The Man Who Followed Women

by Bert Hitchens

  And then … and then Mr. Howery had his stunning reward for all the hours of purposeless trailing, for the nights when stupid women had rewarded his attention by drifting home to oafish companions in odiously tasteless houses, or to the laundromat, or to the confession-magazine racks, or to a neighbor’s claptrap porch and rocking chair, or to church. For this woman darted in through the fence, and across the maze of tracks, and so on into the dark of the yards.

  Mr. Howery licked his lips. His pulse was simmering.

  He walked forward finally to the opening in the fence. He took a good long look at the scene inside. Linked boxcars sat, apparently deserted, in the middle distance. A diesel switcher grunted and stammered somewhere out of sight, and there was the answering clang of moving cars. High in the night sky banks of lights hung, big ones, but the creeping mist cut down their brilliance. Patches of darkness lay here and there, and one of them had swallowed his quarry.

  The conviction came to him that she had lost him.

  Had she done so deliberately?

  Had she sensed him following, had she slipped into this place—this incredible place for a woman to wander—just to lose him?

  He thought not.

  This had been her destination.

  Excitement tingled all the way down his arms and prickled in his palms. Bafflement brought his curiosity to its highest pitch. He picked his way past the boundary marked by the opening in the fence. He was careful in stepping through the crisscrossing tracks, remembering tales of his youth about people getting a foot caught in a switch and then being run over by a train. He came to the place where the boxcars sat, huddled end to end; they made him think of something grotesquely asleep, some kind of great bug which had been immobilized. He waited there in the shadows, and listened.

  He heard her walking in the distance, the faint scratch of shoe leather on hard soil. He went after her, cautious about making noise; she would be much more wary here off the street. Probably both he and she were trespassers and would be rousted out of the place if they were caught.

  She must have walked a quarter of a mile, he thought, before she came to a second fence and a gate. She opened the gate; he heard the metallic sound of its latch and the faint screech of the hinges. Beyond this point, when he came cautiously to stand and look, he sensed a dropping away of the ground like the opening of a shallow gully, or some old excavation; and a little way beyond, dimly, he could make out some sort of structure. It was high, braced by the side of an embankment. An overhead ramp, or a signal bridge perhaps. He thought that tracks ran under and through it.

  He touched the gate with his finger tips. It had not been relatched, and moved with a slight grating of hinges, and he slid through. The ground did drop away, unevenly. He almost turned an ankle before he got upon the firmly packed roadbed. He followed the tracks toward the overhead structure, knowing that she was ahead of him somewhere and that he might run into her and that if she made a fuss they could easily both be in trouble. She must be meeting someone. This someone could be with her now, and the results of his own appearance on the scene could be rough treatment.

  He couldn’t go back, though. Curiosity burned in him like a fire.

  The light was very poor. Mist floated around him. If the thing up ahead was a signal bridge, it must be out of use. No green or red glow burned in it. Mr. Howery walked touchily in the dark, alert for alarm; and then from far off he caught the approaching thunder of a train.

  He stopped, standing there between the rails, and his heart began to thud. This was no yard switcher, poking back and forth with a few cars in tow. This thing coming toward him through the night was full-grown, a reverberating juggernaut; he sensed even in those first moments of listening, the rush, the weight, the hammerhead of roaring power; and he froze inside his prickling skin.

  It came on. The air around him began to vibrate.

  Get off the track.

  He hurried. He fell on the gravelly border and felt his pants give, the right knee shredding and gravel digging into his flesh. He got up and hurried to the embankment and grabbed at weeds in the dark, trying to pull himself up. He could not have made it before the headlight swung into sight, except that now the train was noticeably slowing.

  Probably it had begun to slow before he had even heard it, long before it approached the boundary of the yards.

  Wig-wags danced in the distance, signals flickered; he caught these glimpses as he scrambled up the embankment, dirt rolling away under his feet. Finally he reached the buttresses of the overhead bridge. He saw now what this thing was—an overpass connecting two areas of the yards, spanning some main right of way.

