A bit shakily, I got up and walked to the edge of the road to look down. Peter Carr’s shack just wasn’t there any more. Some of the scattered fragments that had been the shack were still burning, and there was enough light to see by—only there wasn’t anything there to see except the place where the shack had been.
There wasn’t any use in my going down the path. If anyone had been in that shack—well, he wasn’t there now. Somewhere in the distance I heard the wail of a siren and then another. Squad cars and fire engines would be converging on this spot, and they’d be here within minutes. I had to get away from here, and quickly.
I turned and sprinted back across the road toward the railroad tracks on the other side. Far in the distance I could see the headlight of a freight locomotive coming slowly as it cut speed to enter the yards a mile away.
It seemed to take hours to get there, but it beat the squad cars and the fire engines, at that. I ran alongside the first box car back of the tender, caught the rungs and swung aboard. I made myself as inconspicuous as possible between two of the cars until the train, now down to a crawl, reached the Covina Street crossing, just south of the yards. I dropped off there.
Somewhere a clock struck three. I’d escaped from the sanitarium about fourteen hours ago; it didn’t seem possible in so short a time, unless, in some way I couldn’t understand, my escape had precipitated those events.
And now, damn it, I was worse off than before, because I didn’t even know whether Peter Carr was alive or dead. Well, I couldn’t go back and ask, under the circumstances. I’d have to wait until tomorrow morning’s newspapers to find out whether or not the firemen had found a body—or parts of a body—in the wreckage. And whether positive identification had been made.
Under the first street light, I brushed myself off as well as I could, and smoothed down my hair. My hat was gone, but it was too late to do anything about that.
Then I walked, almost staggering from weariness and reaction, down Covina Street toward town. About ten blocks—it seemed like ten miles—farther on, I found an all-night drugstore and phoned for a taxi.
At four o’clock I fell into bed in my room at the hotel. I slept as though I had been drugged.
I slept for twelve hours and a half, and felt more groggy than refreshed when I finally awakened.
But after a bath and a shave, I felt nearly human enough to phone down to the desk for an afternoon paper, and I read it while I dressed.
Read it, that is, after I got over the shock of seeing my own picture staring at me from the first page. I’ll skip the wording of the caption and the headlines; I don’t like to think about them. And they were more or less what I’d expected and feared.
What interested me were the details in the minion type. It seemed that Henry Remmers, an escaped lunatic who was an expert in explosives, had had a busy night. He’d taken a taxi to the neighborhood of his own laboratory, and had murdered the taxi driver. Then, with explosives obtained from the laboratory which he had entered through a window—the report, I noticed, did not mention that the laboratory had been under observation of detectives—he had partly constructed a time bomb.
Apparently something had frightened him away before he completed the detonating mechanism, but he must have taken a quantity of high explosives with him. With this, he went to the bungalow of his former assistant, Peter Carr, and there had overpowered Carr—it was presumed—and tied him up. Then he had made another bomb, this time finishing the job. Yes, I’d expected all that.
The detail that interested me most was that the body of Peter Carr, despite its condition, had been definitely and conclusively identified. Carr’s dentist had identified his own handiwork, and one arm that had been found almost intact had a prominent scar which was listed as an identifying mark in Carr’s selective service registration. Marks on the wrist indicated he’d been tied up with rope.
My hat had been found, with my initials, near Carr’s mailbox.
They’d tied me in with Gene Larkin’s murder, too. A newsboy near Gene’s cab stand had seen me get into the cab.
A nice case. Everything but motive, and why does a madman need motive? Luck was with me in one little detail; the photograph they had of me was an old one. It showed me with a self-satisfied smirk I hadn’t been wearing of late.
I studied it and my face in the mirror. Lot of difference, now. Just the same; I’d have to be extra careful from now on.
I went out through the lobby of the hotel cautiously, but the clerk didn’t even look up from the paper he was reading.
But he was looking at my picture, even then. It would be only a matter of time, if he were normally intelligent, before it occurred to him that it vaguely resembled one of his guests—
There was a hat store only three doors from the hotel. I went in and bought a black felt with a wide flexible brim. With the brim down over my eyes, it gave me a sinister look. I wished I could feel as sinister as it made me seem.
Two blocks farther on, I bought a cheap ready-made suit, as different in cut and color as possible from the suit I was wearing. I wore it out of the store and left my old suit to be called for later.
There seemed to be only one angle still open for me to investigate. Even that was risky and I’d have to be careful.
The Washington Flyer. I could go to the station tonight on the chance that the same conductor might be on the train. I couldn’t inquire in advance about that, of course. But I could buy a ticket and board the train. I could pretend to be a newspaper reporter.
Armin Andrews would already have broken the ice by questioning him; if he didn’t recognize me as his passenger of that night, I could learn as much as Armin had learned.
After that—well, unless I got a lead, I was probably stymied. I might as well give myself up, but not to the police. I’d go right to Major Lorne and try, however vainly, to get him to listen seriously to my side of the thing. Maybe I couldn’t talk myself out of going back to an asylum, but I just might succeed in planting some doubt in his mind, so he’d go ahead and investigate.
