by Jim Lehrer
“I was right, the lawyers are waiting for you, Dar,” said Gene Mathews. “I can see them. Three guys like vultures, each with a large briefcase. They’re all standing just inside the station doorway.”
Darwin Rinehart slowed the pace of their walk, signaling their redcap with his cart to do the same. “I don’t think I can go through with this, Gene. I can’t handle it, Gene. I can’t do this, Gene.”
“No choice, Dar. You have no choice. You can come back. This is Comeback City. People come back all the time. You’ll come back.”
“My company. It’s mine. My office. I love my office. What about my Brancusi? I love that egg. I bought it in New York … you remember, Gene, at the gallery on Fifty-seventh.”
“I remember, Dar. It’s worth a bundle—that’s why they want it now.”
“My house. Will they take my house, Gene?”
“Probably. They’ll give you the complete bad news in a minute. Look, you knew it was coming. We should never have gone to New York. That was crazy, like I told you. You should have stayed here, Dar.”
They were no longer moving. Other passengers had to walk around them on the platform, heading toward the station.
“Look, Dar! Look!”
Rinehart reluctantly followed Mathews’s stare. “See this guy coming from the train?”
“Yeah, what? I’m looking,” Darwin said.
“There’s no mustache and his hair’s been combed differently but look at him. He’s almost a live replica of King Clark Gable. A little shorter—slightly smaller ears. Wonder what his breath smells like?”
Rinehart said, “What this country does not need are two Clark Gables.”
They said their farewell words on the station platform, as redcaps and local California Democrats sorted through the commotion of Truman’s arrival.
“This has been the ultimate honor for me, sir,” said Albert Carlton Browne.
“I’ve enjoyed it myself, Browne,” said Harry S Truman. “We had quite a bit of excitement on our trip, I’d say.”
“A killing, an A-testing protester and, to top it off, a potential Clark Gable imposter—and that’s only what I know about,” said Browne, then, after a pause, adding, “That railroad detective never said anything further to me about our Clark Gable doubts. Did he to you?”
“No, he didn’t,” said Truman. “Clearly the detective team of Truman and Browne was not that persuasive.”
“All told, this really would make a great ‘My Spring of ’56 Trip on the Super Chief’ story for me to write,” Browne said.
Truman lifted his walking stick as if it were a club. “Permission still not granted.”
As they stepped apart, Harry S Truman halted, grinned and said in a quiet voice, “You’re almost back to talking like a Kansan, Browne.”
“Thank you, Mr. President—I think,” Browne replied.
“I did finally remember something more about that Dale Lawrence,” said the former president.
The prominent journalist took a breath.
“Yeah, he may very well have been in the Oval Office with Stimson. I think Stimson may have made me let the guy talk for two minutes—not a second more. I’m pretty sure he made the case for delaying the testing. He wanted more data known and studied before any more explosions were allowed. But the guy was in the minority so I didn’t pay much attention. Nobody did. All the Atomic Energy Commission top brass said there was no danger.”
A. C. Browne put his monocle back into his right eye. “On the train, that Lawrence certainly seemed awfully sick himself, didn’t he?”
Harry S Truman said, “But from what cause? Or what disease?”
“Are you going to look into it further, sir?”
“No, I am not.” A half grin came across Truman’s face. “And I don’t want to read about this in Reader’s Digest or any other goddamn magazine or even in the Strong Pantagraph.”
Browne was not grinning. He looked down at the station platform.
“You gave me your word—no story,” said the man from Missouri. “I have to go, Browne.”
This was not an easy situation for A. C. Browne. He was at this moment a reporter with one helluva story—and he was going to have to give it up.
But he said, “All right, Mr. President.”
Darwin Rinehart and Gene Mathews and their redcap stood motionless in a quiet corner of the giant waiting room. The humiliation ceremony was suddenly over, the lawyers had in less than a minute acquired Rinehart’s signature and life, including his Brancusi egg. He’d been granted five hours to go to his house and, under court supervision, remove his most personal effects.
