Trouble Follows Me

by Ross Macdonald

  “Someone on the train, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’d better get the conductor and the Military Police,” Major Wright said.

  “I’ll get them.” Teddy Trask slapped away again.

  “That’s a genuine seal on the bottle, isn’t it?” I said.

  He examined it near-sightedly. “Looks like it to me.”

  “I broke that seal myself. I even smelled it when I opened it. It didn’t smell so good, but I didn’t smell any ether.”

  “You didn’t smell the ether when you drank it, either. Some people don’t have a very good sense of smell, especially when they’ve been drinking. I think your olfactory evidence is questionable.”

  I admitted sheepishly that that was true.

  “Smell this.” He uncorked the bottle and passed it quickly under my nose. “Do you smell ether?”

  “I can’t be sure. I’m not very familiar with drugs.”

  The odor was a pungent, sweet and nauseous mixture. It reminded me of hospitals and of something else which I couldn’t place.

  “That’s ether all right,” he said. “I’d stake all the money I ever earned in anaesthetist’s fees on it.”

  “Is ether ever used in cheap liquor to hop it up?”

  “I’ve never heard of it. But you can’t tell what these bootleggers will do. I’d never touch bootleg alky myself.”

  A combination of things, the sick hospital odor in the air, the dead man on the unswept floor, and my own reaction from fear, made me dizzy again. The room lost weight and reality, became a foul shape-changing bubble in a dark stream. For a minute I held on to the curtain in the doorway with both hands. Then by an effort of will I focussed my eyes and mind again. But I felt shaky.

  Major Wright was watching me narrowly. “See here, you’re looking terrible. Sit down on this seat.”

  He took my pulse and listened to my chest. “You couldn’t have got a great deal of that stuff, or you wouldn’t be up and around. An ounce taken internally is enough to kill a man. But you’ve got to remember ether poisoning sometimes has secondary consequences. You go to bed now and let me look at you again tomorrow.”

  There was the sound of several footsteps approaching in the passageway. “I’ll go in a minute. But first I want to talk to the conductor. That’s probably him now.”

  The conductor came in preceded by his paunch and followed by a Shore Patrol man. He was biting his moustache hard as if the tobacco which stained its fringes was edible but bitter.

  Then he saw the dead man waiting on the floor. A tremor of nervous anger went through him, from his knees through his belly and heavy shoulders to his multiple chin.

  “What in God’s name happened?” he said.

  Major Wright took natural charge of the situation. “This man is dead. I’d say it was ether poisoning, though I can’t be sure without an autopsy. The dead man and Ensign Drake here were drinking poison liquor.”

  The conductor raked me with a hard old eye. “That’s what you were doing under the train, eh? Don’t you know it’s illegal to drink liquor on a train in the State of Kansas?”

  “It’s more illegal to poison people,” I said unpleasantly. “Somebody poisoned that bottle.”

  He picked up the bottle and examined it, turning it over and over in his hands. His palms were netted with dark lines like a railway map.

  “Where did the liquor come from?” the S.P. man said. He added a perfunctory “sir.”

  Wright answered him. “Private Hatcher—the man there on the floor—got it in Kansas City. The stuff’s got ether in it.”

  “Look here,” the conductor said suddenly. “This is how the ether got in.”

  He had turned the bottle up, and the discolored nail of his right forefinger pointed to something in the bottom. It was a small circular flaw in the center of the thick round glass.

  “I’ve seen this done before,” he said, “mostly during Prohibition. In my state it would be technical homicide.”

  “What is it?” Major Wright said.

  “Somebody who handled this liquor drilled a hole in the bottom of the bottle and extracted the good liquor. Then he refilled the bottle with his own deadly concoction, and sealed the hole with molten glass.”

  The S.P. man, who was young and eager, said: “I’ve seen that done, too. You can change the liquor without opening the bottle and breaking the seal. It’s a quick way to make money. If you don’t care what happens to the people that drink the cheap stuff.”

