Skipper Moran gave me a pretty smile that meant, Join me for breakfast. She said aloud, “Does your little head still burn where I patted it, Simon?”
“Burned all night. Throbbed like a toothache. All I could do was lie there and pant.”
“You lie as good as you pant, Mr. Pell.”
“We’re in Chicago in another hour or so. Are you going all the way through to New York? Can we get on the same train?”
She smiled. “Poor throbbing boy.” I made another inventory of the face. Sweet stubborn chin. Flower-petal eyes. “Why are you staring?”
“It’s just pleasant to look at a woman with a certain amount of decency in her face. You’ve a good face, Skipper. It has been around, and it has gotten wisdom instead of toughness.”
She looked at me oddly. “That’s quite nice. That you should think so. Trying to disarm me, Simon?”
“That’s a splendid idea.”
She grinned. “You’re too soon out of the hospital for the big leagues, rookie.”
Something was wrong. I didn’t catch on until the second strip of bacon. “I didn’t mention any hospital, Skipper. I mentioned Vietnam, nothing more. What kind of spy are you?”
She looked upset. Prettily confused. “You must have said something about it, Simon.”
“I was careful not to, Skipper. A sympathy pitch is not my style. And another thing. That empty chair in the lounge car was almost too opportune. There are never empty chairs by lovely blondes. And I did get the eye. Oh, very subtly, but I got it.”
She laughed. A good try, only faintly strained. “Oh, Simon! You’ve got to stop reading novels. I’m a gal on a train. I’m heading for New York.”
A neat brisk young man with a neat, close shave and an eye like the accounts receivable ledger came down the diner, looked through me, and put his lips practically against my gal’s little pink bunny ear.
She had been looking at me. She started looking through me. She got up, remembered her manners, gave me a smile about three millimeters long, and departed.
When I had gotten tired of toying with my third cup of coffee and half decided it was time to pack, she came back. She sat down and ordered coffee.
She balanced me on the razor’s edge of her eyes and said, “Your ex-wife’s friend was knifed during the night. Know anything about it?”
“I never knew Dick Tracy was such a master of disguise.”
“Don’t clown, Simon. I’m talking off the record and out of order and against instructions. So don’t clown. What do you know about it?”
I forked a groove in the tablecloth and admired it for a moment. I heard her coffee being brought. I heard her tear the paper off the sugar.
“My ex enlisted me last night. The corpus undelectable was in her boudoir. It was either pull an assist or try to talk myself out of an eyewitness report. So I moved junior back to his own room.”
“You just made a very intelligent decision, Mr. Pell.”
“Moving the body, or telling you?”
“Moving the body was almost unforgivably stupid. I suppose you told her you wouldn’t give her the money.”
“If I kept a diary, I’d swear you’d been peeking.”
“Why do you feel such a compulsion to be flip?”
“Counter question. Who are you?”
“A working girl. Working.”
“You don’t know what a shock this is to me. I thought it was my good looks and sparkling personality that intrigued you.”
“When, as a matter of fact, it was the criminal tendencies of your ex-wife. Marjorie has been a cooperative little morsel, Mr. Pell. Without knowing it, of course. We’ve had the net over her ever since Juarez, hoping for leads.”
“Hmmmm. A junior G girl.”
“No. A clerk-stenographer CAF-ten filling in because our little club is a bit shorthanded. The man who came and spoke to me is phoning ahead. I’m afraid we’re going to have to take her into custody now.”
“Do you think she killed Hanneman?”
“Oh, no. Hanneman was hired to ride herd on her and protect the investment. She must have told him you turned her down. My guess is that he tried to tell the others and they thought he was pulling a fast one. The knife work is typical of—some others we’ve found.”
“Hanneman had her convinced that he was a trustworthy legal eagle.”
She smiled sweetly. “No one is as gullible as a cheap crook, Simon.”
“Then you can just pick up the guy who did it, eh? No fuss. No problem.”