Remove them to where exactly?
Mathews suggested a hotel. Not the Ambasssador and certainly not the Beverly Wilshire, Rinehart’s most favorite Hollywood place. Something cheaper. They did have some cash, but maybe only fifteen hundred dollars or so.
Rinehart said, “We’re getting back on the Super Chief, Gene, where we belong—where we’re safe.”
Mathews pointed toward the steps from the train platform and the Super Chief. “Look! That’s Harry Truman! He’s coming right this way.”
Rinehart looked. “My God, it sure is. Was he on the Super with us?”
“Must have been the big-name passenger who was in the ‘Kansas City’ sleeper car,” Rinehart said.
Truman and a group of five or six other men passed right by Rinehart and Mathews on the way to the front entrance.
“Mr. President—I was always with you,” Rinehart said to him.
“Me, too,” said Mathews. “I loved the way you gave ’em hell.”
Truman raised his walking stick to his hat to acknowledge the good words. “Thank you, thank you,” he said, as he kept walking.
Someone started clapping. And then a few others did, including Rinehart and Mathews. Truman acknowledged it all with smiles and more salutes with his stick.
“There was a lot more happening on the Super than we knew about, Dar,” Mathews said, once Harry Truman was gone.
“We’ll be on it again tonight. We’re going to stay right here in this waiting room until it leaves. We’ve got enough cash for tickets, a drawing room with an adjoining bedroom. Same as always for us, Gene.”
Mathews shook his head slowly, sadly. “All I’ll get is a ticket for you, Dar. I won’t be going.”
“No, no, Gene. Think of it as a story. A failed movie producer goes into a deep dive, flips out …” He stopped, waiting for Mathews to pick it up.
“I’m not playing anymore, Dar,” said Mathews.
“What?”
“I’m leaving you.” Mathews turned and headed in the direction of the station’s front door.
“No! Gene, no!”
Mathews did not turn around. He kept walking.
“Think about it, Gene!” Rinehart yelled after him. “He flips out and spends the rest of his life riding back and forth, back and forth, back and forth between LA and Chicago …”
Gene Mathews made no sign he’d heard anything as he moved farther away.
If Darwin Rinehart had been a streamliner he would have sounded his howling horn loud enough to shake Mount Rushmore.
Jack Pryor had had a brief exchange of departing words with Ralph, the sleeping car porter. The detective gave instructions about taking the linens and other evidentiary items from the late Otto Wheeler’s compartment to the station dispatching office. And he warned Ralph again to get out of the Private business and stay out of it.
“I am certain you let that guy on to bother President Truman,” Pryor said. “I promise you with an oath on my badge that I’m going to get you. Every time you take money from a guy like that, think: This could be it. This could be a company plant. This could mean your job and your life. Think that every time.”
“Yes, sir,” was all Ralph said in response.
Then Pryor went into the station, where there was word in the railroad police office for him to call his boss, Captain Lordsburg, in Chicago. URGENT, was the
message.
“Did you put somebody off the Super in Dodge City?” were Lordsburg’s first words. No hello greeting, no how did things go with the death of the Bethel regular? That was now up to some Kansas sheriff to sort through.
Pryor confirmed that he had indeed tossed a man off at Dodge City.
“He was bothering President Truman, for one thing,” said Pryor. “And he was a Private. That porter Ralph put him on board, I’m pretty sure.”
“The guy you tossed turned up in Boot Hill.”
“The cemetery?”
“You know another Boot Hill in Dodge City?” said the captain. “But he’s not dead, not yet. They found him lying by one of the tombstones. He’s sick as hell. They’ve got him in a hospital. Some of the railroad lawyers don’t like the idea of a dying man being put off one of our trains in the middle of nowhere—no matter the reason. Did you know he once worked in Washington for the government?”
“I did hear him tell Mr. Truman that. He was coughing but I didn’t know he was dying. Dodge isn’t really nowhere—”
“Get back there and clean it up. Our railroad doesn’t like it when sick people are put off our trains—particularly VIPs.”
