by Allan Folsom
Now the last of the new commuters walked past looking for a seat. He was tall and athletic, dressed in a dark business suit and carrying a briefcase. He looked like an eager young executive. He wasn’t. His name was Jimmy Halliday, and he was the third of six plainclothes detectives assigned to take the cardplayer into custody when the Chief reached Union Station in Los Angeles at 8:40 A.M.
Barron sat back and looked out the window past the sleeping girl, trying to shake off his nervousness. It was the job of the detectives on the train to verify that the cardplayer was indeed the man wanted by the Chicago police. If so, they were to follow him if he got off the train before it reached L.A. or, if he stayed on board, as they suspected he would because his ticket was straight through to Los Angeles, to follow him off when it arrived. The idea was to sandwich him between themselves and the three other plainclothes detectives waiting on the platform at Union Station and quickly take him into custody.
In theory the concept was simple. Do nothing until the last second and then close the vise with as little risk to the public as possible. The trouble was, their man was an unusually perceptive, emotionally explosive, and excessively violent killer. What might happen if he sensed they were on the train and took action inside it, none of them wanted to guess. But it was why they’d boarded separately and had deliberately kept a low profile.
They—Barron, Valparaiso, and Halliday, and the three waiting at Union Station—were homicide detectives, members of the Los Angeles Police Department’s 5-2 Squad, the famed hundred-year-old “special situations” section that was now part of the Robbery-Homicide Division. Of the three riding in car 39002, Valparaiso was oldest at forty-two. The father of three teenage girls, he’d been in the 5-2 for sixteen years. Halliday was thirty-one, had five-year-old twins and a newly pregnant wife, and had been in the squad for eight years. John Barron was the baby, twenty-six and unmarried. He’d been on the squad for a week.
Reason enough for him to have sweat on his palms and upper lip, and why the young girl sleeping next to him, the toddler with the teddy bear, and everyone else in the car made him nervous. This was his first potential live-fire situation in the 5-2, and their man, if he turned out to be their man, was hugely dangerous. If something happened and he missed a cue, if he screwed up in any way and people got hurt or killed—
He didn’t want to think about it. Instead he looked at his watch. It was 6:40, two hours exactly before they were to arrive at Union Station.
4
Raymond had seen the tall man in the dark suit come on board, too. Confident, smiling, briefcase in hand, looking like a young businessman ready for a new day. But, like the men who had boarded the Chief in Barstow, his presence was too keen, too studied, too authoritative.
Raymond watched him as he passed, then turned casually to see him stop two-thirds of the way down the car to let a woman settle her toddler in a seat, then he continued on and went out the door at the far end of the car just as Bill Woods came through it the other way, smiling as he always did and balancing four cups of coffee on a cardboard tray.
Vivian Woods smiled as her husband set the tray on the card table and slid into his seat beside her. Immediately she took the coffee cups and handed them around, purposefully trying to keep her attention from Raymond. She turned sympathetically to Frank Miller instead.
“Are you feeling better, Frank? You look a little better.”
By Raymond’s count the salesman had been back and forth to the toilet three times in the last two hours, waking them all to some degree each time he left or came back.
“I’m better, thanks.” Miller forced a smile. “Something I ate, I guess. What do you say we play a few hands before we hit L.A.?”
Just then the conductor passed. “Good morning,” he said to Raymond as he went by.
“Good morning,” Raymond said absently, then turned as Bill Woods picked up a deck of cards from the table in front of him. “You want to deal, Ray?”
Raymond smiled easily. “Why not?”
5
LOS ANGELES, UNION STATION. 7:10 A.M.
Commander Arnold McClatchy drove his unmarked light blue Ford through a dusty construction zone and stopped at a secluded graveled parking area just across a chain-link fence from track 12, where the Southwest Chief would come in. Less than a minute later, a second unmarked Ford with detectives Roosevelt Lee and Len Polchak inside pulled up beside him.
There was a brisk slam of doors, and the remaining three members of the 5-2 Squad crossed under an already hot sun to the track 12 platform.
“You want coffee, there’s time, go get it. I’ll be here,” McClatchy said as they reached the platform, then watched his senior detectives, one tall and black, the other short and white, walk off and down a long ramp into the cool of Union Station below.
For a moment McClatchy stayed where he was, watching, then he turned and walked down the deserted platform to the end to stare out to a point in the distance where the tracks vanished around a bend in the bright glare of the sun. Whether Polchak or Lee had wanted coffee made no difference. They knew he wanted time alone, to get the sense of the place and how the action would play when the train came in and they went to work.
At fifty-nine, “Red” McClatchy had been a homicide detective for more than thirty-five years, thirty of them as a member of the 5-2. In that time he had personally broken one hundred and sixty-four murder cases. Three of his killers had been put to death in San Quentin’s gas chamber; seven more still sat on death row awaiting appeals. In the last two decades he had been nominated to become chief of the Los Angeles Police Department four times, and each time he had brushed it aside, saying he was just a working stiff, an ordinary cop, not an administrator, psychologist, or politician. Besides, he wanted to sleep at night. Moreover, he was head of the 5-2 and had been for a long time. And that, he said, was enough for any man.