  “Murder is a quick way to make money,” the conductor said solemnly. “This is technical homicide.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “The salesman who sells poison liquor is legally responsible for its effects. That’s probably the Missouri law the same as it is where I come from. But it’s going to be an awful job finding the liquor store where this bottle came from.”

  My certainty that someone on the train had poisoned the bottle was dissolving and trickling away. I had a hard time trying to think clearly.

  “Does this mean it couldn’t have been poisoned on the train?”

  “It sure looks like it,” the S.P. man said. “You don’t get equipment on a train for melting glass and drilling bottles. It’s this consarned liquor shortage that does it. These fly-by-night sharks know that the boys will drink anything if it’s all they can get, and they take advantage of it. We get more trouble from bad liquor than from everything else put together.”

  “Damn it!” I exploded. “I didn’t walk under the train by myself.”

  Major Wright put his hand on my shoulder. The paternal effect was spoilt by the fact that he had to reach up. “You can’t tell what you did. Maybe it just looked like a comfortable place to lie down.”

  The light dazzled me. My eyes were sore and heavy in my head. My throat felt raw, as if someone had reamed it out with a file. “This is the third death,” I said. “Yet nobody seems to give a damn. Don’t people get tired of all these deaths?”

  The conductor and the S.P. man paid no attention to me. They were making plans to get Hatcher’s body off the train.

  “Look,” Major Wright said. “I like my work, but one corpse on my hands is enough for one evening. For God’s sake go to bed. That’s an order in two senses, professional and military.”

  “All right,” I said finally. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  “Good night. Pleasant dreams.”

  On the way out I heard him tell the conductor that he thought he’d close Hatcher’s eyes, because the sclera of the eyeball was drying and turning brown.

  The ladder was standing ready at my upper berth. As I started up on shaky knees, I noticed that the fight in Mary’s lower berth was still on.

  “Sam?” I saw her white hand fumbling between the heavy green curtains, and then her face. Washed shining for the night, with her bright hair done up on top of her head, she looked naïve and very young, like a nymph peering between green boughs.

  I said, “Good night.”

  “Sam, what’s the matter with your face? What’s happened?”

  “Be quiet. You’ll wake everyone.”

  “I won’t be quiet. I want you to tell me what’s happened. You’ve got a bruise on your forehead, and you’re covered with dirt. You’ve been fighting.”

  “No, I haven’t. I’ll tell you in the morning.”

  “Tell me now.” She reached up and took light hold of my arm. The confused alarm on her face was so flattering that I almost laughed.

  “If you insist. Move over.”

  I sat on the edge of her berth and, in a low voice which grew steadily hoarser, told her what had happened.

  More than once she said, “You might have been killed.”

  The second time I answered, “Hatcher was. By God, I don’t believe it was an accident. Maybe that poisoned bottle was intended for me.”

  “How could anyone know that you were going to drink out of it? And didn’t you say a hole had been bored in the bottom an
d resealed? That couldn’t have been done on the train.”

  “I don’t know. I do know one thing. I’m not going to touch another drink until I get to the end of this trouble.”

  My mind’s eye was struck by the sordidness of the scene which had seemed jolly enough at the time: Hatcher and me sprawled on the shabby leather seats of the smoking-room drinking ourselves to death or to the edge of it. A strong revulsion placed me for the first time in my life on the side of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

  The remembered scene was so vivid that I could see every detail of the room, the brown bottle on the floor, Hatcher’s thin lips mumbling over his letter.

  “I wonder if it’s still on the train,” I said to myself.

  I must have spoken aloud because Mary said, “What?”

  “Hatcher’s letter. He wrote part of a letter while I was with him and went to mail it in the club car. Maybe it’s still there.”

  “Do you think there could be anything in it bearing on his death?”

  “It’s possible. I’m going to the club car now, before that letter’s taken off the train.”

  I leaned forward to get up but she laid a restraining hand on my arm. “No. I’ll go. You look terrible, Sam.”