It was five-forty now, two hours before train time.
I had an hour and a half to kill before I could start for the station, and I couldn’t sit here in the restaurant that long without attracting attention.
The darkness of a movie would probably be the safest place. I remembered now having passed one just a few doors before the restaurant.
The picture was a Western. I sat through it and never did find out what it was all about or why the actors shot at one another at frequent intervals. My eyes were on the luminous dial of my wrist watch fully as much as they were on the screen.
At seven-twenty I left the theater and walked to the railroad station.
No use looking around for detectives. If they were here and spotted me, that was that. It would be worse than useless to resist arrest. If they’d anticipated my coming here, then there wasn’t a single angle of the case I could investigate independently, anyway. If there were detectives, and I got away from them, I’d have Hobson’s choice between hanging around Philadelphia until they caught me, or running away and becoming a fugitive for the rest of my life.
So I strode confidently across the lobby and up to the ticket window. I pushed a bill under the bars and said, “Wilmington, round trip.”
A familiar voice, over my shoulder, said, “Make it two.”
I whirled around, and it was Armin Andrews. He looked friendly. He said under his breath, “Careful, Hank. Keep it casuallike.”
I nodded, picked up my ticket and change, and waited until he’d bought his. Then as we walked away from the window, I asked, “What did you mean about the ‘careful’? Are they watching for me here?”
“No, but there’s a regular on duty here all the time. If you’d run, or done anything to call his attention to you, he might have recognized you from that photo.”
“And you’re not going to turn me in?”
He shook his head slowly. “Not till I hear your side of it, anyway. I’m still not convinced that you’re…uh—”
“Crazy,” I said. “I’m not afraid of the word, but I’m not crazy. And plenty happened last night. I’ll tell you all right, but first, what did you find out from the conductor on—”
“We’ve plenty of time to talk on the train. Meanwhile, you look like hell, Hank. A drink’ll do you good. We got time for a quick one in the bar over there.”
“You mean we’re really going to ride to Wilmington and back? Why, if you’ve seen the conductor?”
“Why not? We’ve got tickets, and can you think of a better or safer place to talk?”
We had the drink, and it put a pleasant warm spot in me and made me forget just a fraction of the trouble I was in. And I had plenty to ask him, and he had lots to ask me, but we waited until we’d found a seat on the Flyer and it was pulling out of the station.
Then Armin said, “All right, I got less to tell so I’ll talk first. I saw your conductor. He didn’t remember you, but he remembered the drunk he had trouble getting the ticket from.”
“Any details? Did he remember how the guy looked, or anything?”
“Not much. Said he wore a gray suit and a black felt hat with a wide brim—like the one you’ve got on now. And dark glasses. But he didn’t notice his features much, and isn’t sure he’d know him if he saw him again. But he remembered he had two fellows with him who were sober, or comparatively sober.”
Here, then, was confirmation of the fact that I had boarded the Flyer that night. A sleepy drunk could have been a coincidence, but not the two companions, the black hat, the glasses. I’d seen the rims of the glasses from the side, although I hadn’t fully caught his face.
It should have excited me, but it didn’t. It was nice to find confirmation of at least the start of my story, but damn it I’d known ever since last night that it had really happened.
A conductor was coming down the aisle now. It wasn’t the same one. Armin said, “He might be on a different car. We’ll look later; there’s no hurry. Now what happened last night?”
I told him, and he listened but I couldn’t tell from his face whether he believed me or not.
He whistled softly when I finished. He said, “Boy, you sure put your foot into it. Two murders, and you were on the spot for both of them. Two bombs, and you were just too soon for one and too late for the other.”
“Do you think there’s a chance, any chance that the police will believe the truth?”
“I doubt it, Hank. Even if you can prove it, you might have trouble getting them to listen to your proof. You see, they know what happened, or they think they know and that’s just as bad. To them, you’re an escaped maniac. They won’t even want to ask you questions, because they’ve got that preconception.”
I nodded gloomily, knowing that he was right. It wasn’t going to do me any good merely to find out what was what. I was going to have to be able to prove it, and in words of one syllable.
I asked him, “Armin, have you got any ideas? I mean, assume for the sake of argument at least, that I’m sane and that I’ve told you the truth. Then somebody’s up to something. What have they got to gain by it?”
“I’ve wondered about that. Are you sure—completely sure—that you didn’t make any discovery in the lab that would be of…of military value? Even of commercial value?”
“Positive. I’ve thought about that very angle, and the more I think the surer I get, Armin. I ran the tests myself on every variation we tried. I checked every sample for stability, rate of expansion, the works. Look, if Peter had found anything that had better-than-average properties along any of those lines, he wouldn’t have known it. He didn’t run the tests himself.”
“Not ever?”
“Not alone. He knew how, of course, and when I talked to him last, while I was in St. Vincent’s, I told him he could go ahead and finish the tests on one line he was working on.”
