Vultures in the Sky

by Todd Downing

  “I’m sure, Miss Talcott, that I could not have done any better.” Rennert paused and said evenly: “Do you know that you yourself are included among the suspects?”

  Her start was imperceptible, manifested only by a slight contraction of her fingers and a tightening of her lips. “I?” she laughed. “That’s interesting. You mean because I was in the car too?”

  “Yes, and because Mr. Jeanes is not sure now that what he felt against his hand was Mr. Searcey’s corduroy trousers. He admits the possibility of it being your fiber bag.”

  He sensed rather than saw a slow tautening of her body.

  “My bag?” she stared at him, her eyes guarded. “That’s too foolish—” she checked herself and turned her face to the window. For several seconds she stared steadily into the darkness. Then she turned to him and said with a smile: “No, it’s not foolish, I suppose, when you come to think of it. I imagine that my bag would feel much like corduroy if it touched the back of a person’s hand. I remember now that Mr. Jeanes was rather startled when he touched it back on my seat though I didn’t know at the time what was the matter with him.” Her gaze was meeting his squarely, without wavering. “Would you like to see the bag in question, to feel it?” “Yes, Miss Talcott, I would.”

  “Very well,” her voice was unruffled.

  She got up and led the way down the aisle, her shoulders straight. The starched white collar seemed unaffected by the day’s heat and lent a stiffness to her carriage. When they came to her seat she picked the bag from its surface and held it out to him.

  “It does feel like corduroy,” she ran a hand over its side. “Mr. Jeanes is right about that.”

  Rennert took it and did the same. “A little rougher, of course, but I can see how a person might confuse it with corduroy at a sudden contact with it in the dark,” he said as he held it out to her.

  She made no motion to take it. “Don’t you want to examine it?” she asked quietly. “The murderer, you know, might still have the needle concealed.”

  “I feel sure that he has probably disposed of it by this time, Miss Talcott—unless he thinks that he might have occasion to use it again.”

  “To use it again?” her eyes searched his face. “In that case I want you to look in the bag to make sure that I don’t have it,” she said steadily.

  “All right,” Rennert said with sudden determination, “I will.”

  He opened the bag and glanced through its contents. It contained a small coin purse, a gold pencil and memorandum book, a folded letter, a handkerchief, a photograph in a worn folding frame which Rennert did not open and a pasteboard box labeled “Veronal.”

  “Thank you, Miss Talcott. I’m grateful to you.”

  She let the bag fall upon the seat. “Not at all,” her smile was pleasant again. “It interested me to realize that I could take this matter so objectively until it concerned me and that then I became perturbed. I’m a sublime egotist, I suppose.”

  “All of us are, more or less.”

  She was standing with one hand resting upon the back of the seat in front of her. She looked toward the other end of the car and said: “Even Mr. Jeanes.”

  Rennert turned his head. Jeanes had walked into the car, his face looking pale and haggard in the electric light. He sank into his seat without a glance in their direction.

  “I wonder what has become of that hatbox?” Miss Talcott said suddenly.

  “Hatbox?” Rennert turned to her.

  “Yes, I noticed that it was missing a few minutes ago when I was walking down the aisle looking for my paper knife. The owner must have claimed it.”

  “I’m afraid, Miss Talcott, that I don’t know what hatbox you’re talking about.”

  “Oh,” she laughed, “I must get out of that habit of talking as if to myself. It comes from living too much alone, I suppose. You see, there was a hatbox there in the aisle this morning at breakfast time, a rather shabby-looking one. I remember wondering why someone didn’t move it instead of always … stumbling over it. Now it’s gone.”

  “The porter stopped to place it on one of the vacant seats when I called him upon discovering the dead man this morning,” Rennert said reflectively. “I supposed that it belonged to you.”

  “No, he asked me last night if it was mine. It had, I believe, the initials O. W. stamped on it and wasn’t fastened very securely. In fact it was bulging open slightly.”

  She lurched forward and had to grasp the back of the seat with the other hand as the train came to a sudden stop.

  Rennert regained his balance and glanced quickly out the window.

  The desert seemed cloaked in palpable blackness and the mountain peaks still stained with orange looked immeasurably far away, suspended in the vast dark reaches of interstellar space.

  He turned to meet Miss Talcott’s questioning gaze.

  “Why are we stopping?” she asked. “There’s no station here.”

  10

  The Eyes of Texas (6:45 P.M.)

  Spahr was becoming slightly maudlin and during the increasingly frequent lulls in the conversation kept humming “The Eyes of Texas.”

  “The eyes of Texas are upon you

  All the livelong day!

  The eyes of Texas are upon you,

  You cannot get away!”

  Coralie Van Syle sat across the table from him, her fingers tightening upon the jade holder from which the cigarette emitted an upcoiling curl of smoke. She knew that she had about reached the limit of her endurance. Her face felt tight and drawn and the muscles about her mouth and eyes ached with the effort to keep them from twitching.

  She glanced around the diner again, to see how much attention Spahr was attracting.

