The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK ™: 20 Modern and Classic Tales of Female Detectives

by Catherine Louisa Pirkis

  Six boxes today, twenty yesterday, thirty the day before. Dwyer, Ralbotten, Seacur and Czolb was burying her in paper.

  Of course, she had expected it. She was a solo practioner in a town whose population probably didn’t equal the number of people who worked at DRS&C.

  People had told her she was crazy to take this case. But she was crazy like an impoverished attorney. Every other firm in the New Mexico had told her client, Nan Hughes, to settle. The problem was that Nan didn’t want to settle. Settling meant losing everything she owned.

  Pita took the case and charged Nan two thousand dollars, with more due and owing when (if) the case went to trial. Pita didn’t plan on taking the case to trial. At trial, she wouldn’t just get creamed, she’d be pureed, sautéed and recycled.

  But she did plan to work for that two grand. She would spend exactly one month filing motions, doing depositions, and listening to offers. She figured once she had actual numbers, she’d be able to convince Nan to take a deal.

  If not, she’d resign and wish Nan luck finding a new attorney.

  Her actions wouldn’t hurt Nan. Nan had a spectacular loser of a case. She was taking on the railroads and two major insurance companies. She had no idea how bad things could get.

  Pita would show her. Nan wouldn’t exactly be happy with her lot—how could she be, when she’d lost her husband, her business, and her home on the same day?—but she would finally understand how impossible the winning was.

  Pita was doing her a favor and making a little money besides.

  And what was wrong with that?

  * * * *

  At its heart, the case was simple. Ty Hughes tried to beat a train and failed. He survived long enough to leave his wife a voice mail message, which Pita had heard in all its heartbreaking slowness:

  “Nan baby, I tried to beat it. I thought I could beat it.”

  Then his diesel truck engine caught fire and he died, horribly alive, in the middle of the wreck.

  The accident occurred on a long stretch of brown nothingness on the New Mexico side of the Texas/New Mexico border. A major highway ran a half mile parallel to the tracks. On the opposite side of the tracks stood the Hughes ranch and all its outbuildings.

  Nan Hughes and the people who worked her spread watched the accident. She didn’t answer her cell because she’d left it on the kitchen counter in her panic to get down the dirt road where her husband’s cattle truck had been demolished by a fast-moving train.

  And not just any train.

  This train pulled dozens of oil tankers.

  It was a miracle the truck engine fire hadn’t spread to the tankers and the entire region hadn’t exploded into one great fireball.

  Pita had been familiar with the case long before Nan Hughes came to her. For weeks, the news carried stories about dead cattle along the highway, the devastated widow, the ruined ranch, and the angry railroad officials who had choice (and often bleeped) words about the idiots who tried to race trains.

  It didn’t matter that the crossing was unmarked. Even if Ty hadn’t left that confession on Nan’s voice mail (which she had deleted but which the cell company was so thoughtfully able to retrieve), trains in this part of the country were visible for miles in either direction.

  The railroads wanted the ranch, the cattle (what was left of them), the life insurance money, and millions from the ranch’s liability insurance. The liability insurance company was willing to settle for a simple million, and the other law firms had told Nan to sell the ranch, and pay the railroads from the proceeds. That way she could live on Ty’s life insurance and move away from the site of the disaster.

  But Nan kept saying that Ty would haunt her if she gave in. That he had never raced a train in his life. That he knew how far away a train was by its appearance against the horizon—and that he had taught her the same trick.

  When Pita gently asked why Ty had confessed to trying to beat the train, Nan had burst into tears.

  “Something went wrong,” she said. “Maybe he got stuck. Maybe he hadn’t looked up. He was in shock. He was dying. He was just trying to talk to me one last time.”

  Pita could hear any good lawyer tear that argument to shreds, just using Ty’s wording. If Ty wanted to talk with her, why hadn’t he told her he loved her? Why had he talked about the train?

  Pita had gently asked that too. Nan had looked at her from across the desk, her wet cheeks chapped from all the tears she’d shed.

  “He knew I saw what happened. He wanted me to know he never would have done that to me on purpose.”

  In this context, “on purpose” had a lot of different definitions. Ty Hughes probably didn’t want his wife to see him die in a train wreck, certainly not in a train wreck he caused. But he had crossed a railroad track with a double-decker cattle truck filled carrying two hundred head. He had no acceleration, and no maneuverability.

  He’d taken a gamble, and he’d lost.

  At least, Nan hadn’t seen the fire in the cab. The truck had flipped over the train, landing on the highway side of the tracks, and had been impossible to see from the ranch side. Whatever Ty Hughes’s last few minutes had looked like, Nan had missed them.

  She had only her imagination, her anger at the railroads, and her unshakeable faith in her dead husband.

  Those were not enough to win a case of this magnitude.