She snapped her fingers. “Sure. Just like that. All we’ve got to do is pick him or her out of a hundred and ninety-three passengers.”
“Maybe I’ve spotted him for you. The slick-looking punk in the sharp suit in the lounge car.”
“Mr. Delehanty is one of us, Simon. Sorry.”
“Nice guess, Pell. Try again. Some sweet little old lady, maybe?”
“I said others. We know of one of them. And we also know he didn’t have the opportunity to kill Hanneman. So there are two of them. That was our tip. Two aboard. Plus Hanneman and Mrs. Pell. These people are canny. They don’t contact each other. Not where it can be observed.”
I frowned. It didn’t seem to fit just right. “Look, maybe I’m stupid. But I thought, according to the comic books I read, that there was big dough in this importing dope for the twitch and glitter trade. So why the uproar over a lousy thirty thousand?”
“Thirty thousand, plus a willing tool, Simon. First they’d take the thirty thousand, and then they’d show her one of the photostats of that receipt she signed. And then they’d send her down to join the Mexican end of the organization. They have a spot all planned for her, we think. Using her obvious charms on gullible tourists to get them to take stuff across the border. She would do it well.”
“And enjoy the work,” I said flatly.
“She did hurt you, didn’t she?”
“A long time ago, Skipper. Just the scar itches sometimes.” I frowned again. “Say, don’t they organize the smuggling better than that?”
“My dear Mr. Pell. The very best man you can get is some banker from Toledo with shining face, balding head, and sterling reputation.”
“Marj could collect that type like postage stamps.”
“She’s still got a little too much spirit for them. They planned to break her down, flatten her out good, and then put her to work after they had taken her for as much money as they could get.”
“Lovely people.”
“I’ve seen what they’ve done. I’ve seen fifteen-year-old children who open their wrists with a pin and use an eyedropper to squirt in the dreams. I hate the peddlers, Simon. I hate their guts!”
“Look. I better pack. Not much time left.”
“You’ll have plenty of time, Simon. Everybody on this train is going to have a long personal interview and show credentials. All of them are going to be hopping mad except one. And he’s going to be scared and desperate.”
They ran the Amtrak train over onto a siding that hadn’t been used since Casey Jones took his header. It was in a wilderness of tracks, out near a jungle of derelict boxcars and rusting steam locomotives. Chicago came equipped with its usual strong wind. The train stopped and the men were already spotted. Spaced out. A perimeter guard with shotguns and riot guns through the crooks of their arms. Neat young men who leaned against the wind while their topcoats flapped.
A puffy little man with protruding glass-blue eyes collared me in the aisle. “Friend, this is an outrage,” he wheezed.
“What’s the trouble?”
“Haven’t you heard? Look where we are. Out in the middle of nowhere! Some bum was knifed on the train. Busybody cops have taken over one of the cars up front. We got to go up there, one at a time, and let them question us. Me, I got a meeting to go to.”
The little man stamped on down the aisle, grunting and wheezing with indignation.
An official came through. “Kindly remain in your own car until called.”
I wondered about Marj and decided to pay a little social call. I went into her car and tapped on her door.
“Yes?” a stentorian female voice said.
I pushed the door open. An iron-gray slab-faced matron with eyes like roller bearings stared at me. She had three parallel scratches down her cheek. Marj sat on the bed. I forgot about the planted knife, about her greedy amorality. She was a child who now stood outside life’s candy store, nose flattened wistfully against the glass, looking in at the goodies she could no longer afford.
They’d put handcuffs on her. The sleeve of her dress was ripped and her cheek was puffed, turning blue. She looked at me and said in a soft voice, “Thanks so much, Sim. Thanks for turning me in.”
There was no hope of explaining to her. She had gone too far away. She wouldn’t hear anything I said.
“Out,” the matron said.
Out I went, feeling exactly as though, hat in hand, I had tiptoed into sickly flower scent to view a waxen face on the casket pillow. I felt soul-sick and emptied.