  He crouched in shadow as the great oscillating beam swung into line down the track. He saw the woman for an instant. There was a small shed, a tool house or a housing for some mechanical equipment, across the track, and she stood by it. Even in that momentary glimpse Mr. Howery got a distinct impression that she was waiting for this train.

  So he expected it to be a passenger train, somehow; and it turned out to be a freight.

  It was a long train, and it must have come a long way. Four road engines, hammering and puffing giants, rolled past, and then there was an almost interminable line of cars, boxcars, gondolas, hopper cars, tanks, and flat cars with piggyback freight. Dust and the smell of oil flew up from the roadbed, filling Mr. Howery’s throat and lungs. Meanwhile, the train continued to slow, and long before the caboose reached him it was going at a crawl. The rattle of brake rigging and the clank of wheels subsided to little more than a mutter.

  The caboose rolled by—someone on the tiny rear platform, a dark figure—and Mr. Howery waited until it was safely past. Then he looked around for the woman.

  She was still over there. He could see her dimly. She was alone, though he had figured out during the time the train had passed that someone must be dropping off it here to meet her. A member of the crew? It didn’t seem likely; Mr. Howery had some inkling of the strictness with which train crews were expected to stay with it. If she’d planned to meet someone on that train, the person must have been traveling through the unknowing courtesy of the railroad; in other words, a hobo.

  She stood for several minutes as if still waiting. He thought that her head was turned in the direction the train had taken.

  She moved, then. He thought she must be leaving and prepared himself for the ticklish job of getting back down the dirt bank. But she walked only a few feet and sat down on something … a stack of crossties? … and was now much more openly in the light. He could see her distinctly, the shine of the blond hair and even something of the pattern of the blue print dress.

  She sat, swinging an ankle, and Mr. Howery sweated with tension.

  He was up beside the concrete buttresses of the pedestrian bridge, but these sprang out of the smooth, hard-packed earth, the embankment with its sharp drop of perhaps thirty or forty feet. He was perched on the slope. His wounded knee throbbed and stung. He was quite uncomfortable. For God’s sake, why couldn’t she take herself off and let him go down?

  It was such a crazy place for a woman.

  Even his curiosity about her, though, could not overcome his feeling of discomfort. Go, he thought with an effort at mental telepathy. Go on home.

  She didn’t leave, however. Time passed, instead. Mr. Howery grew cramped and twitchy, clinging to his perch; and then at last, after what seemed half the night, there came another freight train.

  This one had none of the hammering power, the night-shaking vibration, of the other. Even at a distance it sounded tinny and rackety. Its pace seemed lackadaisical. She stood up from the thing on which she had been sitting and turned her face in the direction of its coming; but even from his perch Mr. Howery sensed a change in her. Something in the way she stood, looked, waited, betrayed a loss of confidence. This was the last-chance sort of thing. She didn’t actually expect anything to come of it.

  Mr. Howery knew almost nothing about trains, but he would have bet that this one ha
d been patched together off the sidings between L.A. and the Arizona line. The boxcars bumped and rattled along as if most of them were empties. There were no tank cars, no hopper cars. A few reefers—refrigerator cars—and some empty flatcars, and then the caboose.

  She didn’t sit down again when it had passed. She came close to the track and stood there, almost as if meditating.

  Mr. Howery was tired, torn, dusty. His knee hurt. He wished to God that the woman would go home and let him get down; and he promised himself that never … never so long as he lived … would he follow any other woman. Anywhere. Any time. And no matter how eccentric, weird, baffling, and intriguing her looks and actions might be.

  So help him God!

  She turned abruptly away from the tracks and went back the way she had come, losing herself in the shadows. He heard the metallic rasp of the gate, a faint trace of vanishing footsteps, and she was gone.

