The Man Who Followed Women

by Bert Hitchens

  “I’ll even buy you an ice cream soda.”

  Randy licked his lips. “Let me ask Grandad.”

  When they got to camp, Bucklen wasn’t in sight. Randy apparently figured his grandad would be lying down for a noonday nap; he headed for the sleeping tent. He stayed in there a couple of minutes. When he came out, his manner had changed and Kernehan realized that the old man must have forbidden the trip. Randy looked at Kernehan and shook his head. Then he turned in the direction of the chicken yard, as if Bucklen had reminded him of some chore to be done.

  Kernehan turned the car, headed back through the empty, rutted street between the old buildings, climbed the ridge, and began to look for the highway in the distance. He had forgotten how far it was, had forgotten the long empty valley and the look of desolation. He wondered as he drove how often the old man took the truck into town, and what Randy did with himself while his grandad was gone.

  The kid was under tight control, too scared to break free.

  In Vermillion, Kernehan found a secondhand store and bought a used Army cot for a couple of dollars. He ate at a lunch stand. He phoned L.A., and though Pete wasn’t in the office because it was Saturday, he had left word for Kernehan that the numbers on the tires had checked out, that they were part of a stolen shipment.

  Kernehan called the Vermillion office, hoping to catch Farrel there. He finally got hold of the day patrolman, who gave him Dyart’s home phone number. But Dyart didn’t know where Farrel was. “I’ve got something for you, though. Richie called from Colton. There’s a character over there in the hospital, somebody named Howery, who wants to see you.”

  “Who?”

  “Howery. That’s all I know. Richie didn’t explain.”

  It was almost four when Kernehan entered the hospital room. He saw Howery in a bed beside the window; Howery wore a lot of dressings on his head, and he looked remarkably sick, gray-skinned and shrunken. He said, as soon as he saw Kernehan: “I want to make a complete confession. I made them move me to this private room, so that we could talk. I’ve got a lot to tell you.” He started right off then, almost before Kernehan could sit down in the chair by the bed, a rambling preamble about his mother dying and how he had begun—just out of loneliness, or something—to follow women on the street. He stressed, more than once, that he had never molested anybody.

  Kernehan listened and believed, in spite of a feeling that the stuff was too fantastic to be true.

  “Then one night I saw this girl in the market. She was very pretty. There was something kind of … hard to express it … sort of beaten down about her. As if she hadn’t had a very easy life. I felt sorry for her, very sorry, even in those first moments. She wrote a notice for the idiot board … bargain board, I guess I should say. You know, where people can advertise rooms for rent, used fur coats, cars—of course they don’t let you try to sell anything they carry in the market. Or I don’t imagine—”

  “She wanted to sell some tires,” Kernehan put in grimly, remembering his visit to her home.

  “How did you know?”

  Kernehan shrugged. “We made some inquiries.”

  “Maybe you know”—Howery’s gaze grew worried—“maybe you already know all of this.”

  “No, we don’t know much,” Kernehan assured him. “Go right on talking.”

  Howery continued, telling Kernehan all about his following the girl to her home, then on to the freight yards. “You can think me a liar, but I did follow her into those freight yards with a wish to protect her. She was young and lovely, and that was no place for her.”

  “I’m not arguing with you over your motives,” Kernehan said. In spite of Howery’s queer habits Kernehan could not help feeling sorry for the sick and miserable man. “What did she do in the freight yards?”

  “Someone must have told her exactly what to do, where to go. She headed straight across tracks in the dark to a gate in a steel fence, then on to wait beside a kind of overpass. There were mainline tracks there, I thought, and through trains that didn’t seem headed for the yards. She stood there a long time as if she had expected somebody.”

  Kernehan kept his face blank, but he was convinced—she had been waiting for Jennings.

  Howery patted sweat off his face with a handkerchief. “No one met her. Finally she left. I’m sure she hadn’t seen me.

  “You were hidden up under the overpass,” Kernehan reminded. “The next night you came back, and that’s when I caught you.”

  Howery flushed, two spots of color coming into his gray cheeks. “I was still curious, still afraid she might get into trouble.”

