The Man Who Followed Women

by Bert Hitchens

  “Nope. Somebody called up here after she’d gone. Might of been him. I don’t know.”

  Again Kernehan was aware of Roff’s uneasy caution, as if the old man were trying to conform to some standard of behavior, or was checking everything he said against some instructions left by Margie DeWitt. Probably the latter, Kernehan thought. Roff was convinced of the girl’s honesty and seemed to feel protective toward her.

  When the sergeant from Burglary Detail arrived, he and Kernehan made out a receipt for the tires, gave it to Roff, who seemed more relieved now than anything else to have them taken away. Kernehan drove downtown, following the L.A.P.D. car, and signed the tires in at the Property Room. Then he went to a public phone booth and looked up the Bonnie Brae cafe offices—there were six or eight of these scattered between the downtown area and Hollywood, all of them decorated with a Scotch motif, the signs outside all showing a big bagpiper in kilts. The personnel office gave him little information, though—simply Margie DeWitt’s home address, that of Roff’s boardinghouse, and the date she’d left their employment, three days before. He did find out which Bonnie Brae she’d worked at, on Sixth Street just past Figueroa. He drove out there.

  The big bagpiper hung over the doorway, blinking with neon, and a subdued Scottish tune played off a record somewhere, no squealing of bagpipes involved, Kernehan noted. He went inside. There was a lot of dark wood paneling, tartan wallpaper, and a great gray mural of what would pass for a moor. The hostess came forward, a skinny girl in a black silk dress, purple lipstick, hair pulled back into a chignon—fashionable, Kernehan realized, contrasting her suddenly and without intending to, with Lora’s genuine approachableness. He flashed the I.D., and she widened her eyes over it and moved back a trifle as if he might carry some contamination. “I’d like some information, whatever you can give, about a girl who worked here, Margie DeWitt.”

  “Margie? She isn’t here any more. Has she done something?”

  “Just a routine inquiry.”

  The hostess looked around as if searching for a place to get Kernehan out of sight. Under a rug, perhaps. “We might sit down, and I’ll try to remember what you want. I guess you know where she lived?”

  “Yes, I’ve talked to her landlord. She’s moved.”

  She led him to a rear booth, and had him sit opposite, had a waitress bring them coffee. Kernehan realized that she was trying to make him look like a casual customer, concealing the odium of cophood.

  “We’re very careful, I mean Personnel is very careful, to hire the very best girls, the very highest type girls, who apply,” said the hostess, trying to sip the coffee without marring the purple lips. “We would all be very much shocked if Margie turned out to be in some kind of … ah … trouble.” She looked around to see if the other customers were staring at them.

  “We check out dozens of people a day, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re in any trouble,” Kernehan assured her. “We would like to talk to Miss DeWitt if we could locate her.”

  “And she isn’t at home?”

  “She gave up her room at the boardinghouse.”

  The purple lips were parted a little. “Suddenly?”

  “She didn’t leave a forwarding address, is all.”

  “I didn’t get very well acquainted with Margie. None of us did,” she said cautiously. “She did her work well, she was prompt and neat. She didn’t always … ah … dress quite as meticulously as she might. Of course the uniform took care of that, while she was on the job; I’m talking about her street clothes.”

  “I see.”

  “The only thing I ever learned about Margie”—she paused as if considering whether to part with this—“I learned by overhearing a talk she had with another girl. This other girl came in as a replacement, a temporary replacement for one of our regular waitresses, and she didn’t last. She wasn’t suitable at all for permanent employment. But Margie kind of took to her, was friendly with her. They were … alike, somehow. Both kind of—No, the word isn’t shabby. Just not … not quite up to snuff. They were both like that, and then I heard Margie talking to her, and it turned out they were both from some small town, a place near the mountains in central California. Bishop.”

  How nicely it fitted, Kernehan told himself, refusing to believe it. And still, if those tires came out of the cars that had been hit between Sidewinder and the River, there had to be a connection between the girl and some of the gang. It could be Bishop; she could have known Jennings or Pethro.