  If someone asked Pita what her case really was (and if this imaginary someone could get her to answer honestly), what she’d say was that she was going to try Ty Hughes before his wife, and show her how impossible a defense of the man’s actions that morning would be in court.

  And Pita believed her own powers of persuasion were enough to convince her jury of one to settle.

  * * * *

  But the boxes were daunting. In them were bits and pieces of information, reproduced letters and memos that probably showed some kind of railroad duplicity, however minor. A blot on an engineer’s record, for example, or an accident at that same crossing twenty years before.

  If Pita had the support of a giant law firm like La Jolla, Webster, and Garcia, she might actually delve into that material. Instead, she let it stack up like unread novels in the home of an obsessive compulsive.

  The only thing she did do was take out the witness list, which had come in its own envelope as part of court-ordered discovery. The list had the witnesses’ names along with their addresses, phone numbers, and the dates of their depositions. DRS&C was so thorough that each witness had a single line notation at the bottom of the cover sheet describing the reason the witness had been deposed in this case.

  The list would help Pita in her quest to recreate the accident itself. She had dozens of questions. Had someone inspected the truck to see if it malfunctioned at the time of the accident? Why had Ty stayed in the truck when it was clear that it was going to catch fire? How badly had he been injured? How good was Ty’s eyesight? And how come no one helped him before the truck caught fire?

  She was going to cover all her bases. All she needed was one argument strong enough to let Nan keep the house.

  She was afraid she might not even find that.

  DRS&C’s categories were pretty straightforward. They had categories for the ranch, the railroad, and the eyewitnesses.

  A number of the witnesses belonged to separate lawsuits, started because of the fender benders on the nearby highway. About a dozen cars had damage—some while they were stopped beside the road, and others because they’d been going too fast to stop when the train accident occurred.

  Pita started charting the location of the cars as she figured this category out, and realized all of them had been in the far inside lane, going east. People who had pulled over to help Ty and the railroad employees had instead been dealing with accidents involving their own cars.

 
A separate group of accident victims had resolved insurance claims: their vehicles had been hit or had hit a cow that had escaped from the cattle truck. One poor man had had his SUV gored by an enraged bull.

  Cars heading west had had an easier time of things. None had hit each other and a few had stopped. Of those who had stopped, some were listed as 911 callers. One had grabbed a fire extinguisher and eventually tried to put out the truck cab fire. That person had prevented the fire from spreading to the tankers.

  But the category that caught Pita’s attention was a simple one. Several people on the list had been marked “Witness,” with no accompanying explanation.

  One had an extra long zip code, and as she entered it into her own computer data base, she realized that the last three digits weren’t part of the zip code at all.

  They were a previous notation, one that hadn’t been deleted.

  Originally, this witness had been in the 911 category.

  She decided to start with him.

  * * * *

  C.P. Williams was a Texas financier of the Houston variety, even though his offices were in Lubbock. He wore cowboy boots, but they were custom made, hand-tooled jobbies that wouldn’t last fifteen minutes on a real ranch. He had an oversized silver belt buckle and he wore a bolo tie, but his shiny suit was definitely not off the rack and neither was the silk shirt underneath it. His cufflinks matched his belt buckle and he twisted them as he led Pita into his office.

  “I already gave a deposition,” he said.

  “Before I was on the case,” Pita said.

  His office was big, with original oil paintings of the Texas Hill Country, and a large but not particularly pretty view of downtown Lubbock.

  “Can’t you just read it?” He slipped behind a custom-made desk. The chair in front was made of hand-tooled leather that made her think of his impractical boots.

  She sat down. The leather pattern bit through the thin pants of her best suit.

  “I have a few questions of my own.” She took out a small tape recorder. “I may have to call you in for a second deposition, but I hope not.”

  Mostly because she would have to rent space as well as a court reporter in order to conduct that deposition. Right now, she simply wanted to see if any testimony was worth the extra cost.

  “I don’t have that much time. I barely have enough time to see you now.” He glanced at his watch for emphasis.

  She clicked on the recorder. “Then let’s do this quickly. Please state your name and occupation for the record.”

  He did.

  When he finished, she said, “On the morning of the accident—”

  “I never saw that damn accident,” he said. “I told the other lawyers that.”

  She was surprised. Why had they talked with him then? She was interviewing blind. So she went with the one fact she knew.

  “You called 911. Why?”

  “Because of the train,” he said.

  “What about the train?”

  “Damn thing was going twice as fast as it should have been.”

  For the first time since she’d taken this case, she finally felt a flicker of real interest. “Trains speed?”

  “Of course trains speed,” he said. “But this one wasn’t just speeding. It was going well over a hundred miles an hour.”

  “You know that because…?”

  “I was going 70. It passed me. I had nothing else to do, so I figured out the rate of passage. Speed limits for trains on that section of track is 65. Most weeks, the trains match me, or drop back just a bit. This one was leaving me in the dust.”