  “I admit my head’s swimming. I think it’s trying to swim the English Channel.”

  “Poor dear.” She patted my arm. “Please go to bed, Sam.”

  “See if you can read the name and address on that letter through the sides of the box.”

  “I will.”

  I climbed the ladder to my berth. It seemed very high. I took off my coat. It was such an effort that I played with the idea of simply falling back and going to sleep as I was, without undressing. I heard the heavy rustle of Mary’s curtains falling to behind her, and then the soft rapid sounds of her feet retreating in the direction of the club car.

  Then I heard fainter sounds moving towards me, a mere susurrus of feet so faint that it was suspicious. I opened a narrow crack in my curtain and peered down. Moving swiftly and silently like a panther in the jungle path which I had imagined the aisle to be, a man glided beneath me in the direction Mary had gone. All I could see was the top of his head and his shoulders, but I knew him by their shape.

  When the door at the end of the car had closed softly behind him I climbed down the ladder and followed him. My mind, inflamed by shock and fear, hated the beady-eyed man so much that I hoped wildly I would catch him in some overt act, and have an excuse to club him with my fists. He had looked like an animal stalking game. I felt like another.

  But when I stood on the shaking windy platform at the end of the club car and saw him again through the window in the door, he was standing in the passageway quietly doing nothing. Rather, he was standing with his face turned away from me, intently watching the interior of the car. Making no attempt to conceal my movements, I opened the door and walked towards him. He started and turned in a quick graceful movement and his right hand jumped unconsciously towards the left lapel of his coat. I deliberately jostled him as I passed him, and made contact with a hard object under his left breast which could have been a gun in a shoulder holster.

  It was Mary he had been watching. She was sitting by the mailbox at the far end of the shadowy car, which was half full of sleeping people and dimly lit by a small light at each end. As I walked towards her among stretched-out legs, I tried to keep in the line of vision of the man in the passageway. She glanced up startled when she heard me. She had a pair of eyebrow pluckers in her right hand and Hatcher’s letter in her left.

  “Put it back,” I said in a hoarse whisper. “You’re being watched, and it’s a Federal offense to tamper with a mailbox.”

  “You didn’t tell me!”

  “I told you to try to read the address through the glass. Now put it back.”

  There was so much intensity in my voice that her hand moved as if in reflex and dropped the envelope through the slot.

  “Did you get the address?”

  “No. It was your fault I didn’t.”

  I looked back over my shoulder and saw no one in the passageway. “I didn’t want you to get in trouble. There was a man watching you.”

  “Who?” The pupils of her eyes had expanded, making them seem almost black. Her mouth was soft and vulnerable, and her hands were trembling slightly.

  “The black-haired man with the beady eyes. He was in this car this morning.”

  “Oh.”

  I crouched down and tried to read the address on the envelope, but it was lying in shadow. I lit my lighter and tried again. I couldn’t make out the complete address but I saw enough for my purpose: Laura Eaton, Bath Street, Santa Barbara. I wrote it in my address book while Mary looked on.

  “Why are you doing that?”

  “I’m going to go and see her. I want to know what’s in that letter.”

  “Is it that important?”

  “It’s important. I’m getting very tired of people dying. People should die of old age.”

  Her hysteria suddenly matched mine. She rose with her blue silk robe sweeping about her in tragic folds and embraced me with arms so tense they almost hummed.

  “Please drop it, Sam,” she said. “I’m afraid you’ll be killed.”

  “I’m beginning to think that’s not so important. I don’t like these ugly deaths.”

  “Don’t you want to live, Sam?” Her eyelids held bright tears like evening dew on the closing petals of flowers. “Don’t you love me?”

  “I hate the cause of these deaths more. If you got off at the next stop I’d stay on. Perhaps you’d better.”

  Her mood changed suddenly. “Don’t worry, I’ll stay on. If you’re going to be any good tomorrow you’d better get some sleep.”