And obviously it was, because in all that time, through the scandals and the political and racial wars that had tarnished the name and reputation of both the city and the department, this “working stiff” had kept the long and rich tradition of the squad above reproach. It was a history that had involved incidents making worldwide headlines, among them the Black Dahlia murder, the suicide of Marilyn Monroe, the Robert Kennedy assassination, the Charles Manson murders, and the O. J. Simpson case. And all of it was surrounded by the aura, the dazzle and glamour, that was “Hollywood.”
That the tall, broad-shouldered redhead with touches of white beginning to show at the temples looked every inch the classic frontier lawman only served to enhance his image. In his trademark starched white shirt, dark suit, and tie, with a .38 caliber pearl-handled Smith & Wesson revolver in a reverse-draw holster at his waist, he had become one of the most publicly known, respected, and influential personages within the LAPD, perhaps even the city, and was nearly a cult figure inside the worldwide law enforcement community.
Yet none of it changed him. Or the way he worked, or the way the squad worked. They were bricklayers. They had a job to do, and they did it day in and day out for better or worse. Today was the same. A man was coming in on the Southwest Chief. They were to apprehend and detain him for the Chicago police while at the same time guarding the safety of the public around them. Nothing more, nothing less. It was as simple as that.
6
7:20 A.M.
Raymond took a sip of coffee and looked at the cards Frank Miller had dealt him. As he did he saw the Barstow man in the sport coat get up from his seat by the door and start down the aisle toward them. Raymond glanced at his hand, then at Vivian, and discarded three cards.
“Three, Frank, please,” he said quietly.
The man in the sport coat walked past as Miller dealt him his cards. Raymond picked them up and turned in time to see the Barstow man pass through the door at the far end of the car. Just as the man in the business suit had done earlier. A heartbeat later the younger Barstow man got up from his seat midcar and casually walked back down the
aisle and went out through the same door.
Slowly Raymond turned back to the game. If before there had been two, now there were three. Without doubt they were police and they were there for one reason alone.
Him.
“He’s our man, no doubt about it.” Marty Valparaiso stood with Jimmy Halliday, John Barron, and the train’s conductor in the gently rocking vestibule between the passenger cars.
“Agreed.” Halliday nodded and looked to the conductor. “Who are the others?”
“Far as I’ve been able to tell, just people he met on the Chief when it left Chicago.”
“Okay.” Halliday pulled a small two-way radio from his jacket and clicked it on. “Red,” he said into it.
“I’m here, Jimmy.” Red McClatchy’s voice came back with crystal clarity over Halliday’s radio.
“It’s a confirm. We’re going to sit tight as planned. Car number three-nine-zero-zero-two—” Halliday looked at the conductor. “Correct?”
The conductor nodded. “Yes, sir. Three-nine-zero-zero-two.”
“We on time?” Valparaiso asked.
“Yes, sir,” the conductor said again.
“On time and set, Red. See you in L.A.” Halliday clicked off the radio and looked to the conductor.
“Thanks for your help. From here in it’s our job. You and your people stay out of it.”
“One thing.” The conductor held up a warning finger. “This is my train, and the safety of the crew and passengers on it is my responsibility. I want no violence on board, no one hurt. You wait until he’s on land before you do anything.”
“That’s the plan,” Halliday said.
The conductor glanced at the others. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” Then, with a tug on his mustache, he pulled open the door and went into the coach where the cardplayers were.
Valparaiso watched the door close behind him, then looked to the others. “Game’s started, gentlemen. No further radio communication until we get there.”
“Right,” Halliday said. “Good luck.”
Valparaiso gave a thumbs-up, then opened the door and followed the conductor into the car.
Halliday watched the door close behind Valparaiso; then his eyes went to Barron. It was he who had first learned of the young detective’s meticulous and uncompromising work while in the Robbery-Homicide Division, breaking open a murder case long considered a dead end. Because of it he had brought him to the attention of McClatchy and the others in the squad and ultimately into the 5-2 itself. In short, Barron was in the squad because of him, and here on the train for the same reason. Halliday knew Barron would be nervous, and he wanted to address it.
“You okay with this?”
“Yeah.” Barron smiled and nodded.
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Then here we go.”
7
7:35 A.M.
Raymond had seen Valparaiso walk past and take his seat just inside the door, then simply sit and stare blankly out the window as the train drew closer to L.A. and the countryside became increasingly urban. A few moments later he’d seen the other Barstow man return to his seat a dozen rows behind him. He sat there now, head bowed, either dozing or reading, it was hard to tell. Then, after what seemed a carefully measured interval, the tall man in the business suit came back, reentering the coach and taking an aisle seat across from the lavatory at the rear to open his briefcase and take out a newspaper, which he sat reading now. It was about as tight a trap as could be.
“Raymond, are you playing?” Vivian Woods asked softly.
Raymond looked back to the game to see that the hand had come around to him and the others were waiting.
“Yes.” He smiled and for an instant held her eyes the way she had his earlier, seductive and encouraging, then let go and looked to his cards.