“I really don’t think this guy rates as anybody that important—”
“Just take care of it, Jack. I already got word to that kid from the traffic office—Sanders. He’s still in Bethel. I told him to get over to Dodge and cover us in case the guy really dies before you get there.”
Before Pryor could respond, Captain Lordsburg said, “Got to run. Some drunk ballplayer’s gone nuts on the Texas Chief north of Houston and is using the dining car china as baseballs. He’s mad because the Dodgers cut him from their roster—something like that. Talk to you soon, Jack.”
Lordsburg hung up as abruptly as he had begun.
Jack Pryor went to the waiting room and looked up at the schedule board. It confirmed what he already knew. The El Capitan, the Santa Fe’s eastbound high-level chair-car streamliner, would depart at 1:15, less than three hours from now. And he would be on it.
Pryor turned around to see Albert Carlton Browne standing there, also looking up at the schedule information.
“Where you headed, detective?” Browne asked.
“Back to Kansas,” Pryor said.
“Me, too,” said Browne.
And a while later, Pryor spotted Darwin Rinehart staring off into space, sitting by himself in a far corner of the waiting room.
“Can I help you, sir?” Pryor asked Rinehart, who just shook his head and looked away. He seemed embarrassed that he had been seen.
Pryor’s cop antenna was alerted. He thought he saw something new and alarmingly sad in the face of this man of Hollywood who had disembarked from the Super only a short time ago.
“I’m going back on the Super Chief,” Rinehart said to Pryor after several seconds of uncomfortable silence. He spoke in a near whisper.
The Santa Fe detective had learned that often the best way to get people to say something is just to remain silent. He wondered, What in the hell is going on? Two passengers from the Super—the Kansas editor and now the movie man—turning around to head back the other direction the same day they arrived?
“Forget something?” said Pryor to Rinehart, smiling.
“Yeah, you might say that.” Rinehart still hadn’t spoken in full voice or made eye contact with Pryor.
The Santa Fe man looked up at the schedule board. “The El Capitan leaves at one fifteen …”
Darwin Rinehart glared at Jack Pryor. “I only travel on the Super Chief!” he said with indignation.
“That’ll mean waiting six more hours,” said Pryor.
There was no response from Rinehart, and Jack Pryor finally just walked away.
It was all over by the time Jack Pryor got to the hospital in Dodge City.
“That guy Lawrence is dead—as of about ten minutes ago,” Charlie Sanders reported to Pryor.
Sanders had been waiting for Pryor just inside the hospital’s main entrance. He had had to wait six hours in Bethel to ride a slow-moving train named the Grand Canyon, the next westbound, for the two-hour trip to Dodge City.
Now he told Pryor that he had stayed with Lawrence until the end. Sanders said the poor man had been in terrific pain from what the doctors said was cancer in his stomach and lungs; he could speak only in a weak whisper just before he died.
“The Kansas man with the British accent—you know, the one who hung out with President Truman—was in the room with Lawrence the last few minutes,” Sanders said.
As they walked up the hospital stairs together, Sanders reported that last night a watchman had come across Lawrence lying on the ground between two graves in the Boot Hill Cemetery. One grave contained a buffalo hunter who had frozen to death in a blizzard, the other a dance hall madam known around town as a soiled dove. Lawrence was shivering, pale, feverish, coughing like hell and talking crazy. An ambulance was called and he was brought here to Trinity Hospital.
Now Pryor went with Sanders into a room where A. C. Browne was seated in a small green metal chair on the other side of Lawrence’s now-empty bed. He was writing in a small notebook.
“I knew you were going to Kansas but why did you come here, Mr. Browne?” said Pryor, unable to hide his wariness about the unexpected presence of Mr. Truman’s journalist friend.
Pryor had run into Browne briefly a couple of times on the El Capitan but figured he was on his way home to Strong. Pryor, who’d been preoccupied with railroad business on arriving at Dodge, had not seen Browne disembark from the train.