  Within forty-five minutes Mr. Howery was at home. He inspected the ruin of his pants, threw them into the trash box. He showered, doctored the skinned knee, put on fresh pajamas, and got into bed.

  He found himself unexpectedly wide-awake, and full of thought.

  What in hell had she really been doing in the railroad yards?

  Well, she had waited for a freight train, and after it had passed she’d hung around until there had been a second. That was all she had done.

  Of course to his mind she’d had an air of expectancy about her, of being prepared for someone or something to drop or jump from that train when it reached the overpass.

  Then he remembered another fact about her. She had five brand-new tires to sell. Would fit Caddie or Olds, new models.

  A suspicion trickled into Mr. Howery’s mind, and he frowned into the dark, squinching up his eyes as if trying to see.

  He realized the possibility but not the method. How could she have worked it? Carried the tires home one by one in her arms? Tires that big and new were heavy. She was a slim woman.

  A confederate on the train. One who jumped when the tires did.

  No, no. He mustn’t let his imagination run away with him.

  The yards must be policed, guarded in some fashion. He had heard of bums being chased out by cinder dicks, so the cops must be there. And how would you roll, carry, or somehow finagle five big tires across all that maze of tracks, between all those huddled boxcars, without one of them seeing you? He and she had crossed that corner of the yards tonight, of course, but they’d been like flitting shadows. Unburdened, quick. And lucky.

  A daring thought crossed his mind. Its very impudence and risk brought out goose-pimples on his skin and dried his mouth; and in spite of this there was something about the idea which was familiar. Like an echo. Like a reflection mirrored back from that other time when he had snatched the pair of underpants.

  Call her up on the phone and say that you’ve seen the ad on the idiot board and would like to see the tires.

  Then go and have a look, and find out what story she tells.

  In spite of the nervous apprehension, the goose-bumps, Mr. Howery was so intrigued by the idea that he couldn’t stay in bed. He got up and fixed a pot of coffee and sat in the kitchen, drinking it, to think.

  He saw the principal risk.

  Once he had shown himself at her dwelling, had talked to her and had inspected the tires, she would know him. It would be much more difficult to skulk along behind her without being noticed. She’d be able to pick him out of a group. His silhouette would attract her eye, even in shadows.

  Well, now, it should be possible to do something about the silhouette. Nights were misty, quite cool. If he went in the evening to look at the tires, it might not seem too out-landish if he wore an overcoat. He had that huge one, the one Uncle Sherman had left when he’d died and which his mother had packed into mothballs in a box under the bed, because she had been positive that someday, somehow, she could rework it into a rug.

  Mr. Howery went in his mother’s room and knelt down—cringing over the pain in his scraped knee—and got the box out, opened it. He put the coat on over his pajamas and was startled at the change. It concealed all his rounded middle-aged softness. Uncle Sherman had been tube-shaped, and tube-shaped it made Mr. Howery, giving him vast high military shoulders and a hint of bulky legs, both quite false. The thing had a terrific stench from the moth-killer, so Mr. Howery put it on a wire hanger and fixed the hanger to the rod of the open window, where the coat could air all night and the next day.

  Drinking more coffee, Mr. Howery decided that tomorrow he would pick up a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, the dime-store variety, and a secondhand hat. He had been going bareheaded since he’d noticed the increasing baldness on the top.

  He had one fear, now.

  He itched with nervousness over the idea that by the time he got there, she might have already sold those tires.

  For this reason he didn’t wait until after work to call her. He phoned at eight-thirty the next morning. First he had to call the market, which didn’t open until nine, and get a janitor to go to the board and look up the number on the card. Then he got the house, and a man who sounded half asleep went to get Margie.

  Margie. Yes, somehow it fit her.

  Her voice on the phone was light, clear, and cautious. She listened to his inquiry about the tires, asked his name and his make of car and whether he was willing to give what she asked or wanted to haggle. He assured her he had no wish to haggle. Meanwhile he got the odd impression that she was listening not so much to his words as to his voice, that she wanted him to talk so that she could place something about him. His mind chilled under a trickle of warning.