  Mr. Searcey sat at the rear, at the last table on the other side. She looked at him over Spahr’s shoulder and saw that he didn’t seem to be paying any attention to anyone else but sat smoking his pipe. The electric lights lent a blank masklike expression to his face.

  Across the aisle sat Mr. King and Mr. Radcott. The former was finishing a frugal meal of aguacate salad, toast and tea and glancing with slight distaste at the steak which his companion was consuming complacently. Conversation between them seemed at a standstill and King sat for the most part gazing out the window with an uneasy expression on his face.

  “Lonesome-looking country, isn’t it?” he remarked. “Desert and mountains, cactus and rattlesnakes and bandits. I’d hate to be lost out there.”

  Radcott laid down his fork and chewed for a moment, as his half-closed eyes followed the direction of King’s gaze.

  “I don’t know,” he spoke after a while, “sometimes I get a crazy notion that I’d like to ride off into mountains like those, away from everything, see what’s in them, what’s on the other side—” he did not conclude but sat staring out the window with a faraway look upon his face.

  King caught at the edge of the table. ‘“What’s the matter?” he asked, looking about him in alarm. “The train’s stopped!”

  “I don’t know,” Radcott peered out the window, “I don’t see any station here.”

  The waiter hurried in with another bottle of wine and set it upon the table before Spahr.

  “What’s the matter?” Radcott asked him. “Why are we stopping here?”

  The man shrugged and said deferentially: “I do not know, sir. It will be but a short time, I think. They are having trouble with the engine.” He bowed and turned toward the kitchen, passing the conductor in the aisle.

  Spahr had poured out the wine and was pushing a glass toward her and saying: “Have some more wine, Miss Van Syle. We might as well make a night of it, hadn’t we?”

  He picked up the bottle and held it over his glass. The wine gurgled and splashed up to the rim and over.

  “Do not think you can escape them

  From night ’til early in the morn,”

  he was beginning again as he cocked a quizzical eye at the glass.

  She felt a sudden tightening of the muscles in her t
hroat and a queer sense of desolation surged over her. Outside the windows the mountains were vague heaped shadows upon the horizon. She reached up and pulled down the blind. She sipped red Rioja wine and waited for its reassuring warmth to spread over her tired body. For some reason there was no response. She waited, then drank again, emptying the glass.

  “The eyes of Texas are upon you

  ’Til Gabriel blows his horn!”

  Spahr concluded in a louder happier voice.

  It was too much. Her hand shook as she set the glass upon the table and it fell over, the remaining drops of the wine staining the white cloth. She let her cigarette holder drop into the tray. She let her arms rest on the table and buried her face in them. She did what she had been wanting to do for hours and hours, it seemed. She cried, silently and without trying to control the hot tears that touched her arms.

  How long she remained thus she did not know—nor care. She looked up at last, was vaguely aware of a solicitous expression on Spahr’s flushed face. She got to her feet and said as steadily as she could: “Excuse me, please. I don’t feel well. I think I’ll go lie down.”

  “Let me help you,” Spahr made a motion to rise.

  “No, no,” she gestured him back to his seat and fled down the aisle, without looking to right or left, without knowing whether there were other diners in the car or not.

  Outside, she paused on the platform between the cars and went to the door. She pressed one hand against the coolness of the glass and gazed out into the darkness. She stood for a moment, conscious of utter weariness, then walked slowly to her compartment. It had become all at once a haven, a little compact private world with barriers that would shut out the universe.

  She met no one in the passage. She closed the door and stood for a moment with her back to it, letting its quiet ordered air of security fill her as she had hoped the wine would do.

  She put out a hand to turn on the light.

  “If I were you, Miss Van Syle, I wouldn’t do that.”

  The voice was soft yet sharp admonition barbed it.

  In the silence that followed she heard very distinctly the gentle dispassionate ticking of the watch upon her wrist. The muscles of her throat tightened again into paralyzing knots and she would not have recognized her own voice as she spoke.

  “Who is it?”

  “That doesn’t matter, Miss Van Syle. You will walk straight ahead to the other side of the room. Quietly, if you please.”

  It was the violation of her sanctuary that angered her, that sent hot surges of resentment over her body and made the blood pound through her heart. A slight breeze from the window bore to her nostrils the too-sweet, almost fetid odor of the withering yellow flowers upon the table.

  “What are you doing in my room?” her fingers groped for and found the button of the light.

  “I must ask you to lower your voice,” impatience underscored the words. “I’ve finished here and as soon as you walk to the other side I’m ready to leave. You will say nothing to anyone about my visit here. If you’re foolish enough to do so you will suffer the consequences. Now, move forward please.”

  She tried to recognize the voice, to identify it as one of the voices which she had heard that day. She thought, but could not be sure, that she knew to whom it belonged….

  Her middle finger found the light button and pressed it as she felt her wrist gripped by a hand that felt like steel encased by flesh.

  She stared into the face before her while a kind of numbness came over her. “Oh,” she heard herself say, “it’s you!”