  It was fantastic. While he took in its fantasticness and his own unbelievable cleverness, Kernehan studied the hostess’s purple lips. In spite of her care the lipstick had run, had formed little spider-lines above and below her mouth. There were even traces on her teeth.

  “Does that help, that little scrap?”

  “It may help a lot.” He thanked her for the coffee and went out.

  Chapter 12

  He phoned Pete at the office, and Pete promised to get in touch at once with the police in Bishop and find out what he could about Margie DeWitt, whether there was any connection up there between her and Jennings and Pethro, and if any of the three had a record with the Bishop police. Kernehan also asked Pete to call Dyart in Vermillion and see if Dyart had any suggestions about where he should start tomorrow, any junk yards or used-auto supply dealers who seemed to be on the shady side.

  Kernehan told Pete he would call back later and check.

  “I thought you’d be home asleep,” Pete said. “Wait a minute. You know, about those dead dogs in New Canyon Yards? They’ve got another one, and I’ve heard from L.A.P.D., somebody you talked to there. A woman in Altadena has reported her poodle stolen. Wasn’t one of the dead mutts a poodle?”

  Kernehan had almost forgotten about the dead dogs, the indignant old car-knocker who had buried two of them, all of this which had led him into the original stake-out and latching onto Howery. “I’ll call L.A.P.D. and see what they’ve got. Thanks, Pete.”

  But brief investigation revealed that the woman in Altadena had missed her dog only early this morning, when she had let him out to go to the bathroom—as she had put it, according to the L.A.P.D. man—and he hadn’t come back to his breakfast.

  “The poodle we found was dead last week. Thanks anyway. Let me know if you get anything more.” Kernehan left the phone booth, got back in his car in the parking lot of the Bonnie Brae, and headed for New Canyon Yards. The car-knocker, Lizt, was sitting in his shanty taking a break, drinking coffee from a vacuum bottle and eating a doughnut. He finished the doughnut and coffee quickly, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, wiped the back of his hand on the thigh of the overalls, slapped his cap on his head, and took Kernehan off over toward the gate to the main-line tracks.

  “I ain’t going to clean it up. I buried them others, I called the pound to come get the last one. This one’ll take a broom, and then a bucket and mop.”

  They went in through the gate. The remains of the dismembered dog were ground into, and strewn on, about twenty feet of track. The head lay intact, tossed into a greasy patch of grass; it had been a big black and white dog with long ears. Part hound, Kernehan thought.

  Lizt sniffled, rubbed a finger under his nose. “I’ll bet it was What they was trying to do all the time. That first one, that white poodle, I found him before the train hit him. The other two, they brought them in and didn’t get all the way, and something scared them off.”

  It was exactly what Kernehan had been thinking.

  “You think it might be some of them juveniles?” Lizt asked.

  “Probably.”

  “What for they want a train to run over a dead dog?”

  “Damned if I know.” What did any of them want? What did a kid like Lora’s brother want, stealing a car and wrecking it, knowing he’d be caught and that his father and mother and sister would all be involved in the theft, the punishment, and the shame that went with it? What made them the way they were, without conscience or restraint, without pity, or under
standing? “Anyway, they’ve got what they wanted. A mess. Maybe they won’t come back.”

  “I almost feel like waiting here myself all night,” Lizt said. “Get my big hammer and just wait.”

  “Well, it’s not your job to clean it up, anyway,” Kernehan told him. “I’ll call the Division Engineer’s office, they’ll send a section hand to do it.”

  “Flies already gathering,” Lizt complained. “They better make it snappy.”

  Kernehan went over the ground carefully but found nothing to give a clue to the culprit or culprits. But more than one had been in on it, he made a private bet to himself. Two or three, having their kicks. Then he walked on down the tracks to the shanty and the overpass, remembering how he had first found traces there of a man and woman, the man having climbed the bank on the other side of the tracks, the woman having waited near the shanty and the stack of ties.

