by Jim Lehrer
The sheriff asked for a rundown on what was known about what had happened on the train. It took only a couple of minutes because Sanders didn’t know very much. There was very little time between the porter’s discovery of Wheeler’s body and the arrival in Bethel.
“No weapon then, is that right?”
Sanders told him he hadn’t seen one. Jack Pryor remained on the train to handle that part of the investigation.
“I know Jack Pryor,” said the sheriff. “He’s been around awhile. Knows his stuff except when he thinks the Santa Fe Railroad has more authority than the people of Valerie County, Kansas, as he’s been known to do.”
Charlie Sanders chose, on behalf of the Santa Fe, not to speak to that issue.
“Do you know about the connection between Valerie County and the Santa Fe?” asked the sheriff.
Sanders shook his head.
“Valerie was the wife of a Santa Fe vice president when they founded our town, so they named us after her,” said the sheriff. Then back to business, he asked, “Do you know where the Super Chief actually was when the shot was fired—when Otto Wheeler shot himself?”
Again, Sanders said that, presumably, was also under investigation.
“How sure are you that it happened in my county?”
“Not sure at all, sir.”
“In the State of Kansas?”
“Pryor’s the one who’s working on that, sir.”
“I hope to Randallite hell the FBI doesn’t get involved in this,” said the sheriff.
Randallite hell? Sanders could only assume it was worse than the regular hell.
When neither Sanders nor Helfer responded, Sheriff Ratzlaff added, “Most FBI agents are lawyers, the others are accountants and they’re all afraid to say or do anything that might get them transferred to the end of the earth. I tell them they’re already in Kansas, where else is there to send them, you know what they say?”
Sanders said he didn’t know.
“Butte. Butte, Montana. That’s the place nobody in the FBI wants to go.”
Sanders had never been to Butte, Montana, because it was not served by the Santa Fe. He knew the Northern Pacific (“Main Street of the Northwest” was the company slogan) ran its best Chicago–Seattle train, the North Coast Limited, through there. It left Chicago at eleven o’clock at night and, while it was a streamliner with sleeping cars and a decent dining car, it wasn’t even close to being in the class of the Super Chief. Besides movies, the other interest Sanders had pursued as a kid was trains. Garrison, Indiana, was served by four major railroads on the way east from Chicago, as well as what was called the South Shore Line, an electric commuter service.
“Anybody talked to the church folks yet?” the sheriff asked Helfer.
“Not that I know of.”
“The cause of death isn’t going to please Pastor Funk now, is it?”
“Maybe because it’s a Wheeler he’ll make an exception.”
“Not likely at all and you know it, don’t you?” the sheriff said. “You ever had him make an exception for one of your customers?”
Helfer didn’t answer.
To Sanders, Helfer said, “My boys are now going to take off Mr. Wheeler’s clothes so everybody can see what was done by the bullet. Do you want the clothes as evidence or something?”
“I’ll take them when you’re finished,” said the sheriff. “We have a death here that is at least temporarily under our jurisdiction until somebody comes along and tells me differently. Is the Santa Fe all right with that, detective?”
Sanders, on behalf of the Santa Fe, said he was all right with that. “I think,” he added.
“You are welcome to stay and observe now,” Helfer said to Sanders.
Again, speaking on behalf of the Santa Fe, Sanders said he’d take a pass on the opportunity to see Mr. Wheeler’s bloody body completely naked. He had already seen enough, thank you.
He walked out of the room with the sheriff.
“I don’t understand the church issue you were talking about just now,” Sanders said once they were in the hallway.
“Otto Wheeler was big, big in the most conservative wing of the Randallite Church—that’s what most of us are around here, Randallites—which doesn’t approve of suicide. It’s a sin. You can’t be blessed and sent off to Heaven unless you’ve confessed all your sins, and how can you confess you killed yourself after you’re dead? Most of the pastors around here don’t make a big deal about it, though, and go ahead to do the full funeral with all the church trimmings. But not Pastor Funk. He’s old and old-fashioned, he’s rigid, he’s stubborn. He won’t say so much as a prayer over you if you take it upon yourself to end your life.”