As I walked back, I told myself I was a big boy now. I shaved and everything. I’d even snuck up on a gook tunnel and dropped a present inside that went boom. So this was just a tramp I happened to marry once. Lots of people marry tramps. Lots of tramps marry people. The silken wench was no longer a part of my life. It would be easy to forget her. Just as easy as leaving your head in the hatbox along with your hat.
I went into the men’s room and sat on the leather bench and exchanged cool stares with a salesman type inhabiting same bench, lipping an evil cigar butt.
“Hell of a note,” he said.
“Yeah,” said I.
He got up and slapped himself vigorously in the belly, belched largely, and left, dropping the butt into a shallow spittoon, where it hissed softly like a dying balloon.
I got up and aimlessly tried the john door. Locked, of course. I had me a drink of ice water. I wondered if the lounge car was in a fluid state. I wandered back toward it.
A conductor in a dark blue shiny suit said, “Stay in your own car, mister.” He had bright red cheeks and frosty blue eyes and a shelf of yellow teeth that pushed his upper lip out of the way.
“Got the time?” I asked him.
He looked at his wristwatch. “Nearly eleven, mister.”
I clumped back to the men’s room. I stood and looked out the top of the window, the unglazed part. The staunch young men were still leaning against the wind. I wondered how they’d work out as replacements in Vietnam. Replacements are so shocked at having the countryside loaded with eager little brown men who desire earnestly to shoot them dead that they obligingly freeze and get shot. The ones who scramble fast enough to avoid this unhappy fate six or seven times thus become what the newspapers call “combat-hardened veterans.”
The unobliging conductor appeared from somewhere on my right, spoke to one of the young law enforcers, and plodded across the tracks toward the distant station, shiny shoulders hunched against the fingers of the wind.
In due course they got to me. They said, “Okay, Pell. Sit over there.” I sat. They were thorough with the ones who came after me. Name, occupation, residence, identification, any personal letters, please. Reason for the trip. All recorded neatly.
A hefty man with a tombstone face who seemed to be in charge said, with considerable satisfaction, “Okay. That’s one ninety-two. He’s on the train, boys. Go get him, and be careful.”
Skipper moved over and sat across from me. “He was afraid to try to bluff his way through. We’ve got him now, Simon.”
It took thirty minutes. The boys came back. They looked as if the old farmer had just rock-salted them out of the orchard.
“He’s gone, chief.”
Tomb-face stood up. “Gone! How?”
“Maybe he dropped off the train before it got here, chief.”
“Impossible! You know that as well as I do. Did you look everywhere?”
“Even the ladies’ rooms,” the thinnest one said with a pretty blush. “One part of them is locked, of course. The train people locked them as we were coming in.”
“Maybe he picked the lock on one of them. Where’s that conductor? Get his keys.”
“He went over to the station. He’ll be back.”
“Get keys someplace, dammit!”
“Yes sir, chief.”
Skipper said, “If they don’t find him that way, the only answer is that he brought his invisible coat along.” She tried to smile, but there wasn’t much heart in it. “We wanted to get this one. Our tipster told us he was very high in the organization.”
I stared at her. I said, too loudly, “He did bring his invisible coat, honey.”
Tomb-face glared at me. “Shut up, you.”
I looked at him steadily. “Friend, maybe you’ve gotten too accustomed to talking to the lower classes. You use that tone of voice on me again, and I’ll slap a little courtesy into you.”
“When we want suggestions, Pell, we’ll—”
“Ask me, because I happen to have one. Something has been nibbling away at the back of my mind. Now I know what it is. If you want to hear it, suppose you tell me that you’ll take it as easy as you can on Mrs. Pell.”
“That isn’t my decision to make, Pell.”
“Then kindly go to hell. Every minute you stall, your friend is getting further away from here.”
That got him. He probably had superiors riding him. He licked his lips and looked almost human.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said uneasily.