  He could still see traces of what he now figured was Howery’s progress up the side of the cut, the weeds dislodged and the earth gouged by sliding footmarks. The girl—he was convinced it had been Margie DeWitt—had waited here for some time, a damned funny place for a woman. Her footprints were gone now, blown away on the dust, but he remembered the number of them and the impression he had received of a long, impatient vigil.

  With Howery across, up there under the abutments of the overpass, she had stood here in the foggy night. Suddenly Kernehan had a hunch as to what must have happened. Howery had hidden from her, up there in his perch. But something must have scared him, set him climbing at a frantic rate; and Kernehan thought, it must have been a train coming.

  A train had been approaching, maybe the one the girl had been waiting for, and Howery had figured she would see him in the glow of its headlight.

  He had clawed his way up to the deep dark under the overpass, had sheltered there while the train went by. He had spent enough time up there to tramp out a little shelf for himself; Kernehan thought, Howery must have been a kind of prisoner, waiting until she had left before he could come down again. Watching and listening. The train had gone by, but Howery had stayed—which meant that the girl had stayed. There was only one logical reason she’d be loitering here in the dark near the overpass. She had been waiting for someone to drop off a train to meet her.

  With a little more evidence at hand now, Kernehan would have been justified in putting out an all-points bulletin for her. If Howery would only admit that she had been the woman he had followed into the yards, if they could prove that the tires she had left at Roff’s had been stolen from a railroad shipment—at this point Kernehan was mentally kicking himself for not going right in after her at her home, two nights ago. She might have been co-operative—if she was really as honest as her landlord thought.

  He used a phone in the yard offices to report the mess on the tracks to the Division Engineer, and then called Pete. Pete had not been able to run down the tire serial numbers yet, but he had talked to Dyart in Vermillion, and Dyart had said that as far as he knew every junk yard and used-car supply dealer in Vermillion was clean as angels.

  Kernehan drove home and packed for the trip to Vermillion. He might be over there several days. He had a choice of driving over there tonight or of waiting until early morning. It was a four- to five-hour drive, depending on traffic.

  He looked at the clock. It was past five-thirty. Lora should be home by now. Without any preplanning he walked over to the phone, lifted the receiver, and dialed her number at home. Her dad answered. “Yeah, Mike, she’s here. I’ll get her.” The tone was warm and friendly, so Kernehan judged that Lora hadn’t told her folks anything about their disagreement over her brother.

  “Hello, Mike.”

  “Hello. How have you been?”

  “Fine. And you?”

  “Okay. Have you had dinner yet?”

  “Dad and Mother and I were going out to eat. A cafeteria, I guess. Mom’s been down with a virus most of the week, and I’m too beat to cook. Or maybe we’re just lazy.” There was a drawn-out moment of silence. “Do you want to come along?”

  Kernehan was tempted; he thought, I ought to take her up on it. I like her mother and dad, I ought to go along and play up to them and make out like I’m bucking for a spot in the family. I could pretend that I’d been planning to go along when they went to get Jimmy out of stir, only this thing in Vermillion has come up, so I can’t. I could make quite a production out of it. I might even pull the wool over Lora’s eyes.

  Only, I can’t.

  He said, “No, I won’t be able to join you. I’m driving over to Vermillion. I’ll be there a day or so, I just wanted you to know I’ll be out of town.”

  “It came up nicely, didn’t it?”

  “I wasn’t going with you to meet your brother, anyway. Do you know what I think, Lora? I think the kid will come home and lay low, he’ll be real quiet and well behaved for a couple of weeks—maybe even a month. And then the roof’s going to fall in. You might prepare your folks for it.”

  There was a moment of silence, and then she hung up.

  Something seemed to jump blindingly through Kernehan’s body, and then a heavy, knotted, convulsed feeling came, so grinding that he was almost forced to bend over, gripping himself across the waist. He got the phone in its stand and got himself into a chair. He tried to force the hot breathless knot to go away by sucking in a deep gulp of air and holding it.