“So that would mean what exactly for Mr. Wheeler?”
“No funeral in the church or burial in the church cemetery, for sure. Maybe no preacher presiding even if the service is held in a hotel coffee shop or the waiting room at the train station. We Randallites aren’t prone to suicide but the few that have popped up who weren’t even members of Funk’s church got nothing because he pressured other pastors to toe his line, too.”
At that moment, a plump fortyish woman came down the stairs. Sanders remembered seeing her sitting behind a desk when they came in.
“You’re the Santa Fe man?” she said.
Charlie Sanders said he was indeed. I am the Santa Fe man!
“They want you back at the train station by 6:47 to take a call from a Detective Pryor in St. Mark,” said the woman.
“The Super doesn’t stop at St. Mark,” Sanders said, mostly to himself.
Conductor Hammond, after protesting, bowed to Pryor’s authority and a little bit of Santa Fe history was made. For the first time ever the Super Chief came to a full rest in St. Mark, Kansas, population 1,735. Until now, only local trains stopped here.
Pryor flashed his gold pointed-star Special Agent badge to a startled station agent and headed for the first office with a telephone and a door that could be closed for privacy.
“Tell me it was suicide, as we thought, and not murder,” Pryor said to Charlie Sanders almost immediately once the connection was made.
“I certainly hope it was murder,” Sanders said. “That would be great.”
“Great? What in the hell are you talking about, Sanders? Murder on a Santa Fe train is never great! Are you crazy? Drunk?”
Pryor was the one who was on the verge of going crazy. He yelled silently at himself and at the heavens for not having stayed in Bethel himself after that spot turned up on the blanket, for having let some kid passenger traffic agent office boy “handle” the Wheeler death.
“I mean only that it’s great that Mr. Wheeler can have a real church funeral if it’s ruled murder instead of suicide,” Sanders said.
And then he quickly explained to Pryor what the Randallites believe about suicide and how a particular Randallite preacher was likely to punish the late Mr. Wheeler.
Pryor listened, understood but then yelled: “So what was it? Murder or suicide?”
“The sheriff’s still working on that ‘or’ part,” Sanders said.
Pryor quickly told Sanders what he knew—and didn’t know—about what happened on the Super that pointed toward murder, whatever the Randallites might want. No weapon, no shell casings were found. There was a man in the compartment next to Wheeler’s. He’d disappeared from the train. His bunk wasn’t even slept in.
“Maybe he slipped off the train there in Bethel during the commotion,” Pryor said. “Tell the sheriff all this and go with him to the station and ask everyone who was around this morning when the Super Chief was in the station if they saw this man get off the train. He was a white man, dark curly hair, suit, shirt and tie. He was traveling under the name Rockford. That’s all I know. Are you on it, Sanders?”
“I’m on it,” said Charlie Sanders, who would have sworn Pryor had habitually called him by his first name before now—before their business turned so serious.
Jack Pryor had one
last and most important question for the kid passenger traffic agent office boy.
“Is Sheriff Ratzlaff officially taking jurisdiction over the Wheeler case, whatever kind it may turn out to be?”
“Yes,” Sanders said. “Well, at least temporarily.”
“Tell him the time of death has been determined by a most credible witness,” Pryor said. “He heard a gunshot at a particular time when we know the Super had already crossed into Valerie County.”
“I’ll tell the sheriff,” Sanders said.
“Tell him the witness was Harry S Truman,” Pryor said.
Still in the dining car, Rinehart said to Mathews, “So, how about Gantry? Is there a picture there?”
“Yeah. Maybe we could get Gable to play the preacher,” said Mathews with a laugh.
“No way Clark works in a preacher picture,” Rinehart said. “That would be like Widmark doing a comedy.”
Mathews grinned, shrugged.
Rinehart said, “I don’t have to tell you that Clark’s got that bastard daughter with Loretta Young he won’t acknowledge or support. The kid—a girl in her teens now—doesn’t even know. Everybody else in Hollywood knows but her.”