“Okay. Did you ever ask a conductor what time it is? He pulls out a big gold turnip and tells you it is three and a half minutes to eleven. I ask a conductor the time. He looked at a wristwatch and said it was almost eleven. And then I saw him walk right through your cute little cordon out there. Who looks twice at a conductor’s face? I can even tell you where the real conductor is. Knocked out, or dead, and locked in one of the Johns with his own keys.”
“I don’t suppose you’d know what he looked like?” Tomb-face asked, but gently this time.
“I’ve got a vague idea. Five nine or ten. Hundred and sixty pounds. Gray hair, possibly bald on top. Bright red cheeks, high cheekbones, very cold little blue eyes. Big yellow teeth that stick out, making him look like Barney the Beaver. A lot of black hair on the backs of his hands. A gold ring, I think. Deep voice. Some holes in the side of his neck where he’d been lanced once upon a time. The right side of the neck.”
“I didn’t see him on the trip,” Skipper said.
“You’ll probably find a porter that brought his meals to his compartment or bedroom.”
Tomb-face roared out of the car and lit running, bellowing, waving his arms.
“You surprise me, Simon,” Skipper said. “That was a nice job of identification.”
“It doesn’t surprise me as much as it would have a year ago. I’ve just had a lot of training in observation, Skipper.”
They found the conductor with a mild concussion. He had opened a John door and a citizen had yanked him in by the front of his conductor suit and thumped his head against the wall. In there with the conductor was a nice gray expensive suit with the pockets emptied and the label ripped out of it. In a bedroom they found a brown bag, topcoat, felt hat. The hat had been purchased in Los Angeles, the bag in Seattle, and the laundry marks on the shirts were traced to a San Francisco hotel.
Skipper kept me informed. I had to remain in Chicago. I was the guy who could make a positive identification, when and if they picked up our boy. Evidently Barney the Beaver had walked through the station and into a bottomless pit. The man they had been able to grab on the train was small fry, and he was not inclined to be talkative.
Yes, Skipper kept me informed. She let me hold her hand in the movies. The peta
led eyes stared at me over the rims of cocktail glasses. Her stride was long beside me as we walked dark streets. She let me kiss her, and, unlike Marj, it wasn’t a tigress reaction. It was more like a kitten when you start to cuddle and then it takes a surprisingly sharp slash at you. We traded life histories, exchanged likes and dislikes, discovered a song that was “our song,” and all the rest of it. You can’t dress it up. It is common, ordinary, everyday falling in love. To the people involved it feels like it had never happened before to anyone in just that way.
Marj’s charms had been startlingly self-evident. But Skipper had a knack of creeping up on you. She would happen, by accident, to turn just so or stand in a certain way, and whoomp!—there would be a line so breathtakingly lovely, so full of a soft and lingering promise, that it could make a bill collector weep.
Over 3 A.M. coffee in a bean wagon, I told her she better marry me. She was lifting her cup and it stopped in midair, wavered, and floated back down to the saucer. Her lips were the shape of your first game of post office.
“This is so sudden. Give me time to think it over.… Okay, I’ve thought it over. Yes, Simon.”
The ham-handed counterman propped his chin on his fists and looked dreamy. “So lovely,” he purred. “Such a beautiful emotion, love.”
Coffee was on the house. Wedding present number one.
For three days I went around patting children on the head. Some of the hard-bitten Chicago tykes spat through a curled lip and said, “Go pat ya own head, ya creep.”
My phone rang beside my hotel bed in the middle of the night. “Simon, darling. I’m down in the lobby.”
“Check in with the house dick and come up.”
I had time to ice-water my face and belt myself into a robe and jam the ugly toeless foot stubs into the trick shoes before she came through the door I had opened for her.
I kissed her. “Aha! You are now in my powah, fair maid,” I said.
She didn’t smile. “Simon, I had to come and tell you this. I had to be the one to tell you. Dear Simon. I’ve been so jealous of her, of what she had of you and what she took away from you. Now I’m so ashamed.”
The Good Old Stuff Page 27