  “She was already in trouble,” Kernehan pointed out, “trying to peddle stolen tires.”

  “Well … I didn’t know that they were stolen.” Howery plucked at the hem of the sheet. “And perhaps she didn’t know it either. She looked kind of innocent. As pretty as she is—if she’d been a bad girl—she needn’t have gone shabby.”

  “You have a point there,” Kernehan admitted.

  “I guess you’re wondering why I really called you here, how I happened to be in Colton Hospital, and what happened to my head. Well, I called her home, and the landlord thought I must be the one she’d been waiting for, and he gave me her Colton address.”

  More than he gave me, Kernehan thought.

  “I realized that she had run away and that she must be frightened. So I followed her. She’s staying with another woman. They wouldn’t answer the front door, and when I went to the back yard—it was dark, this was last night—they tackled me with a club of some kind.”

  In spite of Howery’s injured appearance, his obvious sorrow, Kernehan had a hard time to keep from smiling. The thought of the two women falling on the pudgy, inoffensive little man had its ridiculous side.

  “I understand that the police are keeping a watch on the house now, waiting to ask questions,” Howery concluded, “and that the women haven’t come back. From snatches of their talk while I lay half conscious in the yard, I think they’re afraid of someone. They thought I was a messenger from some bunch of crooks. The other woman, the one with wine on her breath, suggested I was a ‘business agent’ for the others—whatever that means.”

  “This was out on Tamarind Street?”

  Howery blinked. “Yes. Did I tell you that?”

  “Did the girl named Margie mention anyone named Jennings?”

  “She said … something about someone named Hart.”

  “That’s Jennings. He was murdered.”

  Howery licked his pale lips. “Murdered. So he won’t ever show up.”

  “No, he’ll never show up.”

  “I thought—the reason I called you, told you the truth—I thought you might find Margie and try to help her.”

  “I’ll watch out for the club she carries,” Kernehan promised.

  “Oh no, Margie hit me with a bottle of wine,” Howery corrected. “It was this other woman who used the club.”

  Kernehan couldn’t see much choice, but Howery was so worried and anxious and protective about the girl that he didn’t say so. He sat observing Howery for a minute or so. “Hadn’t it ever occurred to you,” he said, “that you would eventually get into serious trouble by trailing women and spying on them?”

  Again the red spots sprang into Howery’s pale cheeks. He fussed with the covers, brushed at his thinning hair, reached for a glass of water on the bedside stand and sipped at it. “Yes, I knew it. I’m not an idiot. But it was something I couldn’t seem to help. Like having a case of measles.”

  “If I were you,” Kernehan advised, “I’d give it up.”

  “I mean to.” Howery hesitated, as if thinking it over. “You know, since I’ve become interested in Margie—you’ll think I’m an old fool—but since then I haven’t really had the urge to follow anyone else.”

  Kernehan nodded without commenting. “Well, suppose you give me a good description of her.”

  “And you’ll find her?”

  “If we can.”
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br />   “I don’t suppose you can tell me all about this thing she’s mixed up in?”

  “Not now. And she may not be mixed up in it, I mean criminally. I think Jennings was.”

  “He was a bad man, and he fooled her and she trusted him,” Howery mused, in the tone of outlining a romantic tale. “Now he’s dead, and she will need a friend.”

  “Just watch yourself in the clinches.” Kernehan took down Margie DeWitt’s description. When he left the hospital he called Richie, told Richie the details, and advised sending out an all-points bulletin for the missing girl and her friend, Mrs. Pethro.

  In the outskirts of Colton he passed a large specialty ice cream store, and on a sudden memory stopped and swung back. They had dry ice available, and airtight packing. He had them put up three quarts, various flavors. Then he swung out on the highway east. A dusky look began to hang around the edges of the horizon; the shadow of the car slanted far ahead along the pavement, then died out as the sun went down.

  When he reached Bucklen’s camp it was dark. There was a fire under the outdoor cooking stove, the old man and Randy were sitting at the table as if expecting him. Kernehan saw that they had waited dinner. When he got out of the car, they welcomed him almost as one of the family.