“Could he have found something important in the last few days?”
“He could,” I said, “but he couldn’t have known about it in advance. It could account for—”
“For what?”
“For the runaround I got five nights ago. The night of the train wreck.”
Armin grimaced. “That damn train wreck. If we could only dope out what really happened on that train—Are you subject to hypnosis?”
I shook my head. “It couldn’t have been that, I’m sure. But however it was done, I’m beginning to see why.”
Andrews looked interested. “Give, pal.”
“It’s tied in with the laboratory, of course. Somebody needed me out of the way for a while, to get at something in the lab. Something that would take a bit of time and couldn’t be done—or obtained—in an ordinary burglary. They couldn’t murder me, but they did manage to frame me into talking myself into a nuthouse, about a train wreck that wasn’t.”
“Why couldn’t they have murdered you?”
“Major Lorne—and the FBI. If there’d been any murdering done, the FBI would have been on that lab like a swarm of locusts. They’d have turned that lab inside out, and guarded it with their lives. Even Peter probably couldn’t have got in, alone.”
“Makes sense,” Andrews said judiciously. “Carry on.”
He nodded toward the window. “We’re going through Chester. Do you remember Chester? I mean whether your wreck was before or after here?”
“After,” I said. “Yes, I remember seeing the station. And after the outskirts of Chester, the conductor came through. Then there was Marcus Hook. I don’t remember going through any station after Marcus Hook. I’d say it was about five minutes out of there that the…the wreck—”
“Would have happened, if it did happen. Look, maybe I ought to leave you alone to concentrate for the next ten minutes or so. I’ll take a stroll up toward the front of the train and see if our favorite conductor is on duty in one of the other cars.”
He left, and I turned to stare out the window.
I tried not to think, but to remember. To recapture every little detail, however slight, that had preceded whatever had happened.
Yes, just like this—I’d been sitting here when the conductor came through. I’d handed him my ticket without looking up.
Then, at the seat ahead, he’d said, “Ticket please,” and there hadn’t been any answer. He’d said it again, more sharply, and then was when I’d looked and seen the back of the head of the man who was asleep there.
He was sitting on the outside and another man was sitting next to him. I got a view of his profile as he turned to look at the conductor and said, “I’ll wake him up.” And then he shook the drunk and said, “Wake up, Bob.”
And the third man, who was sitting on the seat facing the others, riding backward, took an interest, and helped try to wake up the drunk.
One of them asked, “What pocket’d he put it in, Walter?” And the other said, “I dunno…I don’t like to—Shake him again.”
And the head wearing the black felt hat had waggled back and forth under the shaking and the drunken one murmured something inarticulate and must have reached into his pocket, for I saw his hand, holding a ticket, go up toward the conductor.
The conductor had punched the ticket and put it under the clip with the other two, over by the window. They’d been yellow slips of cardboard; mine, a through ticket to Washington, had been red.
Then the conductor had gone on.
I turned back to the window. Marcus Hook had gone by outside, as it was going by now. I remembered glancing at the drunk, and his head had lolled forward again.
The man who had been riding backward, facing the others, had got up. I remember now that he’d said, “Back in a minute, Walter.” He’d gone down the aisle toward the back of
the car.
I’d turned toward the window again, and a little time, maybe five minutes, must have elapsed.
And then—The wreck. Damn it, I remembered—
“Wait a minute, Hank,” I said to myself, “just what do you remember? Let’s analyze it, let’s take it apart to see what makes it tick.”
And I closed my eyes and thought hard, and a little light began to enter the darkness. A possibility.
I tried to remember what seat I’d sat in that night. It had been third—no, second from last. There hadn’t been anybody sitting behind me, I was almost sure.
Darkness and pain and the screams of people being killed or injured, and the sound of rending steel and the—
I opened my eyes and looked up, and Armin was coming back from the front of the train. He slid into the seat beside me and said, “He isn’t on duty tonight, Hank. I asked one of the other conductors.”
“It doesn’t matter.” I told him.
“Well, no, I questioned him pretty thoroughly but—”
“I didn’t mean that. I mean—I know now what happened last Wednesday night.”
Armin said, “The hell!” and his eyes widened. “I thought—Well, never mind that. What happened?”
“Three men,” I told him, “boarded this train with a carefully worked-out plan for getting me. A plan so…so preposterous that it worked perfectly. So smooth that I didn’t know I’d been shanghaied, and neither did the conductor or the other passengers. They—”
“But what about the wreck, Hank? Are you forgetting that?”
“There wasn’t any wreck. And when I got right down to it, Armin, I don’t remember a wreck. I remember certain things, mostly sounds, that added up in my mind to the impression of a wreck. I see now how it could have been done, I think. But let’s take the kidnapping first.
“Those three men had a plan, and one of them playing drunk was part of it. They wanted to stamp on the conductor’s mind that he was practically unconscious. And they never let the conductor get a good look at his face, really. He had that wide-brimmed hat and he didn’t look up when he finally did hand over the ticket.”
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 117