“I came here for the same reason as you, detective,” Browne said now to Pryor. “To visit Dale Lawrence.”
Pryor was annoyed with himself for taking his sweet time finishing various reports and doing other tasks at the Dodge City station. Now—too late—he knew he should have rushed immediately to the hospital as Browne obviously had done.
The detective took a breath, held it a few seconds and then asked, “Did you talk to him about … you know, my having put him off the Super Chief?”
“No, no,” Browne said. “As far as I could tell, his conduct toward President Truman justified what was done.”
“He didn’t have a ticket either,” Pryor said, a bit too loudly, defensively.
Browne resumed writing something in a narrow spiral notebook, about the size of a paperback book.
“So you’re not doing a newspaper story about the way he was treated by the Santa Fe?” Pryor asked, trying to remain as nonchalant as possible.
Browne smiled, shook his head and said his interest was in something very different. “Lawrence was able to speak to me only for a few moments but it was all about what he’d been saying to President Truman about nuclear testing.”
When Pryor didn’t immediately respond, Browne added, “He said a lot of people are dying because of the tests in Nevada.” Then, looking down at his notebook, Browne said, “‘I’m one of them.’ That was probably the most coherent thing he said. He also mumbled something about John Wayne and Susan Hayward being victims.”
“John Wayne’s sick?” Pryor asked.
“I don’t know,” Browne said. “The best I could understand was that it had to do with making a movie in Utah—which I couldn’t follow.”
“The Conqueror, yes, I saw it,” said Charlie Sanders, who had accompanied Pryor to the hospital room but so far had remained silent. “It was truly awful. John Wayne was wearing heavy makeup and a drooping black mustache.”
Pryor, not interested in a movie review at the moment, motioned for Sanders to follow him and said to Browne, “We’ll leave it to you, sir. We’re taking the Super Chief back home to Chicago at ten fifteen tonight. You?”
“I’m returning to California on a westbound at eight fifty,” said Browne. “I think I’ll go back to the story I was working on in the first place—out in Hollywood.”
Pryor said nothing because he did not really know what Browne was talking about.
“I wasn’t able to get enough from Lawrence to put his tale together,” Browne added.
They made their perfunctory farewells.
“No offense, Mr. Browne,” said Pryor, “but for a man from Kansas you sound a lot like Winston Churchill.”
“There’s more to Kansas than an accent, detective,” replied A. C. Browne.
On the Super, Pryor and Sanders were met by Conductor Hammond in a vestibule between cars in the middle of the train. Hammond, having napped and freshened up in crew quarters at LA, was on the eastbound return trip. He, too, was going home to Chicago.
Hammond said they were really full of movie people this time—actresses, actors, bit players, directors.
“A couple of really big lady Stars are aboard traveling under other names,” Hammond said. “I mean, really big.”
Only on the Super Chief, The Train of the Stars, would—could—any conductor talk like this. It made Charlie Sanders proud to be of the Santa Fe family. And he wondered—oh, how he wondered—who those two big lady Stars might be.
Hammond said, “That producer Rinehart is on board, too, if you can believe it.”
“Yeah, he told me he was heading right back on the Super,” Pryor said. “I didn’t ask him why but I figure that kind of thing is known only by people in the movie business—not ours.”
Pryor then told Hammond he was most interested at the moment in finding a place to sleep. The conductor pointed him toward a sleeping car four up the train that had a couple of vacant roomettes.
Charlie Sanders and Pryor said they would meet up later.
Sanders had a question for Conductor Hammond.
“It concerns Mr. Wheeler, the Bethel man who died on the westbound,” Sanders said, remaining in the vestibule. “Do you remember his friend here on the Super, a woman from the movies?”
Hammond grinned. “Oh, yeah. She’s one of the big Stars. They were a regular sight. She’d get on in LA, sleep late the next morning, go to bed early that evening and then get back up just in time to meet Mr. Wheeler at one thirty in Bethel, first in the lounge and then in one or the other’s drawing rooms.”