Mathews wasn’t listening. He already knew all that was known about Clark Gable. He was one of the Everybodies. But Rinehart finished the indictment anyway.
“He shaves all the hair off his body. Everywhere except over his lip where that mustache is. Not just the head like Yul Brynner and I do. But off his chest, his arms—I mean everywhere. Takes four or five showers a day. He’s a clean freak, not in a league with Howard Hughes but close. He’s got false teeth. The women call him Bad Breath behind his back.”
“Jesus, Dar, give it a break,” Mathews said, looking up from his book. “Everybody knows all that.”
“And those ears. They’re as large and floppy as lily pads. He wears his hair long on the sides to hide it—”
“I know, I know,” Mathews interrupted to finish the point. “They taped his ears to the sides of his head they looked so bad. They were calling him Donald Duck behind his back. That kid of his and Loretta Young’s has his ears. It was so bad Loretta had ’em fixed by surgery when she was six or seven. She was afraid the kid looked too much like Clark. That’s it. Now let me get back to reading.”
Rinehart looked out the window at the passing early morning landscape of western Kansas. “He’s a coward, too. The reason he’s on this train isn’t because he loves the Super so much. The big American hero hasn’t been on an airplane since Carole Lombard went down in that airliner crash in forty-two. Think about that.”
Mathews shut the book again and pushed it aside. “Enough of this,” he said. “Clark Gable enlisted in the Army Air Force after Carole died even though he was too old to be drafted and he didn’t have to. He trained and flew as a tail gunner on a B-17, took movies on raids, won some medals. He may be a whiskey-soaked hairless whoremonger with smelly false teeth and floppy ears but he’s no coward, Dar. Just because he won’t speak to you doesn’t rate all this.”
Darwin Rinehart resumed looking out at Kansas.
And after a while he said to Mathews, “I’m back to thinking that guy on the train—the ratty-looking one—was a government man.”
Charlie Sanders hustled through the Bethel train station with the sheriff and three deputies in search of a man in a dark suit, tie and shirt.
Sanders had done as he was told. He briefed Sheriff Ratzlaff on the Truman gunshot information and the rest of what Pryor had found—and not found—on the train after Wheeler’s body was removed.
And now, in this most impressive of small-town Kansas train stations, they were acting on that information.
The place was classy. The architecture, said a brass plaque at the main doors, was based on Shakespeare’s house at a place in England called Stratford-upon-Avon. A red brick structure with white wooden window frames and doors, it was four stories high and almost a city block long, with at least twenty long rows of polished pine benches. Large signs on the walls displayed the arrival and departure times of the trains as well as framed advertising posters, most of them for the Santa Fe’s Indian-related destinations in Arizona and New Mexico. The floor was covered in small white and light blue tiles; the fluted light fixtures were recessed.
“We’re a division point and that’s serious business on the Santa Fe,” explained Halstead, the chief station agent, a husky man with a large black mustache. He wore a white dress shirt, black tie and a cream-colored jacket cut like a suit coat: standard railroad-issued dress for most male “inside” station employees.
“I don’t remember seeing anybody like that get off,” said Halstead. “But it was still half dark and there was a lot going on connected to Mr. Wheeler’s … situation.”
Sanders and the sheriff and his men got similar answers from the ticket agents, baggage handlers, porters, cleaning men and all others who were on duty just an hour ago when the Super Chief came through.
Then Charlie Sanders had a detective-like thought. If the man did get off here that meant he now had to get out of town, most likely in the easterly direction from which he had come.
He asked the sheriff to have someone check with the ticket agents at the Continental Trailways bus waiting room, which was also in this building, Santa Fe having at one time owned a bus company that mostly paralleled the railroad from Chicago to the West.
Then Sanders began studying the big train schedule board under Departures. No eastbound trains had stopped here since the Super Chief. The next one was The Chicagoan, a combination sleeper-chair streamliner due from Wichita, Oklahoma City, Dallas and points south at 8:40, just half an hour from now.
