better not start on me.”

  “Keep your shirt on.”

  Farrel said good-by and went out. He crossed the broken paving, looked around again. A kid of eighteen or nineteen in the wrecking yard next door was poking around under the hood of a stripped Buick, and he gave Farrel a long sizing-up look that said he smelled cop.

  Farrel strolled over to the steel-link fence and said, “You ever hear of a guy named Watkins? Used to live there.” He jerked a thumb back toward Mac’s place. “Wore glasses. Used a cane to get around.”

  “Never heard of him,” the kid said sharply.

  “How long has the old guy been there?”

  “I don’t know. I’m new here myself.”

  “I asked him about Watkins, and he claims Watkins never lived there.”

  The kid smirked as Farrel turned away, pleased because the cop was put out. It might be enough to cover Mac. Might not. The kid may have noticed how long Farrel had been inside, and wondered why he had stayed if Mac hadn’t been talking.

  Farrel drove a couple of blocks and saw the beer joint. It would have to be within walking distance for Mac; Mac had lost his driver’s license when he’d had his accident. Farrel parked and went in and had a couple of beers. The place was almost empty.

  He felt better with the beers under his belt. He chewed a stick of gum on the way back to the yards.

  Mr. Howery looked into the frozen-food compartment of his refrigerator. He made a distasteful mouth and shut it again. He went to the cupboard and examined the canned goods. Peas. Always peas. How many cans of canned peas had he eaten since his mother had died?

  He thought suddenly of her roast beef, crusted without and tender and pink inside, the baked potatoes, Waldorf salad, apple pie. His expression grew pinched. It was the first time that he had really missed her.

  Best to go out somewhere. A cafeteria.

  He went to the bedroom for his jacket and hat, and saw Uncle Sherman’s coat in the closet. It reminded him of his cowardly reluctance of the night before. He hadn’t been able, after all, to go right up to her and start acting a part, pretending to know something about the person she’d been intending to meet in the freight yards.

  Funny. He’d followed women for a year. This was the first one he had felt involved with, had wanted to know, had been curious about beyond the mere act of tagging along to see what would happen.

  He remembered his first sight of her. She had been standing at the counter writing the notice for the idiot board, and he had noticed her hair, the heavy silky quality of it, and the way it had slid and slipped as she moved her head.

  The memory, even now, had some strange impact.

  It occurred to Mr. Howery, with a great shock of surprise, that he might have fallen in love.

  He found himself at the dresser mirror, looking at his own face as if to catch some change in it, some remarkable altering of the features. He peered and squinted. His lips were chapped from being out in the fog, and a few whiskers of the peeping beard showed silver in the light; and that was all.

  The change was inward, though; and it was real. He had to hear her voice again, he had to find some means of getting to know her.

  Call up, then. Call up and pretend to be interested in those tires.

  He hurried to the phone, found the number, dialed, and waited. It rang five times, and the instant before the receiver went up, Mr. Howery knew that Margie herself wouldn’t be on the line.

  The man’s voice said, “Hello.”

  “Is Margie there?”

  “No, she ain’t.”

  “When will she be in?”

  “I don’t guess she will. She moved.”

  Some broken exclamation indicative of disaster must have escaped Howery’s lips, for after a moment of cautious waiting the other said, “Hey, you ain’t that guy she’s been expecting, are you?”

  “Y … yes. Yes!”

  “Well …” There was again hesitation, as if some warning had been passed on. “I got an address. In Colton. You know where Colton is, I guess?”

  “Yes, I know!” Mr. Howery’s palms were hot and moist.

  “Here it is … Tamarind Street, six hundred and eighty-six. She said you’d know the place when you heard it.”

  “I would? … I mean, yes, I see what she means … Tamarind.” He tried to grasp, commit it to memory, and control his surprise all at once. “And thanks so much.”

  “Welcome. Hope you find her okay. She sure was anxious.”

  There was a click. The conversation was finished.

  Chapter 10

  They spent the late afternoon working in the yards with Richie, not finding any cars that had been hit. Along about dinnertime Farrel excused himself and disappeared. Gone for another beer, Kernehan thought, then corrected himself. Farrel had gone for a pint to see him through the night’s stake-out.

  Kernehan ate in a diner, a sloppy meal topped off by a leathery wedge of pie. The coffee wasn’t too bad; he had two cups of it. It was the kind of meal he’d found everywhere, and he was beginning to wonder how the human stomach endured.

  Farrel showed up, smelling of cloves. They got into the car and took off eastward into the desert. The distances were purple, the long sandy valleys swept with smoky light. You could smell the sage, Kernehan noted. The tires hummed and the miles of highway dropped behind them.