  Dinner over, Kernehan broke out the ice cream. The kid couldn’t keep down his surprise and pleasure—plus an appetite that allowed him to finish off half or more of every one of the quart containers. Kernehan and Bucklen mopped up what was left.

  All the suspicion Randy had shown earlier, the guardedness with which he had answered Kernehan’s questions and suggestions, had vanished. The kid seemed to have become his friend.

  Guard down, Kernehan told himself, figuring how he could use the kid in his plans for the next day. He needed Randy as a guide. Somehow he had to crack his sense of obedience to Bucklen.

  Farrel was tired. He lay on his bed in the motel and stared through half-shut lids at the ceiling. He had been out all day, keeping track of his three men; and what he had learned he figured he could use to stuff a gnat. He had parked on a piece of rising ground where he could see Grofsky’s ranchy layout, and he had seen Grofsky come out and start early on the yard. His reddish skin seemed to grow redder under the sun, or from nervous tension. He ran around fiddling with the shrubs and creepers with the same air of frantic disorganization he’d shown in the office. He moved several plants—one of them twice. They promptly wilted, and even Farrel without any recent experience with gardening, had a strong suspicion that Grofsky had killed them.

  When he seemed to have done as much damage as necessary to the yard, he had started on the car, washing it and applying polish, renewing the white sidewalls on the tires and bringing out a vacuum cleaner on a long cord to tidy up the interior. Just watching him had made Farrel feel exhausted, so that at noontime he’d gone into the downtown section and had a few quick ones. Then, somewhat revived, he had gone to check on Kodear. That had been easy—Kodear and the eighteen-year-old were playing ping-pong on a table on the wide old porch.

  I don’t know why in hell I’m spending daylight on them, Farrel thought. They have to be good boys while people are watching. He decided to go to the motel and rest until night, then see what Kodear and Grofsky were doing with the Saturday evening. He had mentally crossed off the name of the clerk who had the baby with the bad heart; Dyart had found out that a heart association was footing a lot of the bills. He’d driven by the home on his way to Grofsky’s, and it looked like you would expect, the yard neglected and a rattletrap Chevvie about eight years old in the driveway. Nothing out of line—Farrel had made up his mind then, somehow of the three he liked Kodear the best. Grofsky showed every sign of finding himself in a blind with no way out, not the air of a successful thief. Kodear gambled and had a way with the girls, and most important had been the only one in the office who had shown a quick interest in the train consist.

  Farrel lifted himself on an elbow, renewed the level in the water glass, drank, lay down again. The room was warm and close, smelled as if dust had been stirred up and the doors and windows kept shut. He thought about getting up, opening a window for some air, then let it go. He’d have to watch himself; he was woozy already.

  He was near retirement, and Ryerson was showing a remarkable forbearance about the booze, but something had better happen in this thing. He and Kernehan had better pull it off. Kernehan was out there prowling around in the desert, and then Farrel found himself hoping that Kernehan wouldn’t get into trouble and be hurt or killed. He hadn’t known until that moment that he had begun to like Kernehan. He’d always thought of him as a good-looking pansy type—no, not quite that, either, just too interested in his appearance and his clothes. But Kernehan wasn’t really like that at all. He was smart and tough, the looks were an accident he’d probably had a hell of a time living down.

  Farrel remembered the gossip, then. Kernehan had had a couple of run-ins with juveniles, and he was mean in that particular direction, and Ryerson didn’t give him jobs where juveniles were apt to be involved.

  Well, there wasn’t much chance of Kernehan running into troublesome kids out on the desert.

  Chapter 18

  When Farrel awoke the room was dark. The pillow smelled of sweat. The stuffy air had left him dry-mouthed and heavy-headed. He reached for the bedside light, lifted himself, drank from the glass, then got up and went into the bathroom and splashed water on his face, combed his hair. Beard was showing, and he debated over it, knowing that in the end he would have to shave. A shave and a fresh shirt always made people think you weren’t drinking, at least at a distance. He looked into a suitcase he had left propped open on a chair. One clean shirt, thanks to Mrs. Bellows, who occasionally in frustration sneaked out the collection on his closet floor, and laundered the lot.