This would be the killer’s first opportunity to get out of town on a train.
Sanders scanned the waiting room once again and, to his surprise, saw a familiar face enter through the main doors leading in from the street. It took a second or two for him to place the man as the assistant to the late Mr. Wheeler. Pollack, wasn’t that his name? Sanders hadn’t seen him after they arrived at the funeral home with Wheeler’s body.
“You leaving town, sir?” Sanders asked Pollack, who had not seen him approaching. Pollack lurched back as if he’d been whacked with a two-by-four.
“No, no,” he said.
“On behalf of the Santa Fe, let me say that we stand ready to assist you in any way we can,” said Sanders.
“Thank you,” said Pollack, who steadied himself and even seemed to brighten a bit. “I’m shocked that someone would murder him … but at least, well … his suffering has ended.”
Murder him. Those words jarred Charlie Sanders. They were said so directly, almost casually.
Sheriff Ratzlaff joined them and exchanged greetings with Pollack, who then said, “I just came by to see if a friend … an old childhood friend of Mr. Wheeler’s was here. I had heard he might leave town and might not yet know about Mr. Wheeler’s passing. But I don’t see him around the station. So I must have gotten wrong information.”
And he turned and left the waiting room—almost at a running pace.
The sheriff said to Sanders, “My deputy says there have been two buses out of here since the Super Chief. Nobody got on who fit our white man/dark clothes description.”
Sanders made his case to the sheriff about the Chicagoan possibility and, thirty minutes later, on time, the Chicagoan arrived.
One of the deputies was checking on the platform near the end of the ten-car train, another up front behind the engine while Sanders, the sheriff and a third deputy took up watch on the middle cars.
In the few minutes the train was in the station, less than a dozen passengers boarded. None of them was a white man in dark clothes.
“The next train is at eleven o’clock,” said Sanders. “It’s a slowboat LA–Kansas City local—Train #4. Maybe our man is waiting for it. Maybe he figured the Chicagoan would be watched.”
“Yeah, and maybe you’re the Lone Ranger and I’m Tonto,” said Sheriff
Ratzlaff. “Tonto say, You do what you think you need to do, Lone Ranger. I’m going to get some breakfast and then head to the office and see what else needs to be done in my county today besides hang out at this train station looking for a man who may have killed Otto Wheeler on the Super Chief who nobody saw get off the train but he may have and may now be waiting for an opportunity to sneak onto another train back to Chicago or wherever.”
Charlie Sanders understood the message. “Thanks for coming over here with me, sheriff. We appreciate what you’re doing by taking official jurisdiction over Mr. Wheeler’s death, too.”
Sanders had thanked him before, but he felt it ought to be said again—on behalf of Jack Pryor and the Santa Fe.
“Want to join us for a Randallite breakfast?” the sheriff asked.
Sanders declined. He didn’t know what he was going to do—should do—but having a Randallite breakfast, whatever it was, didn’t seem right.
“I have to ask, sheriff,” he said. “What exactly is a Randallite breakfast?”
“Crisp bacon, runny scrambled eggs, buttermilk biscuits, apple juice mixed with orange juice, coffee with cream and sugar and a thirty-second saying of grace with your eyes closed and your utensils at the ready.”
Sanders’s face must have said, I don’t get it, loud and clear.
“A Randallite’s breakfast is just like everybody else’s,” said the sheriff. “That’s the message. So is most everything else about us—but not quite every everything.” He gave Sanders an all-in-fun pat on the shoulder and left with his crew.
Sanders stood there by himself in the middle of the waiting room for a few seconds. Now what? was the question for the moment. The only answer that came to him was why not have a look around Bethel for that white man in the dark clothes?
Then he remembered his suitcase, which he had not had time to retrieve from the Super Chief. It was a small leather case his mother had given him when he went off to college; it didn’t have much in it besides a change of underwear, a couple of shirts and ties and his shaving kit. But it would be nice to have. Maybe Jack Pryor had, in fact, remembered to put it off at Hutchinson and it came to Bethel just now on the Chicagoan.