If the three men on the train were indeed police as he believed, and were there for him, he was going to need every advantage he could get, and having Vivian Woods on his side was one of them. Middle-aged or not, in a pinch she might well do anything he asked.
“I’ll play this hand, Vivian.” Raymond’s eyes went to hers once more, held just long enough, and then pulled away to look at Frank Miller studying his own hand in the window seat beside him. An overweight salesman with a nervous stomach who was afraid to fly—God only knew how he might react if the police closed in and things got tight. He could have a heart attack, or panic and do the wrong thing and get them all killed.
Raymond bet and Miller called his hand, pushing a stack of red plastic poker chips toward the center of the table. For the first time Raymond wondered whether Miller wore the hairpiece because chemotherapy or radiation treatments had caused him to lose his hair. Maybe he was ill and had said nothing about it and that was the real reason for his trips to the toilet.
“Too rich for me, Frank, I’m out.” Raymond folded his cards. He might have had the better hand; he didn’t care. Nor did he care if Miller was wearing a wig or even if he was ill. What he was thinking about was the police and how they had found him. He’d been utterly meticulous in the way he’d handled the killings in Chicago. There, as in San Francisco and Mexico City, he’d spent minimal time on the premises, disturbed almost nothing while he was there, and worn surgical gloves, the throwaway kind that in an era of public uncertainty about contagious diseases you could get in almost any pharmacy, meaning he’d left no fingerprints anywhere.
Immediately afterward he’d taken a deliberate zigzag of trails down the ice-slickened streets to the railroad station that should have been all but impossible to follow. It didn’t seem thinkable that they could have traced him at all, let alone to the train. Yet here they were, and every passing moment brought him closer to a final confrontation with them.
What he had to do, and quickly, was find a way out.
8
UNION STATION. 7:50 A.M.
Detectives Polchak and Lee came up the ramp from the station toward the track 12 platform where McClatchy waited. Len Polchak was fifty-one and Caucasian; at five-foot-six, he weighed two hundred and thirty pounds. Roosevelt Lee was African-American, forty-four, and a foot taller, a towering, chiseled, still powerfully built former professional football player. Polchak had been in the 5-2 for twenty-one years, Lee for eighteen, and despite the disparities in age, size, and race, they were as close as two men could be without sharing the same birthright. It was a closeness that came from years of breathing in the same tedium, the same vigilance, the same danger, witnessing the same awfulness of what people did to each other. It was a familiarity fueled by time and experience that made knowing what the other was thinking and what he would do at any moment in any situation instinctual, the same as the inherent trust that told you he was protecting you at all times, the same as you were protecting him.
It was no different throughout the squad, where tradition dictated that no one man was more important than another, even the commander. It was a working, everyday mind-set that required a special breed of individual, and one was not invited to become a member of the 5-2 readily. A detective was recommended, then quietly watched for weeks, even months, before the others agreed on him and he was asked to join. Once he had been accepted and taken oaths of responsibility to the integrity of the squad and his fellow members, it was a commitment for life. The only way out was calamitous injury, death, or retirement. Those were the rules, the way it was. Over time the certainty of it fashioned a faith of brotherhood few other groups shared, and the longer one was there the more his blood became the same.
This was what they trusted in now as they reached the top of the ramp and walked down the platform toward where McClatchy stood watching them, each counting the minutes until the Chief arrived and their cardplayer stepped from it.
7:55 A.M.
John Barron had seen him clearly once, as he got up from the card game and walked down the aisle to use the lavatory at the end of the car. But it had hardly been more than a glimpse as he passed, not
enough to get the kind of sense of him he wanted—to see the intensity in his eyes, or how quick he might be on his feet, or with his hands. It had been the same a few minutes later when he’d returned, walking past with his back to him and sliding in with the others on the same side of the coach a dozen rows down. Still not enough.
Barron looked at the young girl in the seat beside him. She was wearing a headset and staring off, keeping time to whatever it was she was listening to. It was her innocence more than anything else that troubled him—the idea that she or any of the other passengers or train crew should even be subjected to this. It was potentially deadly stuff and no doubt the reason their man had chosen to travel the way he had, surrounded by innocents who were protecting him without knowing. It was also the primary reason they hadn’t just grabbed him as he walked through the train.
Yet, for all the confidence he had that their man would be taken without incident, there was something else going on, something he couldn’t put his finger on, and the closer they got to L.A. the more uncomfortable he became. Maybe it was the nervousness that had been with him most of the way. His concern for the people on the train went hand in hand with his relative inexperience compared with the others. Maybe it was his sense of wanting to prove himself worthy of the honor he had been given by being brought into the squad. Or maybe it was the volatile, “should be considered armed and extremely dangerous” profile put out by the Chicago police. Or maybe it was a combination of everything. Whatever it was, there was an increasingly unwelcome electricity in the air. With it came a sense of foreboding and the feeling that something awful and unexpected was about to happen. It was as if he knew they were there, and who they were, and was already two or three steps ahead of them in his thinking. Preparing for what he would do at the last moment.