  Shaved and showered and dressed, he checked the gun, slipped it into the holster on his hip. He took the bottle, almost empty, with him to the car.

  He drove out first to Grofsky’s, having decided that Grofsky was the sort whose Saturday evening—if any—would start quicker and end sooner than Kodear’s. The lights were on in the Grofsky living room, and Grofsky and his wife were in there, plain to be seen through the unshaded window, having a fight. She was standing in a fighting-hen stance, head stuck out, yelling words Farrel couldn’t hear. Grofsky was walking up and down between the furniture, brushing at his sandy hair and waving his arms and apparently about ready to choke her. Farrel parked boldly, right across the street. He could even hear faint echoes of the yammering. He wondered if they were fighting over the brother-in-law who had negotiated the loan and then skipped out.

  It ended suddenly, and without any violence. Grofsky came over to stand directly in front of his wife; he put his hands on his hips in a gesture that was somehow ridiculous and womanish. He stamped a foot. Mrs. Grofsky threw up her hands to cover her mouth. Farrel thought that she had burst into laughter.

  Then she ran out of the room, and Grofsky went tiredly to a chair and sat down. He seemed like a thoroughly defeated and unhappy man.

  After a while he lifted one foot, then the other, and took off his shoes. He rubbed his socked feet, winced, put his legs up on the hassock and stretched back and shut his eyes. He obviously wasn’t going anywhere.

  Farrel drove back, parked near the big old-fashioned house where Kodear had his room. The lights were on upstairs, the room the girl had indicated, and now and then a shadow passed on the blind as if Kodear was moving about, getting ready to go out. When the light went out, there was a short delay, and then he came down the front steps and the young girl was with him. They went out to a car parked by the curb, probably Kodear’s. It was a low-slung little foreign job. Kodear drove fast, and Farrel had a hard time keeping him in view; and then in the end he and the girl simply parked downtown and entered a show.

  Farrel checked the time when the show let out, and then went to a bar.

  He sat, drinking bourbon and listening to the chatter, and then beg
an to think about the case, speculating as to his and Kernehan’s chances with it. Kernehan was out there where he might actually run into something; Farrel figured he didn’t have quite the percentage working for him. Their boy in the office—Grofsky or Kodear or whoever—could be playing it so cute he’d never be pinned down. There would have to be a moment of carelessness, and so far in this thing there hadn’t been any. The murder of Jennings might fit in, too, and still not lead into the core of it.

  Say that Jennings had been trying to peddle some of the hot tires, just as Mac’s hoody friend next door had suggested. Jennings wouldn’t have risked it unless he had been planning to skip. It implied that he was dissatisfied with the setup, or had someone pressuring him to get out, or was scared. He’d been scared, then, with cause. An outfit that killed to prevent one of its men from leaving was savagely dedicated and streamlined. Someone up top had made the rules and saw to it they weren’t broken.

  Farrel thought, I should have spent some time on Jennings, checked back through what Kernehan had done, talked to the Colton P.D., and looked at the place where they found the body. There might have been something, a tag end, that hadn’t meant anything to Kernehan.

  Farrel beckoned to the bartender. “You ever have a customer in here named Jennings?”

  The bartender, a bald man with pale eyes, shook his head. “Gee, Chief, I don’t keep track of names. He a friend of yours? You can describe him?”

  Farrel pushed his empty glass over. “How about a character named Pethro?”

  The bartender lifted the glass, then hesitated. “Pethro. Wait a minute. Is he a kind of a dark guy, not too tall? Heavy around the middle?”

  Farrel wasn’t familiar with Pethro’s description, but he nodded.

  The bartender said, “The reason I remember him, I like to go fishing, see? And he was talking about a catfish he’d caught, over on the canal. It was a lie. No catfish ever got that big.”

  “When was this?”

  “Oh”—the bartender shrugged—“couple of weeks now, at least.”