  She explained finally that she didn’t have the tires at home. They were stored in a friend’s garage and she wouldn’t have access to them, to show them, until the coming weekend. Saturday morning.

  Mr. Howery took alarm. The morning would certainly be bright, might even be warm, so that the overcoat would seem ridiculous. She’d get an excellent look at him. All at once, mentally he backed away from the meeting. He decided that he wanted much more to see if she went back to the railroad yards than to check her tale about the tires.

  He promised to call her again before Saturday, gave her a name … John Abbott, a cousin of his in Pasadena … and hung up.

  He wiped the sweat off his brow.

  Very queer about those tires.

  She was on guard during their conversation, that was plain. In some way she had been screening him over the telephone, seeking some trace of … what? A voice like a cop’s?

  He didn’t bother buying the hat, or the glasses. He tucked the coat away in its box before driving down to report to the office. That day, covering the miles of Orange Country from one newly cross-hatched acreage to another, seeing and talking to building contractors, he found his mind straying to the scene of the night before, her figure in the dark beside the tracks.

  Something funny going on, he’d bet on that.

  She might be some sort of dupe, a pawn. She didn’t seem quite the type to be a … what was the word? … a moll.

  When the day was done, when he had gone home and fixed dinner and eaten it, read the paper, and decided definitely on seeing what she did that night, he had a moment of self-congratulation. He didn’t have to trail her all the way from her house. He could pick her up along the way somewhere. Or even in the yards.

  He couldn’t explain to himself why he was so sure that she would repeat her fruitless errand of the previous night.

  Perhaps because it had been fruitless.

  He was across the street in shadow, therefore, when she came to the opening in the fence, the big gap where the tracks converged to enter the yards; and he was no more than a hundred yards behind her as she tripped down the dark, lonely way between those boxcars. But there Mr. Howery’s luck ran out.

  He was collared by a railroad dick named Kernehan and taken off to the yard office to be interrogated. Leaving her to meet her freight trains unobserved.

&
nbsp; Chapter 3

  Michael Kernehan had been an investigator for two years. Before that he had served his time as a yards patrolman, mostly at the Brett Street Yards. He had had two run-ins with juvenile gangs, tough ones, during the time at Brett Street; and these encounters seemed to have left him with an unusual attitude of suspicion, especially toward anyone under twenty-one. The change was marked enough so that the chief special agent, Ryerson, took note; he rarely assigned Kernehan to a case which might involve juveniles.

  Kernehan was just a few months short of thirty. He was a veteran of the Korean War, in which he had served as a marine sergeant. He was well over six feet tall, lean-bodied with wide sinewy shoulders and flat hips, a redhead with brown eyes which must once have been warm with innocence but now had the cold vigilance of a cat’s. He was good-looking as far as his features went; and on first sight women were always much impressed. It was on longer acquaintance that they became uneasy. Under the surface Kernehan was always on guard.

  He went to New Canyon Yards late that morning, checking on a report about a dead dog.

  At about eleven o’clock he was near the overpass talking to an old car-knocker named Lizt. This old man, shabby in greasy overalls and a shapeless cap, red-eyed and sniffle-nosed, perhaps from last night’s wine bout, took Kernehan to a spot near his shanty and pointed to the ground. He pointed with the long-handled hammer which was the badge of his employment and said irritably, “He’s the third one. Cluttering things up. I don’t like it a bit.”

  The dog was a big tan-haired mongel. He lay stiffly, puffed with poison, and some expression around his jaws, an incompleted retch, gave a hint of agony. Kernehan looked him over and said, “The poor son of a bitch, to go like that.”

  The car-knocker edged a paw around with the head of the hammer. “He’s stiffer’n a board. Take a big hole for him. I buried the other two. They was little ones. I won’t keep it up.”