  “There’s another passing track two miles this side,” Farrel said all at once. “I’ll take it, and you can have Sidewinder.”

  Kernehan, driving, frowned at the road ahead. “I thought we’d stick together. There’s more than one in this business, and they’re in it for a pretty nice take. It might not be a good ide
a to meet them alone.”

  “All we can do to start with is to find out what’s going on. You jump anybody this soon, you’ve spoiled it. Listen and watch. You got any idea how many sidings we got between here and the Colorado? You figured the nights we can stakeout without a nibble?”

  “You’d better keep out of sight, then.”

  “I’ll take the car,” Farrel said stubbornly. “I got to have me a place to sit. You’ll have the shed at Sidewinder. This other passing track, there’s nothing.”

  Kernehan didn’t want to argue with Farrel, but he said, “They’ll spot the car as sure as hell.”

  “No, there’s a kind of ditch, or draw there, as I remember. Piled up with brush. Some kind of old road, goes off into the hills. I’ll put the car down out of sight and wait in it till I hear a train pull into the passing track. Then I can get out and have a look around.”

  Kernehan disliked the sound of it, but there was no use getting Farrel sore. Farrel had made up his mind. Probably he hadn’t wanted this job and mostly hadn’t wanted Kernehan for his sidekick; he was a hard-bitten old cop, and Kernehan didn’t fit his ideas of what an investigator should look like. It was an attitude that Kernehan was completely familiar with, one that he’d had plenty of chances to correct as a marine sergeant.

  “Suit yourself,” Kernehan said shortly. “Why not?”

  By the time they reached the vacant sheds and corrals at Sidewinder, the sky to the east had darkened enough to show a few pale stars, and the scrubby hills to the north and northeast held black crevasses. Kernehan got out, and Farrel moved over behind the wheel. Kernehan looked in at him. “Take care of yourself.”

  Farrel grunted in derision.

  Kernehan went up the steps to the platform and stood there to watch Farrel turn the car and drive away. The empty distances held a vacuum-like stillness that settled around him as soon as the sound of the car had gone. He explored the place for something to sit down on. He found a wooden crate, one side caved in, propped against the inner wall of the long shed, and settled to wait.

  Kernehan hated stake-outs, hated the waiting and the boredom and the sense of useless waste when they proved profitless, as most of them did. It wasn’t too bad in town, though; you could break off for coffee or at least have something to listen to, if only distant traffic. This place had a world’s-end sort of feeling to it. Miles of nothing but creeping dusk and silence, the pattern of tracks, main lines, and sidings, laid out in shadowy steel, the smell of sun-baked wood and manured dust of the corrals, and an up-the-neck sort of prickle about what Farrel was doing. He lit a cigarette and smoked it, and watched the night settle in.

  His ear caught a faint vibration, and then from miles away he caught the swinging twinkle of a headlight in the east.

  He got up, went to the other end of the covered platform and dropped to the earth, went around back and stood there while the vibration grew greater. It was a big one, coming fast. He walked the length of the loading shed at the rear and had a look; it was a passenger streamliner, roaring up the shallow grade. He waited where he could see it pass, and in the lighted windows he saw people in brief flashes, bright against the dark. A sudden gush of loneliness welled in him, and he thought of Lora. Lora was somehow like those people in the train; she moved in warmth and light. And he was shut away from her.

  He shook it off and went around front and back up the steps to the crate where he could sit down. By now Farrel must be at the other passing track, in the car. With his pint. With his scorn for good-looking cinder dicks who kept their clothes neat because what you learned in the Marine Corps hung on, for a while at least; and the Marines were notoriously neat dressers. Farrel knew that, but he’d ignore it, just as he chose to ignore what Kernehan had said about sticking together on this particular job.

  In the hollow box of the shed Kernehan caught another approaching vibration, this one from the west. It rolled by without slackening. Kernehan hadn’t moved this time; a train headed east wouldn’t be what he wanted. He shut his eyes for a moment, opened them to find the dark suddenly thicker. All the far valleys had vanished into night; there were lots of stars overhead, a faint dry wind was rising. He shivered, then got up and walked back and forth on the platform, the planks echoing under his heels.

  The switch lights out by the passing track only seemed to accentuate the dark and the silence.

  Finally his ear caught the approach of another westbound train; he stopped walking, lit a new cigarette, waited with a sense of tension. The headlight came up the rise, slowing visibly, and he saw that the train was headed for the passing track.