  “I warned you not to turn on that light, Miss Van Syle,” there was now a patient regret in the voice. “I’m sorry—”

  She stared down at the upraised right hand and saw it move steadily toward her wrist. Her scream was merely a choking noise that stuck in her throat. At the sight of the clean bright needle that protruded from between the fingers of the hand nausea overwhelmed her and she did not feel the pain as the needle bit into her flesh….

  Part Two

  Time-Table Of National Railways Of Mexico

  *Non-agency, flag station.

  11

  Wings in the Darkness (7:00 P.M.)

  Stars glittered, faceting the sky over the top of the train. To the west the mountains reared ungainly humps cloaked in flame-crested purple against the horizon. The smell of the desert was acrid in the nostrils and a faint coolness was beginning to creep upward from the dry sands.

  Voices and sharp metallic sounds from the forward part of the train reverberated with odd distinctness in the heavy stillness that seemed to be pushing in upon them.

  A revolver cracked with a splintering sound. Laughter echoed after it eerily.

  At his back Rennert heard a tiny clatter against the rail. He turned.

  At the edge of the observation platform, he could make out the white jacket of the porter. He walked back.

  The man was leaning over the railing, gazing toward the front of the train. “That shot,” he queried quickly, “what was it?”

  “One of the soldiers up front, I believe,” Rennert told him.

  The Mexican was silent, his dark face a part of the obscurity which surrounded him. His fingers seemed to be busied with something at his throat.

  Rennert stood near the railing and said: “I understand that there was an unclaimed hatbox in the Pullman this morning?”

  The other seemed not to understand and Rennert repeated his words.

  “Yes,” the answer was smothered by the stillness, “there was a hatbox.”

  “What became of it?”

  “I took it back to the lady in the compartment. It belonged to her.”

  “Why wasn’t it put into her compartment last night in San Antonio?”

  Rennert could see the porter’s shoulders rise in a shrug.

  “But I did not know that it was hers, sir!” he protested. “She did not tell me and it did not have the same initials as the rest of her luggage.”

  “And she didn’t inquire about it until this morning?”

  “At noon, sir, she told me that it was hers and asked me to take it to her compartment while the others were in the diner.”

  Rennert’s foot found and pressed against an object lying in the gravel close beside the rail. He stooped and picked it up.

  “Was the hatbox locked?” he asked as he held his hand up to the light from the doorway.

  “No, sir,” the porter was staring down at him, “it was not locked. It was full—very full—and the lid would not close. I thought that it would come open while I was carrying it.”

  Rennert lifted his hand. In it he held a small tin whistle.

  “You dropped this?” he asked quietly, as his eyes sought to penetrate the darkness to the man’s face.

  “Yes,” the monosyllable was flat. He moved his head a trifle so that his face was concealed.

  Rennert’s eyes went for a moment to the barely discernible horizon and nearer to the swiftly in-crowding night.

  “You were going to blow this whistle?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why?” (Was it his imagination, rendered receptive by the brooding silence of the desert, or was there a rustling sound, as of softly moving wings, close by the telegraph pole that rose in gallows-like isolation out of the dark ground?)

  A tremor ran through the porter’s voice, speaking unaccustomed English: “I but wanted to hear the noise, sir.”

  “The noise?”

  “Yes. Everything is so quiet out here in the desert that a noise—I thought it would be good.”

  Rennert watched the lantern of the conductor approaching from the front of the train. He was trying to force himself into self-recrimination. A natural desire, to want noise to combat the fears engendered by the night. A small boy whistles while going along a lonely road. He knew many people who kept a night-lamp burning for the same reason, although they would not have admitted it. And yet—this abrupt unexpected stop in the desert and a shrill whistle that
might pass unheeded in the train but which would carry far into the darkness….

  He asked: “Where did you get this whistle?”

  “I found it, sir.”

  “On the train?”

  “Yes, sir, on the train.”

  “In what part?”

  “In the smoker, sir, while I was sweeping it.”

  “You swept it this afternoon?”

  “Yes, sir, late this afternoon, before we left Vanegas.”

  “Thank you,” Rennert said abstractedly as he turned away. “I shall keep this whistle for the present.”

  There was no response from the man upon the platform. Rennert walked forward to meet the conductor.

  The man’s face, lit from below by the swaying flame of the lantern, looked as if it had been slashed from dark granite out of which stared bright round crystals. He paused by Rennert’s side at the foot of the steps and said with a muffled laugh: “Do not be alarmed, señor. It was but the soldiers shooting at a rabbit.” He started to move forward.

  “What has caused the stop here?” Rennert asked.

  “The engine again, señor. It has stopped. They are going to have to send to San Luis Potosí for another.”

  The lights of the train were suddenly extinguished and for an instant the hulks of the cars were but black shapes looming against the sky. Then the lights flashed on again.

  “No word has been received from San Luis?”

  “No, señor, no word.” The conductor seemed restive, disinclined to talk.

  “How far are we from San Luis?”

  “About sixty kilometers, the delay will not be great. Con permiso.” He stepped past Rennert and swung himself up the steps. His shadow loomed distorted for an instant against the sands.

  They lay, these sands, like a heavy silent sea, motionless yet restless with contained movement, stretching away to become fused with the mountains and darkness.