  “You’d make a good wife.” I kissed her.

  “Do you think so, Sam? Do you really think so?”

  A disturbed sleeper in the shadows behind us began to snore in loud protest.

  “We’d better go to bed,” I said.

  We passed the dark man again in the vestibule of our Pullman. He was standing at the window looking out, but he turned and stared at us as we went through. Tension hung sharply in the air for a moment and the blood pounded angrily in my temples. But I could think of nothing to do except to go to bed.

  When I closed my eyes in my berth, it swayed like a windswept treetop. Outside my cell the train whistle howled desolately, and the night rushed by like a dark wind. Where are we going? I wondered in languorous desolation, and then in sleep moved confusedly among blank staring eyes. I wandered among forests of dead flesh beside typhoid streams, and emerged in an open space where a hunchbacked spider cocked his beady eyes at me and scurried away on many legs. The sun was bloody red and throbbing in the lowering sky, a beating heart which as I watched it became pale and still, and the pulse of the world stopped. I wandered in the desert of the dead world, its rotting crust crumbling beneath my running feet till it gave way utterly and I fell endlessly in a soundless void.

  The worried and impatient face of the Pullman porter appeared between my curtains and announced that it was noon.

  9

  I GOT to the diner on the last call for lunch. On the way I saw Mary in the club car, where she was talking with the Tessingers. She walked down to the end of the car with me. She looked fresh and untroubled, clear of last night’s hysteria.

  “Are you all right, Sam? You slept like a log all morning, and I hated to wake you.”

  “There’s nothing I like better than sleeping in till noon. But it’s the first time I ever had a hangover after twelve hours’ sleep.”

  “You should stick to nice pure alcohol.”

  “I’m sticking to nice pure water.”

  “I know you are. Everybody’s out of whiskey and we can’t buy any from here on.”

  “It’s just as bad as being at sea.”

  She leaned towards me and kissed me lightly on the cheek. “Is it?”

  “Well, not exactly. Life was gen
erally much more tranquil at sea, and much less interesting. There weren’t enough women to go around—”

  “None at all, in fact?”

  “None at all, in fact. It’s sort of nice having women around again. I’ve always wanted a dog, too.”

  “Dogs are easy to get.”

  “Not as easy as you think. I am a victim of a dog shortage. Behold me dogless.”

  “You are feeling better today.”

  “I had to. I couldn’t have felt any worse.”

  “You’d better hurry if you want anything to eat. I had my lunch ages ago.” She went back to the Tessingers.

  The diner was still crowded, and my ears turned red as I walked down the aisle between the alert tables. I knew what the old ladies of both sexes would be saying behind their hands. Practically drank himself to death. Think he’d have more self-respect. Gentleman by Act of Congress. Disgrace to the uniform he wears. The trouble was that the old ladies had half the truth on their side. In the white light of hangover, my actions of the night before looked criminally foolish.

  Major Wright was at a table by himself and nodded to me to join him. “You’re looking a bit better. Feeling all right?”

  “Pretty good. My throat’s still sore, though.”

  “Ether’s a pretty powerful irritant. I’ll have a look at your throat this afternoon.”

  Looking out the window I was struck, with the inextinguishable surprise of travelling, by the difference that a day’s journey made. I had left Detroit and Chicago shivering in the grip of the northern lake winter. The prairie outside the window now was snowless and sunlit under a summer sky.

  “Where are we? I haven’t looked at the timetable.”

  “The Texas Panhandle. The last town we stopped at was Amarillo.”

  “The spring comes early up this way.”

  “It’s the best time of the year here. It gets too hot in the summer.”

  The subject of the weather had been exhausted, and I asked him the question that was on my mind: “What happened to Hatcher?”

  “His body was taken off at Wichita. I turned him and the whiskey bottle over to the Kansas state police. They’re going to get the Missouri police to try and find the man that sold it to him. They seemed rather doubtful that they’ll be able to. Kansas City is a big town.”