  She was leaning forward. If the train was speeding—and if she could prove it—then the accident wasn’t Ty’s fault alone. He wouldn’t have been able to judge how fast the train was going. And if it was going twice as fast as usual, it would have reached him two times quicker than he expected.

  “So why call 911?” she asked. “What can they do?”

  “Not damn thing,” he said. “I just wanted it on record when the train derailed or blew through a crossing or hit some kid on the way to school.”

  “You could have contacted the railroad or maybe the NTSB,” she said. “They could have fined the operators or pulled the engineers off the train.”

  “I could have,” he said. “I didn’t want to.”

  She frowned. “Why not?”

  “Because I wanted the record.”

  And because he repeated that sentence, she felt a slight shiver. “Have you done this before? Clocked trains going too fast, I mean.”

  “Yeah.” He sounded surprised at the question. “So?”

  “Do you call 911 on people speeding in cars?”

  His eyes narrowed. “No.”

  “So why do you call on trains?”

  “I told you. The potential damage—”

  “Did you contact the police after the accident, then?” she asked.

  “No. It was already on record. They could find it. That attorney did.”

  “I wouldn’t know how to compute how fast a train was going while I was driving,” she said. “I mean, if we were going the same speed or something close, sure. But not an extra thirty miles an hour or more. That’s quite a trick.”

  “Simple math,” he said. “You had to do problems like that in school. We all did.”

  “I suppose,” she said. “But it’s not something I would think to do. Why did you?”

  For the first time, he looked down. He didn’t say anything.

  “Do you have something against the railroad?” she asked.

  His head shot up. “Now you sound like them.”

  “Them?”

  “Those other lawyers.”

  She started to nod, but made herself stop. “What did they say?”

  His lips thinned. “They said that I’m just making stuff up to get the railroad in trouble. They said that I’m pathetic. Me! I out earn half those walking suits. I make money every damn day, and I do it without investing in any land holdings or railroad companies. They have no idea who I am.”

  Neither did she, really, but she thought she’d humor him.

  “You’re a good citizen,” she said.

  “Damn straight.”

  “Trying to protect other citizens.”

  “That’s right.”

  “From the railroads.”

  “They think they can run all over the countryside like they’re invulnerable. That train pulling oil tankers, imagine if it had derailed in that accident. You’d’ve heard the explosion in Rio Gordo.”

  Probably seen it too. He had a point.

  “Tell me,” she said. “Is there any way we can prove the train was going that fast?”

  “The 911 call,” he said.

  “Besides the 911 call,” she said.

  He leaned back as he considered her question. “I’m sure a lot of people saw it. Or you could examine that truck. You know, it’s just basic physics. If you vary the speed of an incoming train in an impact with a similar truck frame, you’ll get differing results. I’m sure you can find some experts to testify.”

  You could find experts to testify on anything. But she didn’t say that. She was curious about his expertise, though. He seemed to know a lot about trains.

  She asked, “Wouldn’t a train derail at that speed when it hit a truck like that?”

  “Actually, no. It would be less likely to derail when it was going too fast. That truck was a cattle truck, right? If the train hit the cattle car and not the cab, then the train would’ve treated that truck like tissue. Most cattle cars are made of aluminum. At over a hundred miles per hour, the train would have gone through it like paper.”

  Interesting. She would check that.

  “One las
t question, Mr. Williams. When did the railroad fire you?”

  He blinked at her, stunned. She had caught him. That’s why DRS&C’s attorneys had called him pathetic. Because he had a reason for his train obsession.

  A bad reason.

  “That was a long time ago,” he whispered.

  But she still might be able to use him if he had some kind of expertise. If his old job really did require that he clock trains by sight alone.

  “What did you do for them?”

  He coughed, then had the grace to finally meet her gaze. “I was a security guard at the station here in Lubbock.”

  Security guard. Not an engineer, not anyone with special training. Just a guy with a phony badge and a gun.

  “That’s when you learned to clock trains,” she said.

  He smiled. “You have to do something to pass the time.”

  She bit back her frustration. For a few minutes, he’d given her some hope. But all she had was a fired security guard with a grudge.

  She wrapped up the interview as politely as she could, and headed into the bright Texas sunshine.

  And allowed herself one small moment to wish that C.P. Williams had been a real witness, one that could have opened this case wide.

  Then she sighed, and went back to preparing her case for her jury of one.

  * * * *

  Most everyone else in the witness category on DRS&C’s list was either a rubbernecker or someone who had made a false 911 call. Pita had had no idea how many people reported a crime or an accident after seeing coverage of it on television, but she was starting to learn.

  She was also learning why the police didn’t fine or arrest these people. Most of them were certifiably crazy.

  Pita was beginning to think the list was worthless. Then she interviewed Earl Jessup Jr.

  Jessup was a contractor who had been on his way to Lubbock to pick up a friend from the airport when he’d seen the accident. He’d pulled over, and because he was so well known in Rio Gordo, someone had remembered he was there.