  This was bad. Mostly it was bad because he hadn’t known how much he cared for Lora, how he really felt deep inside—as if she were an irreplaceable item in his life, something he couldn’t live without. No, not live without and not be crippled obscurely, a maiming so terrible he didn’t seem to have the stamina to face it. He gripped the chair arms and felt the sweat come out on his face in a thin film. My God, he thought. My God, I really must love her, and it’s the way all the corny songs have it; it’s like cutting off an arm to lose her.

  And why the hell did I have to talk to her like that?

  He wiped the sweat from around his mouth with the back of his hand. Why did I say what I did? Why can’t I leave the kid out of our conversations? Why do I always have to stomp my foot in her face about Jimmy?

  Some of the hot knot subsided, and his hands, gripping the chair arms, quit shaking so badly. Kernehan looked around at the flat, the big empty vacant-sounding place where once there had been a party, a dago-red and spaghetti party, where he had met a girl with green eyes; and all at once the very furniture and the way the walls were painted made him want to be sick. He went to the phone again. He called the agent who had rented the place to him and his friends, and told the woman who answered that she could put the place up again for rent, that he was leaving.

  Then he dialed the telephone company and asked that the phone be disconnected. Two more calls took care of gas and lights. Water meter was on the landlord. All he had to do now was to pack. He drove to a market and got some cartons, came back, and stuck books, knickknacks, the bathroom stuff, and the few groceries he wanted to keep, all together helter-skelter. He packed a couple of suitcases; extra clothes he put into a carton. The neighbors downstairs had been friendly; he went down and asked if he could leave some cartons in their garage until the next week, and they said fine, he was welcome.

  He hit the outbound freeway with a strange sense of freedom, of release.

  He would never have to go back to the flat again, never have to remember the long-ago night of the party, of the days that had come and gone since then, the departure of his friends, his efforts at housekeeping, and most of all those moments of terrible self-revelation today.

  The sun went down as he drove, and the landscape clouded with twilight. He drove through Santa Ana Canyon, the wild rocky hills still green from the spring rains, and from far away drifted the scent of orange blossoms from some grove in bloom. A scent like a memory, fading and dropping back. Getting lost. No matter how tough the next few weeks would be, he told himself, in the end the memories would fade and be lost, and he would be wel
l again.

  It just took time.

  He had a job to do, and he had better keep his mind on it.

  His thoughts returned to the most puzzling item of all, the question of where the stolen stuff was being taken, once it was off the train. He had an idea Farrel had sounded out some contacts, hadn’t come up with anything, and was as puzzled as he was.

  All of a sudden a hunch hit him about the part Ryerson had planned for him. Asking around Vermillion, trying to find hot tires for sale, was going to get them nothing; it just wasn’t the way the thing could be broken. The thieves weren’t that careless.

  They were pretty damned cute. Too cute to have any tie-in with Colton or with Vermillion. No contacts with town. Somewhere out in the desert, out in the wasteland of sage and sand, the stuff was being moved and stored. And that was the place to start.

  He thought it over, and he drove on through the darkening night.

  When he got close to the river, he ran into a broad area of irrigated fields. He could smell the irrigation water, the rank odor of vegetation. Finally, in the outskirts of Vermillion, he turned in at the first motel with a vacancy sign showing. After paying his bill and parking his car he carried both suitcases into the cabin, opened them on the bed.

  The fact that he had cleared out of the flat, packed stuff he wouldn’t otherwise have brought along, had provided him with the kind of clothes he needed. There were faded dungarees and a couple of old khaki shirts, a worn leather jacket, Army-surplus boots which had scuffed around the closet for a couple of years, it seemed.

  He put these clothes aside, repacked the suitcases with more care, realizing how he had punched the stuff in any old way at the flat.

  In the morning when he got up he rubbed a hand over a satisfactory stubble of beard. He washed up without shaving, put on a khaki shirt and dungarees, the battered boots. He slipped the holster over his belt at the back, put the Colt detective .38 special in it, put on the jacket, and inspected his backside in the mirror. The leather jacket wasn’t long enough to completely cover the gun. He took off the belt, removed the holster, and stuck it and the gun into one of the suitcases.