  He could make out the figure of the man who dropped off the engine to throw the switch. The train swung into the siding, moving slowly. The head brakeman jumped off the engine with his lanterns, went quickly to the main track to guard against eastbound trains, until the rear of the freight had cleared the main line. The twinkling lanterns, the big headlight, were like ghostly stars and moon.

  He knew that when the caboose had cleared the main track the rear brakeman riding in it would throw the switch again. Then the train would wait.

  He put out the cigarette, stood close to the wall of the small office, listened.

  There was no sound except that of the Diesel.

  Kernehan thought, if anybody’d been on the cars, the time to jump would have been on the long upgrade below the passing track, when the train had slowed to a crawl.

  If. If they’d been on the train, hitting a car, where and how had they managed to whisk off the tires or cigarettes or whatever?

  Farrel should have stayed here, and we should be checking cars at this point, looking for cut seals. Kernehan had a sudden bitter hunch that the night was wasted. They wouldn’t see anything worth seeing until they pinpointed the area in which it was happening.

  He was folded on the crate, cold, half-asleep, when Farrel rolled up in the car. Farrel honked, and Kernehan stretched his stiffened body and stood up, went down the steps. Farrel said, “Say, I’ve got another idea, what we’d better do.” Then he proceeded to tell Kernehan what Kernehan had just figured out, about checking seals here and now. Kernehan was disgusted. Farrel said, “Let’s check the next freight and then pull out.”

  It was way past midnight. Kernehan decided that Farrel had killed his bottle, that’s why he was willing to call it a night. Or perhaps he was being unjust to the old boy.

  Kernehan crawled into the car and spent the next half hour or so fighting off the desire to sleep. A westbound freight pulled into the passing track at about one-fifteen. They took flashlights from the dash compartment, some extra seals just in case. Farrel cut around to the south side of the train, Kernehan staying on the north side next to the main line. The head brakeman spotted Kernehan, and he had to flash his I.D. under the lantern before getting to work. Then he went down the line, pulling on seals. The fifth car, he yanked and the seal came loose in his hand.

  He made a note of the seal number, the number of the car. Then he took out a new seal, ran the wire through the hasp and fastened it. He turned the flashlight here and there, noting some fresh marks on the side of the car by the door.

  They weren’t deep, though they were quite obvious in the light of the flash. More in the nature of smudges, rubbed abrasions on the wood, Kernehan thought. He went on to the next car, and the next—on down the line, and found nothing. He met Farrel at the end of the train. Farrel hadn’t found any cut seals. He was talking to the brakeman at the end of the caboose.

  Kernehan said, “I want to get to Colton ahead of this train.”

  Farrel gave him a quick look by light of the brakeman’s lantern. “Found something?”

  “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Farrel stopped by the car where Kernehan had found the seal cut, looked at the smudges by flashlight, and grunted as if something had been proved according to his suspicions. About that time they heard the eastbound passenger streamliner coming, and headed across tracks to where the car was parked.<
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  In Colton they parked by the yard offices and got out. Kernehan thought it was the grisliest hour possible, not quite dawn, cold, the air tainted by the smell of fog drifting in from the coast. They went across the street to a diner, had coffee, came back. By now the freight they’d checked at Sidewinder was pulling in. They were in luck in one respect—about a third of the train was due to be set out, cars for local consignees, and the car they were interested in was among these.

  When they had it open, Farrel turned his light inside and whistled through his teeth. Tires were packed in, the inter-lock method, and there seemed a room-sized space here by the door where the shipment had been raided. Kernehan licked his lips. “Brother.”

  Farrel said, “They made money tonight.” Instead of showing further interest in the load, though, he climbed up the ladder to the top of the car, and Kernehan could see him up there in the dark, shining the light here and there, finally squatting at the catwalk about the middle of the car, above the door. Kernehan climbed up after him. Farrel was kneeling on the roof. “Look at this.” In the light of the flash Kernehan saw some fresh scars on the wood at the edge of the catwalk. Something had been pressed or clamped here, it seemed, and had marked the plank and splintered it a little. “It’s the one way they could be doing it,” Farrel said. “They’re not angels or birds, they can’t be flying alongside and opening the door. They’re hanging from up top by a rope ladder.”

  “Then they damned well must be acrobats,” Kernehan growled.

  “Just nervy. Nervy, and interested in the dough, which is getting real good by now. The amount of tires they got out tonight would run, I’d say, over a thousand. A thousand bucks every other night or so will buy some pretty high living.”

  They climbed down again, and Kernehan shut and resealed the door, making a record of the new seal number. “We’ve got one thing out of the way,” he said to Farrel. “But we still don’t know where the stuff is going. They’re able to handle quite a lot. What in hell do they do with all those tires in the desert between the River and Sidewinder?”